'What Does the State Want from Dead Bodies?': Suruç and the History of Unmournability

[Protestors in Istanbul carry coffins of those who died in the suicide bombing in Suruç, 23 July 2015.] [Protestors in Istanbul carry coffins of those who died in the suicide bombing in Suruç, 23 July 2015.]

'What Does the State Want from Dead Bodies?': Suruç and the History of Unmournability

By : Nicholas Glastonbury

Since 20 July, when a suicide bomber in the town of Suruç killed thirty-two socialist activists on their way to help rebuild Kobanê in northern Syria, Turkey has devolved into a de facto state of emergency. While Turkish police began operations across the country and have arrested approximately one thousand leftist activists and revolutionaries affiliated with the Kurdish movement under the guise of disarming and dismantling ISIS on the domestic front, protests over the Suruç Massacre have been brutally suppressed by the same security forces. At least seven civilians in Turkey have been killed by the police operations and during the protests. The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), meanwhile, began military operations in Syria and Iraq, dropping bombs on Kurdish majority regions in both countries under the premises not only that the PKK and ISIS are part of the same “terrorist bloc,” but also that all Kurds are potential terrorists until proven otherwise. At the same time, forests across Northern Kurdistan—in Dersim, Şemdinli, and Lice—have been set on fire by “flammable materials” dropped by fighter jets on their way to Syria and Iraq. The state-led attempt at managing the aftermath of the Suruç Massacre has been taken up on other fronts as well: the interim government has blocked access to Twitter as well as to a number of leftist and Kurdish news sites, including Fırat News Agency (ANF), Dicle News Agency (DİHA), Etkin News Agency, Hawar News Agency (ANHA), Jiyan.org, Özgür Gündem newspaper, Yüksekova News, Sendika.org, RojNews, and Rudaw.

What has arguably generated the most outcry on social media, however, are the attacks on the funerals, funeral processions, and graves of those who died in Suruç. The police suppressed Günay Özarslan’s funeral in the Gazi neighborhood of Istanbul; a group of fifteen people defaced the grave of Suruç victim Ece Dinç; several trucks containing at least two dozen bodies of citizens of Turkey who died fighting as members of Yekîneyên Parastina Gel‎ (People’s Protection Units, or YPG) against ISIS in Syria have been held up at the Habur and Mürşitpınar border crossings to Turkey since July 26, preventing families in Turkey from being able to bury their dead. HDP member of Parliament Ferhat Encü wrote on Twitter, “[Turkey is] a state that is afraid of Kurds’ funerals.”

The cases mentioned above, and the responses by the government and the pro-government media to the Suruç massacre, all beg the question that Judith Butler raises in her book Precarious Life: “What makes for a grievable life?”[1] Grief and mourning, according to Butler, expose to us how our ways of being in the world are inherited and continuously mediated through our social relations. Thinking through the relationship between those social relations and the transformations of the nation-state in contemporary times, this essay explores how we can better analyze not only the senseless deaths of so many people, but also the state’s utter lack of remorse as we try to mourn these deaths. In other words, here I explore the particular conditions of possibility that allow the Turkish state to render certain forms of mourning impossible. In so doing, I am particularly interested in parsing out the affective domains that “furnish a sense of political community.” [2] I take as my point of departure the fact that Turkey, after all, is a nation-state led by a prime-minister-cum-president who wept for the death of the daughter of a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the same one who declared a state of national mourning after the death of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud of Saudi Arabia.

In what follows, I suggest that this nation-state also needs to be approached as an affectively inhabited country where soldiers’ deaths are eulogized by relying on the discourse that their deaths are “for the good of the nation” (“Vatan sağ olsun”). Grief, particularly in its political and affective articulations in the sacrificial body, operates not only as a technology of governance under the guise of Turkish governmentality. Rather, I argue more broadly that grief and practices of grief that get denied signification—those undertaken by Kurdish, Alevi, and allied subjects—are better approached as a contested field of force, where the discourse of martyrdom leads to dissident attempts at political expression that co-opt, confound, and resignify the very categories of grief, grievability, and the possibility of the nation-state. Thinking about the limits of mournability, and about who is allowed to grieve, I conclude, enables us to trace the affective boundaries of political community in Turkey, to understand whose lives are considered worth living and whose are not.

