![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
If Armenians have a core belief, it is that they are an endangered people. They live as if under constant threat. After the annihilation of the Armenian population living in their historical lands—the Armenian heartlands were in eastern Turkey—by the Young Turk government during 1915–16, a new Turkish republic emerged from the old Ottoman-Turkish state in 1923, including an oppressive nationalistic hegemony. The resulting identity politics only fuelled the sense of being Other among Armenians and other minorities. By assessing the consequences and social impact of anxiety on this minority population defined as the Other, Anahit's paper aims to explore identity and cultural assumptions in Turkey through the Armenian experience. Leaving behind conceptualizations of the shifting modes of cultural representation, it seeks to go beyond the existing sociopolitical constraints that have persisted since 1915. Based on field research conducted between 2005 and 2011, Anahit examines the ever-changing set of norms of cultural identity by exploring the politics of collective memory. She asks whether a dominant culture is dependant on counter-cultural movements to remain all-powerful.
I would like to thank Dr Kerem Öktem and Dr Sossie Kasbarian warmly for organizing the workshop, ‘Civil society rapprochement and high politics stalemate: mapping the future of Armenian-Turkish relations in the context of the wider Middle East’. I am indebted to them for their insightful comments and useful advice in the preparation of this article.
I am grateful to Barbara Rosenbaum for her care and attention to detail, and to the anonymous reviewers of Patterns of Prejudice. I also would like to thank Professor Jean Fisher for her truly helpful and constructive remarks on an earlier version.
I would like to thank Dr Kerem Öktem and Dr Sossie Kasbarian warmly for organizing the workshop, ‘Civil society rapprochement and high politics stalemate: mapping the future of Armenian-Turkish relations in the context of the wider Middle East’. I am indebted to them for their insightful comments and useful advice in the preparation of this article.
I am grateful to Barbara Rosenbaum for her care and attention to detail, and to the anonymous reviewers of Patterns of Prejudice. I also would like to thank Professor Jean Fisher for her truly helpful and constructive remarks on an earlier version.
Notes
1 The Young Turks, officially known as İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress, CUP), ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1906 until the end of the First World War in November 1918. See Şerif Mardin, Jön Türklerin Siyasî Fikirleri, 1895–1908 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları 1983), 221–50; and M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2001).
2 Donald Bloxham remarked: ‘The 1915–1916 genocide was a one-sided destruction of a largely defenceless community by the agents of a sovereign state.’ Moreover, he claimed that the conditions and the massacres in Anatolia from around 1917 onwards can be described, following Mark Levene, as ‘post-genocidal’. See Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2005), 99.
3 The research for part of this article was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) postgraduate award between 2006 and 2010. I would like to express my gratitude to all the interviewees with whom I have worked, whether or not their words have been quoted in this paper. I thank them for fully trusting me and allowing me into the private corners of their psyches. Without their collaboration, this study would not have been possible.
4 I am borrowing the term ‘social construct’ from the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. See Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. from the French by Francis J. Ditter, Jr and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row 1980), 6.
5 See, for example, Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage 1995); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd edn (Oxford and New Malden, MA: Blackwell 2005); Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 1996); and David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995).
6 The song was written in 1920 as an inspirational march for troops fighting in the Turkish War of Independence (19 May 1919–24 July 1923). It was adopted in 1921 and officially became the national anthem after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The fact that it was originally written for the military later became a symbol of the link between patriotic nation-building and militaristic nationalism in Turkey. See ‘Turkey: İstiklâl Marşı’, available on the National Anthems of the World website at www.nationalanthems.me/turkey-istiklal-marsi; and ‘İstiklâl Marşı’, Wikipedia, 28 February 2014, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/İstiklâl_Marşı#Turkish_lyrics (both viewed 3 March 2014).
7 In 1935, when surnames were introduced in Turkey, he was given the name ‘Atatürk’, meaning ‘Father of the Turks’. He died on 10 November 1938. Portraits of him from different stages of his life can be seen on the walls and façades of many buildings in Turkey.
8 Atatürk delivered this speech on 20 October 1927, the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Republic.
9 The obligatory ‘Atatürk corners’ in schools were first introduced in 1961, after the coup d’état of 1960, in line with Article 30 of Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı Yaygın Eğitim Kurumları Yõnetmeliği (Regulations of the National Education Establishment). They might be seen as analogous to ‘sacred’ altars in places of worship.
