Culture is not only a mark left by man on the world; it is also a wound inflicted by the world on man. From the moment man has existed, he has not only been content with shelter and sustenance, but has also wanted to make sense of his life. Culture is the intensification of this effort to make sense over time. However, culture is often misunderstood: To see it as a set of traditions from the past is to miss its essential nature. Culture does not remain in the past; it calls the past into the present and carries it into the future. For this reason, culture is a state of consciousness that disrupts the linear flow of time and makes the past and the future talk at the same time.
In human history, culture was first born with silence. What could not be said, could not be named, what was feared turned into myths; myths evolved into narratives, narratives into identity. In this respect, culture is the domain not only of what is expressed but also of what cannot be expressed. The culture of a society is as much about what it says as what it carries in silence. Although the invention of writing made culture visible and permanent, it also made it selective: What is written is remembered, what is not written is accepted as forgotten. However, many things that have not been forgotten have continued to live in areas outside the written word.
It is precisely at this point that Kurdish culture occupies an exceptional place in human cultural history. Kurdish culture has largely been carried on the shoulders of memory, not writing. This is not a deficiency, but a different way of being. Memory is more fragile but more alive than writing. Writing fixes; memory changes, reconstructs and interprets. The fact that Kurdish culture has existed in oral form for a long time has made it a culture that is not frozen but constantly reproduced. Each narrator did not merely pass on the past; he or she added to it the pain, hope and questions of his or her own time.
One of the most profound elements of Kurdish culture is the perception of time. In this culture, time is not just a moving line; it is circular, it returns, it reverberates. An old lament can describe the pain of today; a saying spoken hundreds of years ago can still be relevant. This makes Kurdish culture timeless, not nostalgic. Culture here is not a “longing for the past” but a state of “perpetual now”.
What has perhaps never been said is this: Kurdish culture is not only a culture that struggles to exist, but a culture that has learned to think with absence. The scarcity of records, being outside the center, and constant interruptions have not diminished Kurdish culture; they have deepened it ontologically. In this culture, identity is not a ready answer, but a question that is constantly asked. The question “What is being Kurdish?” does not attain a fixed definition; it is asked again in every generation and answered differently each time.
In the modern era, culture is often defined through visibility: written works, archives, museums, digital records. Kurdish culture, on the other hand, has learned to exist without being visible for a long time. This has given it a different form of resistance. Not being visible did not mean extinction; on the contrary, the culture continued to live in a more internal, quieter but more deeply rooted way. Today, the fact that Kurdish culture has begun to express itself through modern means is not a “rebirth” but rather the outpouring of a long-standing internal conversation.
Kurdish culture today is neither purely traditional nor purely modern. It is not stuck between two times; it is a culture that carries two times at the same time. Oral narrative and written literature, local memory and global language, ancient myths and contemporary questions stand side by side. This juxtaposition is not a contradiction but proof that culture is alive.
Ultimately, culture is not about what a people has, but about what they can still remember who they are despite what they have lost. Kurdish culture is precisely the name of this practice of remembering. Where time has fallen silent and history has been incompletely written, culture has continued to speak. And perhaps the most striking fact is this: Kurdish culture is a culture that has taught people how to remember, rather than how to explain themselves.
Gürsel Karaaslan