Some Reflections on a Turkish--oops, Kurdish--Parliamentarian

August 27, 2007

Kani Xulam

Her Name is Aysel Tuglu

Something strange happened in Turkey last May. A Kurdish woman sang the praises of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. She called him a "miracle". She said he was "deathless". She went on to say he was an "unrivalled" example of how to make--yes, make--a nation. She added other tidbits that could only be said of God. I was rattled to see this near deification of a mortal at the dawn of the 21st century. Nothing like it had ever crossed my path. It was akin to being blinded by something extraordinarily bright--but it wasn't light, it was prose, black on white. I was definitely at my wits' end ready to throw in the towel so to speak. Life, I murmured to myself, couldn't be so bleak. Literature, thank god, came to my aid. I remembered a passage from Ralph Ellison's beautiful book, Invisible Man. The grandfather of the protagonist, probably a newly freed slave, tells his son how to deal with the white folks. Give them a lot of "yeses" and "grins", adding, "agree'em to death and destruction."

And that is precisely what our Kurdish sister, Aysel Tugluk, did in Turkey and in Turkish--and in broad daylight! The Turks fell for it and sucked it all up and called her the "model" Kurd under the sun. Radikal, a Turkish newspaper, upstaged every other daily and printed, word for word, her statement. Turkey's talking heads then ran with the story the way their American counterparts are fixated with the exploits of Paris Hilton. A columnist for the Turkish daily Milliyet, Taha Akyol, usually a dour face when it comes to the words that have the root Kurd in it, went ballistic from joy, praising our very flesh and bones, for the first time in his life. A lover of good prose, I almost fainted when I saw so many superlative adjectives placed next to Aysel's name. I had a vision of her reading about herself in the Turkish media and pinching herself to be sure that what she was seeing was real! It was! I saw it in America! Aysel, you are our own miracle superior to Ataturk! full text