Sara

Sakine Cansiz

Description

The second instalment in a gripping memoir by Sakine Cansiz (codenamed 'Sara') chronicles the Kurdish revolutionary's harrowing years in a Turkish prison, following her arrest in 1979 at the age of 21. Jailed for more than a decade for her activities as a founder and leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, she faced brutal conditions and was subjected to interrogation and torture.



Remarkably, the story she tells here is foremost one of resistance, with courageous episodes of collective struggle behind bars including hunger strikes and attempts at escape. Along the way she also presents vivid portraits of her fellow prisoners and militants, a snapshot of the Turkish left in the 1980s, a scathing indictment of Turkey's war on Kurdish people - and even an unlikely love story.



The first prison memoir by a Kurdish woman to be published in English, this is an extraordinary document of an extraordinary life.



Translated by Janet Biehl.
Translator-editor's Preface

Sara

Notes

List of People

List of Political Names and Acronyms

Timeline

Index

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Ethnic Studies
• Political Freedom
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Partido de los Trabajadores de Kurdistán
• Turquía
• Kurdish
• Memoir
• General officer
• Military
• Kurdistan Workers' Party
• Prisoner of war
• Kurdish people
• General
• Parti des travailleurs du Kurdistan
• Abdullah Öcalan
• Turkey

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 15 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786804938
• Langue: Turkish
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Sara
Also available:
Sara
My Whole Life Was a Struggle
Sakine Cans z
Surrender leads to betrayal, resistance to victory : Cans z with photos of Leyla Qasim and Mazlum Do an on the wall behind her, anakkale prison, 1990.

