https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo183627808.html

Andrew Bush: The book makes crucial interventions that connect the study of liberal governance in Turkey to the comparative study of oral traditions in places that include Africa and South Asia. But these several interventions are possible, it seems to me, because the work is also quite clearly grounded in a specific locale—the city of Wan. Can you describe how Wan became a field site for you, and how it stayed a field site for you, and how that locale sets up the main arguments of the book?

Marlene Schäfers: I think that Wan became a fieldsite for me partly because I was interested in exploring forms of Kurdish politics and subjectivity and cultural engagement outside of the well-known locales. In Turkey, and in the Kurdish region more broadly, the city of Amed or Diyarbakir is often seen as the Kurdish capital, which is very central to the imagination of Kurdish community and Kurdish politics. Wan is more marginal to that Kurdish political imagination, so I was interested in what was happening there.

It is also in some ways a place that is quite ambiguous when it comes to questions of identity and belonging. We should not forget that it was a site of genocidal destruction. Wan was majority Armenian until the genocide in 1915. Today it is a border town, close to the Iranian and Armenian borders. The Kurdish presence has always been there, but even that has been by mobility and migration. Some of the biggest Kurdish tribes in the Wan region actually moved from the Caucuses in the early twentieth century. So it is a place with an ambiguous and fluid identity more than something settled and fixed.

It seems to me that this fluidity might allow for forms of experimentation in self-expression and new forms of subjectivity-making that I explore in the book. Precisely because identity is not as fixed here as it might be in other places, there is perhaps more of a demand on voices to articulate a more bounded, distinct identity. The book explores how oral repertoires have been answering those demands and burdens, and how voices have become more and more intelligible as an index of the interiority of the people who pronounce them.

Andrew Bush: At least in their predominant expressions, kilam are meant to have a particular emotional, corporeal, and sonic impact on listeners. In the first chapter you argue persuasively that what you call the “social potency” of the singing has a lot to do with form. What drew your attention to the notion of form that you develop there? The book names three factors there—the multiplicity of voices that compose the narrative element, the way poetic imagery is stitched through the work, and the melodic mold that encompasses improvisation on recognizable genres. Reading that section of the book, I couldn’t help but wonder what other ideas you left on the shop floor, as it were, in working through those particular elements. Could describe the process of identifying and naming those formal features?

Marlene Schäfers: I must admit that that was the most difficult chapter to write. One reason it was so difficult is that I lacked the training and vocabulary to properly engage with vocal form. I was not trained in ethnomusicology or linguistic anthropology as such. I felt that I needed to engage the question of form, but I lacked the training, the language, and even the ear to do so. Linguistic anthropology and ethnomusicology opened doors for me. For a long time, I was focused on the narrative of the kilams that I heard – mainly narratives of pain, suffering, and tragedy – so developing a sensibility to approach the more formal aspects was somewhat of a breakthrough for me personally.

At the same time, what didn’t make it easier is that the women I worked with did not have an elaborate vocabulary for the formal aspects of their repertoires either. When I asked them to explain an element of a melody to me, for instance, they often didn’t have a meta-level terminology to explain how they used their voices. And I think that itself says a lot about how Kurdish women have long been marginal to the urban centers of cultural production where those elaborate meta-level vocabularies would have been developed, as is the case for Arab or Turkish repertoires, for instance, or for the southern Kurdish urban culture of poetry you worked on. These women were also marginal to forms of public and political speech historically dominated by men. So women really operate in a minor key within that culture of musical and poetic expression and that made it extra difficult to develop a vocabulary.

But why do I focus on these three elements you mention above – multiple voices, poetic imagery, melodic molds? In some ways it’s because they are the elements that struck me the most, or that were most foreign to me. In the book I show that these are the factors that remove voice from self and therefore make it difficult to decode songs as expressions of personal feelings, interiority, will, or desire. And that’s exactly why these elements made kilams initially quite opaque to me. They upset my expectations about how a narrative should give expression to the person who pronounces it.

At the same time, these were precisely the elements that local listeners would seek out, and take pleasure in. Kurdish audiences often say that a good singer is one who makes you cry. These were the elements that did that, although I don’t think the three factors I identify are necessarily exhaustive. I hope the book will open a conversation to further inquiry about what other aspects of form might make voices powerful social forces.

Andrew Bush: The conventional description of fieldwork and writing that says fieldwork is when you listen and writing is when you analyze. But in your case, the listening was always troubled or confusing in the field, and it was in the process of writing that you found the ear.

Marlene Schäfers: Definitely, the listening that I did in the field often troubled the discourses I heard there. I was told, women raising their voices is “a form of resistance,” or “a form of empowerment.” Well, yes. But then when you listen carefully, things become more complicated. Suddenly voices no longer function so easily as expressions of resisting or empowered selves. So the listening actually interrupted some of the narratives that were transmitted to me during fieldwork, and it was only through writing that I was able to make sense of that interruption.

