Özge Yaka, Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (University of California Press, 2023).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Özge Yaka (OY): After focusing on state theory and political economy in my formative academic years, including my PhD, I needed a change of orientation. I wanted to spend my remaining intellectual energy understanding and analyzing social movements that are challenging the hegemony I had been working on for a long time.

Environmental movements in general and the anti-HEPP (Hydroelectric Power Plant) movement in particular derived my interest for two main reasons. The first reason was that environmental movements were one of the few popular and effective movements (together with the feminist movement) in the increasingly authoritarian and repressive political environment of Turkey. I was also sensing the central importance of grassroots environmental movements not only against the “bulldozer capitalism” (see Erdem Evren’s Bulldozer Capitalism) that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was promoting with endless (and endlessly destructive) energy and construction projects—but also globally in the face of the ecological crisis the extractive-neoliberal capitalism accelerates (and hence, is unable to produce effective responses). This was my Marxist political economist self, making politically strategic research decisions. 

What had opened new horizons for me and forced me to write this book though was my curiosity toward the motivations of people—not of movement activists and professionals, the usual suspects that I closely associate with—but the “real people”, the villagers who are resisting HEPPs so effectively, especially the peasant women who are at the forefront of the struggle. I was truly curious about their reasons, determination, and commitment that empowers them to resist not only the private companies but also the state and its repressive apparatus. 

This second reason made me conduct extensive ethnographic research, something that I have not done before, in many villages and valleys in three different regions of Turkey in which the HEPPs are concentrated. In the end, what I observed in the Black Sea Region, especially my conversations with women, made me write this book. Why? Because as far as I was concerned, their voices—their narratives, their motivations to resist HEPPs and protect their rivers—were not heard in the ever-growing literature on environmental movements and environmental justice within political ecology, human geography, anthropology, or sociology. So, I had to come up with a way to make them heard, which took the shape of developing a novel body-centered, phenomenological approach that relates women’s everyday sensory-effective connections to rivers (and to non-human entities and environments in general) and their political agency. Establishing this relation, I conceptually engaged with the body, as well as emotions, memory, and place.

OY: This book is about the resistance of Black Sea women against HEPPs in Turkey. But it is also about the environmental struggles of our age in general, and about what they reveal in terms of our more-than-human existence. 

It argues, very briefly, that grassroots environmental struggles cannot be reduced to purely economic motivations (sustaining livelihoods) or cultural and political contexts (struggles for political autonomy and sovereignty and/or secrecy, cosmology, and religious belief). These are, of course, powerful motivations for many struggles around the globe. I also observe these motivations in Turkey’s Mediterranean region (where subsistence agriculture is dependent on irrigation and hence river waters are instrumental for sustaining livelihoods) and the Kurdish region (where the struggle against HEPPs is embedded in the broader struggle for Kurdish autonomy), respectively. But this is not the whole story. That is why I focused on the Black Sea case—to demonstrate that our everyday, bodily, sensory, and affective connections with the non-human world function as media of political agency. This phenomenological connection, which is largely invisible, is the basis for our relationship with the place, engenders body memory, and conditions what we call selfhood and identity. What makes this largely ignored, flattened-out connection suddenly visible, and even vital, is the threat of environmental dispossession. In the face of such a threat, the routine becomes visible, the mundane becomes special—and the rivers become an urgent cause, so urgent that one puts her life on the line for it. In a way the threat of losing the rivers forces what Husserl called “phenomenological reduction”—the method of bracketing our positive knowledge and representations to return to the description of our lived experience.

I know that phenomenology is not normally the way to go if you study environmental movements and resistance. And I did not do it because I was a phenomenologist, or this was my chosen methodological standpoint when I started—not at all. I was neither familiar with phenomenology nor with the work of Merleau-Ponty and feminist phenomenologists who build on him. The whole framework emerged very slowly, and painstakingly, in relation to the empirical data. It was my conversations with the East Black Sea women, their stories and narratives, that forced me to engage with the literature on the body, and I arrived at Merleau-Ponty and contemporary feminist and eco-phenomenology through corporeal feminism. Grounded theorists would be proud. As a result, the book turned out to be a truly transdisciplinary venture that builds on and thinks with various fields and disciplines such as feminist theory, political ecology, social movement studies, critical geography, environmental humanities, affect studies, memory studies, actor-network theory, new materialism, posthumanism, phenomenology of body and water, theories of justice and environmental justice, indigenous studies, and Turkish studies, to name a few.  

