Kurdish women of Iran (Rojhelat) are retelling their stories of harm, suffering, defiance, love, and hope through the literary genre of memoirs, which is a unique and emergent phenomenon. They write about their relations to family, to their Kurdish land and to nationalism, and to the very fabric of their conception of reality, identity, culture, language, and politics. The memoirs are complex textual histories in which personal and political struggles are woven together. Thus, they compose a collective autobiographical remembering and witnessing. In this paper, I read and think through seven differing women’s memoirs to put together overburdened lives of women. In this process, I will not be an unresponsive and spectral reader. I will trace my personal, political, and intellectual encounters with the lives and struggles of Kurdish women to figure out how to think about everyday women’s lives in the past and how to uncover absences to comprehend the present. The seven memoirs examined in this paper constitute diaspora literature, and they are all banned in Iran. Indeed, the very subject of “Kurdish women” is among the censored topics in publications in Iran. One author writes in Kurdish, four of the authors write in Persian, and only two write in English with the help of a native-speaker writer. Historically, they primarily cover the 1960s up until the 1979 Revolution and then the 1980s onward, when the suppression by the Islamic State of the Kurds began--hence their displacement and eventual exile around the world. Powerful and captivating images are included in these memoirs as well as a list of almost all women “martyrs”; those who were killed in wars or executed by the Islamic State. The books are mostly published in Europe and are written after decades of experiencing an exilic life, therefore some of the texts carry cultural and political traces of the “hostland.” Three authors depict an intricate dynamic of social life within family and schools, gender relations, and the sense of national belonging