Building "Little Kurdistan"

Nolensville Pike arches like a bent bicycle spoke from the city center. If you’re cresting a hill on the drive south from the city center, Nashville’s skyline in your rearview mirror, you could stop off for a home-style flounder meal for $4.99 at Captain D's; but if you drive a little farther, approaching what is now embraced as Little Kurdistan, you can stop into Erbil Kabob. Or House of Kabob, Dunya Kabob, or Shish Kabob. If not, there’s Grassmere Grill & Kabob. The Kurdish community has assured that Nashville does not lack grilled meats.

As part of the federal government’s refugee program, Catholic Charities resettled a few Kurdish families in Nashville in the mid- to late-1970s. From there, momentum built in the state capital known for its music industry. Several waves of Kurdish refugees – mostly Iraqis – arrived through the 1990s. Now, about 15,000 of Nashville’s 634,000 residents are Kurds, comprising the largest Kurdish community in the country. A lot of Kurds who don’t live in Tennessee wish that they did.

“Kurds [are] coming from out of state just because we have everything here,” says Tabeer.

A constant flow of cars passes by the salons, bridal stores, Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, and a hibachi grill with a “supreme buffet” along Nolensville Pike. The main mosque for the Kurdish community is across the multi-lane road from a gas station-turned-taco-and-seafood stand, at the intersection of Elysian Fields Road. In a multi-ethnic neighborhood strip mall, Kurd-owned grocers flank the Salahadeen Center behind a used car dealer that advertises in Spanish. Kurdish family homes line the Nolensville backstreets; though now, families are heading a bit farther south every year as they can afford bigger homes in quieter neighborhoods.

“This is my community. This is the community that raised me,” says Drost Kokoye from inside Salahadeen Center, in between the Friday prayer service in Kurdish and the one immediately after in English.

On a Friday afternoon in May, she is standing at a folding table in the front of the mosque to sign up a few more voters as the men file out from prayers, dropping their shoes to the ground with a clack, putting them on and shuffling off to work again. At the end of an hour, seven people have registered. But she’s done it so many times, a low number doesn’t bother her; that just means most of the eligible voters here have been reached.

“We’re in the center that I learned my Arabic alphabet, my Kurdish alphabet, along with having parent-teacher conferences and taking ACT courses,” says Drost, 25. “This is home, and building from home is where power starts.”

“Our parents’ generations were the ones that had to put down the structure and make ends meet, and put down these institutions that we have now. And we’re the ones that are growing on that,” she explains. “We’re more aware of the culture around us. We can kind of assimilate much more, but that means we can keep authentic to our Kurdish roots and bring that into the limelight as a positive, and not something that we need to walk away from.”

The media, pundits, experts and think tanks all talk about immigrant and refugee integration or assimilation. The framework around it makes the process like unlocking video game levels. The government measures it by job and education attainment, and English language acquisition. There isn’t really a measure for it though. No federal employee can account for the family divide between Drost’s mother, who cranks the radio to a country music station in her pick-up truck, and her three adult children, who choose hip-hop and rhythm and blues (R&B) and tease her over a dinner of stuffed grape leaves, grown in their Nashville backyard.

Drost, a law school student, plans to be a civil rights attorney. The way she sees it, she can tackle the social justice issues she cares about and, at the same time, make her parents proud of the work they put into raising her and her two siblings, from Iraqi Kurdistan, to Nashville.

“Advocacy from outside groups can go so far. But it really takes away the agency of the community itself,” she says. Kurdish-Americans need to participate civically to be heard, she says, and voting is a way to “take back the voice for ourselves.”

“We don’t have to look to somebody else to do that."