The Submerged, the Faithful, the Fighters, the Perpetrators, the Careless and the Layers of Shame

This text is a translation of the article “Su Altında Kalanlar, İnançlılar, Dövüşenler, Failler, Umursamayanlar”, originally published in 2023.

I.

In her book The Shame is Over: A Political Love Story, published in 1976 and widely read during the 70s and 80s, Anja Meulenbelt narrates her personal life experiences and, in line with the implications of the slogan “the personal is political,” thinks about these in conjunction with trajectories within feminist politics. This hallmark of feminist politics had impacted her too; doing feminist politics irreversibly transformed her life at the same time. While writing the book, Meulenbelt realizes once again that talking about politics or theory means also talking about her own life. In the book, she openly quarrels, fights, and comes to terms with the words she uses, the way she writes the book, her past, her former relationships with women and men, with having given birth and the experience of motherhood. She settles her account with some of these, whereas with others, there is no way of doing so. As she attempts to tackle these issues, she not only brings the feeling of shame to her title, but distinguishes it as one of the emotions she grapples with the most throughout the book. In the book’s opening, she says that she decided to write about trajectories of feminist politics and her personal life together in the text, before taking out her old notes. The moment she starts looking at these notes, the feeling of shame emerges, and thus we encounter it on the first pages of the book. “It would be a boring book, too many lovers and melancholy love stories with sad endings. I find bits that embarrass me. Did I let myself behave like that, for that boring prick. And which prick was it. Eli or Michael? Undated scraps that I can no longer place. Annoyed, I put them all back in the plastic carrier.”[1]

At many more points throughout the book, we encounter this feeling that is there on the cover and at the beginning of the book. She blushes from shame as she puts back the clothes her child Armin has touched with dirty hands in the shopping mall, her and another woman go quiet in shame when others look at them for whispering about dresses during a leftist meeting, she starts keeping a diary and cannot shake off the feeling of shame when going through what she has written, she recounts how she felt ashamed for feeling unhappy in her suffocating life with her child and partner. Shame is everywhere in the book and perhaps feminism is most useful here—when struggling against shame, disposing of shame. Now is the time to stop feeling ashamed for being fond of women, for not being attractive at all times, for feeling down, for objecting to a world that constantly subordinates women and appropriates their labor and bodies. The shame is over, the shame must be over.

Self-pity? Sure. I can swim in sympathy for myself. I can roll in it like a pig in the mud.

“Over-sensitive, over-emotional, perhaps even paranoid. I see, as if under strong searchlights, magnified ten times, the daily details of my oppression, the daily details of the pain of other women. I have no defence against it any more, no blinkers. I am right in it, a mollusc without a shell.

Bitter. That too.

But no shame. The shame is over.”[2]

One of the most important tools for disposing of shame is feminism. Challenging the heterosexist patriarchy that preaches to us to feel ashamed of everything about ourselves, our growing breasts, our bodies, intense emotions, our understandings, our rage, not liking motherhood, desiring other women, being bored with men; for challenging without shame, without feeling ashamed of yourself, your mind, ideas, emotions. One realizes how important this is while reading Meulenbelt. Actually, not just feminism but a lot of other liberation movements talk about firstly disposing of shame in order to take action, to struggle; or alternately, struggling itself is one of the most important ways of disposing of shame. In this world, marked by exploitation, domination, relations and systems of inequality, a lot of different groups are forced to feel ashamed of themselves in different ways. And they do feel shame. That is why liberatory movements firstly try to tear down the shame felt by the groups they emerge from and claim to represent politically. In fact, it is not quite correct to describe this as an external process, for many oppressed and exploited groups that struggle against oppression and exploitation, doing politics is at the same time a praxis of becoming free from self-shame. Different types of black liberation movements deal with shame in different ways. For example, the “Black is beautiful” movement, that emerged in the 1960s and defended an African sense of beauty and dignity against Euro/Western-centrism, actually posits itself mostly against black self-shame. One of the most important themes of the Pride Parade, initially organized in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago on June 28, 1970, the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, is to transform the shame imposed on the LGBTI+ community, regardless of their existence being recognized or not, into pride and dignity in embracing one’s identity. The transformation of shame into pride and the mobilization of anger instead of the feeling of shame has played an important part in the radicalization of gay and lesbian activism, especially since the end of the 1980s.[3] The effort to dispose of shame, which we clearly encounter in Meulenbelt’s book, is actually an important part of the radical spirit of second wave feminism; many practices associated with womanhood that need to be eliminated along with shame are taken up by militants of second wave feminism, and part of holding the patriarchy accountable is defined as liberation from shame. Shame becomes one of the topics that women talk about the most, especially in small consciousness-raising groups.[4] The transformation of the feeling of shame has also been important for many working-class movements. Carrying the influence of having been raised within working-class culture—which permeate all aspects of a person, from speech to bodily manner—with dignity instead of shame, has been on the agenda of many working-class movements.[5] Therefore, just like other feminisms, working-class movements, radical black organizations, anti-colonial groups, and other liberation movements have also tackled shame as a political issue. This feeling, the roots of this feeling, how to deal with this feeling or how to come to terms with it, or other issues such as how to erase deeply engrained effects of shame, have all been on the agenda of liberation movements for a very long time.

