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Articles

Revisiting Trauma: Choreographing the Loss of the Armenian Journalist Hrant Dink

Pages 270-295 | Published online: 12 Dec 2019
 

Abstract

As a choreography of intervention into daily life, Mihran Tomasyan’s Sen Balık Değilsin Ki (SBDK) allows viewers a moment not only to remember the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, but also to revisit past and current traumas that need to be reworked by Turkish and Armenian societies. I argue that the choreography of SBDK functions as a memorialization of a history of losses, using images and objects as guiding elements to trace the roots of the truth. Through their choreographic revaluation, the objects used in SBDK exceed their inherent functionality and gain new meanings marked by Tomasyan’s subjectivity.

Notes

* A famous quote from Hrant Dink, found at Hrant Dink, “Vision & Mission,” Hrant Dink Foundation, accessed August 27, 2019, https://hrantdink.org/en/about-us/vission-mission.

* Dink stated, “Armenians are experiencing a major trauma regarding Turks.” Hrant Dink, “Arşiv Odasi: Hrant Dink, 2005—BBC Türkçe,” YouTube video, 8:28, posted by BBC News Türkçe, January 15, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3_VC4ttjRA. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

† As Hatsantour Karenian et al. state, “Regardless of the exact character of these events (persecution, expulsion, genocide), the refugees and their descendants are likely to have been subjected to traumatizing influences.” Hatsantour Karenian et al., “Collective Trauma Transmission and Traumatic Reactions among Descendants of Armenian Refugees,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 57, no. 4 (July 2011): 328, http://doi:10.1177/0020764009354840.

* This paragraph summarizes a wide array of scholarship on the political history of the Turkish republic. For further reading, please see the following: Bill Park, “Turkey’s Deep State,” The RUSI Journal 153, no. 5 (2008): 54–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071840802521937; Michael M. Gunter, “Turkey, Kemalism, and the ‘Deep State,’” in Conflict, Democratization, and the Kurds in the Middle East, eds. David Romano and Mehmet Gurses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17–39; Ayşegül Kars Kaynar, “Making of Military Tutelage in Turkey: The National Security Council in the 1961 and 1982 Constitutions,” Turkish Studies 19, no. 3 (2018): 451–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/14683849.2017.1387055; Zeki Sarigil, “The Turkish Military: Principal or Agent?,” Armed Forces & Society (2012 [published online]):1–23, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X12442309; Koray Caliskan, “Explaining the End of Military Tutelary Regime and the July 15 Coup Attempt in Turkey,” Journal of Cultural Economy 10, no. 1 (2017): 97–111, https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2016.1260628; Frank Tachau and Metin Heper, “The State, Politics, and the Military in Turkey,” Comparative Politics 16, no. 1 (October, 1983): 17–33, https://doi:10.2307/421593; Metin Heper, “State and Society in Turkish Political Experience,” in State, Democracy, and the Military: Turkey in the 1980s, ed. Metin Heper and Ahmet Evin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 1–10; Kemal H. Karpat, “The Military and Politics in Turkey, 1960–64: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of a Revolution, The American Historical Review 75, no. 6 (1970): 1654–83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1850760?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents; Sabri Sayari, “Political Violence and Terrorism in Turkey, 1976–80: A Retrospective Analysis,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22, no. 2 (2010): 198–215, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546550903574438; Markar Eseyan, “Ergenekon: An Illegitimate Form of Government,” Insight Turkey 15, no. 4 (2013): 29–40; John Gorvett, “Talking Turkey: Turkey’s ‘Deep State’ Surfaces in Former President’s Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 25, no. 1 (2006): 37–41.

* I find performing arts scholar Caroline Wake’s framing of a secondary witness as “being spatiotemporally copresent at the scene of testimony” helpful for understanding Tomasyan’s performance of Dying Like Hrant for 15 Minutes. Caroline Wake, “Regarding the Recording: The Viewer of Video Testimony, the Complexity of Copresence and the Possibility of Tertiary Witnessing,” History and Memory 25, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013): 113.

* Political scientists Birsen Örs and Ayşegül Komşuoğlu conducted research on the identity of the Armenians of Turkey the year Dink was assassinated. Their research laid out the fundamental difference of experience between Armenians living in diaspora, Armenians living in Armenia, and Armenians living in Turkey. The researchers define the Armenians living in Turkey as an exceptional case, since they continue living in their homeland, Anatolia: “Today on those lands the Republic of Turkey is established, the national identity of which has an ethnic and religious emphasis although citizenship is officially defined as equal. This citizenship has both an external and internal duality.” Birsen Örs and Ayşegül Komşuoğlu, “Turkey’s Armenians: A Research Note on Armenian Identity,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13, no. 3 (2007): 413, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537110701451595.

*The song of the group Büyük Ev Ablukada is “Ne Var Ne Yok,” which is a phrase that is used in colloquial language as the equivalent of “What’s up?” The lyrics of the song refer to a loss and the resulting sadness.

