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Nazan Üstündağ’s work concerns feminist political theory, political imaginaries, gendered subjectivities and state violence in Kurdistan. Her book, Mother, Politician and Guerilla: Political Imagination in the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, was published in 2023, by Fordham Press.

Issue 170 of The Internationalist excerpts from her book Mother, Politician and Guerrilla.

Here she writes how the Kurdish language has survived through women's intergenerational transmission, the passionate preservation of dengbej musical traditions, and clandestine cassette cultures, even as recent superficial reforms reduced Kurdish to an exotic "color" in Turkey's multicultural landscape without addressing the fundamental demand for education in the mother tongue.

The linguicide of Kurdish has taken many different forms in Turkey: bans on speaking Kurdish in public spaces, prisons, and schools; denial of the existence of Kurdish as a distinct language with its own grammar, vocabulary, and history; naming it as an “unidentifi ed utterance” in court and Parliament; changing place names from Kurdish to Turkish; preventing families from giving their children Kurdish names; and punishing those who speak Kurdish and / or listen to Kurdish music. These policies aim not only at halting the transmission of the Kurdish language, but also at “eliminating” Kurdish identity itself, rendering abject the people who speak Kurdish. Here, I don’t use the term “abject” lightly: Turkish people often display disgust, shock, and horror when they hear the Kurdish language. In the last two decades such disgust has manifested itself in mobs beating, humiliating, and lynching Kurds who spoke Kurdish in public in predominantly Turkish- speaking populated areas.

Testimonies, memoirs, novels, and academic studies document how the childhoods of many Kurds are scarred by the experience of linguicide. In a policy report based on ethnographic field research published in 2011, Coşkun, Derince, and Uçarlar state that Kurdish- speaking children experience violence and stigmatization.39 They try to keep quiet in school and keep their distance from public spaces even when they are brought up in predominantly Kurdish cities. The children interviewed express their frustration by saying that they “begin life with a deficit” and that it is extremely hard—if not impossible—for them to ever become equal with children whose mother tongue is Turkish. To use the term that Jasbir Puar developed for talking about the Palestinian experience, these children feel they are “maimed” by linguicide; they experience having Kurdish as a “mother tongue” as a disability. Linguicide “colonizes the psychic space” of Kurds, alienates them from themselves—as the Kurdish movement describes it—and makes them see their own voice and the voices in their family as obstacles to overcome and as “defects to be amended.” For Kurdish people, in other words, it is not the skin but the voice that becomes the object of self- loathing, and speaking Turkish with no accent is the “white mask” that they are forced to wear.

Indeed, at least until the beginning of the new millennium, the pressures, restrictions, and bans on Kurdish in Turkey partially relied on the forced cooperation of Kurdish families. Many families chose to speak Turkish at home because their children would be stigmatized and face violence in school if they spoke Kurdish and be disadvantaged academically if Turkish were their second language. This was the case especially in city centers, where class mobility and national belonging through education remained a promise. As the Turkish language became associated with urbanization and education and Kurdish with the rural and the traditional, Turkish inevitably became an important symbol of modernity, progress, and knowledge. Meanwhile, Turkish words that signify things, movements, and affects constitutive of modern life entered the Kurdish language, imprinting Kurdish with a sense of anachronism.

In other words, a feeling that the two languages belonged to two different temporalities colored common perception of even those Turks who recognize Kurdish as a language while cultivating a desire among Kurds to speak Turkish. The emergence of the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq, with Kurdish as its official language, has, however, brought Kurdish a new prestige and accelerated the process of the standardization of all its dialects, including Kurmanji, which is spoken in Turkey. Also, after the forced displacement and mass political mobilization of Kurds in the 1990s and the politicization of speaking Kurdish thereafter, Kurdish became the voice of resistance and liberation. Kurdish slogans traveled worldwide and became symbols of freedom movements and women’s struggles. Still, the number of people who rely solely on Kurdish for everyday business and intimate conversations continued decreasing rapidly.46 Despite the effects of linguicide, Kurdish still remains the main medium for communicating with their mothers for 90 percent of Kurds, who report that they speak mostly Kurdish with their mothers, as compared to 60 percent who use some degree of Kurdish when talking to their fathers. Many Kurds believe that Kurdish survived the Turkish state’s linguicide thanks to women. Men regulate women’s mobility and limit their relations with other people, which reduce the latter’s need and opportunity to learn Turkish. Low levels of schooling and paid employment among women also keep them “safe” from the domination of Turkish in their lives. While some women learn Turkish from television, others are too occupied with housework and family care to spend any meaningful time watching TV.

