Rose Gilbert conducting an interview in the village of Chalke in Iraqi-Kurdistan
Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish community in the U.S. — but the history of how that came to be is filled with tragedy and genocide.
The new WPLN podcast The Country in Our Hearts outlines the history of conflict in the region of Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as Kurdish people’s fight for land and the right to exist — much of it through the eyes of one Nashville family. WPLN reporter Rose Gilbert traveled to Kurdistan to create the four-episode series, and spoke with the Scene about her experience reporting on the community and what its members can tell us about issues in immigration at the federal level. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You traveled to Kurdistan as part of your reporting for the podcast. Can you talk about that experience and how it helped you build out this story in full?
As a reporter, I think you always gain more from going to the place you’re reporting on, whether it’s an ethics meeting in Franklin or Iraqi Kurdistan. When you talk to people face to face, I think you build more trust. You get all the intangibles of body language and what the place looks like, what the place smells like, what the food tastes like there — all of those things.
In this specific instance, I think traveling is very important because the struggle for land and autonomy within an ancestral homeland is so much at the heart of Kurdish history. A lot of the people I’ve spoken to have expressed a really strong emotional connection to the land that their family’s from — talking about how much they enjoy eating the food grown in their parents’ or grandparents’ village, talking about how much they enjoy drinking the water from the stream that feeds their village. And there’s a lot of people who live most of their lives here in Nashville, but ask that their bodies be sent back to be buried in Kurdistan. I thought that was really important.
How do you think the medium of audio helped convey this story in ways that maybe you wouldn’t have been able to with a print story?
The first thing that comes to mind is language. There were a lot of longer tracks of untranslated Kurdish in there, and that was an intentional choice, because Kurdish as a language has been, at different times, stigmatized, banned or even criminalized, because it is such an important marker of culture and identity. So including whole stretches of Kurdish was important to me and to the people I was talking to. There have been times where I’ve interviewed somebody who was more comfortable [or] more fluent in Turkish than they were in Kurdish, but they were like, “I don’t want anybody to hear me speaking Turkish. I want them to hear me speaking Kurdish or English, because those are my languages.” So there’s a real sense of identity tied up in language.
Being able to convey emotion in a more subtle way is something I’ve always really loved about audio. There was a gentleman I knew who was talking with his daughter about the story of how they fled, and there were just moments that you could hear how revelatory or heavy this was for her at the moment — not because she said something super long-winded or eloquent about it, but because of the quality of her voice.
You utilized old news footage and other archived materials to create the podcast. What was the process of finding those materials and sorting through it all?
Some of it was, like, you’d be reading primary sources or talking to people, and then doing research on those things. And then you’d find a specific figure who would come up and you’re like, “OK, I gotta learn more about this person.” And then you would fall down these rabbit holes.
[The Associated Press] archive has incredible historical archives. ... Sometimes I’d be searching for videos in Kurdish or Farsi, and that would get better results, because the results that are in English are going to be results that are geared toward an English-speaking audience, which might not be as specific or go as far back as you want.
How do you think this podcast can help create a better understanding of all of our neighbors in Nashville and their different cultures?
One of the goals of this project was the idea of helping our neighbors get to know each other a little bit better. And part of that is having non-Kurdish folks who aren’t as familiar with the story get to know the story better, but also even within the Kurdish community.
But also, there are parts of the story that are not specific to the Kurdish community. Right now, immigration and immigration policy is such a rapidly shifting subject. Having talked to a lot of immigration lawyers, a lot of people just feel like the rules are changing every day. A lot of the story is about looking back at a group of people who, although they went through incredible hardship, were ultimately, at least at first, welcomed in America and found kind of a safety and community here. Not to say it was easy, but America wasn’t the thing making it harder for them here. And then coming to the present day and meeting with a new group of people who are coming to a very different country under very different circumstances. So I think that that part applies to a lot of different immigrant communities in Nashville and America more broadly.
