Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey

By Marlene Schäfers

A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contemporary Turkey.

“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226823034

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Voices That Matter

Voices That Matter

Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey

MARLENE SCHÄFERS

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2023 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2023

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81980-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82305-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82303-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226823034.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schäfers, Marlene, author.

Title: Voices that matter : Kurdish women at the limits of representation in contemporary Turkey / Marlene Schäfers.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022014514 | ISBN 9780226819808 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226823058 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226823034 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Women, Kurdish—Turkey—Social conditions. | Women, Kurdish—Civil rights—Turkey. | Kurds—Songs and music—History and criticism. | Singing—Political aspects.

Classification: LCC HQ1726.7.Z8 K877 2023 | DDC 305.409561—dc23/eng/20220404

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014514

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Gazîn

Contents

Note on Language, Naming, and Musical Notation

Introduction

1  The Potency of Vocal Form

2  Vocal Services

3  Voice, Self, and Pain

4  Claiming Voice

5  Making Voices Matter

Conclusion: Resonance and Its Limits

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Note on Language, Naming, and Musical Notation

This book proceeds from the observation that the Kurdish voice constitutes an overdetermined object of concern and debate, hope and promise, in contemporary Turkey. Setting Kurdish voices into writing—as I do in this book—does not escape these tensions. I carried out the fieldwork that my account is based on in both Turkish and the Kurmanji variant of Kurdish, which is spoken by most Kurds living in Turkey and northern Syria, as well as in parts of northern Iraq, western Iran, and the Caucasus. Given that Kurdish does not have official status in Turkey, the language has not been standardized to the extent that other national languages have. Regional variations abound, as do ideas about how to accommodate them. To give readers a sense of the sonic articulation of these voices, I have decided to stay close to my interlocutors’ spoken language when transcribing their songs and citing original phrases. This means that while I rely on the standard Kurdish Latin orthography that is commonly used by Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Europe, my transcriptions occasionally deviate from standard orthography that readers may encounter elsewhere. I write, for instance min go or mi go (I said), rather than min got. Where terms from the region’s local languages have entered into common use in English, I use the English spelling rather than adhering to Kurdish orthography (e.g., I write Yezidi rather than the Kurdish êzidî, Ajam rather than acem, or Kurmanji rather than kurmancî).

Staying close to the spoken language of my interlocutors also means acknowledging the extent to which Turkish and Kurdish routinely intersect and intermingle in everyday speech. In order to allow readers not familiar with the two languages to recognize whether original phrases are in Kurdish or Turkish, I italicize Kurdish words and expressions while italicizing and underlining Turkish ones. I apply this only where spoken language or primary written sources are concerned. Where I provide original terms, names, or titles, I use simple italics for either language. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own, though based on generous assistance by Ergin Öpengin where song texts are concerned. Needless to say, I am responsible for any mistakes that may remain.

In Turkey, non-Turkish place-names have been systematically replaced by Turkish ones. In the attempt to undo some of that colonial hold over Kurdish geographies, I prioritize Kurdish place-names rather than Turkish ones, which I place in brackets upon first mention. Where more than one designation is used in Kurdish, I employ the one most commonly used by my interlocutors. For instance, rather than Amed (Tk. Diyarbakır) I use Diyarbekir.

For the same reason, I refer to the part of Kurdistan that lies within Turkish national borders as northern Kurdistan (Bakur in Kurdish) rather than Turkish Kurdistan (or Turkey’s Kurdistan). While northern Kurdistan refers to Kurdish areas under Turkish rule, southern Kurdistan (Başûr) refers to Kurdish areas within Iraq, eastern Kurdistan (Rojhilat) to those in Iran, and western Kurdistan (Rojava) to those in Syria.

