They took my grandfather’s music and our language.
I was born in Kirkisrak village in Kayseri Province, Bakurê Kurdistanê (Bakur, Turkish-occupied Kurdistan), in 1983 to a shepherd and farmer family. Life was hard but ideal for an innocent child growing up in between beautiful mountains and living a simple organic life. My mother tongue is Kurdish (Kurmanji), and I didn't learn Turkish until I started school. Our teachers were Turkish, they didn't speak Kurdish, and there was no teaching assistant for Kurdish speakers. We always had to reach out to someone in the village who knows both languages to support us.
I can recall two of our teachers, one was a young man named Tuncay and the other teacher I can't recall his name, but I remember he used to hit us all during teaching. He was harsher on boys, belting them, and once gave a boy a black eye. We were poor children who didn’t understand Turkish because we were born in Kurdish families and our first language is Kurdish. I can't even recall how but within a year I was able to read and write Turkish, but for all my sins my handwriting was awful, and I was often beaten up for that. We were forced each morning to read a declaration of being Turkish. We were aware that we are Kurds and speaking Kurmanji, but we warned not to say anything in school or that we will get into trouble. …
My grandfather had a gramophone which was a very precious thing to us. We didn't have TV or radio, so the gramophone was the most prized possession in our family. We children were not allowed to touch it. The songs were mainly Kurdish songs, ‘dengbej’, from the southeast. We were living in a mud house, walls made of rock and ceiling lined with wood. Inside our house we had a few stoves to keep warm and all three generations lived in these four roomed houses.
My first memory of which I felt really oppressed was seeing my grandfather digging a hole in our garden in front of our house. He put the gramophone and all the disks into the hole, then covered it with dirt and laid a carpet on it. I didn't understand! I was questioning, why is my grandfather doing that? While I was questioning my grandmother, she was encouraging him to hurry, she had an anxious voice, and I was told not to say anything. Especially not talk in Kurmanji! But we don't speak Turkish! What should we do? They said, ‘Don't talk at all and sit where you are.’ A few minutes later we heard an army vehicle coming, they were on an operation apparently to search and look for anything which they suspect. My dear grandfather’s music and our language (us speaking Kurdish/or a single word of Kurdish) were something we strongly believed they would be interested in taking away from us. Others in the village were taken away for not doing what my grandparents did. This event was so traumatic for me! I must have been five or six years old back then. I never forgot it and remember it vividly.
I learned that the Kurdish language is the language that we are suppressed for and the fact that we are Kurds, not Turkish, is unacceptable.
Sevim Zelal Tonbul, Kurmanji speaker in Bakur, Turkish-occupied Kurdistan
(Edits made for clarity. Emphasis added.)
