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Diyarbakir: the slap in the face
International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Jan, 2003 by Mehmed Uzun.
(Mehmed Uzun died in Diyarbakir in October 2007)
In a prominent corner of my office hangs a phrase of Euripides: Omnis hominum vita est plena dolore. That means: man's
entire life is full of suffering. It goes without saying that this maxim is not there to encourage suffering. Quite the contrary, it
is there to impart a lesson, to transform suffering into a richness capable of contributing to man's happiness without losing
sight of it for a moment. This principle is important, if not for everyone, at least for the child of a people condemned to
suffer.
Four Tips For Better Decision Making For reasons that have nothing to do with my own will I came into the world as a Kurd,
and since then my life has been marked by two things: suffering and the lie. And one can say that whatever my faults, the
forty-seven years of my life have been entirely devoted to a struggle designed to free me from these two evils. I have
incessantly forced myself to decipher the hideous, primitive, and cruel countenance of the lie, seeking to create on the
basis of suffering artistic works placed at the service of mankind, of humanity as a whole. I do not know to what extent I
have succeeded. I do know, however, that this has been the central motive of everything I have undertaken. Of course it is
not my intention here to tell my life's story in sentimental fashion, but I wish nevertheless to speak briefly of three lessons
that I have tried to draw from three grievous facts.
The first lesson goes back to 1960, the year I was seven. On a hot, clear day at the end of summer, the very day on which,
dressed in new clothes from head to foot, I was beginning grammar school, I received a violent slap in the face in the guise
of a lesson on the importance of language and words. I had been born and raised in the shelter of a Kurdish tribe. My
family possessed no books except for the Koran, which hung on the wall, and had neither a radio nor a television set. In this
enormous house, its garden planted with some pomegranate trees and an equal number of peach trees, the garden where
roses bloomed, there was nothing besides my father's bilur (shepherd's pipe), the stories and legends told by my
grandfather, and the beautiful strans (traditional songs) that my grandmother sang in the Zaza dialect of Kurdish. It was a
universe forged in the feelings, ideas, norms, and values of the Kurdish language.
I was seven years old and loved this universe that I was part of. But from the first hour of the first day that I set foot in
school I was instructed by a slap in the face, ineradicably engraved in my memory, that my universe was meaningless,
useless, primitive, and taboo, and that I had to leave it. While I was joining the ranks of my classmates in the yard of the
grammar school, which was named after the poet Ibrahim Rafet, the teacher, who came from central Anatolia and was
fulfilling his civil service, called me to order by a violent slap because I was speaking with a classmate in my maternal
tongue. "It is forbidden to speak Kurdish!" The real meaning of this injunction, pronounced in Turkish, only came to me
years later.
The lesson I drew from this slap is that language and the word are of great importance. The second lesson came during the
course of the summer of 1976. Arrested on March 21 of that year for my responsibilities as managing editor of a
Kurdish-Turkish magazine, I was accused of "separatism" and incarcerated in Ankara's central prison. Some time afterward
I became aware of the nature of the indictment against me, and presented myself for the first hearing of what was called a
Court for State Security, similar to the tribunal that is currently banning my books. I no longer remember the month or the
day, except that it was a dog day in the summer of 1976. The atmosphere in the concrete chamber, windowless on all four
sides, was horribly suffocating. We were all sweating heavily: myself, "the accused" Mehmed Uzun, wearing a short-sleeved
shirt and linen pants; the tribunal made up of five people, two soldiers and three civilians all obliged to wear their official
dress; the prosecutor, who I later found out was a Kurd from Agri (1); my counsel; my relatives who had come to be present
at the trial; all of us were drenched in sweat. In answer to the prosecutor's brief, which was no longer than two pages, I had
prepared a response of seventy-six pages attempting to prove in a pretty awkward and puerile manner the existence of the
Kurds and the Kurdish language. The prosecutor's argument was that the Kurds and their language had no form of
existence. Whoever claimed the contrary was considered a separatist and deserved to be punished.
The prosecutor hammered home his arguments while looking me straight in the eye. As for me, I pronounced some phrases
in the Kurdish language one after the other and then said to him: "That's the language whose existence you deny. It also
happens to be my maternal tongue. Did you understand any of it?" The prosecutor, naturally, refused to answer and
repeated his arguments. The trial was adjourned. It was only in the sealed army van that was taking me to prison that my
eyes stopped watering. Not so much because of the overpowering heat but because of my impotence, my inability to
establish a dialog with the prosecutor and the tribunal: because I had been incapable of unmasking a horrible lie that was
misrepresented as truth by power, violence, the law, and official values. The lesson I drew from that inane day was that the
word must preserve its dignity, its respectability.