People believe the second reason that Kurdish survived despite linguicide is the widespread passion Kurds feel for both traditional and contemporary Kurdish music. The figure of the dengbej, individuals who accumulate and retell inherited stories of the past in lyrical and musical forms and thereby transmit culture and memory, is crucial in this context. Dengbejs ensure that events, sensibilities, and affects that are violently written out by official history are regenerated through songs and poetry performed in communal spaces. They also reproduce the plurality in Kurdish (despite standardization of it by the production of a national grammar) by retaining the diverse accents, regional tones, and local syntax imprinted in songs.

Besides the dengbej culture, which relies on a face- to face transmission, historically, mechanically reproduced music has also played an important role in the survival of Kurdish against state- induced linguicide. Many Kurds I interviewed shared their anecdotes about how, in the 1980s and 1990s, under the most adverse conditions, Kurds kept their spirit and resilience by listening to songs released in other parts of Kurdistan or in Europe, which were then transported to Turkey’s Kurdistan in cassettes hidden within Turkish covers. While such cassettes have become a means for archiving, teaching, and learning Kurdish, they also created a cultural intimacy among Kurds and a code for mutual recognition. Which songs you knew and enjoyed communicated your identity and political commitments to other Kurds without Turks knowing it.

Starting in the early 2000s and until the end of the peace process in 2015, Turkey’s pending accession to membership in the European Union forced the government to remove restrictions “on linguistic and cultural rights for minorities.” Regulations that aimed at harmonizing Turkey’s laws with those of the EU passed in 2002, and, as a consequence, broadcasting in languages other than Turkish and teaching Kurdish in private courses were permitted. Soon afterward teaching Kurdish as a foreign language in universities became possible, and in 2012 elective Kurdish courses were available in secondary schools. Despite these reforms, however, Kurdish remained unnamed and was lumped into the category of Living Languages. Also, the demand of the Kurdish movement for the right to access “education in the mother tongue” never came to the table, which caused many Kurdish actors to remain suspicious of government initiatives and the Turkish state’s newfound tolerance for diversity.

Meanwhile, performing the nation’s newly found multicultural sensibility, Turkish television channels have opened their frames to Kurdish-identified politicians, opinion leaders, artists, and singers. In the flourishing TV- series industry, Kurdish ethnicity and language captured audiences as exotic goods and enabled a shared imagination of new beginnings, where Kurdish could become a “color” in the Turkish landscape. However, even then, the Kurdish language in the mainstream media always remained a background “flavour,” an expressive sound of worry, suffering, and hustle, which eventually was destined to be left behind as the heroes of the drama became famous, married across ethnic lines, migrated, and embraced a happy ending.

During this period, which was officially called the Kurdish initiative, and the peace process that followed it, Kurdish mothers also became momentarily visible. “Re- presented” by Turkish male politicians and TV channels, their tears and sighs were captured to make the argument that it was the new government of the Justice and Development Party, with its discourse of “democracy,” “fraternity,” and “service to people,” that would end the pain that mothers suffered in the previous repressive regimes, where violent tactics and strategies of counterinsurgency reigned. Hunger strikes of Kurdish political prisoners and the mothers’ struggle on behalf of them—mothers who mourned the continued killing of their guerrilla children and searched for their graves and the arrests of thousands of Kurdish activists, feminists, and (the so- called stone- throwing) children during this period however—barely made the news. In other words, Kurds in general and the Kurdish- speaking mother, in particular, with her cries and suffering, although appearing in the cultural and political realms, functioned “at the register of myth” and performed a colonial Turkish grammar where denial of difference was replaced by tropes of “partial recognition.”

Excerpted with permission from The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement by Nazan Üstündağ

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