A season in Sakarya 

I first heard the name Sakarya when I was a child. Like many of our cities, in summer many families from Diyarbakır would get on the train and go to Sakarya to work in the hazelnut orchards. I didn’t know where Sakarya was and how to get there. But I knew it was a far city, because families used to go there by train. The families who went there to work didn’t stay there permanently. As a seasonal worker, they went for only so long and after their work finished they returned to their hometown. Unfortunately, they didn’t bring good memories with themself when they returned. Families worked for months, so many times they couldn’t get their payment from their employer. After a season of work they returned home empty-handed and looked for another job before winter came. In Sakarya, in seasonal work, they faced fights, beating, abuse, insults and sometimes they were killed! 

This season that thousands of Kurds worked for years in Sakarya or other Turkish cities couldn’t be a subject of a novel. It couldn’t be a movie and couldn’t get a gold or silver award. Every season, those workers forget their stories and memories in these cities. So they can go back to work and then forget about it for another season. How many stories and pains of Kurd workers do we know? How many seasons are we sad for them? How many Kurds are killed in these cities every season? I wonder if we know? 

We know a teacher’s story. We read the story of aTurkish teacher in the book of Hakkari’de Bir Mevsim (A Season In Hakkari) by Turkish writer Ferit Edgu. The teacher had to come from his city to Hakkari, among the Kurds, for the work of teaching. Even though Ferit Edgu doesn’t give his name directly, we read his story in the book. Edgu came to Hakkari as a military teacher in 1964 and started teaching in the village of Pirkanis. We read his ideas about Kurds in the book. But we can conclude that there is no word of Kurd in the Edgu’s vocabulary by reading the book. He was never willing to say the word of Kurd. His fingers never touched the letters of “k-u-r-d” in the typewriter. For him residents of the village are “they”, and they speak “their ” language which Edgu didn’t know. Edgu always mentioned his victimisation in the book. For Edgu, the village of Pirkanis and the people who live there are uncivilised, immoral and illiterate… And their children, i.e his students don’t know the language, don’t understand anything, there are so many nit and lices in their hair, they are “dirty”! Whenever Edgu mentioned his students he always emphasised their “dirtiness”. But the teacher of the book never mentioned the dirtiness of his ideas and dreams. He can leer at the girl students as a normal thing. And he can even easily say to the little girls as a civilised man “whatever they are worth, I’ll pay it!” Because the Turkish teacher sees the people in the village as uncivilised people, he wants to teach them “his” language, civilisation and make them civilised people(!). 

This idea about us, Kurds, isn’t new. Whenever a Turkish writer, teacher, politician, educated or uneducated person talks about Kurds and Kurdish cities, they always emphasise that it is an “uncivilised place”. That is why they want to teach us their civilised language and change us for years like the teacher of Edgu’s book did. Let us put aside Edgu’s book and look at another teacher: Sidika Avar.  

Sidika Avar came to Elazığ in 1939 to work as a teacher at the Girls’ Institute. But she wasn’t an ordinary teacher. She went to Elazığ, Tunceli and Bingöl on her horse. She took the little girl from her family by force and placed her in Turkish schools. Especially the children who were orphaned after the Tunceli massacre or who were forcibly separated from their families were educated by Avar. After their education, these girls were often married with a soldier or sent to Turkish families as servants.

Sidika Avar took the Kurdish children from their family and placed them in Turkish schools

As a Turkish teacher who came from civilisation Avar mentioned Kurdish children as illiterate, wild, don’t know language and dirty! This depiction isn’t foreign to us, because the teacher of Edgu’s book also mentioned Kurdish children like this. Two teachers want to teach their civilised language to the Kurdish children and make them civilised people. There are other common points between the two teachers. They didn’t use the word Kurd when they mentioned Kurds. According to Avar, the Kurds of Tunceli are actually of Turkish origin, they came from Horosan, Erzurum and forgot their origin. We never heard from teachers who come from civilization, who they are and why they speak a different language. Two teachers frequently complain about the backwardness of Kurds and define them as “uncivilised”. But they never have questions about their lives and didn’t include them in their memories. Why were these cities and villages destroyed? Why were children orphaned? Why do the girls who bring them to school have marks of beatings and torture on their bodies? Why is there no hospital? Why are they poorer than other Turkish cities? 

Serdar Şengul in his article titled Mountains, snow and sheep: Kurds, Nature and History in Colonial Representations asks an important question about the Edgu’s book: “How could someone like Ferit Edgu remember Kurds only in terms of sheep, snow and rain? That Ferit Edgu had been a student in Paris before going to Hakkari, that he had experienced the Algerian war, that he had praised the French intellectuals who supported the Algerian people, that he had been politically active in the TİP between 1968 and 1972 and that the Kurds had organised the Eastern Rallies together with the TİP in those years. How?” We must see this question as an important criticism of Edgu and therefore understand the basis of his views. Edgu is not the only person in this case. The Turks haven’t changed their ideas about Kurds in many areas, from cinema to literature. Although they are educated, aware of the world and democratic, they keep silent, close their eyes and ears to the Kurds and support assimilation and massacre in the Kurdish question.   

I would like to add another question to Serdar Şengul’s question. The Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet mentioned Spain in his poems. He mentioned the warriors who fought in the war between Spain and Madrid and felt sad for them. He was worried about the poverty of the residents of the Hunan in China and mentioned their suffering. He was sad about the colonisation of Cuba and wrote poems about it. In his poems he shed tears for the children killed by bombs in Hiroshima. This is my question: How could someone like Nazım Hikmet, who wrote poems about the pain and suffering of distant countries and expressed the injustices done to them, not have heard of the oppression and persecution of the Kurds? How did Nazım Hikmet never mention the massacres against the Kurds in the 1930s and 1940s in his poems? How did Nazım Hikmet, who heard the cries and screams of children in Hiroshima, couldn’t hear the Kurdish children who were killed in Tunceli, Ağrı and Zilan Valley? Or he didn’t want to see like Edgu, Avar and many others. Because, according to them, the cries and screams coming from the Kurds are not the language of the civilisation, so they don’t have to care about ‘them’. Therefore, we have to clearly understand the situation of the Kurds and the situation of “them” with these questions and we don’t have to care about their seasons. We have to understand that their season isn’t our season. Our season isn’t the season of a Turkish teacher in Hakkari. The season of the Kurds is the season in which Kurdish workers were killed in Sakarya! 

*Sakarya : A Turkish city located west of Türkiye.

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This article was translated by Betül Demir

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Murad Dildar

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