|
Editorial of January 2001 "Between his lips and his teeth, there was full of amassed sand ; and the sand, blotting his saliva, overran all his mouth. On the hard-earth of the entrance, he began to spit. But spitting was vain. This rough stayed in mouth ; and his mouth, even empty and dryed, was still scattered by sand, as he felt it : it was like going out through his teeth, a new sand, again and again, was making under his palate."The woman of sands" - Abé Kôbô" Sand is an insidious material. More than insidious in fact, obstinate, overpowering, invasive : under the doors, by the interstices of windows, it reaches the heart of houses, slips into clothes, mixes with food. Living in a place surrounded by sand is to be condemned to eat sand, to sleep in sand, to live in a world of sand, unremittingly. A grain of sand attracts some thousands, some milliards of other grains invading everywhere. We can not expell the sand, we let it to overcome us or we flee it. But it is more difficult to escape from a totalitarian political movement. Then, the Kurdish society let itself overrun and destroyed by a totalitarism that pretends to defend it, more than these years of war against which it had to fight. It was necessary to exterminate «the feodalism that oppressed the masses» : A political apparatus had been set, so efficient than a Traban lugged in the Paris-Dakar, but at least with the merit to crush efficiency Individual, this highly suspicious entity. It was necessary to «liberate the Kurdish man from his familial and tribal faithfulnesses» : Then in the Kurdish peasants’minds, local aghas were replaced by a Great Leader(1) for whom his followers developp an idolatry that makes the Moon Sect members a bit sceptical. And otherwise, with some methods that a sect could envy – they get rid of all these old sentimental things like honour, tolerance, love of poetry, respect of love and love of life, with that the Kurdish Man od this New Era does not know to do … Totalitarism, this illness of the past century, is like sand : osbtinate, overpowering, invasive. When we are surrounded by it, keeping an inner freedom is an illusion. Grain by grain, it reaches our mind, plugs our ears, sticks our eyelids, crunches between our teeth, rolls in the creases of our clothes. It stays vivid a long time, enven after its defeat. For to have lived, thinked or tried to think, loved or tried to love, to have been a human or tried to be human in a totalitarian system condemns you to chew this sand until the end of your life. There is a way to survive that distorts people for ever. Thinking, loving, and even dying, nothing is preserved, nothing is let unspoilt. The one who pretends today live as a free man, who pretends to let the collective meanness and cowardness that prevails presently, the one who pretends to live according to more humanist values has a few chances to escape without dammage. If his reeducation does not succeed with « soft » ways , the system to which everybody is a party –more or less willingly – would not hesitate to apply more radical methods, with the blessing of right-thinking people, the guardians of order and "morality". For the Kurdish society, devasted by war and political repression, the greatest danger comes from itself and its black inheritage : political intolerance, prohibition of feelings, social and intellectual alienation that overcomes even the youngest, and amongst all the end of the Kurdish proudness, so lovable because tender and funny, that makes of each Kurd the king of his mountains. Nowadays, « progress » upsurges : there are no kings, only migrants ; there are no moutains, all of them are burnt. Under the fine calls to peace and democracy, behind the appearances that denounce no respect of Human’s rights, some methods, more insidious and efficient than the Turks’, eat away at the basic values of the Kurdish society. Today, they still point at the finger of shame Mam and Zin, and they still tack them, but poets have lost the right to sing them... But come on, stop moarning, everything is not lost. Many refuse to be defeat and resist to the collapse of their culture : at the beginning of the Third Millenium, in many places in Turkey and Europa, some voices claim against totalitarism. A rebirth is always possible, and the burst of vitality that saved the Kurds for several centuries could surprise everybody : perhaps in 2001 ?
Of course, we wish a happy new year... for everybody Sandrine Alexie & Roxane (1) all resemblance or similitude with living persons or persons who had lived and closed in Imrali is an unwillingly (very) coincidence.T
|
