Diyarbekir Diaries – Rojnivîska Amedê, Day One

Diyarbekir Diaries – Rojnivîska Amedê

Fall break has begun, and we have come to Diyarbekir to visit my sister-in-law who is working in the city as a translator. Inspired by her ”Boston Diaries”, I have decided to keep a daily record of our stay in the unofficial capital of Kurdistan. Maybe I can shed some casual light on a city on the edge of several Middle Easter conflagrations.

Day 1

We get off the plane at 2:00 PM. The airport is brand spanking new—having only just opened two weeks ago. Parts of it are still under construction. F-15s sit on the runway along with commercial jets. There’s some sort of garden-like thing under way in the arrival lounge. It looked like a cross between a Zen rock garden and a putt-putt golf course. There were swathes of raked sand winding through astroturf, all shut off by panes of glass like a green house.

Hilal was doing an interview with Diyarbekir's women’s soccer team and we were to meet her at the sports center. We hopped in a taxi and asked him to stop by an Akbank ATM on the way.

“I’m not sure I know where there is one,” he said. “Not the way we’re going. I’m terribly sorry, ma’am.”

We were coming from Istanbul where there was an ATM at least every 100 feet. He told us, no problem. If we wanted, we could just pay him the day we went back to the airport.

“How’s that?” Delal asked.

“Well you’re leaving, right? You’ll need to go back to the airport.”

“Not for a week!”

“That's fine. You can pay me then.”

And that is the best introduction I can give to Diyarbakir.

My sister-in-law lives in the apartment once occupied by our good friend and Kurdistan’s top foreign correspondent, Frederike Geerdink. (Anything I write here is done in her shadow, and with much respect and in debtedness) At the beginning of the Fall, she was run out of the country for “supporting terrorism” or some such nonsense—her actual crime being, of course, writing things that the state didn’t like. It was odd going into her house without her. Her office (where I am writing from) is untouched, as if she might come breezing through the door at any minute. Her book still sit stacked on her desk. Her schedule still waits for attention, things to do in a list on a dry erase board. There is a haunted feeling about the place, or perhaps, more accurately, a de-haunted feeling, as if a resident spirit has been ripped out.

From Frederike’s balcony we could see a huge park, full of maple, sycamores and acacias on fire with the last yellows and reds of Autumn. After having a snack, we made our way down to the park and strolled around. What struck me first was that all the signs were in Kurdish, and Kurdish only. In the mornings, a group of women do Pilates on the grass, apparently. Now some kids were playing volleyball and people sipped tea next to duck-filled fountains. We ran into two old men sitting on a bench and playing checkers using different colored rocks they had found on the ground. Their board was a card board box on which one of them had drawn squares. In the center of the park was a huge statue with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights engraved upon it in Turkish. Diyarbekir is a political city.

At the end of the park was the clothing store Heft Reng—"Seven Colors", a store that sells traditional Kurdish cil û berg (clothes) along with modern T-shirts with captions in Kurdish. I love to go here every time I visit because it is the only place I have found where people actually want me to casually speak Kurdish to them and will tolerate my mistakes and slow sentences. I know very little of the language but it is always exciting to be able to shop and pick out something in a new language.

We stopped in Aram Book Store at the end of the park to have a look around and have a tea. My sister-in-law met up with us there and brought along a friend, Hasan. Hasan was apparently a writer and had recently published a book on philosophy. We sat for an hour and talked politics. The walls were decorated with pictures of Kurdish writers and poets. Two in particular captured my attention, one because I like the poem, the other because I could understand her poem.

The first was a poem by Şêrko Bêkeş:

If, from among my poems,

You remove a single rose,

Then one season

Of my four seasons dies.

If you remove a lover

Two of them die.

If you remove bread

Three of them die.

And if you remove my freedom

Then my years die,

And

I, myself, will die as well.

The second from the female poet Evrim Alataş

As long as you

Don’t understand the Kurds’ ambition

You cannot

Understand a thing

About the Kurds.