In this light, the attacks on Günay Özarslan’s funeral and on a number of the funerals of those who died in Suruç are not a new story: committing such violent acts of incarceration and remorseless killing is nothing new to the formation of the Turkish state. Rather, I argue that these acts should be understood within a much longer history of state prohibitions on Kurdish and Alevi mourning. This genealogy of illegalized and incarcerated grief extends at least as far back as the 1925 execution of Sheikh Said, leader of a Kurdish rebellion, whose body was disposed in a mass grave in order to suppress his future veneration and the unrest it might entail.[3]  

What I want to examine here, however, is the longue durée connecting the Suruc Massacre and its aftermath to the imposition of martial law and a state of emergency in Kurdistan in the 1980s and 1990s, when at least 1353 people—primarily Kurds and leftists—across the country were forcibly disappeared by state actors. At the same time, the 1990s also witnessed extreme state violence directed toward Alevis, punctuated by the 1993 Sivas massacre and the 1995 attacks on the Gazi neighborhood in Istanbul. By situating the recent attacks on funerals and the official regulations on and prohibitions of grief within a longer history of state violence against Kurdish and Alevi minorities, I suggest, we can better interrogate the AKP’s discourse of political renaissance used to distinguish the current government from this rather violent and continuous history of incarceration and annihilation. I conclude that by bringing such a historically attuned lens to examine the Suruç Massacre and its aftermath, we can, however cursorily, begin to chart out the more deeply rooted and enduring affective structures that underpin the historical constitution of the Turkish state—structures predicated on differentiating between those whose deaths are mournable and those whose deaths are not, even as both are caught up in the same context of state-led violence.

Enforced Disappearance and the Grief of the Saturday Mothers

The practice of enforced disappearance is a method used frequently by state, military, and paramilitary parties in order to eradicate dissident political subjects and their collective organizations from society. That project of eradication in turn further foments widespread fear in that society. It is a particularly common practice in military regimes and juntas, such as Argentina and Chile in the 1980s. According to the United Nations’ interpretations of international treaty and human rights law, enforced disappearance is a crime that is continuous by its very nature, beginning at the moment of abduction and continuing as long as the crime is “not complete”; that is, continuing until the fate of the individual is acknowledged. According to Meltem Ahıska:

The most psychologically tragic dimension of the strategy of disappearance is imposing the responsibility of "killing" on the relatives of the disappeared. Declaring someone disappeared imposes the absolute force of sovereign power by denying the life of that person as well as the end of that life, and by doing so with extreme bluntness (just as the openly contradictory phrase ‘disappeared while under custody’ demonstrates). Either you accept this power and you kill your own relative, or you are forced to live a lifetime of psychological torture within the ambiguity of the fate of the disappeared.[4]

In Turkey, the practice of enforced disappearance began following the coup on 12 September 1980, when a military junta under Kenan Evren’s leadership took over the government. Toward the late 1980s and in the early 1990s, with the declaration of a state of emergency in the Kurdistan region, the practice of enforced disappearance became more common across the entire country, reaching fever pitch in the mid-1990s. According to research published in 2014, 1994 witnessed 518 disappearances and 1995 witnessed 232 disappearances, the highest years of disappearance during the state of emergency. Because enforced disappearance primarily targeted Kurdish men, the mothers and wives of the disappeared were frequently left behind with the tremendous responsibility of looking after their families, often with little to no income. Many of these women gathered at local branches of the Human Rights Association (İnsan Hakları Derneği), where they built support networks with one another. The destructive force and the urgency of the ongoing disappearances contributed to a sense of solidarity among these women, one that would eventually give way to collective action.

The catalyst for this action took place on 21 March 1995, when a young socialist leader named Hasan Ocak disappeared. His mother, Emine Ocak, spent the next fifty-eight days searching for him, contacting the police, lawyers, and other authorities. She went to the office of the Istanbul governor, where she was bludgeoned by police. She went to the Parliament in Ankara, giving flowers to Members of Parliament and asking about the fate of her son. At one point, after occupying a courthouse, she was imprisoned for nineteen days. On 15 May, her son’s tortured body was recovered in a forest on the outskirts of Istanbul. After his burial, Ocak was contacted by other Kurdish women who had lost their family members. This group of women quickly decided to organize a silent protest, a sit-in Galatasaray Square in the heart of Istanbul.

