Nazan Üstündağ, The Mother, The Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement (Fordham University Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Nazan Üstündağ (NÜ): I met the Kurdish movement in 2000. Since then, I have been involved with it both politically and academically. The people in the movement related to me always with great care. They were protective of me as much as they were persistent in their demands for solidarity. They were always open and shared their vulnerabilities without reservations. I have learned profoundly from them about friendship, ethics, politics, attachments, knowledge, willpower, leadership, responsibilities, and commitments. Every single person I met in the movement left a print on me and gifted me generously with intimate stories. The movement has transformed me, changed the world I was living in, helped me to know myself better in terms of the criteria according to which I want to live and the genuine needs I have in life (like the needs for enchantment and entanglement). This book is first and foremost a “thank you” to the Kurdish movement and specifically the Kurdish women’s freedom movement for having brought me to the place where I am today.
I would like to think that I thank them by turning my book into another tool by which the movement is linked to other worlds and hence becomes universalized (if we follow Da Silva and her definition of the universal as difference without separability). I say “another,” because the movement practices many universalities through generating differentiation at the same time as it forms links to many other movements, struggles, and ideas, using multiple tools. The methodology and theoretical framework I use in the book aim at communicating my urge and enthusiasm to share the joy the movement gives me—despite all the suffering its members survive—and my appreciation of this joy. The theoretical vocabulary I use is the means by which I translate, recreate, and rework what this movement has carved on the flesh of my world.
Also, I guess, writing Mother, Politician, Guerilla was a matter of honor for me. I had to leave Turkey because of the investigations opened against me regarding my writings and speeches on the Kurdish movement. In order to avoid prosecution, I left everything behind, including my university position, and moved into exile. It is difficult to be hated by your own people, as was the case with me. Despite my mixed heritage, I consider myself to be Turkish; while I was growing up, I did not experience the same violent gap that Kurds have been experiencing between themselves and the signifiers of the Turkish culture and politics. In regard to the Turkish state, the book is a statement: I continue my struggle and I am firm in my belief and action. I refuse the charges that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a terrorist organization. I refuse the entire discourse on terrorism that prevents us from pursuing our dreams of becoming free, becoming “women to come,” and enacting a “perhaps” in the world. My writing and speeches will always be political practices that might be regarded as terrorist propaganda. I am okay with it as long as terrorism entails the blocking of the reproduction of our current colonial, capitalist, patriarchal present as future.
My book is a desire manifested in writing, an invitation to understand what makes the Kurdish movement in particular and armed resistance movements in general move people and become leaders that incite. I want to underline the potentialities of the Kurdish movement and not be stuck in a place where satisfaction is achieved by obvious, boring, and unproductive critiques that are disguised under the comfortable garments of western humanism, pacifist feminism, sexualist freedomism, and moralist leftism.
Finally, I have a problem with the Kurdish people being identified only with the struggle in Rojava (northern Syria) and the Kurdish movement being whitewashed due to its resistance against the Islamic State. The book focuses on the Kurdish freedom movement as it unfolded against the Turkish state—a NATO member—within an armed anti-colonial movement under the leadership of a man who has been isolated since 1999 in a Turkish island prison. It is a messy movement that has experimented with many rights and wrongs under very harsh conditions. Western and Middle Eastern countries have been complicit in the victimization of Kurds through multiple counter-terrorism tactics, as in Palestine or Baluchistan. In my book I talk about the marvelous ideas and practices Kurdish women have developed in relation to motherhood and its laws, friendship as a genre of humanity, and politics as that which unfolds at the limits and thresholds of flesh and body, voice and language, the legal and the illegal. These ideas and practices have been generated through a dialectic grounded in Kurds’ struggle to make their lives worth living for themselves, as well as to make their lives matter for the whole world.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
NÜ: The book enters a dialogue with Black feminism, feminist psychoanalysis, feminist political theory, and queer studies in order to shed light on the political imagination of the Kurdish women’s freedom movement.
It is divided into three parts—the mother, the politician, and the guerilla—as it is through these figures that I trace the various lineages and linkages of the Kurdish political tradition that give rise to temporalities, spatialities, and matter-ings (i.e. both what matters in politics and what is the matter with politics) other than those constituted by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. In the first part of the book, I engage the question of what laws of the state are injured when mothers become public and what other laws/loves are conjured up through Kurdish mothers’ acts that are situated between voice and language, myth and sociology. The second part focuses on the figure of the politician and how that figure uses the parliamentary floor and the body granted to it as the holder of a governmental post as limits. It is by occupying these limits that women politicians perform what cannot be articulated by discourse, which is the “Ate” of the Kurdish community, the curse and gift of being Kurdish, which always already equals to violent exclusion from legality and therefore humanity. The third part addresses the figure of the guerilla and how she becomes the “Real” of the Kurdish people by going to the mountains. She leaves one zone of non-being, the space of the family where she is made fungible by patriarchy—to migrate to another, where to mourn her death is forbidden. Here she lays a claim on humanness by enacting radical friendship, which involves the resignification and decolonization of truth, freedom, and being within multiple entanglements with nature, people, and community. Following Sylvia Wynter, I call this the “human as friend” genre and argue that, in the Kurdish movement, life is always offered and played out rather than owned.