After the book store we went to the theatre. This was the last day of the city’s theatre festival (Festîvala Şanoyê) and they were performing a modern dance piece about Leyla Bedirxan, a Kurdish woman who lived in Paris. She was the daughter of an exile, raised in Turkey, Egypt and Europe and master of dance. The troupe’s name was Mesopotamia Dance and they were performing a fairly abstract piece about her life. 

We boarded a minibus to the City Hall where the performance was taking place. An odd thing happened on the way. We passed by one of the ubiquitous police "scorpion" tanks and suddenly there was a loud pop. We thought a tire had blown, but suddenly the air filled with tear gas. The streets were dark, no demonstrations were anywhere near, no people, for that matter, and yet it seemed that the scorpion had fired a gas canister into the empty street. The driver commanded everyone to "close the windows" and floored it--speeding us through the gas without even a slight burning sensation to disturb us. Such maneuvers were clearly old hat. 

Upon arrival at the theater, I learned quickly that whatever peculiarities governed life in Istanbul, they were intensified here. We bought out tickets for a dollar only to find a house literally packed to the walls with nowhere to sit. No one seemed to mind and so we chose a place at the back and stood, leaning against the wall.

It opened with darkness and the sounds of thunder and of a house creaking and straining under the brunt of a storm. A spotlight fell on a woman lying on the stage and the snap of boards breaking and glass shattering filled the air. She moved her body to every noise, to every rumble and crack. She seemed to possess absolute control over every muscle in her body. We were impressed. 

Videos here and here.

The rest of the performance was gorgeous, one woman and three young men, sometimes dancing in synch and sometimes in a kind of round of body movements, one cascading off the other. At the end, the crowd leapt to their feet and the city’s co-mayor, Gülten Kışanak appeared on stage with red roses. This woman is one of my favourite politicians in Turkey. I will never forget the elegance of her speech in Parliament during the Hunger Strike and how, without breaking stride, she silenced the rightwing nationalist men trying to shout her down with a simple but effective, “Shut your mouths! Shut your mouths! Shut your mouths!” Childish words maybe, but spoken with such command and dignity that they did shut up, as they never had before.

The dancers on stage with Gülten Kışanak

Dance Lessons--How to Dance the Govend, part 2

Sorry for the long delay--it was a busy Spring.

The govend at our wedding

So let's begin with another dance essential to know, the şemamê. This is a relatively new dance cooked up by youngsters and based on an older traditional dance. Here’s how our teacher Sedat explains it.

“The ‘şemamê’ comes from the ‘şêxanî’ govend. Over time, the rhythms of popular music, in particular hip hop and disco, were added to the şêxanî as its rhythms were particular amenable to this. In Van this dance is called the  ‘hêjirokê’, but the song is different. There is a general terminology problem with these dances—each one is named according to the song they are danced to it seems, instead of according to the steps, so that the same dance can have several different names just because one region chooses a different song to perform them too.”

The handwork in the şemamê is tricky—your feet are doing one thing and your hands another and the synchronization is a bitch to master and make look natural. The fancier versions of the şemamê involve all sorts of little half-steps and change-steps and tricks with the feet and legs. And everyone comes up with new variations all the time that you kind of half to catch whenever you join a dance with people you don’t know. The dance also is unique because it starts on the left foot while most govends start on the right.

Here’s the şemamê. Watch the boys on the left, at the head of the line. 

Learn it here, in Turkish, but she shows you step  by step so it's easy if you don't speak the language.

And here’s the şêxanî from which it sprung.

Now let’s get naughty. Close the curtains, switch off the phone taps. You just cannot ignore the existence of what’s casually known as the “guerilla halay”—you’ll see some of the kids at rallies dancing this one. Let me again refer to Sedat Hoca to explain this one.

