The 49-year-old is one the leading names in Turkey’s Kurdish political scene and has been behind bars over terrorism charges since November 4, 2016, alongside her counterpart, Selahattin Demirtas.

Coming from a conservative family in southern Turkey, Yuksekdag spent most of her life in Turkey’s left-wing parties and organizations, before she was elected co-chair to the pro-Kurdish HDP in 2014.

Joining the ranks of politicians-turned-writers in prison like the prolific Demirtas, who has penned three books in four years, Yuksekdag wrote "Walls to Bring Down,” in the Kandira Prison in northwestern Turkey.

“Figen is a dream wanderer, who never loses her spirit,” says Kurdish poet Suna Aras, in the text the book’s publisher provided to Ahval before its publication.

One of Yuksekdag poems laments the death of 33 young people in Suruç, Şanliurfa in 2015. The young activists, members of Yuksekdag party before she joined the HDP, had gathered to take supplies to help rebuild a Syrian Kurdish town, Kobani, after it was liberated from a long occupation by the Islamic State (ISIS) and were killed in a suicide bombing by the fundamentalist group.

“Birds flew off me,” Yuksekdag says in her poem about them. “Their red scarves tangled in my branches.”

In her poems about the victims of the Suruç bombing, clearly a subject dear to her heart, Yuksekdag uses images of war and destruction, juxtaposed with hope and rebirth, with flowers and newly-fledged saplings.

Another one of her poems is dedicated to the women in the Kandira Prison. Women, in Yuksekdag imagination, are who take the old and the battered, and whisper new life into them. They heal love, that is crippled by patriarchal vulgarity, and plant rose bushes before they gather their skirts up to prepare for a fight.

Among the women Yuksekdag dedicates this poem to is Gultan Kişanak, a Kurdish politician who served as mayor in Turkey’s biggest majority-Kurdish province Diyarbakir, and as co-chair in HDP’s sister parties Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and Democratic Regions Party (DBP).

Kişanak was arrested a few months before Yuksekdag, and she also wrote a book while in prison. Hers is a non-fiction work - a collection of essays from women in Kurdish and left-wing politics in Turkey. Yuksekdag has a piece in this book titled, “History does not like women who stop and stay silent at all.”

As a woman at the top level of left-wing Kurdish politics, Yuksekdag lived the motto of refusing to stay silent.

“We believe in a peace that women will build,” she had said at a HDP event for World Peace Day 2014, exactly six years before her book is set to be published. Her conviction on charges of terrorist propaganda stem from similar speeches, one given at a HDP congress.

World Peace Day is celebrated on September 1 in Turkey, after the Warsaw Pact’s decision to commemorate the day Germany invaded Poland in 1939, kickstarting World War II. The United Nations celebrates the International Day of Peace on September 21.

For Peace Day activities this year, HDP is holding a socially distanced human chain as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to maintain an upward trajectory in Turkey, forcing stricter protective measures against it. The human chain will be the final demonstration in a months-long protest the party started after two of its deputies were stripped of their parliamentary status in June.

Thousands of HDP members are currently in prisons throughout Turkey, many awaiting trial, including more than 50 mayors, who were dismissed by government decrees and replaced by state-appointed officials.

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