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California-born Kurdish youngsters and
their Kurdish culture
7.1.2007
By Kevin McKiernan |
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Slender
Roots: The way
his two children saw it, a vacation in Iraqi
Kurdistan would only take them away from their
friends. But for Rashid Karadaghi, who spent a
lifetime protecting the Kurdish language, you must
go
January
7, 2007
The last time Rashid Karadaghi and his wife, Bayan,
took their children "home" to Iraqi Kurdistan was in
1997, when 13-year-old Diyari—the name means "gift"
in Kurdish—was a little boy of 4 and 11-year-old
Lanja ("spirited walk") was just a toddler.
A lot has changed since then—both in Iraq as well as
at home for the Karadaghis. Now the California-born
youngsters are immersed in a culture of cellphones,
rap music and PlayStations—"bombarded," as their
father puts it, "by everything not Kurdish." The
very notion of a vacation in Iraq—even in the
relatively stable Kurdish region—seems exactly what
Bayan's employer calls it: crazy.
But Rashid has a dream: He wants his children to
know their Kurdish roots. "I want the kids to see
the donkeys and sheep where I grew up and to see the
pile of rubble where Saddam's soldiers destroyed our
house," he says. "I want them to see where we baked
bread, hauled water from the well and where I napped
under a mulberry tree."
Karadaghi, who holds a doctorate in English from UC
Santa Barbara and is now a teacher, set out in 1971
to write the first comprehensive English-Kurdish
dictionary, translating tens of thousands of words
and making painstaking entries with his Parker
fountain pen. The project culminated in 1999, when
an Iraq-bound friend succeeded in smuggling his
manuscript through Turkey—where the Kurdish language
is still a source of controversy—in a crate of
satellite parts. From there, the manuscript made its
way to Iran, where last summer 10,000 copies of the
1,256-page hard-bound book, each weighing more than
51/2 pounds, finally rolled off the press.
Those stats, though, aren't the ones that interest
Diyari, the sports fanatic in the Kurdish American
household.
Inside the Karadaghis' home in Salinas, ESPN is
blaring. Diyari's hero, Barry Bonds, has just hit
his 715th home run, surpassing Babe Ruth's former
record, and Dwyane Wade, the NBA star whose jersey
hangs in the boy's room, is shooting 59% for the
Miami Heat in Game 4 of the NBA playoffs. Lanja,
Diyari's precocious sister, thinks her big brother
is acting "ridiculous"—again—and, for the umpteenth
time this weekend, she needles him as a "couch
potato."
Rashid is having a hard time selling the upcoming
trip to his kids. They are too young to know that
today's Iraqi Kurds have their lands mostly under
control; that the semiautonomous enclave established
as a no-fly zone in 1991 to protect them from Iraqi
forces has advanced—though not yet brought about—the
age-old Kurdish dream of independence; that the
bloody chaos in the rest of the country is largely
outside the checkpoints manned by Kurdish fighters
called peshmerga ("those who face death"); and that
not a single American soldier has been killed in the
region they are about to visit.
Lanja is worried, in particular, about creature
comforts. "There are supposed to be normal toilets
in the houses on my mom's side," she explains, "but
on my dad's side I think there are just holes in the
ground." Diyari thinks a full month is too long to
be missing Pony League baseball at Jack's Park,
where he plays left field for the Monterey
Cardinals. "Why can't we just take a short trip to
Hawaii like the other kids in my class," he
complains.
I met Rashid Karadaghi in Santa Barbara in 1991,
when he briefed me before my visit to the Kurdish
area of Iran, where I was going to do some relief
work. That was a year before Bayan came from Iraqi
Kurdistan to marry Rashid and a dozen years before
the U.S.-led invasion would topple Saddam Hussein.
Rashid lived in Isla Vista, the student ghetto near
UCSB, in a two-room cottage carpeted with scraps of
paper, scrolls of words, old texts and would-be
dictionary entries, which he stored in an Igloo ice
chest. (After moving to Salinas, he would secure
them in a heavy safe in his bedroom closet).
Karadaghi called his dictionary Azadi
("Freedom")—"the most precious word" in the Kurdish
language, he said.
