“Whatever you are going to write about me, write my name underneath. Write my name. (…) Whenever. Wherever. Because the day will come and we will disappear. You know how many people have disappeared. (…) So many historical people, writings, pieces, things have been lost. And whatever is left, [other] people have appropriated for themselves.” This is what Sinem, a female dengbêj [Kurdish singer/story-teller] from Van, told me during one of the many conversations we had about her singing. Like many other female dengbêjs I met, Sinem, too, regarded her singing as a means to leave traces by way of her kilams – traces that would remain and prevent her from joining the fate of all those individuals whose names and identities she felt had disappeared. This paper seeks to follow the traces women dengbêjs like Sinem were so intent on leaving behind as a means to explore the ways in which Kurdish women imagine themselves as subjects who have a voice – in both literal and metaphorical terms. I argue that the way in which women dengbêjs made use of and imagined their voices indicates a peculiar politically inflected desire for individuality, authorship and recognition that forms part of a distinctly modern understanding of the voice as an expression of the inner self; an understanding, which in turn makes possible the easy slippage between voice, self and agency. At the same time, this is an understanding crucially shaped by the long-standing history of Kurds’ struggle for recognition in Turkey and in particular the role that women have played within it. Based on ethnographic material, I will focus on the ways in which women dengbêjs actually went about leaving traces through using their voices in specific ways. In particular, I will pay close attention to the role technologies like the tape recorder or cell phones – as means for fixation and inscription – came to play in the process of literally “making” traces. By connecting an ethnographic investigation of changing understandings of orality and writing, of original and copy, of improvisation and authorship with an investigation of the transforming understandings of subjectivity on the part of Kurdish women, this paper thus shows how imaginations of the voice and imaginations of the self are closely intertwined.

This paper contributes to the debate on the worlds of imagination upheld by Kurds by presenting the theme of ‘health’ as a fundamental part of individuals’ and communities’ everyday life. I engage with the ongoing health care transformation in Turkey and its application in the south-eastern context, where it is not possible to dismiss state violence which represents the strongest form of inequality suffered by the Kurdish population, simultaneously affecting their very own health. From their inclusion into the national health care system through the ‘universal’ coverage -the green card system- to the ongoing transitional moment characterised by the expansion of the private sector, I analyse how women and men perceive and imagine ‘health’ and how this has been changing in relation to economic, social and historical transformations in the Kurdish region. I would like to present part of my ethnographic fieldwork – conducted between 2011 and 2012 - in Diyarbakır province, where I interviewed doctors’ union, health professionals and several other actors inside the governmental institutions. By doing so I will portray how the interviewees and these organisations advocate for the betterment of ‘health’ for Kurdish women and men in south-eastern Turkey. I will not consider Kurds as an homogeneous group and I will look at ‘health’ as a result of a complex construction where several factors interplay in order to show how, through collaboration with and criticisms of state institutions, women and men actively imagine and fight for new trajectories in which they can also express their sense of belonging. I argue that, once taken together, this socio-political interplay draws a clear image of how ‘health’ is constructed and imagined in the Kurdish region with references to the political conflict and through a strong discourse on the biomedical domain which reinforces the perception of inequality inside the system itself. Furthermore the hegemony of the biomedical system is silently questioned in the private sphere through the practices of local medicines in the everyday life not just as a solution to inadequate medical care, but also as a significant way to define ‘health’.

“Doğubeyazıt is the fourth most Kurdish city in Turkey,” I am told by the owner of an internet cafe as an impatient soldier nudges me to pay. I leave without an explanation of the ranking system or a completed list. As I walk down İsmail Beşikçi Street, named after the Turkish scholar who served 17 years in prison for his “pro-Kurdish” writings, I wonder what comes after Diyarbakır, the “Kurdish capital.” Istanbul could be second, more Kurds live there than any other city in the world. Any of the cities on the nightly news, Kurdish teenagers throwing stones at Turkish police, more commonly known by their Kurdish names, Colemêrg (Hakkarı) or Gewer (Yüksekova), could take second and third place. There always seems to be a slight pause when people call Doğubeyazıt, Bazîd. However, the statement is not a criticism of the city’s commitment to the Kurdish struggle. The town has been run by a “pro-Kurdish” municipality since the end of the 1990’s. In fact, both the current and former mayor are women, suggesting that the city also supports the movement’s gender policies. And on the walls of the local BDP office, surrounding a picture of the imprisoned Kurdish leader, Abdullah Öcalan, are numerous photographs of local PKK martyrs. Perhaps this ranking points to the city's historical insignificance? However, just outside the city is the mausoleum of Kurdistan’s most famous poet and philosopher Ehmedê Xanî (1651-1707). If we flip through the booklet, Doğybeyazıt’s Natural Treasures, written in Kurdish, Turkish and English, on page 57 we come across a list of local organizations that includes İlimizi geri istiyoruz derneği (We Want our Capital Status Returned Society). This refers to the city’s position as a capital during Ottoman rule and alludes to the Kurdish nationalist rebellion, the Mount Ararat Rebellion (1927-1930), that led to the loss of this status. What the tracing of this fragment reveals is not what “Kurdish history” but “how history works” (Trouillot 1995). Rather than viewing the historical imagination produced and performed in Turkey’s “fourth most Kurdish city” as mimetic re-appropriation of the state or as an identity narrative, I suggest reading it between the state and the nation. How these histories work, whether in everyday encounters, on street signs, or during martyr’s funerals, is through an ambiguity over state and nation. What these histories "do" is imagine forms of belonging beyond the limiting political horizons of the two.

