IMAGINING THE NATION IN TRANSNATIONAL SPACE

Deprived of their political rights as a distinct collective being in a homeland transected by the boundaries of recognized nation-states, Kurds have declared themselves a unified nation mostly through cultural production in diaspora. The conditions for the imagining of a unified nationhood in diaspora over the past few decades are a product of the augmented malleability of nation-state boundaries, the increasing circulation of media, and the decreasing monopoly of autonomous states over the ways in which subjectivities are imagined. Starting in the second half of the 20th century, transnational mobility and electronic mass media opened up new imaginary spaces for individuals, through which they have been able to challenge and contest the discursive boundaries imposed by nation-states. As Arjun Appadurai has noted, the loosening of the bonds between people and national territories helped transform the basis of cultural reproduction from nation-state projects to transnational imaginings.Footnote ⁶ Unraveling this expanded vocabulary of imagination, Appadurai notes that “electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of imagination. Together, they create specific irregularities because both viewers and images [and producers] are in simultaneous circulation.”Footnote ⁷ However, new political spaces generated through transnational imaginations cannot be assessed independently of nations, nation-states, and nationalisms. As Mike Featherstone writes, “It is misleading to conceive a global culture as necessarily entailing a weakening of the sovereignty of nation-states which will necessarily become absorbed into larger units and eventually a world state which produces cultural homogeneity and integration.”Footnote ⁸ An informed theory of the transnational world takes into account the ways in which “the hyphen between [the nation and the state] has become reconfigured by capital mobility and migration” rather than directly assuming that mobility and migration negate the validity of nations as organizing principles of collectivities.Footnote ⁹

Kurdish cultural production in European diaspora exemplifies transnational imaginations informed by the existing discourses of the nation. Kurdish media produced in Europe have constituted productive avenues through which certain imaginings of political collectivity have arisen and been transmitted via satellite across borders to the Middle East. MED-TV, a Kurdish television channel established by a group of Kurdish immigrants in Britain in 1994, is a palpable example of this.Footnote ¹⁰ Disseminating media content to most of Europe and the Middle East via satellite between 1994 and 1997, the programming of MED-TV sought to create cultural and linguistic unification among Kurds and to simulate the sovereignty of an imaginary Kurdish nation-state, albeit in transnational space. Amir Hassanpour coins the phrase “sovereignty in the sky” to describe the channel's efforts to erect Kurdish nationhood via satellite in the absence of an official Kurdish state: the “presence of the Kurdish national flag and anthem [on the screen] means that MED-TV has the power to treat Kurds not as audiences but as citizens of a Kurdish state.”Footnote ¹¹ After MED TV lost its broadcasting license in Britain due to diplomatic pressure from Turkey, the channel renamed itself MEDYA TV and started broadcasting from studios in Belgium. After MEDYA TV, too, was forced to shut down, there followed the launch of ROJ TV, located this time in Denmark. Despite Turkey's diplomatic pressure on European states to eliminate Kurdish broadcasting from Europe, diaspora organizations continued to launch new stations, which have been significant building blocks for the Kurdish public space, transcending national borders in the various centers of the diaspora.Footnote ¹²

Kurdish film festivals in Europe are another stark example of the productive irregularities that have impelled imaginations of a Kurdish nation in transnational space. Just like MED-TV and its successors, Kurdish film festivalsFootnote ¹³ (first in London and later in other diaspora cities, including Hamburg, Vienna, and Paris) arose as an outcome of both the deterritorialization and the transnationalization of Kurdishness. A group of Kurdish immigrants from Turkey launched the first run of the London Kurdish Film Festival, with major funding from a government-sponsored community center in London. When I asked the London Kurdish Film Festival's founder and director Mustafa Gündoğdu about how the film festival came into being, he noted the ways in which diasporic life figured in materializing the project. He said, “when I moved to England in 2000, I realized that there were endless opportunities here. That was a time when [Kurdish] people, especially in Europe, were conscious and sensitive about their identity and language.”Footnote ¹⁴ By the “endless opportunities” in London, relative to those in Turkey, Gündoğdu referred to the cultural spaces and the material resources, provided by the British government, that promoted multiculturalist policies and integrationist agendas for immigrant communities. The particular citizenship model the British state employed in relation to immigrants, as Christian Joppke notes, required the government to promote policies that left large room for immigrant communities to organize cultural activities through which they come to participate in the fabric of British society.Footnote ¹⁵ Kurdish immigrants in the United Kingdom organized in cultural and community centers sponsored largely by the British government in line with its official policies of multiculturalism.Footnote ¹⁶

