do not celebrate 12 Eylül. Casey argues that commemoration inheres in the action of “carrying the past forward through the present so as to perdure in the future” (1987: 256). He goes on to say that the past can only be honored and preserved in this way “if it has attained a certain consistent selfsameness in the wake of the perishing of the particulars by which it had once presented itself” (256, my emphasis). Which particulars must perish so as to generate the “selfsameness” of the past? Whose past is to be memorialized in its reenactment? If many ex-activists in the forty or more years since those years have elected not to commemorate their acts despite an abundance of particular memories of the city, could not this, too, constitute an honoring of the past? Rather than signifying something negative—say the absence of an ethically efficacious common narrative regarding their past deeds—non-commemoration may express humility on the part of ex-militants, generated by an awareness of the moral ambiguity of their actions. With memorialization is born the first lie.
One consequence, however, as we have noted already, is the difficulty activists have had in translating the dramatic sense and context of their memories of urban politics in Istanbul to non-activist others, even to their own children. Further, alongside this reluctance of many ex-revolutionaries to mythologize or lionize the spatial activism of their generation, we must revisit military actors’ strategies to manufacture a public condemnation of it, so as to better comprehend how up until recently each has combined to make commemoration of those years so problematic. Noting that forgetting is not a “unitary phenomenon,” Paul Connerton (2008) identifies a number of its forms. As we have already seen in their expunging of place names, the junta has pursued his first type, “repressive erasure.” It was exercised most systematically in their prohibition of the publishing of activists’ written or spoken defense or of their petitions in the huge number of court cases opened up by army prosecutors in military courts in the immediate years after the coup. In reporting the list of charges against activists—typically armed robbery, murder, bombing of property, arson, escaping from prison, membership in an illegal organization, communist propaganda, separatist activities and so on—newspapers were forbidden to print that confessions were extracted under torture, or that defendants were not allowed to read to the courts prepared statements.16 The result was that throughout those years there was no legitimate or sanctioned way for militants to publicly testify to or justify their intentions and experiences. Thus, Filiz felt that “Turkey lived through fascism in the ’80s, though even now it is not said very openly. It was hard to know what was happening after the coup: You heard that so and so was arrested, that x was killed, or y tortured, that this house had been searched. In this way people lived through a massive trauma.”
Connerton’s second and third types, “prescriptive forgetting” and “forgetting that is constitutive of a new identity,” do not apply, as they involve a decision to consciously forget—perhaps in an amnesty (literally, to not remember)—that which once was known, not to assign to oblivion past actions that have never been remembered. His fourth, fifth, and sixth types are not relevant here. However, his last form, which he calls “forgetting as humiliated silence,” is more suggestive. This is a forgetting that is not solely “a matter of overt activity on the part of a state apparatus” (2008: 67) but also expresses civil society’s exhaustion and disillusion with a project, as well as its experiences of shame and fear. In particular, the trauma of mass torture of activists in prison, their returning home injured and broken with no prospect of redress or rehabilitation, and “legal” press censorship in the 1980s and ’90s (engineered through the 1982 constitution) all combined to produce decades of censorship and self-censorship, of buried grief and strictly controlled memories. Jenny White found that still in the late 1990s there was a “lingering pain among a lost generation of men and women who had fought as students in the 1970s for something they had believed in, had lost friends to killings and torture, and had themselves suffered in jail or gone into hiding” (2002: 41). As the poet Abbas Beydoun notes for Lebanon after the civil war, “the right to forget [became] obligatory forgetting” (in De Cauter 2011: 424).
During those decades, activists’ adoption of a fugitive silence as a means of “un-remembering” both their own worst actions and the worst actions done to them must have been an essential act of survival. But the slow demilitarization of Turkey amid the struggle to create a post-coup Constitution in the first decade of the new century—and as chapter 8 explores, this counts as a third political development allowing occluded aspects of activism and Istanbul to be perceived—has released a massive reservoir of activists’ memories of their experiences, especially concerning 12 Eylül and the years of martial law.17 Published memoirs of political activities and experiences in the years before the coup have been less common but in Havariler (Disciples), Zileli (2002) recounts his years as a founding member of the Aydınlık movement.
Along with this revived facility in recalling perceptions of the city, leftist ex-activists have initiated a new memory-work project, titled 12 Eylül Utanç Müzesi (12 Eylül Museum of Shame). The traveling museum gives visitors permission to remember events and acts that had been long muted in daily interaction. Its website explains that it is “the first serious attempt to create a memorialization site to reveal the brutality of the 1980 military coup while struggling to foster the democratization process in Turkey. Those who initiated the project are victims of the indiscriminate violence of the Turkish Armed Forces, mainly in the 1980s. Therefore, struggling against unjust state practices allowed the organizers to experience a degree of healing.”18
Here we encounter two further reasons for activists’ publicizing of their memories of the city: the museum enables a counter-recollection for post-coup generations whose memories have already been induced by the junta’s discourse, while also enacting a therapeutic remembering of those years for its creators (and by extension for other ex-militants as well). In collecting and exhibiting various material objects—Deniz Gezmiş’s coat, Mazlum Doğan’s shirt, the mimeograph machine owned by İbrahim Kaypakkaya, Mahir Çayan’s vest—the traveling museum intuits the potent influence these possess empowered by the lived bodies that used them. All four were militants of leftist groups in Turkey killed or executed by the state in the early 1970s.19 Their names are important, as heard in their recital in the battle slogans of THKP-C, Dev-Yol and Dev-Sol up until the coup: “Mahir, Hüseyin, Ulaş: Kurtuluş’a kadar savaş’ (Mahir, Hüseyin, Ulaş: War until liberation). Similarly, for revolutionaries who experienced the military courts, the exhibited trial proceedings are not just a piece of paper: the museum’s collecting of legal documents and files of prisoners killed or executed under the junta preserves intensely expressive memories, securing the past in the present. The power of these artifacts to incite a visceral affective state in visitors—vivifying body memories—is revealed in Cafer Solgun’s account of his painful visit to the museum:
A few days ago I went to the 12 September Museum of Shame exhibition. It was my friends, the Revolutionary ’78ers, who had curated it. I should confess I had manufactured many excuses, not to go to the museum, but to not go. It took time for me to admit it to myself, but if I went, I would grieve, I would remember, I would weep. . . . But if I didn’t go, it would have been as if I had committed an offence against my friends whose photos, clothes, personal belongings, and last letters were exhibited there. I knew myself: I went. I knew that I would cry, but I went. I wouldn’t be able to say anything to those who asked about my feelings and thoughts, but I went. I wouldn’t be able to write a single word in the visitor’s book because my hands would be trembling, but I went. I went and as soon as I entered the door I found myself in a time tunnel.
Our friends “who had been lost” . . . Our friends who had been killed by torture . . . Our friends who had been killed by execution . . . Our friends who had lost their lives in hunger strikes, in death fasts . . . Our friends who had been killed in “clashes” . . . For us that was 12 Eylül; torture, murder, fascism.20
One final example, that of the opening, almost in the same year, of another, very different museum, demonstrates the alteration that urban activism makes in perceiving, remembering, and commemorating Istanbul. As we have seen,
