The story of Turkey in late 20th century is one in which personal recollections vaguely form the figure against the wider background of history, written in many different perspectives. To further the visual analogy, every now and then the figure and the ground merge into one another, like, for example, lapses into darker states in this story replicates other unhappy instances worldwide, though not always in synchrony. One large picture to form this backdrop is Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes (The Short 20th Century) that came out in 1994.
My reminiscence from the years which Hobsbawm calls the ‘Landslide’, starting with the deterioration of wealth and welfare state (in western democracies) in early 1970s is sketchy. Against this backdrop of decline, also of ‘real socialism,’ Turkey has undergone a massive expenditure of its young, educated and passionate citizens through military juntas, oppressive state and the so called liberalization of its economy. As elsewhere in the third world, but to the betrayal of gains towards modernization and secularism, and towards attempts at a plausible democracy and constitution that the country had been through since its inception in 1923, Turkey had lapsed into a dark phase which, in many ways, still continues today. This ‘past-as-picture’ can finally be complemented by the middle ground standing in front of of the short 20th century, Feroz Ahmad’s ‘The Making of Modern Turkey’, a book published a year before Hobsbawm’s.
By the late 1970s, the militant (left) political struggle bypassed my generation within a few years. Feroz Ahmad refreshes the memory by reminding that the massive terror and massacres came from the ‘nationalist movement’ of thugs (the fascists) in cooperation with the opressive state during those years, leading to the 1980 military coup. Terrified by the violence on the streets, and by a short experience in detention, the moments of joy, as I reflect now, came from a close circle of friends, the extended family and the awe that I felt facing the landscape and pristine sea (the Aegean), all signs of an introverted search for happiness. Still, patriotism stems from the love of the land and people living on it, and not necessarily from different forms of nationalism.
When I come to think of it, the passionate citizens (and youth) that proposed a vision for emancipation and democracy (which I see as the left) were mainly equipped with a cultural capital of an educated middle class, somewhat prone to claim superiority and turn into the ‘educators’ for the masses on the basis of of this capital. Looking back, now I realize that for me and my friends the indicator for ‘otherness’ was how Turkish was spoken, rather than other signs of class or individual identity. In a wider social context, this was the stuff that humor was made of, both in the printed form (humor magazines) and later on television. In the face of massive urbanization and evacuation of the countryside since 1950s, this clash of cultures had determined the face of the cities in Turkey for a long time. The knowledge and interpretation of Marxist literature on class struggle and the many faces of proletariat to understand wide phenomena had escaped some of us who sought freedom through creative gestures, as in art(y) expression. And our idols came not from the socialist countries, but from the West. Meanwhile (in retrospect) the majority of the educated youth of my generation was by that time marked by the ignorance of the struggle of Kurdish people (who naturally spoke Turkish as a second language) and illiteracy on the Armenian genocide and on the fate of Greeks and other former ‘Ottoman subjects’ all through 20th century. The same goes for understanding devote muslims and the then emerging political islam. To put the blame of this ignorance on the official curricula of education and the limited access to written history does not explain the whole story. As the sons and daughters of die-hard secular Kemalists, we were secluded from anything that came in the way of ‘progress’ for the Republic of Turkey.
In cultural terms, we were like Anglophones and looked up to America, even when our left allegiance required the loathing of Nato and the American imperialism. Looking back, this was consistent with the rise of American counter-culture, diffusing into the rest of the world with a considerable delay. Rock music, film -and for me the art of photography- from the English speaking world had fed our appetite for role models of creative and dissident gestures. Now I understand that the photographs I took in the first half of 1980s, naïve as they were, were all mimicking the ones made by American photographers of the last century. Indeed these were the masters that we have closely studied through the books in the finest source for English speakers in Turkey, namely the METU library in Ankara. As for Hollywood, we were all deeply moved by films as critique of racism, dirty politics and US wars, naturally Vietnam. In this sense, music and cinema were conveyors of our rage against the oppressive climate in Turkey, which we probably thought that they were showing us the creative ways to rebellion.
This transition into adulthood story displays many different delays that the middle class Turkish youth in universities had been through. In a sense, we were living through adolescence in our early 20s, with the rebel spirit attached. It is an indication of a sheltered life for most, financially sustained by family until the end of higher education, which was available by then to a relatively small proportion of the young, in several universities of world stature, and without the tuition. Most of us were barely getting by with minimal expenses, our joys were quite immaterial, possibly eased by an expectation that education would provide a decent living in the future. The working class life was something else. But it is certain that the patterns of consumption in Turkey were nowhere near to what we have seen the last couple of decades, except perhaps for the relatively small group of wealthy Turks that we did not have much contact with. Later on living in New York, for me the culture shock was about the extraordinary wealth displayed by the few and the rate of consumption enjoyed even by the middle class. By then, I began to realize the true meaning of the term ‘materialism’ (not the dialectical one) when faced with my peers’ ordinary habits revolving around money. Even with around fifty thousand homeless in New York in Reagan’s America (in economic decline) one could easily be sucked into an upwardly mobile grind as a wage earner with higher education, albeit in small installments unless one was aspiring to be a yuppie. It was the time, just before the fall of Berlin wall (the end for the short 20th century), that I decided not to go into the grind and head back to Turkey for good after five years. That was the (latest) transition into adulthood. Five years without a break, as I understood then, especially in the absence of channels of communication (one NYT reporter dispatching from İstanbul once a month) was a long enough time to blur the faces, places and the state of the homeland which I had left behind for the first time. Back home, it took some time to reboot the memory even for someone with a (visually) sharp recollection.
In the absence of written diaries, what I mostly rely on to remember youth are the photographs that came out of the closet to be scanned after almost forty years, which also prompted me to write this. For me, images are like the diary entries coming one after another, even in certain cases re-constituting an itinerary of a single day, step by step. Every now and then a face of a friend comes up, to which I am unable to attach a name. What I regret more is the scarcity of photographs of the buildings, the streets, with the people, and anonymous portraits in order to observe the extreme violence of change that the cities had been subjected to (continuing today) and to refresh the short memory span of its inhabitants, looking at themselves. Somehow, the ‘documentary’ mode escaped me, and a kind of formalism that came from architecture education dominated the images. Golden section is fine, but not when everything around denies the pleasure of contemplation and indulgence, unless one is under the spell of apathy.
So, why pit personal history against histories, masterly distributed and written by Hobsbawm, and with great attention given to details of turmoil, politics and economy in strict chronology, in the case of Feroz Ahmad? After all, Hobsbawm utters the name of my country rarely, in short passages when its arts of literature relates to the wider argument and when the Kemalist revolution as an example is set for the developing world. I always thought that the mood we were in is most accurately displayed by Marshall Berman, in ‘All that is Solid Melts into Air’: “The modernism of underdevelopment is forced to build on fantasies and dreams of modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts. … It turns in on itself and tortures itself for its inability to singlehandedly make history –or else throws itself into extravagant attempts to take on itself the whole burden of history.”
I guess it is all about situating one’s self in tandem with the wider scope of events in rememberance of things past, as though a memory trace would be triggered in tune with, for example, a well known journalist murdered in cold blood in İstanbul and the Pope surviving an attempt to his life by the same murderer. As shameful as this overlap of the figure and the ground was, a wide range of quality literature in Turkish, fiction and non-fiction, awaits to be incorporated into this story so that, in order to remember, one does not rely on sorrow and agony induced by thugs and assasins who got away with impunity in the past, and do so today. The unhappy history is unbearable…
March, 2022