Old age induces a sense of doom. In complex ways, one’s extended expectation of death is woven into varied catastrophe happening around the world. I clearly remember the expression on my father’s face, somewhere in between agony and desperation, when hearing of timeless deaths of young people on the news, near or far away. Meanwhile, for fifteen years he grieved the death of his son, my brother, in very subtle rituals, in silence. As I am, he was not a believer in a higher being that held the fate of all life in his hands. His was a somewhat secular and introspective revolt to the injustice that while he was alive young people have perished, as in wars. At the same time, I suppose he did not hold the conviction that the conditions leading to the injustice could be changed by political means. I would not call him a pacifist, for that stance also requires a conscious political deliberation. He was simply a decent man, well read in his youth in classics, very modest, and with sincere empathy for fellow beings. I suppose these substituted for the extra material wealth that he could possibly accumulate over the years working as an attorney, they chased away the unnecessary hustle and competition that would make his and others’ lives tense.
The estimates are that close to seven hundred refugees died off the coast of Morea in June 2023, men, women and children. One mourns these tragic deaths, tries to understand the people’s plight, and is repulsed by the chain of circumstances and catastrophe in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria that lead the victims to this journey and abhors the lack of response at sea to prevent it. Like wisdom, old age is a factor to process the totality of unhappy destiny all over the world, from war, famine and destruction to climate catastrophe. A sense of destitution is caused by apparent diminishing of one’s agency in the face of events, especially in isolation. It seems the introspection should be vented either through organized political struggle and comradeship, or by an attempt at poetry (or madness.) In both cases, in good health (or not) one’s demise is indefinitely postponed and defied. And this, as opposed to an expectation of a posthumous legacy or a favorable quarter in afterlife, is the true antidote to fate: neither immortality nor an early doom, but just on time.
On June 28th we took the train from Thessaloniki to Athens, exactly four months after the disaster on the same line, in opposite direction. The faces on the train were solemn. The hills, the sky, fields, trees, plants, towns and houses were very similar to the ones in my country. But on the East of the Aegean sea, my sensation of injustice is beyond compare…
Once again a kind of desperation sets in. I was in istanbul when the 1999 earthquake happened close to the city. I remember being paralyzed and unable to connect to the civil networks organizing help, when the Turkish state itself was in total disarray and mostly dysfunctional in the first few crucial days of the catastrophe. Something similar happens today, this time the one man regime of AKP is trying to save face and keep an appearance of being in control of rescue and help, while keeping citizens’ solidarity efforts at bay and under pressure. By declaring the state of emergency, the man and his cohorts are aiming at the possible gains from photo-ops around the sites of a huge catastrophe and try to salvage benefits from the little remaining faithful voters before elections, while criminalizing social networks and other channels of organizing and dissent. The regime’s evolution into a full fascist force is complete. And even where it is most effective with 90.000 mosques in Turkey and hundreds of thousands of imams graduated from state schools, the quick burials and mourning are in private. Luckily, its wars abroad, its xenophobic and threathful discourse towards Turkey’s neighbors and other parties from the western world is heavily tarnished and, for now, muted in the face of help coming in from all over the world.
In 1999, we traveled to the sites of destruction in Izmit and Sakarya with a colleague, after a few days, to see for ourselves and to take photographs. That was the first of our collaborations, later to evolve into xurban_collective art initiative. The experience was the source of the theme of ‘catastrophe’ to shape a number of works we have produced together. For us, the term stood for an existential condition of the the whole country and the Turkish state, and later to be applied to all ruins, soft and hard, in the wake of the neoliberal order. I realize how the concept that captivated us loosely applies to roughly everything we looked with a critical eye and how it somewhat flounders in its own capacity. In the case of earthquakes, what turns a natural disaster into a catastrophe is the human agency, aided and promoted by the concessions of the corrupt state, local governments, shoddy construction, greedy contractors and down to ignorant landowners: a chain that was never under the spell of scientific rationale. This is not new and had been frequently mentioned after all the loss, time and again, today as well. For us, I guess we were trying to make sense of this kind of annihilation in a historical continuum related to this part of the world, an extension of the 20th century with the Armenian genocide, expulsion of the Greek population of Anatolia and prosecution of non-muslim citizens of the Turkish republic, the military coups and their aftermath, the purge of socialist left, the suppression of the Kurdish revolt and the human cost of this civil war. The Turkish military-police state as it was in 20th century has today added the the capacities of neoliberal authoritarianism with an islamist cloak, and the ruins are extended to the hills and the plains in the form of quarries, mines, nuclear reactors and other installations, threatening the livelihood of all beings. What I understood reading Walter Benjamin was possibly a blurred sense of memory, of Messianic time and of a catastrophe piling up ruins. In Turkey, we were already living among the ruins, from prehistory up to the present: The pieces of the frieze lay next to the dismembered Ionic columns, a sign of the distant earthquakes. Meanwhile, metaphorically speaking, Benjamin himself was under the rubble when he wrote, German fascism was ascending and Europe was on the verge of catastrophe.