The guerilla halay (or govenda şoreşgeran as I think it should be more properly known) is actually a slower version of the steps of the govend. Since mostly guerillas danced this govend or, since people saw guerillas while they were dancing this govend, it was referred to with a sentence like ‘the dance that they do’ or the ‘the dance the guerilla’s perform’ and eventually was shortened to ‘guerilla halay.’ In other words, under the most basic of circumstances, it’s just called the govend, but due to different factors and in different regions more ‘interesting’ names might be used. Typically it just takes the name of the song it’s danced to. We danced it to the song ‘Keleşo’ so some would call it ‘keleşo.’

Supposedly, once the public starts doing the dance that the guerillas do and starts copying them, the guerillas quickly drop it and invent a new one to be the next ‘guerilla halay.’ The one we learned has been public for a while now and the steps are symbolic. It starts off slow with simple bounce-steps but eventually builds into huge leaps. You take two double hops forward symbolizing an advance. Then with your left foot you come forward and down hard, then move back two double steps. The govenda şoreşgeran can be done with music but is more often done without, the dancers singing one song or another.

We learned to a ditty called Keleşo. Just before Delal’s Dad was released, as we waited in front of the prison gates, a group of young boys built a bonfire and started dancing the guerilla halay to Keleşo around the flames. They were then quickly shown up by two young girls from Hakkari who busted into moves so quick and furious, no one else could follow. They couldn’t have been more than twelve but they knew how to cut a rug.

I’ll introduce just one last dance—although there are lots more. It’s called the çepkî which means ‘lefty’—a name it sports because the line moves left instead of the usual right. It has a three step count starting with the left foot—on the second step you kind of crick your knee and then hop back on the fourth step as your right foot goes out. You repeat this three times, then do two side steps to the right before you launch into another hop. The hand work on this is tricky, too—completely different than what the feet are doing—circles, forward thrusts, back swings to various counts of one, two and three. You can also kick instead of step in a kind of Riverdance version. Here’s a video of what a really young and wild (and possibly drunk) çepkî might look like.

This video shows you the steps—though the dancers are not very animated.

These are just a few of the dances we learned. There are several other rather slow and dignified ones that resemble something out of the Aegean region. Sedat Hoca feels there is a basic problem with the nomenclature and has devised an alternative classification system based on the speed of the dance and the speed of the music. The slow dances are called granî (which means heavy in Kurdish). Each category after that grows greater in speed. Normally, you’ll see each dance classified according to region but then that leads to someone from Hakkari insisting that such and such is her dance while someone from Dersim, dancing the exact same steps, will call it by a different name, and argue that it is a Dersim tradition. Why not, Sedat says, classify them all more systematically according to speed and form?

Sedat, a professional dancer with the Kardeş Türkler who also performed in the über professional Anatolian Fire, sees the govend as a very political thing. His is the first class of its kind—in America or in Japan, there’d be hundreds of these dance classes all across the country. I think of the Cambridge Dance Complex in Boston or the Middle East dance studios all over Tokyo and Osaka. And though I have seen ‘Folk Dance’ courses here and there, nothing focuses on the dances of the Southeast. 

Apparently, he met a lot of resistance when he decided to start a course—his friends in the dance world resented the idea of a “Kurdish” dance class. They gave the usual arguments—these dances belong to everyone. How can you classify them as “Kurdish”? Of course no one gets their panties in a tangle when someone calls the horon a Black Sea dance or the Zeybek an Aegean dance. In my opinion, hell yeah these dances belong to everyone. I can take a ‘Black Sea’ dance course and not cry about how the name ‘Black Sea’ makes me feel uncomfortable. Why should the name ‘Kurdish’ be a problem?

Ah, well, we all know why. Call anything ‘Kurdish’ and it’s like you’re declaring war here—a mindset reinforced by the media and years in an education system created by a fascist military coup.

