March 8, 2010

• A kurdish potluck

  It’s hard to imagine how it feels to be utterly moved by the sight of some red, yellow and green crepe paper lining the walls of a modest community center in Burlingame that is filled with strangers. But by the time Selo and I had walked past the unplugged Bingo machine in the corner, and sat at a table covered with a disposable table cloth and cut-out confetti hearts, we were both trembling and felt as though we were close to tears.

  Kurdish New Year is coming up this month and I was scouring the internets looking for a local celebration. After finding nothing I sent a longshot email to kurdistan.org, which is based in DC, asking if they knew about any groups in Northern California. I was shocked when he wrote back with a contact at something called the California Kurdish Community Center, and even more shocked that the contact also wrote to me, inviting us to celebrate Women’s day with them. And Selo was almost too afraid to note that the invitation was in Turkish.

  Let me just say- we would have been thrilled to find any other Kurds in Northern California. Iraqi, Persian, Syrian, whatever. But Kurdish dialects are different enough to be mutually unintelligible, and the struggles that a Turkish Kurd deals with are different from an Iraqi Kurd, at the end of the day. Anyone who speaks multiple languages and has a community or family that also speaks those same languages knows the fierce sense of belonging that is instilled when you’re surrounded by people that share that same, small, overlapping space.

  When I walked into that room and saw the balloons tied to chairs and the dark-haired children chasing each other between tables, I remembered each and every Kurdish wedding in Warabi. I saw the same tightly wound curls on the women, the same smoking patriarchs outside wearing suit coats over sweaters, the same jutting, triangular noses on the young men. The same music playing on the same crackling speakers from the same pirated MP3s.

  Selo began greeting people in Turkish or Kurdish as appropriate and by the time we sat down to eat we began to feel more relaxed. When the young girls started the dancing, as they always do, we got up to join. It was an easy one, just three steps forward and back, like I made everyone do at our wedding. The woman next to me asked me “Where did you learn Kurdish dance?” and I told her “I learned in Japan”.

  • 1:31 am
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