As will become clear throughout the book, for Kurdish women raising their voices and claiming them as their own is both an attractive and a risky undertaking. This has consequences for how I have decided to deal with my interlocutors’ identities. While some of the women I encountered were keen to have their names recorded, many others only talked to me on the condition that I would maintain their anonymity. Ultimately, I have decided to err on the side of caution and replace my interlocutors’ personal names with pseudonyms except where individuals are publicly well known. This decision has not been easy, particularly where individuals explicitly asked me to mention their names. The anthropological convention of anonymizing interlocutors all too easily contributes to patterns of erasure and renders individuals unable to lay claim to their achievements. At the same time, my interlocutors live in highly precarious situations, saturated with political and gendered forms of violence, which makes it difficult to gauge the long-term consequences of exposure. While choosing anonymity in response is perhaps not ideal, I believe that caution is warranted in light of the potential harms involved.

Given that this book makes an argument about the significance of the voice’s sonic form, readers may expect to see the sung narrative that forms the object of the ethnography rendered in musical notation. However, the central genre of this book, the kilam, is not well suited to doing so. Its irregular meter and rhythm mean that standard notation is unable to comprehensively capture its acoustic and musical qualities. Not all readers, moreover, may be trained to read musical notation. I have therefore decided to rely on prose in order to convey some of the key aspects of the vocal aesthetics at stake and give readers a sense of the quality of the soundscapes created by my interlocutors’ voices. I also rely on transcriptions of kilams’ lyrics in order to discuss narrative structure and poetic form where this helps me make my arguments. Transcriptions obviously have their own shortcomings. They fail, for instance, to reflect the live qualities of a performance, and they do not represent sonic characteristics, including patterns of melody and intonation or speed of delivery. Nonetheless, I hope that transcriptions will prove useful for conveying to readers some of the narrative, poetic, and linguistic qualities of my interlocutors’ voices.

Well aware that rendering sound in writing can never substitute for the embodied experience of listening, I point interested readers to the online collection of audio(visual) recordings that accompanies this book at www.marleneschafers.com. While I am not able to share all of my fieldwork recordings, the listening examples I have curated online will allow readers to get a better sense of the repertoires described and analyzed in the pages that follow.

Introduction

Our voices can no longer be hidden, Gazîn proclaimed with firm resolution. Today it is no longer like it used to be. Now we can say, ‘This is me, this is us.’ We can show our existence to the world. I was impressed by the proud insistence of this middle-aged Kurdish woman on the power of her voice, particularly since I knew something of what it had cost her to raise it. Gazîn had just been telling me about the lifelong struggle she had waged for her voice—a struggle that had involved major conflicts with her family and wider social circle, confrontations with Turkish state authorities, and that had been beset by violence, loss, and fear. I had met Gazîn only a few days earlier at a women’s demonstration in the center of Wan (Tk. Van), a sprawling Kurdish town of several hundred thousand inhabitants situated at the eastern edge of the Turkish republic. Organized by a coalition of local women’s rights organizations, the demonstration was held to protest the increasing number of femicides in Turkey, one of which had just recently occurred in a neighboring province. It took place on a warm evening in late August 2011 in a small public park right in the center of town. At the rally, Gazîn proudly introduced herself to me as the director of a newly founded NGO supporting women singers and artists and invited me to come visit their office sometime soon. When I did so the following week, I found myself welcomed into two tiny rooms inside a bland and dusty office block just off one of Wan’s busy intersections in the city center. While the front room, with its large black desk and office chair, conveyed a sense of official business, in the back room to which Gazîn directed me we sat on low benches draped with colorful rugs and cushions, arranged around a large millstone and several copper jugs. Historical Kurdish women’s dresses with vibrant patterns adorned the walls, alongside framed images of iconic female singers.

