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Interview by Janet McIntosh

Janet McIntosh: It’s really a remarkable book. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It’s incredibly original. It’s so thoughtful. It’s so subtle. It’s beautifully, sensitively written.  You’re being so exquisitely careful as you write. And I was really struck, of course, by some of the through lines between your first book and this volume because in both cases, you’re looking at a population that has been traumatized, whether it’s by civil war in Sri Lanka or persecution, the threat of annihilation, human rights violations in the Middle East. And then looking at how people use language to navigate this delicate aftermath. They have been denied their identity, their homelands. They’ve been subject to real cruelty and in your words, political abjection. And then once they’re in London, you say, Kurdish speakers tell stories about their past incessantly. And you engage in such careful noticing of the patterns in Kurdish discourse to make this nuanced case that language offers them the right handle to take hold of a twisted reality. I have to say I love the way that you don’t claim to actually speak or have fluency in Kurdish, but you say you became attuned to it. And by the end of the book, the reader really understands what that means. I want to delve into some of the details so that people who read the interview can have a chance to engage with the details of some of the arguments in your chapters:

The Role of Precise, Detailed Narratives in Preserving a Lost Lifeworld

Janet McIntosh:  You have a chapter about the way that Kurmanji accounts of the past offer a really precise simulation of reality, even a kind of anchor, and you liken that to a sort of cultural security. For instance, speakers will offer these high-resolution linguistic images and a great deal of direct reported speech, sometimes with direct quotes concatenated one after another to sweep the listener along. Can you tell us a little more about the relationship between this speech pattern and the loss of a former life world?

Alex Pillen:  In terms of the simulation of a lost reality, people can create a template for time and to a certain extent, through narrative detail, almost create a slow-motion reality. It’s as if the story, retold decades later, is so detailed it seems to move slower than the events that are described. As a listener, you may get that impression. What is remarkable, and this has been documented for other languages too, is that two decades, three later people report a conversation that took place in a village, in the mountains, in the Kurdish regions through an almost word-for-word recollection. Of course, so much time has passed by, that it is not necessarily completely verbatim, but that’s the impression you are given as a listener. And because such stories are so detailed, it would be very hard to deny their reality. Precise, accurate, full of  evidence and detail.   If such stories would emerge from an everyday world, a peacetime situation, maybe this wouldn’t be so remarkable. But for Kurdish speakers, the reported interactions may have taken place in a village that was cleared, destroyed. In the 1990s, the Turkish army raided Kurdish villages, orchards were burned, wells poisoned, houses burned too. People were forced to move to cities in Turkey, and some moved to London. Many conversations that are now being quoted and re-quoted belong to a place that no longer exists, has been destroyed or is no longer accessible. That is why precision, accuracy and detailed references have renewed importance. It is as if some aspects of reality only exist within a linguistic domain. Not references displaced by the mere passage of time, but violently eliminated within a short period. In Kurmanji one can say ‘heyata gundi xelas e’, to refer to the annihilation of a life-world. Kurmanji narrative styles operate within this context.

The Significance of the Reflexive Pronoun ‘xwe’

Janet McIntosh: There is a rich, beautiful chapter about the reflexive pronoun xwe, which you very, very loosely translated as ‘one’s self’ or ‘one’s own’, but that doesn’t seem to do it justice at all. I’m wondering if you could explain to us what we can learn from its prevalence in Kurmanji discourse? How does it relate to social spheres larger than the level of the individual? It’s a little bit of a paradoxical term. On the one hand, it points right into the self and on the other hand, in some fascinating ways, it indexes something much bigger.

Alex Pillen: The way that the reflexive pronoun xwe connects to social sphere larger than the individual is interesting and is related to its history.  The linguist Benveniste traced its history over millennia to a root in Proto-Indo-European (*swe).  This is a word that stands for all subject positions, so it’s not just ‘myself’,  but also ‘yourself, himself, herself, ourselves, themselves’. That is why I loosely translated it as ‘oneself’ because ‘oneself’ covers some of these possibilities.  If we want to talk about a group you can use it as ‘ourselves’ or it can refer to a social sphere that includes everybody, in the sense of ‘all Kurds’.  In many languages, including Kurdish, a multiplicity of subject positions can be expressed via a single reflexive pronoun, the xwe in Kurmanji.  This pronoun is thriving today in London and is used to accentuate both singularity and a sense of belonging to varying social spheres. David Parkin’s work on language shadows allowed me to dedicate a chapter to this pronoun’s shadow. I consider chapters 5 and 6 dedicated to Kurmanji’s reflexive pronoun and its shadow the most important ones in the book.  They can easily be read as a stand-alone text.