The first meeting of this group of women, known as the Saturday Mothers, took place on 27 May 1995, just twelve days after Hasan Ocak’s body was found. From that first Saturday, the Saturday Mothers gathered every week to silently protest the disappearance of their loved ones, transforming their grief into a quiet but persistently present form of political resistance. As the group gained attention from the media, the number of its supporters and participants swelled, but this attention also provoked harsh criticism, as well as state intervention. Pro-government columns and newspapers attempted to shame the Saturday Mothers for having “humiliated” the institution of motherhood, reducing it to a set of political claims that they were allegedly too uneducated to actually understand.[5] Eventually, the police became a presence at the sit-ins, outnumbering the Saturday Mothers “tenfold,” according to one woman who was active in the group. As the police became more violent and began arresting those who participated in the Saturday Mothers sit-ins, the number of attendees dwindled, until they stopped altogether on 19 March 1999. However, they resumed again in 2009, after a ten-year hiatus, and continue today.

Born not only out of the disappearance of their loved ones but also out of their frustrations with a hostile state that has dragged its feet in legal proceedings regarding the disappeared, the Saturday Mothers has emerged as a political movement rooted in the fundamental impossibility of grieving Kurdish and leftist death in Turkey. The Saturday Mothers—a group of “mostly middle-aged women” who did not chant slogans or carry banners and instead sat on the ground silently holding pictures of their missing relatives—were subject to pro-government media smear campaigns as well as police brutality and arrest. The crime here lies in the transgression of the rules of decorum of grieving. The Saturday Mothers’ spectacle of grief blurs the distinction between private enactments of mourning for the deceased and public displays of rage against a state that systematically destroys Kurdish bodies.

On the first Saturday after the Suruç Massacre, the Saturday Mothers were again in Galatasaray Square for their 539th demonstration. Instead of mourning one of their disappeared relatives, they dedicated the demonstration to the victims of the Suruç massacre, noting that four of the victims—Cemil Yıldız, Çağdaş Aydın, Büşra Mete, Hatice Ezgi Sadet—attended the demonstrations every Saturday. Maside Ocak, sister of Hasan Ocak, read a eulogy for them, saying, “This week, we are sitting here without them. We are proud to have known them, to have shared the same square and the same dream with them.” The connection between the Saturday Mothers and the victims of the Suruç bombing is a solidarity rooted in the work of grieving: the violence that erased their relatives is the same violence behind the Suruç bombing. This solidarity is a recognition that it is not only Kurdish bodies whose disposable and ungrievable deaths are essential to preserving the stability of the Turkish state. The same holds true, for example, for Alevi deaths, particularly in the Gazi and Okmeydanı districts of Istanbul, neighborhoods in urban centers that have been flagged by security forces.

Grief and Alevi Resistance

In May of 2014, Uğur Kurt was shot and killed in the yard of a cemevi (Alevi house of worship) in the neighborhood of Okmeydanı. Kurt came to the cemevi to attend the funeral of a family friend and was struck by a stray bullet shot by police who were suppressing protests over the death of Berkin Elvan, a twelve-year-old Alevi boy who died nearly a year after being struck by a tear gas canister during the Gezi Park protests. In other words, the state killed Uğur Kurt while he was mourning in their attempts to quash protests mourning the death of another Alevi killed by state violence.

Even if this had been an isolated incident, it is not difficult to see how grief might give way to rage. Indeed, in response to the protests over Berkin Elvan’s death, then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said, “What? Must there be an observance [for] everyone killed? He is dead. It is done with.” However, one need not look far to find numerous instances of the state’s brazen discrimination against and destruction of Alevis in Turkey: the Maraş massacre of 1978, the Çorum massacre of 1980, the Sivas massacre of 1993, the Gazi massacre of 1995, to name a few. Similarly, during the Gezi Park protests, the government tried to frame Alevis as the responsible party, as actively working to divide the country.

Most recently, the police killed another Alevi during its post-Suruç anti-terror operations. Günay Özarslan, mentioned above, was a revolutionary leftist who was shot fifteen times in her home in Istanbul on 24 July 2015. According to police records, “she did not fire at the police and there was no confrontation whatsoever in her home.” After her death, her body was taken to a cemevi—an Alevi house of worship—for funeral preparations. For three days, the police bombarded not only the cemevi, but the entire neighborhood, preventing her funeral from proceeding. The office of the Istanbul governor even issued a statement regarding Özarslan’s funeral, stating that there would be no “obstructions” to the funeral so long as it did not “resort to actions forbidden by the law, such as carrying weapons, covering the face, wearing clothing affiliated with an organization, or making propaganda.” It was only after an intervention by a number of Alevi organizations as well as two members of Parliament that the governor’s office came to a “funeral agreement” and Özarslan was finally allowed to be buried.

