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English language readers may ask themselves: why translate an article about a book only available in French? For one, the book may eventually be available in English also. And, for another, what Joseph Andras has to say is interesting in its own right.
About the book “Nûdem Durak • Sur la terre du Kurdistan” itself: it consists of a biography interwoven with texts by Nûdem herself, tales and notes, meetings and testimonials, slowly becoming a dialogue with the committed singer herself and, through her, a connection to an entire people striving for its freedom, its culture and its will to build a future with the others peoples inhabiting this vast region split in four parts.
In 2015, Nûdem Durak the singer was only 22 years old when she was sentenced to nineteen years in prison by the Turkish regime. Her ’crime’: defending through her music the struggle and the culture of her native people, the Kurds. That is her only crime. And yet, she was falsely accused of being a member of a so-called “terrorist organization”. She is still in prison, sentenced to staying there until…2034. The struggle of an entire people for its freedom is thus also expressed through her.
Five years after Kanaky (published by Actes Sud), Joseph Andras pursues his work of literary investigation : in a sensitive and well-documented narrative — the product of four years of research — he reconstitutes the history of an individual and collective injustice through the life of the young artist.
Who better than the author himself to speak about the book?
*
Kedistan • Let’s begin simply. There are tens of thousands of political prisoners in Turkey: why a book about Nûdem Durak in particular?
Joseph Andras • I’m tempted to answer just as simply : I don’t know.
K • You don’t know?
JA • What I mean by that is that I don’t know why this “case” held my attention so strongly as to spend four years of my life working on it. Her case is trivial. She is but one detainee among so many others. Identical. Sadly identical. State repression is so massive that it destroys all distinctions : prisoners are numbers in brief press releases. One day, I came across a 9‑minute report on Al Jazeera: it concerned the story of this singer on the eve of her latest incarceration, in April 2015. This produced a kind of commotion in me. I suppose this is how I write — previously, I had been caught up by the “case” of Fernand Iveton and Alphonse Dianou. It was impossible for me to act as if I had not seen what I saw. Her life broke into mine : I had to follow through. Sadness is a healthy emotion, but it renders one powerless. Just as a lament does. So I had to go to Kurdistan and meet her family, her relatives, her lawyer. Exchange letters with her. Examine her file. Investigate as best I could. And, in the end, suggest this book written by her side. It consisted, in a way, of transforming an individual concern into a collective political action — because, what is a book, if not a shared space?
K • One could say: You are French, how does this concern you?
JA • I would answer three things. The first: what concerns the human species, and more widely, the world of the living, concerns everyone. The world is tiny now that it is so interconnected. From the Loiret to the Japanese region of Kansai is a story of neighourhoods. The second is that Nûdem Durak is fighting for a more just social order and that, in order to do so, she mobilized revolutionary, democratic and socialist traditions. As a socialist, I am de facto connected to all of mine, or ours, no matter where they may be. I have more in common with a revolutionary whose language I do not understand than with a French capitalist — I’m almost ashamed to mention such a trivial reality. And the third thing is that, being French, thus a French citizen, I find myself co-responsible, as are all French people, for the discursive, military and economic policies and behaviors of my country. It so happens that Kurdish militants are currently in prison, here also. Now, currently. That three cadres of the Kurdish revolution were assassinated in Paris, in 2013, and that official responses are still being awaited, in vain. That on on December 23 last, three other Kurdish militants were assassinated in Paris, in questionable conditions, by a fascist claiming to have committed an “attack”. That the Macron government has condemned Kurdish resistance. That France was a so-signatoree in 1916 to the Sykes-Picot agreements on the splitting up of the Near East. That the Turkish State is a member of NATO along with the French State. And that the latter maintains the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — the PKK — on the list of “terrorist organizations”. How could I not be concerned?
K • What in fact is Nûdem Durak accused of?
JA • Of being a member of the PKK, thus, of being a “terrorist”. Whereas the facts are as follows: she is not a member, and she is a resistant.
