Race-Nation-Gender-Class-Nation: Forget it. Never Forget it

Pat Parker (1944-1989), poet, teacher and activist, wrote this poem: For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend  and had this wonderful line:

The first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black.
Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.

For any social difference that exists in any society, we can place it there, in the space of “Black.”   In any case, color-blindness, gender-blindness, mixed-space blindness, sexual orientation blindness, socio-economic class blindness, neighborhood blindness, body-size blindness, nationality blindness etc. etc. —  we have to pay attention to how quickly we may subsume, make invisible, refuse (ignore), make trivial, something that makes a difference.  Sameness is too valorized in the globalizing society.  It’s not about any particular choices we have in holding on and letting go—-because even this is an action and a series of action (holding or letting go, that is), that come from political positionings that rely on privilege, luck, ability, amount of trauma, fear, violence, and a host of other things that come from oppression and social constructions of society.

Let us not forget how completely and utterly different we are from each other.  This way, we truly understand diversity.  If we “understand,” then perhaps we do not understand difference at all.  We just consume, co-opt, and bring into our own history and culture and language and values, that OTHER.  This is a violence to that Other.

But in saying they are different, do we automatically become AFRAID?   Or do we automatically become ANGRY?  Do we automatically IGNORE?  Do we assume we can translate, communicate?   Yes we can communicate, but understanding its partiality is important.

Honor you.  Honor me.

In our difference.  Utterly different.  Utterly ourselves.  Yet somehow, we are related as humans, as that who has experienced pain.

Perhaps other things.  But do not assume equality.

Be human.

There . . . . . .  Can we allow difficulty, struggle, powerful connection and dissonance?

SULTANA: Sings Turkish woman-rap, banned in 2000. Now back with a vengeance!

Turkish pop/rap star Sultana, was deemed “dangerous” by the Turkish government and the media in 2000 when her song Kusu Kalkmaz came out.  The Title means:  “Birds Can’t Fly”  — which is a euphemism for “Can’t Get It Up.”   The song suggests a failure in the men who leave their wife and family behind while they go out to clubs to search for women and prostitutes for elicit sex, hiding their impotence as men, not just sexual bodies.

When radio and television stations were told not to play her music or music videos or her performances in Turkey because of the song, Sultana was disgusted.  She is quoted to say that Turkey has a problem with freedom, that creativity means freedom and that Turkey’s “Thought Police” is ridiculous because it actually tries to control thought and that creativity will always resist control.  She moved to the United States at that point and continued to record some beautiful “woman-rap” songs in Turkish/English hybrid, mixing Turkish traditional instruments, modern rap and hip/hop sensibility and Europeanesque melodies.

LINK to a short article

 

Some words from her song:

‘Kuşu Kalkmaz’

I am a-kick it for my girl while you ask how
’cause people in the world are living so foul
I manifest a tune about this, aye:
‘Kuşu kalkmaz’ means: ‘your bird can’t fly’!
While wife and kids are locked up at home
And you are at the strip club
headed for the zone,
Brizzle and ice sucked up all your stones
And by the time you get back home
your baby done grown
‘Cause you were stuck at the spot
like a fool to rasclast
Trying to get at what the new girl got
Not conscious of the family
Not acting like a father
When you’ve seen her in the light
Man, that’s your daughter

Sezen Aksu: the Queen/Diva of Turkish Pop

Sezen Aksu (July 13, 1954 -) is the quintessential diva extraordinaire, of Turkish pop.  She is the indisputable queen diva of the Turkish pop music scene.  ‘Pop’ music, now worldwide, through the effects of American colonization, always mixes with its locales to create interesting hybrid music that also carries certain themes that repeats throughout the world.  Songs of falling in love, songs of loving what or who we cannot have, separation and longing, devastation and pride, sorrow and joy.  Also, to dance our butts off.  Sezen Aksu’s unique, rough voice carries emotions that many in the Mediterranean are attracted to.  She has influenced pop music in the mediterranean nations, the Balkans and changed the annual Eurovision Music Context with her protege, Ertab Serener.  From the 1970s through today, and continues to break barriers.

