Representation of Political Culture in Kurdish Poetry: Content Analysis of Hazhar and Hemn's Poems

Advent and development of modernization, nationalism, and nation-building in the multicultural society of Iran have been associated with evolution and development of political and social aspect of literary texts. This impact was highly clear on Kurdish poetry and its ancient tradition that arose in the 16th Century (Ahmadzadeh, 2007: 198). Superiority of poetry over other genres is a phenomenon that is common in the history of numerous Oriental nations. Even during the 20th Century, despite of the advent of Kurdish journalism and literary prose in Kurdish literature, the quality and quantity of Kurdish poetry are still at a higher level.
Poetry is a mediating tool to understand social and political issues (Ahmadzadeh, 2007: 25).“The beginning of the entry of poetry to the field of politics, in the form of integration of these two, in Mukryan Kurdistan goes back to Saif Ghazi’s time” (Dashti, 2009: 47), and it reached its climax in Hemn and Hazhar’s poems. Both claims that Hemn stepped into the field of politics through poetry or entered poetry through politics are acceptable (Ibid, 48). This claim is also correct even more intensely about Hazhar. In this regard, due to their political activism, their poems depict the political, social, and cultural circumstances and help us understand the political culture of the Kurds as an important and effective part of Iran’s civilization.
In the present study, content analysis method was utilized in order to quantitatively analyze the content of Hemn and Hazhar’s poems. The analysis unit is “line”. The published poems composed by Hazhar were retrieved from his books “Bo Kurdistan”[1] (1979) including 5,274 lines and “Alakok”[2] (2001) including 553 lines, and Hemn’s were collected from his book “Bargay Yaran”[3] (2003) including 2,526 lines. These poems were composed over 1941-1990. The reason for choosing the poems was their political nature which indicates these two poets’ attitude toward political culture. The sample size was all of the lines that have political concepts and themes. Stratified sampling was employed to select the poems.
The data of the present study were collected through reverse questionnaire and based on categorization. In order to enhance the validity of the instrument, first, the face validity of political culture categories was examined by making use of the views of some field experts and scholars. To enhance the reliability of the study, the texts of the poems were encoded again and validity coefficient formula was used to calculate the consistency between the two tests.
Discussion of Results and According to the results of the study, only 12.36% of the poems reflect the components and themes of modern and traditional political culture. The signs of modern political culture are reflected about 20 times more than traditional political culture signs in the poems, which indicates the modern view of these two poets. One of the most important features of the political culture of the poets was the dominance of functional and reflexive view on the sociocultural structure of Kurdish regions as a part of Iran’s community. Comparing the main components of political culture indicates that themes related to “individual” are more reflected than other themes while “gender” is least reflected. This issue indicated the importance of major trends like individualism, human agency, and democracy as the main components of modernism according to these two poets. The dimension of attitude toward gender in Hemn’s poems was reflected 5% more than Hazhar’s, which indicates that the former paid more attention to women’s issues. Low reflection of gender-related issues indicates that there were social, cultural and political problems and issues beyond gender, which had drew the poets’ attention. Moreover, apart from the quantity of the poems, this issue has been reflected in a very modern and advanced form in Hemn’s poetry. His famous poem “Yadgari Shirin”[4] (Hemn, 69) is a reason for such claim. Moreover, comparing the method of representing the components of political culture in Hemn and Hazhar’s poetry lightens the fact that political culture is reflected more in Hazhar’s poems (980 lines) than Hemn’s (620 lines). Therefore, themes related to individualism are reflected more than other themes in the poems composed by Hemn and Hazhar.