“You Don’t Look Kurdish!”
“Where are you from?”
We’ve all heard it, but most of us don’t dread it like I do. I can move it on, but more than I care to remember, it almost always manages to stick its foot in the door with, “But you don’t look Kurdish!”
What does it mean to look Kurdish though? We are one of the most diverse groups of people you’ll ever meet. Many Kurdish kids, me included, were born with light or naturally highlighted hair. Up to a quarter of Kurds, depending on the region, have blue or green eyes. This figure is especially high among Yazidi Kurds and Alevi Kurds from Dersim. Kurds usually have flat face bones and many Kurdish women are short with soft, voluptuous bodies, though there are exceptions to these rules too.
I’m undoubtedly Kurd-shaped. I’ve been described as “underheight” and almost had a run-in with growth hormone injections. I was always a D-cup girl, never a Depop girl. I’ve run the gamut of hair colours, from blonde to black. One thing that hasn’t changed though is that I have blue eyes. I have a good friend who can tell a person’s ethnicity just by looking in their eyes, and he took one look at me and knew I was Kurdish and Alevi. At the same time, I met a girl who said I couldn’t possibly be Kurdish with that eye colour, and then contradicted herself by referencing her green-eyed Kurdish ex. Whether I look Kurdish ultimately depends on who’s looking.
At the same time, I am sure that if I did one of those Youtube social experiments, handing them a pen and paper in response to this comment, asking them to “draw a Kurd”, they would reproduce the usual shtick of a scowling manual labourer with a thick moustache, a unibrow and abundant arm hair. Or they would fall for the pervasive myth that Kurdish people prance around in PKK uniform 24/7. In my many years of political participation, I’ve been able to count the number of Kurds who did that on two hands, and it would always be as part of a protest. Because those uniforms are valuable. It would be brutally disrespectful to our heroes to desecrate them in the scuffles of daily life.
The Turkish media is partly to blame for this. Yes, even here in the UK. Most of the time, when I ask people “how many Kurds do you know?” they only know one, which is me. Young people who otherwise have no grasp of the Turkish language or the Kurdish identity, get into English-subtitled series. These range from soap operas with implicit bias that throws darker-skinned actors into the role of manual labourers, all the way to “tribal” or “customary” dramas, in which these same darker-looking actors play “southeastern” village chiefs who drip with a mixture of hair gel and toxic masculinity. (For context, watch Hercai, Sila, Kinali Konak or Berivan. If you can handle it.) Some are somewhat educational, but most modern ones are overdramatised fear-fodder to teach lonely, sedentary housewives to think less of Kurds. They’re racism disguised as QVC. Why is no one calling these shows out for being problematic? Why do they remain uncharted territory when the word “problematic” is otherwise thrown around willy-nilly?
And don’t even get me started on the memes! When I was younger and the internalised racism hit rock bottom, I used to semi-ironically read forums like Eksisozluk and Uludagsozluk, Turkish language equivalents to Urban Dictionary. Cartoon characters, ranging from Pikachu to Winnie The Pooh, would be “Kurdified” with crudely drawn on moustaches, unibrows and Molotov cocktails, the latter only legitimising the Turkish government’s intentionally vague definition of terrorism. More often than not, these would be accompanied by ham-fisted impressions of what the Kurdish language is supposed to sound like. Kurdish stereotypes, whether they’re on TV or on a website, are really no different from humiliating Chinese people by putting one’s fingers in one’s eyes and saying “zhing zhang zhong”, and yet people get away with it because Kurds are “niche” and “obscure”. No Chinese person would allow themselves to be defined that way, but I did as a Kurd because it was better than not being acknowledged at all.
I remember a committee meeting I went to, at the Kurdish centre, where one of the speakers said something that stood out. She said Kurds “must refuse to accept a normal life” for the revolution to be successful. My normal life is one in which the only time people really pay attention to my identity is when they deny it, with “you don’t look Kurdish” or use it as a vehicle for negativity. More often than not, the people who misconstrue my identity are one Google search away from hundreds of Kurdish women, many of whom do look like me. And yet no one’s ever told me that I have Ayse San’s face or Dilek Ocalan’s soft, snuggly body. When my hair was red, I only ever heard from myself that I looked like Sakine Cansiz. I’d have felt far more comfortable standing against injustice if I was compared to Leyla Zana, and maybe I wouldn’t have given up on art completely if I was told my art was like Zehra Dogan’s.
I have enough difficulty explaining that humans are a varied species that I haven’t a clue how to explain how varied Kurdish humans are. It may include saying “You mean, I don’t look like a hegemonically defined Kurdish stereotype as shared in digital media moderated by the Turkish Government” or just using the Socratic method, asking “What does a Kurd look like then?” I wonder how that will go over, considering that young people are on average less likely to believe in negative and largely inaccurate stereotypes of entire demographics. I’ve also tried to use humour, saying things like, “You’re doing a much better job than me”, especially if it’s another Kurd saying I don’t look as Kurdish as they do. I just wish I had a stock reply to this comment that reminded people that there isn’t only one way to look Kurdish and that, as I said, it’s all about who’s looking.
