Associate Director of Women and Gender Studies Holly Mason Badra recently published a nonfiction essay, Ez Kurdim: Meditations on Ritual, Gathering, and Being, in The Markaz Review's Kurdish Issue: Hawar.
From shared fruit to shared memory, a Kurdish American writer traces how culture survives through ritual, kinship, and acts of gathering. Through pomegranates, card games, motherhood, and community, Mason Badra reflects on the rituals that sustain belonging.
An excerpt from the essay here:
When I worry about stress affecting the fetus’ development, I think of my grandmother who carried thirteen pregnancies in Southern Kurdistan and Baghdad, a Kurdish woman under Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns and displacement strategies. While the infestation of patriarchy endangered her both within and beyond the home, she grew life, delivered life, nurtured life; one of those lives being her first daughter, my mother.
Read the complete Kurdish Issue here: https://themarkaz.org/all-issues/hawar-the-kurdish-issue/