For example, one of the most fundamental issues of the transnational black revolutionism of the 1960s was to transcend and dispose of the feeling of shame that came from being black, which manifested itself in different ways. The internal discussions within the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM), which was a proponent of African internationalism and the global union of all black liberation movements, are important for demonstrating this tendency. In 1965, the siblings Milton and Richard Henry, amongst the founding members of the organization, based on a transnational cultural practice, decided to use words from African languages when naming places and people, and this decision became an important political tactic for NAIM’s collective identity-building. The Henry siblings also changed their names to ones from the Swahili and Yoruba languages that meant “guerilla, fighter and strong.” During debate over the name-change, one of the siblings defended this approach by saying: “Nobody in Africa is named Henry. [. . .] That’s an Irish name for god’s sake [. . .] It means that somebody, way back, owned my parents or screwed my parents. It’s a mark of shame.”[6] The feeling of shame which all of these liberation movements collectively—and members of many different oppressed and exploited groups individually—grapple with, is firstly a collectively constructed feeling. The feeling of shame here is very different, for example, from a moment’s shame due to physical intimidation or threat; this shame is socially and historically constructed on the basis of distinct demographic groups, forms of behavior, physical movements, or other daily habits. Liberation movements, on the other hand, aim to encourage and empower both their own members and the groups they claim to represent to save themselves from and win over this feeling that has been socially constructed and established as a result of specific relationships of exploitation and domination. The feeling of shame here is something that is socially constructed and is both emergent from and supportive of collective relationships of inequality and exploitation, it is something that it is necessary to be liberated from. Shame does not actually belong to those imprinted with it; the transformation of shame into dignity, pride, and resistance paves the way for rebellion against social inequalities. Shame ends after all, and the struggle is partly to dispose of this shame that needs to end; the accumulated consciousness and the forms of relationship that have emerged for shaming are transformed by political intervention. In this way, shame becomes a weapon in the hands of the oppressed and exploited by relocating and transforming the relationships it is directed towards. Thus, shame is reversed as those that actually ought to be shamed are marked as racists. Disposing of shame, partly or fully, means appropriating it as a weapon.

II.

Carlo Ginzburg begins his article titled “The Bond of Shame” with “A long time ago I suddenly realized that the country one belongs to is not, as the usual rhetoric goes, the one you love but the one you are ashamed of. Shame can be a stronger bond than love.”[7] Throughout the article, Ginzburg contemplates the relationship of the concept of shame to other concepts and its various manifestations. Firstly, he deals with an opposing dualism constructed on the assumption that there is a normative difference between them; through different texts he traces the distinction between “cultures of shame” that are assumed to be more archaic and “cultures of guilt” that are assumed to be more complex and developed. Looking at numerous texts, he shows how misleading this opposing dualism is; it is actually not that possible to strictly separate shame and guilt. Looking at examples from the Iliad for example, Ginzburg explains how the bond created by shame cannot only be extended to the act of being ashamed of oneself, but also to the act of being ashamed as a result of another person’s behavior, whether dead or living. Afterwards, focusing on Augustine’s Confessions text, instead of getting caught up in the allure of the distinction between cultures of guilt and shame, he discusses how it is much more valid to look at how ideas of guilt, shame, original sin, and primordial guilt circulate around the wider Mediterranean basin, and that it is necessary to emphasize the transitivity between these concepts. The course of the feeling of shame through these texts shows us that it is necessary to think about this concept together with concepts such as guilt, responsibility, honor, dignity, fear, respect, and humility. According to Ginzburg, especially if we read Confessions carefully, we can see how the culture of guilt and the culture of shame become intertwined.

Ginzburg ends “The Bond of Shame” with Primo Levi’s writings on shame. Levi was arrested as a militant of an antifascist partisan group in Northern Italy in 1943, and the 24-year-old partisan, Jew and chemist was sent to Auschwitz. A great portion of those at the camp lost their lives, Levi was part of the very small minority that survived. He wrote on genocide and fascism throughout his life and authored books titled If This Is a Man, The Truce, If Not Now, When?, and The Drowned and the Saved. His last book, The Drowned and the Saved, was published in 1986, and one of chapters of the book is titled “Shame.” In this chapter, Levi uses the concepts of shame and guilt transitively, much as Ginzburg pertinently underlines.[8] Different feelings of guilt and shame, and what they indicate, are the main issues of the chapter. Levi first quotes a section from his book The Truce which was authored in 1947 but not published until 1963. In this section, he describes the reactions of the Russian soldiers when they entered the Auschwitz death camp for the first time and saw the “Lager packed with corpses and dying prisoners”:

They did not greet us, nor smile; they seemed oppressed, not only by pity but also by a confused restraint which sealed their mouths, and kept their eyes fastened on the funereal scene. It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to witness or undergo an outrage: the shame that the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defense.[9]

Those who survived and those who liberated the camp are ashamed, but the perpetrators do not know the feeling of shame. Levi not only uses the concepts of shame and guilt transitively but also describes many different versions of the feeling of shame, he deliberates on the meanings of different kinds of shame. He first states that the feeling of shame and guilt felt by many people that survived the Auschwitz death camp—including himself—is a phenomenon that has been confirmed and proven by countless testaments. As much as it may seem absurd to some, this feeling exists, and the interpretation of survivors’ feelings of guilt and shame are important for Levi.

