Rebin Uzman

There are some things that do not leave people alone like dreams. Sometimes they are a bunch of words, sometimes they are slogans written on a wall and sometimes they are the smell of something from our childhood. When we were kids, we experienced many curious things that we can see that after many years they are still with us and take us back to those days. A slogan, a text, a smell, an interesting word that was not in our school books and we did not learn there… one of these dreams clings in my mind for a short while and reminds me of such dreams, a slogan from the 1990s.

In 1990, I attended a school in Turkey known as YIBO. Most of the students of this school were children from the villages and the school looked like a military headquarters rather than a school. Physical punishment was used because we spoke a language that we had learned from home and years later we learned that it was Kurmanji or Kurdish. We had never been exposed to the Turkish language before that day and we did not even know a word of it, but when you are in a school that is firmly teaching you the Turkish language and culture, you will learn inevitably after a few months. Like all my friends who were in those institutions, after a few months, I learned how to read Turkish. I read the texts even though I did not understand them well, I would do what my teacher had said and I would try to read whatever they gave me…

At that time, we could only visit home once a month on a Friday and go back to school on Monday. The first two months we would go back to the village directly. Since the school was on Midyad Road, we would take a van in front of the school gate and we would pass through Midyad Road to our village, that is, Bazni Taqa. In the third month, I began reading gradually. On a Friday we left the school missing home. We took a van and it took us to Niseibin. It was the first time that we had taken that road.

When we turned right on the Midyad road towards Niseibin we saw a workshop called Zaf on the side of the road. When we were passing by the workshop slowly due to the bad condition of the road, I saw a note written in a large font in red ink on the wall and tried to read it: "Down to Slavery"… It was more, but I could not read it at that time. I prepared myself for the turning back road trip. I memorized what I had read and I decided to read the rest of it when we came back.

Unfortunately, we took another route on our way back and we did not pass by the workshop again. After a few weeks, we took the van once again taking off our black vests and we asked the van driver to take the Niseibin route again. I remembered the text. This time I decided to read it definitely. We arrived on Ipak Road; the van turned towards the road leading to the workshop. I stared at the wall… I saw the first letter and I felt a rush. This time I read it all: "Down to Slavery, Long live Kurdistan".

The words remained in my mind, but they did not mean anything to me. Neither my Turkish nor my Kurdish were not very well. The words, however, are always in my mind.

I always try to understand, but I do not. On our way back we took the same road and I read it again. Once again, the same way and the same meaningless word. Apart from Kurdistan which I was familiar with, nothing else was familiar. The years passed and we grew up very quickly during the 1990s. Not long after, we got older than our age. When I was in the third grade, I understood the meaning of that word and I really enjoyed it. Thus, I thought maybe the workshop owner might have written it himself. What is curious is that in the situation of those years, nobody ever thought of erasing that text.

As far as I remember, that text remained on that wall until 1994, despite the wind, rain, snow, or the governmental forces.