Sedat is definitely a nationalist young man. In his view, the assimilation policies of the last one hundred years have affected folk dance as well. Kurdish folk dances not recognized by the Turks were ignored, many lost, while dances similar to Turkish ones but with some different steps or flourishes were assimilated to get rid of the differences and make the dance exclusively Turkish. The same with songs. A lot of the Kurdish songs have been translated into Turkish and the Kurdish versions lost or forgotten.

Recently, Delal has been watching ‘Eyes on the Prize’ in preparation for our trip to Alabama. She couldn’t help but notice that as the young protesters were attacked with fire hoses or dragged off to prison or attacked by dogs they always responded with songs. Black people faced their aggressors with music. One man in Arkansas actually danced in the water of the firehouse. Music as defiance, as an integral part of a people and their struggle for justice.

‘That’s us, too,’ Delal says. ‘No matter what is happening, we are going to find a way to do the govend. We did it at Gezi. We did it at the hunger strike protests. Everywhere for every reason, the govend.’

DANCE LESSONS--HOW TO DANCE THE GOVEND: PART 1 DELİLO, DUZ, GOVEND

“Her-reeeeeee!!!!”

At the height of excitment, when the music is so frenetic you need quantum equations to describe all the things your feet are doing, you shout this word if you’re a man. It means simply ‘Go!’ in Kurmanci. The last syllable only fails when your breath does.

(If you’re a woman, you let loose with an ululation that shatters glass.)

I am talking about the dance called ‘govend’—a dance as vital to a Kurd’s identity as their language. For Kurds, in my experience, dance at every opportunity—at festivals and protests, at home and on the way home, in sickness and in health. Wherever music is played—and it’s played everywhere—someone’s going to leap up, grab a few others and break into a govend.

A govend in Ovacık, Dersim

I used to run into it everywhere I went with Delal and though I managed to learn the basic steps of the slower dances, it knew it was imperative for me to take a course to catch up with what years being in the middle of her own culture had taught my wife. I was not going to be on the sidelines forever. But no course was forthcoming it seemed—none that focused on the Kurdish dances of the Southeast at least. And then we saw the poster in a cafe in Kadıköy—Kursa Govend—offered at one of the culture centers that have popped up since the Gezi protests in 2013.

I have a “liberal” Turkish friend at school—let’s call her Aleyna. Aleyna’s a middle-aged woman who seems more up to speed than most on the issues of minorites in her country. And so when I excitedly told her over lunch one day that I had started taking a course in the ‘halay’, the Turkish word for govend, I was surprised to hear her laugh. ‘What in the world is there to learn? You should take Salsa or Tango or something.’

I had assumed, drawing from my experience among my inlaws, that absolutely everyone in this country were fanatical dancers of the halay. But I found out rather quickly that most Western Turks at least, look at it as, say, a Boston Harvard grad would look at mudslinging in a pick-up truck (which is fun by the way). I was more surprised by the reaction of my school’s service bus driver, Mehmet. Mehmet is a young Kurdish man from Kiğı, the same region as my wife, a place where people wake and sleep dancing the govend.  When I told him I was taking a class in Kurdish folk dance, he furrowed his brow and said, “What in the world is there to learn from our dance? You should learn the Black Sea horon or something like that.”

Well Mehmet. This blog is for you. There’s a lot to learn from Kurdish dance, the first thing of which is politics. Your answer alone, in a nut shell, demonstrates the effects of a hundred years of assimilation if you ask me. If it belongs to us, you’re saying, it must suck. Try something Turkish—that’s real culture.

Enough politics.

The basic concept of the govend is this—at weddings, protests, and pretty much anywhere two or more people gather, folks join hands in a line as someone plays a rhythm on the davul (drum) and a zurna, an oboe-like wind instrument. A radio or iPhone will do if davul and zurna are not handy. Everyone performs the same steps which vary in complication and generally get faster and faster until all but the best dancers drop out. The first in line is called the “head” and is the leader. He or she commands what steps are done at what speed and when. The head flourishes a handkerchief which is bright colored—among Kurds it tends to be red or yellow. Sedat, the young teacher of our course, said that the handkerchief was a symbol of a piece of flame taken from the fire people used to dance around. The Kurds, eons ago, were Zoroasterian (possibly) and many of your more nationalist Kurds seem to want to reclaim that heritage. And indeed there seem to be a lot of Zoroasterian remnants in many areas of Kurdistan—prayers to the rising sun and moon in Kiğı, for instance, also a reverance for fire. Anyway, the head waves and brandishes the handkerchief just as the flame itself would flicker from the embers.

