MODALITIES OF CHILDHOOD AND POLITICS

Anthropologists and social historians have long conceived of childhood as a construction, and thus have focused on changes in how childhood is experienced and represented across time and space.Footnote ¹⁹ Informed by this literature, this section analyzes how Kurdish children themselves perceive and express the notion of childhood in their specific time and space.

Fourteen-year-old Murat, born in Adana, is originally from Mardin. A primary school student, he works in a tea shop in the neighborhood. His family was displaced by the security forces at the beginning of the 1990s. While we were discussing the participation of children in the Kurdish movement, I asked him what childhood meant for him. He replied:

Murat's understanding of childhood differs from the way childhood is often represented in Turkish public discourse. Childhood, to Murat, is not a category that connotes innocence, ignorance, or vulnerability but rather a state of being with many burdens and in which what one says is not heard by adults. He also implies that the idea of childhood as ignorance is just a construction of adults, who “assume they know better.”

Halil, thirteen years old, was born in Adana; he is now a primary school student and works in a bakery. He is the youngest of thirteen children in his family, which was displaced from Mardin at the beginning of the 1990s. I asked Halil, too, what childhood means to him.

Although Halil claims childhood is better than adulthood because adults have more responsibilities, such as having to pay for electricity and water, he is currently working to contribute to the livelihood of his family. In fact, in Halil's family, children work instead of the parents, who are illiterate and do not speak Turkish. While Kurdish children of displaced families were born into the urban space, their parents often experienced difficulties integrating into that space. In most displaced families I observed during my fieldwork, fathers did not work and children were the primary economic actors in the household. Although adult males had the highest status in the socioeconomic structure of the village, when they came to the city they often lost that status. Their agricultural skills did not translate into urban space, severely limiting their job opportunities as unskilled workers, often in the markets selling vegetables and fruit, as street hawkers, or in the construction sector, though many Kurdish men consider these jobs beneath them. Kurdish children often have more opportunities, such as working as apprentices in barber, furniture, and tailor shops. Most children speak Turkish better than their parents since they have grown up in the city and receive eight years mandatory education. Their linguistic skills are crucial for their families; they conduct business with the Turkish bureaucracy to receive aid and take family members to the hospital. This role contributes to some enhanced power within their families. In spite of this, however, Halil downplays the fact that he has to work as a child to supply income to his family. Although he yearns to be an adult in order to earn an income, he does not point out that he already earns one; he just does not have the right to spend it because he is a child. Yet Halil is unaware of this irony.

This excerpt also demonstrates how Kurdish children of the neighborhood are affected by hegemonic discourses on childhood in society. Halil defines himself as a child. And yet, the way he talks about children is quite significant: “You know about kids; [once] one of them does something, the others also join the game.” Here, Halil speaks like an adult who reflects on childhood. In other words, he speaks from the outside, not as one who experiences but as one who observes childhood. He also represents politics as something that belongs to adults, even though as “young revolutionaries” the children enter politics in order to “know” people, to determine who is bad and who is good, thereby establishing their moral parameters. Murat states:

For these children, it is not education but politics that provides the route to knowledge about life and people. They closely follow political incidents related to Kurds across Turkey, especially through the internet and television. Murat said of the news that a child was killed by police in the city of Hakkari:

Fifteen-year-old Quto is from Batman. His family was exposed to displacement in the early 1990s. Now he works in a barbershop in the neighborhood. Quto's comments on Obama's 2009 speech in the Turkish Grand National Assembly illustrates how the children follow current political discussions:

In my interviews with Murat and other children, I also tried to get them to talk about “nonpolitical” issues, for example their relationship to their families. Yet they immediately became bored. Halil responded, “let's talk about politics.” It is the political space in general and their political experiences in particular that empower them and make them knowing subjects. That is why Murat thinks that the knowledge he acquired in three years paying attention to politics is more valuable for him than what his teacher accumulated in twenty years outside politics. The category of childhood as it is understood in public discourse is challenged by these children's involvement in politics and the meaning they attribute to political knowledge. Another child, Erhan—who was put in jail when he was eight and again when he was twelve—discursively challenges this category by succinctly exposing the contradictions in the state's treatment of Kurdish children.

Questioning the logic of how the law and the state more broadly treats the category of childhood, Erhan is aware that whether he is considered a child or an adult depends on context and not entirely on age. Since he cannot benefit from the protection that the law provides for children, he demands to be considered an adult so that he can enjoy the rights of full citizens, including the right to vote.

