Wassan Ali
The camera, positioned in a car, follows a road flanked by trees and greenery working its way upwards. I’m alert, as I tend to be, trying to analyse each sequence to assess how it speaks to me. I wonder whether the place is welcoming, how the camera sails into town without a human being encountering us.
The screen is a landscape of snow and mountains, with a few beautiful, decrepit, stone houses. Their inhabitants are out of sight and we, the audience, are left to take in the stillness. In a film that offers minimal aesthetics, subtitles tell the history of the town, giving us clues as to why language, farming animals, life, have declined over time. We are outsiders taking a peek, invited by the filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci who speaks the language but who is external herself. The film is an attempt at returning to a place she doesn’t know. She tells of having a history here but not one in which she has been involved first-hand.
One senses the cold and the reserved curiosity with which a woman interacts with the film crew, the question hanging in the air as to why strangers are here. A few off-screen voices can be heard and the camera pans across rooftops that appear between tall trees. The heights, the foliage and the snow make for impressive footage. In the midst of winter, someone is drinking tea on top of their house and stories of the roof as an inhabitable space come to mind.
Öğrenci’s film Aşît is set in Müküs where her father grew up—in Van, Turkey, near the border with Iran. Gradually, it becomes clear that the town was once inhabited by a rich Armenian community whose members were either driven out or murdered in the early twentieth century. Those remaining are mainly the descendants of the perpetrators, mainly Kurds. Müküs is a postwar society that is isolated because of the continuous threat of an avalanche, masses of snow that could bury the town under its weight. The right to live and move freely is inhibited by the avalanche and history alike, with the intimidations coming from the Turkish officials adding further pressure. The inhabitants of Müküs balance historical legacy with ongoing harassment.
But Öğrenci’s film doesn’t work with clear-cut ethnic categories. Those left behind are part and parcel of those no longer present; the Kurds intertwined with the Armenians, the Kurds related to the Turks and vice versa. In the Q&A, I comment that the film blurs the line between victim and perpetrator, one can’t really tell who holds which identity, who is on which side of history. Isn’t it of utmost importance to maintain distinctions? The moderator reaffirms that “it is an important question” and Öğrenci describes her family tree as a tangle of Turks, Armenians, and Kurds. A picture is painted of identities tied together by kinship, how one’s uncle can be this, one’s mother that, and one’s cousins yet something else.
Being assimilated, as I am, means that one cannot pay qualified attention to difference. One tries to follow the parental line of thinking, but one can’t be sure what that is. For what it’s worth, I can offer trivia about Kurdish people. For one, we drink tea in all weathers, rain or shine. I know my Kurds to be cosmopolitans. I say this because Kurds living in the mountains evoke images that don’t match to my experience. Though the years my parents spent living in Sulaymaniyah might entitle them to this designation, and if there are mountains in Baghdad, then even more so. My mother’s family kept animals—chickens, as far as I know. They had a big house, there was always mention of the house. I don’t think my insistence on Kurdish worldliness is innocent.
Moreover, my memory plays tricks on me—it paints out watertight borders between Kurds and Arabs, seeing drama where it’s misplaced and overlooking historical persecution at the same time. The Q&A reminds me of an aunt who married an Arab. There is something cold about putting it this way but that was the narrative. The marriage didn’t work out, they divorced. Ties between Kurds and Swedes, Russians and Brits, on the other hand, have been accepted. They are not too close to home, although it should be noted that the Brits were meddling in Iraqi backyards, pursuing their interests in the country’s oil reserves. My grandfather worked for them. BP paid his pension, with money that wasn’t theirs to pay.
It is a novel sensation to deal with collective guilt when one is used to another narrative. As someone who realised late in life that I carry an Arab surname, and this only because it was pointed out to me, I have mainly been invested in the struggle against majoritarian racism. But the film draws me into territory where Kurds are not only victims of history but also perpetrators. That is what happens when one is in Berlin; in a big city of many peoples one is obliged to be convivial.
I watch Öğrenci’s film as part of a programme that takes place at Spore, an institution that describes itself as a meeting place for indigenous cultures. Spore formulates its policy as aiming to bridge the inequities between the Global North and the Global South by offering its resources and infrastructure. This directive is manifested by how it is one of the few institutions in Berlin where events can take place that thematise Palestinian perspectives and human rights. I’ve come to learn that Spore’s programme focus was meant to be ecological themes such as the promotion of biodiversity but, given that we live in a time when state structures are increasingly undemocratic and politics have folded to fintech corporations, their focus needed to expand. What can we set against the elite other than a philanthropic elite of our own? There are more hopeful approaches than this, but I can’t offer them at the present moment. I soak up the airiness of the building, its modern concrete walls and wooden details. I like the Armenian café.