The idea of a film festival, however, was not an inevitable outcome of access to the resources the British government provided to promote its own multiculturalist agendas. For the Kurdish community in London, an enlarged cultural space created room for a strongly political function because it was harnessed by the already politicized Kurdish community to nationalize Kurdish culture and language. Substantial Kurdish migration to the United Kingdom started in the late 1980s and continued through the 1990s.Footnote ¹⁷ Following the 1980 coup in Turkey, and due to the intensified war in the east of the country, many Kurds arriving in the United Kingdom were highly politicized asylum seekers and thought of diaspora as a sphere to promote their political cause. For many Kurdish activists, the cultural has been political, and vice versa. Gündoğdu explained this as follows: “I am not saying that diaspora has meant merely good things for Kurds. What I am saying is that Kurds were able to render themselves visible via cultural activities in diaspora.” Cultural activity in diaspora, according to Gündoğdu, was “part of the larger Kurdish political struggle.”Footnote ¹⁸

The London Kurdish Film Festival arose from the unique relationship between two “cultures of circulation.”Footnote ¹⁹ In Lee and LiPuma's use, this term explains circulation as “a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them.”Footnote ²⁰ Lee and LiPuma draw particular attention to the performative nature of circulation. Cultures of circulation “are created and animated by the cultural forms that circulate through them.”Footnote ²¹ The intersection of two different cultures of circulation engendered the idea of the London Kurdish Film Festival. One of these brought Mustafa Gündoğdu from Turkey to Europe. After leaving his homeland in Dersim in Turkish Kurdistan, Gündoğdu relocated to Istanbul in the 1990s and then to London as an immigrant. To characterize similar processes of people's mobility and circulation across malleable state borders in a transnational world, Appadurai coined the term ethnoscapes. An ethnoscape is “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.”Footnote ²² Gündoğdu's route from a small Kurdish town to London affected the ways in which he imagined and experienced his belonging to a Kurdish collectivity, which materialized in divergent ways in Kurdistan, Istanbul, and London.

In addition to his personal experience of the Kurdish ethnoscape, another transnational cultural occurrence figured in the ways in which Gündoğdu and his friends began imagining a Kurdish nation: the screening of the film A Time for Drunken Horses by Bahman Ghobadi at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. Gündoğdu stated: “That year, Bahman Ghobadi had won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. We came together with a few friends and started talking about what we could do. The idea of a Kurdish film festival came out.”Footnote ²³ Ghobadi is a Kurdish filmmaker and a citizen of Iran. In 2000, his debut film received the Camera d'Or prize at Cannes, perhaps the most prestigious and most scrutinized film event in Europe. The film narrates the tragic story of Kurdish children who struggle to earn their lives by smuggling goods across the border of Iran and Iraq. Attending several other festivals that year, Ghobadi became well known in international film circles.Footnote ²⁴ Appadurai calls this culture of circulation, which in this case intersected with a uniquely articulated Kurdish ethnoscape that stimulated Kurdish cinema discourse, a mediascape. International film festivals, as mediascapes,Footnote ²⁵ create circuits of production, distribution, dissemination, and consumption, enabling the transnational mobility of images.

As Goankar and Povinelli note, cultural circulation is not “simply a movement of people, commodities, ideas, and images from one place to another,”Footnote ²⁶ but a process that transcends objects moving through space and time. Ghobadi's prize at Cannes, and subsequent laurels, established his film's artistic worth and facilitated its appearance at more than forty international festivals. Ghobadi's own discourse about ethnic identity in these events helped inspire Kurdish youth to organize around a cinema culture based on identity politics. He frequently highlights his Kurdish identity and the existence of the Kurds as a disjointed, oppressed people whose political status has borne tragic stories, while framing filmmaking as the most suitable and effective means of representing these stories. As he explains: “Kurds are always on the move. They have something in common with cinema, which is the art of movement.”Footnote ²⁷ Characterizing his filmmaking as a means to pinpoint the transient existence of Kurds within a politically charged geography, Ghobadi has contributed to the institutionalization of the discursive parameters of Kurdish cinema and established himself as a central figure in this emerging genre.

