Köksal, Özlem. "Memory, Identity: the Turkish Context." Aesthetics of Displacement: Turkey and Its Minorities on Screen

Köksal, Özlem. "Memory, Identity: The Turkish Context." Aesthetics of Displacement: Turkey and its Minorities on Screen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 1–24. Topics and Issues in National Cinema. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501306471.ch-001>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 26 September 2021, 08:14 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. 1 Memory, Identity: The Turkish Context During the 1980s and 1990s, Turkey witnessed major social, economic, and cultural changes. The neo-liberal policies introduced after the 1980s, within a framework of a rapidly globalizing world, inevitably caused profound changes in the country. On the one hand, the process of joining the European Union (EU), and the constitutional changes required by the process known as the Copenhagen Criteria, brought more freedom of speech to the country, compared to the restricted civil liberties during the military regime of the early 1980s. This process, according to Ayşe Kadıoğlu, introduced “some of the most important parliamentary reforms toward the acknowledgment of different religious and ethnic identities in Turkey” (Kadıoğlu 2007: 292).1 On the other hand, the neo-liberal economic transformation resulted, much like everywhere else in the world, in an uneven distribution of wealth, making the gap between rich and poor wider. The process of globalization, and the rapid change in economic and social life, arguably created a rupture in the belief in the promise of the future, and resulted in people enquiring about the past in order to redefine their relationship, not just to the past, but also to the present. Yet, as willingness to acknowledge past atrocities grows, so, too, do reactionary nationalist movements. Arjun Appadurai, who writes that the nation-state, “as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs” (Appadurai 1996: 19), claims that during the 1980s and 1990s many nation-states had to simultaneously negotiate two pressures: the pressure to open up their markets to foreign investment, commodities and images and the pressure to manage the capacity of their own minorities to use the globalised language of human rights to argue for their own claims for cultural dignity and recognition. This dual pressure was a distinctive feature of the 1990s 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 1 04/11/2015 13:54 2 Aesthetics of Displacement and produced a crisis in many countries for the sense of national boundaries, national sovereignty and the purity of the national ethos, and it is directly respon- sible for the growth of majoritarian racisms in societies (Appadurai 2004: 65). In this, Turkey is no exception. However, the so-called “decline of the nation- state,” according to Jeffrey Olick, gives rise to a growing interest in memory and a “politics of regret.” According to Olick, “the discourse of universal human rights is tied directly to a politics of regret because its advocates believe that only gestures of reparation, apology, and acknowledgment can restore the dignity of history’s victims” (Olick 2007: 126). The question motivating Olick’s entire book is “why the wave of regret now?” and he offers an answer from a historical– sociological perspective: “one that sees regret as part of broad transformations tied up with the decline, rather than the triumph, of the nation-state” (Olick 2007: 137). For the author, the politics of regret is a “major characteristic of our age, an age of shattered time and shifting allegiances” (Olick 2007: 137). It is one of the ways in which societies deal with the at best unpleasant aspects of their past and although the sincerity, effectiveness, and substance of such a “wave of regret” is debatable, it is nevertheless visible in Turkey. The change that media and communication technologies went through in a relatively short period is also important in relation to the complicated and interwoven nature of these developments, and the resulting emergence of new narrative(s) about the relation to the past and present in Turkey. Television and radio broadcasting until the 1990s were under the control of the state, and were used to create and maintain the idea of a unified nation.2 The intro- duction of privately owned television channels in the 1990s both contributed to and benefited from the already changing face of Turkey. As a result of these important changes, although constantly policed, a discursive space emerged that allowed alternative voices to be heard on various unresolved issues in relation to past and present identities through newly available media outlets. One of the most controversial of these new media outlets, made possible by new technologies, was the Kurdish ROJ TV in 2004, which previously broadcasted from the UK under the name of MED TV.3 Hence, what might be described as “post-national sensibilities”4 began to generate a demand, from various groups within Turkey, for the country to face up to its history. This demand develops hand in hand with the