She is particularly attractive to me in other ways, making me like her music more.  Her life has not been comfortable, although her fame and fortune has helped her.  She has married and divorced several times, something Turkish society does not like and in some cultures within the Turkish nation, divorcing is a taboo that the woman pays for the rest of her life (although this is not unique just to Turkish sub-cultures).  She has also married an Armenian, works tirelessly and speaks out vigorously for women’s rights and gay rights, and for the rights of the Kurds.  She has been allowed to stay out of jail, even though she has sung songs in the ‘illegal’ language of the Kurdish people, Zaza cultures, and Armenian people  in Turkey, and has co-sung with some of these groups’ popular singers, raising the eyebrows and bringing much-needed discussions at Turkish dinner tables.  She dares the powers that be, to let democracy work, and to love who we love, and for singers and all artists, to express and to live.

I present a nice classical-tinged with a bit of Astor Piazzolla-esque ballad, and a rocking dance song by her.  The remixes of her dance music have been done by hundreds of different musicians.  The dance song ‘Rakkas’ has become a perennial classic in Turkish pop culture and also internationally it is one of the most ‘mixed’ songs in dance clubs by DJs from Spain, Greece, the UK, India, Germany, Hungary to Japan.

Sezen Aksu: wikipedia

Sezen Aksu official site

Kıran kırana

Rakkas

Uzbek Singer Sevara Nazarkhan

She bridges the traditional and pop/jazz/worldmusic genres.  She sings in Uzbek Turkic languages and also in Russian.  She is one of my favorites.

Sevara Nazazrkhan, along with Yulduz Uzmanova, are credited to have brought Uzebek music from its relatively isolated Central Asian and Turkic music scenes, onto the world scene.  Recent events in Uzbekistan remind us of the severe problems existing in the Caucuses and Central Asia due to the several imperial governments that have ruled through violence and heavy-handed central rule via invasions. Mongols, Turkic tribes, Persians and the Russians are the most standout imperial forces that have invaded and ruled the area, and influence the many kinds of peoples, cultures and tribes existing in the nation-state of Uzbekistan.  The recent massacres in 2005, the Andijan massacres ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_Uzbekistan), attest to the central government’s use of violence to control the  state and having some of the worst human violations in the world that go along with impunity.

The rich cultural heritage of Uzbekistan’s cultural arts are reflected in Sevara Nazarkhan’s wonderful music. Islamic/Sufi spiritual tradition, Turkic communal music, popular music, Russian balladry, and various western and local dance styles dot the many music-scapes of Sevara’s albums.  Please enjoy.

Wikipedia information on Uzbekistan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbekistan

Dersim Images: from 2008 study trip to the Dersim Region, east Turkey

In 2008, kind friends and the anthropology program at CIIS, sponsored my research trip to Dersim (Tunceli on today’s maps) of Eastern Turkey.  I was lucky enough to visit diaspora in Europe, as well as in Istanbul and Ankara, and to visit Dersim/Tunceli proper, as well as to a village in the Ovacik district of Tunceli.  Each district of Tunceli is distinct in geography.  There is a ‘Dersim-ness’ in the predominantly Alevi worldviews and Kirmanc (Zaza) and Kurmanji (Kurdish) language and cultural histories, but many of the inhabitants are now Turkish and Kurdish urban people who have been sent there to live, in order to Sunni-fy (Islam) and Turkify the area, even though it is still dominated by Marxist brands of activism, primarily the Maoist type, with Turkish and Kurdish activists.  Many of the families that are originally from the area had been displaced since the late 19th century and continues today, with many of the locals visiting their elder family members or have summer village homes.  Their families live mostly in Europe and the Americas and visit their former homes in the summers.

I had part-time translators and I was able to get snapshots of stories and thoughts from the locals and the young diaspora.

It was an unforgettable experience.

