Picture by Dominique A. Pineiro. Some rights reserved. Any attempt to link the past of the Kurds in Iraq to their future depends on whether the president of the Kurdistan Region can cry. This is not to say that the president should not make speeches, as speeches are required of presidents today and the inability to cry is not synonymous with the inability to articulate. And who would want a president who never speaks? However, it is catastrophic that nowadays more care is taken in writing presidential speeches than in understanding the inability of a president to cry. Modern presidents have become reading machines, voicing written words that are assembled by non-presidents.
The ability to cry signifies neither the absence of total silence, speech, or rationality nor the presence of a magnificent marker of aesthetics and emotionality. It is impossible to reduce crying to the status of an emotion opposed to rationality, just as it is impossible to equate justice with laws or with the modern state constitution. Crying is never hidden, just as acts of injustice can never be forgotten. If we can agree that crying represents an imminent call for justice, then crying can be considered irreducible to a natural state of inarticulation. Rather, crying demonstrates an act of decolonization of the self and the world, forming and proclaiming a decolonized and hospitable order. The inarguable historical “fact” is that in Kurdistan, a national constitution – let alone a system of law independent of politics extending beyond the paradox of colonial politics – has never existed. In the historiography of the region the Kurds’ presence have marked an absence because they have long been signified “blank.” The inability to cry therefore haunts the Kurdish president.
It is impossible to reduce crying to the status of an emotion opposed to rationality, just as it is impossible to equate justice with laws or with the modern state constitution.
