I was on a panel yesterday (for the Middle East Studies Association’s annual conference) about Turkish Studies. Our conversation eventually turned to the question of the past - and in particular, how scholars of Turkey (working in Turkey, from Turkey) could or should acknowledge the histories of violence, genocide, and ethnic cleansing that have helped to produce the present. How should those pasts matter?
Those questions are obviously human questions, but they also have to be thought of as environmental questions. An audience member raised the question of ongoing projects of extraction and environmental destruction, particularly in the Southeast. That, in turn, reminded me of one of the student projects in my Geographies of Memory course, where they’re looking at images of extractive landscapes that Google Earth makes available.
I went to look at Hasankeyf (for a history of the struggles over its destruction as the result of a new dam being built on the Tigris River, see Hasankeyf Matters) on Google Maps this morning, and this is what I found:
What are these places? They’re places of extraction, violence, and dispossession - but they’re not simply static objects acted upon. Borrowing Karen Till’s phrasing, these places are “fluid mosaics and moments of memory, matter, metaphor, scene, and experience that create and mediate social spaces and temporalities” (Till, The New Berlin, p. 8). Another concept that’s stayed with me this semester is Eray Çaylı’s discussion of ‘witness sites,’ one that he develops
to account for the temporal ambivalence that surrounds many a site of atrocity in Turkey. This ambivalence results from the wide range of ways in which different social and political actors with a stake in the discussion around these sites understand time. (Çaylı, “Diyarbakır’s ‘Witness Site’,” p. 66)
Another friend brought my attention to Rojda Yavuz’s essay about Hasankeyf and its stunning, haunting photographs.
And I’m reminded of the end to Zeynep Oğuz’s striking essay about ‘geopower’ and Kurdish identity in Turkey. She quotes Mehmet, one of her interlocutors:
“Dams have a lifespan of only fifty years. Compare this to the 12,000-year-old caves, if not to the actual age of the limestone cliffs where these caves have been carved.” Water rises, water recedes; caves will be unearthed in an indeterminate future. Mehmet believes that just like the now-submerged caves of the Upper Tigris Valley, the social and political story of the Kurdish people will outlive the Turkish nation- state, while geopower will continue taking novel and unruly forms in Turkey and beyond (Oğuz, “Cavernous Politics,” p. 11)
Scattered thoughts - many stories-so-far.