A Childhood Tale From The Dark

For their work entitled A Childhood Tale From The Dark, Leman S. Darıcıoğlu launched an open call through their social media accounts for collaboration with women or LGBTI+ tattoo artists of Kurdish origin. This is how the artist produced the work with Berivan Işık, one of the Kurdish women tattoo artists who responded to the call. They asked for a handwritten tattoo on their body of a Kurdish sentence Işık could remember from tales and stories told by their elders or from dreams they had during childhood. During the performance, Darıcıoğlu did not intervene in the choice of the sentence or the placement of the tattoo, surrendering their back to Işık.

Stemming from the Iranian myth of Kaveh the Blacksmith, Işık chose the following sentence: "Bi mirine ye qrale zordar bihar cardin hat!" It means: "Spring came only when the tyrant king died!" The story of Kaveh the Blacksmith – referred to as a symbol of the Kurdish fight for freedom – is about a ruthless king named Zahhak, who forced his people to bring children to his castle in order to feed his wild animals and snakes with the children's brains. By causing the deaths of children, he also prevented the arrival of spring. One day, the people of the country began to defy the foreign rule by sending lamb brains instead of children's brains. At the same time, they smuggled their children to a safer place and trained them to fight. When the king discovered the truth, he became even more ruthless and ordered his soldiers to bring him the children's brains themselves. In a village near Zahhak's castle lived a blacksmith called Kaveh, who had already sacrificed seven of his eight children. When he was forced to send his last child to Zahhak, he decided to revolt against the rule and encouraged the people to join the rebellion. Under Kaveh's leadership, the people and their children, trained as fighters, fought against Zahhak. They killed him and set his castle on fire. It is said that this revolt and liberation, which brought spring to the land, occurred on the 21st of March. This is also the story behind both the Newroz ritual and references within the Kurdish liberation movement.

During the formation of the Turkish Republic, national identity was consolidated around the idea of “Tek millet, tek dil, tek vatan” [“One nation, one language, one homeland”], marginalising ethnic and linguistic difference. The Kurdish language and identity have since been subjected to prohibition, assimilation and continuing forms of state repression. A Childhood Tale From The Dark addresses this history through the politics of the mother tongue. By surrendering their back to Işık, Darıcıoğlu turns their body into a site for a language historically forced out of public expression. Rather than adopting the slogans of contemporary political discourse, the work turns to childhood stories and oral memory, allowing what has been suppressed to surface through an intimate and irreversible gesture.