Nicholas Glastonbury
Istanbul, Turkey
Hakikat, Adalet, ve Hafıza Çalışmaları Merkezi
“As if the rains would never come.”
–Yazsonu (Summer’s End)
Yazsonu, one of my favorite novels, was written by a Turkish author by the name Adalet Ağaoğlu. It tells the story of a woman whose family fell apart after her son died in the 1980 military coup in Turkey. Before the coup, she and her family would spend their summers at a house they owned on the Mediterranean coast; afterwards, the house was abandoned when she and her husband divorced. Years later, the woman comes back to the house, which has fallen apart in the meantime, and she invites her ex-husband and their closest friends, all of whom have become deeply unhappy. Their time on the beach, the woman’s effort to recapitulate the happiness that they all once had, is as fleetingly happy as it is heartbreakingly sad. By the end of the summer, as the guests all leave one by one, she wants to deny the possibility that this happiness could end, that the summer—cloudless, rainless—could end. “As if the rains would never come” is a refrain throughout the story, the futile belief that the summer sun, this joy, would last forever.
Today is my last day in Istanbul. After an entire summer with no rain, the last two weeks have seen several days of overcast weather, slight rain. Today, indeed, it is raining heavily (it hailed for awhile, in fact) as I write this, my apartment in need of cleaning, my bags still not packed. Two nights ago, my colleagues held a farewell party for me; yesterday, I said goodbye to some of my best friends here. This has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life, working at the Hafıza Merkezi, meeting so many people who know so much and work so hard. It is perhaps too poetic, as well, that the work I have been doing this summer is to bring to light the violations born out of the aforementioned military coup of 1980, which initiated policies of intense discrimination against the Kurds, and spurred the establishment of the PKK, the Kurdish Worker’s Party, which has since been engaged in a nearly 30-year civil conflict with the state.
I have learned so much about myself, about human rights in Turkey, about the Kurdish freedom movement, about the LGBT movement. I participated in the gay pride parade on July 1st, the first pride parade I have ever attended.
The signs distributed at the parade were written in Kurdish, Armenian, and Turkish, in a sign of solidarity with the struggles of ethnic minorities. “Evîn rêxistin e” is Kurdish for “Love is to organize,” which was the theme for this year’s parade. Unfortunately, I don’t know what is written in Armenian.
I was with my two friends, Yener and Çağrı. Yener’s sign read “Genel ahlaksız,” which means “General amorality,” a vague principle in Turkish law that has historically been used to oppress and invisibilize the LGBT population. The sign I am holding, “Velev ki ibneyiz,” means “So what if we’re fags.”
I traveled to Diyarbakır, where I was lucky enough to meet with some incredible activists (and witness a massive demonstration).
This is one of the people I met while in Diyarbakır. For the sake of her anonymity, I’ll call her Didem. Didem is a transgender Kurdish woman living in Diyarbakır. After being abused by her family because she was transgender, she moved out on her own. She has started several organizations working in the region on seeking protection for LGBT Kurds who have been subject to violence and abuse. Her bravery is astonishing.
I worked on the generation of a human rights education handbook that will be used in elementary and middle schools to “teach for the future,” as it was described. I researched truth commissions around the world to help glean best practices for the (very) eventual founding of a truth commission in Turkey. I attended workshops on oral history, collective trauma, fact-finding; I helped with the structure of the database system that Hafıza Merkezi will be using to archive its research.
In my last post, I talked about how it’s important to keep in mind the progress that has already been made in the struggle for human rights (particularly in Turkey) so as not to be discouraged by the current state of affairs. That was near the beginning of my internship. Now, I have seen not only the work that Hafıza Merkezi is doing but also the work other organizations are doing—and the work that organizations are doing in cooperation with one another. One of my biggest fears in coming to Turkey this summer, and a common criticism of the institution of human rights around the world, is the notion of its professionalization. The bureaucratization of human rights ultimately ends up damaging the movement itself. What I’ve noticed in Turkey, however, is that organizations here, for whatever reason (personally, I chalk it up to the really strong strain of Marxism/socialism that imbues many of the social movements here, but that’s perhaps just me) are much more horizontal in their work; they work with one another whenever possible, and conceptually, within the workplace, there is far less hierarchy. It makes the work being done that much more galvanizing, perhaps for the same reasons that Occupy Wall Street drew in such high numbers, because you feel like you are doing something (you ARE doing something) and you aren’t excluded from participating. This means, at least for me, that I was not only welcomed into my workplace but also into the activism itself. It means, more importantly, that these organizations that Hafıza Merkezi is working actively with, because of the horizontal structure of their work, will ultimately have a larger grassroots reach with their work.
Ultimately, I will keep working for my organization as a translator, and in fact, they have offered me a job upon graduation if my other plans don’t work out. My return to Turkey is more or less inevitable. Anyone who knows me knows this much already. But I can’t refrain from feeling, as if the rains would never come, that this summer, and everything it brought with it, could last forever.