How can the shame and guilt felt by survivors be interpreted? Levi first emphasizes here the feeling of shame and guilt coming from the lack of resistance in the camps. This feeling of shame and guilt is shared by almost all survivors, but those organizing politically, albeit under very difficult and secretive conditions, might have been protected from this feeling of shame to a certain degree. “Equally protected must have been Sivadjan, a silent and tranquil man […] about whom I discovered on that same occasion that he had brought explosives into the camp to foment a possible insurrection.”[10] He interprets the essence of the guilt and shame felt here to be constituted by the consciousness of not doing anything, or not doing enough, against a system in which they were being obliterated, and to the surfacing of this consciousness. This shame is not very rational according to Levi because it is not entirely possible to develop such an active resistance due to the conditions of the death camps. Levi says that “too much has been said, too superficially, above all by people who had altogether different crimes to account for” about resistance in the death camps, or, more accurately, the lack of resistance. He especially underlines the fact that even the millions of Soviet prisoners of war, who were captured in 1941 and were in much better physical and spiritual shape than those who were in death camps for years, put up minimal active resistance. All this despite them being much younger, more militarily and politically prepared than those in the death camps, and having organic ties with military officers and sub-officers. Compared to them, those in much worse physical and spiritual condition, who lacked military knowledge and knowledge of politically organizing majorities, and were brought to the death camps following prolonged processes of violence, humiliation and isolation, had almost no chance of showing active resistance. Why then are survivors overcome by a feeling of guilt and shame that does not have much rational basis, and is caused by an expectation of resistance that is almost impossible? Levi explains the answer to this question of why survivors cannot escape from shame and guilt although rationally there is not much to be ashamed of, even with the knowledge that some have, in fact, put up active resistance against impossible odds. Because some have resisted despite all of these conditions, and even though their chance of success was near zero in the conditions of the death camp; shame persists “especially for the few bright examples of those who had the strength and possibility to resist.”[11]

The other feeling of shame and guilt, which according to Levi is much more realistic, is “self-accusation, or the accusation of having failed in terms of human solidarity.”[12] Very few survivors have willingly inflicted harm on a comrade, then again, those that have immediately destroy that memory, that is why the thing for which survivors accuse themselves is not the harm they inflict; on the contrary, almost everyone feels guilty of not having helped. Despite being a continuous and universal desire, solidarity, a compassionate word, a word of advice, even just a willingness to listen to others could rarely be realized. Therefore, the shame and guilt the survivor feels from not showing enough solidarity gradually transforms into a feeling of living on behalf of someone else; “[…] in particular, of a man more generous, more sensitive, more useful, wiser, worthier of living than you.”[13] The best, those who resist, who strive for solidarity the most, who reject the kapos, who fight, the believers who try to explain the fundamental rules of survival to newcomers in their initial days, those who spread around courage and trust, are dead. In reality, the true witnesses of catastrophe are not the survivors and the ones that speak about it; the true witnesses are the dead.

“[…] we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims,’ the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.”[14]

In these lines, where Primo Levi is describing the feeling of shame or guilt emerging from “failure in terms of human solidarity,” there is a very important intuition regarding the impossibility of witnessing the catastrophe they experience from the perspective of the survivor. This intuition actually reflects an important reality in the context of catastrophe; a catastrophe such as genocide, in which annihilation and destruction is experienced on a massive scale, not only kills people but, at the same time, rules out the possibility for language and attestation, it destroys the capacity of language as well. Therefore, a violence has occurred that is impossible to articulate from the perspective of all witnesses and survivors. This impossibility has also been enunciated for other catastrophes, for example by Marc Nichanian in the context of the Armenian Genocide. Nichanian says that genocide cannot be articulate by surviving witnesses because genocide not only means the extermination of people but also the destruction of the possibility to witness and the capacity for language as well. According to Nichanian, the catastrophe of the Armenian Genocide was caused not only by the tremendous physical violence with which it was carried out but also by the destruction of the capacity of language and extermination of the witness. Catastrophe, as a concept uttered in a single breath, is an “event-without-a-witness.”[15]

The shame that Levi mentions here then implies something altogether different than the shame that liberation movements struggle to transform, which I talked about in the first section. Both are doubtless types of shame that are constructed socially and historically, however, while it is necessary to dispose of the first, it is impossible to dispose of the second. Primo Levi, while expressing the shame of survivors, is indeed aware of the impossibility of disposing of shame stemming from “failure in terms of human solidarity.” Because survivors try to tell not only of their own fate but also those of the submerged, the drowned, the witnesses. The shame of not being a real witness, of speaking on behalf of those who will never be able to speak, of attempting to express a violence that is inexpressible, and of failure in terms of human solidarity. A shame that can never be disposed of. The shame of the survivors of a catastrophe in which the real witnesses have already lost their lives, in which the capacity of language was obliterated, and those who will never be able to recount exactly what happened attempt to speak. It is impossible to dispose of such shame. While it may be possible to partially see, in later generations, traces of first-generation survivors’ shame that cannot be disposed of, it is more so unique for the survivors of the camp; this shame, rather than being passed on between generations, means inheriting an objection. This shame can also be interpreted as an objection to moderating a catastrophe, diluting its significance, and framing it as an event that is more acceptable than it is. That is why, rather than being passed on in the way it actually occurred, it continues in “witnesses who could not witness.” Certainly, political commitments and struggles, possibilities for retribution, radical changes in accounting for the past, can be impactful here, but the power of this shame seems to prevail over these factors. A shame that cannot be disposed of, a shame that can only be borne and carried on. “The destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to describe his own death. Even if they had paper and pen, the drowned would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy.”[16] Primo Levi, a year after writing these lines, in 1987, commits suicide, taking his own life.

III.

