- This is an abbreviated eulogy of #Musa Anter# (“Uncle Moses”) recently given to a group of Ohio University students in Athens, Ohio. It has been edited for Rudaw's Culture & Art page.
It is altogether fitting that I tell you, here in Athens, that it was an ancient Greek, the blind bard Homer, who knew the answer to a question it took me the education of two universities to find out—that I am nothing but a lowly Kurdish slave, a stateless person. My discovery came when my American professor asked us to name the three most momentous events of 1776.
We agreed that Jefferson’s beloved republic obviously qualified as one.
But there was stony silence as to the other two. Our good professor volunteered them: The Decline and Fall of Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon and The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. In Gibbon, I discovered, courtesy of Homer, author of the Iliad and Odyssey, that I was only a half man. Yes, you heard me right: what you see is not the real me, but merely a mirage.
The real Kani, according to Homer, lost half of himself in captivity in Turkish misruled Kurdistan. The real Kani is not allowed to speak or write in Kurdish the way you do in English. The real Kani related to the blind bard when he said, “In the first day of his servitude the captive is deprived of one half of his [manhood].” The real Kani wants to feel full again, man again: Like the Poles in Poland and the Danes in Denmark. And, yes, the real Kani would love nothing better than to help his people, the Kurds, be free and his country, Kurdistan, independent.[1]