Steve_Bamlett_blog

Reflecting on The Freedom to Think Kurdistan (2019) by James Kelman, Glasgow, thi wurd.

The impenetrability of this, seeking the entry and if this entry was to be discovered I could not discover it it was outside myself beyond myself, it was, I not discover it, could not.

Kelman (2001:14) Translated Accounts: a novel  London, Secker & Warburg

Are all ‘accounts’ of self ultimately impenetrable. Is the meaning of all experience lost in the translation of the accounts of it. How then are we to understand phenomena, whether persons, places, objects or events, except through bare exposure and confrontation of their apparent exclusion of me, their lack of accessible entry to comprehensibility. In this I’m trying to work out one of the sentences of that most difficult of Kelman’s novels, Translated Accounts.

The last time I reflected in writing on Kelman was in 2016 on that amazing novel Dirt Road. In that short piece of puzzlement I marvelled at the innovative means of telling a story. Story unfolded through charting shifts of feeling or affect during exposure to phenomena in the worlds of migrating cultures in one place, in Southern USA. I tried to explain what I meant by ‘affect’ in this novel thus:

… affect made of exposure to others and affirmation of them and ourselves in as genuine a meeting as possible, such that it must therefore be also a political and social phenomenon.

My Kelman (the one I read currently) is writing that makes no assumptions about the experience offered by phenomena – it demands that we find access to that experience, which will either lead to self-willed exclusion (no ‘entry’ is discovered’) or inadequate comprehension because we enter into the experience too shallowly or with preconception. His work forces a direct confrontation with world phenomena (people, places, sounds, matter) such that emergent meaning is locked into a state of affective being that either enables or disables (or somewhere in between) our ability to meet what we see otherwise as confronting us. This means that in some cases it appears to confront us with projected hostility.

 Authentic meetings in Dirt Road lead to comprehension and commitment. Inauthentic meetings across a range of possibilities prescribe the script of our confrontations. Those prescriptions are built entirely of pre-existent myths in our social cognitions and lead to hostile defensiveness before the fact of otherness. That is to say, inauthentic responses stop people reacting to the novelty of any experiential confrontation by pre-interpreting it through some introjected script or habitual response. This is why we can call Murdo’s Dad in that novel both a racist – he will not meet difference or otherness on its own ground – and not-a-racist – since he resists the novelty of the back person’s experience of racism. There is an analysis of this kind of thing in an early essay (1991) from The Freedom to Think Kurdistan which cuts through habitual definitions of racism (p.20-21).

Once in my company a white working-class guy got into an argument with a black middle-class guy, a writer who had … spoke of the historical culpability of white people in relation to black people. There is …. There is also the daily abuse and violation experienced that is beyond anything white people can comprehend. There is also the day-to-day horror of existence experienced by a great many white Glaswegian people that a great many black people, including this particular black guy (who is an academic as well as a writer) have no conception of.

Extracted from ‘Oppression and Solidarity 1991’ Kelman, J. (2019:21f.) The Freedom To Think Kurdistan Glasgow: thi wurd.

What interests Kelman here is that neither person in this argument really understands the other or their experience. They fail to ‘enter’ each other’s experience. Hence statements of general principles – about the nature of racist behaviour – are built not on the common ground of potential solidarity but of intersected and complex kinds of oppression based on that ensuing, and sometimes mutual, ignorance. Thus Kelman’s collection of essays on Kurdistan face us with a question. In what way have you confronted, as a reader or thinker, the phenomena that is Kurdistan and the experience of being a Kurd, ehether in Turkey, Syria or Iraq? The book starts with that 1991 essay on ‘Solidarity and Oppression’ in order to remind us that oppression is not a phenomenon that is easily translatable, in one to one equivalence, between different kinds of oppression. As in the last example, the experience of being oppressed as a black middle-class person, as severe as that is, does not allow you to understand the oppression of white working-class Glaswegians. This is, in fact, what makes solidarity so difficult to feel and think.

However, we would be mistaken to think of the novelist’s adventures in the imagination of oppression to be the sole key to understanding how we think of Kurdistan as a political writer. Although one role of the political writer is to confront the oppression we name that of the Kurds or of Kurdistan, they must not see that confrontation of otherness as enough. His key instance are the many sincere instances in which international writers and thinkers have tried to form relations of solidarity with writers on Kurdistan, some Kurds, on the basis of a defence of ‘freedom of expression’ for this culture, starting with the Freedom for Freedom of Expression Rally in Istanbul in 1997. Attended by Kelman and other members of PEN through Amnesty International’s invitation, the peculiarly reflexive stance of the title of this conference (‘freedom for freedom to’) cannot be easily understood. To this end, I query Kelman’s explanation of why, ‘when campaigns stop and start on Freedom of Speech and Expression, I am not necessarily sympathetic’.[1]

For Kelman the very term ‘freedom of speech and expression’ is nothing but a phrase that obstructs comprehension of WHAT an oppressed group seeks to express, and WHY it cannot express, experience, or research that confronts emotionally and cognitively the experience of oppression. The phrase is merely, even when used about the values of ‘English literature’:

              …an elitist kind of thing, at best silly, but essentially crap. …

Freedom of Speech and Expression. Freedom to speak about what? Freedom to express yourself about what?