*A well known Turkish poem, translated by Vahakn Keshishian and used in performances in English. http://www.armtr-beyondborders.org/en/as-if-nothing-has-ever-been-said-before-us-april-art-in-istanbul/.

Arat and Ararat refer to the same name, the son of Hrant Dink and his wife, Rakel Dink. The other meaning of Ararat is the name of the mountain that has an iconic meaning in the genealogy of Armenian identity.

* Mihran Tomasyan, interview with the author, Istanbul, June 2018. In Turkey, where dance is not acknowledged as an art form or a profession, those who enter the field are obliged to help create the field itself. Tomasyan is one of these few dancers who is involved in shaping dance in Turkey. Unfortunately, under today’s sociopolitical conditions, reflections on dance as an art form are always accompanied by questions of its political and economic (financial) viability. Because Tomasyan has kept his artistic autonomy, he is able to overcome these conditions.

1 “Çıplak Ayaklardan Dink İçin Performans-Eylem” [Performance-Protest for Dink from Çıplak Ayaklar], Bianet, accessed January 2019, https://bianet.org/bianet/toplum/90742-ciplak-ayaklardan-dink-icin-performans-eylem. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

2 Mihran Tomasyan, interview with Ayşegül Oğuz, March, 24, 2007.

3 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 11.

4 Hatsantour Karenian et al., “Collective Trauma Transmission and Traumatic Reactions among Descendants of Armenian Refugees,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 57, no. 4 (July 2011): 328, http://doi:10.1177/0020764009354840.

5 Barış Ünlü, Türklük Sözleşmesi (Ankara, Turkey: Dipnot, 2018), 14–15.

6 Mick Wallis and Patrick Duggan, “Editorial: On Trauma,” Performance Research 16, no. 1 (2011): 2.

7 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91–92.

8 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 78.

9 Ibid.

10 “Manifesto/Manifest,” Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası, accessed December 2018, http://cargocollective.com/cakstudyo/manifesto-manifest.

11 Ron Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity,” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 71.

12 “European Capital of Culture. . . ?,” Instanbul 2010, accessed January 2019, http://istanbul2010.org/european-capital-culture/.

13 Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing History,” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1.

14 Ibid., 3.

15 Mihran Tomasyan, personal interview with the author, Istanbul, June 2018.

16 Mihran Tomasyan, Sonu Selamet (blog), http://sonuselamet-blog.tumblr.com.

17 Mihran Tomasyan, “Beyrut Ve,” Sonu Selamet (blog), June 23, 2011, http://sonuselamet-blog.tumblr.com.

18 Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part III),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 16 (1916–1917), trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1963), 275, https://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=se.016.0000a.

19 Gregory Bistoen, Trauma Ethics and the Political beyond PTSD (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 4.

20 Ibid., 55.

21 Ibid., 58.

22 Monika J. Casper and Eric Wertheimer, “Within Trauma: An Introduction,” Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence Conflict and Memory in Everyday Life (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 3.

23 Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), xi.

24 Slavoj Žižek, “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject,” Filosofski Vestnik 29, no. 2 (2008): 11.

25 Angie Panos, “Dance and Trauma,” in Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide, ed. Charles R. Figley (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2012), 192, http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452218595.n65.

26 Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (1953; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 65.

27 Tomasyan, personal interview with the author.

28 Ibid.

29 Andre Lepecki, “Moving as Thing,” October Magazine no. 140 (Spring 2012): 81.

30 Ibid., 76.

31 Silvia Benso quoted in Lepecki, “Moving as Thing,” 77.

32 Zeynep Sayın, Ölüm Terbiyesi [The Ethics of Death] (Istanbul: Metis, 2017), 10.

33 Ibid.

34 Maureen Freely, “Why They Killed Hrant Dink,” Eurozine, June 6, 2007, https://www.eurozine.com/why-they-killed-hrant-dink/.

35 Gülay Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, Coming to Terms with a Difficult Past: The Trauma of the Assassination of Hrant Dink and Its Repercussions on Turkish National Identity,” Nations and Nationalism 19, no. 4 (2013): 688.

36 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Picador, 2007), 11.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayrin Ersöz

AYRIN ERSÖZ is a dance artist and scholar based in Istanbul, Turkey. She graduated from Yıldız Technical University with a BA in dance and received her PhD from the Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy Department at Istanbul University in 2011. In 2016 Dr. Ersöz was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship to conduct research at Rutgers University, where she explored the role that Islam plays in young, female, Muslim college students’ perceptions of dance as an art form and their participation in dance as a recreational activity and/or an artistic expression. Dr. Ersöz has been invited to present her research at numerous international conferences and has published in various national and international journals. Her research focuses on the connections of dance to political ideologies and systems within historical and contemporary societies. Dr. Ersöz serves as an associate professor within the Department of Music and Performing Arts at Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul.

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