To understand a person is sometimes to hold onto the sentence they left behind:
“The thought that if I fall as a martyr one day, I will leave a deep pain in the heart of my people, already hurts me…”
This saying is spoken not about the aesthetics of death, but about the responsibility of life. It is a sense of truth conceived not through one’s own absence, but through the burden carried by those who remain.
It is the mark of a consciousness that grasped its people, its comrades, the silence of the mountains, and the future of children not through victory or defeat, but through the weight of conscience.
To understand Heval Delal Amed is not merely to recount the tragic or heroic story of an individual. It is to grasp the societal memory hidden behind that story, the historical ruptu…
To understand a person is sometimes to hold onto the sentence they left behind:
“The thought that if I fall as a martyr one day, I will leave a deep pain in the heart of my people, already hurts me…”
This saying is spoken not about the aesthetics of death, but about the responsibility of life. It is a sense of truth conceived not through one’s own absence, but through the burden carried by those who remain.
It is the mark of a consciousness that grasped its people, its comrades, the silence of the mountains, and the future of children not through victory or defeat, but through the weight of conscience.
To understand Heval Delal Amed is not merely to recount the tragic or heroic story of an individual. It is to grasp the societal memory hidden behind that story, the historical rupture forged in the woman’s body, a design for freedom woven with honour, and the human will to transcend the self.
The sentiment revolving around a single name is, in fact, the distilled essence of the long struggle for existence of a nation, a geography, a gender, and a collective spirit.
The Kurdish woman was not recounted by history for a long time. What history did to her was not only silence, but also invisibility. The double oppression of national denial, patriarchal hierarchies, and a geography that was not militarized but was constantly subjected to violence, targeted not only her body but her very possibilities of existence.
The internal wounding that Fanon’s analyses of colonialism pointed to was two-fold deeper in the Kurdish woman: she carried both the mourning of her people and the pain of her own voice being negated. But history bends; and when a woman rises at that point of bending, she lifts not only herself but her past, her future, her society, and the sense of justice. Heval Delal is the very embodiment of that bending point.
To imagine her only within the armed resistance of the PKK or YJA-STAR is to diminish the truth. What is truly needed to understand her is to understand why she resisted.
Heval Delal lived, struggled, and resisted for Honour… for Language… for Identity… for Woman… for Culture… for Revolution… for Freedom… for Truth… for the sanctity of Life… for the right of children to demand a future.
The point that Hannah Arendt called “the courage to make oneself visible in the public sphere…” was embraced by Kurdish women, especially figures like Delal Amed, with a naked reality: being visible was vital, being free was imperative.
Bell hooks’ understanding of “love-centred freedom…” deepened here: freedom was not only against male domination, but also for the society to reconnect with itself with love. Therefore, Heval Delal’s struggle was not a history of hatred; it was woven with the heavy ethic of love and responsibility.
To understand Heval Delal means not to romanticize sacrifice, but to see it as a rational moral domain. In her life, self-sacrificing dedication (fedailik) was not an aestheticized bond with death, but the naked expression of a readiness to shoulder the burden of life.
This sacrifice was not the individual erasing the self, but the ethical resolve that transforms the individual into a collective will. The fine line that turns the “I” into “We,” but does not destroy the “I”… Because there, every individual was part of this path with their own mind, their own intuition, their own intuitive morality. Heval Delal’s power was this: not extinguishing the light of the individual while amplifying the collective.
In the modernist narratives of Western democracies, women’s freedom is often limited to the legal level. However, in Kurdistan, freedom is a way of organizing life.
The message that the Kurdish Women’s Movement’s subjectivity, especially as shaped in the mountain areas, gives to the world through the person of Heval Delal is this: Woman is not merely a political subject; she is an ethical subject, an epistemological founder, and the fundamental element of social reconstruction.
This claim is radical; because it challenges not only male authority, but also the epistemic foundation of the state-violence-power continuum. The slogan Jin – Jiyan – Azadî (Woman – Life – Freedom) is not merely a street slogan; it is an ontology: Without Woman, life cannot be established; without Life, freedom finds no meaning.
Delal Amed | Image courtesy of MAHİR ENGİZEK
What is important in Heval Delal’s story is not the military operations, but the universal claim to truth born from the conscience of a village child. This is the journey of a girl from silence to speech, from invisibility to history, from being subjected to being a founder.
The moment Fanon called “the violent birth of subjecthood…” transformed into a more refined ethical ground here in Kurdistan, through the hand of the woman in Heval Delal’s story: Defense is the last resort to protect existence itself. And this protection is not for revenge, but for truth. Not for destruction, but for life. Not to dominate another, but to protect the honour of all.
The void left behind by Heval Delal is not a hole left by death; it is the heavy trust left by duty and responsibility. To commemorate her is not to poeticize her, but to grasp the duty and responsibility she left behind.
Today, her name echoes not only on the tongues of Kurdish youth, but in every struggle from Latin America to the Middle East, from Palestine to Chiapas, by those who place women’s freedom at the centre of their existence.
Because the idea she carried in her essence speaks a truth that transcends borders: Freedom is the liberation not only of the political sphere, but of emotion, economy, language, memory, and love. No society is free until the woman is free. The freedom of the body, identity, memory, and thought are inseparable.
This is why Heval Delal’s name lives on not merely as a ritual of the past, but as the foundational verb of the future.
To commemorate her is not a mourning; it is a moral and ethical remembrance. It is not to retreat into grief, but to shoulder the duty and responsibility, to turn memory into a living act.
This story is not a lament; it is a construction. It is the destiny not of death, but of life. The single sentence that resonates in a nation’s memory is her greatest testament: Be among those who leave not pain, but honour.
The name of Heval Delal Amed is now a flare not only in the winds of the mountains but in the conscience of world public opinion: Freedom begins with the woman. Humanity endures through conscience. The future is built by the will of those who defend right and truth.
This is a test not only for the Kurds but for all of humanity. What Heval Delal left behind is not a legend; it is a measure. That measure is clear and explicit: no power, no patriarchy, no denial is stronger than the memory of the peoples, the truth of women, and the dignity of human existence. And humanity is invincible as long as it defends its truth.
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