Cultures of circulation both create and are created by particular opportunities, rules, and constraints. Transnational migration and electronic media have intersected and provided many subaltern groups, including the Kurds, with “new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds.”Footnote ²⁸ Gündoğdu explained in my interview with him: “in a way, the Kurds recognized their cultural wealth by virtue of the activities organized in diaspora. It was only in diaspora we got to know each other without borders between us.”Footnote ²⁹ He believes that cinema has a peculiar capacity to bring the Kurdish nation together; when a Kurd from Iraq sits in a European movie theater next to a Kurd from Turkey and watches a film narrating a Kurdish funeral or wedding in Iran, that experience becomes effective in healing the ruptures of time and history in cultural knowledge, historical memory, and identity.Footnote ³⁰ Uprooted from their homeland and swept to diasporic metropolises as either labor migrants or political refugees, Kurds organized around activities such as film festivals, which became public sites for the imagining of a unified political community and constituted a sense of symbolic sovereignty on a silver screen.Footnote ³¹

It was in this context that Gündoğdu transformed Zaré (1926), an Armenian-produced film about Kurdish village life, into part of the Kurdish cultural heritage. When Gündoğdu and his colleagues planned the London Kurdish Film Festival in 2001, they sought, in addition to erasing borders that fragment a people, to render Kurds visible both by encouraging new cinematic production and by reclaiming films that “belonged to Kurds.” In explaining this, Gündoğdu said, “we wanted to give Kurdish films their identity.” The festival was, in his words, “designed as a response to cultural imperialism that systematically attempted to eradicate Kurdish heritage from the cultural landscape.” Most films by and about Kurds, like other Kurdish cultural productions, were created under the proprietorship of the nation-states of which their producers were citizens, such as Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the former USSR. Bringing these films together in a “Kurdish” film festival, according to the organizers of the event, was “part of the larger Kurdish struggle to exist and become visible.”Footnote ³² They conducted research on films about and/or by Kurds with the aim of reclaiming them as part of a Kurdish cultural legacy. After encountering a reference to Zaré in an online article, Gündoğdu contacted Armenian officials to inquire about the film. In 2006, after tedious bureaucratic maneuvering with the Armenian government, he finally managed to salvage a print of the film from the Armenian national archives. At a well-publicized screening at the fourth London Kurdish Film Festival, viewers saw what was billed as the first film ever produced about the Kurds. Retrieving Zaré from Armenian national archives, according to Gündoğdu, proved that the London Kurdish Film Festival had achieved its founding mission: to make Kurds visible within the pages of history. Launching a national cinema in transnational space, the festival formed a significant platform on which Kurdish cinema as a discursive formation was crystallized. Zaré came to occupy a prominent place in this genre.

ZARÉ: FROM THE ARMENIAN ARCHIVE TO THE ROOTS OF KURDISH CINEMA

In 2011, the Istanbul Independent Film Festival (!f Istanbul), a festival that embraces independent productions from both within and outside Turkey, hosted a panel on Kurdish cinema. In cooperation with Gündoğdu, the festival committee selected four feature and documentary films by or about Kurds. Alluding to the conflicts in eastern Turkey, the organizers highlighted “the ones in the mountains” as a common leitmotif in the chosen films. In all four, “mountains” had a significant thematic presence.

The titles selected for this special festival section included the 1926 Zaré, a love story set in an Êzidî Kurdish mountain village in Soviet Armenia that revolves around the frustrated love affair between the beautiful village girl Zaré and the shepherd Seydo. With a satiric overtone, the film portrays an “authentic” Kurdish life permeated by poverty, feudal values, and traditionalism against the backdrop of World War I. Set in a beautiful landscape, in Mustafa Gündoğdu's words, “Zaré is a unique and silent gift from Hayastan to Kurdistan . . . celebrating its 85th birthday in Istanbul.”