I went in such a conceptual direction because the field had taught me that we cannot grasp the core of the grassroots environmental struggles of our age—which are, in my opinion, struggles for more-than-human coexistence—without grasping the ecological embeddedness of our social existence and the more-than-human character of our lifeworld (of our everyday lived experiences, practices and encounters). Non-human entities and environments are not only resources for us—we live with them, interact with them, and feel our “flesh” only in connection with them. They are central to our social existence and place-based lifeworld. This idea of a more-than-human lifeworld stands at the core of the notion of socio-ecological justice that I develop towards the end of the book. By introducing this notion, I aim to intervene in the environmental justice literature by framing human-non-human relationality as a matter of justice. In other words, environmental justice is not only about the just distribution of environmental goods and bads or about the recognition of certain cultures and identities—it is also about the ethics of coexistence and the relational nature of the social and ecological realms (as many Indigenous communities and struggles around the world have been teaching us).

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

OY: It could be seen as a radical rupture if you consider my PhD thesis and first publications as my previous work. I remember sending a picture of my work desk in Paris to my boyfriend, who lived in Berlin. On my desk, you could see Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject, Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, and Rosi Braidotti’s Patterns of Dissonance. I added a note asking, “There was an orthodox Marxist doing political economy, what happened to her?”. He responded, “Old Karl keeping guard while simultaneously getting his beard queered,” in reference to the framed Karl Marx portrait with a glittery beard on my desk.

This research indeed transformed me drastically. My methodological perspective, conceptual orientation, and even my discipline have changed. I started as a Marxist political economist with a PhD in Sociology and ended up as a feminist geographer who works with phenomenology! But still, some things have not changed like the old Karl keeping guard. In the first chapter of my book, I analyze the political-economic (and political-ecologic) context in which the anti-HEPP struggles flourish. And I think this analysis is essential even when you mainly discuss the relationship between somatic experience and political agency. So, the basis is there, I just went on to build something else on it. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

OY: Scholars of political ecology, environmental humanities, and phenomenology. But also social scientists in general. And feminists. And, maybe even more importantly, students. Activist-minded young people who are interested in understanding and analyzing the world we live in and in the struggles that aim to change it.

The impact I would like the book to have is twofold. On the one hand, I want it to act as a vehicle to amplify the voices of the women I talked to. I want people to know about them, their grievances, their struggle, and their individual and collective stories. And also their more-than-human lifeworld. I want the book to transport people into the East Black Sea villages to make them feel what it means to live with a river—what sensations, bodily affects, and emotions such a life engenders. On the other hand, I want the book to have an impact on a more conceptual level in demonstrating how we can think about environmental struggles in a different way, as struggles for coexistence, and how we can put seemingly very different theories and approaches in dialogue to analyze activism and political agency. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

OY: I prioritize presenting my work in public settings these days while I continue working on the themes I discussed in the book in a different, more accessible language. I also aim to expand my focus to read and write about the environmental movements in the wider Middle Eastern geography.

I also am working on a personal project—a book on motherhood that discusses my own lived experience in close dialogue with feminist and psychoanalytical theories. Another project is writing a book on phenomenology and body in a more accessible language in the future.

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter Four, “Place, Body, Memory: River Waters and the Immanence of the Past in the Present,” pages 120 to 125) 

Memories of the Body, Memories of the Place: Retrieving the Past through Embodied Sensory Interactions with River Waters 

Everyday, even banal personal memories of persons, events, and places remain underrepresented within the field of memory studies, which is mainly occupied with collective-social memories. Memories of everyday life and experiences, however, are central to our sense of self and our attachment to place. When we talk about memory, we refer to a mental capacity—to remember and reclaim, to retain and retrieve. We mostly overlook the ways in which this act of recollection occurs within and through the corporeal-material interaction of our bodies with our environments. Bodies are not only central to how we experience the world; they are also fundamental to how we store and reclaim those experiences as memories. Memory, in this sense, can be defined as “a process of encoding and storing records of experience which can be retrieved or which re-emerge in subsequent practice”, which involves lived bodies, things, and environments situated in place. 