I wrote my PhD dissertation on the forcibly disappeared in the context of the Kurdish war in Turkey during the 1990s. Within the new special warfare concept of the 1990s, especially focusing on Cizre and Silopi, I tried to grasp the meaning of enforced disappearance in relation to state structure, the realm of law, and memory making and daily life. I made use of both archival material and semi-structured interviews that we did with relatives[17] of the disappeared. The approximately 80 interviews we did in central Cizre, Silopi and Şırnak in Kurdish and Turkish constituted the foundation of my dissertation. During that time, between 2011–18, I was working at the Truth Justice Memory Center (Memory Center), which I co-founded, as the Program Director for Memory Studies. Therefore, during this entire period, to better understand the phenomenon of enforced disappearances, I tried to join the approximately 450 semi-structured interviews we did between 2011–18 mostly with relatives of the disappeared but also with lawyers, grassroots organizers, civil society representatives, and, as much as possible, with activists, and I read transcripts for interviews I could not join. The feeling of shame, mixed in with guilt, sorrow, and rage, was among the principal feelings expressed in these interviews.

First, I would like to give brief background information regarding these enforced disappearances. With a past in Turkey that can be traced all the way back to the Armenian Genocide of 1915, enforced disappearances, publicly referred to as the ‘disappeared’ or ‘disappeared under custody,’ actually emerged as a frequent state crime after the military coup of September 12, 1980. Later, during the 1990s, it is used systematically as part of a new special warfare strategy adopted in the Kurdish war. As a result of the strategy  of “Reestablishing Area Control and Driving the PKK Organization Out of the Region” which was announced after a National Security Council (NSC)[18] meeting in 1993, when war was intensifying in Kurdistan and new military strategies including special warfare and counter-guerilla tactics were introduced, there occurs a significant rise in the number of forced displacements, enforced disappearances, and illegal and arbitrary executions. When we look at the forcibly disappeared after the September 12 military coup, when this crime became widely used in Turkey, and during the 1990s when it became systematic, we come across three different profiles. In the first group are students, workers, union organizers and political militants who live in Western Turkey and are allegedly members of leftist organizations pursuing armed struggle; in the second group are city dwellers and frequently provincial and district heads of political parties of the Kurdish movement, journalists—with Kurdish press workers being foremost among them, union leaders, and local Kurdish political leaders well-known by locals, such as members of the Human Rights Foundation; and in the third and largest group are all Kurds living in the State of Emergency (SoE) region. Today, we do not have precise data about the total number of disappeared individuals, the great majority of which were disappeared in the 1990s, but if we evaluate all of the data of civil society organizations that have worked in this field, we can say that this number is around 1000 individuals (1353 individuals according to an indefinite list). This number regards those forcefully disappeared in ways that fit the definition of the United Nations; if we were to include those executed and those killed via other means, this number would surely be much higher. A large portion of those disappeared still lack graves today. For example, according to the data of the Memory Center, a great number of the relatives of the forcefully disappeared have not been able to access the bodies of the disappeared, 277 out of 486 bodies of people that have been confirmed by the center to have been forcefully disappeared are still missing.[19]

We can return to the feeling of shame here. This was a feeling that came to the forefront especially during interviews we did with relatives of the disappeared. As Carlo Ginzburg said in his evaluation of Primo Levi’s writings, guilt and shame, or feelings of guilt and shame, were used very transitively. Relatives of the disappeared felt guilty; they had very deep feelings of shame from not having searched for their disappeared loved ones enough, not being appropriately loyal to their memory, from not having done their part, not having submitted more petitions, not following through with the cases enough and from many other things.

“I don’t know what to say. I mean I keep asking myself, I say what did we actually do. We tried a lot, we toiled but what did we do, I mean we asked around everywhere but could not get an answer. I say sometimes I guess we were not able to. So, it’s our fault, we haven’t fulfilled our duty. I think if it were him/her, if they had disappeared me, s/he would have looked after me much better. It burns inside. I mean it is a scar inside us, whatever we did was not enough. Neither did Allah help us. I guess it means we were not able to do it fully either. I blame myself a lot, it’s very difficult, I could not sleep a wink for years from not having done more.”[20]

“I could not speak. I’m not going to lie, I mean if I lied I went but could not speak. Even we could not get it out of our mouth and ask, we could not ask out of fear. We did not say this is our relative. […] However, it’s genuinely my dad’s brother. We could not have said out of fear. We were not able to say out of fear. You lament as you keep thinking. We were not able to say it. We were not able to say it out of fear, we did not say this is our relative. His son did not say this is my dad. His wife did not say this is my husband. For every moment, I mean they were also going to get caught in the strife. We could not say it everyone knows it. Everyone knows it. We are ashamed.”[21]

I remember the interview quoted here very well. From the moment we turned on the camera to record it in a house in Silopi, to the moment when the interview ended and we turned off the camera, the relative of the disappeared both told their story and wept incessantly. They felt such great shame, they lamented so much while recounting that I remember having difficulty not intervening. Moreover, during the interview, while listening to their story, I realized that they had actually appealed to so many authorities, wrote petitions to them, gave money to some people that claimed to know their uncle’s fate, applied to every possible institution and person, that they therefore actually spent a lot of effort to find their uncle, contrary to what they said. Still the feeling of shame was very dominant. What they did felt very inadequate to them, they felt that they were very guilty and actually felt very intensely ashamed. Because of this shame, when they started talking they said “we did not do anything,” while it turned out that there was a lot that they had done. As they kept speaking, the sentence “we did not do anything, did not fulfill our duty” was continuously repeated here and there. They were describing an enormous and intertwined feeling of shame and guilt. Here, shame and guilt were almost being used transitively, but we can also talk here about a partial difference: while shame was being expressed as a feeling relating to how the relative of the disappeared was seen from outside, guilt was marked by a burning feeling that was experienced internally. Not having searched for your disappeared, not having looked after them enough; the feeling of not being worthy of their memory in front of society was mostly expressed as shame in front of others. On the other hand, shame and guilt were, at the same time, experienced as interwoven, and shame was a feeling that was mentioned in internal conflicts as well, therefore I would like to stress that the internal and external distinction that I speak of is not absolute.

