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Figen Yüksekdağ Şenoğlu is a Turkish politician, journalist and political prisoner, who was a co-leader of the left-wing Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) of Turkey from 2014 to 2017. 

On 3 November 2016, she was arrested for allegedly not cooperating with "terror" investigations and attending the funeral of the Marxist Leninist Communist Party's (MLKP) Yasemin Çiftçi. Parliament revoked her parliamentary membership on 21 February 2017 and the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that she was no longer a member of the HDP on 9 March 2017. Yüksekdağ remains imprisoned in the Kocaeli F-type Prison today. 

Drawing from The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics (Gültan Kışanak, Pluto Press 2022), Issue #33 of The Internationalist features Yüksekdağ’s reflections on her imprisonment — and how it has united her with so many persecuted women across Turkey at this critical moment in its modern history.

As this latest imprisonment wasn’t my first, the experience hasn’t been particularly strange to me. However, this time, our people’s freedom to vote and our party’s right to be elected were arrested with me. This was the most important thing that I couldn’t and wouldn’t accept. Prisons are constructed to shatter people’s will and spirit by confining their bodies. But sometimes, in the face of the greatness of one’s will and spirit, that doesn’t work. How will AKP suppress the will and spirit of 6 million HDP voters? Feeling the power of that, from the moment I entered jail, I ruled out the option of loneliness.

But the isolation we faced was very strict. Upon our arrival, one by one, we were placed in F-type cells, isolated and removed from one another. For a long time, we couldn’t even hear each other’s voices due to the distance. I was able to hear and talk to women who had been convicted in the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front case—they were in nearby cells. F-type cells are spaces of severe isolation but also revolutionary solidarity, which is good to feel. 

This was my first experience in an F-type cell. Every aspect of such cells, from architecture to regulations, is based on the logic of isolation and prolonged torture. Considering that political prisoners experience so much repression and torture in jail, the hardships that my elected friends and I endured are scarcely worth mentioning. But our imprisonment and every non legality perpetrated on us constitute an attack, beyond our individual personalities, on the inviolable democratic rights of the people. 

Let me also mention some positive sides of imprisonment. If you don’t bow down, you always see the sky. You realize deep in your soul that the phrase “Like a tree—alone and free” isn’t just a line of poetry but life itself [1]. Your vocal cords develop, as you shout ever more skillfully. Your sense of hearing becomes acute. You specialize in discerning who called out to you and in listening to what they’re saying. Since touchscreen smartphones are now things of your past, you learn to use smarter communication tools such as the “scream-screen,” the “pencil-screen,” and the “air-screen.” As you throw balls (of holiday candy, pieces of cake, pepper, etc.) from one prison yard to another, you take justifiable pride in breaking the airlines’ monopoly on the use of airways. In the evenings, you listen to women’s voices singing fugitives’ folk songs. Then you hear the songs of individual trees come together in the roaring of a whole forest. 

Humor aside, the women prisoners here, myself included, are gaining new and valuable experiences. In the past we never walked very far apart anyway, but our paths have converged at this razor-sharp moment in history. I said we’re a forest, but this place also becomes like the sea, as women flow into it from their own riverbeds and mix their waters. Sometimes you fit a whole forest or a sea in between four walls; and then you don’t fit in those four walls any longer and burst out. This is how I describe the rich existential resistance of the women politicians whose paths have led them here and to prisons all over Turkey.

Notes: 

[1] Lines from a poem by the Turkish communist poet Nazım Hikmet: “To live, like a tree—alone and free, And like a forest—in solidarity”

Excerpted with permission from The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison edited by Gültan Kışanak and published by Pluto Press in November 2022.

The Internationalist Archive