One thing I did not want to do in my book was to present my arguments as somehow filling a gap in literature or being superior to what has already been said. Rather, I would like to think about the people I give reference to as fellow travellers. I parted ways with them and travelled different journeys at times because the home we wanted to go back to or we remembered was different. As such, I make reference to people and theories that others might regard strange bedfellows, without really letting myself be overwhelmed by the deep chasms others have attributed to them.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
NÜ: I have always been interested in experimenting with different genres—academic, literary, journalistic—to express the joy and the suffering experienced in impossible lives carved out at the intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and the nation state. This time, however, I am writing about women who are also consciously trying to give birth to a new way of being and becoming to overcome the conditions of their existence. They have an enormous vocabulary to name their own experience and to communicate it to the world. As I said above, I wanted to contribute to this effort by bringing that vocabulary in dialogue with theories of feminist psychoanalysis, Black feminism, and queer theory. I think this dialogue proved itself to be very productive in terms of underlining how the figure of the mother, the orator (the politician), and the fighter (the guerilla) are common themes in different world-making practices and how such a dialogue on the margins points to universalities alternative to those promoted by colonialism and patriarchy. I have a problem with suffering being the only common trope through which we communicate with each other as women. Neither should we communicate through white feminism. Dialogue between those at the margins to mainstream feminisms is vital in building a new internationalism that speaks the language of desire, joy, and invention.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
NÜ: I hope that those interested in the question of anti-colonial inventions and post-patriarchal futures will read the book. I also would like scholars of Black feminism to read it to see how their thoughts and those of Kurdish women intersect. I would like scholars to read it who are methodologically interested in links and lineages that are untellable in conventional historical narratives. I would also like those who are interested in the intersection between politics and psyche to read it.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
NÜ: I am writing a poetry book based on women’s narratives that I collected in my research. I am also working on a book of essays on several concepts that I believe have been marginal to critical theory but are actually vital in imagining and inventing new worlds. The theoretical language of academia has always excited me and given me joy. Now, I want to find ways to abandon its ornaments—especially, in the face of the sheer reality of genocide in Palestine, in Kurdistan, in Sudan, in Congo, in Tigray.
Excerpt from the book (from Introduction, pp. 2-5)
“By resisting here we are opening a space for politics,” a woman guerrilla I met in Cizre told me. She was in her early twenties and had come to Cizre from the mountains surrounding the city with three of her friends. When the first publicly announced peace talks between the Turkish state and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) ended in 2015, Kurdistan youth opened up trenches in their neighborhoods to protect themselves from the raids by the Turkish police forces. With the assistance of guerrilla teams located near city centers, they also mined these trenches and equipped themselves with arms. Meanwhile, in several Kurdish cities, local assemblies that were created during the peace talks as (extralegal) bodies of governance parallel to state bureaucracy had declared regional autonomy.
Cizre was one of the most organized among the “trenched” cities. I was in Cizre with the Women for Peace Initiative—an initiative we had founded in 2009 to struggle for peace in Turkey between the state and Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). Our visit aimed at showing our support for the people in the town, especially the women, who had experienced an eight days’ long around-the-clock curfew imposed by the state in order for the security forces to raid the neighborhoods where the trenches were dug. Twenty-two people had died during the raids. Despite the losses, the mood in Cizre was high; security forces aided by special counterinsurgency squads brought from the capital, Ankara, and equipped with tanks and drones had failed to enter the neighborhoods because of the resistance shown by the people and the armed youth. The woman guerrilla continued: “They want to annihilate us. We can only push for politics and peace by showing that we will not be annihilated.”
Once we left her quarters, I contemplated with a friend, who lived in Cizre, why we were so moved by her and her friends. He said, “Because they are like stray puppies, and so loving towards each other.” While there was some truth to that, this did not explain why everyone else also felt so much love for them, following their orders even though they were so young. I thought to myself that the people regarded them also as warriors and prophets, leading the way to a much-anticipated free future with their very flesh. After a moment of silence, my friend added, “They inspire people to be their best.”
Soon the trenches and the declarations, both acts of sovereignty on the part of the Kurdish opposition, unleashed an even greater violence from the Turkish state surpassing that of the 1990s, when various counterinsurgency tactics had traumatized the whole region. Overall, around-the-clock curfews in “trenched” neighborhoods lasted for more than six months, and Turkish counterinsurgency squads killed hundreds of civilians, youth activists, and fighters, demolishing buildings and infrastructures, which reduced the insurgent cities to rubble. After a second curfew in which state forces destroyed entire neighborhoods in Cizre, displaced thousands of people, and burned alive more than one hundred people (including the resisting youth, politicians, nurses, and other supporters who were waiting for a cease fire and ambulances in three basements), I frantically searched through the pictures of dead bodies on the Internet that counterinsurgency accounts posted to find out whether the woman guerrilla we met was among them. She was. Face down, lying on the ground, her flesh exposed.
