What is it like to be a crane? Notes on Alevi semah and the Sivas massacre

ABSTRACT

Semah is an Alevi ritual practice performed throughout Anatolia (Turkey) and the Alevi diaspora consisting of collective, dance-like movements that often take on or mimic the movements of animals, especially cranes. In attempting to elucidate that interplay between human performer and sacred animal, I draw on theoretical writings (especially philosophy and affect theory) about how people might – or might not – be able to become – or become like – other animals or forms of life, and what kind of affective processes that becoming might entail. I focus here especially on the role of semah in Sivas, Turkey, during the 1993 Pir Sultan Cultural Festival, during which Alevi participants, including many semah performers and musicians, were killed in an arson attack. Histories of that event highlight how prior to the attack, semah performers at the festival exemplified the possibility of becoming (like) cranes. Furthermore, many Alevis have placed semah at the centre of subsequent memorial events, suggesting new forms of affect and becoming as a political (and often public) response to the trauma of the Sivas massacre.

KEYWORDS:

• Alevi
• semah
• Turkey
• Sivas
• affect
• ritual

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the use of the term ‘massacre’ for this event, see Sökefeld 2008: 121. For further details on the event and the individual victims, see Aşut (1994) and Toker (2008).

2 In its multiplicity of meanings and affective orientation(s) to the past, this event has some resonance with Denise Gill’s descriptions of ‘melancholic modalities’ in Turkish classical music (Gill 2017), though the stakes at Sivas are more acute.

3 Some readers may fairly object that I have shifted from bat-ness to animality, a major leap given that humans are already animal. For Deleuze and Guattari, the animal seems always to be the non-human animal – or rather, the human-becoming-(a-)non-human-animal. But the objection remains important, not least since Nagel focuses on sonic sensation and flight, a pairing that figures centrally in Alevi semah.

4 While I agree with Deleuze and Guattari’s objections that these becoming-animal cannot be reduced to ‘an imitation’ of, say, a crane or other animal, it seems productive to at least consider such becoming in relation to mimesis. Recent scholarship on mimetic music/dance traditions of the eastern Mediterranean have underscored these affective dimensions. For instance, see Sonia Seeman on Romani musicians use of music’s affective powers to respond to, imagine, and shape the world around them (2019: 36–39); and Panayotis League’s discussion Anatolian Greek practitioners of zeibekiko dance and their understandings of taste, time, and the body (League 2019).

5 For further discussion on the tensions within affect theory between signification and feeling, see the introduction to this special issue, as well as Hofman 2015.

6 Wetherell’s affective ‘entanglements’ are also reminiscent of the growing body of literature on ‘musical atmospheres’ as spaces of ‘collective feelings’ (Riedel 2020).

7 Defining semah presents considerable challenges, since it doesn’t neatly fit into other Western taxonomies. In an article on semah as a musical genre, İlhan Ersoy usefully summarizes the challenge: ‘There are different definitions of semah in the literature. Some definitions focus on music, some on dance, some both on dance and music and some focus on the cem ritual. It can be said that semah belongs to all of these focal points and it can also be said that semah even has an esoteric meaning’ (Ersoy 2019: 33, italics as in original). He ultimately offers his own suggestion: ‘Semah is a basic cultural performance which belongs to the Alevi cultural identity and makes this identity visible, as well’ (2019: 33).

8 Hande Sağlam (2018) offers a compelling close-reading of the music and poetry of a single semah, ‘Gine dertli dertli iniliyorsun,’ a piece which depicts a conversation with an injured crane. This same text played an important role in the Sivas gatherings described here, as well as Alevi semahs more generally. On a personal note, it was also the first semah I studied with my first bağlama teacher, Adil Arslan, who suggested that it was one of the most important musical and poetic expressions of Alevism more generally.

9 Hû is an important esoteric word, meaning literally ‘he’ in Arabic (i.e. ‘God’) but also understood by many Sufis to be a shortened form of God’s full, formally-pronounced name, Allāhu. Many Sufi orders in Turkey (and elsewhere) recite this word as a key part of their zikr ceremonies.

10 The word çark, one of the formal sections of the semah, means ‘wheel’. This section is also known as pervaz, literally meaning ‘flying.’

11 Interview with author, June 1, 2012, Berlin.

12 See for instance http://www.alevinet.org/MAP.aspx?pid=UluOzanlar_en-GB&aid=nn_176314638_109173189, accessed August 1, 2019.

13 Yıldırım’s account of the entire arc of events at Sivas highlights the role sound played more generally in this tragic conflict. For instance, sounds of Sunni assailants chanting ‘Allahu akbar’, commandeering a police loudspeaker to recite the Qur’an, and shattering hotel windows with stones overwhelmed Alevi music, both figuratively and literally, while Arif Sağ sat in the hotel, his bağlama tuned, waiting to perform a concert when the noise subsided. (It never did.)

14 Hoca is a term of respect for a teacher or master-artist. İsmail’s surname is Kaya.

15 Haydar literally means ‘lion’ or ‘brave one’ but specifically refers to (and invokes) Imam ‘Ali, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad and a key theological figure for Alevis, as well as many Shi‘i Muslims.

16 Alevism has a longstanding relationship with workers movements, dating back at least to the 1960s (Ertan 2019).

17 I have drawn here both from Ali Yıldırım’s textual account and an 11-minute video excerpt of the performance, ‘Sivas Katliami (1 Temmuz 1993)’, posted by user Hasan Doğan on October 30, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1DNt5FZD9Q, accessed August 1, 2019. It is quite possible this list is not exhaustive.

18 Kırat literally means ‘grey horse’.

19 Much of the event can be seen online in a video posted by YouTube user Renas ARDIL (with a logo for AleviKültürDernekleri.com): www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_FuoAsR8zU, accessed August 1, 2019.

20 A minute later, Duygu explained what she meant by a trance: ‘That one is simply gone [weg], no longer experiences these surroundings. That a person is in her own world, thinking about nothing, simply hearing the music.’

21 Interview with author, March 18, 2018. Berlin, Germany.

22 At this point, our conversation shifted into Turkish to clarify that the German verb she used for worship (beten) related most closely to the Turkish ibadet. For more on semah as ibadet, especially in relation to notions of public visibility, see Kabir Tambar (2014: 98).

23 http://muhlisakarsu.org/temmuz2.php?oku=1, accessed August 1, 2019. Yıldırım also writes a personalized tribute (1993: 40–41).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Philip Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2018-102).

Notes on contributors

Peter McMurray

Peter McMurray is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University of Cambridge and a Fellow in Music at Queens' College, Cambridge. His research focuses on intersections of sound and religion (especially Islam) in Turkey and its diasporic communities.