Forget the general principle. To see this as a general principle plays into the hands of despots, dictatorships, and every other authoritarian regime. ….

… Speaking freely on the situation of Kurdistan is to break the law, not to breach a principle of natural justice.

The distinction made here still seems difficult to understand unless we see that it is the illegality of a specific ‘what’ (some essential content of living, feeling, behaving and thinking) that has been rendered illegal and hence unspeakable because it is unthinkable without breach of law. And this content (the ‘what’ Kelman’s essay labours over), although it may seem different for each and every kind of oppression and have to be known as such, will be secured by the same forces of statehood. One has freedom only FOR things of which the STATE approves. So although the content of any one kind of oppression is then often unthinkable for those oppressed for another reason, the fact of each oppression is a product of operations of power by hegemonic states.

Put generally then, claiming solidarity with those oppressed is not valuable if only expressed as a belief in a ‘general principle’ of ‘freedom of expression’. Such a principle does not exist in reality even in Great Britain. If it is to be politically meaningful, solidarity acknowledges the differences of content in that which is oppressed for each of many different oppressed groups in what they seek to express, assert or restore in their local struggles but only in the knowledge of the over-riding role of the state in organising all these oppressions, of organising limitation of the FREEDOM FOR THE FREEDOM TO.

International PEN writers may think they can talk and think they can think about Kurds, Kurdistan, Kurdish languages and dialects and this validates that this validates their freedom to do so. They may see their role as extending the freedom to do this to Turkey.  However, for writers in Turkey the demand is not for freedom to express the Kurdish struggle (the struggle against every instance of the suppression of Kurdish town names, languages, autonomous rights and so on) but for freedom to think this. It is a demand for a state of political being that enables FREEDOM FOR all citizens to speak about those oppressions legalised and naturalised by an UNFREE Turkish state. In the end ‘Freedom for freedom to’ is ‘freedom from state power’ and the validation of that power by other nation-states. Hence Turkey was able to present Abdullah Öcalan of the Kurdish Workers’ Party as a dangerous terrorist and have him regarded in such in Syria. In the European Countries to which he fled, under the pressure of  ‘blatant disinformation’ from their own national press, he was wanted as a criminal terrorist in Italy and Germany.[2]

This is why in the final essay of the collection, ‘Who’s Kidding Who? (2018)’ he can show that freedom to speak or think Kurdistan is less important than freedom for people – no matter of what and in what they speak.

The demographic nature of the imprisoned population (in Turkey) cannot be ignored. When I was writing this, dated November 2018: “the number of detained and convicted students in Turkey was around 70,000.” Seventy thousand students. How many of these are Turkish? How many are Kurdish? And how many have no association whatsoever with Kurdistan or Kurdishness?

in Kelman (2019:97).

Thus we have an impossible problem for writers wishing for an equivalent ‘freedom of speech and expression’ for Kurds in Turkey. Those writers may humbly seek freedom of speech for others in the knowledge that they cannot think of Kurdistan as Kurds do. But if those writers have no freedom for any free act, those writers must break through the hypocrisy of their own nation states and speak for freedom for those who are unfree to do so. Freedom of speech and expression is an example of what Kelman calls ‘Brit-speak gobbledegook’. It does not help us understand the ways in which British values are in fact implicit in upholding the rule of law in Turkey and hence the lack of anything like FREEDOM FOR anything disapproved by the Turkish state. Kelman tries to bring down this gobbledegook by attacking the international action against writers (not always Kurds) like the imprisoned Turkish sociologist Beşikҫi, including the difficulty he has even in finding a publisher outside Turkey. There is doublespeak rather than freedom in the UK too then. This is no different than, at the end of World War 1, a ‘lover of Arab culture,’ Gertrude Bell, according to the BBC, could admire Churchill’s RAF’s ‘wonders’ in ‘bombing insurgent villages’ In Iraqi-Kurdistan to preserve its oil riches for the West.  

---

[1] Extracted from ‘But What Is It They Are Trying To Express 2016’ Kelman, J. (2019:84) The Freedom To Think Kurdistan Glasgow: thi wurd.

[2] ‘The University of Strathclyde Students’ Association Grants Honoray Life Membershi[ to Kurdish Leader, Abdullah Öcalan 2015’ in Kelman (2019:70ff.).