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Mikail Aslan & Ahmet Aslan: Singer/storytellers of Dersim

Mikail Aslan (on the left of the photo) and Ahmet Aslan (on the right of the photo), although unrelated to each other by family heritage, are among the elites and considered amongst the most precious modern artists who work to tell, preserve and empower the people of the Dersim region of what is considered ‘Tunceli’ in eastern Turkey today. Through their songs, both modern and ancient, traditional and roots-fusion, the historical/cultural memory of spiritual traditions, loss, genocide, mourning, isolation, stigmatization, marginalization and state destruction, are woven into the hearts and minds of whoever will listen.

Their music is usually accompanied with the stories of the elders who’ve experienced the 1937-38 events that should be considered an aspect of the continual genocidal actions against the culture and people of the region. Or they would be songs of the displaced who fled the government forest and village burnings and purges during the 1990s, and the continual repression of its people and the collectively grieving population of Dersim, the music also tells their stories. Many of their songs are traditional songs, slightly modernized to adapt to the modern times, while other songs are left as they were sung centuries ago. Many of their songs are songs of mourning that would be sung by everyday people on the streets and roads of the villages while their relations were disappeared, imprisoned, and/or killed by government forces.

The Dersim region in Eastern Turkey, was told to the public to be the land of terrorism and propaganda had been created to present the region as dangerous and of outlaws. Certainly those who practiced non-Muslim worldviews such as Alevism and Christianity, often fled to the Dersim region, where the rugged mountainous territory was easy to protect from encroaching forces. The Ottoman governments, before the formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, tried for centuries to subjugate the Dersim region. The people of the region refused to live via modernizing state laws and the Islamicization of their worldviews, They refused to pay taxes and send their sons into the Ottoman military forces because they felt the the government wanted to control them through these means. The Dersim region was very poor and because they were isolated, their subsistence also included banditry, while others we wealthier–benefiting from working the the Turkish state.

During the height of the Armenian pogroms and genocide, many Dersim Kurds helped thousands of Armenians by taking them into their homes, as they lived amongst them for centuries, in harmony. During the 1915 intensification of Armenian genocide, many Kurds assisted the American Protestant missionaries form an underground railroad to help Armenians escape out of Turkey into Russia.  Other more fundamentalist groups in Dersim took advantage of the pogroms and participated in assisting the Turkish state in the Armenian cleansings.  Today, some Turkish officials used Dersim’s Armenian connection as some sort of ‘negative’ trait, which shows the long history of animosity against the Armenian Christians who were a threat to mainstream Islamic officials.  For the most part, in Dersim, the Armenians and the Dersim Kurds lived side-by-side without issue.

The Dersimian languages were mainly Zazaki and Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish dialect) and they practiced a form of Alevi worldview and ritual that was distinct from the Bektashi Alevism that is being mainstreamed in Turkey today. Many Dersim Alevi religious terms have Armenian words and forms of worship, as well as pre-Christian, pre-Islamic forms, including Zorastrianism and Shi’a Islamic forms as well. The Dersim region was distinct in its cultural forms, held together by strong bands of men who knew the mountains well and were ruthless in defense of the region. However, they believed in diplomacy and negotiation and proper mediation in conflict. These were all betrayed by the early Turkish state. As early as 1925, plans to transform eastern Turkey and to split families and destroy the region, was planned. In the rest of Turkey, people learned of a ‘rebellion’ in Dersim and the need for the subjugation of the region. There was really never a ‘rebellion’ in the traditional sense of a wholescale anti-government movement. The early Turkish government used such terms to give it the go-ahead in a genocidal campaign that would destroy its leadership and split the villages and families apart and to assimilate the young into a particular brand of state Turkishness that even for many Turkish-identified people, has outgrown in its ‘cover’ and its place in modern Turkey.

Through their fine music and personalities, Mikail Aslan and Ahmet Aslan bring us the realities of grief, joy, mourning, memory, the strength, and the courage of the Dersim people and their efforts toward cultural survival.

For more information in English on Dersim, I have included a website that is Armenian. I include this because most of the information written about Dersim in the English language, begin with official state claims and versions, such as a ‘suppression of a rebellion’ which was a state propaganda version and pretext for ethnic/cultural cleansing for state-building. Please be careful when reading any historical texts, of cultures that we are not familiar with, as even well-meaning people may tow the state version of events and lives.