changes in understanding of nation and citizenship. Understanding of citizenship, which is normally imagined to have a natural connection to the nation-state, has arguably been undergoing an important 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 2 04/11/2015 13:54 Memory, Identity: The Turkish Context 3 transformation. Nation-states are, more and more, envisaged and articulated as dynamic institutions with multiple dimensions. This triggers a transformation from an understanding of a uniform citizenship to a citizenship informed and shaped by multiple dimensions, which, according to Saskia Sassen, is defined by two interconnected conditions: “the change in the position and institutional features of national states since the 1980s” that resulted in various forms of globalization, and “the emergence of multiple actors, groups and communities partly strengthened by these transformations in the state and increasingly unwilling to automatically identify with a nation as represented by the state” (Sassen 2002: 277). However, as in the case of Turkey, this new understanding of citizenship “may not necessarily be new,” but rather the result of “long gestations or features that were there since the beginning of the formation of citizenship as a national institution, but are only now evident because enabled by current developments” (Sassen 2002: 277). According to Sassen, there is a distinction to be made between “post- nationalism and denationalization as they represent two different trajectories”, and the difference between the two is a “question of scope and institutional embeddedness” (Sassen 2002: 286). Although these two terms are not mutually exclusive, “denationalization” denotes transformation of the national and “tend[s] to instantiate inside the national” while “post-nationalism” is about new forms “located outside the national rather than out of the earlier institutional framework of the national” (Sassen 2002: 286). Taking this differ- entiation between the two terms, Ayşe Kadıoğlu looks at Turkey’s case and, mainly focusing on constitutional changes, reaches the conclusion that Turkey is not post-national, but rather undergoing denationalization. However, when attention is focused on the experiences of individuals and groups a different picture emerges, one that does not fit into the frame provided by the nation- state. I argue that the films analyzed in the following text stem from a new form of understanding of belonging, what I would like to call “post-national sensibilities”. Inevitably this newly emerging language also questions the language of the past and what that particular past failed to articulate. Although, on a global scale, the increasing interest in the past, as well as the interest in preserving and representing it, started in the 1970s, it became almost an obsession after the 1980s. Until the 1980s, “modernist culture was energized by present futures,” Andreas Huyssen writes, which is replaced by “present pasts” in the post-1980 context as a result of the radical shift in the way time and space is experienced. What Huyssen calls a “memory boom,” paradoxically, 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 3 04/11/2015 13:54 4 Aesthetics of Displacement goes hand in hand with the boom of forgetting. According to Huyssen, “we are trying to counteract this fear and danger of forgetting with survival strategies of public and private memorialisation” (Huyssen 2003: 17). The “informational and perceptual overload combined with a cultural acceleration that neither our psyche nor our senses are adequately equipped to handle,” in return, creates a lack of confidence in the future, which causes us to “turn to memory for comfort” (Huyssen 2003: 25). Similarly, Barry Schwartz argues that the recent explosion of research on collective memory is due to a perceived break between past and present. According to Schwartz, “since the past frames the present existence, the complete detachment of past and present is theoretically as well as empirically impossible; however, in some instances the rupture of the tissue of memory is so severe that it becomes an object of special inquiry” (Schwartz 2000: 13). Such rupture is very rarely as observable as in the case of the modern Turkish Republic and its specific decision to separate itself from the Ottoman Empire. Although still strongly resisted by the official discourse, regret, empathy, and apology as part of post-conflict peace building have also emerged in Turkey, visibly affecting the cultural field. Within the last few decades, academic works, literature, cinema, and television have become increasing concerned with the unresolved issues of the past in Turkey. Since its establishment, the country has been focused on the future continuously, suggests oral historian Leyla Neyzi, and the sudden interest in the past has caused “history’s Pandora’s box” to open (Neyzi 2007: 24).5 A symptomatic example of contemporary interest in the past in Turkey can be seen in the increased attention paid to the events that took place before, during, and after the 1980 military coup d’état.

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