Şahap Eraslan: 'I am of Turkey'

Rastinews — The identities we are given

We live in an age where parents name their children, yet a person who grows up unable to identify with that name can change it. The name handed down by those who came before us is not a life sentence we must carry forever. People who don't identify with the sex assigned to them at birth can change their sex and build a life that fits their own gender identity. Bülent Ersoy, the performer we've all applauded on television, is a familiar example to everyone.
A person can also redefine their relationship with the culture they were born into and the beliefs and loyalties passed down to them. They can embrace these, change them, or reject them outright. What those who came before us, or those who hold power, say about us does not have to be the limit of what we can say about ourselves. A child born into an Alevi family and raised with an Alevi identity can embrace Sunni belief later in life. Someone raised Muslim can abandon that faith and become an atheist. A person can question and leave behind an identity inherited from their family, even one they once internalized. An identity being handed down to us since childhood doesn't mean we owe it lifelong loyalty.

Is our origin our identity's destiny?

I see examples of this in my work with fourth-generation children in Germany. When I ask, "How do you feel, how would you define yourself?", some answer, "I'm German, of Turkish origin." They don't say "I'm Turkish" — they use Turkishness to describe their family's origin rather than their own identity. And they don't just say "I hold German citizenship" either; they say "I'm German." They live their relationship with Germany as a form of belonging, not merely a legal status.  Of course, some fourth-generation Germans do say "I'm Turkish." They have a bond with Turkey, and by identifying with it, they make that identity their own. Some Kurds we today think of as assimilated also say "We're Turkish" — at times performing Turkishness more emphatically than Turks themselves. But others say "I'm not Turkish, I'm Kurdish." Some say "I'm German." Others say "I'm a Turk with German citizenship." What I'm pointing to isn't an outside imposition; it's people's right to define themselves through an internal process of identification.

When we tell someone who says "I'm German," "No, you're Turkish," what exactly are we doing? We're invalidating what they say about their own belonging and turning their origin into a fixed identity they can't escape. Yet a person's relationship with their origin can change too. Where a person's family comes from doesn't dictate who they must be or where they must feel they belong.  But the moment someone says "I am of Turkey," we suddenly start arguing over this right. We say, "No, you're Turkish." Why? Because someone before us labelled it that way? Because those who hold power deemed it fitting?

Whenever this comes up, people object: "Germans don't say 'I'm of Germany,' the French don't say 'I'm of France.'" As if how someone else uses language should decide how a person gets to define themselves. Why should a name someone else uses for themselves dictate how I must define myself?

Names given by the mistaken

Here are some other examples:

Consider the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. We lump peoples with entirely different languages, histories, cultures and names under a single label imposed from outside. When Christopher Columbus, sailing west in search of Asia, reached the Americas, he believed he had landed in the Indies. The name "Indian," given to the peoples he encountered, was born of that very mistake. The German word "Indianer" still carries the trace of this history. A European's geographical error settled onto the peoples he met as a name. The ones who were mistaken were the Europeans themselves — but others had to carry the name of that mistake.

The issue here isn't just a geographical error. The name Columbus gave the peoples he met came not from how they defined themselves, but from where he thought he had arrived. The logic behind that naming rests not on asking "Who are you, what do you call yourselves?" but on declaring, "I call you this; from now on, this is what you are." It turns one's own mistake into someone else's identity. It refuses to recognize the person in front of it as a subject who can speak for themselves, and insists on deciding who they are instead.

We, too, call the Indigenous peoples of the Americas "Redskins," despite the vastly different cultures, languages and ways of life among them. We replace people's own names with a label imposed from outside based on skin color. Likewise, we call anyone we take for East Asian by the shape of their eyes "Chinese." We don't even bother to find out where a person actually comes from, which people they belong to, or how they define themselves. We look at appearance and decide who someone is. These are racist attitudes that treat different peoples as interchangeable and reduce a person to physical traits.

Many Indigenous people prefer to be known by their own people's specific name. People can, of course, come to embrace a name given from outside over time. But that decision is theirs alone to make. A name being widely used doesn't mean everyone referred to by it has to accept it. What matters isn't the habit we've formed of calling them something, but what they call themselves.

Consider the Aboriginal peoples of Australia as well. Labels like "savage," "barbarian" and "cannibal," pinned on them by Western colonizers, said nothing about how these peoples defined themselves. Those words described how the colonizers wanted to see and present them. Rather than listening to people who had their own names, languages and cultures, the colonizers claimed for themselves the right to define them.

