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Better Late Than Never: Modern Turkey Remembers Its Past

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  • Better Late Than Never: Modern Turkey Remembers Its Past

    BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: MODERN TURKEY REMEMBERS ITS PAST
    by Leyla Neyzi

    Monthly Review
    http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/neyzi031108 .html
    Nov 3 2008
    VA

    Esra Ozyurek, ed. The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey. Syracuse:
    Syracuse University Press, 2006. x + 225 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN
    978-0-8156-3131-6.

    The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, edited by Esra Ozyurek, an
    associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University
    of California San Diego, has its origins in a book in Turkish edited
    by Ozyurek in 2001. Another related book, Nostalgia for the Modern:
    State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey, based on Ozyurek's
    dissertation, was published in 2006. Taken together, these books
    make an important contribution to the previously scant literature
    on memory in Turkey. Until the 1980s, there was little interest in
    the public sphere in history and memory in Turkey, where history
    was understood to stand for national/official history, and personal
    and communal memory, in so far as they diverged from history with a
    capital H, were relegated to the relative safety of the home or were
    even silenced therein.1 Rejecting the Ottoman past, despite the fact
    that most of its cadres emerged from among the Committee of Union
    and Progress that turned everyday life in

    Anatolia into tragedy during World War I, the new Turkish Republic
    focused on the future in its attempts to achieve modernity.2 The
    interdisciplinary literature on memory was only recently discovered
    by young critical scholars studying abroad in the last decades. This
    coincided with a slow but gradual democratization of Turkish society
    and the beginnings of a debate on history and memory in the public
    sphere.3

    Eighty-five years after the founding of the Turkish Republic, the
    legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), the hero of the Turkish
    War of Independence and the country's first president, is beginning to
    be discussed in the public sphere in a highly emotional debate. As a
    result, a number of recent historical events and issues have come out
    of the closet. These include intercommunal violence between Turks and
    Armenians, the transfer of the Armenian population from Anatolia by the
    Ottoman state in 1915 (tehcir), and the ensuing mass destruction of the
    Armenian population; the Greco-Turkish War, followed by intercommunal
    violence and the forced exchange of populations in 1923; the process of
    construction of Turkish national identity, secularization, and state
    administration of the Islamic religion; and the status, treatment,
    and experience of minorities under the Turkish Republic (Kurds, Alevis,
    Armenians, Greek-Orthodox, Jews, Assyrians, and Yezidis, among others),
    including Kurdish uprisings, transfer of populations and violence, the
    separate conscription and unequal taxation of non-Muslims during World
    War II, attacks on non-Muslims instigated by the state in Edirne in
    the 1930s and in Istanbul in 1955, and the forced expulsion of Greeks
    in 1964. Most recently, the conflict between the Kurdistan Workers'
    Party (PKK) and the Turkish army since the 1980s led to large-scale
    forced transfer of populations and an exponential rise in violence,
    including the disappearance and deaths of civilians, guerillas, and
    military personnel.4 Unfortunately, the superficial and manipulative
    use of these issues in international politics and the global media
    only solidify the defensive attitude of representatives of the Turkish
    state, making it more difficult to institutionalize democracy and open
    channels of communication among diverse groups within society. It is
    in the current context of categorical black-and-white thinking and
    a highly polarized debate concerning identity that there is greater
    need than ever for nuanced academic analyses of history and memory
    in Turkey.

    Ozyurek's recent work contextualizes current debates in Turkey
    within the wider literature on the subject. In her brief editor's
    introduction to Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, Ozyurek refers,
    in particular, to the modernist vision of Kemalism, which is being
    debated four generations later. Kemalism refers to the ideology of
    Ataturk, the cult leader of modern Turkey. According to this vision,
    Turkey would be a modern republic, which necessitated the creation
    of a new national identity and a distinct rupture with the Ottoman
    Empire. Confirming that the peoples of Turkey are finally remembering
    their history, she suggests that the past is used by individuals
    and groups in the present to express their identities and further
    their diverse cultural and political projects. An important aspect of
    memory discussed by Ozyurek is commodification through the heritage
    and nostalgia industries, as in the case of the marketing of symbols
    of the past and of the city of Istanbul itself since the 1990s.

    Politics of Public Memory in Turkey consists of seven essays, four
    of which were included in an earlier form in the book edited by
    Ozyurek in 2001 (essays by Aslı Gur, Nazlı Okten, Cihan Tugal, and
    Aslı Igsız). In a new contribution for this volume, Kimberly Hart
    suggests, in "Weaving Modernity, Commercializing Carpets: Collective
    Memory and Contested Tradition in Orselli Village," that rug-weaving
    villagers in Turkey embrace modernity and national identity while
    producing commodities, which, ironically, represent "tradition"
    for the urban middle class. Hart argues that the people of Turkey,
    at least in the rural West, culturally embrace a practical present-
    and future-oriented vision, supporting through their agency the rapid
    socioeconomic transformation of the country.

    Gur's article, "Stories in Three Dimensions: Narratives of the Nation
    and the Anatolian Civilizations Museum," is based on a study that
    asked whether official representations of the past in the Anatolian
    Civilizations Museum in Ankara were meaningful to ordinary people. Gur
    argues that while the Turkish state used archaeology to represent
    official history in the museum, the degree to which patrons of the
    museum identified with this narrative varied by class (specifically,
    education and urban/rural status). The focus on representation in
    museums is important: since 1990, another indicator of the new interest
    in the past has been the establishment of a number of privately funded
    museums. Of particular importance for the present would be a study
    that compares the representational strategies of privately funded
    museums with those of the older, state-funded museums.

