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PREFACE
This study has its own history, which however I do not intend to relate in this context. The greater portion of this essay was written in the beginning of the 1990s. At that time, the political and cultural climate in Kurdistan was altogether extremely insecure. For this reason, 1 chose to let this study proceed from the body of works written up to 1988, the year those ghastly atrocities took place in Kurdistan. During the following few years, developments were altogether too quick and the consequences of this were great, both politically and culturally. The collected production of Kurdish short stories during the last decade of the 20th Century has been so extensive and diverse that, when I presented the text to fulfill the requirements of philosophical licentiate in 2002. 1 recognized the necessity of a new chapter treating this unprecedented period.
Now that I prepare the essay to be published as a book some 14 years later, I have a feeling that there are topics related to Kurdish literature that need to be explained. These questions are not confined to this study, but can be relevant also in other contexts when Kurdish literature is discussed. The significance of these topics is derived from the fact that they constitute an important part of the historical and factual background against which we can comprehend every development in the cultural and literary sphere in Kurdistan.
A Semi-Independent Kurdistan
The years from the beginning of the 1990s and up to now constitute a new and decisive period for Iraqi Kurdistan, but also for other parts of Kurdistan. The establishment of a semi-independent federal region and the constant strive to found and enhance political, economic and cultural institutions are remarkable. There are uncountable educational and cultural bodies: radio and TV-stations, magazines and newspapers, universities, associations, centres, publishers, book fairs and so on and so forth. The freedom of expression is respected to some extent and the government supports the writers and the artists generously. The region has practically become a haven for thousands of Kurds from other parts of Kurdistan, among them a large number of freedom fighters, students, writers and artists.
The abundant change in the conditions of Kurdish culture in Iraqi Kurdistan has influenced to a large extent the Kurds in various parts of Kurdistan and abroad. The rapid progress of information technology has minimized the effect of the borders that separate different parts of Kurdistan and has made the culture produced in one part a wealth that is shared commonly by other Kurds everywhere. The satellite TV broadcasts enable the Kurds wherever they live to follow even the minute events and developments in Kurdistan, and the Internet makes it possible for Kurdish readers around the world to have access to most of the newspapers, magazines and books published in Kurdistan, and materials in Kurdish published elsewhere.
Nevertheless, it should be admitted also that there are disturbing signs that must be dealt with seriously. The most relevant in the context of this study is the absence of a cultural policy and language planning. It is probably astonishing to know that the number of newspapers, weeklies, monthlies and periodical magazines, has already surpassed 600, which is unreasonably high for a small population of about 6 million with a high level of illiteracy. The negative effect of some superficial aspects of Western culture is also obvious in the daily life of people and in the programmes of most of the TV-channels.
The condition of Kurdish language has deteriorated noticeably because of the prevailing chaos in the mass-medial and educational institutions. A generation of students has already been brought up who doesn’t command any language other than a poor Kurdish. Articles that are published in the press contain a great deal of grammatical, orthographical and typographical errors. Furthermore, many journalists and writers publish the same text in several magazines and newspapers and receive royalties from each. The state of corruption that has gained ground in many sections of the Kurdish administration is obvious even in the fields of culture transmission and education.
In the span of nearly two decades now a new generation of short story writers has made its presence felt. These are, partly, writers who have experienced the worst form of cruelty and brutality used by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party against the Kurdish people. Obviously there are also among them several who have only vague recollections from that time or do not have any at all. But all share and experience one rare and important living memory; to live in a free Kurdistan that is ruled by the Kurds themselves. It would be a difficult task to map all the details of and about this generation that is still being shaped and reshaped, but it is sure that there are among them talents that will contribute very much to Kurdish literature.
The writers of this generation are particularly eager to approach the themes of their stories from another and a new point of view, other than those consumed by the writers of previous generations. An example is the history of the Kurdish people that they no more consider as sacred and untouchable. They attach significance to imagination and fantasy, to an extent with which the realities of the Kurdish society are not recognized in the texts they produce. The form is less important for these writers. They have abandoned the popular but complicated forms of the 1970s which, they think, put a burden on the texts rather than gi\ ing them a modem appearance. Among the known writers of this generation are Jamal Jabar Gharib, ‘Ata Muhammad, Twana Ami and ‘Izzaddin Yousif.
In the Former Soviet Union
The Kurds of the former Soviet Union founded in the third decade of the last century their “own” Kurdish literature that lasted some 60 years and vanished with the collapse of the Soviet system. As an ethnic minority, the Kurds enjoyed some cultural rights within the framework of the Armenian and Georgian Republics, whereas the Turkish Azerbaijan Soviet Republic denied the very existence of the Kurds. These rights included publishing books in Kurdish and learning Kurdish language at schools a few hours a week. An advantage of that situation was the contact with various cultures and languages and the access they had to Russian literature, since Russian was the common official language for all the peoples of the Soviet Union.
The Kurdish writers of the Soviet Union and the literature they created were severely restricted by two obstacles; firstly, as Soviet citizens they didn’t have the freedom of being in contact with Kurds from various parts of Kurdistan and. secondly, the Cyrillic alphabet was imposed on their language that practically made it impossible for them to read any other Kurdish literature, and other Kurds couldn't read the literature they produced. The literature of the Kurds of the Soviet Union remained a local literature that never became a vital and integrated part of the greater Kurdish literature.