As for my third lesson, it was furnished by my years in exile. I was finally freed after eight months in prison. However, finding
myself still under the threat of indictment on account of my responsibilities as editor of a journal, I chose exile and left for
Sweden, where I settled in 1977. The regulations prevailing in Turkey at the time made any return to my native country
impossible. Subsequently, in 1981, by decision of the military regime and like many other Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals,
I was stripped of my nationality, which was my most elementary right. I learned quickly enough that exile was a bottomless
pit, or, in Gombrowicz's expression, "a cemetery inhabited by the living."
How to live in exile while avoiding this cemetery? How to lead a respectable, productive life capable of enriching all
mankind? Those were some of the questions among many others that never ceased gnawing at me. As a newcomer to the
West I set myself to investigate, to read exiled writers of the Western world in order to find out what their experiences and
their responses to these questions had been. Homer, Euripides, Ovid, Vergil, Dante, Cervantes, Hugo, as well as writers
from our criminal century: Mann, Zweig, Broch, Canetti, Bunin, Berberova, Celan, Sachs, Singer, and many other creators
of the aesthetic literature of uprootedness and suffering.
Today, fifteen to twenty years later, I am writing an essay about my cherished writers titled "I am a Green Phoenix." For
each of them was a phoenix reborn from its ashes. The lesson that I draw from my life in exile, every day of which was as
long as an entire lifetime, can be summed up in a few words: language must be beautiful, simple, and humane. I have
learned from experience that a beautiful and humane word surpasses in force every oppression, tyranny, or disaster.
Thanks to their creations, each of my "green phoenixes" is far more immortal, far more humane than all the sacred and
absolute leaders who were the Sardanapaluses of their times.
Beauty, strength, dignity. Language is the only area in which I permit myself to bring together these three words that are so
vague, overused, and full of snares. It also took me some time to discover in my own life these three qualities of language. I
began by taking shelter in words, creating a warm space only for my own use, a space beyond countries, borders,
prejudices, and various loyalties, and thus immersing myself completely in the universe of words. Then I began to seek and
assemble my words, which had been sorely tried by time, wounded in their quasi-totality, and which I had to heal. Finally,
putting them in order to create literary works, I offered them to the Kurds, to Turkey, to the Middle East, and to Europe. The
Kurds took up these works with joy and jealousy. For these wounded words were theirs, they belonged to their cultural
heritage and bodied forth the voice of their melancholy, their sufferings.
On January 15, 2000, in Diyarbakir (2), I was able to affirm the extraordinary force of language. On the occasion of the
appearance in Turkish of my novel Roni mina evine-tari mina mirina (Clear as Love, Dark as Death), I found myself in the
company of my Turkish and Kurdish publishers. At the invitation of the Democratic Platform, composed of civic
organizations such as the Turkish Bar Association, the order of physicians, and numerous workers' unions, I gave in the
precincts of the City Hall a lecture entitled "Language, Identity, Literature." According to information furnished by the
Platform officials, six thousand people were present: young, old, children, intellectuals, peasants, workers, businessmen, all
constantly exposed to scorn, to different vexations, oppressed on account of their language, their culture, their identity, and
finding or seeking to find in a word of literature that owed everything to them a semblance of hope, consolation, joy, and
pride. The next day I participated in a book signing at the Avesta bookstore, writing dedications in my book for six or seven
hours without interruption. There, too, people stood patiently in interminably long lines that overflowed onto the sidewalk.
How to explain the infatuation of these people, this joy, this patience?
Among the hundreds of letters, questions, poems, criticisms, and suggestions that came to me in the course of those two
days I have only kept two, entrusting the rest to the Democratic Platform with the intention of reading and examining them at
leisure at a later date: a letter in Kurdish dictated by an old grandmother to her grandson, and a photograph given to me by
a little boy of seven or eight whose first name is Omer.
The old grandmother had had her grandson read her in Kurdish my novel Bira Qedere, and had asked him to communicate
her impressions to me in writing. In reading her letter my eyes grew misty from mixed feelings of sadness and joy. As for
Omer, on the day of the book signing, presenting me with a pile of books to inscribe to various people, he had left on the
table his photograph, on the back of which were the following words: I greet you with the pure feelings of a child. Greetings!