Naming a people and hurling a degrading label at them are, of course, not the same thing. But what I want to highlight here is a shared claim to power running through both: "I know who you are better than you do. I will define you."

Turks are of Turkey too — just like Kurds

In his book Wir sind "Frankfurter Türken" ("We Are Frankfurt Turks"), the ethnologist Sven Sauter examines the bond young people of Turkish origin build with the city they live in. The phrase "Frankfurt Turks" lets local belonging and origin meet within a single identity. To my mind, it also captures the difference between belonging to a place and sharing an identity with that place's majority. Those who say "We're Frankfurt Turks" claim Frankfurt, their lives there, and, in a sense, Germany itself. But they don't see this belonging as requiring them to give up their Turkish identity or accept a Germanness imposed on them. Being from Frankfurt and being Turkish can both find a place in the same person's life.  That one person says "I'm German, of Turkish origin" while another says "I'm a Frankfurt Turk" gets at the heart of the matter. Not everyone has to relate to their origin and the place they live in the same way.

When Kurds, or other non-Turkish peoples, call themselves "of Turkey," they are also declaring a bond with Turkey. They could just as easily call themselves "West Asians" or "Anatolians." By saying "we are of Turkey," they are stating that they embrace Turkey as a shared space of life and belonging. That statement isn't merely an objection saying they aren't Turkish — it's also an act of ownership, an assertion that they belong to Turkey.

The term "Frankfurt Turks" is similar to "being of Turkey" in this respect. Frankfurt Turks form a bond of belonging with Frankfurt without giving up their Turkish identity. Kurds who say "we are of Turkey" form a bond with Turkey — and so with the shared life they have with Turks — without giving up their Kurdish identity. Demanding that they become Turkish in exchange for this bond means accepting the common ground they offer only on condition that they abandon their own identity. Yet this is precisely where the possibility of living together lies: belonging to the same place without having to be the same.  A person can embrace the country they live in, take part in its shared life, and still remain Kurdish. Belonging to Turkey doesn't require being Turkish. Turks are of Turkey, and so are Kurds; this shared belonging doesn't have to erase the differences between them.

Besieging identity from within

What we call identity — cultural identity and belonging in particular — forms through a process. A person makes an identity their own by embracing it, identifying with it, cultivating it, and building relationships with others. They don't passively absorb everything that comes from outside; they form a relationship with it through their own experience and feelings. An identity finding a place in a person's inner world is not the same thing as having it forced on them.

Clinicians who work with psychiatric patients can witness a telling phenomenon: in certain conditions, a person may consider themselves someone entirely different from the identity those around them recognize — believing, for instance, that they are Cüneyt Arkın or Jesus. Here there's a deep split between how a person experiences themselves from within and how they're recognized from outside. I don't equate this clinical condition with cultural identity or with resisting an imposed identity — I want to be clear about that. What I want this example to highlight is that a person's inner experience of identity doesn't automatically line up with a name handed to them from outside.  There is a psychological boundary between a person's inner world and the outer world. That boundary isn't a wall closed to relationship; a person engages with what comes from outside, embraces some of it, transforms some of it, rejects some of it. But there are psychological processes governing what they make their own. Someone from outside saying "This is what you are" doesn't, on its own, bring that identity into being inside them.

Once coercion enters the picture — once someone is told, "You must feel this way, define yourself this way" — we're no longer simply talking about passing down an identity. What's at work here is an attempt to invade a person's inner world from outside. Others want to decide how a person will feel about themselves, what they will identify with, and where they will feel they belong. In this sense, imposing an identity can be understood as an attempted psychological occupation.

This is exactly the invasive quality of forcing Kurds to define themselves as Turkish. Without the person's consent, a Turkishness is placed alongside the Kurdish identity they actually live. And this imposition doesn't stop at proposing two identities that could sit side by side; it turns into a siege the moment it aims to replace Kurdishness, transform it from within, or invalidate it altogether. The problem isn't that a person can hold more than one sense of belonging. The problem is others deciding, in that person's place, which belonging they are allowed to live.

This coercion aims to dictate not just how a Kurd will live, but how they will feel about themselves from within and how they will describe who they are. It tries to settle into the relationship a person has with themselves. Replacing the name a person gives their own identity with another name strips them of their say over their own experience. Dismissing the objection of Kurds who resist this imposition as mere fixation on a word ignores this dimension of the issue entirely. What people are doing here is resisting the invasion of their inner world by others; they are defending their right to decide things about themselves and drawing their own boundaries. Saying "You don't get to decide how I define myself" is a person protecting their own psychological space.