On a cold Saturday evening, moments before the screening of Zaré began, a diverse crowd that included artists, film critics, journalists, and students filled the foyer of the movie theater in downtown Istanbul. Zaré garnered far more attention than the other films in the selection. Gündoğdu introduced it, proclaiming its retrieval from the Armenian archives as an important event for Kurds everywhere. Shot eighty-five years ago, he said, Zaré had sown the earliest seeds of Kurdish cinema. As the foundation of a visual history of the Kurds, Zaré possessed a special significance.

Despite the pro-Kurdish motives behind the revival, the special status Gündoğdu assigned to Zaré in Istanbul seems to contradict the critical norms of Kurdish cinema that have been established in debates among Kurdish filmmakers and film critics. In these debates, several of which I observed during my fieldwork between 2009 and 2012,Footnote ³³ interlocutors almost always employ three criteria when judging and ranking Kurdish films. One is whether, and to what extent, the language in the film is Kurdish. The other is the ethnic identity of the filmmaker, and whether or not he or she embraces or dismisses his or her Kurdishness. The third is the subject matter of the film, and in particular the ways in which it portrays Kurds. In employing these criteria, interlocutors often highlight the need to counter the existing images of Kurds in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic films and popular imaginations, which often portray Kurds as backward, ignorant, feudal, and folkloric. These criteria are by no means clear-cut and they often create disagreement rather than consensus. Nonetheless, critics utilize at least one, and often a combination, of them as a prism through which to evaluate and rank specific films vis-à-vis their “Kurdishness.”

According to these established criteria, Zaré seems to fall notably outside the scope of the Kurdish cinema genre. The film is a silent feature with intertitles originally in Armenian. Its writer and director, Hamo Beknazaryan, an ethnic Armenian celebrated as the founder of Armenian cinema, was not of Kurdish descent.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, Zaré, like other early Armenian films that documented the lives of Kurds, originally functioned as a tool for the nationalization of folk culture in Soviet Armenia. In Zaré, Kurds are signified as noble savages, identified by their traditional regalia and a rural lifestyle governed by feudal patriarchy. As historian Rohat Alakom notes, in interviews Beknazaryan frequently described Kurds as ignorant, violent, and childlike, characteristics reflected in their depiction in his film. Zaré reflected the Soviet policies of its time, which sought to tame and absorb an undifferentiated, so-called primitive folk into Stalin's orbit.Footnote ³⁵

How and to what end does Zaré attain its status as the foundation of Kurdish cinema? Bill Nichols writes that an “image represents the visible event, not the motivation. Subjectivity eludes its grasp.”Footnote ³⁶ The recontextualization of Zaré within Kurdish cinematic discourse provides an example of how subjectivity makes multiple interpretations of an image inevitable. A media text obtains its national character in discourse. Discourse that recenters a text as “national” reveals the governing principles of a political collectivity that is contingent on historical experiences and social constructions.Footnote ³⁷ Images “do not simply represent or express the stable features of a national culture, but are themselves one of the loci of debates about a nation's governing principles, goals, heritage, and history.”Footnote ³⁸ Thus, the important point to explore is not what the texts themselves potentially express about a people's collectivity but how and why certain texts come to constitute their “national” identities, particularly in historical and cinematic contexts. Similarly, when Kurdish intellectuals, cultural activists, and media producers and consumers historicize Kurdish cinema, such history, created selectively in the present, reflects longstanding collective anxieties as well as present-day agendas.

Discourse that prominently recenters Zaré in Kurdish cinema is indicative of two sociopolitical processes. Zaré consummates perhaps the most significant capacity of images for Kurds: their capacity to carry an imagining of collectivity into the realm of existence, the state of visibility, by virtue of documentation. Against a backdrop of nonrecognition and invisibility within sovereign nation-states, visual media have proved especially conducive for Kurds in imagining a political community of their own. Zaré accomplishes a significant social and political end by objectifying Kurds as a people. Such objectification dragged Kurds into existence at a time when they were being diligently eradicated as a distinct people within the preeminent national imaginings. The film signifies a collective existence for Kurds and constitutes lieux de mémoire (sites of memory)Footnote ³⁹ by footnoting the official histories with a counter-imagining. Pierre Nora writes that lieux de mémoire are alternatives to official histories and sites where memory crystallizes and secretes itself. Zaré is an example of such a site of memory that is in dialectical opposition to a history that tends to suppress and eradicate memory. At the intersection of multiple regimes of knowledge, Zaré is also an example of intercultural cinema, to borrow Laura Marks’ formulation of diasporic films, as it effectively “[s]orts through the rubble created by cultural dislocation and reads significance in what official history overlooks.”Footnote ⁴⁰ By visually marking Kurdish existence in the 1920s, Zaré, regardless of its content, becomes an iconic reflection of the Kurds and sets a milestone for the visual representation of the Kurds as a people. Telescoping a visual history, Zaré underlines the subsequent omission of Kurds from the social landscape and the cultural imagination of the respective nation-states they inhabit. The film thus helps shed light on the prolific film production based on identity politics today.