Greetings to you, honorable author who writes with so much suffering while resigning yourself to live far away from your
country. Reading you I understand how much I owe you for speaking of me, of your people, and it makes me sad. Life
becomes more painful when it is told as a story. But suffering also gives one a feeling of life and helps to grow ... --Omer
After reading these words I immediately called my friends of the Democratic Platform and asked them to find Omer, whose
identity, whose family name, I did not know, and to tell him that I was the one who was really indebted to him. My debt to
Omer was the beauty, strength, and dignity of his literary statement.
In the plane carrying me back from Diyarbakir to Istanbul I shared my excitement with my friends. "That's the power of
language!" I told them. "Those who claim it has become meaningless are badly deceiving themselves. Language is still
powerful."
However, the historical experience of language scorned repeats itself always and everywhere. Those whose voices are
silenced, whose difference is denied, who encounter so many difficulties in expressing themselves and who need language
as much as they need bread or water, they make it their own. As for the others, those who demand that all men be like one
another, experience the same feelings, live and think identically, and who seek to impose this choice by force, they fear
language more than anybody, and try to control it. And history repeated itself at Diyarbakir. Seven of my books, six in
Kurdish and one in Turkish, were suppressed by Judgment no. 2000/39 of the Fourth Court for State Security of
Diyarbarkir, dated February 4, 2000, and this in flagrant violation of Turkish law. Also, beginning in March, the police
systematically began making a sweep of bookstores in Ankara, Bingol, Batman, and Nusaybin, seizing my books and
forcing the booksellers to sign documents forbidding their holding or selling them. In the course of my lecture I affirmed that
the unity and integrity of Turkey was of great importance in the eyes of the Kurds; that the Kurds must abstain from all
violence and abstain also from relations with totalitarian-regimes like those of Iran, Iraq, or Syria; that the Turks as well as
the Kurds must take their proper place among democratic nations; and that the Kurds themselves could aid Turkey on the
road to democratization. Even though my talk had been filmed in its entirety by police in Mufti, all my books, including the
Kurdish original of my novel as well as its Turkish translation, came under the ban. Why?
Because the Kurds, like the other ancestral communities of Mesopotamia, such as the Assyrians, Syrians, Armenians, Jews,
Chaldeans, Nestorians, Yezidis, or Alawites, who find themselves in a situation far more difficult than that of the Kurds, are
confined in an irrevocable mode of life. These communities, which have received from history a slap in the face like the one
I received at the age of seven, have been condemned to disappear. Completely deprived of their legitimate democratic
role, human rights, the right of equality, and freedom of conscience, delivered over to ignorant and wilful military dictators
who could not care less about law and justice, to shameless religious leaders who push religious conservatism to an
extreme, in a region governed by arrogant politicians who only pay lip service to the words civilization, happy future, and
justice, but who are in reality totally insensitive to the real needs of their fellow citizens and completely befuddled by the
technical and economic progress to which they reduce all reality, these populations always hear the same message
repeated: "Accept your fate. Your forehead is marked with the stamp of death. Do not struggle in vain, history's slap is
mortal. Do not expect any help from outside, because you are alone, no one will hear your long cry. Do not hope to open
yourself to the world, still less to rejoin it. You have no other choice but to sting those around you like a scorpion--before
stinging yourself and disappearing. Everything that belongs to you--including your linguistic and cultural heritage--will be
nothing but dead knowledge. You can speak your language in your family if you wish, and even create a literature of the
oppressed, capable of awakening in others a feeling of pity. Within your confined universe you can cry out, howl, quarrel
with your neighbors. But do not try to open yourselves to the world or to offer it anything at all. Your only chance for
survival is to forget everything, to abandon everything that belongs to you and conform to the official vision that defines
you. Be ashamed of your own language, your identity, your cultural heritage, and admit that they are primitive and from now
on useless. Turn to money, celebrity, pleasure, comfort, kill what you carry in your soul, your brain, your heart. Come, join
us ..."
That is what has been repeated for two centuries to the custodians of the oldest cultural heritage of humanity. The Epic of
Gilgamesh, the stories of the Bible, the parables of the prophets, the paradise gardens of the Euphrates and the Tigris, the
ghats of Zoroaster, Babylon, Nineveh, Ur, Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and an innumerable number of other human
treasures belong to them. Still, it is deemed necessary that all this be retained as an ornament evoking the past, but a past
not in any way enriched by evoking new voices, new breath.
