In Turkey We Need to Develop our own Language to Express our Problems

In Turkey, we have lost the ability to express what is happening to our country in our own words. Perhaps we never could to begin with. After a wave of arrests in the first week of November, targeting Kurdish opposition leaders, I have found myself transfixed in front of the screen reading article after article which rightfully condemns these arrests. My heart gets lifted each time with powerful words of solidarity, words of defiance. I feel hopeful and empowered by the courage of brave figures like Gültan Kışanak and Selahattin Demirtaş. Then my eyes fall on propositions which invite the EU to take action. Propositions which always imply that Europe is the cradle of democracy, the pinnacle of freedoms. I start to develop instincts: as soon as I see something written about the recent rise of autocracy in my country, my eyes dart across the page to find the words “Europe”, “Democracy”, “EU”, “Islamic dictatorship.” I stop and gasp for air. The words we need to express our struggle and anguish are held by the same hand that holds our leash. It has become impossible to express our most basic desire to protect our elected representatives from arrest without appealing for the mercy of glassy eyed Brussels bureaucrats, or stroking their tender egos and whispering words of love to their uncompassionate ears.

As I sit disheartened and depressed, I hear Neil Young’s wailing voice, force its way into my head like an uninvited guest: helpless, helpless, helpless. I have purposefully refused to listen to music made by white people for over a year, and as I watch the Last Waltz version on YouTube, I realise what a well placed decision that has been. When I first saw this video from a borrowed VHS in my late teens I remember being in awe. “Look at that nonchalant look on his face, his comfort on stage…WOW, is the shoulder of his shirt ripped? How cool is that?” Now I look at his swollen face wrapped up in a drapery of rags and I think: “Surely this dumbass cracker can afford a new fucking shirt!” Strange part is, I once related to this. What is it that made me associate my own helplessness with a song that starts with the line “There is a town in North Ontario”? What is it that made me project my teenage frustrations from Central Anatolia to North Ontario? It was adolescence of course. It was an unripened sense of frustration which made me think that Neil Young with his rebellious attire was more emblematic of my fight for freedom than Kazım Koyuncu, Selda Bağcan and Hasret Gültekin.

Just like my parents’ generation turned to the hippie subculture in their youth, my generation was taken by the whole grunge attitude. We thought we could transcend petty local identities and create a utopia clad in flannel and batik. This would be a Utopian land where Joan Baez would not be frightened to visit. Her songs about brave white men with unpronounceable names like Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti or Joel Emmanuel Hägglund (Joe Hill) would echo as anthems. It will take a degree of maturity to grow out of this charade and embrace what we are.

There is something about the music that has sprouted from the land where I grew up that punk, grunge or metal will never have. It is a sense of bonding. Not long ago an old friend whom I have fallen out of touch with, partially because of politics, quoted Ahmet Kaya to me- a Kurdish musician famous for his political activism who died in exile. I was moved deeply and confessed that I am partial to some music that is associated with my friend’s profoundly opposing nationalistic views. For one brief moment, we shared a bond that went beyond politics. We shared a bond of being from the same land. Neil Young can’t do that for me, Radiohead can’t do that for me, Morrissey whimpering about how he never gets what he wants can’t do that for me.

So when a jailed Turkish intellectual declares that the first thing she will do when she gets out of jail will be to get the “same type of tattoo that was forced on the inmates in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.” I can’t help but be repulsed by how she equates her individual suffering to the systematic extermination of every Jewish life on the European continent with a prepubescent fashion statement. My mouth is left ajar when the same intellectual uses Deutsche Welle to call for the EU to “assume responsibility in Turkey”  with the values that make “Europe a democracy with human rights.” It is the inability to use our own terms and values, the inability to sing our own songs that makes us rely on holocaust hyperbole when it comes to express our pain. It is the same inability that makes us think about the “West” so uncritically. One minute we commemorate its brutality, the next we wash its hands with the most fanciful of soaps and elevate it to a position of impeccable morality. Even cynically suggesting that the EU uses its leverage on the “refugee deal” not for the benefit of those who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean but to manipulate Turkey’s domestic politics. Yes! Turkey has to change. Yes! The rights to language and culture for the Kurdish people are fundamental and there is a long and hard fight ahead. Yes! A great responsibility falls on us Turks to give unconditional solidarity for those within our borders who struggle to survive.  But suggesting the idea that the lives of Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis put on the line as a bargaining chip is shameful! Such disregard for the lives of others is exactly what we should be criticising about the AKP government, not emulating.  

In Turkey we have a strange relationship with compass directions. In the secular middle class demographic I grew up in,  directions like East and West are not merely descriptive of geography but of an internal landscape. The cliché is that after the abolition of the caliphate, our great leader Atatürk has rescued us from the darkness of the East and made us face the light of the West. How this West came to be what it is, is never questioned on these accounts. It is a funny thing that those friendly Westerners who invented “human rights” as a gift to us have been able to emigrate en-masse across continents without borders and passports. They have even settled among the natives and slaughtered them.

There were no nations like mine back then to regulate borders from marauding hordes of pale-skinned cave dwellers hell bent on genocide. And for our complicity in playing with the lives of refugees, I am ashamed. That’s not all I am ashamed of. I am ashamed of my compatriots who are now crying for Europe to restore democracy in Turkey. I am ashamed of them like I was ashamed of my nationality in my adolescence. Ashamed like I was ashamed of my language, ashamed like I was ashamed of my name, my people, my religion. I am afraid that until my compatriots grow out of their perpetual puberty, until they come back from North Ontario, until they cease to be impressed by unshowered troglodytes with translucent skin, we will never be able to sing our own songs to solve our own problems.