"They can confiscate your land and they can take
your cattle away too," he explained, "but as long as
you have your language, you are a people." After 20
years, he had reached page 4,112 in the giant
manuscript, having just added "domino effect," a
term he had heard on a talk show on his car radio.
He had recorded a staggering 44,000 entries by hand,
and he told me proudly, "You know, Samuel Johnson's
dictionary only had 42,000 entries!"
When he landed in California in 1964 as a
scholarship student from the University of Baghdad,
Karadaghi knew nothing of Isla Vista's storied
counterculture. His naiveté came to an end during a
campus discussion about hallucinogens, when a UCSB
instructor asked students to recount their favorite
"trip." Karadaghi laughs now when he recalls how he
almost blurted out the details of the flight from
the Middle East, his first experience on an
airplane.
Karadaghi adapted quickly to the '60s. He grew his
hair longer; protested the Vietnam War; served lamb,
organic rice and pita bread at cookouts in the
backyard of his tiny cottage; and watched the
notorious burning of the Bank of America.
One day he saw some classmates running on a Goleta
beach, and he asked them what they were doing.
"We're jogging," one said. "Why don't you join us?"
He did, and before long he was running marathons. He
was partying too, like much of the UCSB campus,
turning up the volume on favorites like the
Jefferson Airplane and Santana and marveling at the
spontaneity of the opposite sex. "Middle East women
are more complicated than Americans," he said. "Over
there, if you ask to go for a walk, a woman will
analyze it awhile before answering."
When it came to preparing me for that visit to the
Kurdish region of Iran, Karadaghi had his work cut
out for him, and I found myself quickly overwhelmed
by the blitz of information on Kurdish history,
politics and culture. Halfway through the compressed
tutorial, I tried to recite some of what I'd just
learned about Turks, Kurds, Syrian Kurdistan,
Iranian Kurdistan, the Turkish language and so on. I
was confused. "So you people," I stammered
foolishly, "do you all speak Turdish?"
Salinas is known as "the salad bowl of the world."
The area supplies 70% of America's lettuce and
produces more vegetables than anywhere in the
nation. Salinas itself has a population of 152,000,
two-thirds of whom are Latino, and many of the local
stores have signs in Spanish. The Karadaghis are the
only Kurdish family in town and the children, who
are olive-skinned, say it's not uncommon for
strangers to greet them with Buenos días or ¿Cómo
estas?
When I visited a few months ago, Karadaghi drove me
to Monterey, some 20 miles away, where we watched
Diyari's baseball team get shellacked by the Seaside
Giants. Bayan and Lanja joined us in the stands, but
left early for a Monterey mall to shop for gifts for
relatives they would soon visit in Kurdistan. After
the game, Rashid suggested that we stop for lamb
kebab before going home to Salinas. Despite his good
showing at bat, Diyari was brooding about the
loss—and promptly announced his refusal to eat
Middle Eastern.
"The food is gross," he said. Instead, he persuaded
his adult companions to visit a Subway shop near
Monterey's gentrified Cannery Row, where we settled
for cold cuts on a bun. By then, the teenager's mood
had shifted and Diyari was leaning across the red
plastic booth, playfully poking his father—a
big-framed boy in a baseball uniform tickling an
older man, kissing his cheek and smothering him with
baba gians, the Kurdish term of endearment for "dear
one."
The next morning we went out to eat in Salinas.
Diyari pretended to be in a funk, complaining about
the upcoming trip, making comments like "Kurdish is
borr-ring" and "Kurdish girls are ugly" to try to
get a rise out of anyone who would listen. He had
confided the day before that his Kurdish was better
than Lanja's—it was his first language until he was
5, when Bayan went back to work as a bookkeeper—and
it was clear that his sister was the intended target
of the wisecracks. He said he didn't want Mexican
food, but no one really believed him, and we ended
up downtown at La Perla, a breakfast joint on Main
Street.
Main Street is undergoing a face-lift these days,
but some buildings are still run-down and a number
of stores, having lost customers to outlying strip
malls, are boarded up. Local merchants are banking
that the lure of John Steinbeck, Salinas' famous
son, will help to rescue downtown. The National
Steinbeck Center at the end of Main Street, across
from La Perla, offers first-class exhibits. And the
nearby restored Queen Anne Victorian, Steinbeck's
birthplace and boyhood home where he wrote parts of
"Tortilla Flat" and "The Red Pony," is now a
restaurant with docent tours and a prix fixe menu.
