VOICES OF COURAGE
©HOSHIN ISSA
For further information and more on Zehra's art:
https://banksyexplained.com/zehra-dogan-march-2018/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zehra_Doğan
https://artinprotest.viewingrooms.com/viewing-room/6-zehra-dogan/
https://pen.org/advocacy-case/zehra-dogan/
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202102/zehra-dogan-85043
Zehra Doğan is a Kurdish artist, journalist and author from Diyarbakir, Turkey. Zehra is the co-founder and former editor of the feminist Kurdish news agency Jinha which the Turkish government shot down in 2016 for its critical news coverage. In 2017 Zehra was arrested and served almost three years in prison because of her critical art and for sharing her paintings on social media about the destruction - after clashes between the Turkish state and Kurdish insurgents - of Nusaybin, a city in southeast Turkey whose population is predominantly Kurdish. In order to cope with life in prison, she continued to work creatively under impossible conditions: "In prison artistic material was forbidden, so I used everything I could find: packaging, newspapers, clothes and sheets and colours I prepared with vegetable waste, tea, coffee, spices, menstrual blood …."
Many international human rights organisations and famous artists like Ai Weiwei and Banksy have campaigned for Zehra's release from prison. Today Zehra is free and shows her art around the globe. She had to leave Turkey but continues to draw attention to the human rights violations of Turkey against the Kurdish people.
Zehra is a member of the PEN International and received numerous awards for her art as well as for her human rights activism. Zehra has written and published several books, for example, the graphic novel "Prison No 5" and "Nous aurons aussi de beaux jours: écrits de prison" (We shall also know better days: prison writings)
For various reasons, it was not possible to record Zehra's interview on video at the time. Therefore we decided on a written version of the interview. With heartfelt gratitude to Naz Oke, who made this interview possible and translated it into English.
Zehra's Interview:
I was born in Diyarbakır, in 1989. I am a journalist and artist.
What does courage mean to you? How has this meaning of courage influenced your life?
Courage is not necessarily a heroic feeling. It probably comes from an awareness and a sense of responsibility. In specific circumstances, we know that we can achieve things, in our own way. Even if sometimes fear is there, we do it. Not to be confused with a sense of duty, it's a much simpler thought "I can do it, if I don't do it, who will, so I do it". In the end, courage is just the fact of not allowing oneself to be overwhelmed by fear. Of course, there have been times of despair. But this necessity to act that I felt helped me to overcome the torpor, very quickly.
For example, when I was in prison, drawing... The most important thing I held on to... From day one, everywhere I looked I saw sketches. The rusty iron in the toilet, the peeling paint on old walls, the shapes of tea spilt on the table can take... I could see in all that, a lot of things. Even when I was talking to a friend, I would draw her mentally hundreds of times. I couldn't stop it. For a moment, I thought I was losing my mind. But then I realized that art is my song, my faith, my prayer. And I started painting again, drawing again, with everything I could find. And that gave me more and more courage. It was a sign that, despite all the difficulties and prohibitions, I would never surrender.
Also, the solidarity between us, and the solidarity that I was receiving, that we were all receiving, from the outside, gave me a lot of courage.
What kind of books for example did you read as a child?
It was Dostoyevsky, War and Peace that struck me the most.
What kind of stories have shaped you and are maybe still with you until today?
The stories my mother used to tell me never left me. She has many, and long ones. Some are traditional stories, and others are real-life stories, for example, the story of the Armenian women. In fact, I would like to transcribe them, to do something with all these riches.
The Kurdish legends and epics that I have known since my childhood are also part of my universe. For example, I have several works that refer to the Shahmaran, a mythological creature whose cradle is Nusaybin.
Do you remember when you first stood up (at what age and in which situation) for something you believed in - even if it was not the opinion of the majority in your society?
Diyarbakır was already a political hotbed, and it still is today. I was a child who grew up in this political atmosphere. My problems with power began at birth. Because I was born as a Kurd, but I am registered with a Turkish identity. So I am of Turkish nationality. But I am Kurdish.
All the children who are born in this town are politicized. From an early age, I was a child who struggled politically, like all children. When I was 17, I was arrested for throwing stones. I was taken into custody, tried, and given a six-month suspended sentence. Since then, until today, I've been like this. During my university years, I was politically active. I was immersed in a political atmosphere and political work and I started JINHA this way.
My first problem was in school. When I started primary school, I was faced with a language I didn't know. With a teacher who came from the Black Sea region, and didn't speak Kurdish. I entered a system that pretended that the Kurdish language did not exist, that Kurds did not exist, and that I had to, and all children had to, "be put on a straight path". And I went through a great upheaval. And that's when I started to question even more. Because in this school, we started the day by "praising our existence to the Turkish existence", the Turkish youth oath.