Many relatives of the disappeared articulated the feeling of shame in different ways. The feeling of not having done one’s part, not having searched enough, strong feelings of shame, guilt and inability in relation to not having vigorously sought accountability for their loved one, to not having shown enough loyalty to them, to still not having found their bones. These complicated and very painful feelings were gnawing at all of the relatives of the disappeared. Then again, I would like to state once more, at the risk of repetition, that the great majority of the relatives of the disappeared were people that had struggled extensively to find out the fate of their lost ones in the terrifying war and violent environment of the 1990s. They had persistently appealed to the law, which yielded no result, tried to plead with prosecutors who threw the petitions they submitted in the trash, tried to find out the fate of their loved ones from anyone they could get news from, with different strategies at different stages of waiting, they hid photographs of their disappeared spouses like precious jewelry, always in the most beautiful part of their house, they joined the many political actions organized by relatives of the disappeared, with Saturday Mothers/People foremost among them, sent their best Turkish speakers to testify in court when perpetrators started to be tried after 2008, and delivered their statements while looking relatives of the disappeared in the eyes.[22] Still, shame and guilt, the feeling of not having done their part clung on to them. This feeling was repeated in so many interviews with such similar words that after the interviews ended and we turned off the recording device, we all used to try to console these nameless heroes who never let us go and welcomed us at their table. We used to tell them how much we believed that they did everything they could and how this was actually a lot.

Another social scientist, Idelber Avelar, talks about a similar phenomenon based on crimes against humanity and torture practices in Latin America. Avelar, in texts he has written on torture, talks about the terror, or the terrifying “excess,” that torture contains.[23] Idelber Avelar argues that torture is not done to obtain a knowledge that the state does not possess but is done for the act of inflicting pain itself. The terrifying excess that torture contains includes both physical pain and the feeling of guilt emerging from the tortured person speaking out. Therefore, torture does not actually entail obtaining unknown knowledge, it entails the reproduction of already known knowledge through specific technologies of pain. That is why torture is more important for the torturing state officers than it is for obtaining the knowledge that the tortured person provides. The knowledge of the existence of a state that is capable of subjecting thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people to torture, that is what is actually important. Even then, he says that he observed the cycle of self-accusation, self-condemnation, and self-shame in the texts produced by torture survivors in interviews he did with them in South America. Virtually all of those who were tortured feel greatly ashamed by the statements they provided under torture. Knowing that these statements do not have crucial importance does not relieve them. Avelar says that these people that have survived torture, much like relatives of the disappeared, are stuck in a cycle of self-accusation, self-condemnation, and self-shame.[24] This shame is not to be overcome with mere political struggle, with the struggle itself, such as I mentioned in the first section, since the vast majority of the relatives of the disappeared that I had talked to in Cizre and Silopi were already a highly political community that was politicized around the Kurdish movement. Neither was this shame, I think, a category of shame that was impossible to dispose of, the type that I mentioned in the second section. This shame, the traces of which could perhaps last forever, stemmed from not having sought accountability for the disappeared. Therefore, this shame was one that was assumed, that was carried. One day, if perpetrators of the disappeared were legally or political held accountable, if their bones were accessed or a reckoning worthy of their name were to happen, even if their remains were not obtained, maybe this assumed and carried sense of guilt and shame could be moderated somewhat. I think, the most important factor in transforming this shame into a disposable feeling was the driving power of the persistent, vibrant, and hopeful political struggle—the Kurdish struggle for liberation—the belief in political struggle to seek accountability for what happened, in one way or another. Shame was like a feeling that was carried until the awaited day came when loss was somehow accounted for through political struggle, a feeling that must be carried ethically until the arrival of that day, the day of reckoning, the day when a dignified peace is established, the day we win. Relatives of the disappeared that assumed this shame carried it partially as an indicator of their loyalty to their lost ones, as a sign that they had not forgotten their obligation. Despite their whole struggle and the tribulations they went through, the feeling of not having sought accountability was never able to completely save them from this shame.

IV.