NATIONALIZING ZARÉ IN DISCOURSE

Kurdish film production in Turkey has proliferated mostly in and through spaces reclaimed by the Kurdish political movement within the last two decades. The cinema unit of the Mesopotamia Culture Center (MKM), a community center with central offices in Istanbul, is a case in point. Launched in 1992 by a group of intellectuals, the center modeled itself after the Paris Kurdish Institute. It soon branched into different units that were delineated by specific artistic media, such as music, theater, and cinema, and in which participants organized workshops, seminars, and performance events. The cinema unit documented these activities with its limited equipment and capacity. İbrahim Gürbüz, one of the founders of MKM, noted in my interview with him that during the 1990s the amateur filmmaking efforts at MKM were similar to the national cinema movements of any other colonized and poor people.Footnote ⁴¹ Such national cinemas, he emphasized, “often started in tents.” Even though MKM's filmmaking efforts began with shoddy equipment and an amateur spirit, by producing several films and videos and offering cinema workshops to a new generation of Kurdish youth, MKM's cinema unit helped initiate a national Kurdish cinema. Directors such as Kazim Öz and Hüseyin Karabey, whose names appear regularly in discussions of Kurdish cinema, emerged out of MKM's cinema unit during the 1990s.Footnote ⁴²

Kurdish cinema activists emphasize the proliferation of Kurdish film production as a reflection of the collectivity and political agency created by the institutions of the Kurdish movement, against the backdrop of the Turkish government's current and historical policies toward the Kurds. Müjde Arslan's analysis of the presentation of Kurdish cinema illustrates the ways in which longstanding and contemporary anxieties of Kurdish cultural activists circumscribe Kurdish cinema, and how the strategic intertextuality employed by the interlocutors of Kurdish cinema discourse restructures this genre. A vocal Kurdish filmmaker and film critic, Arslan has sat on several panels and written numerous articles on Kurdish cinema.Footnote ⁴³ Her most recent documentary film narrates her personal story of searching for the grave of her father, a guerilla fighter, in the Qandil Mountains.Footnote ⁴⁴

Arslan was a guest speaker at a series of lectures on contemporary cinema organized by a culture center in downtown Istanbul in December 2010. During an hour-long presentation titled “Kurdish Cinema: A People's Desire to Become Visible,” she positioned Zaré within the scope of Kurdish nationalist film, assigning it special significance in rendering Kurds visible. Arslan attached to filmmaking a political import and a performative mission. She posited that filmmaking was a tool capable of making visible: a tool that, in the case of Zaré, dragged Kurds from (political) nonexistence into the realm of recognition by virtue of sight. The discursive strategies she employed positioned Kurdish cinema within a genre of political and “revolutionary” filmmaking and the Kurdish political movement as the agent of this field of cultural production.

Arslan opened her talk, which she delivered in Turkish, by posing a set of questions to her audience: “Is there a Kurdish cinema? And if there is one, what are its dynamics?” To an audience waiting to hear Arslan talk about “Kurdish cinema,” the question of whether Kurdish cinema existed was not merely a rhetorical one, with the metadiscursive function of signifying the absence of a Kurdish nation-state warranting a national cinema. Rather, by reconfiguring Kurdish cinema as she calibrated discursive links between different national cinema traditions, Arslan chose to make explicit a certain feature of the cinematic medium: the capacity to drag Kurds into visibility. For instance, she referred to Palestinian cinema as a platform through which Palestinian existence in an occupied homeland becomes visible.

