Might Kurdish statelessness ironically offer an alternative mode of being?
A former friend once told me that the most valuable part of getting to know me was learning about the Kurds. I was reduced to a history lesson, a mere corrective to a status quo that invisibilizes Kurdish realities in the everyday Middle Eastern imagination. I would have preferred not to do that work, I said. The work of constantly pushing for Kurdish realities to appear on someone else’s horizon. I would rather be the Kurd in Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “The Kurd Has Nothing but the Wind,” inhabiting the wind and being inhabited by it. I would rather not have to encapsulate myself, draw contours, and force a singularity of my, of our, being.
But I am confronted by my own contradictions. As I write this, the Kurdish map rests against my collarbones, hanging from a necklace my father bought for me in Slêmanî in 2009, during more hopeful times. There were periods when I stopped wearing it, feeling it was too nationalistic, as though I’d turned my chest into a billboard for political advocacy. Then Kobanê came under siege, Afrîn was invaded and occupied, Jina Mahsa Amini killed. Başûrî villages were bombed and trees cut down to make way for Turkish military occupation; another Kurd imprisoned, another democratically elected mayor removed. Another Kolbar shot and killed by Iranian border forces. Another Kurd executed. I know that wearing the necklace does not repair, undo or prevent any violence. But every time someone asks, “What is that shape?”; “Is that a gun?”; “Which map is that?”; I tell myself that it counts for something. I tell myself that because of it I can, however marginally, assert Kurdish existence in the face of denial, erasure, or plain oblivion. How many of us turn encounters, any encounter, into a demand for visibility and legibility, to the point of it becoming parody?
The world treats Kurds as guilty by default, and any pathway to freedom is premised on first and foremost justifying our flesh and blood existence.
Many Kurds of my generation and older experienced 2014 as a turning point, when Kurds suddenly became visible overnight for their battles against ISIS. For the first time, our answers to “Where are you from?” were not met with confusion or incomprehension; the very words “Kurd” or “Kurdish” were not received as a foreign language. Kurds made headlines as “the only hope in defeating ISIS,” and many internationalists joined the Kurdish forces in the field. Yet, as we materialized, we made it only as far as the margins. We arrived stripped of agency and history; “The Kurds” were, and continue to be, only either heroic fighters or imperial proxies. Kurdish female fighters had existed for decades, but suddenly they were hot news, reported on via exotic and orientalist tropes, and their motivation to fight ISIS was portrayed as merely an attempt to rob the fighters of the 72 virgins allotted to them in heaven—the supposed punishment for being killed by a woman. We now exist in the world’s dictionaries, but under what definition?
In Hüseyin Karabey’s film Were Dengê Min (Come to My Voice), the sole breadwinner of the family, Temo, is, along with the rest of the men in the village, accused of gun possession and imprisoned. The only way for Temo to return home is if the remaining family hands in the gun Temo is accused of possessing. Except that there is no gun. The film follows his mother Berfê and his daughter Jiyan as they set out through the mountains of Bakur, navigating Turkish military commanders, village headmen, and smugglers to find a gun to surrender for Temo’s freedom. The movie narrates this impossible search as an oral epic transmitted over generations by dengbêjan (Kurdish bards). Embedded in Kurdish collective memory, it becomes an allegory for a world in which the Kurds’ innocence cannot set them free.
The world treats Kurds as guilty by default, and any pathway to freedom is premised on first and foremost justifying our flesh and blood existence. “Show me your country on the map if you exist”; “Wait, you have your own language?”; “Why are Kurds always undermining Arab unity?” Those that accuse Kurds of separatism for merely making a claim to existence are endowing those imaginary lines drawn by imperial powers a mere 100 years ago with sacred status, but supposedly we are the blasphemous ones. My friend got first-hand exposure to the supremacist logic underpinning the occupying states when he was seen carrying the Kurdish map keychain I’d brought back as a souvenir from Kurdistan: “Are you a kāfir?”
So, we fit ourselves into molds. We internalize the nation-state logic, attempting to prove that we are unified despite the absence of, and prior to having, a nation-state. All nation-states are modern, artificial creations; uniform identities come into being through active, violent, top-down constructions only after borders are drawn, not before. Yet, we are burdened with having to prove nationhood before becoming worthy of being treated like a people. We write PhDs demonstrating that Ahmedî Xanî expressed nationalist thought long before any of our enemies, and dedicate lifetimes of research to proving that we are just as deserving of a country as anyone else. We debate our multiple languages and our two alphabets, desiring a single dialect and script at the expense of our linguistic diversity. We are made to believe that we must strip ourselves of our varied colors, to adhere to the bland, monotone idea of the modern nation.
