A woman raped, disenchanted, and sickened by the burden
of proof. Dogmatic, hypocritical, cowardly students. The first represents the
Armenian Diaspora, and the second, politicized Kurds, in two telling fantasies
that have adorned the pages of Taraf, the sometime-contrarian Turkish
newspaper, which recently boasted the Wikileaks first-publication rights in
Turkey, and which is best known for its profound ambivalence with respect to
just about everything but the military establishment. The fantasies in question
were featured in columns by Alper Görmüş, in “Why are Armenians ‘stuck’ in 1915
. . .”, and by Halil Berktay, in “Not that I was asked, but no, I do not want
to teach at the BDP,” which appeared at the tail-end of 2011.1
In the Turkish media of all stripes sexism comes in
spades.
These pieces exemplify a kind of quick psychologizing
discernible in many writings that, while purporting to lend some kind of
sociopolitical support to Armenians and Kurds, in fact objectify them as highly
irrational, unstable, susceptible subordinates trapped or reveling in
victimhood. The writers slip into the shoes of authority they criticize, and
identify themselves with its gaze—the venerable older brother, the master
professor—in formulaic, instrumentalizing readings of the other as though in a
laboratory experiment. Gutted by the very fantasies they conjure up in order to
illustrate their anti-authoritarian claims, their analogical and interrogative
tautologies delineate the very bounds and fabric of the imagination.
‘HEY, I GOT A SOCIAL DISEASE!’2: THE DISEASE ANALOGY
In the title of the column by Alper Görmüş, a seasoned
journalist who received the Hrant Dink prize in 2009, the quotation marks
around the word ‘stuck’ (‘takılıp kaldı . . .’) foreground the citable,
repeatable quality of the word while mirroring the responsibility-shirking
attitude of the column. Unlike other, affirmative or critical, uses of scare
quotes in a title, the quotation marks here serve as a safety net around a
phrase left hanging (a sense reinforced by the ellipses placed within the quotation
marks in the original) as someone else’s qualifier about Armenians. The entire
title is a question that the writer himself simultaneously poses and withdraws
by replacing the question mark with ellipses: “Why are Armenians ‘stuck’ in
1915 . . .” Other than a disclaimer of the kind it’s not me who said it, the
title registers no distance, no analytical or critical distinctions.
The same attitude is visible in the more earnest
overarching descriptions of crime denial, and the denial of the “1915 massacres”
in particular: “The perpetrator’s denial of his crime can, in some cases, be
even more damaging than the crime itself,” reads the very first sentence, which
would clearly have the reader empathize with the hypothetical victim. But the
tentative nature of the qualifier “in some cases” is quickly lost in the
“fated” (mukadder) damage which comes to possess the victim in the most
absolute terms:
“Every victim who encounters such a denial will expend
all their energy on turning the ‘denial’ into ‘acknowledgement,’ unless they
have exhausted all of their life energy and retreated or ended their lives. . .
The primary feeling of such a person will inevitably be ‘rage.’ On the other
hand, a huge ethical problem presents itself when deniers, forgetting that they
are the very cause of this ‘rage,’ further attempt to accuse a person almost
sickened [neredeyse hastalanmış] with rage for being in that state. Forgiving
does more good to the forgiver than to the forgiven . . .” (italics mine,
quotations in bold in the original).
What Görmüş objects to here and later is not the
characterization (“almost sickened with rage”) of the victim who, he further
adds, will need to “pour out the venom inside her,” but the deniers’ attempt to
lay the blame for some such “almost sickness” on the victim herself. The
vagueness of the phrase “almost sickened” itself captures the status of “sick”
between a metaphor and a medical diagnosis, thus echoing the
responsibility-shedding quality of the quotation marks in the title. The moment
unfolds as yet another instance of misplaced analogies to human physiology,
pathology, and contagion in reference to social problems, as well as imputations
of social psychological illness, that pervade the Turkish media and the columns
of many self-proclaimed democrats. Before analyzing imputations of
psychological illness, it is interesting to note how anti-discrimination
writings analogically slip into biological determinism, and how the language of
“disease” (hastalık),3 marshaled to metaphorically displace sociopolitical
problems, taps into a repository of fear and mystification surrounding the
number one historic cause for death en masse: epidemics. As a political
analogy, the language of “disease” is an alarmist and mystifying concoction
that pushes many buttons at once: It evokes images of personal stigma (through
additional metaphors stigmatizing diseases),4 doom, and global apocalypse; it blurs
agency through connotations of natural determination and preordainment, and
recalls epidemic-related states of emergency that have historically licensed
witchhunts, minority pogroms, and even anti-(bio-) terror laws. The disease
analogy rather successfully intensifies angst, mystifies all, and explains
nothing.