The time I went to a panel discussion at Spore on the Kurdish notion of xwebûn, I thought to ask for entrance into the community, as if there were a rite of passage one could perform. On stage sat four cultural figures who had made their mark as artists, discussing their relation to the term. As I learned that evening, xwebûn signifies the art of resistance—to become and to be oneself, to live according to this principle and to do so in alliance with others. The concept is central for Kurdish identity and needs to be considered beyond individualist aspirations. It needs to be considered in relation to how nation states have been pursuing the dissolution of Kurdish identities by prohibiting the language and other recognisable trademarks such as the flag. But being assimilated, I’m not sure if xwebûn pertains to my particular branch of Kurdishness. Nevertheless, I noted that two of the four women taking part in the panel discussion were wearing translator earphones—how Kurdish identity could be represented by those who don’t have full access themselves.
The writer Cemile Sahin was the glamorous guest of the evening, with facial features resembling those of my niece at home in Sweden and exuding a similar confidence. In Sahin’s novels, the protagonists are tortured—internally and by military force. Violence is capricious and ubiquitous; Sahin’s debut novel, Taxi, opens with the first-person narrator taking a beating, his thoughts whirling around not choking on his own saliva. To exemplify Sahin’s brutal language: “Jetzt bekomme ich Prügel, zur Abwechslung diesmal nicht mit Händen, sondern mit seinen Stiefeln.” Ambiguously disavowing his own innocence, the protagonist repeatedly tells himself that the affliction is either torture or justice. “Ich bin ein ehrlicher Mensch” (13), he adds, by way of accountability—this with a boot to his face. In Sahin’s second novel, Alle Hunde Sterben, a man sits down on a chair to scout out of the window, a firearm in his hand, repeating this act day after day. He, too, is waiting for revenge or justice, for the forcefully disappeared relative to return. The terrorised protagonists cling on to the past, with everyday life unfolding under the banner of militarism. They all live in the same high-rise but the location is not specified, nor are there markers or background information that make the terror explicable. The question arises whether violence can be justified—the reader given no assurance as to where to place their sympathy. Over time, the line between wearing a uniform by choice or by force becomes exhausted. Sahin’s stories illustrate how oppression shapes you into becoming a problem in the eyes of the world. Violence is inflicted on you and thereby you become part of a violent apparatus—no longer entitled to act in the name of innocence.
On occasion, I ask my aunt whether Iraqi Kurds are sympathetic towards the Kurdish liberation struggle in Turkey, and she shoots back with an “of course” (in Dutch), giving me a look as if to tell me I’m not quite right in the head. To partake in Kurdish contexts in Berlin means finding oneself caught in the wake of the recruitment agreement between Germany and Turkey that occurred in the 1960s. However, there are other flows of Kurdish migration to this country. There is the flow that followed after the Iran-Iraq war, the one that inadvertently led me to Sweden, a flow that broke into different directions.
On stage the panellists say that the politics of assimilation has resulted in a situation where those exiled might not even know that they are Kurds, living in a state of ignorance that prevents them from growing as human beings. But Sahin interjects that there can be no return to folklore, that we can’t resort to nostalgia by trying to invent a Kurdish Heimat and that we must find new ways forward. Eager to hear more about such alternative pathways, I want to ask frankly about Kurdish community—is there space for the assimilated, for the Iraqi, and what happens when queerness is thrown into the mix? But there is no instance to solve this for me, nobody to meet my interrogations. Instead, I am offered the analogy of the onion—the onion that consists of multiple layers, and if you peel them away, you will reach the inner core—an interiority where you can express your own thoughts because you are able to formulate them in your own language. But I’m too comfortable to get rid of my layers. What if I believe them to be likeable? The assimilated respond to questions on the Kurdish situation with follow-up questions.
Sahin, Cemile. Taxi. 2019. Aufbau Verlag, 2020.
Wassan Ali explores intersectional histories in the archive and their impact on the present. She contributed to the collection Nicht die Ersten: Bewegungsgeschichten von Queers of Color in Deutschland and to the hand-bound book Reading Roses in Constellation with an essay on Gillian Rose and digestion. Ali is an associate in the research project Queer Theory in Transit.
Inter-Asian Berlin Anthology 