Truth of Dersim ’38 (from Armenian Weekly): http://www.armenianweekly.com/2010/01/24/kahraman-dersim-38-from-rebellion-to-massacre-a-state-project

Dersim’s Lost Girls film: http://www.kurdishcinema.com/DersimsLostGirls.html

Mikail Aslan.net : http://www.mikailaslan.net/website/index.php?lang=en

Ahmet Aslan.org : http://ahmetaslan.org/

Above Photo of a Dersim villager hunted and captured by the Turkish army during the 1937-38 genocidal campaign.

Lêa Qeraji (in Zazaki language)  by Mikail Aslan

Dilo Dilo (in Zazaki language)  by Mikail Aslan

Susarak Özlüyorum ( (in Turkish language)  by Ahmet Aslan

Veyve Milaketu (Dance of the Angels) (in Zazaki language)  by Ahmet Aslan

“Calling it Home” Documentary Video by Zeynep Uygun: Displacement & Democracies

Tarlabasi is a district in Istanbul, Turkey with a long history of housing non-Muslims and other displaced persons such as trans-identified persons, Armenians and Kurds, Christians, Romani, and others. There are a few neighborhood districts in the huge city of Istanbul that are like this. They are home to these thousands and provide safety and diversity in a city that is continually mobilized (in people’s minds and therefore actions) as one that tows the dominant ideologies and meanings of the Turkish state. The Turkish state has long afforded many of the elites with the controls to navigate its global identity through the late 19th century and early 20th century political worlds, imprinting it into the present. In that period in the 1800s and through the 1950s, the Turkish model of citizenship included everyone as long as they became ‘Turkish.’ The single mode of identity was crafted as a defense against encroaching European colonial powers in their times. But to the popular masses, no mention of ‘Turkishness’ was spread.  Only after the establishing of the republic in 1923 did the ideas of cleansing move into full force to create national unity.  Through tremendous and bloody wars against many fronts, the Turkish mono-identity politics was formed as a resistance to a certain domination. It was done at such costs considering the general poverty and exhaustion of the large Ottoman population that earlier, stretched from the edges of Spain and the African continent, into the edges of China and South Asia. Centuries of warfare left its people exhausted and wartorn. Yet, through tremendous efforts, it fought off completely being swallowed by the French, British, American, Greek and Italian encroachments, among others. The region’s peoples gained their strength of spirit, through warfare as defense of itself. In empowerment, how does this play out as identity? However, its ideological center, which usually creates the nationalist unities necessary in order for people to fight against something against all odds, was borrowed from those foreign ideologies that were popular and powerful at the time, which had totalitarian and fascist elements, mainly the French and Italian forms of ideologies and their forms of ‘science.’

These elements have been called ‘Kemalism’ –named after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was the military officer who is credited for saving what was left of the former Ottoman Empire and creating it into the new Turkish Republic. This authoritarian form of rule, mixed with its secular Muslim Turkish ethnic identity written into the Turkish Constitution, has created its violent political clashes ever since. Although Woodrow Wilson’s democratic ideals were forced upon the new Turkish government, its wordings and its lack of protections created a diverse array of dominating tactics along mono-ethnic and mono-religious lines.  Difference existed in relatively more harmonious relations in the Ottoman period, have been hammered into violent political differences in the nation-state system of Turkey. Today, the diverse population tries to navigate and make life live-able with its diversity, while the laws and policies remain very typically staunch in its single ethnic, and particular forms of secular Islamic qualities that defined the earlier periods of Turkey. Those who have gained prominence and power in this system, will not let that go, even though their changes may bring about more love from some of its people. On the other side, it will bring about exile, imprisonment, and assassination at the turn of a dime, as have the many coups and right and left-wing assassinations in the streets and even in Europe, have proven, in the name of maintaining the structure of what is considered ‘the Turkish state.’