La Perla, which is decorated with hanging piñatas, a
Mexican flag, a painting of Emiliano Zapata, a
statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a Negra Modelo
beer sign, was named for the author's 1947 novel
"The Pearl." According to a sign in the window,
"Steinbeck would have eaten here."
Lanja dives into a plate of huevos rancheros, agrees
to "take a chance" on the homemade tamarindo juice
and readily answers questions about being a
first-generation American.
"We are proud to be Kurds," she says. "It's just
that we don't like speaking Kurdish with our parents
when our friends are around." At school she has
given reports on Kurdish geography and food, gamely
fielding questions from other fifth graders on the
Iraq war and why Kurdish script reads from right to
left. ("Frankly, I don't know.")
A classmate recently teased her about being
"Spanish," and the next day he called her "Turkish"
when they passed in the hallway. On the third day
Lanja was prepared. "No! I am Kurdish—with a K!" she
countered. Her nemesis was prepared. "Well," he
observed, correctly, "Kurdistan is not on a map."
That flummoxed Lanja, but only for a moment. "OK,
OK," she recalled telling him, "but I'm still from
there!"
Article taken from: www.eKurd.net
One of the reasons for the upcoming trip, Rashid
says, is for his children to improve their Kurdish,
"the language that connects them to their parents
and grandparents." Rashid emphasizes that Diyari has
helped him with dictionary entries ("He put in the
primary stress in each phonetic entry"), but the boy
isn't listening. Sitting in the high-backed booth at
La Perla, he is picking at his burrito, one arm
draped around his mom, his thoughts somewhere else.
Bayan manages to get his attention by talking about
basketball, which has become her favorite spectator
sport ("I love the screaming!"), and she dwells on
the close games when Diyari's three-pointers have
saved the day.
Rashid brings up the fact that Diyari received
straight As on his last report card. Lanja points
out that she also got As. Yes, there was that one B,
she acknowledges, carefully folding beans into a
corn tortilla, but that was only because there
wasn't enough time to recopy some work. "Therefore,"
she argues with a straight face, "it's technically
an A." Rashid cracks up, smothering Lanja with
kisses. "Listen to her—'technically!' " he exclaims.
"My little girl is going to be a lawyer."
Shoes come off at the front door of the Karadaghis'
tidy home, which is decorated with Kurdish carpets,
American and Kurdish flags and a picture of yellow
nergis, the Kurdish national flower. A satellite
dish on the side of the house provides the family
with 24-hour Kurdish programming from Kurdsat and
Kurdistan TV in northern Iraq, and visitors are
offered medjool dates, pistachios, figs and birma,
the sweet Kurdish dessert. Bayan is on the phone
talking in Kurdish to her sister in Kurdistan about
the trip.
Rashid is in the kitchen, making hummus from
scratch. Diyari and Lanja claim that the hummus at
Trader Joe's is better, but that's just part of the
endless teasing to which they subject their father.
After all, just because they love him and his crazy
dictionary dream, and just because he translated
thousands of words into Kurdish—even ones like
"double whammy," "holy smokes" and "gee whiz"—that
doesn't mean he knows everything. They howl when
they trip him up with sports slang; he didn't know
what "southpaw" meant, and he called a left-handed
pitcher a "leftist." And once, in segueing from a
conversation about hand baggage for the upcoming
trip to the subject of getting burritos for dinner,
he suggested they stop for "carry-on" food. He was
ribbed a lot for that slip-up, but the time they
really got him was when he talked about the Founding
Fathers. "To you, they may be the Founding Fathers,"
the American-born children gleefully declared as
they tickled their immigrant father and kissed his
cheeks. "To us, they are our Founding Fathers!"
The family computer station sits in a loft at the
top of the stairs. That is where Bayan downloaded
and printed Rashid's dictionary corrections from the
publishing assistant in Kurdistan, and where Diyari
uploaded All-Star Baseball 2004 and NBA 2k6 and
other video games. It is here that Rashid composes
his late-night Internet blogs about independence for
the Kurds ("It is the food we eat, the air we
breathe"), and where he expresses his hope that the
much-anticipated trip will offset his children's
craving for popular culture.
