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Ded­i­cat­ed to the Kur­dish artist Nûdem Durak, impris­oned since 2015 and who fears nev­er singing again, after being diag­nosed with a tox­ic goitre (a tox­ic goitre is one with hyperthyroidism)

By Bilge Aksu pub­lished on May 19 2022 in Yeni Özgür Politika

If you are among those who, dur­ing a meet­ing with fam­i­ly or friends fall silent when the top­ic veers toward the 90s, it must be because you share the same tongue. As you know, the Turk­ish gen­er­a­tion born in the 80s, seems unit­ed in this respect.

The influ­ence of the era of rapid change and tele­vi­sion that every­one knew in the 70s and the 80s reached our lands in the 90s. I know peo­ple who remem­ber an entire decade in detail, when the top­ic involves pop cul­ture, mag­a­zines, new forms of rela­tion­ships and new celebri­ties. Over the years, chil­dren who grew up in “west­ern” Turkey, along with icon­ic posters of pop fig­ures, tazos, chips, provoca­tive songs, still remem­ber the peri­od in their nos­tal­gic quest.

Per­son­al­ly, I am one of those chil­dren. How­ev­er, prob­a­bly because I came from a class raised in pover­ty, even if we were unable to see life with rose-tint­ed glass­es, we some­times clung to this nos­tal­gia. But most­ly, when we start­ed tak­ing on our polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty, in our ear­ly 20s, there appeared this silence I men­tioned above. Because, if the “west­ern side” of this coun­try offered us a joy­ful child­hood illus­trat­ed by col­or tv icons, no one informed us of what was hap­pen­ing in this “oth­er side”. We became aware of the facts through our own efforts, our curios­i­ty ad most­ly, thanks to our friends who were not from the west or did not behave as such.

The colonial mindset

Dur­ing that dan­ger­ous peri­od, the most impor­tant effort of the Kur­dish Move­ment for free­dom involved pre­serv­ing Kur­dish chil­dren who were extreme­ly open to assim­i­la­tion. When these chil­dren over­came — so to speak — this dark peri­od and began appear­ing in the uni­ver­si­ties, Turkey had not yet stepped out of its peri­od of pro­hi­bi­tions. In the mid­dle of the years 2000, the eman­ci­pa­tion move­ment, dressed in the rhetoric of broth­er­hood pro­mot­ed by the AKP gov­ern­ment, was only in its first expres­sions. The TRT Kur­dî pub­lic chain had only bare­ly begun trans­mis­sion and emi­nent min­is­ters, micro­phones in had, with old-fash­ioned and pedan­tic expres­sions, attempt­ed to announce the exis­tence of a lan­guage called Kur­dish, a lan­guage of which they mas­tered nei­ther the gram­mar nor the pronunciation.

Ensconced in the com­fort of a colo­nial mind­set, with the lux­u­ry of a lack of curios­i­ty for what this cul­ture con­sist­ed of, or of the con­no­ta­tions it evoked, these lead­ers were like the  pre­sen­ters of a strange fes­ti­val of eman­ci­pa­tion, led in an awk­ward and con­de­scend­ing way. Yet, despite the appear­ance of the tvs, the pro­hi­bi­tions and oppres­sions con­tin­ued cease­less­ly in the back­grounds. The Kur­dish lan­guage, not accept­ed for state­ments before the courts, for exam­ple, became in the micro­phone of İbrahim Tatlıs­es1a tear­ful and pathet­ic lament. At the same time, the tongue was still ban­ished dur­ing the first four years of pri­ma­ry school in Bakur2. This penal­ized Kur­dish chil­dren from the onset of their edu­ca­tion. This for­bid­den tongue, through the micro­phone of Şivan Per­v­er, lulled the Erdoğan fam­i­ly and Turkey in a melan­cholic happiness.

nudem durak

In such cir­cum­stances, a polit­i­cal con­scious­ness car serve as a life saver. It was with such a polit­i­cal con­scious­ness that it became pos­si­ble not to be car­ried off into this fes­ti­val of eman­ci­pa­tion the strange­ness of which was spread­ing every­where. This staged spec­ta­cle did not last in the long run. Giv­en the fact that the Kur­dish move­ment was gain­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty and sup­port at all lev­els of soci­ety, the Turk­ish State with its Lord and Mas­ter atti­tude began reclaim­ing every one of the oppor­tu­ni­ties it had “offered”.

The regime tightens the noose

If we assess the results today in Turkey, most of the writ­ers, jour­nal­ists, polit­i­cal fig­ures and artists in prison are Kur­dish. As of last week, we seem to have entered into a new phase of this pol­i­cy of oppres­sion. Activ­i­ties by artists well accept­ed by soci­ety, such as Aynur Doğan and Metin-Kemal Kahra­man were for­bid­den one after the oth­er. The play “Don Kixot” at the Amed City The­ater also encoun­tered its share of pro­hi­bi­tions. Of course, oth­er peo­ple are includ­ed in this car­a­van. Erdoğan’s regime, know­ing it has noth­ing but a shot­gun for the elec­tions sched­uled for next year, is delib­er­ate­ly tight­en­ing the noose. The fes­ti­val is for­bid­den in Eskişe­hir, a pro­hi­bi­tion against noc­tur­nal music is intro­duced under the guise of the pan­dem­ic and pro­longed until 01h00 and, clear­ly, peo­ple are being made fun of when the cloth­ing of well-known fem­i­nine per­son­al­i­ties is loud­ly tak­en to task, when oppo­si­tions is loud­ly crit­i­cized, when cul­tur­al fes­ti­vals cel­e­brat­ing posters and graf­fi­ti orga­nized by town­ships are pro­hib­it­ed, when the arti­cle about a con­cert by the group K‑POP is lynched on social networks…

Intellectuals who can’t stand up

So here we are, in one of those peri­ods when polit­i­cal con­scious­ness saves lives.  The men­tal­ly divid­ed geog­ra­phy of the 90s which I evoked at the begin­ning of this arti­cle seems to show a ten­den­cy at divid­ing anew in the face of these all-out attacks. If, in such a peri­od, the fact of pro­tect­ing a youth fes­ti­val turns into a his­tor­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ty, the same enthu­si­asm does not appear for voic­es com­ing “from afar”. Sol­lic­i­tude envelops Aynur, Metin-Kemal, at least for those with media vis­i­bil­i­ty,  there exists a pro­tec­tive reflex. But we do not see this same emo­tion, for exam­ple, for young groups such as Stêr­ka Kar­wan who, in the most recent news, was dropped form the pro­gram at the spring fes­ti­val  at Eren Uni­ver­si­ty in Bitlis, or again for Nûdem Durak, who has been in prison for years and for whom sev­er­al well-known “Occi­den­tal” musi­cians have voiced sup­port.

We have a prob­lem in Turkey with an intel­lec­tu­al milieu where peo­ple do not stand up, the way Roger Waters of Pink Floyd did, who offered his gui­tar to Nûdem Durak, along with his open sup­port. The only way now would be to con­front the fas­cist cur­rent attack­ing us, with­out tak­ing shel­ter in  the cho­sen igno­rance of the 90s, with­out tak­ing to the shad­ows, or wan­der­ing in the wilderness…

If we pull it off, we might deserve to see Nûdem and Waters on the same stage in Turkey.

Bilge Aksu 

Cov­er image: Nûdem Durak by Mahn Kloix
You can also skim through Dossier Spé­cial Nûdem Durak, on Kedistan.


Translation from French by Renée Lucie Bourges

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Le petit mag­a­zine qui ne se laisse pas caress­er dans le sens du poil.