Published in German 2015 by Mezopotamien Verlag as
Mein ganzes Leben war ein Kampf (2. Band - Gef ngnisjahre)
First English language edition published 2019 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright The Estate of Sakine Cans z 2015;
English translation Janet Biehl 2019
The right of Sakine Cans z to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material in this book. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in this respect and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3984 9 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3983 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0492 1 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0494 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0493 8 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Swales Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Translator-editor s preface
Sara
Notes
List of people
List of political names and acronyms
Timeline
Index
Translator-editor s preface
This is the second of three volumes of the memoir of Sakine Cans z, a remarkable Kurdish revolutionary woman leader. In the first volume, as readers already know, she described her childhood in Dersim, and her escapes from marriage in defiance of Turkey s patriarchal gender system. She recounts how she became a dedicated organizer for the group UKO, also known as Kurdistan Revolutionaries, advocating a socialist revolution in Turkey s southeast, where many Kurds live. In November 1978 she attended the founding conference of the UKO s successor organization, which would come to be known as the PKK some 18 months later. Sakine moved to Elaz , a city near her hometown, to specially focus on organizing women. But in the spring of 1979, Turkish police began a crackdown on the nascent party, carrying out a wave of arrests of leading cadres as well as rank-and-file members. On May 7, in an early morning raid on a movement apartment, police arrested her along with two other members of the Elaz group, Hamili Y ld r m and his wife Ayten. As Volume I ends, the three of them are in a police van en route to prison, in a state of shock and bewilderment.
At the opening of Volume II, no time has passed-they are still in the van, which takes them to a prison in Elaz . That will mark the beginning of Sakine Cans z s 12 years of incarceration, the period covered in Volume II.
She entered the Turkish prison system at a perilous moment. A year and a half after her arrest, on September 12, 1980, Turkish generals staged a military coup and declared martial law. They abolished parliament, suspended the constitution, and banned all political parties and unions. Most significant for this memoir, they took control of Turkey s prisons and militarized them. Prisoners would now be overseen, not by guards and wardens, but by soldiers. In the days before and after the coup, PKK leading cadres, including central committee members, were arrested en masse.
Surely the most notorious post-1980 military prison was in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey. Within four months of the coup, more than 30,000 people were jailed here. PKK leadership cadre, as well as rank and file, were concentrated here. Sakine Cans z was taken here around March 1, 1981.
The goal of the militarizing prisons was to strip prisoners of their rebelliousness, and especially, to strip Kurdish prisoners of their Kurdish identity, and transform them into obedient, soldier-like Turkish nationalists. To this end, prison administrators ( the enemy, as Sara called them) showed no scruples when it came to violent torture.
Conditions at the Diyarbakir dungeon, as the prisoners accurately referred to it, were the most dire of all. It was not simply that Diyarbakir was severely overcrowded. Between 1981 and 1984, the Diyarbakir dungeon became notorious for its barbaric cruelty, a hellhole, as it was often called. The military administration inflicted horrific systematic torture on the prisoners on an unprecedented scale, with unparalleled methods, both physical and psychological. When detainees were admitted, for example, they were beaten until their skin was raw, then thrown into vats of excrement, so that their wounds would become infected. Then they were made to sing Turkish military marches.
The reader might well set this book down in horror, but that would be a mistake. While Sara refers to the barbarism, she does not dwell on it. Other survivors have written memoirs testifying of the barbaric torture (alas, rarely translated into English), but Sara prefers to focus instead on the dialectic of capitulation and resistance.
For in the spring of 1979 the nascent PKK had been blindsided. Its members had not yet had much experience in prison, and its ideologues and theorists had given scant if any attention to the subject, should its members ever be imprisoned. They had developed no theory of prison, no policy for how PKK members were to behave there-not even a clear analysis demarcating resistance from surrender. As a result, many of the young Kurdish detainees were understandably terrified and capitulated under torture, naming names, becoming informers, betraying the organization.
Sara wanted no part of capitulation, and she herself did not yield under torture. Instead, she closely observed the behavior of her comrades (or friends, as the Kurdish movement calls them) and tried to discern the nature of their weakness, as she calls it. From the outset she was determined to resist, and apart from an initial error based on misinformation, she never wavered. She fought back at every opportunity, snapping back verbally at Diyarbakir s torturer-in-chief, Esat Oktay Y ld ran, refusing even to scream under torture, so as not to give the enemy that satisfaction, and refusing to accept military rules. Above all she participated in the great hunger strikes and death fasts of 1980-1984.
By modeling unshakable resistance for those around her, male and female, she helped build their courage. By the time she was released, from anakkale prison in 1991, she was an acknowledged leader of prison resistance-and a legend.
* * *
This book is not only a powerful memoir but also a remarkable historical document. Sara wrote it (in Turkish) under difficult circumstances, in the mountains of northern Iraq, on a manual typewriter, sheltered from the elements by tents. She and her friends carried the pages in backpacks through mountain defiles. Thereafter the manuscript underwent some editing. It was translated into German, which is the version I used (I do not know Turkish). But to be frank, as I worked through the book, I found it to be in need of more editing than it had received-understandably, given the circumstances of its creation. The sequence was scrambled in places, at the sentence and paragraph level; episodes appeared to be out of sequence, and the narrative was too often interrupted by out-of-place inserted paragraphs. Important discussions were scattered. Chapter titles did not always correspond to chapter contents.
Eventually I concluded that a word-for-word translation (as in Volume I) would have been as frustrating for readers as it was for me. And not only did the book contain all these difficulties, Volume II was considerably longer than Volume I.
I am an editor by profession, having worked on manuscripts for New York book publishers for 40 years. As I worked on Volume II and noticed these problems, my editor s mind was inevitably working, and I could see how to fix them to make the book more readable.
But of course as a translator, I lacked the authority to do so. My brief was to translate, not to edit. Moreover, since Sakine Cans z is of enormous significance to the Kurdish movement, it would have been arrogant of me to change her text. Nonetheless, as a publishing professional, I wanted to ensure that her story was accessible to English readers.
So I created an edited version: I trimmed repetitions. I consolidated similar material that was scattered through the manuscript into dedicated sections. I corrected the placement of chapter titles, so they would correspond better to chapter text, and created new ones where needed. Where something essential seemed missing, I inserted words in brackets. I made numerous micro-cuts that have resulted in a shorter, more concise book. I did all this with the aim of editing the book s form without changing its content or altering Sara s meanings.
Readers may well disagree with this choice, but fortunately, Sara s original document exists in Turkish and German-it is on the record and available, not least for scholars who need the original. But I feel that by clarifying Sara s text, without doing violence to her content or to the book s overall integrity, I have widened her potential readership.
* * *
For background on Turkish prisons in the 1980s, especially Diyarbakir, I relied on several academic studies in English. 1
Throughout the book, Sara refers to many people (often by first name only), political organizations (by acronym), and events, many of them recurring. I suspect that many readers will be unfamiliar with them. To provide