Then there are those who are not much ashamed: those who do not even think about being ashamed, who think “Why would I be ashamed?”—broad sectors of society who remain outside of these debates. Very broad sectors of society that, let alone being ashamed of the past and the present of their own countries, hold onto these with nationalistic hubris. While shame is an important feeling in “working through the past,” in Adorno’s terms, and while its mobilization in different ways can open trajectories for us, this does not really happen. Because wide sections of society do not want to view their past with shame, they want to glorify and flatter it instead. At least this is the story for Turkey. How, then, is the situation in Turkey different from other countries? To understand this, we can look at Germany, which has been referred to as a nearly “perfect example” by some mainstream social scientists regarding this issue. The wave of reckoning with the past that had significance in the establishment of the new Europe after 1945 was actually related to the anticommunism of the Cold War and the realpolitik concerns of the “free world,” and since this process called reckoning occurred as an imposition of the allies, it was actually planned as a new technique of government while being limited as much as possible. For example, after the Nuremberg trials in 1950s’ Germany, where very few perpetrators were tried, many Nazis and their collaborators comfortably found places for themselves in society. They easily occupied positions in universities, the judiciary, and many segments of the bureaucracy as if the crimes they committed in their past did not exist. Moreover, they perhaps constituted the cadres that articulated and applied the intense anticommunism of the Cold War era the best, since they knew it even better than they did Nazi ideology.[25] Germany represents an important experience today because the radical current of the 68 movement took the rhetoric of “reckoning with the past,” in which a small minority was tried and which was then depoliticized as a technique of government in line with Cold War ideology, and placed it within street actions, rearticulating it in the context of a radical political program. Still, this “perfect example” is in fierce debate over ways of working through the past. Recently, important actors in the field of reckoning with the past in Germany again lambasted historians who argued for discussing the Holocaust together with other genocides, colonialism, colonial massacres, Germany’s genocide in its former colony of Namibia for example, in a way reminiscent of similar discussions held in the past using similar terms. According to this conservative view, the Holocaust was the one and only genocide because Jews were annihilated for the process of annihilation itself, therefore it cannot be compared with other genocides that had limited and pragmatic ends. The following statement of these conservative historians was that anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism.[26] The mecca of reckoning with the past is Germany, where there is a very strong negative reaction to thinking the Holocaust together with other colonial and racist forms of violence of the 20^th century. Things do not seem that bright in the example referred to as the best either. Regarding the Germans, Primo Levi, while describing the shame that the Soviet soldiers who saved them felt as they encountered them, said that this was “the shame that the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another.” I do not know whether German perpetrators ever knew the feeling shame, but I guess it could be said that they refrained from being ashamed.

Actually, we can say that there are serious obstacles to ways of working through the past and doing this in a radical political perspective in the entirety of Europe. Europe itself looks pretty fragmented now, and, letting alone demands to reckon with the past, a denialism has reproduced itself with the influence of rising neo-fascist movements. We can say that the neo-fascist movements rising throughout Europe have formed around a few political bases, which can be summarized under hostility to LGBTQI+ movements and reproduction of the sacred family myth, hostility to immigrants/foreigners, opposition to abortion and rejection of bodily integrity with trans rights being foremost among these, as well as an enormous attack on working class achievements despite the clamor of claiming to support lower classes with a hint of populism. We can also define one of the most important political axes of these neo-fascist movements as “pride in the past” a framing that can be summed up as colonial nostalgia, Holocaust and genocide denialism, and praise for nationalist and militarist heroics that proclaim state crimes. For example, Eric Zemmour, who could be dubbed the buffoon-like representative of classical fascism in France, has produced many racist, colonialist, and nationalist myths about many different eras of French history, from the colonization of Algeria to Nazi collaborationism during World War II. One of the most important pillars of his presidential campaign is formulated as “a call to real French people who are not ashamed of their past.”[27] Another example: one of the most important policy areas of Poland’s radical right and neo-fascist movements, who claim that Poland’s role in the Holocaust process was exaggerated, is Holocaust denialism, and they engage in the issue of the past by advancing historically revisionist theses.[28] Pride instead of shame, an aggressive glorification instead of a feeling of guilt, denial instead of responsibility, the staging of a comeback.

On the other hand, regardless of how much stronger different fascisms become and their attempts to appropriate ways of working through the past and memory debates, many grassroots movements and radical groups also simultaneously incorporate ghosts of the past into today’s liberation movements by underlining a continuity between the past and the present. Some by tearing down statues of colonizers,[29] others by rising up against police violence on the outskirts of cities into which they have been stuffed. Many anticolonial, radical, liberatory movements, from the United States to England, from France to Greece are speaking up on the streets. The most important difference of these movements from their more moderate counterparts from a few decades ago is that they do politics by thinking together the ghosts of the past and the exploitation and domination relationships of the present. In other words, instead of viewing the past as a chronology of concluded events, this new generation of antiracist and anticolonial grassroots movements approach history by relating it to the conditions of modern racial capitalism under which they live, by forming a connection between the past and the present. As such, ways of working through the past do not only belong to various fascisms but are also constituted and re-constituted everyday as a form of struggle in the hands of different movements of liberation and freedom.

Returning to the context of Turkey, we are operating within certain paradoxes regarding ways of working through the past. Firstly, I do not agree with the common presupposition that Turkey is a country of forgetting/amnesia. In the self-composition of both radical political movements and mainstream political traditions in Turkey, the assessment of the past, that of the Ottoman Empire and the republican period, occupies an important place. Moreover, we could talk about a memory turn in Turkey with roots that could extend to the 1990s but formed especially in the early 2000s, that led to the emergence of a new memory field that demanded new relations with the past and perhaps even memory justice.[30] This field, that is made up of works of art, the activities of new generation civil society organizations, and many critical academic studies is, of course, at the same time, in mutual interaction with the political mobilization of many movements that do politics on ways of working through the past in Turkey. Despite the important cultural accumulation it has led to, I believe that we should maintain a critical perspective towards this literature because I think that this field generally distances itself too much from race- and colonialism-based approaches, that it views ways of reckoning with the past solely through the perspective of individual rights and liberties instead of frames of collective struggle, and that it constructs a language that discusses crimes of the past with loose terms that often diminish and trivialize them. I do not think that the struggle for reckoning with the past in Turkey is a problem to be discussed by truth technicians with a certain know-how; this struggle is a field that must be approached politically and the concepts of which must be formed with the demands of many struggling political movements taken into account.