Tarlabasi is one of the beautiful, poor neighborhoods of Istanbul where the marginalized have crafted lives and learned to live with each other, complete with disagreements and harmonies, sharing and autonomies. While cities in modern nations are crafted, the marginalized are apparently equal to everyone else, and must find their own way. As those in this great video state, the neighbors know each other and respect each other. If they are displaced, how will they live? Where will they go? What will happen to them? Often, people do not realize how social ostracization works in countries where they are heavily more politicized than in, let’s say, the US or the UK. But even in these two western nations, the marginalized are still invisible and their voices are the last to be heard, if at all. Oh well, the city wants to build new apartments here. So we’ll give you a couple hundred or a thousand dollars, go find your new home….

Tearing people and communities apart is only the beginning of a series of fears, isolations, loneliness and the sheer exhaustions of starting over again in new places. In places such as Turkey, which are communal, much of the ways people survive are based on relationships formed, the places frequented, etc. In new places, without those places and people, starvation and stress and ill-health begin to form. In many nations, these are blamed on the poor and marginalized themselves. In effect, the elites and governing forces, along with the over, tacit or secret agreements of the more privileged, create these circumstances.

Please watch and listen to this wonderful video. This is a glimpse into Tarlabasi, but also a glimpse into a way of making and displacing and creating suffering, that is common in every nation, especially those that are ‘modern’ and supposedly civilized.

Photo by Tesstantrum at Flickr.com

US Journalist Jake Hess Detained in Turkey

Human Rights abuses are looked upon as exceptions to the otherwise wonderful and peaceful nation, anywhere.  This kind of thinking is ridiculous, really.  The world map, and the nations we live in and that encircle the globe, have been created by hundreds of years of pillaging, destroying, killing, massacres, fires, bombs, genocide, criminalization, stabbings, rapes, forced displacements, creation of poverty and tortures.  The national boundaries have been drawn on indigenous lands, and often usually decided by people who do not live in those places where the boundaries fall.  All are made to comply with those rules.

In the US, the experience of the successful genocide of the Native American tribes, is spoken about as just a thing of the past.  It is politically incorrect to speak of any of the Global north nations as abusers of humanity.  Yet, in our hearts of hearts, in our quiet moments, when we reflect on what is happening globally; and if we have any scant awareness of how history has been developing since the 16th century, then we know that the techniques and tactics of RULING are largely unchanged.  What changes are how it LOOKS and the furthering of the role of smoke and mirrors, propaganda and formulations of ‘truths.’

Turkey has been a nation carved out of the World War One experience–a combination of elite Central Asian and Meditteranean peoples who fought hard enough to not be swallowed by the expansion and control of European colonial rule.  In its necessities to unite a people who were as diverse as one can imagine in the Ottoman Empire, there needed to be certain forms of killing.  Cultures, people, groups, villages, language, etc.   Much like the Native Americans in the boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who would dare speak their own language or sing a lullaby they remember that their mothers sung to them.  If they did, they were punished.  Bars of soap might be crammed down their throats and the child wimpered and cried out.  They were told it was ‘for their own good.’

Most nations did this.  The Australian whites toward their Aboriginal tribes, the Canadians and their native tribes, the Japanese and the Ryukyu people and the Ainu and the other countless peoples that used to reside as different in Japan.  Today, who even remembers such things about Japan.  Now we think “they’re one people.”  Propaganda has been largely successful.

Turkey, in its desperate attempt to fight the racism of the Europeans, had to eradicate and continue eradicating much of what has not been in its own image.  Whatever may appear to be ‘uncivilized’ would get in the way of Turkey’s acceptance into the Euro-American imagination.  It continues to do so.  As mentioned earlier, Partha Chatterjee’s notion of the ‘extinction of the peasant’ is not just speaking literally about peasants, but about certain looks, certain social classes, certain ‘lower’ forms of life that are deemed so by what the Europeans would call primitive.  What nation, under the thumb of the First World Nations at the UN meetings, would dare to be lesser?  After all, the first world nations have not understood those ‘lesser’ to even be human.  If they were human, they were ‘not yet like us.’

