Didar Masifi                                                                                                   dmasifi289@yahoo.ca

(For Mehmet and Fatma, the siblings who died by the H5N1 virus in Van)

Three months ago I read a novel by the British novelist Louis De Bernieres called Birds without Wings. This novel is one of the bestseller books of the year. Birds without Wings is a historic novel which is set in Turkey during the dying period of the Ottoman Empire’s life. This book has a long fabulous plot, nostalgic setting, and dramatic climax that all together keep a reader in suspect. Beside of that the writer’s poetic and descriptive technique is so exceptional by which a reader can imagine a colourful and mosaic depiction of the Ottoman Empire’s cultural backgrounds. For reading this 600 pages book is like a wonderful journey through the past and over a land which is historically and geographically considered as a bridge between the East and West.

However if Mr. De Berinieres’s reader is a Kurdish person like me, he/she smells the disgusting odour of humiliation in the midway of this journey through the book. Exactly, in the passage where a group of Kurdish tribe men rape and kill an Armenian family, and then as a result of that savage a Turkish Aga called Rustam Bey intervenes to stop them and saves the girls.

 In another passage this Turkish Aga travels to Istanbul by train in order to find a new wife after his wife ends up in a brothel house; there Mr. De Bernieres brings a filthy Kurd to sit down beside the clean shaved modern Aga who by this irritating action from the writer dislikes a trip by train with a Kurd.Between sentences of the novel a negative feeling toward the Kurds can be read, as they were the only people who do not fit into the nicely written sentences of Mr. De Bernieres. Here Mr. De Bernieres raises a question to let readers decide weather his sentences are too tight and conservative to comprehend the aging dilemma of Kurds, or Kurds themselves haven’t yet done enough to represent as a modern nation. In the Anatolian town of Askibahce, the novels setting, Turks, Greeks, Arabs, Italians and others live together peacefully before the war. However there is only one exceptional person who doesn’t fit Askibahce’s mosaic society. The writer names this character Dog and mentions a little bit about his background as a Yazidi Kurd. In the novel this character is a poor homeless beggar, lives in cemetery, and blasphemes both Muslim and Christian religious leaders in the town whenever they pass by. Without mentioning why this man lives in such a miserable situation in that small town in the far west of Turkey the writer brings more Kurds to that region unfortunately, unlike other local people in town those Kurds have bad souls.

However, there is a good thing in describing Kurds in this novel that the author was so generous of putting neither Dog nor any old fashion Kurd to stone Layla Hanim, the Rostam Bey’s ex-wife.

 Despite all creativity I felt in reading this book the title was also so hooking to me and it stopped me long enough to recall something in my childhood. Which in some ways resemble to Karatavuk’s, the protagonist of Birds without Wings, for instance once I made for myself a small wing from nylon and stood on school’s high wall trying to fly before falling to the ground and hurting myself, moreover, in a different stage of life I was again like Karatauvk, had a very close Christian friend. This friend wasn’t teaching me Greek letters like what is in the novel, but he was lending me numerous of tabooed books from what left after his elder leftist exile brother. Most of these books were novels written by Great Russian writers. Books were similar to the bird like whistles which Karatauvk and his Christian friend Mahmetcik have them in the novel and through them they imagine a world in which a human being flies just like a bird.

All at all after reading Mr. De Bernieres book whenever I see a black bird in the sky I imagine Karatavuk in it, Karatavuk as the innocent Turkish young boy, Karatavuk a little singing beautiful bird, but not the damn Kara Tavuk (Black Chicken) that claims the Kurdish children of Van!