One is tempted to joke that the use of disease as a
metaphor is so pervasive as to be called, well, a disease. Nor are all of its
uses metaphorical. Lamentably, in 2010 the same Taraf hosted in the guest
column “Every Side [Her Taraf]”5 edited by Markar Esayan what amounted to a
relentless “debate” amongst conservatives as to whether homosexuality is a sin,
or quite literally, a disease.6 But the analogical use of the word disease
proves the most fruitful and, as I will try to show, relevant. Markar Esayan
himself privileges “disease” as one of the many introductory metaphors in his
book The Tight Room of the Present (Şimdinin Dar Odası).7 Quoting the opening
paragraph of his own award-winning book in his Taraf column, “The Past,” he
writes: “To be a person without a past… This hang-up is not new. . . This
disease is not one acquired on purpose or knowingly. [We Armenians,]8 [w]e
Easterners [and] we Anatolians live mostly in the Narrow Room of the Present,
and fear the past just as much as the mouse fears the cat and the cat fears the
dog.” Elsewhere, ruminating on “the Kurdish issue,” Esayan declares: “We are
all sick; we have all gotten sick and we maintain a very good relationship with
our sickness. Writing our immoralities backward, we read them as virtue.”9
The analogy of “disease” is also a favorite of Ali
Bayramoğlu’s. A columnist in Yeni Şafak and one of the leaders of the “Great
Catastrophe” apology campaign,10 Bayramoğlu has no fewer than 12 columns with
the word “disease” in the title, in immediate or latent reference to “symbolism
defect disease,” staunch laïcité, militarization, misconceptions of society,
anti-government prejudice, the deep state, nationalism, power, and “The Kurdish
and Military Problem: Two Intertwined Diseases.” Concerning nationalistic
objections to the protest slogan ‘We are all Armenian’ in the aftermath of the
murder of Hrant Dink, Bayramoğlu observes, “we are faced with a structure that
does not understand metaphor, that has nothing whatsoever to do with simile,
that is literalist, that attempts to explain everything by way of straight
signs, that tries to graft even Islamism and nationalism on this symbolic
defect.” Perhaps in defiance of such pedantry, that last column is titled
“Political Symbol Disease.”11
Of all the devotees of the “disease” analogy, Etyen
Mahçupyan, writing earlier for Taraf and now back in Zaman, is the most
committed to making it work. In a column titled, quite simply, “Disease,”
Mahçupyan asserts that “human perception” (insani bir algılama) accounts for
the corollary between medicine and politics, and defends its salience despite
acknowledging its flawed positivist thrust (never mind that defining as natural
the metaphorical corollary between the body and society is tautological). The
quotient of social “health” according to “sociopsychology,” in this view, is
the ability for co-existence and functional communication, as opposed to
assimilation, the use of force, and blame-game (itemized as the Turkish state
and society’s “sick” attitudes toward the Kurds).12 In another column titled
“Acute and Chronic,” the writer explores the etiology of infectious and
autoimmune diseases, only to analogically find that European racism, even as it
takes the immigrant to be a “germ,” itself constitutes the “chronic” and
“self-generated” (bünyenin kendisinde) disease issuing from European modernity
and liberalism. By contrast, racism—and according to the writer, its root-cause
nationalism—“entered” the otherwise robust Ottoman Empire as an “infection,”
but then became “chronic.”13 European racism was thus a self-generated disease
of seeing immigrants as germs, as opposed to the Ottoman Metabolism’s originary
good health. One begins to wonder whether European racism should more concisely
be diagnosed Regional Congenital Hypochondria.
Where does this analogical thinking come from and where
does it lead? Languages have disease-related dead metaphors such as “plagued
by, poisoned by, infested with, congested, contagion, immunity, virus, toxic,
antidote,” and, of course “social ills.” Words that once literally spelled
horrors in human existence or exuded a sense of new scientific explanatory
power can in their next or parallel lives adopt secondary or idiomatic meanings
that are, nevertheless, unsuitable for rhetorical heavy-lifting.
Disease-related dead metaphors gain discursive power when used pervasively and
superficially to stigmatize an opponent group or theory. But they crumble under
the weight of one bold-faced, capitalized title after another. And as a social
theory, extended metaphors of disease not only hark back all the way to
Antiquity but are rather antiquated themselves.
This last point is no small matter. The notion of a “body
politic,” grafted upon an analogy between society and the individual organism,
dates back to a determinable point in history not because there is a similarity
grounded in “human perception,” but because political discourse, historically
that of ruling elites, co-opted the body as a resource for metaphor as well—a
resource that is readily experienced as a unit of coherence by the individual
subject and that can never be avoided by her. As metaphors, the body politic
and its pathologies evolved along with societies and with increasingly
elaborate scientific understandings of the body. And yet, “the body that
featured in comparisons of body and society did not have a historical
dimension.”14 Colorful physiological analogies for social problems and ideals
pervaded pre-modern Europe, and fueled the French Revolution (the body as a
metaphor for sovereignty, as a narrative device concretizing political
abstractions, and as an element of ceremonial spectacle), followed by another
peak in social functionalist organicism in 19th-century sociology and
anthropology. Social theories scripted on the body-society analogy assume and
idealize social integration and cohesion, using the analogy as a narrative tool
to create the illusion of and excuse for “scientific” claims.15 The history of
the categories of the normal versus the pathological in “hard” sciences itself
has long been a subject for study, as have the analogies to physiological
pathology favored by totalitarian regimes—such as Nazism with its “body
politic” and the racially designated “toxins, parasites, tumors, bacteria,”
etc., of which it should be “purged.”16 If knowing that extended metaphors
comparing society to the body are, and have always been, thoroughly ideological
is not enough to dissuade a social theory enthusiast from searching for the
“right” physiological analogies for society in lieu of the “wrong” ones, then
perhaps a step-by-step invitation to consider both the individual
psychoanalytic dimension of otherness and the historical, fluid stereotypes of
racial, sexual, and psychological “pathology” would prove liberating.17 It may
be difficult for us all to recognize the stereotypes going into our
assumptions; it should not, however, be difficult to realize that the problem
is not this or that particular stereotype attributed to a group, but the
ever-present endeavor of stereotyping itself.
