Türkçe Politikhane | Français | English
Translation of the article by Uğur Güney Subaşı, published in Turkey on November 21 2020 in Politikhane.

We are stretched out on the oper­a­tion table, like a “bod­i­less” patient who, because of the anes­the­sia not hav­ing pro­duced its intend­ed effect, remains con­scious; a patient who knows, who hears, who even sees what is going to hap­pen; but who, despite this, because the body has fall­en asleep, can­not react to the pain or to the pains soon to be admin­is­tered. As if we were not only the patient of the doc­tor every­one knows, the one whis­per­ing in our ear that he is the only per­son who can cure us, who then pro­ceeds to lac­er­ate, sav­age­ly hack away at our human organs start­ing with our heart and our mind, our virtues, using his own meth­ods; but as if we were also corpses devoid of resis­tance, of emo­tions, silent, on which stu­dents prac­tice in their final year of med­i­cine! Our “humanoid”-like bod­ies show no sign of life, while demon­strat­ing that we are human beings who, despite our tears mis­tak­en for sweat and wiped away, pos­sess fears, dreams, loves, revolts.

I observe with sad­ness our col­lec­tive insen­si­tiv­i­ty, our indif­fer­ence, our res­ig­na­tion stretch­ing out on large por­tions of soci­ety, slow­ly, like an ink stain fall­en on the ground. The worst is our state of mind and body, accus­tomed, ren­dered accus­tomed; there are not too many pos­si­bil­i­ties left for social sup­port being offered to Kurds; the sup­port they are jus­ti­fied in expect­ing from us and, it must be admit­ted, that they deserve, emerg­ing from the dusty ruins of the lives of suf­fer­ing that have land­ed on their heads, mor­ph­ing into a moun­tain of flesh: resist­ing, alley­way by alley­way, avenue by avenue, square by square, no mat­ter the cost, against end­less ille­gal­i­ties exert­ed by a cru­el author­i­ty and a State with a hate­ful face; and try­ing to make known at the world lev­el all the legal assas­si­na­tions com­mit­ted with pre­med­i­ta­tion against all of their polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives, start­ing with their charis­mat­ic leader. I can bear wit­ness from up close.

For the cur­rent pow­er struc­ture in Turkey, hav­ing long dis­cov­ered that their coun­try­men have no use for rights, for Law, for democ­ra­cy and free­doms, espe­cial­ly when they involve Kurds, Ale­vis, non-Mus­lims, have proven time and time again, through poli­cies based on sec­tar­i­an and racist his­tor­i­cal hatred, instilled in Mus­lim Turks’ DNA, with no dis­tinc­tion between believ­ers or Kemal­ists, that it is extreme­ly clever in max­i­miz­ing its own polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic objectives.

Start­ing from this premise, even if the pic­ture appears seri­ous for the Kurds, I think that this peo­ple no one has suc­ceed­ed in “bring­ing to its knees”, of “push­ing into the ranks”, and that has demon­strat­ed deter­mi­na­tion and obdu­ra­cy from head to foot, is not alone and hope­less, as one might think, hope, and plan to shove around and assault. I think that they eyes filled with suf­fer­ing, with dis­ap­proval, with anger fil­tered out of a dig­ni­fied life which has been trans­fig­ured into years of hell, will pro­vide the raw mate­r­i­al, the cement for their deter­mined pos­ture. I expe­ri­ence this as a pos­si­bil­i­ty for us to escape the bloody cir­cle of this hope­less coun­try fight­ing des­per­ate­ly in the awful swamp of racism and sec­tar­i­an con­fes­sion­al­ism in which , the more it strug­gles, the deep­er it sinks; that this may be a hope for us, even if only a speck, a hope for a human breath.

Uğur Güney Subaşı

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…
You may use and share Kedistan’s articles and translations, specifying the source and adding a link in order to respect the writer(s) and translator(s) work. Thank you.
Auteur(e) invité(e)
Auteur(e)s Invité(e)s
AmiEs con­tributri­ces, con­tribu­teurs tra­ver­sant les pages de Kedis­tan, occa­sion­nelle­ment ou régulièrement…