That day, the association’s office was bustling with visitors, mainly elderly men who prided themselves on being knowledgeable dengbêjs. At once poets and singers, historians and storytellers, Kurdish dengbêjs perform different forms of sung narrative, including epic tales of war and battle, stories of tragic love and courageous deeds, and personal accounts of painful experience. Sipping tea from small tulip-shaped glasses, the men shared local news, discussed Kurdish politics—including the recent collapse of yet another ceasefire agreement between the Turkish state and the guerrilla forces of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK)—and challenged each other to perform one or another oral tradition. Gazîn, though, wanted to take me away from this busy scene, keen to confide in a more intimate setting how her own life as a singer had unfolded. It was thus in the quieter back room that I was to learn about the trajectory that had taken Gazîn to where she stood today, the proud director of a freshly inaugurated NGO, a woman who felt she no longer had to hide her voice. Gazîn was one of the few female dengbêjs to reach this level of success. By the time we met, she had recorded over a dozen albums and produced several video clips to accompany her most popular pieces, which were regularly broadcast on various Kurdish TV channels. She was frequently invited to perform at festivals across the Kurdish region and had even traveled to France to give a concert. These were major achievements for a woman who hailed from a rural background, had not attended school, and had learned to make do with the most modest of economic means while raising five children.

Getting to this point had clearly not been easy. As Gazîn explained to me, in northern Kurdistan many people considered it immodest (‘eyb, şerm) for a woman’s singing voice to be heard in public. Even though many women knew the rich repertoires of oral tradition that are today widely celebrated as key aspects of Kurdish cultural heritage, performing them in public was often met with severe opposition from families, kin, and the wider society. Zehra, a younger female singer of Kurdish pop genres who had joined our conversation, agreed. She recounted how she had published her first cassettes under a pseudonym for fear of her family’s reaction. When they nonetheless discovered her pursuit of a singing career, they pressured her to give it up. Gazîn similarly spoke of years of fierce arguments and conflict with her family over her public appearances.

In addition, there were the political consequences. In a country where Kurdish linguistic and cultural expression has been suppressed for decades, Kurdish voices continue to attract suspicion and surveillance. Although the formal ban on the Kurdish language was lifted in the early 1990s, when I conducted field research for this book two decades later Kurdish sounds remained heavily policed, perpetually suspected of indicating disloyalty toward the Turkish nation. Outside Turkey’s Kurdish heartlands, the sounds of Kurdish easily incited public anger, while Turkish courts, for their part, regularly issued rulings declaring spoken or sung Kurdish a threat to what the constitution proclaims as the indivisible unity of the nation. Becoming audible in and through Kurdish was a risky undertaking in Turkey. Gazîn knew this only too well: at the time we met, she had been freshly indicted on the grounds that two public performances of hers constituted acts of promoting separatism.

Against these stories of patriarchal restriction, political subjection, and different forms of violent disciplining, Gazîn, Zehra, and the other women at the singers’ association displayed remarkable perseverance. Determined to raise their voices despite all opposition, they stubbornly negotiated with the authority figures in their extended families to let them participate in the association’s activities. They risked not only straining domestic relations but also legal sanctioning to perform at concerts and on television. Notwithstanding the precarity of their everyday lives and the challenges of having to run multigenerational households with modest financial means, they dreamed of fame and popularity, of being celebrated on stage and screen, and of the financial gain that such fame might bring. They also insisted that not being able to raise their voices would condemn them to suffocate amid experiences of restraint and memories of loss. And despite the routine frustrations they encountered—when once again a husband or father-in-law intervened to prevent them from attending a performance, a music producer withheld their rightful profits, or yet another promised concert invitation was withdrawn—they radiated a resolute optimism. As women and as Kurds, they knew they had important stories to tell. The time had come for them to raise their voices.

In the stories that Gazîn, Zehra, and the other women at the association told me about their passionate investment in their voices and the struggles they had waged in order to raise them, the voice functioned as a powerful index of emancipation and empowerment. In a context rife with political subjection and gendered disciplining, it held outstanding liberatory potential. Freely circulating voices signaled free subjects, unencumbered in their urge to express their desires, opinions, and inner selves. Such voices spoke of social progress and political advancement, suggesting avenues for overcoming both personal and collective trauma. They promised forms of recognition, participation, and authority from which my interlocutors, both as Kurds and as women, had mostly been excluded.¹

