Köksal, Özlem. "Introduction." Aesthetics of Displacement: Turkey and Its Minorities on Screen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016
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Köksal, Özlem. "Introduction." Aesthetics of Displacement: Turkey and its Minorities on Screen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. xv–xxviii. Topics and Issues in National Cinema. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 23:21 UTC. Copyright © Özlem Köksal 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Introduction I grew up in Turkey in the 1980s, and my knowledge of Turkish history was limited, predominantly, to the information disseminated by the education system, which provided a binding, unifying narrative. Although at times a contradictory piece of information would enter into my world, I was, never- theless, equipped with the necessary unifying narrative to put those fragments into working pieces within that narrative. Hence, I was convinced that the girl with a non-Turkish name in high school was a “foreigner” who spoke perfect Turkish. At school we were also taught that Turkey was a “cultural mosaic.” This usually meant the inclusion of different ways of life (which revealed itself in accents, culinary differences, folk dances, etc.), but never the stories behind what created those differences. I first encountered the stories behind those different cultures in my twenties, and that was predominantly through film and literature. When Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s film Bulutları Beklerken/Waiting for the Clouds (2003) was released, I was in London and saw the film as part of the London Turkish Film Festival. Narrating the story of a Greek survivor of the forced marches of the early twentieth century, part of the efforts to homogenize the populations of both Greece and Turkey, the film ended on a relatively sad note. After the screening, I overheard a conversation between two Turkish speakers. While one of them appeared touched by the story, the other said that he did not like such films because “they make us [Turks] appear bad in Western eyes and give Greece even more reasons to accuse us [of injustices].” It was a reaction to the powerful and challenging narrative, but also to his own lack of knowledge on the subject: caught off-guard by a version of history which does not comply with the momumental narrative most Turks are familiar with, his initial response was defensive. Being constantly “assured” at school that when the Greek army invaded Western Anatolia the Turks “dumped the Greeks [the enemy] into the sea from the shores of İzmir,” it was perhaps confusing to see a character in the film who not only claimed to be of Greek origin, but also had to hide her identity in order to survive in Turkey. Until the late 1990s, the general public remained largely uninformed about the different discourses on unresolved aspects of the past in Turkey; they were, 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 15 04/11/2015 13:54 xvi Introduction by and large, bombarded with the official versions disseminated by the state. The social and economic changes that took place in Turkey during the 1990s, particularly the constitutional changes brought about by the ongoing process of applying to join the European Union (EU), in contrast to the restricted civil liberties of the military regime of the early 1980s, among other factors, created a discursive space that allowed previously unavailable perspectives on history to be discussed. Before going any further, I should add that the writing of this book spans several years and, although the films analyzed, particularly the ones originating in Turkey, emerged in a context that allowed such discursive space, the success and sincerity of the official efforts toward protecting freedom of speech and civil liberties can be contested. Yet, the growing interest in the past, and the contestation it creates, has become particularly visible in all areas of cultural life in contemporary Turkey, from literature to cinema, in the context of the post-1980s nation. The interest in the recent past, the ways of remembering and representing the past, either with the intention of affirming it, or in order to challenge it, as well as cinema’s particular and peculiar relation to memory itself, is the point of departure for this work. The objective of this book is to explore the relation between cinema and memory in Turkey from a transnational perspective, by paying close attention to the depiction of memory and language and the ways in which the geographies of minority experience affect both narrative and cinematic space. Focusing on films made from the late 1990s onward, I investigate how cinema has responded aesthetically to the issues created by the unresolved past. The analysis carried out locates what is often referred as the “new cinema of Turkey” within the specific context of Turkish history, particularly in relation to the troubled relationship between the concept of unified citizenship and Turkey’s unassimilated minorities. Treating displacement as the structuring condition of the “now” of these films, this study focuses on those who bring the taboo issues of the repression of minorities into visibility, which result from a gradual ideological shift toward an acknowledgment of the political validity of minority identity and its subjectivities. I argue that the political and social contexts in which these films emerge influence, and to a certain extent determine, the aesthetics of the image. A substantial number of the films examined here pay attention to the issues that are related to Turkey’s troubled but unresolved past. Since the late 1990s, films begun to be produced about issues that continue to haunt present-day Turkey, bringing previously ignored subjects into the realm of the visible. The 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 16 04/11/2015 13:54 Introduction xvii image, in the majority of the cases that are examined here, is not one that “shows, equating visibility with knowledge and self-evidence; it is an image that must be read” (Rodowick: 148). These films, with their narrative and aesthetic strategies, raise more questions than they answer, and play a significant role in putting these issues into the realm of the visible in Turkey. Memory, displacement, and cinema The main object of this study is to understand how particular events, ones that are highly contested, are remembered and represented in film. Memory deter- mines who we are, but the reverse is also true, that our identities determine what and how we remember. Cultural texts not only help us remember, but also introduce accounts that fall outside of the dominant discourse. Whether called “collective memory,” “social memory,” or “cultural memory,” these terms all have one thing in common: they refer to the ways a given group’s shared memories shape their identity. By definition these terms point to the constructed nature of memory. As Andreas Huyssen writes: “The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory” (Huyssen 1995: 4), and cinema has become a very important part of this, as well as serving to challenge the established articulations by offering new ones. Nevertheless, “to focus solely on memory’s constructed side is to deny the past’s significance as a model for coming to terms with the present” (Schwartz 2010: ix). This book, rather than taking history as the truth and memory as constructed, acknowledges that history and memory are both constructed in the sense that they both involve narration. Hence, it aims to look at the conditions and the ways of such narration, examining films and treating them as texts effecting and affected by the social, historical, and political milieu they react to or reproduce. The book imagines these texts—the films analyzed—in conversation with, or even as participants in shaping, historical thinking. If by the latter “we mean coming to grips with the issues from the past that trouble and challenge the present” (Rosenstone 1996: 162), then it is inevitably shaped by historically informed texts, and film is increasingly the most dominant form. Different accounts of the past inevitably result in contestation, which “evokes a struggle in the terrain of truth. If what is disputed is the course of events—what really happened—new answers, particularly by groups whose knowledge has been discounted, may challenge dominant or privileged narratives” (Hodgkin 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 17 04/11/2015 13:54 xviii Introduction and Radstone 2003: 1). Contestation, like memory, has more to do with the present than it has with the past. The past itself does not change, but its meaning does and “contests over the meaning of the past are also contests over the meaning of the present and over ways of taking the past forward” (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003: 1). The dynamics involved in this struggle are complicated and change over time. This, of course, is not to deny that the state or the dominant groups are not involved in repressing and/or silencing memories; it is rather to acknowledge that memory itself is an ongoing construction and that “both ‘memory’ and ‘truth’ here are unstable and destabilising terms” (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003: 2). Representing such unstable and destabilizing notions in cinema introduces further challenges, particularly with regard to traumatic pasts. Hayden White writes that what he calls “holocaustal events”, that is, events that are devastating and traumatic, “cannot simply be remembered; which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning and contextualized in the group memory in such a way as to reduce the shadow they cast over the group’s capac- ities to go into its present and envision a future free of their debilitating effects” (White 1996: 20). Among those effects, he lists the “difficulty felt by present generations of arriving at some agreement as to their meaning.