"Daughters of Smoke and Fire" by Ava Homa
Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire: A Novel. Overlook Press, 2020.
Daughters of Smoke and Fire was one of the first novels written in English by a Kurdish woman. It tells the story of two generations of a political Kurdish family living in Iran, a place that denies their identity as well as their human rights to live, love, thrive, and create. Iran is a “636,400-square-mile prison,” we hear at one point. But in terms of her characters, it should be said at the outset that Ava Homa is at pains to avoid stereotypes: “I’m weary of superhuman representations as much as victimized portrayals” of Kurds, one of her characters says, apparently echoing her own view. “The world needs to accept [Kurds] as people with strengths and weaknesses.”
Her characters are indeed complex: intelligent, sensitive people who did not ask to be born into a cruel society but must respond to it and make impossible choices in order to survive, let alone sustain a modicum of honor.
The father, a onetime activist, is indelibly traumatized by past experiences of state-sanctioned torture; he is sunk in depression, unable to love his children. The mother is consumed by disappointment in her own narrow life of enforced denial. Their daughter, Leila, the book’s main character, is neglected by her troubled parents and blames herself, feeling herself a failure in every respect. Her younger brother Chia is precocious and idealistic and aspires to become a human rights lawyer to free Kurdistan.
For Leila and Chia, gender defines their life prospects differently, but as children, they are each other’s emotional anchor. Their bond is the engine that drives the book.
Leila is oppressed both by her family and by the state, one Book Club member pointed out. “It’s the story of so many, an entire generation.” Leila is an unlikely hero—she doubts, stumbles, and fails, to the point that as a teen she unconsciously tries to commit suicide.
Meanwhile Chia follows in their father’s footsteps and becomes an activist. Inevitably his activism leads to his arrest and imprisonment, in Evin. Leila is shocked and outraged, so much so that she finds her voice and agency in fighting for his release. She publishes his writings online, leading to international publicity—and exposing herself to possible arrest. In the process, she develops unexpected strengths, finding ways to carry on her family’s political passions.
In the Book Club, this aspect led to a discussion about the children of political families. Political parents tend to set a standard that children feel they have to fulfill. Sometimes the children reject it altogether and choose to live apolitically. But Chia and Leila go on to become active.
“There’s a lot of generational trauma in a political family,” said one Book Club member. “People either completely reject politics, and sometimes reject their parents for it, or they feel like the only way to get approval is to do something political, to honor their parents. The author handles this exceptionally well—she shows the trajectory of a female protagonist who goes through personal trauma but carries the trauma of her brother, and of both her parents. She carries that with her from childhood to the very end of the book. It’s a heavy burden. The author does an exceptional job of walking you through the mindset.”
When Chia is executed and his death is reported internationally, Leila initially refuses to believe it. She does find proof, as one Book Club member observed: “After Chia was executed and they go get his body to bury him, Leila gets down into the grave and removes the shroud and sees that it really is him, that the person who was closest to her in the world is really dead. I was listening to the audiobook while driving, but at this point I had to pull over. I couldn’t listen to this and drive, there was so much pain.”
Some of the Book Club’s Kurdish members found the book so painful, even triggering, that it was a struggle to read. Said one, “I was sad in so many places. I almost dropped it.” Said another, “There must be a manual on how to torture Kurdish people. The same methods seem to be used in all four parts. The torture these characters go through is similar to that of the other parts. It made me feel angry and sad and I came close to dropping the book.”
But in recounting the family’s great sorrows and minimal victories, Homa is also at pains to explore the sources of their resilience. “We have no control over what the oppressors do to us but we have control over how we respond to oppression,” she has said. In the novel, Chia found resilience even under the brutal conditions of Evin prison because “he had a rich inner life that no one could take away from him, its currency insightful books and people and the processing and application of the wisdom he had gained.” That rich inner life was fed by the many intellectuals and creative people he met behind prison walls (itself a comment on the Iranian regime).
Leila too was in the end able to stand on her feet: “What she went through as a Kurdish person,” said one member, “she made something good out of it.” Making art out of sorrowful experiences is another source of resilience that Homa identifies: she makes her way to Canada where she goes on to become a filmmaker.
The character of Chia is in fact modeled on a real-life Kurdish journalist Farzad Kamangar, who continued his resistance from prison: “Farzad’s letters … showed me it was possible to find meaning even when torturers break your bones . … He wrote about love, hope, and justice while being physically and psychologically tortured. Farzad defeated atrocities by refusing to give in to them; he liked to say he wouldn’t let them ‘kill him inside.’ To me, Farzad is a model of humans’ ability to rise above oppression, like Viktor Frankl, like Nelson Mandela. Being touched by his voice and his message, I realized that I had no time for doubt and self-pity. I kept on writing.”
We are glad she did, and the book deserves the acclaim it has received.
You can purchase Daughters of Smoke and Fire here or at your favorite bookseller.