A govend at a village wedding in Xiwek, Kiğı

For my people in the American South, maybe it would be easiest to say the govend is essentially an ancient line dance of great variation and I have seen people from all over the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Western Asian doing some version of it—Armenians, Arabs, Israelis, Greeks, Turks, Turkmen and Kurds. In Kurdish, the word for this dance is ‘govend.’ And Sedat insisted that we call it the ‘govend’, for the dances he taught are specific to Kurdistan (he says) and so it’s going to be ‘the govend’ from here on in. And if you are non-Kurdish and want to argue over who owns the copyright to this dance, all I have to say is, ever ask a Southerner who makes the best barbecue? To the outsider Kansas City and North Carolina might all be meat with sauce on it, but child please.

If any of you have any doubts as to how hard this dance can be, I just want to give you a bit of a video introduction.

Here’s a video of the şewko—go on, y’all. Grab a friend and give it a whirl.

And here’s another type of govend from Iğdir—these girls are doing the most basic of all versions. Think you can spin quickly from the şewko into this?

That basic dance step in the video of the Iğdir girls is the Delîlo (Üç Ayak in Turkish which means ‘Three Legs’ though I couldn’t begin to tell you why, as it’s done on a count of four with two legs.) According to our teacher, the word Delîlo has no special meaning but is made up of three exclamations heard in Kurdish dance and song—‘De!’ ‘Lê!’ ‘Lo!’  The best translation might be ‘Oh Hey! Hey!’. It’s the easiest of all the dances and I’ve known the basic moves since the first few weeks I met Delal. You can learn the footwork in a second (though the finer subtleties are lost on most people) and it’s the one that laymen usually think of when you say the word ‘halay’, which is probably why so many people think the class I am taking must be so laughably easy.

Essentially, you link hands, often hooking pinkies, and take four steps forward then four steps back and to the right, all in synch with everyone else. That’s it. But one essential trick that I learned while doing this basic step and that I had not known previously is—you’ve got to bounce. Your legs should never be straight. Your body keeps the time by spring-bouncing to an 8 count rhythm as you move through the main steps, so that while your feet are going “1, 2, 3, 4” your knees are going “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”. Learning this bounce makes all the more complicated dances a lot easier later on and ensures that your shoulders and hands bounce as well, an essential component to the flair of any good govend dancer.

The Delîlo is a good primer on why the govend is actually quite difficult—the synchronization among a large group is hard. The difference in rhythms between the body and feet is hard. Okay, in the Delîlo your feet are moving to a count of four while your body is moving to a count of eight—that’s rather easy, but later on feet can be going to a count of four while the music is to a count of six or the music is a count of eight while your feet move to a count of 6, or feet to a count of pi (3.1415...) while the music is to a count of e (2.71828...). And then, of course, the coordination of hand movements and feet movements can get tricky—like the old pat your head and rub your stomach routine.

Here is a rather dorky video that explains the footwork in zombie like monotone but still, it gives you an idea (Try to imitate the Iğdir girls!). Notice how the woman bounces—critical, and yet the instructor in the video does not mention it at all. We spent a good half hour learning just to bounce to the rhythm in our class. It was a blast and tremendously crucial to getting anything right later on.

There are tons of variations on the Delîlo. We learned a few easy ones.