The voice constitutes a powerful trope promising empowerment and recognition not only in Kurdistan, of course. In many parts of the world, marginalized, disadvantaged, and dispossessed subjects are regularly encouraged to raise their voice as a means of asserting their identity, engaging in public discourse, and participating in political decision-making. Many feminist, development, and human rights activists are deeply invested in measures that seek to give voice to the ostensibly silenced so as to bolster their agency and ensure their participation in social and political life. Mental health practitioners and transitional justice activists encourage the voicing of personal experiences of trauma, hardship, and suffering as a path toward personal healing and societal reconciliation (Schlichter 2014; Slotta 2015). In documentary films, we encounter the voices of the disenfranchised as a token of their belonging to a common humanity (Rangan 2017b), while the foundations of representative democracies tell us that decision-making should rely on us citizens voicing our opinions and sentiments in the public sphere (Habermas 1990).

Tying political and personal agency, recognition, and participation to having a voice, liberal discourse and practice invest the voice with immense emancipatory promise, political value, and ethical weight. Voices That Matter sets out to examine some of the consequences of this contemporary valorization of the voice as a route to empowerment and agency. Following Daniel Fisher (2016), I approach representational politics as a framework that powerfully incites minoritarian subjects to raise their voices, noting that such politics render the voice at once an object of desire and aspiration for the marginalized, a linchpin of subaltern resistance, and a site of moral anxiety, governmental intervention, and bureaucratic management. Based on an ethnographic account of Kurdish women’s struggle for voice in contemporary Turkey, I argue that raising one’s voice is not always or necessarily empowering but constitutes an endeavor that is equally shaped by risk, dilemma, and contradiction. What is more, an equation of voice with agency and empowerment fails to adequately capture the effects of the hailing to voice that I observe. These effects reach beyond the question of whether and how voices empower those who enunciate them, or represent the subaltern who speaks. They also inhere in the ways that contemporary politics of voice shape the contour and flow of vocal sound and thereby determine how voices affect those they encounter.

Like the voices of so many other women of the Middle East, those of Kurdish women, too, have long constituted an object of speculation, suspicion, and intervention. From a Western perspective, Kurdish women form part of that broad category of the muslimwoman so astutely described by miriam cooke (2007), whose alleged silence and invisibility function as markers of her ostensible suppression by her own culture. Within Turkey, Kurdish women have similarly been portrayed as silenced and oppressed by the backward forces of Kurdish tribalism, mobilizing generations of Turkish state feminists to come to their rescue over the course of the last century. When Kurdish women have disrupted these tropes of silencing and oppression, they have been met with responses ranging from surprise and admiration to violence and exposure. Following the massive capture of territory by the so-called Islamic State across Iraq and Syria in 2014, for instance, Kurdish women gained much international attention and praise for fighting against and eventually defeating the Islamist group in northern Syria, displaying a resolve many would not have expected.² In Turkey, on the other hand, Kurdish women who use their voices to speak out against discrimination and injustice are regularly disciplined for their excessive agency through a variety of legal and extralegal means (Üstündağ 2019b).

Whether the audibility of Kurdish women’s voices is celebrated as proof of their bearers’ emancipation from restrictive custom and tradition or condemned as evidence of their transgressive agency, implicit in such evaluations stands the assumption that voices inherently represent the will and identity of those who enunciate them. It is this assumption that allows us to see in the circumscription of Middle Eastern women’s voices an act of suppression, and in their becoming audible a sign of empowerment. As I have come to realize over the course of researching and writing this book, however, voices do not in any inherent or universal way represent the interiority of those who pronounce them. In the Kurdish contexts where I conducted research, voices often became detached from the subjects who uttered them, expressing not the emotions of the self but those of others, for example, or featuring like a service that could be commissioned and exchanged rather than being tied to a singular individual and their intimate experiences. How, this prompts me to ask, has the voice evolved from a vehicle that is in principle detachable from its bearer into one that is read as the direct expression of the self and as proof of their agency? And what are the consequences of this positioning?

