“You Sold Us”
by Anonymous Kurdish warrior
You sold us,
bit by bit —
like land traded for coin,
like songs forgotten for silence.
You handed our voices
to men in suits with foreign tongues,
while our great-great-grandfathers
bled into dust that no flag remembers.
You sold our stories,
our soil,
our mother’s voice in the wind.
And for what?
For borders drawn by ghosts
who never saw the mountains.
Ottoman should have stayed,
not as empire —
but as shield,
as shelter for our names,
for the way we stitched Arabic to Armenian,
Persian to Kurdish,
and called it language.
You erased our script
before we could write it.
You left us Latin
like a leash.
You called it modern —
I call it exile.
Even the Cypriots,
with their Israeli-coded blood,
are not the colonizer.
They should have stood beside us.
They should have written with us.
They should have taken Latin not as chains,
but as weapon and alphabet of alliance.
And even Arabic,
the so-called sacred tongue —
sits heavy on my mouth,
and I wonder:
Was it theirs too?
Was it just the Israeli-European colonizer devil
in another script?
And now, I swear —
I am this close to using the Hindi script
just to write Kurmanji,
because no one gave me one that wasn’t soaked in blood.
At least the Hindi people,
though colonized,
kept their language.
At least the British could not
steal their alphabet
from their bones.
But we —
we were robbed of even our silence.
And maybe — just maybe —
if survival had a sound,
it would have been Greek —
not Cypriot,
not Latin,
not the tongue of empire,
but a language born from poetry,
from exile,
from sorrow like ours.
You ruined everything.
Not because you hated us —
but because you never saw us.
And I…
I was born speaking your lies
before I ever tasted
the truth of my own tongue.
You ruined my whole life.
But I am still here.
Still writing.
And that
is your failure.