The last post I made with my two other pieces were brilliant, a lot of people on this forum provide feedback that is so much more helpful then anything my teacher has given me. Because of this, I thought I might as well add in my context piece that I've finished recently. If you could provide feedback on this that would be amazing, and at the same time, I'm willing to look over anything possible for anyone on this forum as well!
Just some information on this piece. The context itself is Kinsella's poems (references to the 'finches' and 'tamarisks' in his poem 'Finches') whilst the piece I've decided to do is a speech to the UN on the notion of a landscape from a Kurdish representative. This written piece was a fix up from a previous one in which my teacher told me to add more of a 'feeling' to the landscape, rather than a political/historical lesson. A mark out of 10 would be great too!!
Meanings of a landscape change over-time.
President of the General Assembly; Excellency Mr Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations; Excellencies, head of delegations; ladies and gentlemen.
It seems that our recent declaration of nationhood has stirred some controversy within this assembly, with the nation-states of Iran, Iraq and Turkey calling for military intervention on this issue. Our declaration of the Republic of Kurdistan is not only something that is within our own cultural interests, but is a also declaration to the international community that a region isn’t define by modern-drawn up borders, it is defined by the cultural and social ties to the land! It is about time that we seriously changed our perceptions and meanings towards landscapes.
From time immemorial until the current era, to an extent, the notion of regions and areas in the world were held in mostly economic, political and strategic perceptions. The Empires of Persia, Britain and Mongolia all continuously sought to expand their political hegemony through the incorporation and annexation of countries, city-states, smaller empires and other territorial entities, disregarding the cultural and social attachments to these areas of land. In some ways the competitive nature of the world forced them to continue to annex and defend regions of the world, in hopes of improving and at the very least, sustaining their political dominance in a world, perceived by them, as being one about pragmatic and realistic actions. Within smaller groups such as tribes or clans, attachments to land meant nothing more than the arability of the land for growing crops and its strategic position, such as whether it was near neighbouring clans, or if it was secluded. For the Kurds this was more or less the same. Our notion of nationalism and a united Kurdish state was not existent before the 19th century, we never sought such ambitions. To a Kurd back then, the feeling of a landscape provoked little emotions or associations. Instead, tribal mannerisms and norms dictated how we saw the world we lived in, one which was consequently dominated by conflict, and taught us that a landscape was ever changing, and never meant to be permanent. We might as well have been like ‘Finches’ in ‘tamarisks’, moving across the landscape to find areas where we could sustain ourselves temporarily, with nothing else in mind.
It was the rise of idealistic political ideology in the 19th century, such as nationalism and communism, that marked a shift in how we viewed and valued the landscape in our world. Firstly, Nationalism transcended traditional views of the personal landscape from beyond smaller units of family, town or province, and into the nation as a whole. Nationalism allowed a shared group to find feeling in the significance of the nation-state, and produced a subsequent sense of security, belonging and prestige in a larger context. In comparison, the ideology of Communism attempted to channel the feelings of belonging that people had tied to either smaller units of family, regions or nation-states onto an identity of a liberated person of the world, unbound by borders. Communists wanted to destroy the preconceived notion we held for national and class boundaries, and intended for humans to instead value the importance of each other as a whole in the formation of their identity, and view the entire world as their landscape. The coining of terms by the USSR such as the ‘spirit of collectivity’ attempted to evoke feelings of shared-identity and the greater good of communalization amongst ordinary people. It was the ideologies of nationalism and Communism, although both different in their ideals, that ultimately demonstrated a shift in how we perceived the landscape. And whilst the assembly today may point their fingers at these ideologies and list all the regimes and governments that utilized them and produced calamities on the world, they allowed us to transition into what we are today, into beings that are able to grasp different perceptions on the landscape and transition between them! It has allowed us to become objective to an extent and view the landscape in cultural and social perceptions! It has allowed creativity through the arts and the exploration of different ideals. They were a change from what we were use to and they both highlighted problems and presented them on ties to the landscape!
In other regions of the world, shifts in the perception of the landscape took place from cultural and social perceptions onto political, economic and militaristic ones. In Australia for example, British Imperialism brought about a shift in the meaning of the Australian landscape. Before colonisation, the Indigenous people of Australia, to which we as the Kurdish nation respect their right to integrity, valued the landscape in cultural and environmental terms, largely refraining from damaging the landscape. They had a profound spiritual connection to land, with both Aboriginal law and spirituality being intertwined with it, the people and creation, and this formed and even currently forms their culture and sovereignty. To them, the land owned the Aboriginal people, and every aspect of their lives was connected to it. However, British Imperialism demonstrated a shift in the viewing of the landscape in Australia. Whilst the Aboriginals saw the land as owning them, the British and subsequent foreigners brought about their own values of land. They saw it as something to be owned, merely a commodity to be bought and sold, an asset to make profit from. This largely destroyed the nature and landscape of Australia, using its economic interests to justify the destruction of much of Australia's landscape and exploit resources. The Western poet, Kinsella, demonstrates this notion through his poem The Silo where he implies that Western farming practice has brought negative influences on the Australian environment, which was once cared for by the Indigenous tribes. The shift of meaning in this example saw the lost of something valuable, a unique idea on how to interact and view the landscape, and instead replaced by economic interests that followed a worldwide trend, something we rightly condemn!
And where do we, the Kurdish nation, fit into all of this? Well like I previously mentioned, we as Kurds never had the notion of a single, unified nation in a permanent landscape. Instead, the Kurdish nationalist movement that emerged following World War I and end of the Ottoman Empire was largely reactionary to the division of the Kurdish-majority territories between the newly formed states of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Our loss of tribal autonomy, coupled with the suppressive cultural policies of this newly formed states, ignited a joint-national struggle amongst us all. Suddenly, the very landscape that we were always surrounded by, such as the Zagros mountains, the lakes of Dukan and Urmia, the cities of Hawler and Diyarbakir, gained social and cultural significance for us. Instead of identifying with tribes and villages, we started to identify with a greater Kurdistan. We wanted a home within the Middle-east, and refused to call it by the names of the newly formed nation-states, we wanted a right to be recognized as a country! Since then we’ve taken resistance, and we’ve fought to establish the dreams of a Kurdish state as our forefathers have done and have finally succeeded in doing so. This was in order to have our own ideal landscape, a place we could call home!
Let us remind you that this is not just happening in Kurdistan, this is happening everywhere. The Uyghur in China and their vouch for a East Turkmenistan Republic, the IRA and there ideal of a Northern Ireland Republic, the Chechens and Tatars in Russia, and the Tibetans in China. All of these examples are showing us that we are shifting the way that we are viewing landscapes, that cultural and social ties to a land will always override those of the imperialist and economic ones. Those states that hold onto these regions due to their own interests will eventually lose grasp as they lack the cultural ties to the land! This is a warning for the assembly from not the newly found Kurdish Republic, but rather as a concerned humanitarian, it won’t be long until all these ethnicities without a home will finally succeed, you cannot oppress their desires for long!
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