"I don't want them to live in a Kurdish
bubble—that's not my ideal," he insists. "But if
they end up owning big houses in Beverly Hills or
Pebble Beach but have forgotten Kurdistan, I will
have failed."
Lanja leads the way to her room, where she shows off
the eye-catching sash she earned for Kurdish dancing
at Newroz, the Kurdish New Year festivities the
family attends each year in San Jose or San Diego.
The sash is red, yellow and green—a forbidden
display of colors in parts of Turkey and Iran—and
Lanja has hung it proudly on her wall. Diyari,
always the contrarian, tries to convince her that
the Newroz celebrations in San Diego, some of the
largest in North America, were "borr-ring," but
somehow I don't believe he thinks so.
We go across the hall, where he shows me his sports
trophies, the ticket stubs from a San Francisco
Giants game, the posters of Barry Bonds above his
bed and the Dwyane Wade and Lebron James jerseys on
the wall. When I press him on the prospect of
meeting kids his own age in Kurdistan, where he's
heard that community vigilance affords teenagers
more freedom from parental supervision than in
America, a smile creeps across his face. And then we
go outside to play catch.
A few months after the Karadaghis' trip to
Kurdistan, a group of Rashid's UCSB grad school
colleagues from the '60s met the family at Goleta
Beach to celebrate the new dictionary. It was Sunday
afternoon, and the beach was crowded with squawking
seagulls fighting over the remnants of someone's
tri-tip. Thirty miles offshore, the powder-blue
outline of the Channel Islands shimmered above a
flat Pacific Ocean.
The one-time literature students found a picnic
table near the water, which they spread with
barbecued chicken and enough health-conscious salads
to last a weekend. A copy of the Azadi dictionary,
hot off the press and thicker than an L.A. Yellow
Pages, was triumphantly displayed next to the
chocolate cake. The alumni were older and grayer
now, but clearly still fond of the smiling Kurd who
had landed in their lives, straight from Baghdad to
Isla Vista, some 40 years before.
Diyari and Lanja were on hand, polite recruits at an
adult reunion. They seemed more interested in
fingering excess frosting from the cake than in
fielding a visitor's questions, but I pressed them
to report on the trip. Had they gotten used to all
the guns and checkpoints, the intense security that
makes Kurdistan a stable island—so far—in an
otherwise shattered Iraq? How did Lanja's aunts like
the hand lotion the family had brought them from
Victoria's Secret? Had the youngsters learned to
read Kurdish street signs and soda pop labels? Did
Diyari get over his aversion to kebab and Lanja
overcome her trepidation about latrines? Did
Diyari's cousins succeed in converting him to
soccer? The last inquiry elicited a grin, but most
of the others got me friendly shrugs of teen-like
indifference.
By then the once-dreaded trip to the "old country"
was two months in the past—a lifetime ago at their
ages—and the ex-travelers were already in the swing
of a new school year, reunited with friends and back
in their California groove. More than likely, they
were still processing the four-week immersion in
Iraqi Kurdistan, a heady experience of language,
culture and connecting to scores—literally—of doting
relatives. In any case, it was a
happy-go-lucky day on the beach and they were having
too much fun for a protracted exploration of Kurdish
roots. I let it go after a while, recalling the gist
of something my own father used to say: "What is
bred in the bone will out."
Diyari had a football and was looking for
someone—anyone—to throw him a pass, and he spent
much of the picnic trying to pry the guests away
from their spirited conversation with his parents.
When that failed, he would turn his attention to his
sister, a pursuit that largely consisted of
slide-tackling her in the sand. Then Lanja would
half-heartedly complain to her father, and Rashid
would smother her with kisses and baba gians. But
just for a moment, and then she'd break loose to
bait Diyari again.
And so it went, until the autumn shadows fell and a
chill drifted in from the sea: old friends
reminiscing about Santana, student protests and one
immigrant's dream about the power of words—and two
Kurdish American kids at arm's-length, chasing
sunbeams.
latimes com
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