Whoever claims the right to define Kurds also appropriates the authority to speak on their behalf. The question "Who are you?" gets replaced by the verdict "I know who you are." What a Kurd says about themselves stops being a self-definition that should be accepted, and is instead treated as an error to be corrected. What's being targeted here is the person's own will to define their own existence. In this sense, imposing an identity can be understood as an intervention aimed at breaking down Kurdish selfhood and crushing Kurdish will.

If I say "I am of Turkey," don't keep insisting, "No, you're Turkish." What exactly are we arguing about? Supra-identity, sub-identity, side identity, right identity, left identity… Where do these classifications get you the authority to invalidate how I define myself? You're free to call yourself Turkish. My objection isn't to how you define yourself; it's to your feeling obligated to define me the same way. Why should your sense of belonging be a requirement for me?

Is leftism just about soup?

Some leftists say, "So what if you say Turk or of Turkey — what matters is solving the problem of hunger." Only those who reduce leftism to a bowl of soup can think this way. Solving hunger matters, of course. But feeding people doesn't give anyone the authority to trivialize their right to define themselves. People need bread and freedom alike — and they need to exist under their own names and identities. Saying "Feed yourself first, we'll talk about who you are later" asks the person whose identity is being imposed on them to endure that imposition a little longer still. Leftism requires defending a person's dignity and their say over their own life just as much as it requires defending their bread.

This is a familiar script… Didn't we once tell women, "Grit your teeth a little longer, we (men) will solve your problems under socialism"?

Linguistic violence is real too

What I want to say here is this: calling people by a name they object to, against their objections, is a form of violence. Insisting "No, this is what you are" to someone who says "I don't define myself that way" erases their say over their own identity. Claiming the right to define someone else establishes a hierarchy. The person doing the defining places themselves above, and places the person being defined in a lower position whose own word doesn't matter. One becomes the one who decides who the other is; the other becomes the one who is decided about. "What you say about yourself doesn't matter; what I say about you is what counts."

There is a symbolic and linguistic violence at work here. But being symbolic doesn't make this violence any less real. The constant denial of a person's identity and belonging, the stripping away of their right to speak for themselves, is an oppression with real consequences in their life. Once this imposition becomes embedded in institutions and state policy, it can turn into a vehicle for discrimination, forced assimilation and physical violence as well.

We saw a horrifying example of this under Nazism. The Nazis did not invent Jewish identity; but they decided who counted as Jewish using racial criteria, independent of people's own beliefs and sense of belonging. People who did not identify as Jewish were also forced into that classification. The regime claimed for itself the authority to determine who a person was, and turned that definition into an instrument of persecution.

Not every mislabeling is, on its own, fascism; not every imposed identity is historically the same thing. But silencing a person's objection and declaring, "I decide who you are, not you," is one of the core logics of fascistic domination. Because what's being denied here isn't just a name — it's a person's right to have a say over their own identity and belonging.

Making room for a shared "we"

The space the term "being of Turkey" can open up reminds me of Winnicott's thinking on the transitional object and transitional space. I'm drawing an analogy here, borrowing his concepts: "being of Turkey" can form an in-between space between a person's own identity and a shared sense of belonging. It can be thought of as a kind of transitional identity. But the transition here is not from Kurdishness to Turkishness. It is the space in which a person can build a shared life with others while keeping their own identity intact. Building such a space also requires recognizing a person's freedom to define themselves.

This space belongs to us, and yet it isn't only ours. We find something of ourselves there, but we also make room for others to find something of themselves. Within the shared "we," our own "we" continues to live on. The Kurdish "we" and the Turkish "we" can meet within a broader "we" without erasing each other.

Within such a partnership, the distinction between "us and you" doesn't vanish entirely. But the existence of differences stops being an obstacle to living together. The people we call "you" can, with their own identities intact, also become part of the shared "we."

Perhaps the real question, before we demand that everyone say the same "we," is whether there's room in the "we" we've built for others to exist with their own identities. Because the ground for a voluntary partnership can only form where a person is able to speak for themselves and exist under the name they give themselves.

We can accept that people can change the names given to them, change their sex, redefine their beliefs and loyalties — so why can't we accept a person saying, "I am of Turkey"?

That's exactly what I object to. I don't need your permission to define myself.