    Another look at archaeology is found in Ayfer Bartu Candan's
    contribution, "Remembering a Nine-Thousand-Year-Old Site: Presenting
    Catalhöyuk." Analyzing the way the heritage site Catalhöyuk in
    central Anatolia is represented by the Turkish state, archaeologists,
    villagers, New Age groups, artists, and producers of artifacts for
    tourism, Candan suggests that it is the unequal power relations among
    these diverse groups that influence the persuasiveness of different
    narratives of the site in the present.

    In "An Endless Death and an Eternal Mourning: November 10 in Turkey,"
    Okten focuses on the commemoration of the death of Ataturk since
    November 10, 1938. Based on interviews with citizens who remember
    him, she argues that the sacralization of Ataturk and continual
    mourning have made it difficult for Turkish society to freely debate
    the past. While Okten suggests that middle-class citizens have
    largely internalized official narratives about Ataturk, the possible
    discontinuities and contradictions within life story narratives of
    elites, changes in these narratives over time, and comparison of
    these narratives with those of other groups in society may raise new
    questions about the remembering/commemoration of Ataturk in Turkey.

    In "Public Memory as Political Battleground: Islamist Subversions of
    Republican Nostalgia," Ozyurek shows how the Islamist media differently
    represents the 1920s in line with their contemporary vision and
    political aim of providing an alternative -- though equally homogeneous
    and dominant -- narrative to that of the secularist narrative. In
    addition to showing different readings of the same past, this essay
    suggests that despite their seeming polarization, the secularist
    and Islamist elites resemble one another in their refusal to accept
    alternative visions of society, including alternative histories of
    the nation.

    In "Memories of Violence: The 1915 Massacres and the Construction
    of Armenian Identity," Tugal uses Armenian memoirs to comment on
    the construction of Armenian history and identity by the Armenian
    diaspora. Tugal suggests that autobiographies contain internal
    contradictions not found in nationalist narratives, which point to
    the complex relations of Anatolian Armenians and Turks who shared
    everyday life and a history in their homeland for generations before
    nationalism and international intervention led to unprecedented
    violence. Underscoring the difference between history and memory,
    Tugal argues that sense memory may represent the irrationality and
    meaningless of violence.

    In "Polyphony and Geographic Kinship in Anatolia: Framing the
    Turkish-Greek Compulsory Population Exchange," Igsız focuses on
    the recent nostalgia about the forced population exchange between
    Greece and Turkey in 1923. Focusing on such cultural products as books
    and music, she argues that it is the shared spatial identity between
    Turks and Greeks that is emphasized by those attempting to surpass the
    polarization based on national identity. Like Ozyurek, Igsız reminds
    us that the study of memory must also treat nostalgia, heritage,
    and the commodification of memory by the culture industry. What
    is particularly ironic in the Turkish case is that these products
    for sale in the capitalist marketplace may be simultaneously deemed
    "dangerous," resulting in various forms of censorship, where the
    distribution of particular products may be prohibited and their
    producers taken to court and sentenced.

    The most important contribution of this volume is that it introduces
    contemporary debates on history and memory in Turkey and the voices
    of a new generation of critical young scholars to an international
    audience. While recent historical events and issues in the late
    Ottoman and early republican period have been treated by historians and
    political scientists, the view from memory studies is significant. The
    book touches on some of the main events and issues currently debated
    in Turkey, including the history and memory of 1915, the legacy of
    Ataturk, including modernity and secularism, and the representation of
    history through cultural means, such as archaeology, museums, books,
    and music. However, in its focus on representation, the book gives
    short shrift to individual and communal experience as expressed in
    oral history narratives. While the essays contribute to understanding
    the Turkish context, Tugal's study is the only one that uses the
    Turkish case to make a theoretical contribution to the literature
    on memory. Given that earlier work which focused on the opposition
    between history and memory is giving way to an appreciation of their
    interpenetration in a new interdisciplinary field, Tugal's distinction
    between history and memory may not be terribly useful. However, his
    focus on the contradictions in autobiographical narratives and on
    sense memory complicates an era and event that have been excessively
    politicized and oversimplified in the literature.

    It is unfortunate that the book lacks a conclusion; it would have been
    useful to discuss future directions for memory work in Turkey at a
    time when the field is rapidly expanding. Nevertheless, Politics of
    Public Memory in Turkey is a pioneering work that opens the way for
    new interdisciplinary and comparative research on Turkey that will
    contribute to the theoretical and methodological literature on memory.

    Notes

    1 For an example of such silences, see Leyla Neyzi, "Remembering to
    Forget: Sabbateanism, National Identity and Subjectivity in Turkey,"
    Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 1 (January 2002):
    137-158.

    2 Sibel Bozdogan and ReÅ~_at Kasaba, eds., Rethinking Modernity and
    National Identity in Turkey (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
    1997).

    3 See the recent special issue on memory in New Perspectives in Turkey
    34 (Spring 2006).

    4 See Hans-Lukas Kieser, ed., Turkey beyond Nationalism: Towards
    Post-Nationalist Identities (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).

    Leyla Neyzi is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social
    Sciences at Sabancı University in Istanbul. This review was first
    published on H-Memory (October 2008) under a Creative Commons 3.0
    US License.

    --Boundary_(ID_jhgpWftoRNsOC00nfidfUQ)--
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