Why is it normal for “the intellectuals’ wake” to be empty?

For years, with the death of every great writer, artist and intellectual, we have been struck by the same scene repeating: “the wake empty, the mosque empty, the graveside empty!” Intellectuals are sent alone and unaccompanied to the last home of life.

A few months ago Simko Nakam, the pioneer of Kurdish theatre and creator of the brilliant plays Lanewazan and Chekhmakhe, who spent the last days of his life in poverty and illness in a home for the old in Germany, laid down his head in the depths of loneliness and abandonment. Nakam’s heart was so broken by this country that he asked in his will for his body to be cremated and not brought back to “Kurdistan”!

A few days ago, when Mamosta Husên Arif died, what a sad scene it was: the number of those around his body did not pass the fingers of one hand!

The image of Letif Helmet’s loneliness too, over the body of his dearest one, lamenting his own frailty and abandonment, opened the wound again!

Truly, why are these great people, who produced Kurdish culture and made the history of our literature and art, not given a worthy farewell as in every nation of the world, and why are their families not offered real sympathy and support in their time of grief?

Can “being unsociable, absent from public funerals and reclusive” be made an excuse for leaving them alone, when they have given the finest works of art and the rarest literary texts to the Kurdish language and to us?

In truth, the emptiness of the intellectuals’ wake and the repetition of these scenes are very natural and normal. To understand why they are natural and normal, we have to look at the question from another side. Today everyone in Kurdistan who falls outside the circle of “Islamic culture, the tribe and the party” is left alone and isolated. Let us press the finger harder on the wounds.

Islamic culture

Islamic culture in its intellectual and social sense, not its political one, has never been as dominant in Kurdistan as it is today. It has had so deep an effect on the direction of thought and social life that most members of the “non”-Islamic parties now carry the same thinking as the Islamists.

Anyone who was not a person of the mosque in his life, however inventive a human being he was, finds the wake the moment in which he is punished. This has repeated in recent years with several bright names of art and literature, so as to say to public opinion: this is the end of all who do not turn to the mosque.

Tribe and clan

Tribe and clan are another social force, again able to gather people and produce a crowd in mourning and in celebration.

Although in this twenty-first century, when technology and artificial intelligence have changed the whole course of human life and “loneliness” is the defining feature of our age, in Kurdistan the clans and tribes have not only preserved their existence but hold huge festivals full of crowds every year, and the social media of the clans is busy every day displaying the strength and pedigree of their guest halls.

Certainly a wide section of Kurdish citizens still do not trust the great umbrella that should protect them, the “nation”, and so they return under the umbrella of the tribe.

Especially when the citizen feels that the legal institutions in Kurdistan are far too weak to rely on. Like Amerigo Bonasera in the film The Godfather, who finds that “being a citizen, obeying the law and being a good American” gets him no justice from the law against those who assaulted his daughter, and is forced to turn to Don Corleone for revenge.

Many people in Kurdistan are sure that the “Don Corleones” of the tribes and the parties protect them better than the law, the courts, the security service and the police. Even people who commit crimes, if they “have a back”, are released from punishment by reconciliation.

Inside the tribe the rule is “care for your kin and your kin will care for you”, and one of their joys and prides is that their wakes overflow and there is no room for one more.

What use are art, intellect and an open mind to a tribe that cannot bear a different idea or way of life?

In tribal culture there are authentic and inauthentic people; the authentic one is the clansman!

The parties

The parties are another force that plays a large part in the wake: according to the importance of the post, the party rank, the many or few years of service of the departed and their kinship with leaders and officials, a crowd is produced for them; some of their wakes are even dressed like a festival.

The ruling parties of Kurdistan give importance only to those poets, writers and artists whose work beautified and whitewashed their black history; those who did not follow the party and its leaders have always been marginalised and, where possible, made ugly.

And what does a party want with a real poet, artist or intellectual? A party needs a “praise-singer”!

In short, the Islamists, the tribes and the ruling parties, who speak in the name of religion, custom, nation and morality and who are active and produce crowds on the ground, treat the wakes and mourning of people by the rule of profit and the interest of “their businesses”.

To them, intellect, art, literature and patriotism are worth “a penny”; they give no importance to living writers, poets and artists, let alone the dead.

These dominant cultures, which have killed every beautiful value in Kurdish society, generally see obedience as a virtue and the criticism and questioning of intellectuals as a threat.

In this culture, the wakes of real intellectuals who did not chase a superficial, hypocritical crowd and did not give up their freedom and individuality can expect only those empty and hollow scenes.

It is living nations that know how to give worthy respect to their great artists, writers and intellectuals and to see them as the most precious national capital, not the mentality of a country like Kurdistan, which is gravely ill.

So picture your own wake: it is very natural and normal that the sad fate of Simko Nakam and Husên Arif and the lament of Letif Helmet should be the fate of every intellectual and every lonely, rebellious person whose heart is not in the crowd of the mosque, the gathering of the guest hall, or obedience to the branch, the centre and the service of the parties.