Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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is by now old news. Hyped by travel agents, lauded by cultural brokers, marketed as a bridge spanning East and West by the tourism and culture industries, the image makers and money makers agree: Istanbul is fashionably global, its markets and food places, its Sufi lodges and gay bars, its museums, mosques, mosaics, and manzara (landscapes) exhibited and consumed on- and off-line, by a flood of tourists and by the city’s own residents, twenty million people or more.
See Istanbul and die, says the poet Can Yücel.
Istanbul is all this, and much more. Do the extraordinary changes in its built environment and its sense of place post-coup mean that Istanbul, City of the Fearless is a study of a city and of a time that exists only in memory? This side of 12 Eylül, are activists’ spatial politics, experiences, and memories of the years before and after the coup—their private and arcane knowledge—of historical interest only? Are those years sealed off from the decades that succeeded them? Are 12 Eylül and the military government a door that opened to Istanbul’s neoliberal or “global city” future by slamming it shut upon the past?
In these next two sections I show that this is indeed partly true. Revolutionary Istanbul lives on in the memories of its ex-activists. But it lives on, too, in their learned capacities and accumulated reflective wisdom that even now give depth to and partially orient the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens living in the city. Casey describes this process in his book Remembering, noting how “orientation in place . . . cannot be continually effected de novo but arises within the ever lengthening shadow of our bodily past” (1987: 194). In this process, militants’ embodied and emplaced historical memories and perceptions of the city prevent any easy articulation with the shallow self “free of any particularist spatial ties” (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005: 150) imagined and mobilized by neoliberalism, and sometimes assumed by analysts to be a plausible account of social agents’ modified dispositions and ethical consciousness (Hilgers 2013). The selves that ex-activists are in the process of becoming—just like the city that they are continually in the process of inhabiting—depends in part upon their memories of and reflections upon their earlier actions, convictions, and experiences. Elsewhere, Casey writes of the “incoming” of places into the body. Places, he notes, “constitute us as subjects. . . . To be (a) subject to/of place is to be what we are as an expression of the way a place is” (2001: 688, emphasis in the original). Accordingly, a history of the sedimentation and hierarchy of places in people’s bodies exists according to the intensity of experience encountered in them, even as places themselves are altered by people’s actions. Although this constituting of self through its marking by places is cumulatively produced over a lifetime, the city before and after 12 Eylül powerfully impressed its presence upon militants, interacting with and reorienting their earlier socialized bodies and personae.
Certainly the material infrastructure of much of the 1970s city has disappeared, in particular in the transformation of Istanbul’s housing. The gecekondu suburbs of the 1960s and ’70s with their small, separate houses have been transformed into apartkondu (four- to ten-story buildings). They are no longer on the periphery of the city. On the other hand, gentrification has conserved and spruced up the buildings of older, more central areas but contributed to the massive emigration of their earlier residents. Even the perduring monuments of the physical environment (mosques, museums, palaces, villas, administrative buildings, etc.) have been upgraded or restored, their lines of sight and their sightlines exposed through simplification of their surroundings, their sounds made more audible (or muted), their occupants changed, their functions transformed.
Of course, not every bit of Istanbul has changed. The three- or four-story apartment blocks put up in the 1960s in lower-middle-class suburbs like Aksaray are still there. Yet when Fırat, an ex-MHP sympathizer, took me on a tour in 2013 of Şehremini in Istanbul’s historic peninsula, where he had lived through the years before and after the coup, we did not encounter a single sign of the spatial politics of the 1970s. Like blood spilled in a stabbing on the stairs of an apartment block at night and washed away by the early morning cleaner, it was as if the era and its acts had never occurred. Fırat recognized few people in his old neighborhood, and Şehremini’s present occupants did not share his or his generation’s intimate memories of emplaced events experienced there. In brief, if memory requires anchoring or harboring in peopled places, activists’ option “to go back to a place [they] know, finding it full of memories and expectations, old things and new, the familiar and the strange” (Casey 1996: 24), is severely compromised in Istanbul.
Nevertheless, sometimes it is the very change of place that compels memory. Differences in places’ inhabitants, activities, appearances, smells, and sounds evoke absences.10 A peaceful street reminds one of a violent march; polite police stir up fears of a baton: the body remembers in its quickening of breath, sweating, or feelings of nausea. Similarly, the forced transformations of sonic place after the coup made activists remember the mood of a time. Filiz (TKP) recalled how, before the military intervention, singing the party’s song together with a thousand people “made us feel we all shared the same views on life.” The events of 12 Eylül fractured this acoustic solidarity: in our interview (thirty years later) Filiz still remembers weeping a year after the coup at hearing in passing a snatch of a familiar (but prohibited) march hummed in the street under someone’s breath. Aural awareness is a powerful if sometimes backgrounded force bearing memories and carrying political subjectivity. In Nesrin Kazankaya’s play Quintet, bir dönüşün beşlemesi (Quintet: A transformation in five parts), a leftist activist returns to Istanbul for the first time in twenty years after fleeing the coup for Europe: meeting up with her old friends and comrades, the ex-revolutionaries best reconnect with the singing of a march (“May 1st”). The now-businessman husband joins in despite earlier bitter arguments over politics. Like places, then, songs hold memories, as do objects: “There was an urban myth of the ‘gri-mavi van’ [gray-blue Ford van]. We knew among ourselves that it was the van of the undercover police. Whenever we saw one, we would run or duck for cover. In Montreal after the coup, whenever I saw one, I still ran for cover. Of course, in Istanbul most vans of that color were not carrying police. But once it came true: we were stopped and frisked by four police who came out of a gri-mavi van! Luckily, we were going to the cinema, and we convinced them of that” (Kenan, HK).
Further, alongside places, songs, and objects “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (Nora 1989: 7), the city is “physically inscribed” in a generation of activists.11 As described by Kenan above, he fled at the very sight of a gray-blue van in Montreal years after his regular exposure to police practice in Istanbul, an embodied reenactment that referenced a personal and collective history. Similarly, Şahin (as we have already seen) still finds himself reluctant to shake the hand of a covered woman, even when extended to him. Casey calls this “body memory” (1987: 146ff), the way that something kinesthetically learned in conscious (or semiconscious) imitation of others’ mannerisms, movements, and comportment may become habitual action over time, an embodied modification thereafter ingrained in militant habit. In body memory, the past is revived by its active entry into present actions. In just this way both urban violence and torture, too, are remembered by the body, in an ache, an itch, impairment, or trauma—an invasion of the body by its past that transacts memory, whether wanted or not.
Yet activists remembered reflexively as well: habitual body memory is not the same thing as retrospective “memory of the perception of the body” (Casey 1987: 162, original emphasis), as Levent’s recollection of Fatih shows: “By 1978 the sound of gunfire in the night was common in Fatih, as people attacked the university lodgments. But despite all this, the sounds I remember most about Fatih are the sound of people talking, of women neighbors chatting, of children calling from the street to their mothers or neighbors. People had their own whistles, everyone with their own melody, just as with nicknames.”
For Levent, Fatih is a “geometry of echoes.”12 They are the echoes that similarly give depth to and partially underpin the lives of hundreds of thousands of other ex-activists living in the city, a class of people often highly active in politics still. The emplaced and powerfully affective multisensory memories initiated by the spatial militancy of those years, including from post-coup torture, mingle with (and even limit) ex-activists’ perceptions in the present.