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2022; Indiana University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-10022202

1558-9579

Zehra Doğan,

Public Spaces through Art

The patterns that adorn the carpets carry within them people’s memory. In Kurdish lands also, carpets are an important means of expression.The women get together and, while singing, tell their stories on their looms, thread after thread, with their fingertips. . . . Mardin, a city in southeastern Turkey, stands on part of the Kurdish lands, which were divided like a pie in four, a hundred years ago, between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. I was born there.Stories lurk on each of the historical streets that crisscross Mardin and turn it into a labyrinth—my town with the ocher atmosphere. Armenians, Arabs, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Mahallamis, Kurds: in this town we have all lived together for centuries. At times the history of the powerful led us to kill one another: the Syriac genocide in 1914–20, the Armenian genocide that began in 1915, then the policies of genocide and assimilation targeting the Kurdish people. . . . By itself, Mardin is like a prototype of Kurdistan: centuries-old peoples, each with their own painful history, holding on to a profound dignity without ever giving it up.In this town, at every turn, you come across women with black, deep-set eyes that say everything. Women who go on living without forgetting their bitter history, who move on, not with sickly hatred in their hearts but with the determination to surmount everything by deeply inhaling the air of the alleyways.