Metis Publishers

Cultural Climate of Turkey

by Vitrinde Yaşamak (1992) and Kötü Çocuk Türk (2001)

A collection of essays on Turkey’�s cultural climate in the last decades from a most insightful literary and cultural critic. The first two essays of this collection, « Life in the Shop Window » and « Return of the Repressed », attend to the 80�’s � a period of radical economic, political and cultural change following the coup d�état of 1980. Nurdan Gürbilek argues that this was not only a period of oppression of speech but also a period of explosion of speech ; an incitement to speech. A period when two seemingly opposed cultural strategies, the old one of repression, forbiddance and annihilation and the new one of provocation, assimilation and incorporation came together, weaving a cultural fabric that had significant results in shaping the cultural climate of modern Turkey. Gürbilek also argues that this was a period of cultural pluralism� - a result of the collapse of the modern Kemalist identity. Years of the « return of the repressed » ; the voices that were previously repressed by the Kemalist project of modernization, the voices of the Islamic and Kurdish opposition, those of the lower and peripheral cultures, of women and queers and also the discourses of desire and sexuality returned to a relatively liberal cultural market ready to incorporate rather than suppress.
The following essays on Turkishness and evil explore the rather sinister cultural climate of the 1990�s and 2000�s when the efforts to redefine the Turkish identity predominated the cultural scene. She takes as her point of departure some of the significant images and tropes in modern Turkish literature and popular culture : popular arabesque songs of the 70s and 80s, the figure of the snob in modern Turkish literature, a news article on the death of a porn star, an oddly popular poster illustration, the child hero archetype in urban popular culture� With utmost care and justice Gürbilek weaves these into a keen understanding of their political, social and cultural significance, exploring Turkishness not as an autonomous and essentialist local truth but rather as an impasse always already shaped in relation to the modern world, as a double-bind that has always produced oppositional sentiments in the cultural sphere. This is where the desire to be the other coincides with the fear of losing one�s self in the other, where xenophilia is simultaneous with xenophobia, and the feeling of inadequacy is concurrent with a reflex of self-defense. And evil here has to do with the unleashing of all things dark and sinister when the liberal promise fails to deliver, when the shop windows cease to dazzle and the struggle for livelihood turns bitter in urban wilderness. Where do « Turkishness » and « evil » converge ? And how do we gain insight into these moments of convergence ?

By Bilge Karasu

In an ancient Mediterranean city, a tradition is maintained : every ten years an archaic game of human chess is staged, the players (visitors versus locals) bearing weapons. This archaic game, the central event of The Garden of the Departed Cats, may prove as fatal as the deadly attraction our narrator feels for the local man who is the Vizier, or Captain, of the home team. Their « romance » (which, though inconclusive, magnetizes our protagonist to accept the Vizier’s challenge to play) provides the skeletal structure of this experimental novel. Each of their brief interactions works as a single chapter. And interleaved between their chapters are a dozen fable-like stories. The folk tale might concern a 13th-century herbal that identifies a kind of tulip, a « red salamander, » which dooms anyone who eats it to never tell a lie ever again. Or the tale might be an ancient story of a terrible stoat-like creature that feeds for years on the body of whomever it sinks its claws into, like guilt. These strange fables work independently of the main narrative but, in curious and unpredictable ways, (and reminiscent of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table), they echo and double its chief themes : love, its recalcitrance, its cat-like finickiness, and its refusal to be rushed. The Garden of the Departed Cats is a work of peculiar beauty and strangeness, the whole layered and shiny like a piece of mica.

Istanbul Culminating Session, 23-27 June 2005

Müge Gürsoy Sökmen (ed.)

« The records have to be kept and, by definition, the perpetrators, far from keeping records, try to destroy them. They are killers of the innocent and of memory. The records are required to inspire still further the mounting opposition to the new global tyranny. The new tyrants, incomparably over-armed, can win every war � both military and economic. Yet they are losing the war (this is how they call it) of communication. They are not winning the support of world public opinion. More and more people are saying no. Finally this will be the tyranny�s undoing. But after how many more tragedies, invasions and collateral disasters ? After how much more of the new poverty the tyranny engenders ? Hence the urgency of keeping records, of remembering, of assembling the evidence, so that the accusations become unforgettable, and proverbial on every continent. More and more people are going to say no, for this is the precondition today for saying yes to all we are determined to save and everything we love. »
� John Berger, from his message of support to the WTI

The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) was a collective effort involving hundreds of people worldwide, most of whom never met in person. About twenty sessions were held in various cities of the world, focusing on different aspects of the war on Iraq. The findings of these sessions were incorporated into a culminating session held in Istanbul on 23-27 June 2005. This book consists of the proceedings of that session.
A civilian initiative inspired by the Bertrand Russell Tribunal of the Vietnam Era, the WTI aimed to record the crimes committed in Iraq, to note the historical, economic and political reasons behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq, to document the extent as well as the details of the destruction caused, and to write a counter-history to that of the victors�. The texts in this volume, an assemblage of experts� and witnesses� testimonies, provides a comprehensive grasp on what an invasion today means.
We hope that this book, which is the result of a worldwide effort involving activists, lawyers and experts from diverse backgrounds, that is, a product of the global opposition to war, will feed back into the global movement, inspire new forms of resistance, providing information and grounds for action, be it for appeals to the International Criminal Court or the United Nations, or for the individual acts of resistance, including that of conscientious objectors.