Nous aurons aussi de beaux jours: Écrits de prison was published in 2019 by the French publisher Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque. The book is a compilation of letters written by Kurdish artist and journalist Zehra Doğan to her Turkish friend Naz Öke during the 600 days she spent in prison between June 2017 and February 2019. The letters—written in Turkish and translated into French by Öke and Daniel Fleury—bear witness to the political arbitrariness that Doğan and her fellow prisoners were victims of. They speak of the conditions in the prisons of Diyarbakır and Tarsus, of the narrow confines of the cells, through whose tiny windows two stars shine every night, and of the women whose solidarity gives Doğan strength and whose stories she wants to record as a way of drawing the world’s attention to the fate of the many Kurdish prisoners in Turkey who have been unjustly imprisoned.
Zehra Doğan, b. 1989 in Diyarbakır (Turkey), is a Kurdish artist, journalist, and activist who was sentenced to almost three years in jail for painting a picture modelled on a photograph of Nusaybin that had been taken by the Turkish military during the state of emergency. She was charged with spreading propaganda for a terrorist organization and being a member of a terrorist group. In 2018, she received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.