When highlighting that in Kurdish contexts voices occasionally mean or do things that are not easily captured by dominant frameworks that understand voice primarily as an index of the self and its identity, my aim is not to map out a space of anthropological difference or radical alterity. Doing so would risk casting as inauthentic the desires for voice that women like Gazîn and Zehra so vividly expressed, brushing them aside as mere mimicry of Euro-American ideologies of voice, self, and agency. Yet these desires were all too real, as were the consequences my interlocutors faced when they set out to pursue them. The task I set myself in this book, therefore, is to acknowledge and honor my interlocutors’ insistent desires for voice, without either dismissing them as inauthentic or naturalizing the equation of voice with agency that they rely upon. Instead of taking this equation for granted, I ask what social, historical, and political forces have turned voices into the objects of women’s desire and aspiration—and into sites of moral anxiety and violent disciplining. In this way, I seek not only to understand the hopes and expectations with which women like Gazîn and Zehra embarked upon the struggle to raise their voices, but also to critically interrogate why it is that their hopes were so routinely disappointed.

It is important to underline that women like Gazîn, Zehra, and others you will meet over the course of this book are not in any way representative of Kurdish women in general. Kurdish women harbor a range of different desires and aspirations, and a good number of the women I encountered showed little interest in making their voices heard in public. Nevertheless, I believe that the women who did can shed important light on the emergence of new imaginations of voice and self in a context where having a voice has become ever more crucial for social and political recognition. As such, they have much to teach us not only about the promises and opportunities that the voice holds in the contemporary world, but also about the conflicts and disappointments it can engender.

Vocal Form, Sound, and Mediation

Gazîn’s and Zehra’s passionate investment in Kurdish women’s voices as a means of empowerment and liberation revolved in many ways around the capacity of those voices to represent the interiority, will, and agency of their bearers. Where voices stand for the innermost self of those who pronounce them, silencing or circumscribing voices easily becomes tantamount to suppressing subjects and their desires, while ensuring voices’ free circulation secures social progress and liberal advancement. The vocal practices that actually unfolded in the rooms of the association for women singers that Gazîn had founded, however, suggested that voices did a whole range of other things apart from (or in addition to) functioning as indicators of their enunciators’ will and agency and as a benchmark of their emancipation and empowerment. As I spent many hours during my fieldwork listening to the voices of dengbêjs singing about experiences of hardship, pain, and tragedy at the association and beyond, I observed how voices had the power not just to represent women’s agency or Kurdish culture and history but also to viscerally affect their audiences because of how the voices of these performers reverberated, trembled, wailed. These were voices capable of moving listeners to tears, making them shiver, or, as local idioms put it, burning their hearts, thanks to the trembling of a vowel or the weight of a poetic image. They provided a means to express not only one’s own sorrows but also those of others, making pain travel between bodies and beyond the boundaries of individual subjects. If I was to understand the power of Kurdish women’s voices, it became clear, it would not suffice to frame them solely as indicators of women’s resistance against patriarchal restraint and political repression or as a means of therapeutic healing from traumatic experience. I would also have to take into account the social labor they carry out in Kurdish everyday life because of how they sound, move, and circulate. And I would have to understand how these two aspects relate to each other: how do voices’ sonic contours and aesthetic qualities render them more (or less) amenable to representing the interiority and self of those who pronounce them, allowing them to become powerful metaphors for personal agency and political authority?

To develop a conceptual grip on the ways in which voices become socially consequential not just because of what they represent or signify but because of how they sound and circulate, I draw on the work of anthropologists who have sought to destabilize the familiar idea of the voice as a natural and universal index of agency and empowerment. As anthropologist Amanda Weidman (2014a, 39) has argued, this idea stands at the heart of a distinctly modern ideology of voice that relies on two implicit assumptions. The first is that the voice constitutes a direct and authentic expression of the interior self, assuring self-presence and truth. As Miyako Inoue writes, this is an understanding of I speak, therefore I am, where the act of speaking is equated with the expression of human agency and where the speaker’s voice guarantees her full presence ‘here and now’ (2003, 180). The sovereignty of the subject is thus founded on the resonance of her voice, such that having a voice becomes an index of personal will, intention, and authority. The second, linked assumption holds that the voice functions as a transparent channel of communication whose acoustic form is inconsequential to the content transmitted. Only once vocal form is effaced in this way does it become possible to read the voice as a direct emanation of the individual self, its will, and its agency.

