Revisiting Trauma: Choreographing the Loss of the Armenian Journalist Hrant Dink (original) (raw)
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The Forgetful Figure: Armenian Representations of Trauma in Aṛakʿel of Tabriz and Shahan Shahnur
Erich Auerbach observed that figuralism seeks a meaningful correlation between events ‘causally and chronologically’ remote from each other. This article examines a correspondence between figural representation and the latency of traumatic experience, which reemerges and repeats in another time and place. By drawing on the theory of Hayden White and Cathy Caruth, it examines figural representations of trauma in the works of Aṛakʿel of Tabriz, an early modern historian, and Shahan Shahnur, a 20th century novelist, who both sought to shape a hermeneutic connection between disparate traumatic events. Although figurative interpretation seeks to unveil the hidden meaning between events, a literary comparison of their works shows that traumatic experience has the potential to interrupt this process: catastrophe can eclipse, rather than fulfill, the meaning of certain past experiences in the present.
The Turkish Studies Association bulletin, 2004
This paper investigates the post-1980s literature in terms of the traumatic memories of Turkey’s recent history resulting from military oppressions and political terrorism. The (1960 and 1980) development of a radical Leftist movement received a violent response in the form of two military coups: 12 March 1971, 12 September 1980. These historical traumas are represented in the ‘coup d’état novel genre’ in Turkish literature. 1970s novels were mostly realistic representations of historical atrocities, written with an urgent need to document the realities of human violations under the military regime. However, the post-1980 coup d’état novels differ from previous literary texts in the sense that aesthetic concerns became much more significant than a transparent representation of those disastrous events. In that manner, Latife Tekin’s third novel Gece Dersleri [Night Lessons] (1986) and Murat Uyurkulak’s first novel Tol [Revolution] (2002) create a new space of narrative, recognizable at the intersection of aesthetic, political, and social experience. Regarding the relation of trauma to memory and narrative, this paper explores ‘trauma discourse’ as a useful paradigm for issues of representation and the difficulties of representing ‘excessive’ events in literature. These frames of contextualization reveal how trauma as a category applies more to post-1980 narratives in terms of divergence from the demands of realism, which had dominated the aesthetic dimension of literary production and criticism of the Turkish literary scene. This paper closes by exploring the literary enactment of trauma in terms of both the structures and the subject matters of Gece Dersleri and Tol, in order to provide a way of conceptualizing distortions and silences in memory as well as its relationship to narrative in the aftermath of traumatic events.
HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF ABJECTION: THE ARMENIAN MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY TURKISH PUBLIC THEATRE
Master's Thesis, 2023
This thesis project started in medias res, building on the theoretical and methodological groundwork of Prof. Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay's European Research Council Starting Grant-funded project, Staging National Abjection: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas. Without the generous support of the European Research Council and the meticulous guidance of Prof. Altınay, I would not be able to begin or complete my research in any way. I am deeply grateful for all the suggestions, mentoring, and informative and delightful conversations we shared with Prof. Altınay. I would also like to extend my sincere gratitude to Prof. Afife İdil Akın, who came to my rescue amidst a bureaucratic crisis and accepted to become my thesis advisor. Prof. Akın was always patient with my questions and generous with her precious time. Additionally, I am indebted to members of my defense committee, Prof. Özen Baş, Prof. Murat Cankara, and Prof. Emine Fişek, for their invaluable contributions to the completion of this thesis. My academic journey started at Boğaziçi University. Every professor I met in this institution guided my whole educational and professional life in various ways; however, three names stand out from this long list: Dr. Esra Dicle, Prof. Emine Fişek, and Prof. Aslı Tekinay, whose courses and guidance have led me to pursue my deep interest in drama, theatre, and performance. Prof. Fişek has been my mentor over the years well after she was my senior thesis advisor, and in fact, if she had not informed me about the Communication Studies Master's Program at Kadir Has University and the Staging Abjection project, I could have quit my deep passion for academia at this point. The years I pursued my Master of Arts degree in Communication Studies at Kadir Has University have broadened my perspective and improved my methodological and theoretical approach to academic research, not only via graduate courses but also through my professional interactions with the members of Kadir Has University. Prof.
Nations and Nationalism, 2013
This paper takes as its subject the question of why some nations are less willing to acknowledge past atrocities. To answer that question, it focuses on the assassination of Hrant Dink – a Turkish-Armenian journalist – and its repercussions on Turkish national identity. Scrutinising newspaper articles written before and after the assassination (2004–2007), it casts a detailed glance at the struggle between two carrier groups – pro- and anti-acknowledgement groups – and argues that the assassination increased the likelihood of the acknowledgement of the mass killing of Armenians in 1915 by creating a cultural trauma informed by collective guilt. However, the relief generated by the funeral, combined with the strength of the master commemorative narrative regarding the mass killings, decreased that likelihood, and despite the huge public reaction created by the assassination there was no attempt at acknowledgement. As such, the paper contributes to our understanding of the trauma of perpetrators and claims that, in addition to other factors listed by earlier studies, cultural trauma is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for coming to terms with difficult pasts.
This article concentrates on the literary representation of the Adana Massacres of 1909. While most of the material lamenting these massacres was written in Armenian, this article deals with a rare and unpublished destan (lamentation poem) of the massacres in Armeno-Turkish. The author, Garabed Artinian, penned the longest destan that has existed on the massacres. Unlike a historical narrative, the destan is a poetic way of expressing sorrow and pain for the loss of lives, belongings, humanity, and honor. Artinian who witnessed both waves of the Adana Massacres in April, lost his wife and child, described in detail the unfolding of the horrifying crime. Artinian's destan, which is made up of fifty-seven stanzas, was written in the third person in a lyrical style, while delivering a chronological account of the massacres. He experienced these events first-hand and thus through his destan Artinian ventured to "speak" the "unspeakable." He wrote it to bear witness to the catastrophe. Hence, the destan is a work of art, a work of testimony, and an expression of pain and sorrow at the same time. The result achieved at least three things: a striking lamentation written in Armeno-Turkish about an incomprehensible catastrophe, a record and reconstruction of the trajectory of the events that transpired, written almost in real time, and a personal expression of pain and anguish by a survivor and witness to the massacres and their aftermath. Therefore, the destan has literary as well as historical value and should be treated as a uniquely informative source and expression. Through entering in dialogue with literary theories of the representation of the catastrophe and trauma studies, this article argues that the destan has literary as well as historical value and should be treated as a uniquely informative source and expression.
Theatre Research International, 2023
In the last twenty years, memory has gained broader attention in Turkey's social, cultural and political arena. In line with this movement, independent and subsidized theatres produced plays engaging with Armenian history through diverse political and aesthetic agendas. Among these works, public and state theatre productions remained mostly invisible in theatre scholarship due to their ambiguous position that does not directly align with the framework of political theatre. This article examines the adaptation of the Ottoman Armenian playwright Hagop Baronian's Adamnapuyj aravelyan () as Şark Dişçisi (The Oriental Dentist) () by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality City Theatres (İBBŞT). While promoting confrontation with the past, Şark Dişçisi eliminates the crucial political insights of its source text and their ramifications for contemporary demands for historical justice regarding the Armenian Genocide. The intersection of revisionist theatre historiography and broader political dynamics in the adaptation process reveals the ambivalences of post-Genocide memory work in Turkey.