10 Zeyno Pekünlü, Doublethink-1, video installation 4'43”, 2009; Doublethink-2, video and sound installation, 4’, 2009, available online at Zeyno Pekünlü's website at http://zeynopekunlu.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/doublethink-1_08.html and http://zeynopekunlu.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/doublethink-2.html, respectively (viewed 5 March 2014). The title of these works was inspired by George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in which ‘Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs [the lie and the truth] in one's mind simultaneously’. ‘And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” … It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control”, they called it: in Newspeak, “doublethink”.’ See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949] (London: Penguin 2003).
11 Irk means ‘race’ in Turkish, although it also meant ‘nation’ in Ottoman Turkish.
12 Esra Ersen, Türküm, Doğruyum, Çalışkanım, site specific (Germany 1998, South Korea 2002 and Austria 2005) installation and video 45’.
13 Since the tenth anniversary of the Republic (23 April 1933), Article 12 of the Anayasa (Constitution), has obliged all students to recite the oath each morning during the eight years of primary schooling. The abolition of this article was published in T.C. Resmi Gazete (Official Gazette of the Republic of Turkey), no. 28789, 8 October 2013. This decision was appealed to the T.C. Danıştay Başkanlığı (Turkish Council of State) on 11 October 2013.
14 See Güven Gürkan Öztan, Türkiye'de Çocukluğun Politik İnşası (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları 2012); and Ayşe Gül Altınay, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004).
15 Erden Kosova, Esra Ersen: Yüz Yüze, Face to Face, trans. from the Turkish by Mine Haydaroğlu (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları 2011), 52.
16 For the pro-nationalist ideology from the late Ottoman period to the first years of the Turkish Republic, see Erik Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905–1926 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1984); and Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris 2004).
17 Millets were legally protected non-Muslim religious minorities, who were ‘allowed’ to rule themselves (in matters not involving the Muslim population) and preserve their own language, culture and traditions under the Ottoman authorities. See Benjamin Braude, ‘Foundation myths of the millet system’, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Volume I: The Central Lands (New York: Holmes and Meier 1982), 69–88; and Roderic H. Davison, ‘The millets as agents of change in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire’, in Braude and Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 319–37. See also Baskın Oran, ‘Azınlıklar’, in İstanbul Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: NTV Yayınları 2010), 159–65.
18 The millet system was based on tolerance, but enforced a model of isolation and systematic patterns of discrimination through religion. Several strategies of assimilation, at least on the surface—for instance, changes of name and surname—were available to minorities during the early years of the Republic. Conversion to Islam—forced or voluntary—during 1915–16 and after was also used as a survival tactic.
19 With Ottoman imperial and Turkish republican histories assumed to refer to Sunni-Muslim-Turkish-male history, the role of women is still neglected in Turkey.
20 The deep-rooted culture of ‘obedience to the nation-state’ is often demonstrated through patriotic acts, such as the overuse of the flag. However, the fine line between patriotic values based on pride and those based on nationalism is often crossed in Turkey.
21 Kemalism and Turkish nationalism are not open to criticism. Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibits the denigration of the Turkish nation or government institutions, limiting Turkish citizens’ freedom of expression both in Turkey and in the diaspora.
22 According to Murat Belge: ‘The ideology formed with the Republic is not a fully secular alternative. Hence, Kemalism is a form of worship. Even if it has a very small place in world history, this secularization process means giving up God.’ Murat Belge in conversation with Berat Günçıkan, Linç Kültürünün Tarihsel Kökeni: Milliyetçilik (Istanbul: Agora Kitaplığı 2006), 15.
23 Murat Paker, ‘Türk Ermeni Meselesinin Psiko-Politik Düğümleri’, in Murat Paker, Psiko-Politik Yüzleşmeler (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları 2007), 169. An earlier version of this chapter was published as an article in Birikim, nos 193–4, May–June 2005, 43–53. I would like to thank Dr Murat Paker for sharing with me a revised unpublished English version.
24 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Dissemination’, in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge 1994), 170.
25 Hrant Dink, monologue video testimony, 32’, recorded 26 October 2006, for Helin Anahit's installation Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak (see note 33). All translations from the Turkish, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
26 Hrant Dink, ‘Why have I been targeted?’, Agos, no. 563, 12 January 2007, 12.
27 Helin Anahit, ‘Prologue’, in Cem Akaş (ed.), Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak, trans. by Evrim Kaya and Çağla Orpen (Istanbul: Geniş Kitaplık Publishing 2010), 3.