In short, the comparison of nationalism and racism to
“disease” is no more natural than the nationalist and racist comparison of
minorities, immigrants, or foreigners to disease. In the world as we (should)
know it, the comparison of the society to an “organism” with its taxonomy of
“pathologies” is studied as a historic artifact, not a living legacy—unless the
better half of the previous century and this one have entirely passed one by.
The metaphors of pathology, if ever used, are best humored as dead metaphors,
not mobilized for stigmatizing discourse or resurrected as sociological
zombies. The urge inherent in the society-body comparison here and elsewhere18
might be one of rhetorical subversion, but the logic is amiss. Just as one
cannot subvert a bad racial stereotype with a good racial stereotype, one
cannot subvert a bad analogy by taking its square, as in “racism is the disease
of calling a group of people a disease.” Furthermore, stereotyping one group is
not counterbalanced by “even-handedly” stereotyping another; rather, this piles
one set of stereotypes upon another. But the most egregious thoughtlessness
takes place when a writer calls nationalism or racism a disease, and then frames
a particular geographic or ethnic entity as (inherently!) racist or
nationalist, effectively designating that entity as a carrier of disease. How
is that not nationalistic or racist? Moreover, conveniently, the metaphor is
used to reinstate a prelapsarian cohesion, thus externalizing a “racism via
nationalism” as “not self-generated.” But most importantly, this tautological
metaphor of “the disease of racism in the social organism” tells us absolutely
nothing about racism. Identifying sociopolitical segments, actors, agents,
groups, attitudes, facts, and events all at once as “sick” and demanding their
responsible “treatment” is a contradiction in terms—in metaphor—that blurs and
in fact eliminates agency and causality altogether. Disease actively spreads
and yet cannot itself be addressed with a question. Agency falls squarely in
the middle of nowhere between germ, cell, symptom, sickness, sick organism,
medication, doctor, and hospital in this analogical universe. Which one of
these is the state? Which one is the society? Which are journalists? Writers?
‘LIKE WE’RE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DISTURBED!’19: AN ALL-PURPOSE
FORMULA OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DISEASE
Insinuations of “psychological illness” straddle the
metaphorical and the medical—not because psychological illness doesn’t exit,
but because discourses “of” psychological illness, especially as attributed to
groups, are always other than cases in psychiatry, itself a self-critical field
with an institutional history. Surely, when it comes to writings on “the diaspora”
(declared “not monolithic” and then characterized as a two-part or single
entity all over again), “disease” is asserted as both a metaphor and a literal
psychological diagnosis of collective trauma. Typical elements of the
psychological disease formula may include some or all of the assertions to the
effect:
1. that (all of) “the diaspora” and (ultra-nationalists
in) Turkey are both (equally) “sick”;
2. but that one must focus on the diaspora’s
“psychological illness” in order to “empathize” with them;
3. that one first sees the immediate content of their
“illness”: rage and vengefulness;
4. but that deep down, damaged victims are needy, in fact
dependent on the “homeland,” for a final merciful recognition of some kind,
most urgently of their pain (“Like inside, the worst of us is good!”20).
The formula can be evinced in starry-eyed, cheeky
personal anecdotes along the lines of, “I saw the diaspora with my own eyes!”
In this new subgenre of travel writing, each “Travels to the Diaspora” lays
claims to honest unbiased observation while reproducing the same stereotypes as
the next. The formula can also take the shape of intelligence reports by
informants who then lament the diaspora’s “trust issues.” It can take the shape
of a lab technician’s report recording the strange habits of a curious
species.21 It can, on occasion, come with fictional fantasies.
This feat makes its most intriguing appearances in pieces
written as if to counteract damning or demonizing language about the Armenian
Diaspora. The column by Alper Görmüş is one of them. In his column, Görmüş
quotes Hosrof Dink, the brother of Hrant Dink, and the weekly newspaper Agos on
the topic of what became known in Turkey specifically as “the French law
criminalizing Armenian Genocide denial.” In an interesting synthesis, Görmüş
agrees with Hosrof Dink’s contention that Armenians in Turkey must have the
better fortune in being “treated” (tedavi) but criticizes him for seeing
geographic location as the reason why the diaspora is “so angry” and “stuck.”
For Görmüş, it is not their living abroad but the “internal” denial (in Turkey)
that accounts for “why they are like that.” Like what, is where Görmüş’s
protest against Hosrof Dink becomes no protest at all. Görmüş’s last section is
strewn with these words in bold and quotation marks—borrowed words, as it were,
that tirelessly recount the same master-narrative of trauma which he would
criticize, and for which he will yet assume no responsibility: Some are in fact
the words of Hosrof Dink quoted on the page, but others are not. “Treatment” is
chief among many: “The process of the Armenians’ ‘treatment’ can only begin
with ‘the denial of denial,’” Görmüş writes; the diaspora “was given no chance
to have any feeling but ‘rage’”; even the opportunity for healing [iyileşme] by
forgiving was taken away from them. I believe that when making references to
Armenians’ rage and their ‘sickened’ state, something must be said about what
made them like this.” Görmüş then traces the diagnosis of sickness backwards to
a cause, one that is conveniently both interned and externalized for damage
control: “Had the State of the Turkish Republic put a distance between itself
and the gangs that plotted and executed the massacres of 1915 and accepted all
that happened in all its clarity, the Armenians living abroad would have long
begun the process of ‘treatment’ by now.” Just as the apparent wish to absolve
the diaspora of blame for its “sickness” serves to confirm its status as sick,
the desiderata for truth with “all its clarity” confirm a simple,
self-contained, appropriately distanced criminal band as the locus of evil. A
sickness so certain, so general as to encompass an entire diaspora; an etiology
so contained and extrinsic as to escape diagnosis. All of these implications
fall under the rubric of “treatment,” the bold scare quotes borrowed from
medicine as if for a fleeting taste of authority from on high.