The Suppression of Intonation when Articulating Painful Experiences

Janet McIntosh:  So the next question I have is about another linguistic dynamic. The way that painful injustice is articulated through a negation of intonation. You write that, quote, at moments of intense pain or the recollection of painful injustice, utterances are cited as accompaniments of a burning heart and are rendered through a suppression of intonation. You also suggest that this mode of speaking diffuses affective responsibility between the speaker and the listener. I was wondering if you can tell us more about this?

Alex Pillen: My question was why do Kurmanji speakers suppress intonation when articulating distress? When people reach highly affective sections of the narrative, they tend to speed up. The story becomes a rapid concatenation of detail, with reported speech clauses or verbs of action. Reported dialogue punctuates the discourse at high speed. There is an aesthetic of speaking fast. When you speak fast in any language there’s a suppression of intonation. This is not specific to Kurdish. But what is specific to Kurdish and has been discussed in the work of Cihan Ahmetbeyzade is that there is this sense of urgency to stories, but it’s almost a whisper. And because it’s almost a whisper, and because of the negation of intonation, you don’t necessarily have the sense that you’re being addressed. Ahmetbeyzade calls this ‘an invitation to listen’. There is a subtle difference between being an invitee or an addressee.

What goes hand in hand with this kind of articulation of painful distress is the relative absence of labels for emotions. Amongst first generation Kurds in London people did not use nouns such as ‘anger’, ‘outrage’ or ‘sadness’. Instead a sense of endurance was wrapped in subtle ethno-poetic forms of telling.  Kurdish women tell detailed stories to family and friends and affect subsides in the interstices of that intonation pattern, that rhythm. Here I relied on the seminal work of Don Brenneis and Judith Irvine and used the concept of ‘situational affect’ to study Kurmanji narratives of painful injustice. The generic phrase I often heard ‘zehmet bû’ or ‘it was hard’ also foregrounds the situation that causes affect. As people tell detailed stories, they create speech events, situations that affect listeners. To a certain extent, this kind of retelling of dialogues, the retelling of the distressing events also is an external affect.  A listener is invited to share and interpret such situational affect, and this requires a culture-specific kind of listening. The suppression of intonation can be compared with semantic ambiguity and I called this ‘acoustic indirection’. Affects are not articulated on the surface of speech through dramatic intonation. There is a space for a listener to be drawn into and to be invited into a complex affective sphere.

Uniqueness

Janet McIntosh: I have a question relating to a theme that you raised at the very beginning of your book and that comes up here and there in your chapters. Could you say more about your suggestion that Kurdish linguistic practices underscore their sense of uniqueness and aloneness, both in London and also it seems perhaps more broadly?

Alex Pillen: That sense of aloneness is something that has been picked up in the wider literature a long time ago. The expression that you hear most often is ‘The Kurds have no friends but the mountains’.  Historically and politically this makes sense, first stuck between the Ottomans and Safavids, and now stateless.   Culturally and linguistically too, whilst living in the vicinity of Turkish, Persian,  and Arabic speakers –  a sense of solitude and uniqueness does not seem surprising.  There is more to it.  A less obvious sense of aloneness and uniqueness dwells within the interstices of Kurdish cultural life. Being slightly apart from other kinds of people, a kind of uniqueness that is quotidian, small-scale and transcends ethnicity, nationality or the geopolitical. This lived uniqueness is what I tried to unearth in this book through an anthropology of language practice.  This is about a sense of uniqueness that is not only about being Kurdish but about being unique within Kurdish society.   This is something I picked up over and over again. I began to question how quotidian language plays a role in articulating such uniqueness. When narrators quote people, the exact words they used, the variant of Kurmanji in a particular village back home more than 3 decades ago, there’s something unique about that. There obviously was a linguistic dimension to that sense of the unique and that’s what I tried to grapple with in this book. Reported speech is one way in which people can accentuate whether it was this phrase or another one that was used. I also studied self-quotation, when people report on their own habitual and distinct ways of saying things.  This can be translated as ‘I tend to say it like this’, not like the others, the masses.  The Kurmanji reflexive pronoun xwe also stood out as a repository of uniqueness, to accentuate a sense of ‘myself-ourselves’. Taken together such linguistic practices underscore a uniqueness, singularity and aloneness that goes hand in hand with the Kurds’ political predicament.

The Anthropology of Language and the ‘Soul’ of Kurmanji

Janet McIntosh: Another issue you address many times in this book concerns the way that language varieties can create their own mood, atmosphere, ambience, ethos. These are all words that you use here and there. This seems to be one reason for the struggle to translate what you are noticing in Kurmanji into English – for English speaking readers. Can you tell us more about that challenge and how you try to manage it in this book? How can one try to avoid sort of flattening the aura of Kurmanji in a book like this?

