Returning to Kurdistan (2007–8)
Susan Meiselas speaks to Kristen Lubben, Associate Curator at ICP, in an interview for the ICP/Steidl exhibition catalogue. For the complete interview, please view the book.

KL: You have just issued a reprint of the Kurdistan book. Does it resonate differently now, after the U.S. invastion, than when it first came out?

SM: The Kurds ordered 5,000 copies of the reprint and the question is, just what are they going to do with them? How many schools and how many libraries actually exist? How are the books going to circulate and how many from Northern Iraq will filter over the border into Turkey and Iran and how many will be sent around the world with their ambassadors? I don't know. Making writer Martin van Bruinessen's texts available in Sorani and Turkish is the significant contribution of the reprint. The book is now more accessible to a larger part of the community that doesn't speak or read English.

When I returned to Northern Iraq in November 2007, it had been fourteen years since my last trip. I had no idea how the book had been received or how many people in Northern Iraq had even seen it. I knew the difficulty of bringing the book into Turkey, where it was banned—it was often captured at customs. And people were at risk trying to carry it across the border. So I just didn't know how much the book had penetrated into Northern Iraq.

KL: But it became clear that it had.

SM: It had. I went with a group of artists on the 2007 trip. When I was introduced to our host, Karwan Barzani, the first thing he said was: "You didn't tell the story of my great-grandfather." Karwan, a newphew of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, wanted me to meet his uncle, who is the historian of the Barzani family. I gave the senior Barzani the Kurdistan book and he immediately turned it over. I didn't know how to read that gesture. I had been told that he was a renowned historian, and also very judgmental, and his initial reaction seemed to be a way of putting me in my place. Then it occurred to me that he might not read English, so I opened the book to a photograph of his family members taken in the early 1940s. He named every person in the photograph, at which point I had a slight meltdown about what was not in the book—there's always more. He closed the book again, but that photograph must have sparked his curiosity, because he put it on his lap and opened it up—from the back. That's the moment in which I realized that's the direction in which books are read in Kurdish.

So fast-forward to New York. I'm finishing up the layouts for the new edition of Kurdistan and trying to figure out where to put the Turkish and Kurdish sections, and suddenly it dawns on me that they have to begin at the back. Convincing the publisher to imprint "Kurdistan" in Sorani on the back cover was the ultimate touch. But none of this would have occurred to me if I hadn't been in Barzani's living room, reading his resistance and inability to penetrate what I had made. That's what I mean about experience giving direction to ideas.

KL: But what about the issue of how this book is functioning in an autonomous Kurdistan, after the changes brought about by the U.S.-Iraq war? You've mentioned that different factions with conflicting agendas have used your book for purposes you may not agree with.

SM: Throughout the making of the book, different sectors were pulling and pushing and wanting more, giving more or less. No, I think the more interesting problematic appeared earlier, when Bakhtiar handed out a hundred books in Washington in 1997 and the neo-con movement appropriated the Kurdish issue to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

KL: Were you worried that your work would be used to make the case during the lead-up to war?

SM: I remember wondering, how do I make sense of this, that this book has obviously helped justify the claim that the Kurds were making under Saddam. The Kurds were firmly behind the war. Meanwhile, not only am I photographing protests but I am myself opposed to the war. Early on, I think it was late 2002, I went to Bakhtiar for help with a new film project. He was completely pro-war so we got into huge debate about the Kurdish position, which was: we want America to intervene, we want America to bring Saddam down. So it put me into conflict with the principal community I had made this object with and for.

KL: Were they aware of that conflict? Of what your position was?

SM: Well, I was clear about my position on the war. I was clear I was antiwar, but I can see even now, five years in, how the war has benefitted them. And that's the point of going back fourteen years later and seeing for myself. Where would the Kurds be today if the war hadn't occurred? How can I know? The war gave them the power to build the society that they've dreamed of all the years in diaspora and for over a century.

KL: In your initial proposal, the book is titled The Kurds. "Kurdistan," on the other hand, evokes an imaginary hoped-for-place and community. Now the Kurds have a territory, but it's not "Kurdistan," it's something very different. The Kurds have moved from the mythological homeland to the reality.

SM: They would still call it Kurdistan.

KL: But it's not the borders on the map that you have in the book.

SM: No, they weren't granted the territory that's outlined on the 1945 map, and it's unlikely they ever will have that map. But they're on the map and they are players. They are no longer just stateless dissidents. Jalal Talabani, the head of the PUK, one of the principal organizations, is president of Iraq, and Massoud Barzani, the man form the border tea party, is the president of the regional government and head of the KDP. So those are significant positions that have been achieved in the time that we're talking about. Now what is their idea of "Kurdistan" and how does the Kurdish community both in the diaspora and beyond those borders feel about what is being created in Northern Iraq? That is what I'm trying to understand now.

Kurds in the diaspora have this idealized, nostalgic view of Kurdistan, but most of them don't want to actually go back and live there, even now, when they have all these opportunities. They just like that it's there.

KL: So the pictures that you took when you went back in 2007 were primarily of that: what does this country that has only lived in people's minds and is now getting built look like? Many of the pictures show the extremes of development, the amusement parks or malls or the massive oil infrastructure that's being built.

SM: The oil is going to change their lives, and give them the capacity to transform the physical environment with the wealth that they're sitting right on top of. Looking at the pictures so far, I'm overwhelmed by the construction campaign and in some ways a bit sad about what is being decimated in exchange. What culture is being eroded through the frantic commercial enterprise?

KL: The exhibition that we're doing is going to include your photographs of just after the revolution in Nicaragua and the beginnings of building a new society and those very optimistic but very humble pictures of guys with hammers. Laying sidewalks brick by brick, people working collectively in the aftermath of a successful revolution. What you've found in Kurdistan is also the rebuilding of a society, but on steroids. And your pictures convey a certain wariness about the culture that's being created.

SM: First of all, there were fourteen years intervening, so it's a bigger contrast for me to go back in time. But in terms of the scale of their dreams and their reference set, it's Dubai. They really have a model for where they're going. I can relate to the necessity of twenty-four-hour electricity. They still have huge water shortages and pollution in the water. But the massive shopping mall on the ruins of a 6,000-year-old settlement in Arbil is the more disturbing part.

And some of the issues with women are growing, not receding, such as the rise in honor killings. The modernizing culture sends confusing signals to women, in a society that was traditionally deeply segregated and that is still very cautious about the roles of women in public life. As the society opens up and creates opportunities, the women are often the ones who are the risk-takers and in greatest danger of reprisals. This is what I'd like to focus on next. But finding the way to do it that feels right is very, very important, and I'm not sure I will.

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This exhibition is made possible by Shell.