“My Breath Becomes a Crimson Horse”: Interviews with Nevhiz Tanyeli

Abstract

This extract from two interviews that took place in 2021 and 2023 with Nevhiz Tanyeli at her home in Şişli, İstanbul centers on a dialogue over her paintings, the possible interpretations of which the interviewers had discussed beforehand, informed by Bülent Küçük’s research on remembrances of Turkey during the events of 1968. Tanyeli offered both tea and counterinterpretations in her unique and witty style, with the interviewers both taken aback and learning something new. Her stories’ poetic sensibilities weave the violent historicity of witnessed events with personal memories of the living and the dead. Her paintings constitute a diary that combines the personal with the political, the dreamlike with the factual, and the associative with the nightmarish and repetitive real of the past. Her paintings, while they belong to certain dates, characters, and places, thus remain open for others’ imaginations to interpret. As a living participant and witness of ’68, her creative will yet speaks to us.

Keywords:

• 1968
• Poetry
• Political Violence
• Turkey
• Visual Arts

Notes

1 We thank Bartu Ersen for transcribing the first of the two interviews. The interviews are informed by Bülent Küçük’s ongoing research on ’68 in Turkey in an attempt to diversify and decolonize the remembrances of this eventful period. The following are excerpts from these two interviews.

2 Cemal Süreya (1931–90) was a poet and writer of Kurdish Zaza descent from Turkey.

3 Operation Return to Life “is the official name given to the operations on 19 December 2000, carried out by approximately 10,000 security guards in twenty prisons, in which thirty-two people—thirty prisoners and two soldiers—were killed and hundreds injured. It was carried out against convicts and detainees who began a hunger strike and death fast on October 20 to resist the F-type isolation and cell system.” See “Hayata Dönüş Operasyonu,” Wikipedia, accessed 22 March 2023, https://www.wikiwand.com/tr/Hayata_D%C3%B6n%C3%BC%C5%9F_Operasyonu.

4 This was the 1999 Gölcük or İzmit earthquake in Kocaeli Province, which had regime-shifting consequences for Turkey. Incidentally, this part of the interview took place before the 6 January 2023 double earthquakes that devastated ten cities in southern and southeastern Turkey and three cities in northern Syria.

5 The 27 May 1960 coup was the first in modern republican Turkey.

6 Here, Tanyeli is referring to the İstanbul Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi (İstanbul State Academy of Fine Arts), which was founded as the School of Fine Arts in 1882. The academy’s status was changed for a third time in 1982, becoming Mimar Sinan University.

7 Mustafa Suphi (1883–1921) was the leader of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Turkey. The term 15s refers to those Communist Party executive-committee members who were killed in 1921: they were tied up and thrown into the water from the Black Sea shores of Trabzon to be drowned in the open sea.

8 Sayha is a word of Arabic origin that is no longer in much use in Turkish. Interestingly, it can also refer to the scream one shouts when waking from a nightmare. The moment of death (whether physical or symbolic) may also be regarded as this last instance of trying to come out of a nightmare.

9 Bülent Küçük took the lead in this section of the interview. The questions were informed by his research.

10 This footage was attained by Bülent Küçük from Kalan Music.

11 On 16 February 1969, a large number of left-wing youth organizations organized by labor unions and the Workers’ Party rallied and marched from Beyazıt to Taksim Square to protest the American Navy [Sixth Fleet]. Over ten thousand demonstrators attended the meeting; two people were killed and more than two hundred injured when conservative nationalist youth groups staged a sudden, organized attack.

12 The Roboski massacre. On the night of 28 December 2012, thirty-four Kurdish citizens—mostly youths and children from the same family—who were smuggling cigarettes and tea near the Iraq-Turkey border were killed by the Turkish Air Force. The Turkish state later proclaimed that they had carried out the operation because the smugglers were thought to be PKK guerrillas who had infiltrated Turkey.