As the person to whom Görmüş defers in his sequels to the
first column, Etyen Mahçupyan well deserves another stop in the whirlpool of
disease language concerning the diaspora in the Turkish media. Ever the
proponent of quaint discourses of “Eastern mentality” and “Western mentality”
in his books as well as articles,22 Mahçupyan further clings to essential
differences between the Armenians of Turkey versus those in the diaspora
(understood as non-Anatolian). The first are privileged with deeper insight
into “free will” and “the wide expanse between recognition and denial.” But at
the end of the day, “even the harshest names of the diaspora” could fathom
these notions, if it were not for the fact that “their emotional need is far
greater. . . They have been longing too long for an outstretched hand.”23
Finally, in his column “The ‘Sick’ Children of Anatolia,” he is at great pains
to apply the analogy of disease: “in the 19th century, everyone got sick one by
one. Interestingly, the last ones to get sick were the Armenians and the Turks
who ‘discovered’ their identity. [. . .] And not surprisingly, the disease [of
nationalism] ate its own children.” Mahçupyan here emphasizes a vast difference
in power between Ottoman and Armenian nationalisms, but concludes by way of
intoning a sad past that “whispers in our ears how nationalism sickened these
lands, and why we still fail to listen to or understand each other. It tells us
why Armenians abroad support the Dashnaks and why they are so dependent on
[muhtaç olduklarını] Turkey’s voice of the heart [gönül sesine]. Anatolia is
searching for the conscience and the heart that it has lost . . .”24 Notice
that the politicohistorical descriptions lend themselves to a metaphor entirely
lacking in agents, the extrinsic “disease” of nationalism, which morphs into
yet another metaphor (the past with its seductive whisper), and into yet
another (the voice of the heart). In a few nonchalant strides, we depart from
the “positive” pathology of the social organism and arrive at the sing-song
neighborhood of conscience. (It is not surprising that Ece Temelkuran, the
exemplary focus of my previous article, “Queens of Hearts,” has recently become
the object of Mahçupyan’s ire, but not on account of “the book” she
wrote—therein they have so much common ground.25 ) Committed as he is,
Mahçupyan is only taking his turn in a chorus refrain teeming with the innate
disease of racism, the extrinsic disease of nationalism, the venom of racism in
the blood, the venom of nationalism in the milk, the desperate Armenian, the
Armenian stuck in the past, the sick Diaspora Armenian, the cured Armenians of
Turkey. The pervasiveness is tragic; the pervasiveness is overwhelming; the
pervasiveness is, sometimes, even surprising.26
As anxious as democrats/journalists in the Turkish media
might be to “talk trauma,” someone is always talking faster. “Psychological
war” and “victimization psychology” are some of the oft-used phrases in
denialist sources—websites, conference proceeding, books—idealizing and
extolling a (racially defined) Turkish history, blaming Western imperialism and
Armenian separatism, and attributing to the diaspora such characterizations as
copy-cat behavior based on “the success of the Jewish Holocaust propaganda”;
“trauma psychology” explained as the “psychology of victimization and
exemption”; “Diaspora psychology” itemized as self-alienation, purely imaginary
reconstruction of the past, and an identity developed around hatred; “the
Armenian Psychological War” concocted internationally to constrain Turkey and
dismiss Ottoman war psychology, among others.27
The co-option of the terminology of psychology as
nationalist discourse is not only a denialist project; it can be a
non-negligible, and sometimes defining, aspect of the state orchestration of
post-genocidal “reconciliation” processes as well. As Thomas Brudhom eloquently
argues in Resentment’s Virtue: Jean-Améry and the Refusal to Forgive,28
reconciliation processes such as those in Germany and South Africa can dictate
forgiveness rather than inspire or even elicit it—not least by insinuations
about mental health. Therapeutic language, itself under increasing criticism in
relation to mass atrocity, can be co-opted by the authorities and the perceived
leaders of the public sphere to frame victims as traumatized, self-preoccupied,
deficient citizens stuck in the past. Dissent and resistance are suppressed and
the victims’ responses instrumentalized toward the higher end of a complete
“social harmony.” Emotions can be divested of their moral dimension and cast as
the purely sentimental and spiritual. In contrast to such framing, and because
of it, rage and resentment can be part of a legitimate demand for justice and
reparations. They can constitute ethical, rather than vengeful and violent,
resistance. As in the work of Améry, resentment can substantiate an
“impossible” demand that the society wish what “should never have happened”
never happened, that its view of the past and social identity be fully informed
at all times and not selective, and that its future be marked, not by a damning
collective guilt, but by fully-formed social responsibility.