Andrew Bush: You just mentioned how marginal women were to some genres, and that reminds me of how gender and law appear intertwined in different ways in the book, especially in ideas of theft. There is the idea that voices can be stolen, or the deserved fame of a performer can be stolen, and most interestingly to me, the idea that dengbej is really a women’s form that is subject to men’s ventriloquizing. There seems to be an impasse between the invitation women receive to become part of a new kind of national public (alternately Kurdish, Turkish, or Armenian) and the fact that the kinds of social change those publics call for—especially some idea of gender equity—is almost foreclosed by the technology of participation that women are afforded. So there is some faith that law might restore authorship or ownership, but it is a limited faith. How do you understand that impasse, and how do women themselves describe it?

Marlene Schäfers: This is a crucial point, I think. During fieldwork, what caught my attention was how my interlocutors would be adamant about the violence and oppression they faced for raising their voices as Kurds and as women. And yet despite this recurring legacy of violence, they remained immensely optimistic with a seemingly never-ending hope that things would get better, that they would eventually reach the fame, the income, the recognition that they felt they really deserved. The book tries to understand where that hope or insistence comes from, and what animates or nourishes it.  It argues that it is precisely because of the way liberal politics elevates the voice to an object carrying immense promises of emancipation, recognition, agency, which is what makes the hope and perseverance possible.

You asked about the law, and it seems to me that the law is one site where these liberal promises become articulated or even codified. In the book I look particularly at copyright law, which some of the women hoped would allow them access to the value that had become attached to their voice. Law was like a mechanism used to make voices deliver on the promises that they hold. But it would often fail to deliver. So the women found themselves always on the cusp of having that promise delivered, but then they would find it taken away at the last moment.  For example, some music producer would sell their voice without their permission, or male performers would once again become famous for repertoires that women said belonged to them.

The women I worked with experienced these disappointments lived in embodied ways: there were tears, sadness, lethargy. But somehow these down periods were always overcome. What I found remarkable was the energy women mustered in the face of continuing disappointment. There is something here akin to what Lauren Berlant called cruel optimism in the sense that people remain attached to structures that might actually harm them. It seems to me that the law, and copyright law in particular, functions as that structure that promises equal access to voices’ value, but nonetheless keeps disappointing.

Andrew Bush: The book is about the voices of Kurdish women who perform as dengbêjs, but it is a book written in a distinctive scholarly voice as well. In the acknowledgements you name the hope that the book will “keep alive the reverberations of [Gazin’s] voice.” Can you describe some of your collaboration with Gazin, and how that work impacted your scholarly voice?

Marlene Schäfers: Gazin was one of my main interlocutors, who, together with some other friends had founded the women’s singers association in Wan where I did a lot of fieldwork. She was the heart and center of the association. She had a modest background, she had never been to school and had had five children, but then she also had this extraordinary taste for experimentation and adventure.

She was one of the first women of her generation who had entered the professional music industry but was essentially scammed by producers and received too little for her work. Nonetheless, she had a very distinct sense of the value of her voice and of the voices of Kurdish women more generally. She would often talk about the voices of Kurdish women as a “treasure,” which someone urgently needed to salvage, because they would disappear as older generations would pass away.

And to do this work of salvaging, she wanted to engage in what she also called research—to go find women’s voices, record, document, and archive them. So we would set off together to different villages and towns and meet women and do interviews and recordings. The collaboration was sustained by the fact that we each had resources and skills that the other didn’t. We complemented each other in that sense. I had access to writing, which she did not. I had access to some modest funding—not much as a graduate student but it was there. I had a computer and a voice recorder. And at the same time, I benefitted immensely from her access, her knowledge, the fact that women knew and trusted her. She was from there, she knew her way around, and obviously her presence opened so many doors. As much as we complemented each other, our projects were also very different. She had this mission of archiving and documenting. But I could not be and cannot be the kind of archivist of Kurdish culture that she was looking for.

For me what became important instead was to understand what was driving her—why it was so important for her to archive, record, and document. That can tell us something about the contemporary politics of voice in Turkey more broadly, I think, and about how liberal politics interpellate people like Gazin to engage in this work of archiving and documenting voices. In that sense, I also don’t see my project as “giving voice” to Gazin or any of the women I encountered. In the acknowledgements I write that I hope her voice will reverberate, by which I mean that I hope the book will let the voice of people like Gazin reach new audiences, and show what kinds of stakes are attached to these voices.

While I don’t see myself as an archivist, I am in fact currently involved in a project that seeks to archive, document, and edit Gazin’s repertoires. Gazin passed away much too early, in 2018, and left behind an entire archive of Kurdish voices on cassette tapes and digital voice recorders. We have now started a project with the Orient Institute in Istanbul that seeks to organize, catalogue, and transcribe these sources, and make them available to the public. So in that sense, I did come back to the archive in the end.