Remembering and Writing the Cycles of Oppression and Resistance in Ece Temelkuran’s The Time of Mute Swans

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that resonating with references to the 1980 coup and inspired by the 2013 Gezi Park Protests, Ece Temelkuran's The Time of Mute Swans creates a cross-temporal communication and gives insight into both the past and the present contexts of Turkey. The novel represents the past in ways to revisit, contest and reconstruct its hegemonic and silenced spaces. By doing so, it brings awareness to the formation of institutionalized forms of memory, knowledge, and discourses through which brutality, violence, oppression, inequality and injustice can be consolidated. Remarkably, while communicating the workings of such oppressions, the novel also cycles the acts of resistance. It shows that remembering, asking questions, demanding justice, and creating something different and beautiful are not merely personal contemplations but powerful alternative narratives manifesting the spirit of resistance, activism and solidarity. Accentuating the ways literature and acts of memory can facilitate hopeful cross-generational dialogs to prevent the brutal cycles of oppression, Mute Swans thus enhances our understanding of resistance.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Critique, and Tuba Korkmaz for their helpful comments and valuable suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Translation mine. See also Temelkuran, “Devir: Bir Ece Temelkuran Sohbeti;” Temelkuran, “12 Eylül’de Bugünkü Deliliğin Tohumları Saklı.”

2. For more on the statistical accounts related to the use of Twitter during Gezi, see, for example, Kuzuoğlu, “Gezi Parkı Eylemlerinin Sosyal Medya Karnesi;” Yaman, The Gezi Park Protests: The Impact on Freedom of Expression in Turkey. See Temelkuran, Turkey: Insane and the Melancholy 180–90, for the increasing use of Twitter in Turkey from 2011 to the Gezi Park Protests and 200–20, for an overview of the Gezi Park Protests. For a study informing the diverse context of the Gezi protests with different socio-political backgrounds, see Genç, Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey. See also Vatikiotis and Yörük, “Gezi Movement and the Networked Public Sphere: A Comparative Analysis in Global Context,” for the increasing use of Twitter during the Gezi Park protests: They note, for instance, “Between 29 May 2013 to 10 June 2013, use of Twitter per day in Turkey increased from 1.8 to 10 million. There were more than 20 hashtags related to the protests that became most popular worldwide trend topics, and among them, six hashtags went over the 1 million messages per day barrier” (7). Use of Facebook and WhatsApp were also widely used during the protests; for a contextual and detailed study of the use of digital networks within Gezi context, see, for instance, Tufekci, Twitter and the Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest; Avcı, “‘Yanıt Verme:’ Direnişin İletişimi ya da İletişimin Dirilişi.”

3. See Saka, “Social Media in Turkey as a Space for Political Battles: AKTrolls and Other Politically Motivated Trolling;” Vatikitiotis and Yörük, “Gezi Movement and the Networked Public Sphere: A Comparative Analysis in Global Context;”; Bulut and Yörük, “Digital Populism: Trolls and Political Polarization of Twitter in Turkey.”

4. The other two were Yusuf Aslan and Hüseyin İnan.

5. See, for example; Fortuny, “Nâzım Hikmet’s Ecopoetics and the Gezi Park Protests;” and Ayşem; Mert, “The Trees in Gezi Park: Environmental Policy as the Focus of Democratic Protests.”

6. See, for example, Selvelli, “Inscribing a New Space: Written Expressions of Utopia and Resistance during the Gezi Park.”

7. In December 2011, Turkish military airplanes bombed a village at the border with Iraq where 34 Kurdish smugglers, mostly teenagers, were killed as they were mistaken for terrorists. The reporting of the incident was controlled by the state. See for example, Temelkuran, Turkey 173.

8. See for example, Okçuoğlu, “The LGBT Block.”

9. There is a large amount of scholarship on Gezi and the way it referred to the past events and circumstances in Turkey. Among others, for instance, see; Selvelli, “Inscribing a New Space;” Genç, Under the Shadow; Temelkuran, Turkey; Koç and Aksu “Introduction.”

10. While showing the diversity and plurality of oppositional voices, Gezi also created a platform to reflect on the tensions and intricacies among these voices. Saying that Gezi “brought together an unexpected variety of – people, most of whom had not physically encountered each other until – then,” Zeynep; Gambetti, for instance, explores the interaction between a LGBT protestor and a homophobic soccer fan (37). See also Tufekci, Twitter and the Tear Gas 105–09; and İrem; İnceoğlu, “Encountering Difference and Radical Democratic Trajectory: An Analysis of Gezi Park as Public Space” 539, for anecdotes relating the encounters which brought attention to issues such as racism, sexism and homophobia prevalent in oppositional groups and promoted mutual respect and empathy.