THE SPADE IN ITS LIKENESS: THE RAPE SICKNESS ANALOGY
A truly perplexing aspect of the column by Görmüş is that
he devotes about a fifth of it to recount the plot for a story or novel he has
never written, a plot that functions much like a parable reflecting the longer
narrative of the column, “Why are Armenians ‘stuck’ in 1915…” This is not only
a story-within-a-story, but a mise en abîme that analogically reproduces the
greater narrative. The sub-plot sets up a (secondary) metaphorical
relationship: The larger narrative is “like” the parable inside it. An example
for this narrative strategy can be found in the Bible, in the story of King
David and Bathsheba, which has “the parable of the rich man” embedded in it.
David sees himself in the narrative mirror of the rich man, and through this
metaphorical detour comes to develop a moral feeling about his own action. The story-within-the-story
implicitly invites the reader to do the same, that is, to identify herself with
David in his moral self-discovery. But of course, there is no way of
guaranteeing with whom the reader will in fact identify herself. And there is
no guarantee that even after such self-identification takes place, the same
emotional response to the character in a story will arise in response to
oneself.29
Analogies can get the better of a writer, and illuminate
other things than their analogous moral. Görmüş embeds his parable in his
column thusly:
“Years ago, I had formulated in my mind a plot for a
story (perhaps a novel) around this theme . . . My heroine was a woman who was
raped by a man she very much trusted and called ‘ağabey’ [older brother]. When
trying to deal with the trauma caused by the shattering of her trust, the woman
faced one that was even worse: The man was saying that he had never done such a
thing, and to top it off, the woman’s friends and acquaintances were speaking
his language. My heroine decides to leave Istanbul, where she was born and
raised, to move to a remote Anatolian city where her older sister and
brother-in-law live, in the hopes of forgetting both the rape and the pain that
the denial of the crime caused, and of curing [tedavi] herself. There, she
would wield her rage on the one hand and keep track of the lawsuit she had
filed on the other. Nonetheless, a few years would suffice for her to realize
that this choice of hers would not serve the purpose she had intended. The woman
would come to realize in that time frame that what really made her “sick” was,
more than the rape, the denial of the injustice she had been objected to by the
man she had called “older brother” and by everyone who knew the truth. In the
plot in my mind the woman was driven by this perception to return to the lands
where she was born and raised, and to face her friends and acquaintances. Even
if the beginning would be disappointing, a friend whose conscience was bleeding
would finally acknowledge the truth and apologize, and the process of her
treatment would thus begin.”
A preliminary reading of this storyline, which of course
tells us so much about fantasy and nothing about the “analogous” history Görmüş
has in mind, will be about the elements of the story/analogy in itself. Here we
have a rape narrative following a certain set of premises that indicate an
urban cultural context which recognizes the woman as possessing a valid and
independent, if violated and obstructed, personal identity, agency, physical
integrity, sexual dignity, and privacy. In this regard, this is a fairly
standard rape-and-denial narrative most familiar from Hollywood movies (one in
eight of which features the rape of a woman, as well as male revenge on her
behalf) and sensational books such as Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman’s
Harrowing Quest for Justice, which may or may not thoroughly explore how a
seemingly gender-egalitarian system continues to uphold male dominance through
sociocultural and legal mechanisms. (In Europe and the United States alone, of
all the rapes reported, a small percentage is charged, and roughly about 10
percent get convictions. The ratio is but a fraction of this in many parts of
the world.)30
But even this premise is simultaneously and severely compromised:
The storyline explicitly endorses male domination as assumed by the female
outlook into the world and warranted by her inherent frailties. It may be a
factual given that a large number of rapes of women are by men of their
acquaintance, but it is not a given that these men are originally revered by
those women. Yet the story repeatedly asserts that the woman deeply trusted the
man as an “older brother,” and the denial by someone she so profoundly trusted
hurt her more than the rape itself. This is an incredibly problematic premise
that implicitly attributes boundless naiveté, dependence, and internalized
submission to the woman, a premise that in fact twice holds the victim herself
as the greater cause of her own suffering on account of her original, misplaced
trust—the wrong place being not the social structure but that particular bad
egg. “Trust” (güven), unless phrased so as to indicate mutuality, pertains to
the one who trusts, and not to the one to whom trust is directed. Her trust was
so absolute as to be of the kind placed in an “older brother” (an uncontested
criterion), but placed in the wrong man. What is problematized is not the
replication of a hierarchical family paradigm, but the woman’s inability to
detect aberration.
This causality immediately and consistently anchors our
attention on the series of frailties in the woman—her original misjudgment, her
total devastation, her negative, self-destructive, fruitless emotional response
of holding a grudge and seeking legal recourse. The storyline defines this
early on as “trauma” and then as “sickness” and reports from on high that the
woman “realizes” [i.e., the fact that] this is not the way to go, because the
actual cause of her suffering is not so much the rape, not even so much denial,
but that she needs to trust again.
The perpetrator is never the problem as an agent, but
remains an absent “denier” to the woman of everything he could have given her:
complete trust in the system as a family structure where she would remain the
happy subordinate. With the law crossed out as an incomplete, and therefore
irrelevant, basis for relationships of trust, we are to read this storyline as
a personal problem, between an aberrant, individual perpetrator (and cohorts
who inexplicably back him up) and a subordinate individual victim. The problem
is essentially interpersonal and only tangentially communal. The crime
temporarily upset the prelapsarian ideal of family cohesion: The solution can
only be a post-lapsarian reinstatement of the same.