28 Haber Merkezi, ‘Yapıcı Bir Diyalog Için Sanat: “Açık Açık Konuşmak”’, Bianet, 15 June 2010, available at http://bianet.org/bianet/bianet/122740-yapici-bir-diyalog-icin-sanat-acik-acik-konusmak (viewed 7 March 2014).
29 I recorded over 500 testimonies for Talking Openly, including those collected after the exhibition. The length of each varied between 25 minutes and 3 hours.
30 See Jacques Lacan, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’, in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. from the French by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge 1989), 1–8.
31 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. from the Italian by Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books 1999).
32 For details of the exhibition, see ‘Exhibition & discussions: Talking Openly’, available on the DEPO website at www.depoistanbul.net/en/activites_detail.asp?ac=31 (viewed 7 March 2014).
33 Helin Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak (video), 8-channel audio visual installation, 30’, HDV, stereo, 2010.
34 Helin Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak (12 Voices), 3-channel sound installation, 20’, HDV, surround, 2010.
35 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.
36 The speaker was raised surrounded by the idealistic values of the Republic. Whether she had Republican values or not, she still considered herself as part of that era, seen as a continuous phenomenon, demonstrating the longevity of Kemalism. Anonymous video testimony recorded July 2007; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak (12 Voices).
37 Anonymous video testimony recorded July 2007; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak (12 Voices).
38 Compulsory second- or third-time military conscription of non-Muslim citizens of Turkey—between the ages of 25 and 45—during the Second World War, known as 20 Kura Askerlik.
39 Anonymous video testimony recorded July 2007; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak (12 Voices).
40 Hamid Naficy, ‘The accented style of the independent transnational cinema: a conversation with Atom Egoyan’, in George E. Marcus (ed.), Cultural Producers in Perilous States: Editing Events, Documenting Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997), 179–232 (222). See also Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London and New York: Routledge 1992); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 2001); and Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. For a discussion on the Armenian case, see Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. from the French by Gil Anidjar (New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press 2009).
41 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. from the French by George Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1988), 14. See also Mahmut Koyuncu, ‘Açık açık konuş ve sese ses ver’, Taraf, 25 June 2010, 16.
42 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and melancholia’ [1917], in Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. from the German by Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin 2005), 201–18. See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996), 10–24, 91–112.
43 Lacan, ‘The Freudian thing’, in Lacan, Écrits, 113. See also Bruce Fink, ‘The real cause of repetition’, in Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (eds), Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundemental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: State University of New York Press 1995), 223–9 (223–4).
44 Anonymous video testimony recorded February 2010; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak (12 Voices).
45 After the Young Turk government took power through a bloodless revolution in 1908, Armenians began to demonstrate support for the new government's policies that reflected more freedom and civil rights. This provoked Sultan Abdül Hamid and his loyalists, who wanted to maintain their positions within the Ottoman Empire, to organize two massacres, known as the Adana massacres, in April 1909, which eliminated one part of Armenian existence in that region.
46 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London and New York: Routledge 2001), 37.
47 See 6–7 Eylül Olayları Fotoğraflar-Belgeler Fahri Çoker Arşivi, introd. Dilek Güven (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları 2005).
48 The government of the time instigated and was responsible for these riots. Having said that, the way in which the riots were orchestrated and then got out of hand, turning into a public tragedy, demonstrates the deep layers of hatred and xenophobia that existed among the population. See Dilek Güven, Cumhuriyet Dönemi Azınlık Politikaları ve Stratejileri Bağlamında 6–7 Eylül Olayları, trans. from the German by Bahar Şahin (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları 2005); and also Alfred de Zayas, ‘The Istanbul pogrom of 6–7 September 1955 in the light of international law’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol. 2, no. 2, 2007, 137–54.
49 Ethnic Greeks from Turkey are called ‘Rum’.
50 Anonymous video testimony recorded September 2006; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
51 Anonymous video testimony recorded August 2006; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
52 Anonymous video testimony recorded August 2006; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
53 Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. from the German by J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin Books 2009), 11.
54 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. from the German by Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico 1999), 227.
55 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, 247–8.
56 Rakel Dink, monologue video testimony, 83', recorded 25 October 2006; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
57 Since 2007, every 19 January, the day of Hrant Dink's murder, is a day of commemoration, accompanied by a silent public protest in front of the offices of Agos.
58 Anonymous video testimony recorded April 2010; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
59 Anonymous video testimony recorded August 2007; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
60 The law, as part of the hegemonic Turkification process, enforced Turkish as the sole language of education and culture, and forbade the use of other languages in the public sphere. The emphasis on a single common language arguably brought about the decline of non-official languages, spoken by indigenous minorities and the multicultural migrant population, leading to a collective linguistic amnesia.