To paraphrase Ovid, what would happen if, incurring guilt for having seen certain things, you would understand that the
reality to which you are required to adhere is a tissue of lies, and you were to insist on giving to this cultural heritage, to
those of its languages still capable of being revived, a new voice, a new breath consistent with their spirit? The answer is to
be found in Tristia by this same Ovid: The gods never pardon those who--even unknowingly--rise up against them. And so
it is with a goal of blocking you that whole armies are set in motion, police, laws, information services, squadrons of death,
universities, newspapers, television and radio networks, censorship bureaus, walls raised in heads and minds, tribunals,
prosecutors, judges, prisons, torture centers, all in league to impose the lie as the sole reality and determined to make this
lie triumph.
That is the history that was repeated yet again at Dyabarkir. For myself, I who remain firmly convinced that it is the mission
of language and literature to bring men together rather than to divide them, this state of affairs is saddening. Language is a
warm place, sincere, that has room for all differences, where all these differences constitute a fabulous richness. What can
I do? It is of course impossible for me to accept this situation, the reduction of literature to a supplementary element of
criminality, or to accept the totalitarian and repressive mentality. What can I do alternatively? I can recall my debt to the old
grandmother who transmitted to me one of the oldest languages of Mesopotamia, and to the child Omer, who must have
received as I did a slap in the face from his teacher. For them I can make the gift of new words, more beautiful, more
worthy. There can be no doubt that I have a debt toward this old grandmother and little Omer.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SBL/is_17/ai_n13826851/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1
International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Jan, 2003 by Mehmed Uzun.
(Mehmed Uzun died in Diyarbakir in October 2007)
In a prominent corner of my office hangs a phrase of Euripides: Omnis hominum vita est plena dolore. That means: man's
entire life is full of suffering. It goes without saying that this maxim is not there to encourage suffering. Quite the contrary, it
is there to impart a lesson, to transform suffering into a richness capable of contributing to man's happiness without losing
sight of it for a moment. This principle is important, if not for everyone, at least for the child of a people condemned to
suffer.
Four Tips For Better Decision Making For reasons that have nothing to do with my own will I came into the world as a Kurd,
and since then my life has been marked by two things: suffering and the lie. And one can say that whatever my faults, the
forty-seven years of my life have been entirely devoted to a struggle designed to free me from these two evils. I have
incessantly forced myself to decipher the hideous, primitive, and cruel countenance of the lie, seeking to create on the
basis of suffering artistic works placed at the service of mankind, of humanity as a whole. I do not know to what extent I
have succeeded. I do know, however, that this has been the central motive of everything I have undertaken. Of course it is
not my intention here to tell my life's story in sentimental fashion, but I wish nevertheless to speak briefly of three lessons
that I have tried to draw from three grievous facts.
The first lesson goes back to 1960, the year I was seven. On a hot, clear day at the end of summer, the very day on which,
dressed in new clothes from head to foot, I was beginning grammar school, I received a violent slap in the face in the guise
of a lesson on the importance of language and words. I had been born and raised in the shelter of a Kurdish tribe. My
family possessed no books except for the Koran, which hung on the wall, and had neither a radio nor a television set. In this
enormous house, its garden planted with some pomegranate trees and an equal number of peach trees, the garden where
roses bloomed, there was nothing besides my father's bilur (shepherd's pipe), the stories and legends told by my
grandfather, and the beautiful strans (traditional songs) that my grandmother sang in the Zaza dialect of Kurdish. It was a
universe forged in the feelings, ideas, norms, and values of the Kurdish language.
I was seven years old and loved this universe that I was part of. But from the first hour of the first day that I set foot in
school I was instructed by a slap in the face, ineradicably engraved in my memory, that my universe was meaningless,
useless, primitive, and taboo, and that I had to leave it. While I was joining the ranks of my classmates in the yard of the
grammar school, which was named after the poet Ibrahim Rafet, the teacher, who came from central Anatolia and was
fulfilling his civil service, called me to order by a violent slap because I was speaking with a classmate in my maternal
tongue. "It is forbidden to speak Kurdish!" The real meaning of this injunction, pronounced in Turkish, only came to me
years later.