Meanwhile, the victim does all the work—travels years and
distances—all of which comes to nil, with the final reward magically bestowed
by a random denier in a split second: a personal apology which finally begins
the victim’s “healing process.” This is suggestive, but in more layers than the
obvious. The “trauma” victim again had mistakenly deserted Istanbul (twice
reiterated: “where she was born and raised”) for a remote town in
“Anatolia”—the privileged locus of self-reflection. She returns—as it is she
who must travel yet again to face her deniers—and it takes just one denier’s
momentary change of heart, or shift in “conscience,” to begin her healing. Just
because the victim happened to materialize in situ.
In this analogy, the Diaspora Armenian = rape victim is
“stuck” indeed first and foremost because she is cast as a generic, objectified
victim in the raw through historic time: the victim herself, and beside
herself. A victim with neither her wits about her, nor her descendants, nor her
defenders. The absent perpetrator, however, is both interned and externalized—a
singular pervert buried in history. And yet, the perpetrator is indomitably
represented through historic time by proxy, through the denialist cohorts. The
Diaspora Armenian = rape victim has self-generated flaws (trust in the wrong
superior, fleeing roots), and the constitutive weakness of being destructible =
rapeable. Her fate is one of long and hard work in realizations about herself,
of her own trauma sickness, and her inevitable return to the location of crime
which she herself had deserted (a caveat overwriting forced displacement and
generational turnover in the diaspora). The perpetrator makes a comeback by
proxy, in the form of a fellow denier, now becoming the Savior of the victim
returned to sender as damsel-in-distress.
In the Turkish media of all stripes sexism comes in
spades. Ahmet Altan, editor-in- chief of Taraf, routinely compliments the Prime
Minister on his delikanlı ways—connoting good-willed macho, man of his word,
patron of the ’hood, “green” yet virile lad. In a recent drama of political
turnover in Turkey, Altan wrote that Turkish governments used to be to the
state as the “submissive woman” is to “the brutish man” (sprinkled with
domestic abuse details). But now, the state is to the government as the “wanton
woman” is to the seducible man. That makes for some anti-climactic content for
a column titled “The Roles Have Changed.”31 In all of one paragraph, Markar
Esayan, too, likened “the past” first to a “shameless . . . black widow,” then
a “virgin” who becomes a “wanton, coquettish . . . temple whore” sleeping with
“many a brute,” but still remaining “girl-boy-girl” [kızoğlankız, i.e.,
maiden]; the iconographic virgin-whore who “worships power. . . flirts with the
powerful. . . and offers herself first to this one, then to that.”32 Indeed!
On the other hand, the column by Görmüş does less, which
is more. It parades a reactionary storyline as an emancipatory one, and leaves
the ugly object hidden in plain sight. For rape is not like genocide; it is
part of genocide.
If we want to “talk trauma,” and rape immediately springs
to mind, but not the kind partaking in the history being represented, there is
a problem. If we are instead seeking a generic analogy in rape cum trauma, then
it is vital to remember that a woman’s rape is a pervasive representational
trope for exploiting entirely irrelevant political agendas. We must also
remember that men, too, get raped, in significant percentages especially in
prison but also elsewhere, as is coming into clearer contemporary focus despite
gender codes dictating silence. Although statistically men are more often the
victim of all violence, women live in much greater fear of assault. If we want
to talk rape-in-hierarchy, we can recall that women officers of the United
States Army who get raped are, instead of legally heard as they wish, often
discharged by their own superiors on spurious diagnoses of “personality
disorder” (as opposed to post-traumatic stress)—a verdict rewriting the
victims’ past, the crime, as well as their future. If we want to talk rape and
denial, we can remember that, steering clear of Hollywood movies, rape goes by
and large unreported in the greater world where there is no structure that
recognizes a woman as the owner of her own body in the first place.
Historically and in many parts of the world, what is considered violated is not
her own body or integrity but male ownership and honor “embodied” in her
alienable chastity, and purged through her exile or murder when violated. In
perhaps the world over, rape, violence, and murder charges for a man can be
mitigated by allegations on the woman victim’s sexual conduct, but charges for
a woman can only be mitigated by the violence she herself endured at the hands
of her victim. The law has only recently begun recognizing domestic rape (and
that, only in certain countries), and rape remains that odd crime hinging on
“consent.”33
A writer can devise whichever rape story he pleases. But
a serious problem arises where mass atrocity is compared to a singular urban scenario
of “sick” legal recourse for rape, followed by a randomly “curing” apology from
a fellow denialist (no charges pressed). That problem might be: Is there in
fact a similarity between mass atrocity and rape, and could that similarity be
the fact that there are kinds of rape and mass atrocity that cannot be legally
actionable, that remain absent from the entire grammar of the law?
Representation where there is no representability pretends to grant the woman a
kind of agency she never had, and strips away all the agency and resistance
that she did assert.
The growing literature and documentation on rape during
mass atrocity reveals many genocidal attitudes and practices in history: the
prohibition on sexual intercourse with “non-Aryans” and simultaneous sexual
abuse in Germany; the use of rape as a genocidal terror and assimilation
mechanism to induce pregnancy in Bosnia; genocidal rape, forced conversion, and
assimilation of women as domestic servants, sexual slaves, or coerced wives in
the Ottoman Empire, among a host of others.34 Genocidal rape as warfare
comprehends the above pervasive effect of rape in the world at large on a
massive scale of destruction, violence, and stigma.