61 Ohannes Kılıçdağı, monologue video testimony, 58’, recorded 3 May 2007; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
62 The main core of the Armenian diaspora was established by genocide survivors and their descendants. The Armenian population is spread across different parts of the world. Among 80,000 Armenians who are Turkish citizens, approximately 60,000–65,000 live in Turkey, mainly in Istanbul. 2,5 million of the world's Armenian population of 7.5–8 million live in the Republic of Armenia, which became an independent country in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
63 Military coups d’état against the government took place in Turkey on 27 May 1960, 12 March 1971 and 12 September 1980. During these precarious periods, many Armenians—as well as other minorities—emigrated.
64 The Kurtuluş Savaşı (Liberation War) or İstiklâl Harbi (War of Independence) (19 May 1919–24 July 1923) was a war conducted by Turkish nationalists against the Allies following the First World War (see also note 6).
65 Anonymous video testimony recorded February 2010; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
66 Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1995), 5.
67 David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian, ‘Between genocide and catastrophe’, in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley and London: University of California Press 2003), 125–47 (127).
68 In Hannah Arendt's theory, a pariah, an outcast of a society deprived of human rights, was in contrast to a parvenu, an influential person able to be heard.
69 Arus Yumul, monologue video testimony, 27’, recorded 12 April 2007; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
70 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton Press 1974), 232.
71 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. from the French by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1993), 17.
72 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. from the French by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1993),13.
73 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. from the French by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1993), 20–33. See also Jacques Derrida, Apories (Paris: Éditions Galilée 1996), 44.
74 Şebnem İşigüzel, ‘Bir Anadolu Gezisi’ (A trip to Anatolia), 5 April 2011, in the e-catalogue for the exhibition Ateşin Düştüğü Yer (Where Fire Has Struck), DEPO, Istanbul, 10 March–22 April 2011.
75 Fethiye Çetin, Anneannem (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları 2004). For an English translation, see Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother: A Memoir, trans. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely (London: Verso Books 2008).
76 For some of these publications, see Ayşe Gül Altınay and Yektan Türkyılmaz, ‘Unraveling layers of gendered silencing: converted Armenian survivors of the 1915 catastrophe’, in Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann and Selçuk Akşin Somel (eds), Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries (London and New York: Routledge 2014); Ahmet Abakay, Hoşana’nın Son Sözü (Istanbul: Büyülüdağ Yayınları 2013); Laurence Ritter and Max Sivaslian, Les Restes de l’épée: les Arméniens cachéset islamisés en Turquie (Paris: Éditions Thaddée 2012); Ferda Balancar (ed.), Sessizliğin Sesi II: Diyarbakırlı Ermeniler Konuşuyor (Istanbul: Hrant Dink Vakfı Yayınları 2012); Fethiye Çetin and Ayşe Gül Altınay, Torunlar (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları 2009); Filiz Özdem, Korku Benim Sahibim (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları 2007); Erhan Başyurt, Ermeni Evlatlıklar: Saklı Kalmış Hayatlar (Istanbul: Karakutu Yayınları 2006); and Kemal Yalçın, Sarı Gelin, Sarı Gyalin (Istanbul: Birzamanlar Yayıncılık 2006).
77 Anonymous video testimony recorded July 2006; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
78 Even though ‘excommunicate’ is a Christian term, I use it purely to demonstrate the forcefulness of the original Turkish term.
79 Anonymous video testimony recorded May 2009; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
80 Karin Karakaşlı, monologue video testimony, 49’, recorded 5 June 2007; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
81 Ohannes Kılıçdağı, monologue video testimony; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
82 The conference ‘Ottoman Armenians during the decline of the Empire: issues of scientific responsibility and democracy’ was first scheduled to take place in May 2005 at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. It was postponed until September by court order, and faced delays and public protests, and finally took place in September at Bilgi University.
83 Anonymous video testimony recorded February 2010; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
84 Hrant Dink, monologue video testimony; Anahit, Talking Openly/Açık Açık Konuşmak.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Helin Anahit
Helin Anahit is a doctoral candidate in fine art and transcultural studies at Middlesex University, London. Drawing on relations between the sociopolitical and the aesthetic, her interdisciplinary perspective explores how expressions emerging from traumatic history may provide an exemplary means for investigating universal issues of globalism, nomadism and diasporic liminality. The outcomes of this research have been configured into several exhibitions as well as conference papers. Email: [email protected]