f36 The Kurdish Way
Since she graced the cover of fRoots back in 2004, Aynur has become the most renowned Kurdish folk artist living in Turkey –something of a breakthrough for this marginalised minority. Nick Hobbs hears progress.
in Kurdish, its original name, changed by the Turkish government in 1936. Her fam- ily fled to Istanbul in 1992 during the fighting between the Turkish military and the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party). She studied music and singing at the ASM Music School in Istanbul and released her first album in 2002.
A
ynur Doğan – usually known just as Aynur – was born in Cemisgezek, a small mountain town in the south east Turkish province of Tunceli, or Dersim
Following her two Kalan albums – 2004’s critically-acclaimed Keçe Kurdan (Kurdish Girl) and 2005’s Nûpel (New Page) – a fRoots front cover in 2004, a Womex showcase in 2006, and regular concerts at home and abroad, Aynur released her fourth album, Rewend (Nomad) on Sony last year. She has estab- lished herself as the most renowned con- temporary Kurdish folk singer in Turkey, with perhaps Gulistan Perwer as her most obvious mentor. But whereas Gulistan and Şivan Perwer had little choice but to
go into international exile in 1976 if they wished to stay out of prison or worse (in contrast to the internal exile of Aynur’s family), it is now more or less safe, even officially encouraged, to be a proponent of Kurdish culture in Turkey, to publish records in Kurdish, to sing in public in Kurdish, and to speak to the audience in Kurdish. Any of those would have stood you a good chance of becoming a target for Turkey’s frequently zealous prosecu- tors until the AKP, the Muslim-democrat- ic ruling party, came to power in 2002, since when there has been a gradual and continuing thaw.
That doesn’t, however, mean you can freely say what you like; anything which runs over the red line of Kurdish sepa- ratism (the unitary state of the Turkish Republic is conceived as eternal) is likely to land you in the courts. Very recently, there has been open debate about creating autonomous regions in Turkey, a huge step in the political imagination of the country, even if it remains an idea (for most Kurds, an ideal) at the moment.
I grew up in Wales, and the resurgence of Kurdish culture has much in common with the resurgence of Welsh culture – with some major differences. Notably, that there is an active, though currently sub- dued, and seemingly interminable (about 90 years and counting) ethnic guerrilla war – not religious, most of both language groups being Sunni Muslims – going on in the Kurdish region of Turkey, usually referred to here as ‘the South-East’.
And there has been some opening by both the AKP and the CHP (the secular- republican main opposition) towards the constitutionally-invisible Kurdish minority who form about 15-20 percent of the population, living since ancient (pre- Seljuk) times in close to a third of the Republic of Turkey.
Justified by the AKP in the name of ‘stable government’, the BDP, the Kurdish equivalent of Sinn Fein, is effectively barred from parliament as an official party by an electoral threshold of 10 percent, though they’ve been able to get round this by standing as independents. Anyway, it means that the main national political representative of Turkish Kurds is semi- disenfranchised. All of which is to say that the situation of Kurds in Turkey remains a mess, very complex, and constantly tense, and seemingly a long way from a transfor- mation like that of Northern Ireland. As well as the more or less weekly deaths of soldiers and guerrillas, riots in the South East are not unusual.
Photo:
sedatmehder.com
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