Most of the writers of the Soviet Union were poets who published abundantly a poetry that was Kurdish only in its language. Otherwise the meter and the metaphors hadn't the slightest ties with the aesthetical and musical roots of Kurdish poetry. The contents, for the most part, were superficial and simple. The stories and the novels, on the contrary, were more advanced in their structure and seemingly had derived benefit from the rich heritage of the Russian narrative art. The texts that dealt with the recollections and the past, be it individual or collective, were packed with genuine feelings, as an expression of the national sentiments that otherwise hadn’t a sphere to utter. Among the most renowned short story writers were Haji-ye JindT, Qachakh-e Mirad, Miro-ye Asad, Khalil Muradov, Usiv-e Bako, Baba-ye Kalash, ‘A1T-ye Abdul-Rahman, Sa‘id-e Ibo, ‘Amarik-e Sardar, Tosin-e Rashid and Wazir-e Asho.
Another “Kurdish literature”
There is a global phenomenon in the literature resulting from the occupation of many of the countries and peoples of Asia and Africa by European colonialists, which is the phenomenon of writing in the language of the colonizer or the occupier. When the colonial power imposes its own language and culture on the occupied country and prevents the people from using their own language, the result will be that a generation of writers grows up who doesn’t command, in writing at least, any language other than the language of colonial power and that language becomes their sole and effective weapon in defending themselves and their case. It happens that some of those writers become great creators in writing stories and novels to the extent that they reach high literary levels and obtain recognition of their literature in the cultural circles worldwide.
Many of the writers of the Indian subcontinent wrote, and still write, in the English language, and a great number of Africa authors write in English, French and Portuguese. The most prominent example in the Arab world is the writers of the Maghreb, and some of the writers of Lebanon, who produced, and still produce, great literature in French. This phenomenon was and still is the subject of extensive studies and theoretical debates by researchers and historians of literature. The most important question in this regard is: Where does the literature that is produced by the writers of the colonized people who write in in the languages of the colonialists belong to? Let's ask the question in a simpler form: Is the literature that has been, or is, written by Mouloud Fir’awn, Katib Yassin, Assia Djebar, Abdullatif Laabi and Salah Steitieh, a French or an Arabic literature?
This question is also being asked in Kurdistan although not with the same force in which it is asked in the Maghreb or in the Indian subcontinent. Some people do not like considering Kurdistan a country that is colonized by Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, because the simplified definition or conception of colonizer is one with blue eyes and white skin who comes from overseas, and this does not apply to the Arab, Turkish and Persian rulers. However, what is relevant is the literature that is produced by some Kurdish creative writers in languages other than their native Kurdish. Where does this literature belong? Should it be studied as a part of Kurdish literature?
There are, however, many big names in Arabic, Persian and Turkish literatures, with Kurdish origins, who have produced a literature that is Signs Franchise for those languages. Brothers Mahmoud and Mohammed Taimour are of Kurdish origins and their pioneering role in the Egyptian and in Arab story as a whole is known in the history of Arabic literature. Abdul-Majeed Lutfi and Muhyiddin Zangana in Iraq were writers who have presented Arabic literature with texts that are characterized as pioneer and innovative. The writer who is the most outstanding in the contemporary Arab literature is, no doubt, the Syrian Kurdish novelist Salim Barakat, whose books are translated into dozens of languages.
One of the most renowned founders of Iranian fiction is ‘Ali Muhammad Afghani, a Kurd bom in Kirmashan (Kirmanshah) in Iranian Kurdistan. The same is true with ‘Ali Akbar Darvishian and Mansour Yaghuti. And when it comes to Turkish literature, no two persons disagree that the Kurdish Ya$ar Kemal was the greatest international Turkish writer in the past forty years, who was a candidate to win Nobel Prize in literature for more than two decades.
I'm not here in the process of deciding on such a spiky subject, although I have my clear opinion about it. I would like to draw the readers’ attention that in this study 1 did not want to embed that literature at all. Nevertheless, it remains one of the important issues that deserve serious consideration and answer.
Instead of Conclusions
Rarely can a researcher in the history of the literatures of various peoples find a literature that reflects the prevailing political situation and constitutes a part of its structure as is the case with Kurdish literature. The emergence of this literature and its development, and the setbacks it suffered from, constitutes perfectly a parallel image to the political situation in Kurdistan in the past six centuries.
The present study is not an attempt to illustrate this image as much as it is an inventory of the different phases in the history of artistic prose in Kurdish. The first texts were used in such fields of everyday life, which had not been related directly to culture and literature in a way. But the beginning of the new century, 20th century, formed the turning point in favor of the birth of artistic prose as represented by the short story. And later we observe the emergence and coming into view of multiple generations of Kurdish storytellers in different parts of Kurdistan. Although the lands of the Kurds were divided among four of the Middle Eastern countries, by the British and French imperialists, and although they were subjected to persecution of political and cultural destruction, the cultural relationship between the Kurds in these parts of Kurdistan remained in coherence to a large extent.