K • And had she been a Party member?
JA • She could have been. But she did nothing other than sing popular, patriotic or revolutionary songs and teach music, as a volunteer, to youths in her region. She was sentenced to 19 years of prison for her opinions. She does not belong to the Party. She never bore weapons. Let’s say that she is a simple sympathizer of the Kurdish democratic movement, in its widest sense, as are a number of her compatriots. I should add that the PKK is obviously not a “terrorist organization”. It is a formation practicing armed self-defence against colonialist, negationistic and policies aimed at extermination applied by the Turkish State. This is a well-known method of States: describing as a “terrorist” whoever opposes their maneuvers. States hold a monopoly on terror and exercise control over words. Baldwin says as much in one of his books, concerning the head of the FBI: “No one ever called former J. Edgar Hoover a terrorist, although that was precisely what he was.” “Terrorists”, then, were the Black Panthers, of course. Algerian, Irish, South-African, Palestinian or French resistance fighters were put in the same category. When writing is the craft you practice, the least you can do is to put words back in their proper place. So, yes, Nûdem Durak resists through her art. And, yes, the PKK resists with weapons — while calling, for decades, to a negotiated and disarmed peace.
K • Half of your book consists, in fact, of a book that Nûdem Durak wrote while in prison. Why this choice?
JA • I wanted her to be read. That people learn what she has to say without intermediaries, ambassadors or other intervenors. She is alive, she is sentenced to stay in prison until 2034 and, during that time, she expresses herself: let’s listen to her. My words do nothing other than to act as escort to her own. She wrote this book behind bars, in Turkish, and she wished for it to be published some day. She managed to exfiltrate it as written pages, and I managed to obtain them. We translated it with comrades. It can now be read in French — hopefully, it will be translated soon into other languages.
K • One of your books is available in Turkey. I imagine it will be impossible for this one!
JA • Books are regularly censored and destroyed over there. Be they Kurdish or Turkish, journalists and writers fill the prisons. For now, I can’t see how Nûdem Durak could be found in a bookstore. But Turkey is not condemned to live under a fascistic regime…
K • You mention a number of Turkish figures in your pages, starting with the poet Nâzım Hikmet.
JA • I’ve been reading him for a long time. He accompanies me: I read him, and re-read him. He has a superb refinement. A beautiful simplicity. I also mention the writer Pınar Selek who lives in exile in France, or the writer Aslı Erdoğan who lives in exile in Germany. I met her in the course of the writing. She openly supports Nûdem Durak, as well as all the other political prisoners. I believe she was broken by detention and by exile. It goes without saying that Turkish dissidents have my sympathy, and even my admiration. They pay a heavy price for their wish for dignity. Nûdem Durak holds no animosity toward the Turkish people : she denounces the institutions, the authorities, the power of the State.
K • Your book is directly linked to the international campaign Free Nûdem Durak. But you also make reference to another, older, campaign, led by Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir in favor of the Algerian prisoner Djamila Boupacha. Do you consider yourself as walking in their footsteps?
JA • I pay them tribute. The book Djamila Boupacha, written by lawyer Gisèle Halimi based on an idea by Simone de Beauvoir, kept me company through the writing. She defends this young detainee arrested and tortured by the French army. She leads us to a close understanding of her, of her motivations, her being. She destroys the State narrative by elaborating another one. This is the gesture I wished to renew, 60 years later : an understanding of a collective situation through a circumscribed case.