And yet, instead of looking into rape as a reality in
genocide, Görmüş prefers to take it as an analogy for the diaspora’s
“sickness.” The diaspora becomes an inherently subordinate, naive, raw, sick
victim of urban rape, misguidedly seeking recourse in cold legal indictment and
enraged structural intervention—a recourse itself cast as irrelevant to the
ineffable and total destruction of the woman’s soul. The writer drives the
fantasy home, to the family reunion in the indivisible empire of the
imagination, where the sickened damsel-in-distress will be brought back to life
by the perpetrator-prince’s “brotherly” kiss of apology, personalized by proxy.
ENDNOTES
1. See www.taraf.com.tr/alper-
us/makale-ermeniler-neden-1915-e-takilip-kaldi.htm. This column became the
first of a three-part series, although there was a significant time gap before
the second installment, which followed, according to the author, significant
responses from the paper’s readership. The second column in question, by Halil
Berktay, will be the subject of my sequel to this article, which will appear in
the Armenian Weekly next month.
2. From the song “Gee, Officer Krupke” in “The West Side
Story,” parodying the various stereotypes that the establishment uses to frame
social problems—in this case juvenile delinquency. Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim,
1956.
3. The word “hastalık” could be rendered variously:
“disease, illness, sickness, malady, ailment,” among others. I suggest that
“disease” comes closest to “hastalık” in its nominal form, which connotes
pervasiveness without definitively implying “contagion” or “infectious” disease
(“bulaşıcı hastalık”).
4. Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor compares
psychological associations of diseases themselves—tuberculosis in the 19th
century and cancer in the 20th—as either an expression of the patient’s
character or an expression of the repression of the patient’s ‘true’ character.
The work was followed by a sequel, AIDS and Its Metaphors.
5. “Taraf” can mean aspect, way, (taking) side(s), (on)
behalf (of), party (to a negotiation, conflict, etc.).
6. The “debate” itself was sparked by a comment by Aliye
Kavaf, minister of “women and the family,” to the effect that homosexuality is
a disease and must be cured. Some of the contributions were then deemed prime
examples of hate speech. Responses have included those by Ayşe Günaysu (see
www.sesonline.net/php/genel_sayfa_yazar.php?KartNo=55223&Yazar=Ay%C5%9Fe+G%C3%BCnaysu)
and the organization Nefretsoylemi.org, which tracks hate speech (see
www.nefretsoylemi.org/rapor_aciklamalar.asp#). The newspaper Taraf itself
otherwise reports on and has regular columnists writing on LGBTT issues.
7. Further metaphors will be discussed below.
8. The book won the Inkılap Kitabevi book prize in Turkey
in 2005. For variations, compare the author’s quotation from his own book in
his own column at www.taraf.com.tr/markaresayan/makale-gecmis.htm (reprinted in
the author’s website) with the commercial blurb at
www.kitapyurdu.com/kitap/default.asp?id=88409, also in the author’s own website
www.markaresayan.com/?page_id=359.
9. See
http://taraf.com.tr/markar-esayan/makalekurt-sorunu-nasil-hallolunur.htm.
10. The text of this extremely controversial campaign can
be found in a number of languages at http://ozurdiliyoruz.com/.
11. See http://yenisafak.com.tr/yazarlar/?i=3621&y=Ali
Bayramoğlu.
12. See http://www.zaman.com.tr/yazar.do?yazino=1162747.
13. See http://www.zaman.com.tr/yazar.do?yazino=1166319.
14. A. D. Harvey, Political Metaphor and Political
Violence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 2–3.
15. See Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body
Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP,
1998) and Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in
Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, transl. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford UP, 1993).
16. See, for example, Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and
the Pathological (1943; 1966; published in English with an introduction by
Michel Foucault in 1978). Examples on Nazi scientific practices, ideas, and
physiological metaphors include Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical
Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986) and Robert Proctor,
The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton UP, 1999).
17. See, for instance, Sander Gilman’s Difference and
Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Gender (Cornell UP, 1985) and
Mieke Bal’s scathing review demonstrating how critics themselves are prone to
the very same stereotypical gaze that they would criticize (“The Politics of
Citation,” Diacritics, 21.1 [1991]: 24–45). Sander Gilman has since pursued
further research into racial, gendered, and “psychological” stereotypes of
pathology in medicine and biology.
18. The extensions and applications are discussed in the
next section.
19. See note 2.
20. ibid.
21. Examples follow in an endnote below detailing the
pervasiveness of the “sicknesss” discourse—although I am just as interested in
its rhetorical role as extended metaphor and analogical displacement.
22. For some such article in English, see
www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-01-18-mahcupyan-en.html.
23. Even “The Demonized Children of Anatolia,” a column
against the denialist demonization of the diaspora, proceeds to characterize
the diaspora as largely depoliticized, but forced by the politicized few into a
singular identity based on ever-present pain
(www.zaman.com.tr/yazar.do?yazino=1224394&keyfield=). For the writer, the
Westernized, sophisticated versions of Armenian nationalism “uninfluenced by
Armenia” and the more heavy-handed and brutish Turkish version can always be
interchangeable: “We should not forget that this is how former Unionists (
İttihatçılar) viewed the Armenians, and it was due to this kind of view that
genocide occurred. It is disgraceful that Armenians are sticking to the
mentality that led to their own destruction” (see www.zaman.com.tr/yazar.do?yazino=1221333&keyfield=
and—in
English—www.todayszaman.com/columnists-204751-the-armenian-genocideand-disgrace.html).
