The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement. By Nazan Üstündağ. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023)

Review by Deniz Duruiz, Concordia University

The decolonization debate has been one of the most intense in the social sciences over the past decade. Scholars in Indigenous and Black Studies in North America, situated within the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and the imperial heart of the global academy, have successfully led this debate. However, anthropologists have criticized the heavy focus on North American colonization, noting that it often dismisses the analysis of other forms of colonialism and racism as derivative or merely reflective of American academic trends. Nazan Üstündağ’s The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerilla (Fordham 2023) offers the kind of brilliant decolonial thinking and research that anthropologists working on various forms of colonialism outside North America have long sought.

Üstündağ’s analysis and recognition of Kurdistan as an international colony and anti-Kurdish racism as colonialism and racism by design rather than discrimination and inequality that resembles Western colonialism and racism is by itself a critical decolonial intervention. By using the concepts of feminism, psychoanalysis, and Black Studies, Üstündağ analyzes colonialism through its effects on the body, the subconscious, and the subjectivity of both the (Kurdish) colonized and the (Turkish) colonizer. Using the psychoanalytical concept of “voice,” Üstündağ expresses the simultaneous erasure of and hypervigilance against the Kurdish language in public: “The ear of Turkish colonization listens carefully to Kurdish bodies to detect any echo that would link them to the Kurdish voice, and a wild suspicion over accents, words, songs, and sounds is unleashed in public” (20). Just like the Kurdish language is to be weeded out from public, the Kurdish body is also an unacceptable sight: “When a Kurdish body leaves Kurdistan, that body must make itself invisible as a Kurd, since otherwise it is seen as a security threat or an object of hatred in other parts of the country. Lynching attempts, beatings, and killing of Kurds who speak Kurdish in public are increasingly regular events in certain parts of Turkey” (112). The Kurdish body thus turned into “flesh” becomes subject to everyday racism and gratuitous violence, reinforcing Turkish civilians’ self-righteous presence in the public space as the entrusted eyes and ears of the sovereign. However, both the flesh and the voice have a capacity (in the Real) to reclaim the worth and the dignity lost through such violation. 

All three figures that give the book its name—the mother, the politician and the guerilla—transform their flesh and voice back into bodies with integrity and intelligible language through creative speeches, images, and performances, thus resisting the colonization of Kurdish imagination. Kurdish mothers, politicized through the search for their children disappeared, imprisoned, or killed by the Turkish state not only focus on the demand for justice, but also try to disseminate and publicize the truth for which their children fought and died. Kurdish guerillas find the way to resist the desires created by capitalist modernity and the heteronormative family built around hierarchy, domination, and exploitation by organizing and living a new life in their exile to the mountains. The ideology and praxis of freedom and friendship (hevalti) in the Kurdish Movement is a search for truth, a truth that becomes visible and audible only if desire and sociality is reorganized around a new understanding of being human. Kurdish women politicians’ search for truth is less recognized and revered: “Neither endowed with the authority and sanctity of motherhood nor promising sacrifice as a guerrilla fighter who is ready to die for her people, the woman politician is therefore open to many forms of resentment” (86). However, the Kurdish woman politician’s access to Turkish public space far exceeds that of the Kurdish mother and guerilla, giving her a higher potential to serve as a limit to the violation of the Kurdish body and language, as evidenced by Üstündağ’s example of a Kurdish woman politician slapping a policeman.

The book not only excavates the decolonial gist of the theory and praxis of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, but also puts the movement’s collective thought in conversation with the decolonial theory of Indigenous and Black Studies. The parallel reading of Sylvia Wynter’s and the imprisoned Kurdish guerilla leader Abdullah Öcalan’s writings on freedom, truth, being, and the search for a new “genre of human” gives the impression of a conversation although, as Üstündağ notes, the two have never read each other. According to both Wynter and Öcalan, the exclusion of Black people and Kurds respectively from being human in colonial and capitalist civilization provides a potential for imagining and practicing other ways of being human, which the book returns to time and again.  

One challenge anthropologists might face with this book is how ethnographic data is used as evidence. This is not a typical anthropology book structured around the usual format: ‘I conducted X months of ethnographic fieldwork in Y location.’ The ethnographic depth of the book is indisputable; Üstündağ’s vignettes range from interactions with the guerillas in the mountains of Southern Kurdistan (Iraq) to an interview in a slum of İstanbul with a woman who experienced sexual violence and domestic abuse, to the heated discussions in different social circles that Üstündağ belonged to on the momentous 2013 newroz celebration/rally in Diyarbakır during which a letter by the imprisoned guerilla leader Abdullah Öcalan was read aloud. However, the book is written neither to intervene in an anthropological debate nor describe, explain, or “contextualize” a region or a phenomenon, whereby the context is always defined with respect to Western priorities and curiosities. The research questions are primarily motivated by the concerns of the movement and its activist and the academic allies. Further, the book’s engagement with theory is inspired by aspirational political alliances with Black and Indigenous Studies, and feminist psychoanalysis. I suggest that anthropologists read this book as a decolonial invitation to broaden the discipline’s perspective on ethnographic evidence and to expand the Western academy’s horizon of curiosity.