K • But do you think your book can have an impact? The Free Nûdem Durak already counts on important voices: Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Yannis Varoufakis, Ken Loach…
JA • I have no idea. This is why this book is part of an international campaign. Books only have a limited influence, we all know that. They cannot undermine the social order. But they feed imaginations, they perpetuate traditions of liberation and they throw some light on areas of usual opacity. They can even, sometimes, act upon time: in light of the daily media flow, of passing information, they force one to stop. To see what we cannot see the rest of the time. This book, along with assembling in one space everything concerning this “case” has no other objective. It will not release Nûdem Durak from her cell, that is certain: it might eventually throw some light, along with other sources on her life, her voice and the order allowing for this detainment. Angela Davis was detained in the past, in North-American cells; in supporting Nûdem Durak, I suppose she knows that she will not bring about her liberation. But she contributes in rendering this incarceration real — because a prisoner with no one to carry his or her voice to the outside is twice a prisoner. Also, a book renders possible this odd experience: passing silently in the back of the world’s daily frenzy, 250 pages alongside a poorly known prisoner, of a banished artist. It can happen that a reader be affected by it: he or she has stepped back from the world in order to return to it, more focused, more obstinate. And that modest strength might link up with larger forces. Political ones. So, we shall see. I think I can state, coldly, factually, that I put Fernand Iveton back on his feet; while at other times, nothing, silence. Once a book is out, nothing belongs to me anymore. I’ve done what I could.
K • Your books have spoken about Algeria, Kanaky, Viet Nam. The anticolonialist question appears central in your work. Is this book part of that?
JA • Yes. Kurdistan struggles against four imperialist States and Kurdish revolutionary openly consider themselves members of the world-wide anticolonial combat. Nûdem Durak does not stop talking about it in her pages. A few days ago, I read in the English-language press the testimonial of a Kurdish fighter, captured and beaten by Israeli agents. It said ” ‘If you know about Viet Nam, you known Kurdistan… a new Viet Nam in our hearts’, wrote Sami in a poem. ‘To the defenceless prisoner in Diyarbakır, to the tree leaf in Viet Nam, to the living being in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the orphaned baby in Sabra and Chatila’ “. Another Kurdish fighter, Can Polat, wrote to a Palestinian writer, Mazen Safi: “May each of us realize that the Kurdish and Arab blood were always and still are united, pure, in defending the dignity and the freedom of the Kurdish and of the Palestinian people.” So, yes, certainly, I unravel this same long string.
K • You seem to hesitate over the word “investigation”. And, in fact, one does not really know what is the nature of this book: a long journalistic reportage? A log book? A legal argumentation? At any rate, you quote several writers : Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Victor Hulgo, André Gide…
JA • I am aware of its rather composite nature. Such as was Kanaky. I am neither a journalist nor a lawyer, only a writer — meaning, that I may occasionally borrow their tools. We were talking about Halimi, but there exists a French internationalist literary tradition to which I feel particularly close. Shortly after the Commune, Louise Michel published Kanak Legends and Chants des Gestes. In the 1920s, writers Léon Werth and André Gide published Cochinchine and Travels in the Congo. In 1982, Genet wrote about the Sabra and Chatila massacres then, with Prisoner of Love, on the Panthers and the fedayin. One could also mention Maspero in the Balkans. I have the impression of following the road they have pointed out for a long time.
K • And Sartre ?
JA • He was asked one day to explain his attraction to lived lives rather than to fictitious ones. He answered : “My aim is to attempt to make apparent the meeting between the development of the person, as illuminated by psychoanalyses, and the development of History. […] What I would like to show is how a man comes to politics, how he is seized by it, how he is transformed by it.” I understand this very well.
K • One last question. Your first six books were published by Actes Sud. This one is published by a small independent publisher from the radical left. Why?
JA • It’s simple. I had a commitment with them to publish a book of poetry, one I finally decided to leave unfinished. I owed them a text — morally speaking. And, in order to defend a combat book, it struck me as natural to turn toward a revolutionary publisher. Especially since Ici-bas has put the anticolonial question at the center of its interests.
K • Thank you so much, Joseph…
• For more: Special Free Nûdem Durak file
International campaign “Free Nûdem Durak”
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Nûdem Durak. Sur la terre du Kurdistan
Joseph Andras
ISBN : 979–10-90507–44‑9
ICI BAS / “Les Réveilleurs de la nuit”, paru le 05 mai 2023
256 pages, 22€
Translation from French by Renée Lucie Bourges
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