At Toronto's 7th Annual Kurdish Culture and Peace Festival, politician Jim Karygiannis, back from accompanying a Canadian business delegation to Northern Iraq, told the crowd that Southern Kurdistan is "open for business." The audience, ignoring the parliamentarian's evocation of a "united Kurdistan" like he was a child pestering for change to buy ice-cream, chatted and caught up with friends. While Karygiannis addressed his audience as Canadian-Kurds, the festival-goers, mostly Kurds from Northern Kurdistan or Turkey, came to the festival, organized to commemmorate the Kurdistan Worker's Party's (PKK) first attack on the Turkish state, to practice a different hyphenated identity. In other words, Karygiannis may have been correct in assuming that he was addressing a crowd of Kurdish long-distance nationalists but he was incorrect in the scale and scope of this longing. However, the mistaken arrest of the festival's headliner, musical superstar Sivan Perwer, the day after the event further complicates this. Within a few weeks, Kurds protested outside the Canadian embassy in Washington, demanding, on behalf of all Kurds all over the world, an apology from the Canadian prime minister. Instead of expanding or contracting the Kurdish "ethnoscape," I examine the Kurdish festival in order to follow "everyday" fluctuations in Kurdish identity. Since festivals are "sites of social action where identities and relations are continually being reconfigured" (Guss 2000), the Kurdish Festival is an "everyday" site through which we can view consolidations of and contentions over national and diasporic belonging. Furthermore, their temporary nature, the taking down of booths one year and the setting up of displays the next, hint at how identities fluctuate between adaptation and re-articulation, and in the process get tampered with and transformed. And since festivals have "audiences" they expose how ordinary people, as "poet of their own acts" (de Certeau 1984), respond to and evade being "called into being." Following Brubaker's notion of the diaspora as a "stance" (2005) and Warner's idea of a counterpublic as a transformative space of meaning-making (2002), I argue that the Kurdish Diaspora is actually a "counter-diaspora." I "participate" in two multicultural festivals in Toronto, the Kurdish Culture and Peace Festival and the Toronto Turkish Festival, in order to elucidate the idea of a counter-diaspora as a national and transnational network of publics and counter-publics tied to, either momentarily or deeply, the emancipatory remaking of contested geographies through ethnicity, sexuality, and/or gender.