Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will pay attention to political narratives that place the Dengbêj folk poets and their songs in a mythical history of Kurdish upland resistance against the lowland Ottoman and Turkish oppressors. While the Kurdish movement likes to present Kurdishness as bound to the imagined homeland Kurdistan, the songs of the Dengbej expose a more flexible upland culture with more space for the insecurities and necessary compromises that were part and parcel of living at the margins of empires and nation-states.

Paper long abstract:

A Dengbêj is a semi-professional performer of Kurdish oral tradition. Until the 1980s the Dengbêj folk poets were one of the most important Kurdish cultural expressions. After the 1980 coup they almost disappeared from the public domain due to oppression and unpopularity. Recently this tradition has been revitalized. Reasons for this revival are among others a growing freedom of expression of Kurdish culture in Turkey, and attempts of the Kurdish national movement(s) to create a unified, 'authentic' and nationalist Kurdish culture. Within the discourse of the Kurdish movement, the Dengbêj tradition is presented as a reminiscence of a distant past, when the Kurds were still 'unspoiled' by Islamic, Arabic and Turkish influences.

In this paper I will pay attention to political narratives that place the Dengbêj and their songs in a mythical history of Kurdish upland resistance against the lowland Ottoman and Turkish oppressors. I will investigate the details of this mythical history. However, I will also pay attention to the content of the songs, which, contrary to this nationalist narrative, tell a different story. They tell about the mobile and flexible character of political bonds, about negotiations with the various surrounding states, about internal rivalries, and about heroes and traitors. While the Kurdish movement likes to present Kurdishness as bound to the imagined homeland Kurdistan, the songs expose a more flexible upland culture with more space for the insecurities and necessary compromises that were part and parcel of living at the margins of empires and nation-states.