In my correspondence book "Nous aurons aussi de beaux jours" published in France in 2019 by Editions des femmes, I told this memory:
Sixty-three children! Most of us lived in stables with our families. No toilets or bathrooms. No one spoke Turkish, yet we were taught Turkish. As you can imagine, we didn't understand anything except the beatings we received. Our teacher kept shouting at us: "You fools! "but we smiled at her. Because we didn't know then what that word meant. I will never forget the day the teacher came up to my desk and dragged a girl who had just been beaten up. She said, "Move over a little to the other side so your friend can sit down. "I didn't understand anything, but I replied with a smiling look. Since I was a tiny little thing, all cute, she didn't take it too hard. But then she repeated the same sentence over and over again. I kept smiling at her, holding my arms folded as she always wanted us to hold each other. She suddenly grabbed me by the arm and slid me abruptly on the bench as if she wanted to push me against the wall: "I'm asking you to push yourself to the other side! I'm asking you to push yourself over to the other side," she probably shouted, making the girl sit next to me. That day, I was still very happy. I didn't have time for violence, I would have plenty of time for it later. I was happy; I had learned that day the word "side". I was going to learn the word 'other' later. ("Nous aurons aussi de beaux jours". Letter of December 10, 2018. Page: 232)
What kind of creative strategies (guiding images ) are you using in your work?
For me, art is a weapon. For me, creativity and activism are inseparable. This is understandable because as a woman, as a Kurdish, as a journalist, and as an artist, I feed off the struggle, the resistance. In all my creations, one inevitably finds the trace of what feeds me.
In my daily life, the conditions in which I find myself inevitably influence my creative strategies. I perceive the places in which I find myself, through my multiple identities. And I express what I witness, the testimonies, the events that touch me, with the possibilities given to me by the conditions in which I live. I have lived through places and periods of war, I have been in prison, and today I cannot work freely in my country, I live in "nomadic mode" in Europe.
Difficulties such as prohibitions, oppressions, and lack of materials have pushed me towards plastic research, and thus necessarily influenced the techniques and materials I use... For example, during the curfews in 2016, I drew a lot in digital format. For example in prison, as artistic material was forbidden, I used everything I could find; packaging, newspapers, clothes and sheets as supports, and for colours, mixtures that I prepared with vegetable waste, tea, coffee, spices, menstrual blood... Today I am free, but I continue to work with the same techniques. My creation is therefore shaped by my life experience.
What do you think enables you to do what you do?
(Means what gives you strength and joy.)
Human beings can only give meaning to life by being free, otherwise, no matter where they live, it will always remain a dark prison. Revealing life in all things is for me to express it through deeds and thought. I know that you don't get things just by hoping for them. A real struggle must mobilize every moment of life.
For example, in prison, could we say, "Today we are imprisoned, we can do nothing until we get out"? On the contrary, we continued to play politics within the prison itself. Politics is also a philosophy of life. It requires curiosity and wonder. I say this as a woman born in the Middle East, a land of contradictions, oppression, exploitation and chaos; it is necessary to have a philosophical, scientific and artistic point of view. It is imperative to internalize all this knowledge and confront it with life. It is necessary to know what is happening on the other side of the world, and to have the desire to be informed about it. But joy and strength are indispensable. Even in prison, even in times of war, there is strength. The most important is the strength of women who are aware of their own energy and determination. This is the essence of life, intimate, each one's own.
Laughter, derision, self-mockery, and humour is a powerful weapon for individual and collective morale. In my book, I paid homage to Leyla Güven, a Kurdish deputy who shared my neighbourhood in Diyarbakir prison. I would like to repeat this tribute here:
Leyla brings joy wherever she goes, and in life, she offers no room for the impossible. She is convinced from the bottom of her heart that everything can be won through struggle and that hope, and conviction in struggle is already half the battle. She is an example for all of us, to take life by the arm and succeed in feeling happiness in the smallest breeze of life. Even in prison, her joie de vivre would pass through the concrete walls and mingle with the sun that warms these lands. ("Nous aurons aussi de beaux jours". Letter dated February 3, 2019. Page: 287)
Ez Zehra (I, Zehra) 97 x 140 cm. Bird feathers fallen in the walk, hair, menstrual blood. 2019, started in Diyarbakir prison and ended in Tarsus prison.
How do you sustain your activism (and your work as a political artist)?
As I said earlier, I cannot dissociate creativity and activism. Life is political and so my art is naturally political. In this perspective, my wish is to take my work to places reserved for art, where political expression, the archiving of political realities through art, and testimonies from the field, unfortunately, enter with difficulty. Some museums and art galleries, for example, offer a certain public the possibility to meet art, if it is political, contains a self-censored expression, that is to say, coded, which is not at all in my approach, which is a raw and clear expression. Of course, I would like to express myself, wherever I am offered a space to speak. But also, as a militant artist, to bring my work, in an activist and concrete approach, through different initiatives, and particularly in the street, to meet public opinion.