Historical and anthropological scholarship on voice has shown that these assumptions are intimately tied to contexts of (post)colonial modernity and their characteristic understanding of the self as endowed with a bounded, private interiority and the privileged seat of agency. While according to the philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005) the privileging of vocal content over form has marked much of Western philosophy since Plato, it was during the European Enlightenment that the privileging of signifying speech over sonic vocality solidified. As Leigh Eric Schmidt (2000) demonstrates, during this period a concerted reeducation of the senses turned voices from highly affective, spiritual, and sensual objects into tame and technical vehicles of communication. Since then, the primacy of meaningful content over vocal sound has become foundational to power relations in the (post)colonial world (Bauman and Briggs 2003). The result has been lasting hierarchies between civilized and barbaric, cultured and carnal citizens that oppose the rational speech of imperial and national elites to the seemingly meaningless or excessive sounds produced by colonized, black, and working-class populations.³ Women’s voices, too, have often been heard as saturated with excessive emotion, playing into long-standing associations of female gender with emotionality, hysteria, and even madness, in opposition to male reason.⁴ Under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism, moreover, voices feature no longer just as vehicles of individual will and rational self-expression as they do in classic liberal formulations, but in a context that prizes transparency and immediacy they have become increasingly potent signs of personal sincerity and authenticity.⁵

If the eclipse of vocal form is what sustains modern ideas about the voice as an expression of self and agency, this eclipse is also what founds the kinds of representational politics that routinely hail minoritarian subjects—including Kurdish women—to voice. Within these political regimes, the voice can promise political agency and authority, social recognition and personal fulfillment, only because it is seen as a direct emanation of the individual self, while its sonic contours, lyrical density, or aesthetic elaboration matters little. What this also means is that if we are to critically interrogate such regimes and their consequences, we need to return to voice as form—precisely what this book sets out to do. Attending to voice as form means holding at bay powerful notions of voice as a representational trope, indicative of agency, will, and presence. It means shifting attention from vocal content (what voices say) and symbolism (what voices represent) to vocal form (how they do so) in order to give prominence to the social labor that voices routinely carry out as they travel and circulate, echo and reverberate, chant and tremble. And it means interrogating how vocal form sustains and nourishes particular kinds of subjects and communities and the political formations they inhabit.

To understand how vocal form relates to the making of subjects, politics, and communities, I have found it helpful to think about the voice as a thick event (Eidsheim 2019) that is at once a material, vibrational sound object and a key representational trope for social position and power (Feld and Fox 1994, 26; see also Feld et al. 2004, 341).⁶ What the anthropological literature teaches us is that the relationship between these dimensions is culturally and historically malleable. This means that we cannot take for granted that voices always indicate the self and authority of those who pronounce them. Quite to the contrary, the voice as a sonic, material object or force may relate to speakers, their selves, and bodies in a multiplicity of ways. Take spirit possession, for example, where a possessed person finds that their voice is no longer their own but has been usurped by a spirit speaking through them. In those instances, voice and self become radically detached from one another, often enabling the voicing of issues that defy public scripts or entail uncomfortable truths.⁷ Linguistic features may have similar effects. Wolof speakers in Senegal, for instance, employ several different speech registers that vary in tempo, pitch, and intonation depending on the social status of the person they interact with (Irvine 1990). Rather than expressing themselves through a singular and immutable voice, Wolof speakers thus strategically handle a variety of different voices, indicating less a stable identity than fluid positionings of the self. Some even renounce speaking altogether and instead employ griots (storytellers) to communicate for them. In Kurdish contexts, too, musicians regularly