The way these children give meaning to their actions also contrasts significantly with mainstream media representations that often claim that Kurdish children view their political actions as “a game.” Several of the Kurdish children I spoke to state that it is not they but rather adults who view politics as a game. According to them, adults do not take politics as seriously as they do. They pointed out, for example, that adults attend cultural activities such as concerts and Newroz celebrations but do not show up for “more serious” political demonstrations that take place almost every day in the neighborhood. Even when children play games, it is evident that they take politics seriously. This is clear from the most common game Kurdish children play, called “Apoism” (Apoculuk), a term that stems from Apo, the abbreviation of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan's name.

The line between play and reality is blurred as such informal games do indeed turn into public demonstrations:

How can one define childhood when even games turn explicitly political, and when adults are accused of playing when they claim to be political?

The children's equation of adulthood with playing games stems from how they define politics. True politics, for these children, is not seen as part of “growing up” or “maturing,” but rather as a refusal to enter adulthood. It refers to violent street clashes, which they call “street politics” (sokak siyaseti). This is in part a reaction against the emergence of a politics of representation starting in the mid-1990s, with the institutionalization and legalization of the Kurdish movement led by adults. The PKK changed its strategy via a unilateral ceasefire declared in 1998. Rather than trying to establish a separate nation-state, the PKK has since aimed at becoming a democratizing force in Turkey. Accordingly, the PKK militants who were still present in urban spaces began to retreat to the rural areas. Meanwhile, the pro-Kurdish Democratic People's Party was elected to metropolitan municipalities in the Kurdish region in 1999, and at the 1999 Helsinki summit Turkey was accepted as a candidate for full European Union membership, all of which prepared the base upon which a new Kurdish (counter)public emerged.Footnote ²⁰ This new public space—which was shaped by the debut of many NGOs, civic foundations, cultural and art centers, local journals, and the like—contributed to the feeling that the Kurdish question could be solved by nonviolent means.Footnote ²¹ There were now two main registers of Kurdish politics: on the one hand, the guerillas force of the PKK, which remained largely as a threat to reinforce the process of negotiation, attacking the state solely in response to the latter's military and other operations against the guerillas and the Kurds in general; on the other hand, the legal register formed by the BDP's parliamentary politics and by civic activism within the new public space.Footnote ²²

This process began to break down, starting with the upheaval of children of displaced families in the slum areas of Diyarbakir in 2006. This incident and many subsequent ones proved that two dynamics largely invisible before the negotiation period would now determine the future of Kurdish politics: class and generational difference. I would suggest that the children's movement emerged as the third register of Kurdish politics, one that is based on a radical street politics rather than “rational” negotiation. “The child,” in this process, became not only a political category as a signifier of “radicalism” but also a category with which urbanized and displaced Kurds began to identify, irrespective of their age. Indeed, many of the self-identified “children” were well into adolescence. Twenty-year-old youth in the neighborhood who had been involved in clashes with the police identified themselves to me as children. This identification marked them as a member of a resisting group famously referred to as “stone-throwing children.” The political activities of these children thus should not be seen solely as a rite of passage to adulthood, as Peteet and Collins argue in the case of Palestine. In their works, Palestinian children's engagement with violence and “the political” are normatively attributed to the process of becoming an adult, signified by the disappearance of childhood.Footnote ²³ Yet, the Kurdish case shows that childhood is necessarily not lost but rather can be constituted and reclaimed through participation in violent resistance. To put it differently, childhood in this context refers to a space of morality and resistance and a distinct political subjectivity that is not available to adults.

These children's narratives reveal the changing geography of childhood within the Kurdish community. The memories they inherit, the violence that targets them, their transformed family relations, and the harsh conditions in which they live mark and constitute Kurdish children in Turkey. In turn, they appropriate these mostly adverse conditions and transform them into a source of power, indeed becoming an “alien nation”Footnote ²⁴ in relation to both the Turkish state and Kurdish elites.

