Interview
Zehra Dogan: Kurds, imprisonment and the case of Maysoon Majidi
We spoke with the Kurdish activist and artist: ‘What happens is, I try to forget its effects, but all it takes is one more question about my imprisonment and I am inexorably cast down into the Turkish cells once more.’
Zehra Doğan was released from prison five years ago. Thanks to the new volume of letters between her and her friend Naz Oke (Avremo anche noi dei bei giorni, published in Italian by Fandango), the world is able to know the person who was confined to the Diyarbakir prison in southeastern Turkey, together with Kurdish activists, staunch opponents of the Turkish government and dozens of other women. They were forced to serve their sentences without ever having understood why they had been convicted, with children clutching them tightly and the only contact with the outside world being through a filthy window set in concrete.
Since then, the story of Doğan, a 35-year-old Kurdish artist and journalist convicted by the Turkish state because of a painting, has been turned into narrative form, into a documentary, and also a Banksy mural between Houston Street and Bowery in Manhattan.
Still, it is a delicate matter to speak publicly about one’s imprisonment. While people's memories fade, the wound caused by the oppressor is long-lasting and its influence continues far beyond the end of the sentence. The pages that reveal the horror of imprisonment are brave and revolutionary, but also intimate, cruel and at times revolting. This is why Doğan, five years after regaining her freedom, now far from her country, says she is tired. Because whenever someone asks her to recount what happened then, it’s as if she never really left.
“What happens is, I try to forget its effects,” she tells il manifesto, ”but all it takes is one more question about my imprisonment and I am inexorably cast down into the Turkish cells once more. And it takes me weeks to get back out.”
“That is why I tend to avoid interviews. I can be in that difficult situation once a year, maybe twice, but any more than that and I would end up collapsing. I know that I should offer my testimony for my people everywhere, but I’ve realized that I haven't really been out of prison for years. I think I have, but every time I repeat everything that happened like a parrot, I go back into the abyss.”
Nonetheless, all too aware that her burden is both a collective and a private one, Doğan decided to speak with il manifesto, in solidarity with another young woman, Maysoon Majidi, who has been in Italian prison since December on the charge of being a human trafficker.
Both women have been accused by their respective countries (Turkey and Iran) of terrorist propaganda, for similar reasons: they are Kurdish, political activists and artists. Doğan sees Majidi's story within the overarching one of the Kurdish people, tortured by History, whose women continue to pay an increasingly high price, and which Europe – in this case, Italy – ends up criminalizing instead of protecting.
“Fearing for her life,” Doğan recounts, ”Majidi fled the Iranian regime and went to the Kurdish autonomous region. Unfortunately, even there she didn’t find respite from persecution and threats. Even though the southern part of the region has been declared autonomous, it is unfortunately only a neo-colony of the hegemonic states, because it is a very important place in terms of geopolitical position and underground resources. In the name of the so-called interests of the autonomous region, those who govern it have become pawns of the American multinationals, the Turkish state and the Iranian state.”
Dozens of female activists lose their lives every year in that region, Doğan tells us. Such was the case of Nagihan Akarsel, a feminist journalist and academic, who in October 2022 was killed in the street by a hitman who, after being arrested, confessed that he was working for the Turkish state. And the same goes for Kurdish militants who had to leave Iran for political reasons: they come to southern Kurdistan but are killed by agents working for the Iranian state.
“Life has to walk a fine line in those places, which is why it’s not surprising that Majidi did not believe she was safe and hoped to seek asylum in Europe. … But it is precisely through her story,” Doğan stresses, ”that we can understand the cruelty of a system in which the Western countries are playing a leading role.”
“We end up getting stuck in the atmosphere of peace through unconditional surrender created in our country by states pursuing their own interests, perpetrating wars and terror. Only to be forced to ask, ‘Can we take refuge in your safe and democratic state because of the unbearable ecological drought caused by the resources you are sucking out of our country and the war in which you turn us into pawns to fight with the weapons you sell?’”
Despite numerous requests from her lawyers, the Italian judge has refused to grant Majidi house arrest. Her next hearing is set for September 18. Unlike Doğan, Majidi’s time in prison has her completely surrounded by a language foreign to her. From this element alone, which may seem like a trivial detail, one can understand the loneliness that Majidi has to contend with. For this reason, Doğan insists on the symbolic significance of her imprisonment: seemingly anonymous and voiceless, destined for the oblivion into which so many migrant people are forced in Europe, it is an eloquent image of a contemporary world that rests on the protection of human rights, only to surrender parts of them in exchange for a faint impression of security, as in Majidi's story.
The list of murdered Kurdish journalists and activists continues to grow. A few days ago, two Kurdish reporters from the Sterk TV station were targeted by a Turkish drone. Their car was blown up in the town of Suleymaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Both were Doğan’s friends and colleagues.
The words she wrote to Naz Oke on July 16, 2017, when she was still an inmate at the Turkish prison in Diyarbakir, come to mind. She and her friends were talking about the future of the Kurdish people, about how to break out of the spiral of horror: “They have left us nothing to live for,” she wrote, “but if they asked us, perhaps we would be able to describe happiness better than anything else, because we are hungry for it.”
An old photo on Maysoon Majidi's Instagram profile shows her behind a camera. Underneath is her profession: theater director. In the end, thinking of her Kurdish compatriot imprisoned in Italy, Zehra Doğan concludes that there is only one language that makes all this bearable: “That of art, in every dimension.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/zehra-dogan-i-curdi-la-prigionia-e-il-caso-di-maysoon-majidi on 2024-09-04