The USA has pushed and controlled much of what has happened since the British left off.  As an empire with far-reaching resources, the USA has also pushed my Kurdish friends working for justice, into the justice system, holding them up in courts, complicating their lives and keeping them hidden from public view.  The Kurds are expendable, much like the Roma, certain Jewish tribes, the Assyrian tribes, and thousands of others we do not hear about in our lives.  They are not invisible by accident.  The USA has spent billions and billions of dollars, working with Turkey, to make way for gentrification and modernization in these areas inhabited by people who everyone doesn’t know about.  This is not hard to figure out.  But even as many people know about the Kurdish people, there is still an ignoring.

Journalists, human rights workers, artists, singers, lawyers, and thousands of others who have been fighting for justice in Turkey, for the marginalized groups such as the Kurds, Alevis, Dersimians, and other groups, have endured not just a ‘Turkish’ form of control.  We must remember that much of Turkey’s justice system, prison industrial complex, the military, and technologies, are informed by the US since the 1950s.  Deep operatives have been in Turkey, helping to ‘transform’ them into the image of the acceptable ally for the USA.  First World technologies must be allowed and MADE to work in those countries.  In order for technologies to work in these places, the culture needs to be destroyed/changed.  Those locals who want power and wealth, most of them gladly want to get on board.  They become the first ‘leaders’ and are not chosen for their other qualities.  The USA ensures that these people, who want to work with US government and transnational corporations, stay in power.

Jake Hess has been detained in Turkey.  He has been reporting the abuses by the state and Turkish  cultural dominance of primarily Kurdish and Alevi people in southeastern Turkey.  Americans are hardly ever detained for their work in human rights work in Turkey.  Usually they are deported and barred from returning.  But  nowadays things have change, since the Patriot Act and Homeland Security technologies are being globalized.   The propaganda and also the positionings and the impunity of governments that goes along with this have also intensified.  US journalists who put their lives on the line, such as Jake Hess, are now in a more precarious position.

If you and I and everyone you know can help put pressure on our government and media, it would turn out alright.  But if no one cares, anything can be done with the resources at play. One never knows how long the tentacles are and the tactics of superiority.  Jake Hess has not been in the television news, save a mentioning.  There is a reason for this.  Even newscasters I know of in the past, have brought these news pieces to the attention of their bosses, in relation to the Kurdish issues, and they are told that they would NOT print or put on air.  Why?

I am hoping that there is enough action from around the world, to push for accountability and justice for Jake Hess, and all of the people working in Turkey and elsewhere, for a different world.

FOR ORIGINAL NEW STORY:   US Journalist Jake Hess Detained in Turkey.

Beginning overview of US covert operations in Turkey – wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Turkey

Operation Gladio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

Kurdish Cinema: A video montage

Kurdish cinema has been exploding since the 1990s onto the world stage.  The first famous ‘Kurdish’ film in Europe and the US is “A Time for Drunken Horses‘ –which won a Cannes Film Festival award.  Film has always been a medium, as with other arts, to communicate something.  In the case of peoples who have been in the world under oppressive conditions, film has been one of the most powerful art forms.  In places such as Turkey, the legal and cultural policies which forbid Kurdish cultural expression, has placed filmmakers under tremendous pressure to create their art, some indeed dying by the hands of the state through imprisonment, torture, and disappearance.  For some, they manage, through surviving harsh oppressive conditions, to create their art forms.  Warfare and the creation of the states which divided the Kurdish people created ways for Kurds in Europe, for instance, freedoms which would help move their art out into the world.

Since the 1960s, Yilmaz Güney of Turkey (1 April 1937 – 9 September 1984), has been considered the most famous and important Kurdish cinema director in what many Kurds call ‘Northern Kurdistan.’  Yilmaz Güney wrote his films in the Turkish language because the Kurdish language had been forbidden more vehemently then, than it is today.  His themes were decidedly Kurdish, although the word ‘Kurd’ or ‘Kurdish’ never appears in his film.  The authorities knew, however, and he was imprisoned and tortured since 1961.