THE REPERTOIRE: CHILDREN'S NARRATIVES OF THE PAST

During the interviews, I asked the children questions about their everyday practices, political and “nonpolitical,” in the present. Yet they mostly talked about their familial past—and in particular about how their families had been exposed to brutal forms of state violence—though the children themselves have actually encountered numerous forms of violence in the urban space of Adana. Unlike in the 1990s, it is children rather than older people who now undertake the struggle of Kurds in the neighborhood; the police thus particularly focus on children, routinely using violent methods. Day and night, civil and official policemen walk through the main street of the neighborhood and randomly stop children to ask for their ID cards. The police also carry out regular operations in Kurdish homes. The majority of the children I talked to have been arrested and/or put in prison at least once on criminal charges such as theft and fighting as well as for their political activities. One of my interviewees was put in prison many times, mostly due to theft. Violence in their urban life also comes in the forms of discrimination, exclusion, humiliation, and poverty. Due to the discrimination and humiliation to which they are exposed in the larger city, for example, these children largely confine themselves to the neighborhood to escape from the gaze of those who identify them with criminality and terror.Footnote ²⁵ And yet, children talked about the present largely in relation to recent major political incidents affecting the Kurds rather than their own day-to-day experiences. I suggest that telling the stories of state violence their families experienced in the past was in part a way of expressing the largely invisible and subtle forms of violence they experience now.

Berivan is thirteen years old. Her family is from Mardin and migrated to Adana in response to state violence when she was nine. She works in a barbershop. She narrates:

The majority of my interviewees were born in Adana and did not personally experience the state violence inflicted on their families in the villages they left behind. What they grew up with was the stories of violence transmitted to them by the older generations. Murat narrates the story of his family's migration and experiences:

Although Murat did not experience these incidents of violence or the forced displacement that followed, he did listen to his parents’ stories and narrates them as if he personally witnessed and experienced them. A circulated story is transformed into testimony not only by the detailed information he provides and his clear and fluid way of narration but also, and more importantly, by the grammar he employs. There are two different past tense morphemes in Turkish, which express a grammatical distinction between direct and indirect experience of the speaker in reporting a past event. The suffix –miş expresses indirect experience and functions to describe resultant states in addition to carrying modal functions of inference and hearsay; the suffix –di refers to directly experienced events.Footnote ²⁶ Here Murat's suffix preference reveals his attitude toward the past events he narrates: he frequently uses –di even though he did not experience the events directly. He employs -miş only when he narrates the story of the rape, a difficult issue for him to talk about and from which he thus distances himself. The usage of –di indicates that Murat narrates these transmitted events as if he directly experienced them, having internalized them and turned them into his own testimony. Another significant aspect of his narrative is his use of “we,” as in “we could not survive in the village,” even though he was not yet born.

The violence experienced in the villages as well as in the city was transformed into anonymous experiences through the circulation of stories in the public and private spheres in the neighborhood. I came to realize this during my interviews, particularly after the ones that I conducted with eleven-year-old Eren. I intended to interview a child who was not involved in the children's movement in order to understand what factors pave the way for the politicization and mobilization of Kurdish children. I knew Eren and his family personally and I thought he was not a “stone-throwing,” politicized child. Yet he told me that he had attended many demonstrations organized in the neighborhood, offering detailed information about how the demonstrators came together and clashed with the police:

This was one of the most surprising interviews I conducted in the field. Immediately after we had finished it, Eren said that he had lied during most of it in order to help me. He had apparently overheard my conversations with others and gathered that I was having trouble finding stone-throwing informants due to the recent intensification of Turkish state repression of Kurdish organizations. What is interesting is that the invented story he told was very similar to those of the politicized children I had interviewed, and it was narrated in a consistent, detailed, and fluid manner. My interview with Eren points to how Kurdish children in this neighborhood of Adana have developed collective narratives of violence and resistance, which they are familiar with regardless of whether they have personally participated in the incidents. The figure of the “politicized child” may have become an established role that Kurdish children can inhabit at any time. What Eren did was in some ways like the games of children who play-act at being revolutionaries.

It was my conduct of some interviews in crowded places that led me to think about the relation between community and narrative. During these interviews, the narratives were often interrupted by friends of the interviewees who inserted their own stories. At first, I tried to stop these interruptions, but I then came to understand that the children were collectively participating in the narration, and even constructing a single collective story. The narrative of the interviewee set the theme, and through the line of his life story others added their own stories. For example, when an interviewee mentioned the burning down of his village by Turkish forces, others interrupted to tell of how their villages were also burnt down. When he talked about the police attacking his home in the neighborhood in the early 1990s, others interjected with stories of their homes being similarly attacked. Conversely, the testimonies of others helped remind my interviewee of stories he had not told me. It came to seem that I was listening to different stories becoming a single story through repetition. They all talked about publicly unclaimed, collectively anonymous experiences.

