Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History - Review

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Maria Antonella Pelizzari

by Susan Meiselas New York: Random House, 1997 388 pp./$100.00 (hb)

". . . The world is a garden of culture where a thousand flowers grow. Throughout history all cultures have fed one another, been grafted onto one another, and in the process our world has been enriched. The disappearance of a culture is the loss of a colour, a different light, a different source. I am as much on the side of every flower in this thousand-flower garden as I am on the side of my own culture."

- Yasar Kemal

These words were written by Turkish writer Yasar Kemal for a speech criticizing his government's cover-up of Kurdish genocide in Turkey following the Gulf War. Kemal reflects on the historical tragedy of fellow soldiers and independence fighters turning on each other. But the overriding issue of how different cultures can exist peacefully on the same land has been raised by many intellectuals, historians and anthropologists recently. This question involves all of us as we witness group migrations across African, Asian, European and North and South American borders. How do migrating communities retain their own identity and how do they mix with other ethnic groups? What do they sacrifice of their own history?

In Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History photographer Susan Meiselas cites Kemal's words among many other voices gathered during a six-year project with the help of Kurdish scholar Martin van Bruinessen and a team of cultural historians, photographers and research assistants in North America and Europe. Through a montage of photographs and texts from Middle Eastern and Western poets, writers, leaders, activists, photographers, scholars and families in exile, Meiselas's book surveys the complex and suppressed history of the Kurds, an ethnic group of more than 20 million people scattered between Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Russia, Europe and North America. Kurdistan is a place that exists only in the mind of its people.

Without a state or a clear delineation on the map, the Kurds nevertheless have a language, -religion and tradition of their own. A sixteenth-century legend recounts that the Kurds gradually formed a group, escaping the terror of human sacrifice inflicted on them by a Persian tyrant. This legend repeats cyclically in Kurdish history, revealing the hegemonic control imposed on the population by foreign nations like Britain, Russia and Turkey. As van Bruinessen observes, the Kurds developed a modern sense of nationhood in opposition to the pressure imposed upon them by other countries. Paradoxically, "the destruction and oppression that forced many Kurds to leave their homeland has had the unintended effect of regenerating Kurdish culture." Meiselas's book is proof of this national endurance.

When a state such as Kurdistan becomes intangible due to massive attempts at its annihilation, a project to resuscitate its voices and images is as courageous as it must be creative. Meiselas, a Magnum photographer and winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal for "outstanding courage in reporting" in Nicaragua, reveals in this book the enormously difficult task of collecting a culture's history piece by piece, fragment by fragment, photograph by photograph, in order to allow its people to exist, belong and unite together.

This is not the first time Meiselas has worked with people on the fringe of society and countries in despair. From 1973-75 she worked with carnival strippers in New England, photographing their lives and performances and recording their voices on tape and in book form. In the 1980s, she edited images by native photographers from El Salvador and Chile culminating in two books, El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1990). In both she let the subaltern speak, assembling their own voices and images. Photographs, for Meiselas, have a special power; they mainfest survival. They testify to life and build collective memory. As she says, "a photograph is a document that resists erasure." Professional photographs are as valuable as those made by amateurs, as proof of evidence against death and denial.

Meiselas embarked on her Kurdistan project in 1991 while participating in a Human Rights Watch mission in northern Iraq investigating Saddam Hussein's massive destruction of Kurdish populations. She was asked to photograph the exhumation of Kurdish mass graves conducted by a forensic anthropologist. Witnessing the unearthing of anonymous clothing, skulls and bone fragments, Meiselas says she felt "strange . . . photographing the present while understanding so little about the past." Left with scattered signs of death, she sought to understand the Kurds' lives and their resistance to death, sensing that this culture had many stories buried under decades of oppression and sacrifice. She included only a dozen of her own photographs in the book, instead searching for remnant photographs of these people, beginning a dialogue with a community while building a massive archive of Kurdish history.

The archive is assembled in a beautifully designed book, in which the entire gamut of photographs that she collected is on display: ethnographic records of Kurds; nineteenth-century travelers' views of desert landscapes, ruins and people; hand-painted photographs of Kurdish costumes; family snapshots; aerial views; combat photographs; contact sheets; magazine and newspaper spreads as well as contemporary reportage. The photographs are treated as artifacts, often printed recto-verso, with extensive captions where available delineating the context of their original use. The chapter headings follow Kurdish history, starting from the late nineteenth century, "Before the Great War," and ending with, "After the Cold War."