The apolitical superficiality and nationalism in the relationship between the masses and the past is seen as a problem but the loose language that different intellectuals construct here is problematized rather little. While reading Murat Belge’s writings on the I Apologize campaign for example, one encounters an unexpected clarity and a self-contentment as if completely unaware of all debates in this field:

Regarding “the apology,” everyone is asking “Why me?” Yes, why me? Why those like me? Whenever I have discussed this issue at places with an Armenian audience, I have said that I do not feel a personal sense of responsibility for this massacre due to being a “compatriot of Turkey.” My personal responsibility is not practically possible anyway, but I don’t feel a modicum of sympathy for those whom I see as and know to be responsible, I do not associate myself with them in any way. So why would I apologize? Then again, in the same meetings, without feeling this responsibility, I always state that I have a responsibility due to the situation caused by the denial of this incident by the Turkish Republic, of which I am a citizen. However, I do not think I have a flawed understanding here either. I learned that this happened at an early age and from then onwards I not only did not do anything to conceal this incident but did everything I could to tear this veil of mandatory ignorance. Through text, action, any and all means.[31]

I did everything I could, so I am not responsible. Doing everything you can should not mean not feeling even partially ashamed or responsible for an already existing, very powerful habitus of denial, for the persistence of denial and its strength, for various shortcomings and improprieties. What is discussed here is not a solely individual responsibility anyway; it should not be forgotten that, in the absence of collective responsibility, we can have a share even though we did everything we could. If broad sectors of society see the immensely powerful violence, racism, and discrimination that Armenians are subjected to today as legitimate, let alone refuse to recognize the Armenian Genocide, what good does having always maintained the correct standing do exactly? You see, this perspective is a perspective that does not think enough about what all this means, one that does not discuss these issues enough. How self-contented. An uncomplicated, unproblematic, how closed a way of thinking. This perspective that sees itself as adequate, that is so comfortable thinking it has done everything that could be done, is very striking considering those who will never be able to achieve this self-contentment. Murat Belge might be personally right in this regard, but this does not change the societal situation, the political climate, and the collective complacency. An intense violence is also being produced today due to the habitus of denial[32] that has emerged around the Armenian Genocide, referred to as “this incident” in Belge’s writing. The post-2008 trials of perpetrators who disappeared the loved ones of relatives of the disappeared that I mentioned in section three are being concluded with acquittals one after another. Colonialism, racism, and acclamation of violence spreads from the judiciary, policies of the executive, and the voices of broad sectors of society in Turkey. An intense (neo)fascism shuts down the smallest discussion on working through the past, it calls on everyone to associate with this violence, to proudly embrace it with open arms instead of being ashamed. Thus, I cannot be sure what the claim of having always personally done the right things for a lifetime means, even if there is some truth to that claim.

One of the most important cases in which perpetrators of the forcibly disappeared in Turkey have been tried regards the Mardin Dargeçit disappearances. On October 30, 1995, in Mardin Dargeçit, seven resident villagers, three of whom were children, were detained with the claim that they were aiding and abetting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). After being taken to the Dargeçit District Gendarmerie[33] Station, all traces of Süleyman Seyhan (57), Abdurrahman Olcay (20), Mehmet Emin Aslan (19), Abdurrahman Coşkun (21), Davut Altunkaynak (13), Nedim Akyön (16), and Seyhan Doğan (14) were lost. The case was reopened following the extraordinary efforts of their families who struggled to find their relatives for years, who appealed to the law, and filed a criminal complaint again in 2009. As a result of the investigation—including the testimonies of relatives of the disappeared and secret testimonies of soldiers, in addition to rangers and teachers—it was found that the seven villagers were tortured to death. The body of Seyhan Doğan, who was disappeared in Dargeçit at the age of 14,[34] was found in mass graves that were excavated 18 years later. The defendants, consisting of the Mardin Gendarmerie Commando Battalion Commander of the period Hurşit İmren (who was charged with an aggravated life sentence in the initial indictment), Dargeçit District Gendarmerie Commander Mehmet Tire, Dargeçit Central Gendarmerie Station Commander Mahmut Yılmaz, Station Deputy Commander Haydar Topçam and Master Sergeant Kerim Șahin, were all acquitted in the final hearing dated July 4, 2022. Hazni Doğan, who struggled a lifetime to receive a concrete verdict from the Dargeçit Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counterterrorism (JİTEM)[35] trials, and for those who killed his sister Seyhan Doğan to receive the punishment they deserve, described the hearings and the trials process a bit earlier, before the trial had ended, like this:

It feels unthinkable for someone reading these lines to not feel ashamed. I think it is really important to understand that it is necessary to feel ashamed of living in a country where perpetrators are protected with a very powerful armor of impunity when state officers commit crimes, especially when this crime is committed in the context of the Kurdish war, where accountability is not sought for those killed, where those responsible are not punished although the bones of those killed are found in mass graves. Moreover, this shame also has the potential to motivate one to act to change this. If this hard truth is properly understood, the shame that understanding leads to has the capacity to create a simple desire to do things. On the other hand, having done politics in life, and even having done this in the most correct way, does not eliminate this shame completely either. Because Hazni Doğan’s powerful words call us to embrace a different kind of shame, to carry it properly. Let us just set aside the claim that the feeling of shame obstructs political movement because, on the contrary, I think that the shame which is in motion here, which I believe should be embraced and carried, propels us to form connections with the world. This kind of shame pushes us to act, to struggle against all our shortcomings, without a claim for perfection. Because we are in this world, being in a world where Hazni Doğan says these things forces us to carry a type of responsibility, to feel guilt and shame, and to act as a result. Once again, I think that Primo Levi is among the best of those describing this shame, let us conclude with him:

And there is another, vaster shame, the shame of the world. It has been memorably pronounced by John Donne, and quoted innumerable times, pertinently or not, that “no man is an island,” and every bell tolls for everyone. And yet there are those who, faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it and not feel touched by it. This is what the majority of Germans did during the twelve Hitlerian years, deluding themselves that not seeing was a way of not knowing, and that not knowing relieved them of their share of complicity or connivance. But we were denied the screen of willed ignorance, T. S. Eliot’s “partial shelter”: we were not able not to see. The ocean of pain, past and present, surrounded us, and its level rose from year to year until it almost submerged us. It was useless to close one’s eyes or turn one’s back to it because it was all around, in every direction, all the way to the horizon.[37]

A shame that will set us in motion against the reality and the past that has fully surrounded us, that is in every direction until the horizon, and a sea of pain unique to our present moment. A shame to remind us of our responsibility in being in this world where all this violence keeps reoccurring. Hazni Doğan invites us all to do this because he cannot ignore. Let us not ignore either.