11. For a succinct discussion of Turkey’s military coups see; Irzık, “The Constructions of Victimhood in Turkish Coup d’État Novels: Is Victimhood without Innocence Possible?”; Günay-Erkol and Şenol-Sert, “From Competitive to Multidirectional Memory: A Literary Tool for Comparison.”

12. See for example, Gürbilek, The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window 4; Irzık, “The Constructions of Victimhood” 7–8; Temelkuran, Turkey 52–53.

13. Suppression of political consciousness in Turkey within the frame of the 1980 coup and in its aftermath is an immensely diverse and complex issue where a variety of socioeconomic and cultural factors should also be considered. “[T]he climate which left its imprint on Turkey during the 1980s cannot be understood merely in terms of repression, prohibition and a politics of elimination. What distinguishes this from other repressive periods in Turkey’s recent past, what made it a fracturing point of not only economic and political but also cultural life, is that during those years Turkey became the site of a great transformation which the concept of repression alone cannot explain,” says; Gürbilek, for instance, as she analyzes how the 1980s also brought “one promising freedom in the cultural sphere” (4–5).

14. This case is also reported in an academic paper published in 1988 by Veterinary Journal of Ankara University, see Aslanbey et al., “Kuğularda Musculus Extensor Pollicis Brevis’in Tenektomisi ile Uçma Yeteneğinin Ortadan Kaldırılması Üzerine Çalışmalar.”

15. Temelkuran says while she was writing the novel, she lived in Ankara from 2014 to 2015 and asked people whether the swans could fly. Most people said “No!” (Temelkuran et al.).

16. The novel’s treatment of opposition is an intersectional one where factors such as economy, gender, ethnicity, and age are also considered, which I find important for the novel’s discussion of solidarity. Although, for instance, Ali and Ayşe cooperate to save the swans, their differences are never dissolved, which can be observed in the material analysis of their familial backgrounds.

17. Erll emphasizes that her use of “literary memory studies” is a loose one reflecting the heterogeneity of the studies at the intersections of literature and memory (Memory in Culture 67).

18. See, for example, Neumann, “The Literary Representation of Memory;” Erll, “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory;” Erll, Memory in Culture; Assmann and Shortt, “Memory and Political Change: Introduction”; Caldicott and Fuchs, “Introduction.”

19. I am borrowing this term from; Mohanty’s “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.” Mohanty uses this expression to introduce the essays in the volume and underline that these contexts are “suggestive rather than comprehensive” to understand the dynamics of struggle where race, gender, and class, among others, interact with each other (39). I find this use helpful because it suggests a material, plural and flexible understanding of struggle which is not exhaustive. My paper thus aims to offer angles and contexts to understand and discuss the dynamics of oppression and resistance in modern Turkey.

20. See Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge 145.

21. For the relevant discussion, see Mohanty, 38–39.

22. See for example, Mute Swans, 102 where Sevgi says that butterflies are not allowed in Parliament “because nothing nice is allowed in this country. In an interview, Temelkuran also said that butterflies, both in Mute Swans and Book of the Edge, stand for revolutionaries (“Devir”).

23. For a study on Bülent Ersoy and Zeki Müren, see Görkemli, “Gender Benders, Gay Icons and Media: Lesbian and Gay Visual Rhetoric in Turkey.”

24. Börek is a kind of pastry filled with cheese, vegetable, minced meat, etc.

25. Assmann’s description of Winston as a “paradoxical archivist” seems useful here since it indicates the multiple workings and manipulation of archive to “mirror the present concerns” of the state (105).

26. I am borrowing this term from Mohanty. See for example, “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle.”

27. The perspective structure of the novel can also be further explored within the frame of “multiperspectival narration.” Although the term is diversely debated in narrative studies, most studies agree that it is beyond the use of multiple narrators. For an overview of the term, see, Hartner, “Multiperspectivity” at, https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/37.html.

28. See, for example, the following quotations from the prologue: “Just like today, Turkey was going through a period in which the lines between good and bad, between beautiful and ugly, and between right and wrong were blurred with blood” (1); and “A strange coincidence… Swans began migrating from Siberia to the Turkish coast of the Black Sea for the first time in 1980, the year of September 12 coup, one the bloodiest in modern history. The swans continued to visit Turkey every year after that. Then, in the summer of 2013, a summer in which the people rose up against an authoritarian regime for the first time since 1980, the swans suddenly stopped coming” (2).

29. I think this becomes more important especially considering that the use of paratextual elements can change in different publications and editions of the book. 2015 Turkish version of the novel, for instance, does not have the prologue available in 2017 English translation.

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Notes on contributors

Şule Akdoğan

Şule Akdoğan a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her current research interests include contemporary women’s writing, transnational feminisms and literary forms of resistance.