Govend at a Germik (Hot Springs) in Bağin, Karakoçan

You can turn the four step figure, for example, into a two step where the missing steps are converted into a scooping motion with the knees, or else instead of stepping forward you can flip your knee back or else you can kick out as you step backward as if your foot were a spatula flipping a burger. When you launch into each set of four you can skim your foot across the floor instead of stepping fully or you can skip your right foot across the left knee to give it a bit of a flourish. You usually do all of this as a group and so the head has to give a signal of some sort and all must follow. What’s fun, if you’re the head, is that you can break off and kind of do your own thing as the others keep going—one basic step when you do this is to walk just moving your heels. In other words, when you step, your toes stay on the ground and your heels flip up. You can combine this with the skipping motion mentioned early, or the flourish at the knees, or all at once to create a really complicated movement. If you’re young and flexible, you might squat down Cossack style and kick out. Like I said, tons of variations on the basic Delîlo.

The next dance we learned was called the Dûzo, Dizo or just Dûz. It’s based on a three step—in other words you bounce your knees to the count of three. Your right foot moves right on the count of one—that’s the easy part. But what about the left? It follows the right on a half or quarter count at the end—which is an easy sentence to write but very difficult to make your foot do with any kind of regularity. The best thing is to surrender to the rhythm and pray, but God doesn’t always answer prayers and it took my class hours to consistently find that rhythm—some of us still don’t have a clue. The music we first practiced with was by an Iranian Kurdish group called Sima Bina and this song named Sheftaluforush—the Peach Seller. We also used the song Celil Ber Çela.

Here are some people running through the basicthree-count Dûz with variations as the video goes on.

As with the Delîlo, this basic step of course has tons of variations. Just simply stepping forward and backward with the right foot is a good start. You can also break off and do the heel tap that I mentioned in the Delîlo. The davul beat can eventually speed up and then you break into the dance that our teacher called the ‘essential govend’, and which in Turkish is called ‘Dik Halay’ or, roughly translated, ‘Straight-Up Halay.’

This “essential govend” was the whole point of me joining this class. The Delîlo was a walk in the park. Every visit to the village or every wedding that I was commandeered into, I could manage that one and retain some dignity, but then the music would speed up and suddenly people’s knees and bodies were doing something I couldn’t decipher and so I would have to bow out and sit on the sidelines like a dork while everyone else zipped through the rhythms, having an ecstatic blast. It looked simple but every time I jumped in the fray, nothing worked. Delal had tried to teach me a hundred times but to no avail. Well, now I’ve got it now, kids—but I doubt I can explain it in words. It’s a body thing—you’ve got to get used to the unusual rhythms and then just groove. It certainly ain’t the Salsa.

Here’s how it goes. You do the basic three step of the Dûz, then you do a four count to finish, bouncing twice on the right knee and twice on the left. Count-wise—it’s a quick stacatto one-two-three followed by a lackadaisacally slow, one two three four. The trick is the first three steps are blurred together into a count of two—something I never picked up from mere observation. What the hell? Exactly. Let me break it down for the math impaired. If you are doing this count--one, two, three, four, five, six—you will move three steps between one and two and then normally for the other numbers. When you are going really fast your feet don’t move at all. Just your legs and knees go through the rhythm—a phenomenon which can be utterly baffling. People’s bodies are dancing wildly but their feet never leave the ground. I used to think they were just gyrating randomly but since everyone was absolutely in synch, my hypothesis was never convincing. Now, at long last, I know that the knees were doing the dance that the feet could not keep up with. Here is the footwork up close (video taken at a festival in Hasköy's hot springs)

And there are variations. The head dancer can give a signal and off you go—we learned a variety of kicks and skips that tangles up my legs as soon as I think about it. In one version, you kick your left toe with your right heel, skim the floor and then do a heel tap before skipping forward with your left foot—all to that bizarre three in two rhythm. In another the initial heel tap takes place at the knee. Or else, it turns into a triple tap on the floor in front of you.

Here is a video that kind of shows theessential govend. Give the people time to wind up into it (around 40 seconds). I recommend watching from 4:44 to about 6:10--take a look at what happens when the head breaks away.