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By İrfan Aktan, published on April 12, 2021 on Duvar
Through dint of hard work over several years, Ersin Korkut, a comedian from the town of Hakkari, managed to build a certain career for himself. In a number of plays, movies and series, he has mostly played characters “who don’t catch on very quickly” but who appear funny because of their “innocence”. When he combined a Kurdish accent with his comedic talent, he was considered a top notch comedian and, as the expression goes “he sat on a throne in our hearts”.
But that throne carried conditions with it. Like his fellow Yılmaz Erdoğan, Korkut had to learn how to move ahead without trampling these conditions: he had to live his Kurdicity “as if” he were a Kurd or “originally“so, as we say… He must not overstep these boundaries. He must draw the curtain of popular culture between himself and the “dangerous” claim of Kurdicity, equality, freedom, and the refusal of oppression.
The price to pay for the slightest slippage from these “throne” conditions, either by error or by accident, could erase an entire career in one fell stroke: the curtain would rise on your identity, the one from which you attempted to purify yourself, your nakeness in the bathroom would be reflected on the screens. You are reminded that the bread you eat was not gained through your work but it is the “bread of this country”, and you are pelted with banana skins.
Ersin Korkut is not the only one in this case. There are several other examples.
Korkut should be the last person you can criticize or judge. Because he is subjected to one of the conditions of the implicit racism in this country, and a condition by which the supremacist regime binds Kurds who aspire to “rise”.
You may choose not to hide your Kurdicity. Besides, this is not what you are clearly forced to do. But you must demonstrate, one way or another, in a coded way, that you have separated yourself from “Kurdicity”. If you are from Dersim, for example, you can send the message by saying “I am from Tunceli” 1, “I am originally from the East”, and thus raise the flag of surrender. But you must also make this permanent, and contrary to what Ersin Korkut did last week, avoid committing a blunder.
As a reminder, for those who do not know already.
In a video clearly recorded in Diyarbakır, a man asks Ersin Korkut:
- “What did you think of Diyarbakır, brother?”
Ersin Korkut answered:
- “Diyarbakır; Amed, Amed, our capital. We love Amed.”
For Kurds, this is more than an ordinary conversation, given the innumerable songs, and books that consider Amed as a capital, and the words of dengbêj [Kurdish bards] heard everywhere…
But following the spread of this video on social media, thousands of fascistic racists called for Ersin Korkut’s arrest, launched threats along with visuals of violence demonstrating “the strength of the Turk”. Thus was a campaign launched for Korkut’s immediate imprisonment. Prosecutors were called up for the job. What was happening was in fact another case such as the one involving Ahmet Kaya 2.
Then, Ersin Korkut called for clemency: “I meant that Diyarbakır is the cultural capital of these lands, of this region. In fact, on the same day I had shared something else where I spoke of Izmir as the cultural capital of the Aegean region. It’s the same thing. This is what I meant, but I wasn’t able to express my thoughts correctly. I’m not someone who understands politics. Of course, we have only one capital and it is Ankara. I’m sorry. I think of nothing other than the fact that everyone live happily together in Turkey. I offer my apologies to everyone.”
But these apologies, dramatic to the highest degree and filled with concessions, were not enough.
As of now, embargos will probably target Ersin Korkut and that invisible hand will delicately intervene against him.
Indeed, Ali Eyüboğlu, of the [nationalist] daily Milliyet, not satisfied with Korkut’s excuses, imposed further conditions. “Instead of this declaration, Ersin Korkut could have remembered the word published [later, in support] by Meral Akşener, President of the IYI Party [national party] concerning the 103 admirals whose declaration had led to reactions: “I was in the clouds, what I did was stupid, please excuse me”. It would be more sincere and could help us in forgetting what he said on TikTok to those who tweet under the hashtag #Ersinkorkuttutuklansın [Ersin must be arrested]. As the anger against Ersin Korkut is not dying down, the comedian must do other things to erase his blunder on TikTok and his personal weakness. If not Ersin Korkut will only be ‘Amed’s favorite’ ”.
In fact, the threat “he will only be Amed’s favorite” is a confirmation of all that is above.
The Turkicity stick openly brandished by Eyüboğlu gathers its strength precisely from the fear revealed by Korkut.
Ersin Korkut truly was the “favorite” in Amed. But following his apologies, he also lost Amed, just like Ankara. Seen from this angle: Ersin Korkut finds himself very isolated.
In order not to lose what one has managed to acquire, one must have the courage, at any moment, to do without what one has acquired. This courage can only be attained by not fearing the lacks in one’s past. The fear of becoming again “as before,” condemns a human being to doing “always more”. Yet some people finds themselves obliged to free themselves of everything they own nonetheless, like a rocket separating from its propulsion device. It is truly a dramatic captivity.
If the applause you received by walking around in the makeup of a “person of origin” transforms itself and this excessive makeup starts to run into anger, hatred madness-inducing acrimony, then wash off the makeup or re-apply it on your face. Must a human live with his choices, or in the captivity of his choices?
It is no “easier” being openly Kurdish than being “of origin”. In other words, let the Kurd behave “as if he were Kurdish” without ever being Kurdish?
