Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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1974? In brief, in unintended preparation for the emergence of the activists of the 1970s and for the city of the fearless, who set the stage, how did they do it, and what was it like?
1. In a 2005 overview of the literature on cities and globalization beyond Turkey, Davis notes that one consequence of the focus on the capitalist world system, transnational networks, and global trade is the relative paucity of anthropological studies on “urban experience” (2005: 97). This is still true of studies of 1970s Istanbul.
2. Duranti (2009) traces out how instructors in jazz classes try to develop in students a “jazz way” of listening to music.
3. The reference here is to the title of Lambek’s book, Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action (2010).
4. Cf. Ingold: “It is apparent that the world becomes a meaningful place for people through being lived in” (2000: 168) (emphasis in original).
5. The phrase comes from Silverstein’s (2008) fieldwork with Sufi Islamic brotherhoods in Istanbul in the late 1990s. I use it to draw attention to an over-correction in recent anthropological work on perceptual enskilment and apprenticeship that emphasizes the imitative, body modelling, demonstrative, and repetitive dimensions of teaching and learning (see, for example, Marchand 2010: S8 and his phrase “knowledge beyond language”) while downplaying oral articulation, verbal explanation and instruction. By contrast, in activism, talk is a pedagogical and emotional force, generative of the affective bonds experienced between leaders/teachers and militants, and between comrades themselves in activist groups. See Şenay (2015) for a similar discussion of the importance of conversation in the learning of the ney (reed flute) in Istanbul.
6. Indeed, even a “passive” apprehension of place has to be actively absorptive, in the first instance by decisively stilling the body’s movement in and between places. More than this, listening is an action, as the poet Orhan Veli attests: “Istanbul’u dinliyorum, gözlerim kapalı” (I am listening to Istanbul, with my eyes closed). Similarly, consider the key lines in Walt Whitman’s ([1855] 1986) poem “Song of Myself”: “Now I will do nothing but listen, / to accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute towards it.”
7. One such group (in Istanbul) has been modernist urban planners, named by Rabinow (1996) as “visualizers of a socio-technocracy.” See chapter 3.
8. The Production of Space was translated into English only in 1991, which has meant its orientation to the urban social movements of the 1970s is often overlooked. (Lefebvre had already in 1970 published a book on the 1968 Paris events, titled L’ Explosion.)
9. For Gibson, affordances of the natural environment are offered to dwellers for their adaptation and use. By contrast Lefebvre assumes the fabrication of space by human labor through the political economy, in which oppositional socialist groups are forced to seize the (non-neutral) affordances of the city created by capitalism, affordances that advantage the dominant class and incite other inhabitants to attempt to transform them in social movements.
10. In her autobiography about growing up in Istanbul, Ayfer Tunç writes movingly about the relationship between memory and absence:
Painted on one wall were robust and merry young girls and boys wearing white swimming costumes playing with a ball in the sea, and on the other wall was drawn a row of young girls, whose arms were stretched out towards each other’s shoulders. . . . They made Süreyya Beach and the railway cheerful. . . . One day the wall was knocked down, and a wide road built between the beach and the railway line. The absent wall made me ruefully realize for the first time that the small things that add colour to our lives will disappear, are able to be lost. (Tunç 2001: 13)
11. Cf.: “the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. . . . The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands” (1995: 14, 15). Wallace Stevens’s poem “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” reveals how the images of intimacy attracted by the “house” (and collected in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space) can also be extended to the city: “The sounds drift in. / The buildings are remembered. / The life of the city never lets go, nor do you / Ever want it to. It is part of the life of your room. / Its domes are the architecture of your bed’ (Stevens 1990: 510).
12. Cf. Bachelard: “The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little bed chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound” (1994: 60).
13. “Kemal Türkler davası düştü,” Hürriyet, 12 January 2010, accessed 20 December 2018. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/kemal-turkler-davasi-dustu-16423709,
14. “Kemal Türkler cinayet davası yeniden başladı,” Posta, 27 February 2013, accessed 12 January 2018, http://www.posta.com.tr/yazarlar/nedim-sener/kemal-turkler-cinayet-davasi-yeniden-basladi-164407, ().
15. One exception to ex-activists’ general unwillingness to commemorate their past is the celebration of 1 Mayıs (Labor Day) in Taksim Square, which in 2010, 2011, and 2012 attracted huge crowds. Since 2010 a wreath-laying ceremony mourning the 1977 massacre has become an integral part of Labor Day demonstrations. Despite this common front there has been no definitive agreement concerning the identity of the perpetrators of the 1977 killings, and differences between leftist factions concerning events on that day still linger amongst ex-militants.
16. One typical example, from Tercüman newspaper (19 November 1980), reported on one of the mass trials of the “illegal” (yasadışı) organization Dev-Yol. The headline read, “Death penalty requested for 30 Dev-Yol members.” The military prosecutor charged them with being members of an illegal organization “whose aim is to change constitutional law and institutions, and the constitutional order by armed force and to bring in a society founded on the dictatorship of a single class.”
17. For example, see Alişanoğlu’s (2005) Netekim 12 Eylül’de geldiler: Bir idamlığın trajikomik anıları; Mavioğlu’s (2008) Bizim çocuklar yapamadı: Bir 12 Eylül hesaplaşması; Öztunç’s (2008) Ülkücüler 12 Eylül’ü anlatıyor; Küçükkaya’s (2011) Darbe şakacıları sevmez: Bir ailenin 12 Eylül günlüğü; Görsev’s (2011) 3 yılda 6 tutukevinde: 12 Eylül anıları; Asan’s (2010) 12 Eylül sabahı; and Saymaz’s (2012) Oğlumu öldürdünüz arz ederim: 12 Eylül’ün beş öyküsü).
18. See the website, http://www.memorializeturkey.com/en/memorial/309/.
19. Interestingly, in its focusing on the gross human-rights abuses of the Turkish government and military against the leftist movement of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the museum of shame “forgets” the intense factionalism in those years that perturbed so many activists in the interviews.
20. C. Solgun, “12 Eylül utanç müzesi,” Taraf, 23 September 2013.
21. The verb flash up references Walter Benjamin’s Thesis VI: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes in a moment of danger” (1940).
3
De-Ottomanization,
Modernism, Migration
A Selective History of Istanbul, 1923–1974
As one of the great cities of the planet, Istanbul has properly been the subject of a vast body of writing. A proportion of it sits on shelves in the Greater Istanbul Municipality bookshop beside the funicular railway exit in Galata, groaning under the weight of local histories of each of the city’s older neighborhoods, supplemented by exegeses of their representations