The end of the Second World War witnessed a qualitative change in the political and cultural awareness of the Kurds, whereupon political parties and organizations were formed, and these in their turn paved the way for armed movements in order to gain national rights. Subsequent stages also witnessed the establishment of contacts between Kurdish intellectuals and writers with foreign cultures, which affected the emergence of modernist currents and movements in Kurdish literature. The situation of the Kurds as a people whose country was divided (or occupied) by several other countries, gave Kurdish readers and Kurdish intelligentsia, despite the gravity of the political situation and despite all the tragedies they suffered, the excellence of being in contact with three important languages of the Middle East - Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, in addition to Russian, Armenian and Azeri languages when it comes to the Kurds in the former Soviet Union. In the 1980s, when the political situation in Iraq, Iran and Turkey was the worst thing for the Kurds, thousands of young Kurds took their refuge to European countries, where an educated elite was formed, that had a good knowledge of the cultures of the modem world.
There is a firm belief among Kurdish politicians to the effect that if the twentieth century, the century in which the Kurds suffered the harshest persecution and oppression, tyranny and repression by the various governments, and that was characterized by the most egregious types of massacres and campaigns of genocide, the twenty-first century would be the century of the Kurdish people, and will witness the birth of the Unified Kurdish State or Kurdish states. There is hope that history will treat this people with justice, after being left in the lurch by its geographical situation for several centuries.
This may be just a political optimism or a derivation of the developments in the contemporary world, but we can preserve optimism at least when it comes to the Kurdish literature, in this new century. The situation in Iraqi Kurdistan in the past two decades, where this part of Kurdistan enjoyed a kind of independence, proved that the Kurds can be active and effective participants in all political and cultural areas in the Middle East, and even also in wider orbits. If translation constitutes an indication of the vitality of the language and culture of a people and their capability to deal with other cultures, the movement of translation into Kurdish language is as twice as what is being translated in the Arabic Iraq, for example.
The more worrying thing about the cultural and linguistic situation in Kurdistan is the lack of a cultural and linguistic policy that could repair all that happened to the culture from the ravages caused by centuries of oppression and occupation, and open up new horizons so that it participates in the enrichment of human civilization. This also may be part of a situation of instability, of which suffers the Kurdistan region as a new political body, that time will undertake stabilizing and enhancing it. However, literary creativity does not need to adapt to the laws and the formal decisions, since it is similar to an erupting flood that finds a channel in each terrain. If the Kurdish storyteller has excelled in the past, under the harshest of life and political conditions, why do not expect him/her to submit what is the more beautiful, deeper and more sophisticated?
At this juncture, I would like to express my cordial thanks to everyone who has helped me with the research and preparations for this essay, and with the production of it in its current form. 1 especially want to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Bo Utas, for his great patience and professional guidance.
I wish also to thank two other dedicated persons who have been involved and who have helped me very much: my colleague Professor Carina Jahani, whose constant optimism and support have always been unique and encouraging, and the Kurdish author and researcher Muhammad Mala Karim of Suleimani, Kurdistan, who has provided me with a great number of books and references, which have been invaluable for my work. Chris Gessner of Uppsala has been all too kind to develop my text into good and correct English. I owe him profound thanks.
I wish to direct my gratitude to everyone who has in any way helped me and taken part in the preparation of this book.
Uppsala, November 10, 2.016
Introduction
I
The Kurdish short story has its origins in the second decade of the twentieth century. When one reads the first short stories that we have access to, one is struck by what a feeble start it was. At times, it is difficult to distinguish folk tales from the then new art of the short story. This is true not only of Kurdish literature, but also of the literature of other peoples, e.g. the Arabic, the Persian, and the Turkish. Another common quality of the literature of these peoples is that, for a very long time, poetry was long the prevailing form of literature. Other genres made their debuts relatively recently.
Kurdish prose arose in the beginning of the nineteenth century. There are few examples of Kurdish prose from the nineteenth century; in every case, they are non-literary. At the end of the 1800s (1898), Kurdish prose made great advances. This is when the first Kurdish newspaper, Kurdistan, began to be published. The newspaper existed only a short time (1898-1902), yet it was significant for Kurdish journalism, an enterprise which continued to survive in different parts of Kurdistan in spite of persecution and interruptions in publication.
Kurdish journalism played two important rolls. On the one hand, it served to develop Kurdish politics and ideology, thereby diffusing a national consciousness among Kurds; on the other hand, it served to develop the Kurdish language and Kurdish culture. The origin of the art of the Kurdish short story is directly related with Kurdish journalism. As journalism made its developments, it also influenced short story craft in a positive direction. The first instances of text are unsophisticated both in form and content. As time passed, content became more profound and styles became more artistic. And this development cannot be isolated from very conscious attempts to further the Kurdish short story with the help of translations of short stories to Kurdish from other languages - European languages in particular.
The political course of events in Kurdistan, and the political and social circumstances which followed, have without question strongly influenced the Kurdish short story both in content, style, and language. A simple comparison of samples from different periods shows this to be the case.
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