“Yes, we are Kurds, but we are also somehow Armenians,” an acquaintance in Mardin mentioned to me as he explained why he and his friends were eager to help me, an Armenian-American woman, in my attempt to learn Kurdish. He explained that many families, like his, have an Armenian ancestor, and if not, then that everyone at least knows someone with an Armenian relative and recognizes the significance of the historic Armenian presence in the region and the violent history of the destruction of the Armenian community. His remarks highlight the way in the history of Armenians is intertwined with the history of Kurds, and the ways in which Kurds imagine themselves partially through imagining Armenians. This process plays out not only in the realm of family lineages, local histories, and individual identities, but indeed is linked to larger political processes and discourses of nationalism and nationhood. In Turkey in particular, the politics of remembering and forgetting the Armenian past has been intertwined with the Kurdish struggle, repression of Kurdish communities, and a reimagining of the history of eastern Anatolia. These questions of the politics of history and memory were highlighted at the recent opening of a memorial in Diyarbakir, the Monument of Common Conscience, which reads in six languages “We share the pain so that it is not repeated.” At the opening ceremony, the Kurdish mayor of the city declared that the Kurds were apologizing in the name of their ancestors for the massacres and deportations of 1915 and called on the Turkish government to do the same. This incident indicates the way in which the history of the Armenian community in Turkey is politicized as well as inextricably linked to the Kurdish struggle. In this paper I will draw on ethnographic work that I carried out in Elazig, Mardin, and Van to explore the ways in which Kurds today imagine themselves through imagining Armenians, and how Kurds construct their own past and present by narrating the history of the departed Armenians. Where possible, I will explore the stories of Armenians who were assimilated into Kurdish communities after 1915, how their histories are remembered and narrated, and how they shape the lived experience and political subjectivities of Kurds today.

“She said to me that I did not seem like a Kurdish girl. How dare she say that I do not look like Kurdish! As if we have lost our Kurdishness! However, this may not be a bad thing, because you know what they say, ‘nothing is permanent except change...’” This is one of my interlocutors speaking, a nineteen year-old young woman, as a response to the accusations by an old Kurdish woman to her and her friends for not looking like “a Kurdish girl.” She is a young Kurdish woman from Dolapdere, Istanbul – a neighborhood predominantly populated by Kurdish migrants who have been displaced from the Kurdish regions of Turkey in the 1990s. This paper brings a feminist challenge to the imagination of Dolapdere as a space of freedom, where Kurdish people find a refuge against the attacks of the Turkish state in the face of their ethnicity, by underlining the ways in which young Kurdish women experience the prevalent rhetoric of Kurdishness that permeates the space of neighborhood. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Dolapdere, I argue that the notion of Kurdishness is a dynamic concept that has been attached different meanings and feelings in different circumstances and spaces by young Kurdish women. On the one hand, their struggle in the everyday life derives from their ethnicity, against the authoritarian Turkish nation-state and racist undercurrents of Turkish society, which is pervasive in the urban public space of Istanbul. While in these moments Kurdishness emerges as a liberatory discourse that evokes the ongoing political resistance, the concept gains a hegemonic meaning when it is applied within the Kurdish community where a homogenizing imagination of Kurdishness is imposed over the body of these women. By putting the ambivalence in my respondent's narration at its focus, this paper claims that the daily lives of young Kurdish women in Istanbul’s city space is based upon their negotiations with various forms of ideologies and belongings. This essay will particularly pay attention to how young Kurdish women themselves imagine the term Kurdishness while interrogating the unifying assumptions embedded in the term Kurdishness that is implemented both by the Turkish state and Kurdish community.