Textual note: Many Western readers will default to judging the naming of Abdullah Öcalan, which in Delal Chamarane’s French version is identified as Apo, as gounded in any number of misrecognitions (patriarchy, worship, charisma, etc.) First, Ersöz is writing from the field, like Villegas in Bolivia; equally importantly (from what little this interpreter can glean from the Western press), the call to disarm came from the same political prison that Mandela occupied. Again, Ersöz’s proletarian English interpreter wonders whether the same process of reading and thinking that Ersöz discussed with Mater in July, 1994 has included a repudiation of the dangerously abject self- and class-denouncing Maoist concepts of the 1986 Third National Congress that Ersöz mentions in her biographical introduction to the diary. Gramsci, a political prisoner like Öcalan, Mandela, and Navalny, used the figure of the Prince, which, whatever feudal liabilities the name and office implies, and far beyond its encoded convenience to evade censorship, situates the need for an international mass party squarely within the memory of the Italian Renaissance. If Gurbet’s Diary is Benjamin’s missing messianic link to World Revolution, which is how this interpreter’s proletarian English is painting over the French watercolor, it is difficult not to intuit that the ever-imperceptible seismic structures of world history have shifted to Mesopotamia as envisioned by Ersöz.
