Reading Occupied Istanbul: Turkish Subject-Formation from Historical Trauma to Literary Trope

Abstract

The Allied occupation of Istanbul is a little-known historical event outside of Turkey and the Middle East. European powers occupied Istanbul between 1918 and 1923 to enforce the partition of the Ottoman Empire after WWI in the construction of the Modern Middle East. Almost 100 Turkish novels that address occupied Istanbul have appeared over the last ninety years, beginning even before Allied armies left Istanbul in 1923. Turkey's present Middle Eastern re-emergence and post-Kemalist reassessment of secular modernity has also led writers and intellectuals back to the occupation of Istanbul. To examine why Turkish authors return repeatedly to the trope of occupied Istanbul, this essay surveys the first canonised novels about occupied Istanbul written during the Kemalist monoparty period (1923–50): Shirt of Flame by the exiled feminist and nationalist Halide Edib (1884–1964), Sodom and Gomorrah by the Kemalist ideologue Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu (1889–1974) and Outside the Scene by Turkey's first experimental, modernist author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1902–62). As bilingual Istanbul intellectuals, all three made occupied Istanbul a central drama in their fictions. However, each represented it differently as a formative event in the construction and critique of the nation-state and of modern Turkish subject-formation.

Keywords:

• Istanbul
• Allied occupation
• Turkish novel
• Islam
• secularism

Notes

¹For a popular history of this period, see Fromkin (2009 [1989]). The historical framing of the work is useful, though it is not comprehensive in its use of sources.

²There are a number of books on occupied Istanbul in Turkish. Many of these offer important political and historical insights. In terms of literature, criticism on novels of the occupation, if not subsumed into larger arguments on the ‘national struggle’, are often constituted by summaries of novel plots. These works include Kıymaz (1991), Yerasimos (1997), Temel (1998), Törenek (2002), Balabanlılar (2003), Erdoğan (2005), and Yıldıztaş (2010). In these works, the analysis often does not fall far from the official state history of the ‘occupation’ as the background for the emergence of the modern nation-state.

³These novels as well as others are written from a secular-socialist and secular-Kemalist perspective (respectively İlhan 2005 and Özakman 2005; see also, İlhan 2007). Orkun Uçar and Burak Turna's Metal Fırtına (2004) is the first volume of a best-selling conspiracy series that predicts a US invasion of Turkey from then occupied Iraq in which the US attempts to enforce the defunct Treaty of Sèvres (1920). The novel played on the fear of occupation based on the Allied occupation of Istanbul and on what has been termed the ‘Sèvres syndrome’, the belief that the division and/or occupation of Turkey is an ongoing Euro-American goal. Like the other novels, this pulp fiction dramatises the re-establishment of the nation in the present moment. For more on the Sèvres syndrome, see Michelangelo (2008).

⁴Furthermore, all three served as early members of parliament. Adıvar and Karaosmanoğlu were also persecuted by the state. Adıvar lived in exile between 1925 and 1939 (the year after Atatürk's death) and Karaosmanoğlu was de facto exiled by being forced into taking an ambassadorship in Europe.

⁵Adıvar was educated in English; Karaosmanoğlu and Tanpınar were educated in French.

⁶For more on the ‘tolerance narrative’ in the Ottoman context see Barkey (2005 and 2008) and Karpat and Yıldırım (2010).

⁷ In a majority of histories and literary works March 16, 1920 is given as the date of occupation; however, the generally ignored earlier date of November 13, 1918, when an Allied naval armada sailed and anchored before Dolmabahçe Palace, should be considered as part of the process of military occupation. March 16 marks the intensification of military and civil control by the Allies. Author Kemal Tahir, in his published notes entitled Notes: The Collapse (Notlar: Çöküntü), refers to these events as a ‘double occupation’. Historian Nur Bilge Criss describes them as a ‘de facto’ and a ‘de jure’ occupation, respectively. In the scope of this analysis, November 13, 1918 is taken as the start of occupation. There is no controversy about the end of the occupation: The last Allied troops left Istanbul on October 2, 1923, and the capital was transferred to Ankara eleven days later on October 13, 1923.

⁸It is noteworthy that this pact did not clearly foresee or forecast the establishment of a Turkish national republic. The stated goal was to reverse the occupations and ensure territorial integrity and the continuation of the Ottoman sultanate, caliphate, and state.

⁹The ‘mandate’, as described in Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant (1919), instituted a system of European tutelage for ‘those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’. For the entire document, see the World War I Document Archive website: www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/versa/versa1.html.

¹⁰For a popular history of this period, see MacMillan and Holbrooke (2003).

¹¹The secret agreements were first revealed by Bolshevik Russia after the 1917 revolution.

¹²‘Turkish Empire’ was a common misnomer for the Ottoman Empire at the time; similarly, the term ‘Turkey’, as it appears in this document, does not refer to the Republic of Turkey (est. 1923), but was an imprecise term used in the West to refer to the multinational Ottoman Empire.

¹³For the entire document, see the World War I Document Archive website: http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_King-Crane_Report.

¹⁴For the entire document, see the Republic of Turkey Ministry of Foreign Affairs website: http://www.mfa.gov.tr/lausanne-peace-treaty-vi_-convention-concerning-the-exchange-of-greek-and-turkish-populations-signed-at-lausanne_.en.mfa.

¹⁵For an intertextual comparison of Adıvar's memoirs and Mustafa Kemal's Speech, see Adak (2003).

¹⁶For another perspective on this ending see Seyhan (2008).

¹⁷The biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah provides the infrastructure for Karaosmanoğlu's version. The comprador inhabitants of Istanbul and the occupying armies represent the depraved, wicked men of Sodom. Necdet represents Lot (the one good man living there who was rescued by God/the national army), Leyla represents Lot's wife (who disobeys God and turns to a pillar of salt/is rejected for her ties to the wicked city), Cemil Kami represents Abraham (who urges God to save any good people in Sodom, that is, Lot and his family), and the force of nationalism, symbolised by the national army, is equated to the divine will of God, which is able to make/change history.

Additional information

Erdağ Göknar is Assistant Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and an award-winning literary translator. He has published various critical articles on Turkish literature as well as translations by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (My Name is Red); Atiq Rahimi (Earth and Ashes, from Dari); and A.H. Tanpınar (A Mind at Peace). He is the co-editor of Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida. His most recent critical study is Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge, 2013).