The truth of the matter is this – we don’t need you to give us access to our own heritage (that is our right) and we certainly don’t need you to give us voices – we have our own!
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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.
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I'm an 18-year-old Pakistani […] I grew up with random people making me feel like I am a burden to my dad. I grew up with my dearest ones telling me that I must not dream too big, as one day I'll have to give up on those dream for a man’s fragile ego. I was taunted by my relatives for not knowing how to cook. I was instructed to bow down to my husband’s will. I was taunted in the middle of traffic when people beside me whispered: "How shameless for a female to drive."
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I could relate to Devi a lot. Maybe it is because Devi wears striped shirts and mom jeans — things I wear every day, like a cartoon character -- maybe it’s her way of dealing with trauma, maybe it’s that the only emotion she expresses in public is anger and that she is constantly fixated on doing things that would look good on her university applications, or maybe it’s simply her relationship with her mother.
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Aesthetics like Kaling’s seem unaware that you can be attached to your culture, informed by it, but also break it down, question it, tear it apart to create holes in it so more voices can come through. It is uncomfortable work, but it is possible –— I know many Indians and South-Asians across the world that do it every day.
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Hollywood celebrates representation politics and white saviourism as it did in Green Book, The Help or Driving Miss Daisy. It tries to be something new when in fact, it stays very loyal to Hollywood’s legacy.
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Istanbul’s particular legacy of continual destruction – that of nature, history and the city itself – is certainly a source of great chagrin and resignation for its denizens. But not just that: a great deal of fight, discourse, resistance, civil solidarity and determination swirls around these issues, renewing one’s faith in humanity in new ways every day.
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It’s a steep learning curve to manage your first-world preferences when you go back to a beloved society which still prefers to cook over a flaming hole in the ground. So if you, like me, moved to London and became a vegetarian because you wanted to ruin your grandparents’ lives, here’s how you can still enjoy yourself.
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Written with hindsight, Wasif seems to long for times, when the three religions lived together. This nostalgia sounds less like a tribute to the Ottoman rule and more of a yearning for a unified Jerusalem.
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That photo says it all. Peter Handke on genocide safari in Srebrenica, mere months after the unspeakable crime. The great white European poet is front and centre, blocking the view of the Cyrillic town sign he presumably can’t read. In the background, we see some people, a car, an industrial plant, houses and hills (and the watermark of the Austrian National Library).
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The depiction of constant movement and decamping, drove artists to come up with nascent tools under shifting and tense conditions. With a clear tendency to overcome that rigorous relationship (identity, self, roots) towards a freer and more direct interaction with the artwork, immersing a new sense, realizing aesthetic and sensational details. Finally, processing them on the canvas or into sculpture.
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To write, to remember, because one feels a duty to do so can be exhausting, and there's nothing wrong with recognizing that the occupied, the exiled and those in-between can also fail. But even in failure, a way out is possible.
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