Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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had lost friends to killings and torture, and had themselves suffered in jail or gone into hiding” (2002: 41). As the poet Abbas Beydoun notes for Lebanon after the civil war, “the right to forget [became] obligatory forgetting” (in De Cauter 2011: 424).
During those decades, activists’ adoption of a fugitive silence as a means of “un-remembering” both their own worst actions and the worst actions done to them must have been an essential act of survival. But the slow demilitarization of Turkey amid the struggle to create a post-coup Constitution in the first decade of the new century—and as chapter 8 explores, this counts as a third political development allowing occluded aspects of activism and Istanbul to be perceived—has released a massive reservoir of activists’ memories of their experiences, especially concerning 12 Eylül and the years of martial law.17 Published memoirs of political activities and experiences in the years before the coup have been less common but in Havariler (Disciples), Zileli (2002) recounts his years as a founding member of the Aydınlık movement.
Along with this revived facility in recalling perceptions of the city, leftist ex-activists have initiated a new memory-work project, titled 12 Eylül Utanç Müzesi (12 Eylül Museum of Shame). The traveling museum gives visitors permission to remember events and acts that had been long muted in daily interaction. Its website explains that it is “the first serious attempt to create a memorialization site to reveal the brutality of the 1980 military coup while struggling to foster the democratization process in Turkey. Those who initiated the project are victims of the indiscriminate violence of the Turkish Armed Forces, mainly in the 1980s. Therefore, struggling against unjust state practices allowed the organizers to experience a degree of healing.”18
Here we encounter two further reasons for activists’ publicizing of their memories of the city: the museum enables a counter-recollection for post-coup generations whose memories have already been induced by the junta’s discourse, while also enacting a therapeutic remembering of those years for its creators (and by extension for other ex-militants as well). In collecting and exhibiting various material objects—Deniz Gezmiş’s coat, Mazlum Doğan’s shirt, the mimeograph machine owned by İbrahim Kaypakkaya, Mahir Çayan’s vest—the traveling museum intuits the potent influence these possess empowered by the lived bodies that used them. All four were militants of leftist groups in Turkey killed or executed by the state in the early 1970s.19 Their names are important, as heard in their recital in the battle slogans of THKP-C, Dev-Yol and Dev-Sol up until the coup: “Mahir, Hüseyin, Ulaş: Kurtuluş’a kadar savaş’ (Mahir, Hüseyin, Ulaş: War until liberation). Similarly, for revolutionaries who experienced the military courts, the exhibited trial proceedings are not just a piece of paper: the museum’s collecting of legal documents and files of prisoners killed or executed under the junta preserves intensely expressive memories, securing the past in the present. The power of these artifacts to incite a visceral affective state in visitors—vivifying body memories—is revealed in Cafer Solgun’s account of his painful visit to the museum:
A few days ago I went to the 12 September Museum of Shame exhibition. It was my friends, the Revolutionary ’78ers, who had curated it. I should confess I had manufactured many excuses, not to go to the museum, but to not go. It took time for me to admit it to myself, but if I went, I would grieve, I would remember, I would weep. . . . But if I didn’t go, it would have been as if I had committed an offence against my friends whose photos, clothes, personal belongings, and last letters were exhibited there. I knew myself: I went. I knew that I would cry, but I went. I wouldn’t be able to say anything to those who asked about my feelings and thoughts, but I went. I wouldn’t be able to write a single word in the visitor’s book because my hands would be trembling, but I went. I went and as soon as I entered the door I found myself in a time tunnel.
Our friends “who had been lost” . . . Our friends who had been killed by torture . . . Our friends who had been killed by execution . . . Our friends who had lost their lives in hunger strikes, in death fasts . . . Our friends who had been killed in “clashes” . . . For us that was 12 Eylül; torture, murder, fascism.20
One final example, that of the opening, almost in the same year, of another, very different museum, demonstrates the alteration that urban activism makes in perceiving, remembering, and commemorating Istanbul. As we have seen, the Museum of Shame assembles things that possess intense affect for leftist activists, bestirring dormant moods and reawakening ex-militants’ sense of places’ presence. Violence is remembered by its configuring of places. Much more famous is Nobel Prize–winning author Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet müzesi), displaying a contrasting set of objects from the very same years (1974–85), artifacts and ephemera commemorating the relationship of two lovers with a now no-longer-existing Istanbul from his novel of the same name. It is a museum of a fictional story. Both museums reflect a labor of love in attending to and conserving things and places that held and afflicted the beloved. Yet it is the peculiarity of each set of objects—the gallows that executed Deniz Gezmiş; the lipstick-stained butts of cigarettes smoked by Füsun (the narrator’s love)—that radiate different memories and emotions, constituting and mourning, in the ensemble assembled in the Museum of Shame, a socialist perspective of the city and its past.
CONCLUSION
In sum, if both the interviews with ex-militants’ and the 12 Eylül Museum of Shame reveal that revolutionary Istanbul lives on only in memory, this does not mean that its existence is any less real. As we have shown, memories exist not just in the mind but also—more so—in the world, in objects and things, in sounds and songs, in the city and in its (absent) places, in legal events, and in the temporal habituation to them of activists’ lived bodies. All of these store and stir militants’ memories of the past even as the value and meaning of remembered practices and experiences wax and wane with new acts of political participation and judgment. Memories can be stabilized but are never completed.
These particular acquired stances of political action, place perception, sentiment, and ethics are urban and activist. In the pedagogic process, the inevitable social friction that activism incites reveals the conflicted interaction that characterizes the sensing and appropriating of affordances of place, both between living beings (including animals and humans) and between the living and the dead in the fraught passage of furnished environments from one generation, or from one group, to another. Activism as a pedagogy and process of skilled practice trains not only practitioners’ awareness of the urban environment but also their ethical capacities, displacing and redirecting existing modes of socialized engagement with the surrounding world and implicating them in particular tasks concerning ways of acting toward and talking about the city and its inhabitants. Here, at the close, is a more adequate description of how political-economic and phenomenological perspectives inform each other: for the rest of their lives, activists’ memory of this key “horizon of the past” (Husserl in Moran 2000: 162) ensures its reawakening or revivification to consciousness in any new auspicious event or appalling episode in Turkish politics, of which, since 1980, there have been many. For ex-militant Ümit, to give just one example, participation in the unexpected explosion of urban activism in Istanbul in 2013, over the government’s proposed privatization and redevelopment of Taksim’s Gezi Park, immediately recalled—and problematized—one certain taken-for-granted aspect of the 1970s. For him, most striking about the Gezi protest were the peaceful relations between the groups, individuals, and civil society organizations that participated in and supported the protest—the rainbow symbol of Istanbul’s emerging LBTG groups, waved alongside the flags of Turkey and those of socialist factions, of football teams, and Kurds. “We weren’t like that,” he commented ruefully. In his remembering, encompassing less resemblances and more contrasts between urban movements and their repertoires of spatial tactics thirty years distant from each other, memories of the past flash up against the unfolding present, instigating a new fragile knowledge of a different history of Istanbul’s inhabitants’ reckoning with the city.21
In the next chapter we turn to the past again, but on a different scale. In it I compose a selective and specific history of the development of Istanbul from the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 up until the mid-1970s, to give readers some idea of the origins and development of the key features of the city