Arslan's next question was a metapragmatic device: “What has happened up to now, let's say until this panel in 2010, in the history of Kurdish cinema?” Before elaborating on what has happened to mark “the now” of Kurdish cinema, she offered a chronology of Kurdish film, beginning with Zaré. Presenting PowerPoint slides of stills from the film, she established the cinematic history of the Kurds and presented the art of cinema as meaningful in relation to a people's desire to become visible. Here, Zaré metapragmatically came to underline the decades-long oversight of the Kurds in the countries that have been a homeland to them. For several decades after 1926, Kurds were unseen on the cinematic landscape.Footnote ⁴⁵ In relation to such invisibility, Arslan asserted sarcastically that “if Zaré is the first film about Kurds, then a whole people [the Kurds] must have fallen into the cracks of the earth after Zaré! Well, that is not the case. Rather, the lack of films about Kurds indicates the oppression and assimilation they faced during those decades.” Zaré as “the first Kurdish film” implies both the omission of the Kurds from the cinematic landscape for several decades following its production in 1926 and, in stark contrast, the prolific state of current Kurdish film production.

Arslan argued in her talk that the reappearance of Kurds on the silver screen in the 1990s was contingent on the Kurdish political movement. Underlining the significance of two Kurdish cultural institutions, she connected Kurdish cinema and the visual culture renascent in the 1990s with the larger Kurdish movement.

The remainder of her presentation discussed the current state of Kurdish cinema, posing an overarching question of who is entitled to (visually) represent the Kurds, that is, whose films are within the boundaries of Kurdish cinema. By encapsulating Kurdish cinema as crystallized through the institutions of the political movement, she brought into her presentation new criteria for evaluating films. The Kurdish language, for instance, became a significant parameter in calibrating intertexual links within the genre after her discussion of Zaré, which signified Kurdish cultural resilience through the omission of Kurds from cinematic landscape following the film's production in 1926.

Arslan utilized a media text to reconfigure the larger discursive genre of Kurdish cinema, and the recontextualization of Zaré functioned to legitimize the conventions asserted in evaluating films produced today. As Briggs and Bauman note, “genres are not road maps to particular texts. Invocations of genre rather entail the (re)construction of classes of texts . . . By choosing to make certain features explicit (and particularly by foregrounding some elements through repetition and metapragmatic framing), producers of discourse actively (re)construct and reconfigure genres.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Following this logic, Arslan's construction of Zaré as the first Kurdish film was a successful strategy. Historical anxieties about the visibility of Kurds inform the ways in which Zaré is recentered in Kurdish cinematic discourse. This recentering of Zaré as foundational to Kurdish cinematic discourse works as a strategy that helps Arslan legitimize the criteria she proposes to evaluate the Kurdishness of contemporary films, which are based primarily on the degree to which a film renders Kurds “visible.”

THE KURDISH LANGUAGE AS A SIGN OF CULTURAL RESILIENCE AND POLITICAL AGENCY

In 2009, another event that sought to institutionalize Kurdish cinema took place, this time in Diyarbakır. The Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality organized the First International Kurdish Cinema Conference between 4 and 13 December. With significant sponsorship from the Swedish consulate, a country with a large Kurdish diasporic community, the conference hosted guests including filmmakers, academics, and journalists. After a week of film screenings, audiences filled the conference hall of the municipality building for two consecutive days to attend panels and discussions on Kurdish cinema. These symposia sought to frame an emergent national cinema with such questions as “What is Kurdish cinema?,” “What defines a Kurdish film?,” and “What unifies it?”

During the coffee break that followed the conference's first morning session, Hasan, a Kurdish media producer in his late thirties, who seemed animated by the discussions and somewhat irritated by the ineffective answers offered by the panels of filmmakers, writers, and academics, volunteered his own answers to me:

Even if the American director of Midnight Express (1978), Alan Parker, had been Turkish, according to Hasan, the language of this film would have determined the national cinema under which it would need to be classified. According to Hasan, language gave a film, and a nation, its “true character.” If a film was not in Kurdish, no matter what, it could not be considered part of Kurdish cinema. In calling a film “authentically Kurdish,” Hasan posited the Kurdish language as an emblem according to the semiotic process of iconization, through which certain features that index social groups or activities “appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group's inherent nature or essence.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Hasan favored one particular feature over others in categorizing films, delimiting the nationality of a film by virtue of the spoken language in its diegetic world, thus choosing this index as an emblematic icon of Kurdishness.

