Reclaiming the World Through Words: Kurdish Rap in Turkey
A man sitting at the Hasan Paşa Inn in Diyarbakır
A version of this article was first published in German by Spex magazine
Turkish Rap has become very popular for some years in Turkey. It has reached mainstream audiences, breaking records. We even see trap beats seeping into pop and fantezi music. Even though popular among working-class and Kurdish communities since the late 90s, contributing to the formation and development of the genre, Kurdish language rap music still remains underground. Guess why?
Back in 2019, Turkish hip hop star Ezhel uploaded an Instagram story of himself playing the ‘’bağlama’’ and singing an old Kurdish folk song. The video went viral: Turkish Twitter lit up with people who appreciate the artist’s peaceful gesture (who himself is not Kurdish) and others who condemn him for being a traitor to Turkey. Although Ezhel is not very upfront with his political thoughts, he has made it clear that he is against discrimination towards Kurds, he shares casual Kurdish music via his Instagram, even using Kurdish words in his music and openly supporting Kurdish rappers through his social media. But he is a rare example. Normally, Kurds and Kurdish language are condemned in the mainstream entertainment world and are always the subject of huge debates. This situation reflects their ostracisation in society as a whole. Even the late Ahmet Kaya, despite his fame and success, had to flee the country in the late 90s because of racism. In Turkey, Kurdish art is considered as only an extension of Turkish culture and anyone who even dares to celebrate it as something independent will suffer grave consequences.
When in 1999, Ahmet Kaya addressed the audience at an award ceremony on public TV that he dreamt of being able to record an album in Kurdish, the audience with the encouragement of other artists in the studio, started throwing stuff at him on live TV. When Aynur, a beloved Kurdish singer who is now living abroad, went up on stage with Sezen Aksu at one of Aksu’s concerts in 2011 and started singing in her native Kurdish, many people left booing in protest. The tradition of hate against Kurdish language and the thought of singing/speaking in Kurdish is a reflection of Turkey’s politics which systematically swept aside ethnic and religious minorities to build the nation’s character around Turkish identity. This outlook allowed a succession of governments to strengthen themselves through feeding on racism within society. With 20-25 million of the whole population, covering one-third of Turkey’s population, Kurds still do not have the right to education in their mother tongues. Though it’s not ‘’illegal’’, many fear to speak in their language in public spaces, for fear of being attacked.
During the peace process in 2014, when AKP was considering certain reforms regarding Kurdish minority rights and the de-weaponizing of the PKK was being discussed it seemed to have been a much more open environment for people to be able to talk in Kurdish. There were even artists who supported the process by contributing with their art, one of them being a Kurdish rapper Dezz Deniz dedicating a song in Kurdish. That’s why Kurdish musicians who could afford it, move abroad at some point to be able to make their music comfortably. The aforementioned Aynur who moved to Germany, Ahmet Kaya moved to Paris after the horrendous event in 1999 and died there a year later. Contemporary Kurdish rap musicians who are relatively more visible are also mostly living abroad. Serhado, who is seen as one of the first Kurdish rappers out there and is much appreciated, was born in Mardin and lives in Sweden. One of the few female Kurdish rappers, Dezz Deniz, lives in Germany.
Most new wave rappers in Turkey benefit from their ethnic origin (as Turkish) and/or singing in Turkish. Unlike them, Kurdish rappers are still mostly overseen. Heijan, a Kurdish MC from a very poor neighbourhood of Bağcılar, became an internet phenomenon with his track Bonzai Bom in 2015 in which he raps about a popular street drug known as Bonzai. He was imprisoned for the charge of using drugs, but this went pretty overseen when compared to the support Turkish rappers got in similar situations. In one of his tracks titled Ez Kurdistanım, he sings ‘’I talk to you in a banned language’’, a clear reference to the fact that the denial of language constitutes the dehumanizing of Kurdish people as citizens.
One other difference between Kurdish rappers and mainstream Turkish rap is the subject matter of their music. While most mainstream Turkish rappers now tend to sing about hedonistic ways of living, including having sex and using drugs and not touching anything political, Kurdish rappers almost always rap about political conditions through personal and public observations. In an interview for Duvar newspaper, rapper Roni Artin rightfully accuses White-Turkish rappers of appropriating a certain American hip hop culture in their lyrics, even if those are not their own reality. Many Istanbulite Turkish rappers try to justify their over-hedonistic lyrics by insisting ‘’this is hip hop culture.’’ Most of the time this statement doesn’t mean anything other than imitating specific musicians. For instance, Ben Fero is a successful imposter of Migos, appropriating their trademark Trap sound as well as the shallow, money-oriented lyrics, on occasions they even name the same luxury brands. For Kurdish rappers, hip hop really means a way to express their socio-political concerns. ‘’We sometimes sing about our problems and sometimes we’d laugh, but all of our lyrics are real’’ says Roni. Cash Ömer, Heijan’s little brother who also raps, recognizes the terrible situation of Syrian immigrants in Bağcılar. He makes the point that the poorest Syrians live there, 15 people in the same basement rooms and working for meagre wages. ‘’Some of them even get into drug dealing’’ he remarks.
In fact, rapping may be a part of Kurdish culture for a longer time than it seems. The Kurdish tradition of Dengbeji music is a form of spoken word that dates back thousands of years. ‘’Dengbej’’ is a person who tells stories through an acapella, melismatic way of half-singing, half speaking. The songs they sing are called ‘’dengbeji’’ and some of them are over one hour long or more. This tradition remains very important to Kurdish culture since it helps prevent assimilation through the imposition of Turkish culture. Storytelling is therefore innate to Kurdish culture. It’s a means to leave a trace in the world when the world is so keen on ignoring you; no wonder rapping became a new form of passing these stories to one another. As rapper Zımanbaz says: ‘’Rapping in Kurdish is my way of protesting in itself. Every song sung in Kurdish is a way of telling the world that I am here!’’.
In Turkey, the Kurdish language is often associated with terrorism and Kurdish music in every form is considered as ‘’protest’’ music. Hence many Turks consider contemporary musical genres as ‘unfit’ for Kurdish language, hip hop is one of them. This racist tendency to label Kurdish as unmodern (hip hop and other popular music are associated with Western values, hence are considered modern and ‘good’), therefore ill-suited for popular music is just another version of the ancient racist allegations that the Kurdish language is underdeveloped. This is how culture works as class performance.
Even when the government puts all of its repressive apparatus to work, these young Kurdish rappers find ways to survive. The Internet functions as the habitat of these newly emerging artists. They share their music on it and find each other and organize over it. The internet also works as an alternative outlet to get information from, bypassingother than government propaganda channels. So at least for some people who dare to follow the white rabbit, the internet works as a mediator between cultures too, provided that it hasn’t been filtered through censorship first.
In September 2019, German Netflix launched a series called Skylines of which its main character is a rap musician of Kurdish descent. Remembering that Turkish rap was born in Berlin in the 90s as a reaction to the discrimination Turkish immigrants were facing in Germany, one cannot help but wonder if late 2010s would be the decade Kurdish rap finally broke into ‘existence’. For a people whose culture was systematically discriminated, stolen, assimilated and erased, speaking matters. Speaking matters as it functions as a means of not forgetting what happened and is happening. It’s exciting to see these artists walking surely through the thick cloud of prejudices against Kurds and insisting on speaking their stories in Kurdish and hopefully this is just the beginning.