During the tumultuous 1960s in Turkey, many young Kurds and Turks wanted democratic reforms and were dissatisfied with authoritarian capitalist regimes and many were associated with leftists movements during this time.  Güney was accused of harboring leftist film students and was jailed one other time in 1972 and in 1974, upon his release, he shot a judge whom he felt was unjust and he was subsequently arrested again.  He escaped prison in 1981 and fled to France.  During his time in prison, he created some of his best films, dictating to Turkish filmmaker Zeki Ökten (August 4, 1941 – December 19, 2009), scene by scene, to make the films and release them.  He died in France in 1984.  Among his films that are the most intensely remembered and praised include: Suru, Duval, Umut, and  Yol (1982)–which is the most widely loved movie among many Kurds and won the coveted Palm d’or prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982.  Güney’s films tell unflinchingly dark, harsh realities of Kurdish life in what is now called Turkey, as well as in the borderlands within and between the four nation-states that rule much of where the Kurds have been for hundreds of years–Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.  All of these states continue to oppress Kurdish expressions and freedoms in their own ways.  Kurdish cinema is one strong way for the Kurdish people and those who sympathize with their plight, to tell their stories.

There have been many filmmakers such as Nezamettin Aric and from the Mesopotamia Arts Collective where filmmakers such as Kazim Öz and  Hüseyin Karabey have been making headways in Kurdish cinema since the 1990s.

The most famous and prolific of Kurdish filmmakers today is Bahman Ghobadi.  His ‘Time For Drunken Horses’ (2000) received critical acclaim worldwide and he has produced several films that have captured the attention of western cinema producers and administrators, which, after all, is the only way to be widely distributed and known.  My personal favorite of his movies is “Turtles Can Fly” released in 2004.”

The first ever Kurdish film festival in the world, was held in London in 2001. It proved to be quite a success and Paris, Montreal, Melbourne and Hamburg followed suit a few years later.  In 2009, New York held its first ever Kurdish film festival while in Turkey, the first ever Kurdish film festival was held in Diyarbekir–considered one of the most heavily populated Kurdish cities in Turkey, in December 2009.

As Kurdish Cinema matures, it has begun to tackle more of the complexities of oppression, and how within Kurdish cultures’ own histories of certain oppressions such as sexism, is a mix of what has been traditional and is  intensified with the displacements, divisions, and the various states’ and globalization policies, including their versions of sexism, that affect Kurdish communal relations.  Ultimately the film-makers can point to the intense continuations that construct various forms of death–cultural, biological and gendered.  Kurdish cinema is said to be one strong avenue where the resistance of this is done by telling the stories and to hopefully invite reflection for alliances and change.

Links:
London Kurdish Film Festival

Bahman Ghobadi: Miji Films http://mijfilms.com/mijfilm/

The following is an introduction to Kurdish films, via videos from YouTube.

This first clip is a short news interview featuring the First New York Kurdish Film Festival held in 2009.

I’d like to add that our graduate school held a Kurdish Conference and Film Festival in 2004.

Here is the link:  http://www.kurdishrightsconference.org/index.html

This next video is a trailer for the Kurdish movie ‘Gitmek’ (Turkish language) entitled in English: My Marlon and Brando, directed by Huseyin Karabey.

Here is an video of an interview with the director of My Marlon and Brando,  Hüseyin Karabey, interlaced with scenes from the movie.

This video is a montage by Azad Kanjo on YouTube, working with some of the more prominent films from 1978 to 2007.

Köfte in Ankara!

I once had the displeasure of eating, or trying to find a place to eat, with some very unadventurous people when it comes to eating. This was after my trip to the Netherlands and Turkey in 2008. These were not friends of mine, but friends of someone I knew in the USA’s San Francisco Bay Area. I almost, but not quite however, had the prejudiced assumption that since we were living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there are many ethnicities, nationalities and cultures, and it is considered one of the top restaurant cities in the United States, that people were fairly adventurous about new foods to try. But I wasn’t quite that presumptuous. An aspect of diversity is that ‘diversity’ means ‘diverse’–there are people who don’t eat much, who don’t go out to eat much, who only like certain foods, who only eats to digest but not for pleasure, etc. Hmmmm……. who was I with that night? I was with people who couldn’t get US American ideas out of their brains when it came to descriptions. Add to this, my not having words able to translate something or an experience or a person to them, etc. We need to practice new languages on new terms.