In addition to being an iconized index of the nationality of films, the Kurdish language and the discussion of language transpire in several ways within Kurdish cinema discourse. First, discussions of Kurdish cinema are almost always held in Turkish. The Kurdish language, by virtue of its absence, metalinguistically frames the discourse about Kurdish cinema. For instance, Kemal Yıldız, the moderator of a panel in Diyarbakır, opened the dialogue by stating the following in Turkish: “I am very happy to welcome you to the first international Kurdish cinema conference. Unfortunately, I cannot welcome you in my own language, Kurdish.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Almost all of the panelists on that panel, in one form or another, underlined the lack of the Kurdish language in their utterances. These metalinguistic assertions centered the respective discourse and its subject matter on issues of language and identity, and signified the ruptures in the speakers’ national imagination produced by nation-state policies and official histories.

Second, interlocutors pinpointed the Kurdish language issue in films in order to index the cultural resilience of the Kurds despite those ruptures. In many utterances, the Kurdish language was portrayed as having an inherent potential to survive the ruptures it had experienced. Commentators noted the importance of the cultural spaces created and enlarged by the Kurdish political movement in fostering the resilient nature of the Kurdish language.

There have been numerous examples of the role of Kurdish cultural spaces in fostering the resilience of the language, and the role of the resilience of the Kurdish language in promulgating Kurdish political and cultural advances against state oppression. One such example occurred shortly after the Diyarbakır conference, at the opening night ceremonies of a municipal Kurdish film festival held in the small Kurdish town of Batman. As these events are sponsored by local municipalities, it is customary for the municipal leader to give a short speech during the opening reception to welcome guests. Batman's municipal leader, Nejdet Atalay, was unable to perform this custom as he had been arrested earlier in the year during a crackdown against the Union of Communities in Kurdistan (Koma Ciwakén Kurdistan or KCK).Footnote ⁵⁰ Instead, Atalay sent a letter from prison to be read in his absence:

Even though the institutions of the Turkish state continued to disparage and dismiss Kurdish, Atalay wrote, holding a Kurdish film festival in and of itself signified Kurdish resilience and the enduring capacity of the Kurdish language. In addition to highlighting its resilient nature, Atalay's message posited the Kurdish language as both a battlefield and a weapon Kurds might use to gain further visibility and recognition.

The linguistic dimensions of genres should be seen “in terms of ideologically mediated connections with social groups and ‘spheres of human activity’ in historical perspective.”Footnote ⁵² Linguistic ethnonationalism circumscribes the fields of Kurdish cultural production, hence the references to language in Kurdish cinematic discourse. Stanley Tambiah explains linguistic ethnonationalism as a political process of the 20th century in particular that attests to the existence of a “consubstantial identity between a collectivity of people and the language they speak and transmit.”

According to Tambiah, linguistic ethnonationalism occurs as a reaction to nation-state projects that subsume ethnic identities in favor of one normative identity and creates in people “a strong sense that their language and their oral and literary productions—poetry, myths, folklore, epics, and philosophical, religious/historical/scientific texts—are intimately, integrally, and essentially connected with them as owners, creators, and sharers of that legacy.”Footnote ⁵⁴ From a historical perspective, the construction of Kurdish language as an icon of the nation is subsequent to the forces of Turkish nationalism. During the early years of the republic, parallel to the myth of the Turks as a superior race, a myth about the Kurds was created. Within the official narrative, Kurds were considered to be Turks but in a deviant and degenerate form. Gunter summarizes the official narrative:

Mesut Yeğen notes that the young Turkish state perceived Kurds as prospective Turks and worked to civilize its Kurdish population into Turkishness through a constellation of state policies, from resettlement to the ban on the Kurdish language.Footnote ⁵⁶ The immediate political context of the festival, marked by the KCK trials and peace talks with the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), on the other hand, circumscribed the evocations of consubstantial language as a sign of both cultural resilience and political agency. Claiming the Kurdish language becomes an arena of resilience and agency, manifesting in diverse areas of cultural politics and crystallizing in courtrooms or through film.