Daughters of Smoke and Fire
A Novel by Ava Homa

Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies

By Arash Rahmani, PhD, Center Visiting Scholar

“Earth is my home. Earth is where I belong, and as long as gravity is holding me, and earth is giving me air to breathe: this is my home. I claim it. It belongs to me. No one can dare get it away from me,” declares Ava Homa, her voice resonating with the certainty of someone who has found peace in embracing the entirety of our planet as her homeland. For Homa, a Kurdish writer who has traversed continents, from Iran’s Zagros Mountains to the cliffs of Big Sur in search of belonging, this realization came after years of displacement and a lifelong quest for “nishtaman”—homeland in Kurdish.

Born to book-loving parents in Sanandaj, Kurdistan, Iran, Homa’s early years were marked by a natural gravitation toward storytelling. “I grew up with a lot of books,” she recalls, her voice brightening at the memory. “My parents loved reading, so it was important for me to both live in a house where I was surrounded by books, but also see them in action, because I think children pick up more on parents’ behavior than on what they’re told,” she adds.

Unlike many Kurdish households where banned literature needed to be hidden from authorities, Homa’s family kept their books handy, though with an unspoken understanding about their dangerous nature. “Our basement was stacked with books, but nothing was hidden,” she explains. “I remember coming across Shiʿism or Read and Judge by Ahmad Kasravi, prohibited books. But my parents weren’t trying to hide them from me. I understood these were not the kinds of books you can take outside.”

Her natural affinity for words manifested early. “I wasn’t thinking of becoming an author or anything. I just loved books,” she says. By fifth grade, Homa created her first picture book inspired by an ordinary household sound. “The ring bell in our house sounded like a nightingale,” she reminisces. “My childish mind wanted to know how that little bird got stuck in our doorbell. And I had a whole story about the bird being separated from her parents and going through the jungle and meeting all sorts of animals and, finally, finding safety and refuge in our doorbell,” she says.

As a teenager, Homa displayed an uncanny ability to memorize poetry. “Every time teachers would recite the beginning verse of something by Hafez or Rumi, I could recite the end of it,” she remembers. “It wasn’t like I would sit down and try to memorize poetry. It was just my mind would pick up on it, and it was effortless for me.” This remarkable talent did not go unnoticed, earning her admiration from teachers and family friends alike, who were astonished by her ability to read complex works by revered Persian poets like Molana (Rumi). “I remember being really young, and my aunt inviting me to—she had a whole group of friends over, and she said, ‘Come here, come here. Read something from Shams for us.’ And I started reading, and her friends were like, ‘Whoa, you’re cheating. You have practiced with her.'” They would give her other poems to read until they believed her!

Her early creative expressions weren’t confined to single genres either. “I would fill out notebook after notebook where I was either making plans for my future or creating stories, or I would just write down poetry, or I would just write down things about my day,” she explains. “I don’t think I had the consciousness to separate them and say, ‘Okay, this is storytelling, that’s journal-writing, that’s poetry-writing.’ It all flew out naturally.”

Her journey toward becoming a writer took a more deliberate turn during her graduate studies at Allameh Tabatabaei University, where she analyzed works by English and American authors. “I remember thinking, I can write stories like this,” she says, reflecting on her growing confidence. ” This realization pushed her to seek formal training in storytelling, leading her to enroll in workshops led by Siamak Golshiri, a respected literary figure in Tehran. Homa pursued her craft relentlessly. “I signed up for Golshiri storytelling workshops,” she recounts. “And I would follow Siamak from one workshop to another,” she adds. This persistence eventually earned her mentor’s recognition when he told her, “You’re going to make it. You have two things that people usually don’t have at the same time—people have one or the other, and that’s patience and perseverance besides talent.”

Like many Kurdish individuals in Iran, Homa experienced the double burden of cultural suppression and gender discrimination. Her work at a bilingual newspaper brought her into conflict with authorities when the publication was shut down, forcing her into hiding. “I worked at a newspaper which was the only bilingual paper at the time. I edited the English section, and that got shut down. I had to go in hiding.” Later, as an English literature professor at Azad University, she faced reprimands for not adhering strictly to Islamic dress codes and for not sending students to prayer—constant reminders of the restrictions placed on her identity. “You can’t be a woman and be Kurdish in Iran and ever feel safe or ever feel like you belong,” she states matter-of-factly. She recalls that her short stories were also deemed unpublishable because of their feminist theme, “every day, there was some new form of intimidation and harassment.”

In 2006, Homa left Iran for Canada to pursue a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. Though initially viewed as a temporary academic sojourn rather than a permanent exile, she acknowledges the underlying motivation: “When I got my student visa and left, it wasn’t an escape in an official sense, but internally, it was an escape from the madness, the oppression and all the pressure.” The move was not an easy decision, but rather something akin to “a choice” born from the constant pressure of living as a Kurdish woman in Iran.

In Canada, Homa published her first collection of short stories, Echoes from the Other Land, which was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize. Yet, this achievement came with a sobering realization about the Western literary landscape. “In Iran, you pay a price for speaking up, for writing, for being who you are,” she observes. “And when I came to Canada, I had this delusion that I’d be okay, and I could write and be read. And then I realized that even though no one holds a gun to my head, no one’s going to send me to prison, it doesn’t mean you get heard either. I realized the hierarchy of who gets heard in North America, and slowly lost my innocence.” >>>