Who In Their Right Mind Would Want To Be Kurdish?
I’m 20. I have blue eyes and I was blonde as a child. I’ve occasionally thought of taking up playing the violin. As part of a seemingly endless list of dream jobs from an engineer to a petrol station attendant, I’ve considered becoming an intern for the HDP, a political party in Turkey that centres Kurdish rights.
What has this got to do with anything, you ask?
A few days ago, a 20-year-old Kurdish woman, Deniz Poyraz, was shot several times in the canteen of the HDP office where she was doing an internship. Her postmortem photo shows her light brown hair and her penchant for playing the violin. The man who killed her was a right-wing Turkish nationalist who thought it was his vocation to kill Kurds and planned to kill more.
I don’t think I’ve ever feared for my life as much as I have these last few days. I quite literally saw myself in her image. This beautiful woman, who smiled and laughed and had a heartbeat, reminded me that someone in the world is thinking about killing me for who I am.
I remember, I quote, “you’ll be dead by 20" being one of the first Kurdophobic talking points I was introduced to. 20 was a faraway milestone back then, but now it feels like a week from Tuesday. I liked to think I’d proved those people wrong as I hosted my social distanced birthday party. Yet now that I’ve heard the news of this senseless murder, I wonder if those people are right. Maybe I haven’t died strictly before the age of 20, but my life expectancy as a “bad” or “terrorist” Kurdish woman is low enough that I could easily meet my maker when I’m 21, or 23, or 25. I can’t help thinking that I just need to listen to those who know better for once. Perhaps a matter of life or death is the only thing that can get me to change and leave bad habits behind. It’s a threat, and not an empty one.
The loss of Deniz’s life was not her fault. She was murdered by someone who believed Kurdish lives didn’t matter. Plenty of Turks believe that, and think it was her fault for being “bad” or “terrorist”, but it wasn’t. Working in an office shouldn’t be a death sentence. I know that. Everyone should know that — and yet half a decade of internalised Kurdophobia is convincing me that if the same thing happened to me, it would be my fault. The fact that I could die from standing in an office canteen would be a “wake-up call”, the sound of gunshots a reminder that “choices have consequences”. I can’t help thinking about my own theoretical racially motivated killing as something I would be able to opt out of. Victim-blaming is so ingrained in society that I can condemn it for others and simultaneously engage in it for myself.
Anti-Kurdish sentiment is the inescapable cornerstone of how the Turkish state functions. If you’re Kurdish, they’ll kill you. If you aren’t, but you “look Kurdish”, they’ll kill you. If you aren’t, but an elderly Kurdish couple and their nephew and his girlfriend live at the end of your road, the Turkish state will take “precautionary measures” and kill you. Deniz didn’t “look Kurdish” and she was killed.
Yet most of the Kurdophobia I experience has been presented as an entirely avoidable result of some individual failing. Concerningly, this viewpoint is backed up by a substantial number of Kurds, most memorably the musician Ibrahim Tatlises and the TV chef Nusret, who have opted to live as Turks as a social-climbing mechanism. Our lives are reduced to the somewhat abstract charge of “identifying” . How many more Kurds need to be killed for it to become clear that their shared experience isn’tanywhere near as simple as whether to “identify” or not? The blame shifted onto Deniz, and millions of other Kurds, is a classic example of the Just World Fallacy — that people universally get what they deserve, for some actual or perceived moral failing.
The Just World Fallacy has been applied to Baris Cakan, another Kurd killed for playing Kurdish music; it suggests he somehow deserved it for playing his music during the call to prayer. Or the Charlie Hebdo journalists; they must have brought it upon themselves for making rude cartoons. Or George Floyd; after all, he was kicking-off during his arrest. This is why I personally believe anyone who uses discriminatory language against Kurdish people is complicit in breeding shooters like the one who killed Deniz. Yes, I said what I said. You might not call yourself anti-Kurdish but you’re promoting murder. Whether you’re a religious Kurdophobe, a far-right Kurdophobe, a neoliberal or some sort of quasi-leftist who thinks “Kurds are a reductive social construct” — you, yes, you, got the ball rolling for the death of a 20-year-old and prompted another 20-year-old to ask “who’s coming next?”.
Time and time again, I’ve thought about how I want to be remembered when I do come next. Deniz was memorialised as a “nice girl”. Personally I want to be remembered as an average girl who went to school, who went to work, who paid her bills. Whose life was quietly unremarkable. Who volunteered and protested and considered becoming an intern for the HDP, but also considered becoming a scientist, a writer and a chef, among other things. Not everyone’s going to consider me a “nice girl”, because if everyone said that, I wouldn’t be fearing for my life. This year has been such a lifetime supply of uncertainty that uncertainty is the only thing I plan on cutting out of it.