This practice of the children calls for us to approach violence through the relationship between the act of telling and community. Although the children have not experienced it themselves, they coherently and lucidly describe the past events of village burnings, torture, death, and loss. Among the children, experiences and narratives of violence in the village become a collective repertoire that any of them can then utilize, elaborate, and perform. This repertoire acts as a means of meaning-making, establishing a link between the symbolic and economic forms of violence that children then confront in the city. It thus forms the ground upon which the oppositional subjectivities of the children express themselves, providing a frame for the representation of the present grievances and discrimination in urban space. This repertoire allows Kurdish children to narrate what is directly unspeakable for them, including the poverty, discrimination, and humiliation they experience in the present. The day-to-day present is difficult to narrate without the infection of the dominant discourses of poverty, education, and rehabilitation, all of which lead to the constitution of the Kurdish subject as a negative space based on lack, rather than presence. By employing these stories of the past instead of dominant discourses, Kurdish children are able to transform themselves into self-knowing subjects.

The concept of “postmemory” can be useful for conceptualizing this process. The term has been used primarily by scholars studying individuals who live in a postconflict present, especially second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors. Marianne Hirsch defines postmemory as “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”Footnote ²⁷ Thus, “to grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one's birth or one's consciousness, is to risk having one's own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation.”Footnote ²⁸ Risking one's own experience and narrative stems from the “responsibility” and “desire” of the second generation to “repair” the previous generation's loss.Footnote ²⁹ At issue is thus the weight of the past in the present, as the effects of past events continue in the present.Footnote ³⁰ In the Kurdish context, however, we cannot talk about a postconflict present, since the struggle continues, which complicates the relation between the past and the present in the discussion of postmemory: for Kurdish children in Turkey, the present is not shadowed or put at risk but instead made meaningful and understandable by the past. Past events are not “remembered” in order to repair an irreversible loss that occurred in the past but rather to render comprehensible the invisible and subtle forms of violence that are experienced in the present. In other words, in the Kurdish context, instead of the present bearing traces of the past, it is the stories of the past that bear traces of the present.

Dwelling in Gündoğan, where various forms of oppression based on poverty and exclusion continue, enables Kurdish children living there to create, use, consume, and contribute to a collective repertoire that defines violence. This repertoire is accumulated from the collective oppression that occurred in the village and has now been transferred to the city. The repertoire also enables children in Gündoğan to continue the struggle today, framing the way they express their current oppression. Continuing to struggle and to remake themselves through the information available to them becomes the means for them to be, to dwell, and to belong. The political in Gündoğan is thus transformed into an everyday phenomenon shaped by the performance, the expression, and the recollection of the past. I would even contend that in Gündoğan, it is the circulation of these stories, more than any ethnic commonality, that constitutes the content of Kurdishness. As a result of these narratives, Kurdishness, often thought of as a lack, or worse as an incapacity to speak in publicly intelligible ways, becomes a nodal point for articulating injustice and violence. Instead of being nonknowledge, a disintegration of language and world, suffering becomes a source of knowing otherwise.

Children's relation to the previous generation's experiences and narratives also reveals a lot about how they construct themselves as subjects. Charles Piot states that individuals cannot be “considered apart from their ontologically prior social context—from the community of relationships into which they are born and within which they live.”Footnote ³¹ He argues that, in the West African society that is the subject of his ethnographic research, individuals are “constantly involved in, and defined through, relations.”Footnote ³² He continues: “If, however, social relationship is presupposed, if the person is always an aspect of various relationships, we should see this person as composed of, or constituted by, relationships, rather than as situated in them. Persons here do not ‘have’ relations; they are relations.”Footnote ³³ Piot depicts a “fluid, diffuse” self that is “multiple and permeable, and infused with the presences of others.”Footnote ³⁴ It seems that the recalling of shared memories, and the retelling of shared histories and experiences by Kurdish children, builds them up as relational subjects, determining to a large extent how Kurdish childhood is experienced. By opening themselves to history, to others’ experiences and narratives, Kurdish children blur the lines between the self and the other, experience and (post)memory, the past and the present. It is through these blurred lines that we can understand Kurdish children's agency and subject formation.