The Kurdish people witnessed numerous atrocities at the hands of the Turkish state. What differentiated this last wave of violence and increased its terror was that—in addition to its intensity and scale—whereas before, the state tried to hide its destruction from sight and hence forced it upon Kurds to prove the occurrence of forced disappearances, displacements, and executions, now the destruction was being done in open sight as proof of the Turkish state’s power.During the curfews security forces regularly produced corpses for public viewing, both as they were attacking the trenched cities from afar and later as they slowly drilled their way into the resisting neighborhoods. Videos and photographs of rotten, crushed, naked, and pulled-apart Kurdish flesh were leaked to the Internet, supplemented by images of captured bodies dragged from place to place. Acoustically, the noise of tanks, drones, and bombs displaying the superiority of the technologically advanced Turkish “Special Forces” accompanied the voices of insurgents who anticipated their own “corpsing” as they talked to Kurdish Television stations on their cell phones In the 1990s, seeing and hearing were unevenly distributed in Turkey, keeping the hope alive that if everybody would know what was really happening they would understand the truth of Kurdish oppression. Now, people saw the same pictures but were affected differently: Turks felt victorious and Kurds were horrified, making it almost impossible to dream a potentially just future of coexistence.
The spectacle of suffering and destruction was as much about confirming the proper role of Kurdishness in the order of things as it was about performing Turkish sovereignty. As I have written elsewhere, Kurdish bodies that do not perform their own symbolic death by an absolute obedience to state law are made to pose face down on the pavement, testifying to the impossibility of surviving a free life in Turkey. For the purposes of this book I want to remind us of three images of such “forced poses” that constituted a devouring “trauma of representation” for Kurds during the curfew and raids. By the concept of “trauma of representation,” I wish to evoke the difficulty and the obligation one feels to look at the reality of dead flesh and how this disrupts the fantasies invested in the human rights discourses and the ways in which resistance, power, and reconciliation are conventionally understood. If imagination always involves “the image,” “trauma of representation” causes imagination to be poisoned and imagined futures to be ruined. The following images played crucial roles in making it clear to Kurds in general and Kurdish women in particular that all of them had the potential to die like those in the images; their bodies were always open to the gratuitous violence of the state. The same photos rehabilitated Turks by restoring their narcissistic image without troubling them with feelings of guilt because no perpetrator was explicitly shown in them.
The first image belonged to Kevser Eltürk, a woman guerrilla known with the code name “Ekin Wan” who, after being killed by the security forces in August 2015, was dragged and left on a sidewalk for everyone to see. In a photo the security forces leaked to Twitter, civilian and uniformed men, whose presence and pose could be recognized by their legs captured in the shot, surrounded her body stripped of clothes. Writing about photographs on lynching, David Marriott states, “The camera lens is a means to fashion the self through the image of a dead black man.” In Eltürk’s case, too, those who photographed her fashioned themselves as sovereign Turks through the image of her dead and stripped body. This image also universalized the violence, sexism, and racism across the Turkish community and displayed the fact that law will always remain Turkish and patriarchal in Kurdish lands.
The second image was a photograph of Taybet Inan lying face down on the street. A mother of eleven shot by Turkish snipers, she remained on the street for seven days while the crossfire between the Turkish armed forces and the armed Kurdish youth continued. Despite persistent demands by her family to stop the fire for a few hours so that her dead body could be taken off the street, central and local state authorities denied the ceasefire and her right to burial. Unlike Ekin Wan, Taybet I nan had not fought the Turkish state. Her crime, however, was as severe, because she claimed life in a zone where Kurds were condemned to death. Moreover, her failure to play her part in the racial genocidal order of the Turkish state by not leaving her home so that the state could kill the insurgents in more effective and less costly ways led to her inevitable corpsing.
The last case concerns not an image but a text message and an emptiness to be filled by one’s imagination informed by the horrors already witnessed. The public received news of the injury of three female politicians, Seve Demir, a member of the Party Assembly of the Democratic Regions Party, Pakize Nayır, a member of the Free Women Congress, and Fatma Uyar, the co-president of Silopi People’s Assembly, from the telephone call they made to a Kurdish MP asking for an ambulance. Fire from an armored vehicle shot by the Special Forces had hit them while they were trying to bring to safety the residents of a neighborhood the youth had left. Hours after this call, an ambulance was dispatched to pick them up, but it was their dead bodies that arrived at the hospital. While how they actually died after being able to phone was never clarified, rumors that Seve Demir was decapitated spread, linking the destruction and violence of the Turkish army to that of ISIS, against whom Kurds were fighting in northern Syria.