The lesson I drew from this slap is that language and the word are of great importance. The second lesson came during the
course of the summer of 1976. Arrested on March 21 of that year for my responsibilities as managing editor of a
Kurdish-Turkish magazine, I was accused of "separatism" and incarcerated in Ankara's central prison. Some time afterward
I became aware of the nature of the indictment against me, and presented myself for the first hearing of what was called a
Court for State Security, similar to the tribunal that is currently banning my books. I no longer remember the month or the
day, except that it was a dog day in the summer of 1976. The atmosphere in the concrete chamber, windowless on all four
sides, was horribly suffocating. We were all sweating heavily: myself, "the accused" Mehmed Uzun, wearing a short-sleeved
shirt and linen pants; the tribunal made up of five people, two soldiers and three civilians all obliged to wear their official
dress; the prosecutor, who I later found out was a Kurd from Agri (1); my counsel; my relatives who had come to be present
at the trial; all of us were drenched in sweat. In answer to the prosecutor's brief, which was no longer than two pages, I had
prepared a response of seventy-six pages attempting to prove in a pretty awkward and puerile manner the existence of the
Kurds and the Kurdish language. The prosecutor's argument was that the Kurds and their language had no form of
existence. Whoever claimed the contrary was considered a separatist and deserved to be punished.
The prosecutor hammered home his arguments while looking me straight in the eye. As for me, I pronounced some phrases
in the Kurdish language one after the other and then said to him: "That's the language whose existence you deny. It also
happens to be my maternal tongue. Did you understand any of it?" The prosecutor, naturally, refused to answer and
repeated his arguments. The trial was adjourned. It was only in the sealed army van that was taking me to prison that my
eyes stopped watering. Not so much because of the overpowering heat but because of my impotence, my inability to
establish a dialog with the prosecutor and the tribunal: because I had been incapable of unmasking a horrible lie that was
misrepresented as truth by power, violence, the law, and official values. The lesson I drew from that inane day was that the
word must preserve its dignity, its respectability.
As for my third lesson, it was furnished by my years in exile. I was finally freed after eight months in prison. However, finding
myself still under the threat of indictment on account of my responsibilities as editor of a journal, I chose exile and left for
Sweden, where I settled in 1977. The regulations prevailing in Turkey at the time made any return to my native country
impossible. Subsequently, in 1981, by decision of the military regime and like many other Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals,
I was stripped of my nationality, which was my most elementary right. I learned quickly enough that exile was a bottomless
pit, or, in Gombrowicz's expression, "a cemetery inhabited by the living."
How to live in exile while avoiding this cemetery? How to lead a respectable, productive life capable of enriching all
mankind? Those were some of the questions among many others that never ceased gnawing at me. As a newcomer to the
West I set myself to investigate, to read exiled writers of the Western world in order to find out what their experiences and
their responses to these questions had been. Homer, Euripides, Ovid, Vergil, Dante, Cervantes, Hugo, as well as writers
from our criminal century: Mann, Zweig, Broch, Canetti, Bunin, Berberova, Celan, Sachs, Singer, and many other creators
of the aesthetic literature of uprootedness and suffering.
Today, fifteen to twenty years later, I am writing an essay about my cherished writers titled "I am a Green Phoenix." For
each of them was a phoenix reborn from its ashes. The lesson that I draw from my life in exile, every day of which was as
long as an entire lifetime, can be summed up in a few words: language must be beautiful, simple, and humane. I have
learned from experience that a beautiful and humane word surpasses in force every oppression, tyranny, or disaster.
Thanks to their creations, each of my "green phoenixes" is far more immortal, far more humane than all the sacred and
absolute leaders who were the Sardanapaluses of their times.
Beauty, strength, dignity. Language is the only area in which I permit myself to bring together these three words that are so
vague, overused, and full of snares. It also took me some time to discover in my own life these three qualities of language. I
began by taking shelter in words, creating a warm space only for my own use, a space beyond countries, borders,
prejudices, and various loyalties, and thus immersing myself completely in the universe of words. Then I began to seek and
assemble my words, which had been sorely tried by time, wounded in their quasi-totality, and which I had to heal. Finally,
putting them in order to create literary works, I offered them to the Kurds, to Turkey, to the Middle East, and to Europe. The
Kurds took up these works with joy and jealousy. For these wounded words were theirs, they belonged to their cultural
heritage and bodied forth the voice of their melancholy, their sufferings.