We are cast in the binary of good Kurd/bad Kurd. But the good Kurd in policy reports is the bad Kurd in social science research: policy-makers prefer compliant Kurds, and researchers resistant, militant ones. Why is it, however, that only after building a new model for democratic and decentralized life, only after affirming feminist and ecological politics, we become worthy of attention?
I remember a documentary screening I attended in April about archival material on the Komala party in Rojhelat. A woman in the audience exclaimed, “There are other Kurdistans?” For her, Rojava was all there was to Kurdistan. But I wonder how much we, in our attempt to draw global attention to the Rojava revolution and its promises, have participated in its dismemberment. The Rojava revolution was a decade in the making, built on ideals that Kurdish communities practiced on a small scale long before reaching international fame. Eventually, the power vacuum that emerged in the wake of the Syrian revolution enabled the Kurdish freedom movement to seize the moment and expand its implementation. The global attention to the Rojava revolution taught us that if we sing our most beautiful songs of freedom, it may finally be enough for us to be heard.
But it does not matter how much we honeyed our throats. Predetermined by our statelessness, we remain spare parts in the arena of imperial governance. In an absurd echo of Temo’s story, Trump himself accused Kurds of “keeping” the weapons the U.S. had sent to Iranian protesters, after weeks of reckless journalists falsely reporting on a Kurdish ground offensive in Iran. While Kurdish officials walked diplomatic minefields to dispel such claims, these events showed that, as Meghan Bodette pointed out, “the reality of war in Kurdistan has drawn less attention than a possible war constructed by unnamed foreign officials.”
Toni Morrison called racism a distraction. One that “keeps you from doing your work,” and busies you “with proving the existence of a self, rather than reimagining the self.” Because no matter what you succeed in proving, “there will always be one more thing.” I think of this when I hear those that do not profess an immediate hatred for Kurds, who at times even claim to support them, question Kurdish language education. “How can Syria function as a state if people up north are taught in Kurdish?” they ask. Before the liberal, we’ve gone from trying to prove that we have a language, to proving that this language is worthy of existence. We are reminded that linguicide is not enacted solely in the name of supremacist ideology, it can also be excused under the guise of smooth bureaucracy. Can we enter the realm of imagination with cut tongues?
Darwish dedicates “The Kurd Has Nothing but the Wind” to Saleem Barakat, a Kurdish writer from Qamişlo whom Darwish met as a fellow exile in Beirut. In the poem, the Kurd, as archetype, is irreducible and unbounded, “so that he can be saved from the adjectives of the land and things.” For the Kurd, there is no tomorrow or yesterday because to exist as a Kurd is to be atemporal. The Kurd is, because he exists, just like the mountains.
The Kurd is told that to be free is better than to be stung by “wounded hope, for it is a mythical beast.” Instead of wounded hope, we find the poetic. The wind cannot be captured in bags, and dust cannot be confined. The Kurd cannot be held captive by the singularity of modernity, nor should the Kurd aspire to it. Freedom and multiplicity, being nothing and everything all at once. The Kurd is liberated from combatting invisibilization, free from “the curse of names.”
And so perhaps this Kurd, liberated from the politics of appeal and recognition, freed from anticipation, can offer a lens into alternative modes of being. Modes that do not subscribe to the violent logics of nation-states and imperialism. There are no Kurdish smugglers, no Kurdish parties in foreign territory. Nor is there an absence of unity, because unity is never a natural occurrence. Oneness can only exist if it is imposed. Our diverse languages, our divisions, our multitudes should not be considered obstacles to becoming legible and legitimate. Rather, they are natural occurrences, in existence prior to, or in the absence of, constructions of singularity. What emerges if one unlearns imperialism.
I do not wish to romanticize Kurdish statelessness and the violence the Kurds have been made to endure as a result. I do not wish to offer the poetic as a momentary relief from the rope around our necks. Nor do I intend to criticize the desire for self-determination, whether in central or decentralized forms. Rather, it seems to me that irrespective of dreams and aspirations, the Kurd offers a different lens, another vocabulary. One that emerges out of our current state of being, as a matter of fact. In the battle over the “X” and the “P,” it is language itself that offers liberation, the language of the non-singular, of the unbounded and the undefined. In the language of the Kurd, absence is not loss, but a wind more capacious than the earth.