The fact of taking it upon one’s self to carry one’s Kurdish identity openly and, if possible, to fight for this, does not require maintaining millimeter-like balances and living with the fear of “losing the esteem of Turks”. The ranks are open and everyone can answer openly. You defend your identity and the State exerts on you, through different means and methods, persecution and violence in different dosages.
But the fact of living as a Kurd, without hiding one’s identity, without speaking of “being of origin” in a Turkish-supremacist regime is even harder, more sensitive and riddled with traps (I take the supremacist concept from Güllistan Yarkın’s article, published in the most recent edition of Cogito Dergisi).
When you show your true identity, things change if you had previously slathered it in humorous sauce and shown it until then as a “pretence” to people you entertained, “joking around” to use the term by Cem Yılmaz3.
The same holds true for those Turks who are surrounded by the codes of the supremacist regime.
Alliance with the Kurds also carries a price for them and at a time when the State hardens its practices aimed at the Kurds, it first eliminates from the arena, one after the other, those Turks who had joined into the Kurdish halay 4. Those who resist this elimination sometimes call down upon themselves the same State thunder as the Kurds do.
In Turkey, racism is not individualistic, it is an implicit system with a finely woven framework. It does not target Kurdicity publicly but alters and erodes this identity through those Kurds it has “captured”. It constantly keeps them indebted for their “advancement despite the fact they are Kurds.”
For this reason, in these “critical” periods, the fact these Kurds “pretend” is no longer sufficient. Because even if you see yourself as white in the mirror, even if your wear masks in the street, you will not escape the radar of the racist system if you are walking around with a heavy debt in your pocket.
As a reminder, there is the example of Bekir Bozdağ, a member of the AKP [Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party] whose ethnic identity is Kurdish but who climbed the steps of his career by hiding it. We can still remember the warning served by Devlet Bahçeli [President of the MHP, the Nationalist Action Party] to Bekir Bozdağ whose reaction in 2018 to the annulment by the State Council of the rule on the abolition of Our Oath: “Mister Bozdağ may say ‘I am Kurdish, I am free’. No one holds back his tongue, nor says ‘shut up and sit down’. Let him evaluate his temperament and his legitimacy. The Turkish Nation carried him up to the the finest and most elevated positions. But do not let him imagine that he can bring down the Turkish Nation. If there are those who say “I am a member of the PKK, I am a separatist, I work for Kurdistan, the punishment is obvious and they will bear the consequences. I advise Mr. Bozdağ to pay particular attention to this.”
One must not lose sight of the fact that Bozdağ, to whom Bahçeli reminded his “debt” could not hold back his tears when Erdoğan gave him his support, but that he could not avoid the slow descent of those steps he had climbed in his career, by dissimulating his Kurdicity in Turkey’s right-wing policies, or that, at the very least, his rise was no longer possible.
“We live in the freest country in the world, Turkey. Our members and compatriots could not find anywhere else a more open environment in which to speak sincerely about their beliefs. For this reason, I will not hide my feeling. The Turk is the sole master, the sole owner of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish descent have but a single right in this country: the right to be servants, the right to be slaves. May the friends, the enemies and those in the mountains know this truth.”
This warning, expressed in 1930 by Mahmut Esat Bozkurt also served as framework to the secret law of the State, then on the first steps of its road. Those who climb the career echelons while remaining in the framework know this truth very well and adjust their steps accordingly. But what can you do, sometimes, by oversight, one day, this flamboyant period, those applause, those acclamations, that stream of love disappears. One stands on stage in one’s most naked form.
So, threatened by the violent nakedness of this stage, is Ersin Korkut alone? Or not? I think he has made up his own mind on this topic.
Note de Kedistan :
Irfan Aktan’s analysis conducted under a double prism could lead to creating the expression, “House Kurd versus Mountain Kurd”, in reference to Malcom X’s famous debate, since here also we are talking of racism, in this instance of anti-Kurdish racism generated and perpetuated by Turkey, an exclusive nationalist “republic”, built on a repressed genocide, a nation-state that will soon be one hundred years old.
This most efficient analytical prism should be applied in all instances where the reality of discriminations is not acknowledged, repressed through a context of rising nationalism, in a Europe that yet claims to be universalist, liberal, in order to better negate differences, classes, exploitations and oppressions of gender or of “origin”, in order to allow the promotion of ideologies that formerly accommodated themselves of fascism or brought it back to power.
İrfan Aktan began in journalism in 2000 on Bianet. He has worked as a journalist, a correspondent or an editor for l’Express, BirGün, Nokta, Yeni Aktüel, Newsweek Türkiye, Birikim, Radikal, birdirbir.org, gazete.com. He was the Ankara representative for IMC-TV. He is the author of two books: “Nazê/Bir Göçüş Öyküsü” (Nazê/A tale of exodus ), “Zehir ve Panzehir: Kürt Sorunu” (Poison and antidote: The Kurdish Question). He presently writes for l’Express, Al Monitor, and Duvar.
Translation by Renée Lucie Bourges
*A word to English-speaking readers: in all instances where the original text is in Turkish or Kurdish, the English version is derived from French translations. Inevitably, some shift in meaning occurs with each translation. Hopefully, the intent of the original is preserved in all cases. While an ideal situation would call for a direct translation from the original, access to information remains our main objective in this exercise and, we hope, makes more sense than would a translation provided by AI…
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