Alex Pillen: Great question. Those words – mood, atmosphere, ambience, ethos – I would like to qualify each of them. The term mood in a linguistic sense comes from the work of William Empson. He is a British literary critic who wrote  ‘the Structure of Complex Words’.  He takes examples from the English language, and asks ‘what is the mood in this expression’? So that’s one way of defining this topic. We could call it the atmosphere, and ambience of a language, or what Michael Bakhtin called the feel or sense of a language. That feel or sense seems to be linked to the atmosphere of a language, sensing that atmosphere. And then I used the word ethos too the refer to the same set of aspects of the Kurmanji language. Ethos is akin to atmosphere as it can both surround and permeate an entity such as language.  It reflects a set of values about how a language is supposed to feel. I was keen to use the word ethos for another reason too. On many occasions, I struggled with the translation from Kurmanji into English. This became one of the book’s tropes. The word ‘ethos’ takes up an exceptional place, at the interface of Kurdish and English.  Its origin is assumed to be the Indo-European term for custom ‘swe-dhos’, a term with links to the ancient root *swe.  This root reverberates into English via ‘ethos’.  This is the same root *swe studied by Benveniste, in his oeuvre that plays a major role in my study of the reflexive pronoun xwe in Kurmanji.  I thought why not use a term and a concept with links to the history of that Kurmanji pronoun? 

There is a beauty to the ways in which each language has picked up that long historical thread, going back millennia.  My use of the terms ethos is really about accentuating a mood and atmosphere in Kurmanji. How does it feel to speak that language with its specific values, the things that are important for its speakers? This is an important question for Kurdish because of its dire political and historical circumstances. This question leads to another one, what does it mean to lose that language? Or to fear being deprived of the Kurdish mother tongue? What does it mean to fear to lose that mood, to lose that atmosphere?  This seems to be about more than what linguists say about a language, its vocabulary, grammar or discursive structure. Beyond the terms of debate within socio-linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and the study of language as social practice, its role in defining gender, status, ethnicity, class, or even just responsibility for what is being said. These are handy conceptual frameworks and tools for analysis, but what do they mean in terms of a Bakhtinian feel of a language that matters so much? This is what I am grappling with. The fear of a loss of language and its feel is culture-specific and this brings us back into the field of cultural anthropology. Perhaps this is a question not only about Kurdish spoken by millions, but the many small-scale societies that live with the fear of linguistic assimilation into a global order.

Janet McIntosh: You very pointedly make an ethical choice to make the Kurmanji language itself the protagonist of the book. Some of that seems to be because you don’t want to dig too deeply into the context of each story about trauma. You’re not trying to give us the backstory of each traumatic narrative. You focus on the language patterns. It almost feels like the language, the way the language is used is almost its own person in this book. It is its own soul. It’s carrying a soul, speaking its own sort of vast message for this population. Is it a stretch to say that you write about this language as if it’s a protagonist with its own soul?

Alex Pillen: That’s beautifully said. Thank you for that! The Kurmanji language is indeed the protagonist of the book. Very often the researcher, the anthropologist, is the protagonist of the story by saying ‘I went to the field’, ‘I got up in the morning’, ‘it was raining’, ‘I went to see so and so’. Apologies for the quite stark depiction. I didn’t want any of that in the book. Very often key ‘informants’ become the protagonists, their life stories determining the plot lines for cultural analysis. But what if the people you work with really don’t want to be written about, and hope the details of their social lives remain private, protected?  Also, when your life is most miserable, you may not want to invite an ethnographer into your home, or only do so reluctantly.  I chose to make the Kurdish language itself the protagonist of the book. There is a kind of cultural agency in language; a force and affordance of language available to Kurdish people living in London. Perhaps that is what you mean when you say Kurdish is carrying its soul, ‘is its own soul’. A language tree is rooted in multiple populations branching out through numerous historical periods. In the end this tree has some sort of force inherent in a language spoken today, something that cannot be observed in a material sense, something cultural that is more than the sum of observable speech events. I call it the ethos of Kurdish. I like the way you say it – ‘language as a protagonist with its own soul, speaking its own vast message for this population’.

Janet McIntosh: I thought I would end with that wonderful metaphor you use, which captures some of what I actually admire in your book. You write that, quote, the practice of linguistics could be compared to a dissection of the birds’ wings in a biology class. A sociolinguist analyzes its quotidian flight path and migration routes. By contrast, an anthropology of language is akin to admiring the bird as it flies. So now, I found myself admiring the flight of Kurmanji as it is flying in London, but also the flights of your own language as you so tenderly and carefully described it. It’s a wonderful book, Alex. I hope that it gets exactly the audience that you want for it and that it is appreciated for generations.

Alex Pillen: Thank you so much for your close reading of my book.  Thank you for your generosity and this conversation.