On January 15, 2000, in Diyarbakir (2), I was able to affirm the extraordinary force of language. On the occasion of the
appearance in Turkish of my novel Roni mina evine-tari mina mirina (Clear as Love, Dark as Death), I found myself in the
company of my Turkish and Kurdish publishers. At the invitation of the Democratic Platform, composed of civic
organizations such as the Turkish Bar Association, the order of physicians, and numerous workers' unions, I gave in the
precincts of the City Hall a lecture entitled "Language, Identity, Literature." According to information furnished by the
Platform officials, six thousand people were present: young, old, children, intellectuals, peasants, workers, businessmen, all
constantly exposed to scorn, to different vexations, oppressed on account of their language, their culture, their identity, and
finding or seeking to find in a word of literature that owed everything to them a semblance of hope, consolation, joy, and
pride. The next day I participated in a book signing at the Avesta bookstore, writing dedications in my book for six or seven
hours without interruption. There, too, people stood patiently in interminably long lines that overflowed onto the sidewalk.
How to explain the infatuation of these people, this joy, this patience?
Among the hundreds of letters, questions, poems, criticisms, and suggestions that came to me in the course of those two
days I have only kept two, entrusting the rest to the Democratic Platform with the intention of reading and examining them at
leisure at a later date: a letter in Kurdish dictated by an old grandmother to her grandson, and a photograph given to me by
a little boy of seven or eight whose first name is Omer.
The old grandmother had had her grandson read her in Kurdish my novel Bira Qedere, and had asked him to communicate
her impressions to me in writing. In reading her letter my eyes grew misty from mixed feelings of sadness and joy. As for
Omer, on the day of the book signing, presenting me with a pile of books to inscribe to various people, he had left on the
table his photograph, on the back of which were the following words: I greet you with the pure feelings of a child. Greetings!
Greetings to you, honorable author who writes with so much suffering while resigning yourself to live far away from your
country. Reading you I understand how much I owe you for speaking of me, of your people, and it makes me sad. Life
becomes more painful when it is told as a story. But suffering also gives one a feeling of life and helps to grow ... --Omer
After reading these words I immediately called my friends of the Democratic Platform and asked them to find Omer, whose
identity, whose family name, I did not know, and to tell him that I was the one who was really indebted to him. My debt to
Omer was the beauty, strength, and dignity of his literary statement.
In the plane carrying me back from Diyarbakir to Istanbul I shared my excitement with my friends. "That's the power of
language!" I told them. "Those who claim it has become meaningless are badly deceiving themselves. Language is still
powerful."
However, the historical experience of language scorned repeats itself always and everywhere. Those whose voices are
silenced, whose difference is denied, who encounter so many difficulties in expressing themselves and who need language
as much as they need bread or water, they make it their own. As for the others, those who demand that all men be like one
another, experience the same feelings, live and think identically, and who seek to impose this choice by force, they fear
language more than anybody, and try to control it. And history repeated itself at Diyarbakir. Seven of my books, six in
Kurdish and one in Turkish, were suppressed by Judgment no. 2000/39 of the Fourth Court for State Security of
Diyarbarkir, dated February 4, 2000, and this in flagrant violation of Turkish law. Also, beginning in March, the police
systematically began making a sweep of bookstores in Ankara, Bingol, Batman, and Nusaybin, seizing my books and
forcing the booksellers to sign documents forbidding their holding or selling them. In the course of my lecture I affirmed that
the unity and integrity of Turkey was of great importance in the eyes of the Kurds; that the Kurds must abstain from all
violence and abstain also from relations with totalitarian-regimes like those of Iran, Iraq, or Syria; that the Turks as well as
the Kurds must take their proper place among democratic nations; and that the Kurds themselves could aid Turkey on the
road to democratization. Even though my talk had been filmed in its entirety by police in Mufti, all my books, including the
Kurdish original of my novel as well as its Turkish translation, came under the ban. Why?
