singing the party’s song together with a thousand people “made us feel we all shared the same views on life.” The events of 12 Eylül fractured this acoustic solidarity: in our interview (thirty years later) Filiz still remembers weeping a year after the coup at hearing in passing a snatch of a familiar (but prohibited) march hummed in the street under someone’s breath. Aural awareness is a powerful if sometimes backgrounded force bearing memories and carrying political subjectivity. In Nesrin Kazankaya’s play Quintet, bir dönüşün beşlemesi (Quintet: A transformation in five parts), a leftist activist returns to Istanbul for the first time in twenty years after fleeing the coup for Europe: meeting up with her old friends and comrades, the ex-revolutionaries best reconnect with the singing of a march (“May 1st”). The now-businessman husband joins in despite earlier bitter arguments over politics. Like places, then, songs hold memories, as do objects: “There was an urban myth of the ‘gri-mavi van’ [gray-blue Ford van]. We knew among ourselves that it was the van of the undercover police. Whenever we saw one, we would run or duck for cover. In Montreal after the coup, whenever I saw one, I still ran for cover. Of course, in Istanbul most vans of that color were not carrying police. But once it came true: we were stopped and frisked by four police who came out of a gri-mavi van! Luckily, we were going to the cinema, and we convinced them of that” (Kenan, HK).
Further, alongside places, songs, and objects “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (Nora 1989: 7), the city is “physically inscribed” in a generation of activists.11 As described by Kenan above, he fled at the very sight of a gray-blue van in Montreal years after his regular exposure to police practice in Istanbul, an embodied reenactment that referenced a personal and collective history. Similarly, Şahin (as we have already seen) still finds himself reluctant to shake the hand of a covered woman, even when extended to him. Casey calls this “body memory” (1987: 146ff), the way that something kinesthetically learned in conscious (or semiconscious) imitation of others’ mannerisms, movements, and comportment may become habitual action over time, an embodied modification thereafter ingrained in militant habit. In body memory, the past is revived by its active entry into present actions. In just this way both urban violence and torture, too, are remembered by the body, in an ache, an itch, impairment, or trauma—an invasion of the body by its past that transacts memory, whether wanted or not.
Yet activists remembered reflexively as well: habitual body memory is not the same thing as retrospective “memory of the perception of the body” (Casey 1987: 162, original emphasis), as Levent’s recollection of Fatih shows: “By 1978 the sound of gunfire in the night was common in Fatih, as people attacked the university lodgments. But despite all this, the sounds I remember most about Fatih are the sound of people talking, of women neighbors chatting, of children calling from the street to their mothers or neighbors. People had their own whistles, everyone with their own melody, just as with nicknames.”
For Levent, Fatih is a “geometry of echoes.”12 They are the echoes that similarly give depth to and partially underpin the lives of hundreds of thousands of other ex-activists living in the city, a class of people often highly active in politics still. The emplaced and powerfully affective multisensory memories initiated by the spatial militancy of those years, including from post-coup torture, mingle with (and even limit) ex-activists’ perceptions in the present. Some are unable to participate in political life altogether, as intended by the junta. Interviewees were aware of friends and ex-comrades who had never come to terms with the things that happened to them in the years of martial law. If being unable to come to terms with past experience is another form of remembering, it testifies to how the past “follows us at every instant . . . pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside” (Bergson cited in Ingold and Hallam 2007: 11). None the less, this pressure was also politically generated: after the coup, the State punished many people involved in activist movements through the banning of their employment in government ministries; discrimination against them via expulsion from study and work; and the withholding of passports or, for political refugees overseas, stripping them of citizenship. Nine thousand members from Maden İş (Mineworkers Union) were blacklisted and unable to gain employment in that field again.
Revolutionary Istanbul and its events live on in ongoing legal trials too, petitioning or extracting memories from activists and overturning both the junta’s efforts to mandate closure and different governments’ wishes to enforce statutes of limitations. To give just one example, in July 1980 Kemal Türkler, founder of DİSK and chairman of the union Maden İş, was murdered in the street outside his house in Istanbul. The public prosecutor indicted four Ülkücü militants for the killing, who were acquitted by one court, only to have that verdict quashed by another. Three decades later, in 2010, the first court ruled that the case had to be dropped because of lapse of time.13 Outside the court, the then DİSK chairman vowed to continue the legal process, and in 2013 the accused murderer was once again on trial. In court Kemal Türkler’s daughter remembered the event she witnessed: “I was 18 years old when my father was killed in front of me. I saw with my own eyes three people kill my father in interlocking fire. I saw the murderers, and I recognize them. Indeed, I even saw which gun jammed. For a full 31 years I have lived out this scene many times, I am still living it.”14
In sum, rather than being “lost forever” with the radical transformation of Istanbul, the city of the fearless continues to live on and with its ex-activists. A city that has been experienced “is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometric space” (Bachelard 1994: 47). Indeed, far from sparsity of recall, the power of places, songs, objects, legal techniques, and bodies to evoke memories and affect through their registering of inhabitation and trauma reveals a lingering surfeit of particulars concerning those years. The reason is clear: individuals’ memories of the past and their perceptions of the present are intimately related. This relationship explains how the interview process itself facilitated awareness of things once unnoticed or unutterable: because the past is not set off from the present as completed event (fading with the passing of time), its prompted remembering (in interviews) allowed new impressions to come into being, according to activists’ present perspectives.
2.3 POLITICIZING ACTIVISM
Alongside the dynamic constitution of ex-militants’ memories of revolutionary Istanbul in the ongoing context of their engagements with the urban world, activists retrospectively identified at least two other efficacious political developments as significant in informing and transforming impressions and assessments of their past experiences and actions. One significant event concerns the decades-long legitimation crisis of Kemalism, the foundational ideology of the Turkish Republic. Activists’ first disappointment with Kemalism can be traced back to the 1971 military intervention, which dashed the (in retrospect) naive 1960s hope of many leftists that a progressive faction of the military might join in a “national democratic revolution,” in a replay of the 1920s. An equally important factor in activists’ own critical realization of Kemalism’s repressive character can be traced back to the torture dealt out as a matter of course to hundreds of thousands of people arrested after 12 Eylül. The consequence has been a pressing need felt by activists in the 1990s and 2000s to critically reexamine Kemalism’s pristine years in search of clues to the abuses of the junta. In the process, they have been forced to uproot commitments to previous ways of configuring ethico-political perceptions and urban militancy. As previously mentioned, in the 1970s, both leftists and rightists found powerful support for their respective programs of revolution and nationalism in founding tenets and practices of the state Kemalist project. Indeed, according to Serdar (Kurtuluş),
In the 1970s no one knew that we were all Kemalist. I’ll explain with an anecdote. In 1968 the US fleet came to Istanbul. The left declared that it would never come ashore; they got some boats and prevented some of the sailors from landing. It was said, “we threw them into the sea” [denize döktük]. The phrase was connected to the official history of the “Liberation War,” which anyway is a hoax. The Greek army invaded Anatolia (encouraged by the British), and it was the British who threw some Greeks overboard when they were fleeing from the Turkish army in Smyrna. Now that it’s time for the left to