I have several projects in progress or in the process of realization, in this sense. For example, I recently launched a wall newspaper with the title "The Hard Times" whose first issue was set up by militant friends in Paris. This first edition was about the mobilization and protests that followed the assassination of George Floyd in the United States. There will be future issues for other events and struggles around the world. This concept makes it possible to intervene in places where I can't go, and the fact of carrying them out with the participation of local actors makes it possible to weave networks, deepen them, and take collective action. Solidarity in creation is very precious and necessary to me. For me, this project, which is built on the idea "if street art exists, street journalism exists too!", is a way of bringing together my two trades, art and journalism, and challenging people in their daily lives, to inform them and invite them to reflect on their daily journeys.
http://www.kedistan.net/2020/06/15/zehra-dogan-paris-walls-blacklivesmatter/
Another street project will soon be carried out in Italy, in Brescia, as a tribute to the medical profession and the population of Italy seriously affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Santa Guilia Museum and the city of Brescia are helping me to create this large fresco.
What are the challenges ( in your opinion) facing us as mankind today?
The list would be a long one... Ecological problems, the predation of nature and life, racism, violence, especially against women and children, the suffering of minorities and oppressed peoples, wars that set the planet on fire, the exploitation of human beings...
The ambition for power is a disease. It is what has put the world in this state. This disease is an ideology: that of power. It began to spread thousands of years ago by annihilating women. Then, like a pandemic, this virus infected all areas of the world. Art and science, confiscated by the dominant powers, have lost their true mission. We, humans, are transformed into machines, in a life that resembles a simulation, we work, we consume, and we serve.
The challenge? Perhaps this challenge is being taken up by women in Rojava, northern Syria. There they try to be at the forefront of a movement of transformation, so rejected by all, that it is attacked and besieged from all sides. To want to create a form of social democracy in such an environment of war, taking into account precisely this long list, is not the most beautiful of the challenges that women are taking up there.
How important is solidarity?
Solidarity is indispensable. In the most difficult times, collective solidarity is a great source of morale and energy. These moments of connection and encounters, both behind prison walls and outside, this pooling of know-how, experiences and the will of each individual, allows us to move forward together towards a conquest. Nothing happens by itself. The dynamics of solidarity offer the possibility of crossing the path of beautiful people. Each one, each one does, each one brings, according to who they are. In the end, the scheme is quite simple. Simple as life itself...
Do you think every society needs courageous people ("first movers") which are willing to move first even if there is no safety in numbers and no guarantee that others will join and often striving for a better world comes at a price?
Of course, it does. Let's take a recent example... In the first issue of "The Hard Times", it is stressed that it doesn't matter who you are, famous or unknown, it doesn't matter, because only your actions matter. Nobody knew Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, or Rosa Parks before they took an act challenging truth and justice... These are just a few examples of "first movers"... I think that, as Angela Davis expresses it in the context of racism, "In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist", the context can be expanded infinitely, beyond geographical and coercive boundaries; as long as truth and justice are lacking, it is not enough to be outraged, but to join the struggle. Oppression creates its own resistance, and then everyone can and must take their place in this resistance with their own means.
Is there anything like an ancient story, writings, images, music, poems.... everything that comes to mind - that has strengthened you to do what you do?
For example, poetry has great popular importance. The Kurds particularly like poetry. Our evenings with friends and family] are always poetic. But there is a poet who touches me a lot and who touches all Kurds, it's Ahmed Arif. He's a poet who was in prison, and he wrote his book of poems in prison. He has, for example, a poem "I used irons in your absence" and he used a lot of metaphors related to prison. I can say that he is the poet who touches me the most.
For me, poetry is, like any art, a weapon. It brings all the metaphors together, in a word. That is to say, it is not necessary to say many things, poetry can express many things at once. There's no need for full pages filled in, no need for long political speeches. It's like a painting. One shot... She focuses on that shot, and she always does it in a sincere way. It's because she's sincere that she's strong. In poetry, there's sincerity and feeling.
Ahmed Arif did years in prison, he survived with three pennies, but he never took a step back. Hasan Hüseyin Korkmaz, another great poet... These are people who marked historical periods with their poetry, and who wrote while taking the risk of prison. For example Ahmet Kaya... Today, everyone still sings Ahmet Kaya's songs. The songs of the resistance are still his songs today. And in reality, Ahmet Kaya's songs are mostly composed of known poems.
For example, the songs of Şivan Perwer, are the songs we like the most. His songs that people take the road of the guerrilla, wave by wave. And these songs are mostly the poems of Cigerxwîn who is one of the most important poets in Kurdish history. My father hid Cigerxwîn's cassettes for years in the body of the car. It was so important. They were recordings of poems read in his own voice. Getting caught with Cigerxwîn's poems was very dangerous, more dangerous even than getting caught with drugs. It was risky business, with serious convictions. Those prohibitions were lifted quite recently. For years, people listened to these poems in secret, secretly recomposed them, and tried to stay upright with the poetry. What keeps the Kurdish struggle alive is also poetry. The poems of Cigerxwîn, the songs of Ahmet Kaya, of Şivan Perwer, of Hozan, keep the struggle standing.