Because the Kurds, like the other ancestral communities of Mesopotamia, such as the Assyrians, Syrians, Armenians, Jews,
Chaldeans, Nestorians, Yezidis, or Alawites, who find themselves in a situation far more difficult than that of the Kurds, are
confined in an irrevocable mode of life. These communities, which have received from history a slap in the face like the one
I received at the age of seven, have been condemned to disappear. Completely deprived of their legitimate democratic
role, human rights, the right of equality, and freedom of conscience, delivered over to ignorant and wilful military dictators
who could not care less about law and justice, to shameless religious leaders who push religious conservatism to an
extreme, in a region governed by arrogant politicians who only pay lip service to the words civilization, happy future, and
justice, but who are in reality totally insensitive to the real needs of their fellow citizens and completely befuddled by the
technical and economic progress to which they reduce all reality, these populations always hear the same message
repeated: "Accept your fate. Your forehead is marked with the stamp of death. Do not struggle in vain, history's slap is
mortal. Do not expect any help from outside, because you are alone, no one will hear your long cry. Do not hope to open
yourself to the world, still less to rejoin it. You have no other choice but to sting those around you like a scorpion--before
stinging yourself and disappearing. Everything that belongs to you--including your linguistic and cultural heritage--will be
nothing but dead knowledge. You can speak your language in your family if you wish, and even create a literature of the
oppressed, capable of awakening in others a feeling of pity. Within your confined universe you can cry out, howl, quarrel
with your neighbors. But do not try to open yourselves to the world or to offer it anything at all. Your only chance for
survival is to forget everything, to abandon everything that belongs to you and conform to the official vision that defines
you. Be ashamed of your own language, your identity, your cultural heritage, and admit that they are primitive and from now
on useless. Turn to money, celebrity, pleasure, comfort, kill what you carry in your soul, your brain, your heart. Come, join
us ..."
That is what has been repeated for two centuries to the custodians of the oldest cultural heritage of humanity. The Epic of
Gilgamesh, the stories of the Bible, the parables of the prophets, the paradise gardens of the Euphrates and the Tigris, the
ghats of Zoroaster, Babylon, Nineveh, Ur, Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and an innumerable number of other human
treasures belong to them. Still, it is deemed necessary that all this be retained as an ornament evoking the past, but a past
not in any way enriched by evoking new voices, new breath.
To paraphrase Ovid, what would happen if, incurring guilt for having seen certain things, you would understand that the
reality to which you are required to adhere is a tissue of lies, and you were to insist on giving to this cultural heritage, to
those of its languages still capable of being revived, a new voice, a new breath consistent with their spirit? The answer is to
be found in Tristia by this same Ovid: The gods never pardon those who--even unknowingly--rise up against them. And so
it is with a goal of blocking you that whole armies are set in motion, police, laws, information services, squadrons of death,
universities, newspapers, television and radio networks, censorship bureaus, walls raised in heads and minds, tribunals,
prosecutors, judges, prisons, torture centers, all in league to impose the lie as the sole reality and determined to make this
lie triumph.
That is the history that was repeated yet again at Dyabarkir. For myself, I who remain firmly convinced that it is the mission
of language and literature to bring men together rather than to divide them, this state of affairs is saddening. Language is a
warm place, sincere, that has room for all differences, where all these differences constitute a fabulous richness. What can
I do? It is of course impossible for me to accept this situation, the reduction of literature to a supplementary element of
criminality, or to accept the totalitarian and repressive mentality. What can I do alternatively? I can recall my debt to the old
grandmother who transmitted to me one of the oldest languages of Mesopotamia, and to the child Omer, who must have
received as I did a slap in the face from his teacher. For them I can make the gift of new words, more beautiful, more
worthy. There can be no doubt that I have a debt toward this old grandmother and little Omer.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SBL/is_17/ai_n13826851/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1
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Diyarbakir Media
Fixing and translating services for news stories and documentary
films in Turkey and Information about east and Southeastern Turkey
Fixing and translating services for news stories and documentary
films in Turkey and Information about east and Southeastern Turkey
Donation to poor Kurds
I am collecting used cloths
and shoes for men, women
and children and electronic
devices and toys for students
and children.
If you are planning to come to
Turkey and have anything that
you don’t need anymore, you
can bring them with you and I
can give them to poor people
in Diyarbakir or in Istanbul.
If you would like, I can arrange
it and you can give them in
person. For more information
please contact.
donations@diyarmedia.com
I am collecting used cloths
and shoes for men, women
and children and electronic
devices and toys for students
and children.
If you are planning to come to
Turkey and have anything that
you don’t need anymore, you
can bring them with you and I
can give them to poor people
in Diyarbakir or in Istanbul.
If you would like, I can arrange
it and you can give them in
person. For more information
please contact.
donations@diyarmedia.com