So I asked if anyone wanted to eat at a Turkish restaurant since I craved köfte. I got cringing faces and “ewww! what’s that?” I explained that they were lamb meatballs, sort of.” Oh please, we’re not going out for meatballs? I might as well eat Chef Boy-ar-dee! ” said one person. No I know what I was dealing with. A poverty of thought and palate.

When I visited the Netherlands and Turkey in 2008, I had the privilege of my hosts taking me to a great restaurant while in Ankara, where the bulk of my stay was while in Turkey (the other being Dersim (or Tunceli as it is called today in the mainstream and on maps) and two days in Istanbul).

Üstünel Köftecisi is a wonderful place, not gourmet or anything, just homey and tasteful, its front doors hidden by tall green. When inside and you order food at the tastefully strong and deep-textured wooden tables and chairs with nice clean table cloth, I wasn’t prepared for what pleasantly followed.

The presentation!!   Two waiters carrying a huge piece of clean bright sheet of plastic, come and spread it onto the table in front of myself and my two hosts, like a second tablecloth. Then the waiters disappear and soon one of them appears with a huge tray of vegetables. Bright green. Lettuce leaves, different other leaves of texture and aroma. Very bright, busting out in colors, and bright red cherry tomatoes and deep red/pink radishes and beautiful parsley. Froom the tray, the vegetables are laid onto the plastic (there are no plates) in a neatly arranged circle with the middle left open. The colors and pattern are symetrical but not stiffly angled or monotonous.

The second waiter brings another sheet of plastic with huge onions. I mean HUGE. They are wrapped in aluminum foil and hot. You can smell the wonderful fragrance! There are other vegetables that are hot. Then the little tasteful silver Ottoman Turkish receptacles of yogurt with finely chopped cucumber and spices.

The meat and tender rice come last. The rice is tender and has a fragrance of a subtle spice that I don’t know and my hosts could not explain to me. The meats came piping hot, along with pattican (paht-tee-john: eggplant). I ordered myh favorite by then: köfte. These came wrapped in aluminum foil, the waiters bringing them with nicely foldd damp towels with nice Turkish pattern colors. Lastly, one of the waiters brings three different kinds of olives in nice silver cups, ayran, cola, tea.

The term ‘meatballs’ does not begin to describe what köfte is. They are finger-sized minced lamb meat patties, hand-mixed with chopped onions, perhaps with cumin and parsley chopped, and other spices. Sometimes they are put on skewers and are kebabs. In any case, I devoured them! The hosts like this restaurant too.

You can find this in Persian restaurants, Kurdish, Arabic, Assyrian, and Armenian and Greek restaurants as well. However, each has their own versions of it. To add, like any other foods (or music or anything else for that matter), the regions and socio-economic class and other influences change it within a nation or culture or ethnic group. In other words, it is a shared history. Sometimes it was irritating to hear arguments about who originated a food–where a food was first made and who has ownership rights.

Upon tasting the food, the tastes are powerful. No, not from the spices or salt or sugar. You can taste everything powerfully, distinctly. I found this to be everywhere I went in Turkey and quite a bit in Holland as well. When I returned to San Francisco, I found that it was not my imagination.

Whenever my Kurdish, Turkish, Assyrian, or Armenian friends in the San Francisco Bay area, who were from those respective areas, would take me to eat at a restaurant in the US, they used to say that food tastes dead in the US.  Now I had to confirm what they’ve said.  I have even heard the same from people I know from Central and South America.  In the US, we are accustomed to the flatness. So we want sugar and salt and that is what replaces the taste of the foods.

When you think about it, the chemicals that bombard food in the US, and the processing and the drugging of animals and the pumping into the soil of chemicals to grow foods faster and make them bigger, etc. suck the food tastes out of them. There is a dullness. That is why when sometimes I eat with some US American friends at a very good Japanese restaurant, they complain of things not having any taste. There needs to be more sugar and or salt or the sauce needs to be stronger. The tastebuds are weak.

But for the moment in the Ankara restaurant, I enjoy the sensual delights of eating! On my tongue, it was Mmmmmmmmmmmm!!!