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[1] Anja Meulenblet, The Shame is Over: A Political Love Story, (The Women’s Press Limited, 1980), 12.

[2] Meulenbelt, The Shame is Over, 15.

[3] James M. Jasper, “Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research,” Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011): 290.

[4] Ellen Rooney, “The Literary Politics of Feminist Theory,”in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. Ellen Rooney (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 84.

[5] Jeff Goodwin et al., Passionate Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2001), 67.

[6] Paul Karolczyk, “‘An African Nation in the Western Hemisphere’ The New Afrikan Independence Movement and Black Transnational Revolutionary Nationalism,” in Crossing Boundaries. Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World, eds. Brian D. Behnken and Simon Wendt (Lexington Books, 2013), 129.

[7] Carlo Ginzburg, “The Bond of Shame,” New Left Review 120 (2019): 35.

[8] Carlo Ginzburg, “The Bond of Shame,” 43.

[9] Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2017), 59–60.

[10] Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 61.

[11] Levi, 64.

[12] Levi, 64.

[13] Levi, 68.

[14] Levi, 70.

[15] Marc Nichanian, Edebiyat ve Felaket, trans. Ayşegül Sönmezay (İletişim: 2011), 27.

[16] Levi, 70–71.

[17] The Turkish word yakın that appears on the original version of this text broadly refers to anyone that is close to someone, including friends and family. Family can include blood relatives or chosen members. In the translation, the word “relative” has been used in this meaning as the same term appears in other works of the author in similar contexts – Trans. note.

[18] In the original, the author only uses the abbreviation “MGK” to refer to the Milli Güvenlik Kurulu (National Security Council) – Trans. note.

[19] Özgür Sevgi Göral, Any Hopes for Truth? A Comparative Analysis of Enforced Disappearances and the Missing in the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus (Hafıza Merkezi, 2019), 58–72.

[20] Interview, Diyarbakır, November 25, 2013.

[21] Interview, Silopi, November 30, 2012.

[22] Özgür Sevgi Göral, “‘İmkânsız Bir Talep’ Olarak Adaleti Beklemek: Kaybedilenler ve Yakınları” in Beklerken Zamanın Bilgisi ve Öznenin Dönüşümü, eds. Özge Biner and Zerrin Özlem Biner (İletişim, 2019), 45–85.

[23] Idelbar Avelar, The Letter of Violence, Essays on Narrative, Ethics and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2004), 28.

[24] Avelar, The Letter of Violence, 34.

[25] Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans. Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2019), 155.

[26] A. Dirk Moses, “The German Catechism,” Geschichte der Gegenwart, May 23, 2021, https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism/.

[27] Gallimard Collectifs, Tracts (N°34) – Zemmour contre l’histoire, (Paris: Gallimard, 2022).

[28] Jan Grabowski, “The New Way of Holocaust Revisionism,” New York Times, January 29, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/holocaust-poland-europe.html

[29] For a comprehensive discussion on the historical roots and political meanings of tearing down statues, see Enzo Traverso, “Tearing Down Statues Doesn’t Erase History, It Makes Us See It More Clearly,” Jacobin, April 24, 2020, https://jacobin.com/2020/06/statues-removal-antiracism-columbus

[30] For an assessment of the usage of the term “memory turn” and especially the artistic productions of this critical field that emerged since the early 2000s, see Devrim Sezer and Emre Gönlügül, “Egemen Anlatıları Aşındırmak: Hafıza Peyzajına Kamusal ve Sanatsal Müdahaleler,” Birikim, no. 392, (December 2021): 10–24.

[31] Murat Belge, “Ermeni kıyımı üstüne metin,” Taraf, December 14, 2008, https://t24.com.tr/haber/murat-belge-sorumsuzum-ama-ben-de-ozur-dilerim,20780

[32] Talin Suciyan, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History, (I. B. Tauris, 2016).

[33] Gendarmerie General Command (Turkish: Jandarma Genel Komutanlığı) was a part of the Turkish Armed Forces tasked with law enforcement in areas outside of police jurisdiction, such as rural regions. In 2016, it was incorporated into the Interior Ministry – Trans. note.

[34] In the original text, Seyhan Doğan’s age was stated firstly as 14 and later as 13. News sources are also conflicted about Doğan’s age. The first information presented was taken as accurate and the text adjusted accordingly during translation – Trans. note.

[35] JİTEM (Turkish: Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele) was an unofficial branch of the Turkish Gendarmerie until 2005, carrying out covert operations in the context of the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state – Trans. note. 

[36] Hazni Doğan, “Aslında Kardeşiyim Ama Seyhan 13 Yaşında Kaldı,” Bianet, September 18, 2022, https://bianet.org/bianet/yasam/267210-aslinda-kardesiyim-ama-seyhan-13-yasinda-kaldi.

[37] Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 71–72.