In March 1988, those who fled to Turkey after the Halabja massacre were first settled in tents along the banks of the Tigris River. From this reality, the novel stretches from Halabja to Diyarbakır, Istanbul, and Geneva, tracing connections through which we encounter Anatolia, Kurdistan, and Europe. Zeynep, a teacher from Ayvalık, marries Hüseyin, a Kurd, during her compulsory service. She later loses him in an unresolved political murder. An intellectual and enlightened woman, Zeynep—after being dismissed from her job—devotes her entire life to learning and to the struggle for human rights. She takes in Delila, who lost her entire family in the Halabja massacre, becoming her foster family.
As Delila, who has endured this trauma, grows within Zeynep’s different, intellectual milieu, her fears and experiences turn into a tragic dependence upon Zeynep. Zeynep and Delila—two heroines with a heightened perception of inner reality—expand and transform through one another, even as they suffer; their pain offers a bittersweet form of existence. It is, without doubt, the endurance of the hardships that freedom itself brings.
The events that took place in Diyarbakır during the 1980s and 1990s are followed by Zeynep’s encounter with Zaven, an Armenian, which sets in motion her journey through Istanbul and Geneva. Delila, meanwhile, is preparing her thesis in comparative literature at Istanbul University. She is introverted, her wounded soul caught between tradition and modernity, and she continually experiences flashbacks: the moment when the chemicals were released, reminding her, her mother, father, brother, and friends. Within this cacophony, meaning crystallizes, distilling its essence.
As Delila endures this trauma, she is shattered when it comes to love and affection. Her restraint is bound to a sense of guilt; she resists freeing herself from mourning, as if to deny herself the joy of passion and love. In Geneva, she falls in love with Roni, a Kurdish painter. While she experiences this romantic enchantment, her hunger for happiness and fullness, rooted in her longing to truly be herself, ensures that she cannot escape disappointment. Yet within the intensity of her passion with Roni lies much more: the wounded consciousness of the same culture, their dislocations and solitude, but also their shared commitment to learning and to art. This commitment prevents them from becoming alienated from themselves, from disintegrating; it gives their exile an existential meaning.
In Geneva, while Zeynep and Zaven withdraw into their own cocoons, Zeynep deliberately maintains a certain distance from Delila. Delila, caught between Roni and Zeynep, cannot adapt to the greyness of Europe; she rebels against the principle of reality in the modern world. Though she shows a quiet resistance, enduring the pains of freedom, she knows that without returning to her own country, without bearing witness to its struggles up close, without producing, she cannot truly exist.Through her relationship with Roni, she learns much—the boundaries of freedom, the limits of innocence and rhetoric... As she comes to know more closely the refugees scattered across Europe, broken into pieces, as well as xenophobic mentalities and Socratic cunning, she defies them with her yearning to return to her homeland. And so, she finds herself back in Halabja—her small town, scarred by pain but striving toward renewal. Meanwhile, Zeynep and Zaven suffer a traffic accident in the Şaklava region. This event draws Delila and Roni closer again after their separation. In Halabja, Delila establishes a women’s foundation, becoming an active force in the region.
The novel ultimately unfolds in a calmer, more developed Diyarbakır atmosphere, where we read Delila’s manuscript as she has grown old, residing in the “writers’ house” on Mount Kırklar, on the evening of her award ceremony. It is a novel of longing—for the region, for its voice—woven out of magical realism and modern epic. (JFY/VK)
