In Kurdistan, the Middle East, and North Africa, I have seen markings on women’s faces, hands, and arms: engraved memory in the form of small lines, dots, and symbols made from breast milk and ash. Known in Kurdish as deq, these tattoos bear ancient history, identity, protection, beauty, pain, and belonging. 

Traveling through Kurdistan, I met Fatê Temel, a deq artist in Diyarbakir (Amed), and spoke with her about the art of deq, its gradual disappearance, and the efforts to bring it back to life.

For the past several years, Fatê has been running a small deq studio in Diyarbakir, where she works to preserve and revive the tradition of deq – hand-poked tattoos primarily worn by women throughout Kurdish history. Often placed on the face, hands, or arms, these markings are composed of dots and simple geometric forms, each carrying spiritual, cultural, and personal significance. 

Besides being a deq artist, Fatê is also a researcher, traveling throughout Kurdistan to learn from the women who wear deq and from the people and places connected to its history. 

In our conversation, she reflected on her connection to deq, her efforts to sustain it as a living cultural practice, and the layered meanings these body inscriptions continue to hold today.

Read the full interview by Joost Jongerden with Fatê Temel in The Amargi here: Deq: tattoos made of breast milk and ash

Joost Jongerden

Introduction
Diyarbakir’s historic Hevsel Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that has fed the city for centuries, face growing threats from pollution, monoculture farming, illegal construction, weakened municipal authority, and changes to the Tigris River.

Hevsel Gardens in Diyarbakir (Amed), Kurdistan in Turkey, have long been characterized by a “thrown togetherness” of agriculture, ecology, and everyday urban life. For generations, farmers cultivated a diverse range of vegetables and fruits in relatively small plots, supplying the city with fresh produce. Now, this historically layered landscape, shaped over many centuries, is undergoing profound transformation. 

Water management, shifts in agricultural practices, illegal construction, and the weakening of municipal authority to protect the area are all placing the gardens at risk. What was once a mosaic of diverse cultivation practices and shared use, sustaining ecological quality, is increasingly marked by monoculture, declining biodiversity, and pollution.

This article by Kamuran Akin for the special issue Rural Protest and Contentious Politics edited by Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden analyzes the governance of northern Kurdistan through the framework of colonial governmentality. It argues that, for over a century, the Turkish state has administered the region through exceptional legal regimes, coercive policies, and military interventions. Drawing on historical practices such as the General Inspectorates, the 1925 Reform Plan for the East, the Law on the Maintenance of Order, and the 1934 Settlement Law, the article highlights how dispossession, forced displacement, and violence have constituted enduring mechanisms of rule. While acknowledging competing scholarly perspectives that interpret the Kurdish issue through lenses such as nation-state formation, minority politics, and underdevelopment, the article contends that a colonial perspective remains analytically valuable. Building on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it proposes “colonial governmentality” as a flexible framework that captures the evolving, heterogeneous, and adaptive nature of state power. Focusing on fortified outposts (kalekol) and checkpoints, the article argues that these are modern extension of earlier colonial-style governance tools. They function as spatial instruments of control, similar in purpose to earlier institutions like General Inspectorates or emergency rule zones and embody a permanent security presence, reinforcing surveillance and rapid intervention capacity in rural Kurdish areas.

read more here: https://doi.org/10.1111/sena.70049