In late 1999 I wrote a short piece for an architecture magazine, and published together with photographs I took from various cities where the earthquake hit. I tried to make sense of what happened in a haphazard way, comparing it to a state of war which I have never experienced and to a kind of nightmare which I have experienced repeated times for a year after the event. This was an outsider’s account, at least of someone who survived physically unhurt, writing from a safe place, but trying to empatize with fellow humans who suffered. The other venue to explain and show what had happened to the masses and to the victims and survivors were several TV channels, both private ones and the official TRT which I had briefly mentioned in the piece. They were all engaged in what I would call the pornography of disaster. Today, the number of television channels have been multiplied and divided along the lines as the propagandists of AKP and those of opposition, but the pornographic approach has not changed. Their mode of operation involves setting up tents for multiple camera crews and the correspondents in front of few of the thousands of sites of wreckage where the rescue operations continue. In live coverage, the studios in Istanbul surf from one site to the next, talk to survivors and relatives waiting for a good news from the wreckage of the apartments, and then cut to ‘officials’ and talking heads whose utterances are as useful as anybody’s. Television agitates the situation, arouses sentiments and tears, and no one thinks that the commercial breaks add insult to the injury while millions of viewers are transfixed in their living rooms. I think this contrarily induces voyeurism, and blocks comprehension of the magnitude of disaster and the contemplation of grief. So, one might think, how else journalism can be conducted in the face of a disaster as such? What to look for? What to show?
Yesterday Orhan Pamuk published a piece in New York Times titled “A Girl Trapped Under Fallen Concrete. A Man Unsure of What to Do.” (*) “… Many people have posted these images of grotesque horror on social media without so much as a comment, a caption or even a few words to accompany them. In doing so, they are sending two messages. The first is the thing made manifest in their shock: the stunning, staggering scale of the catastrophe. The second is the feeling of abandonment and despair, felt by the whole country and as harrowing as the earthquake itself…” he wrote, after following the social media posts of the victims. In 1999 the survivors of the earthquake set up TV sets next to their tents, to see what had happened to them in real time. It was as though a third party had to relay their own desperation for it to be real. It was also to acknowledge that the world knew of their plight. Today, the survivors are directly connected to an effective but diffuse network of communication as the source of news, which the regime wants to suppress.
The deep fissure in between a sensible approach and the practices of journalism appear to be unbridgeable. In such magnitude of disaster, still, I think, decent reporting is done in close-up. After everything the drone cameras had shown, after the before-after comparison images and panning cameras on the street had explained what had happened, the wide view had to stop and the TV correspondents and agitators shut up before being repulsive. Few responsible reporters and observers in the field are bringing out individual stories without intruding and exploiting grief, writing on the extraordinary efforts of relief by many organized groups, talking to individual responders, doctors, nurses and other professionals. It is as if one has to make one’s self invisible and walk on his/her toes in order to respect and report, notify on the urgent needs observed in situ especially after the initial days of frantic search. I guess for now the incomprehensible impact of the catastrophe is hung in the huge void in between what the mainstream media think people should see and the grief on the site, or in between convoys of luxury cars that transfer the president through quake stricken cities and the rising anger, and in between hallow discourse and strife organized around political parties and the incredible solidarity of humans on the ground. For my country, hope is tied to the collapse of this gap.
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.
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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…
We are heading towards annihilation… ‘We’ in this proposition mostly refers to humankind. Or, does it encompass the biosphere? All sentient beings? Flora? Fauna? Gaia (in the plural)? Climate catastrophe is existential. No matter how long it will take the planet to become uninhabitable (for us) as we know it, it will almost certainly happen in the present course. To think that only the humankind is aware of this future is another kind of anthropocentrism. Entire biosphere is genetically coded for the sense of doom as evident in mass migrations of flora and fauna. Survival is essential, mass extinctions happen within a flash when deep time is considered. We can only compare the future of the thin layer on earth’s surface to that of Mars, now that we have images. Water and air? We might as well call them something else in future terms.
For some, the judgement day does not bring up images. There is no consolation in survival of the the righteous, the body or the soul (or both) either intact or in ether. For a non-believer who have witnessed earthquakes, infernos, the high seas or wars when alive, the forces are there to imagine the doomsday (minus the horsemen). Post apocalypse is when these forces cease to be, as on mars, in total enthropy. For Lovelock, this is the kernel of Gaia theory. Then, the philosophical dilemma once more: if no one will be there to witness the end of the world, shall we say it will not happen?
So, how did we end up here? Following Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, one can trace the ills back to the commodification of labour (men-women), land (nature) and money. The self-regulating market economy induced the social catastrophe, as Polanyi observed during WWII. When every actor in society acted in self interest, the forces of the market economy would be in equilibrium for everybody’s benefit, the free market economists thought. What could not act in self interest in this complex web was the biosphere itself, as an externality.
Then, just as it is during the Covid-19 pandemic, the society is expected to take the blame: as we do not wash our hands enough, fail to wear masks and socialize with fellow humans, we consume too much and do not recycle either. The relations governing the market economy attempts at evenly distributing the blame and responsibilities among executives, shareholders, employees, workers, consumers and everybody else alive, while the increasingly powerless and corrupt governments are fixated on growth figures. As the fascists always think, there are too many people on earth to share the wealth…