In a twist of tragic irony, Günay Özarslan was cleared of all charges after her murder but before her funeral was allowed. The fallacy of justice in the death of Özarslan is exemplary of the kinds of violence systematically carried out against Alevis by the state and its actors. That she was cleared of all charges means that she literally died for no reason. The exasperated uproar that followed was consequently an expression of grief rooted in the fact that Alevi death is part of the modus operandi of the Turkish state. And yet, as the Istanbul governor’s statement regarding Günay Özarslan’s funeral shows, certain forms of grief are expected to adhere to certain standards of apolitical decorum. Extrapolating the grief over her individual death to indict the system of violence against Alevis, therefore, poses an extreme threat to the affective domains of Turkish national belonging.

Mournability in the Depths of the Turkish Nation-State

On the seventh day that the state was preventing the trucks carrying YPG martyrs from returning to Turkey, Ali Coşkun, uncle of they YPG martyr Ferit Coşkun, asked plaintively, “What does the state want from dead bodies?” Allowing these bodies to cross the border would be to allow for their grievability, to admit that their deaths meant something. Instead, the state is trying to wish their bodies away, to render them meaningless, forcing them to decompose in the back of semi-trucks. As the cases of the Saturday Mothers and the Alevi neighborhoods illustrate, the state wants these bodies to “leave a mark that is no mark”[6]; it wants these bodies to be over and done with, to have never been in the first place.

Kurds and Alevis killed by the state and its actors are fundamentally unmournable. In order to maintain the illusion of its own legitimacy, the state has to frame such deaths as either meaningless, necessary, or both. Mournability is a privilege reserved for those whose deaths corroborate this illusion; hence the emotional outpouring over the deaths of police officers and soldiers who have been “martyred” in the line of duty. Mourning and grief are therefore better understood as affective tools used to patrol the boundaries of the nation-state, providing meaning, solace, and comfort to those who belong within it while permitting for the remorseless annihilation of those who do not.

Hence, when news pundits and politicians insist that now is not the time for politics but rather a time for personal grief, and for somber reflection and an admission of loss, they deny the fact that all of these deaths are a fundamental element of the world proffered by their politics and their actual practices of governance and violence. When pro-government journalist Abdülkadir Selvi characterized the revelation by Can Dündar that Turkey was sending weapons across the border into Syria as an attempt by the ever-elusive “parallel structure” to delegitimize the Erdoğan administration, he was trying to foreclose legitimate inquiry into the relationship between the AKP government and ISIS. When the pro-government Sabah newspaper published a now-infamous article that proclaimed as its headline, “The PYD [Partiya Yetîkiya Demokrat, or Democratic Union Party in Rojava] is more dangerous than ISIS,” it was trafficking in nationalist fears of Kurds and simultaneously fostering an implicit sympathy for ISIS. And when President Ahmet Davutoğlu legitimized ISIS’ existence as a structure that offers a “front for existing discontent and anger in the region,” he did not acknowledge the discontent and anger in Turkey over widespread violence and suffering at the state’s own hands.

To mourn the deaths of the victims of the Suruç bombing is at the same time to interrogate the historical and material conditions that give way to such suffering in the first place. “The point of public mourning,” writes Judith Butler, “is to expand our ideas of what constitutes a livable life, to expand our recognition of those lives that are worth protecting, worth valuing.” After all, the members of the Socialist Youth Associations Federation were going to Kobanê to build a memorial forest commemorating the fallen of Kobanê and to plant fruit trees in the name of Berkin Elvan. They were trying to build a world predicated upon the vulnerability entailed by suffering, a world that pushes back against the systematic ungrievability of certain lives—not only Kurdish and Alevi lives, but also Armenian, LGBTQ, and leftist lives. In Turkey, where such lives have been systematically and persistently destroyed for the better part of a century, to admit that these lives are lives worth mourning is to recognize the finitude of the Turkish nation-state. It is up to those of us who are left behind to take up this grief, to use it to fight for the world that the dead of Suruç were trying to build.

[I would like to thank Anthony Alessandrini, Cihan Tuğal, Emrah Yıldız and Elif Sarı for their generosity in providing feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this article.]

NOTES

[1] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso Books, 2006), 20.

[2] Butler, Precarious Life, 22.

[3] Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950, 222.

[4] Meltem Ahıska, “Kayıp Annelerin Şiddete Tanıklığı,” Amargi Üç Aylık Feminist Teori ve Politika Dergisi 2 (Fall 2006), 22.

[5] Başak Can, “Barış Anneleri,” Toplum ve Kuram: Hakikat ve Adaletin İzinde Doksanları Hatırlamak vol. 9 (2014), 38.

[6] Butler, Precarious Life, 36.

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]