The concept of body memory, on the other hand, is largely associated with implicit memory, what Merleau-Ponty defined as “knowledge in the hands.” Body memory, however, is not limited to this habitual type, which is widely discussed through well-known examples of riding a bike or playing piano as implicit recollection of pre-reflexive knowledge that is embodied in and expressed through physical activities. Body memory entails a broader range of memories of “being bodily in the world” as “instances of remembering places, events and people with and in the lived body”. Casey is in line with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-subject when he defines body memory as a “trace,” as “a survival of the past, an enjambment” in his published course notes. The past, in other words, exists in the present in bodies, through body memory. In the case of the East Black Sea Region, corporeal survival of the past, in the bodies of people and in the waters of the river, is constitutive of their political subjectivities as they protest against hydropower plant development. 

Thomas Fuchs maintains that corporeal experiences anchored in body memory “spread out and connect with the environment like an invisible network, which relates us to things and to people.” Body memories extend to spaces, places, and situations. They are very much entangled with the tangible materiality of our place-world. Memory is, then, like perception, not the act of remembering that occurs in an isolated mind; it is a complex intercorporeal and situational process whereby places, bodies, and things re-enact the past. It is not limited to a set of abstract recollections insofar as the past is not represented, but is re-enacted, as Bergson once put it, through body memory, through the everyday sensory relationship with river waters. Thus, we access the past not so much through images and words, but primarily through immediate experience and action, in place. 

The example both Thomas Fuchs and Hartmut Rosa invoke is the famous madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The episode, as is well known, illustrates how a piece of tea-soaked cake brings complex memories back. It demonstrates how familiar sensations aroused by certain spaces, places, situations, and bodily encounters can function as memory cores that recall and release enclosed memories under suitable circumstances. Fuchs discusses this in terms of “situational” and “intercorporeal” memory. I encountered various examples of situational and intercorporeal memory when I asked villagers about their motivations behind opposing hydropower projects. Particularly in the case of middle-aged and older residents, the memories of their childhood and their parents often came up. Those memories often involved their bodily-sensory connection with river waters. Semra explained to me how her memories and personal history are inextricably bound up with the river waters in front of her house:

I see my mother and my father by this [Arılı] river; every time I look at the river I remember them. …We are keen on our history. How could I give up on my river?

The first sentence of Semra’s statement clarifies how memory cores work. The visual memory of her mother and her father by the river is released every time she sees the river in the present. 

 ……

“Senses are powerful sources of body memory,” Susan Steward tells us, due to the body’s capacity to carry memories of senses somatically. Oftentimes our sensory memories, which are embodied registers of our encounters with the sensible world, involve more than one sense in complex interaction. As they are anchored in place, memories of senses are situational memories, to use Fuchs’s typology. And, as in the example of the madeleine, different senses participate in various combinations in situational memory. Situational memory emerges through the interaction of bodies, places, and things under certain circumstances, and reflects the multisensory character of those everyday interactions. Let us take the example of Selime, whom I mentioned above. Selime, who was around sixty years old at the time we talked, told me that she was ready to die to protect the river, and pointed to a spot several hundred meters ahead along the riverbed: 

Look, there is a waterfall over there. We used to take a break here with my parents when we were on our way to the plateau [yayla]. We would always eat and sleep next to the river during our journey.

Every time Selime sees that waterfall, or walks again along the river to the plateau, every time she sleeps and wakes up—as her house is located by the river—to the sound of it, she remembers her childhood, her parents, and the intimacy she shared with them, which are anchored in place and, most of all, in the very flow of the river. 

Memories of the past localized in the body become the present. For Selime, it is the multisensory body memories, as well as her embodied experiences of river waters in the present, that retrieve those memories, that connect her, now middle-aged, to rivers and to her long-gone childhood and ancestors. Ayten Aydın, from Arhavi (EBR), also talks about her childhood memories when she is asked about her opposition to HEPPs. Her memories are also multisensory body memories of river waters: 

Our mothers worked in the fields. We, the children, used to go down to the river and spend all day there. The river was our playground.  We used to drink from it, eat our meals by it, and wash ourselves with its waters. We will fight to the end, and we won’t give up on our river. 

 ……

The past leaks in to the present with the flow of the river, as childhood experiences are retrieved within the constant everyday interaction and sensory connection with its waters. The loss of the river might not mean the loss of memories per se, as mental constructs. But it means the loss of the “intimate relation between memory and place, realized through the lived body,” and the loss of the “immanence of the past in the present”.