Title: “The Dream of Kurdistan is Buried Here”: History,
Violence, and Martyrdom in the Borderlands of the Middle
Eastern Nation-State
Author: Susan Benson-Sokmen
Place of publication: Canada
Publisher:University of Toronto
Release date: 2019
This dissertation attempts to answer two main questions. Firstly, how do you tell a history of national struggle that has not ended in the foundation of a nation state? Secondly, is here a way to include women in histories of national resistance without erasing their own desires for and understandings of liberation or reducing their participation in national struggle to accommodation or critique? This dissertation poses these questions from Kurdistan, what many Kurdish scholars describe as the largest nation without a state. Rather than attempting to explain why Kurds have not achieved statehood despite a long history of national resistance, the dissertation’s four chapters explore ways to narrate the nation that has not ended in a nation-state. The dissertation is about the writing of history from Kurdistan and the processing of the past in Doğubayazıt, a Kurdish town in Turkey that sits in the foothills of Mount Ararat. How do ‘ordinary’ Kurdish men and women make sense of an unfinished history of national resistance? How do they use this history to make sense of the ongoing history of state violence? There is no attempt to corroborate or verify the histories told in Doğubayazıt. Rather, the dissertation engages ethnographically with the past. Tracing and following the reanimation of the defeat of the Mount Ararat Rebellion (Ağrı Dağı İsyanı, 1926-1931) by its ‘descendants,’ this dissertation attempts to ‘rescue’ Kurdish history from the triumphal narrative of the nation-state. The reanimations of the defeat of the Mount Ararat Uprising by Kurdish resistance needs to be read as a critique rather than a celebration of the nation-state. Despite the profound transformations in the thought, practices, and goals of Kurdish nationalism over the last decades, scholars continue to confine the “dream of Kurdistan” to what Turkish Foreign Minister Tewfik Rüştü Bey described in 1927 as the two options for “smaller groups”—to “disappear” or to wait.. But if grasped as Walter Benjamin suggests as “it flashes up at a moment of danger,” Kurdish resistance is no longer the tragedy or romance of the nation-state in the Middle East but a desire for the possibility of other forms of belonging. [1]