The writer states that Armenians need to appeal to Turkish people with their
pain and approach their humanistic side, not aggravate matters by political
insistence on recognition.
24. See www.zaman.com.tr/yazar.do?yazino=1223842.
25. Mahçupyan deplores Temelkuran for an antigovernment
piece she wrote for the international media, accusing her of supporting the
deep-state and of using the memory of Hrant Dink in that article as well as in
“the book” (he means: Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide [Verso
2010]). Temelkuran herself had concluded her article thus: “As Dink said five
ago in his last article, we journalists are ‘like frightened doves’. One
killed, two imprisoned, myself unemployed.” The English-language articles are
available at www.todayszaman.com/columnist-270333-hrants-parasites.html and
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/27/turkishjournalists-fight-intimidation.
26. Before the murder of Hrant Dink, his prosecution and
conviction over a series of articles in Agos were in part based on a reading of
the words “poisonous blood” as racist (whereas the analogy was between
poisonous blood and racism itself), thus making him a target. Other analogies
to physiological pathologies are marshaled in these articles to describe racism
itself, but also the generalized “unhealed trauma” and “sickness” Dink
attributes to the diaspora, as well as the twin “clinical condition” of trauma
and paranoia to Armenians and Turks, respectively. In view of the essentialist
or generalizing categories (Oriental, Anatolian, Armenians of the
diaspora/Armenia) it is important to note that discourses, and precisely
physiological metaphors such as those I analyze in this article, are either
explicitly or implicitly validated as the legacy of Dink. Baskın Oran, who
later presided much of the discourse on the apology campaign, has been
resorting to numerous such analogies, for instance of “poison in the milk” (in
reference to Turkish-Kurdish nationalisms) and persistent equalization of
nationalisms through the language of disease and psychological sickness. One
such example is the article “The Wheel Torture and Honor” in which Oran
provides his bullet-point presentation of the “Armenian Psychology” by way of
“reporting” according to his purposes on a scholarly group:
www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalEklerDetayV3&ArticleID=920692&CategoryID=42.
Exactly the same psychological formula appears in Markar Esayan’s recent
article after the French Legislation debates, “Thoughts on a Trip to France”
(www.taraf.com.tr/markar-esayan/makale-bir-fransa-seyahatinin-dusundurdukleri.htm).
Orhan Kemal Cengiz advanced the same stereotypes in “My Encounter with the
Armenian Diaspora”
(www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalYazar&ArticleID=1083345&Yazar=ORHAN-KEMAL-CENGIZ&CategoryID=98),
which “counteracts” the characterization of Turkey as a “sick individual” in
“An Armenian with a Mexican Hat.” Ece Temelkuran’s pervasive stereotypes in her
book Deep Mountain were discussed in my review and Michael Goshgarian’s. Rober
Koptaş, presently editor-in-chief of Agos, also elaborates on nationalism as a
disease, argues against demonizing the diaspora, and yet calls for “Pedagogy
for the Turk, Psychology for the Armenian” as well as categorizes “Armenian the
Victim [mağdur], Armenian the Tyrannical [gaddar],” These are reproduced,
respectively, on his website: http://hayatoldugugibi.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html,
http://hayatoldugugibi.blogspot.com/2009/05/turkepedagoji-ermeniye-psikoloji.html,
and
http://hayatoldugugibi.blogspot.com/2009/04/magdur-ermeni-gaddar-ermeni.html.
In “Guardians of the Temple,” Murat Belge succumbed to the same stereotype of
“rage” as psychological frailty alongside his “cocoon” metaphor designating the
diaspora, along with numerous other direct stereotypes for “good” and “bad”
essential qualities he attributes to Armenians, regionally classified in his
travels: www.taraf.com.tr/murat-belge/makale-diaspora-vetapinak-bekcileri.htm.
In 2004, Yıldırım Türker had portrayed “Armenian belligerence” abroad as
resulting in the “roughing up” of Armenians in Turkey, and chimed, “[we must
bear in mind that] Diaspora Armenians and Turkish nationalists suffer from the
same disease,” referencing Hrant Dink:
www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalYazar&ArticleID=732271. Even
Ragıp Zarakolu briefly concurred that “both societies need therapy” in a piece
on the constraints on the public statements of Armenians in Turkey:
www.evrensel.net/news.php?id=8770.
27. Examples include this article on the website “The
Armenian Problem” (www.ermenisorunu.gen.tr/turkce/makaleler/makale25.html); the
book Ermeni Psikolojik Savaşı: Talat Paşa’dan Alican Kapısı’nın Açılmasına,
Özkan Yeniçeri and Ümit Özdağ (Kripto 2009); the abstracts for the conference
“The Armenian Symposium of the Political Psychology Association”
(http://www.avim.org.tr/degerlendirmetekli.php?makaleid=287); and online articles
(accessible in cache at time of writing)
www.donusumkonagi.net/MerakEttikleriniz/9/psikosiyaset/2733/turkiyeermenistan-iliskilerinin-psikolojik-savas-acisindandegerlendirilmesi.html
and www.donusumkonagi.net/MerakEttikleriniz/9/psiko—siyaset/2206/turk-ermeni-meselesinde-magduriyet-psikolojisinin-etkisi.html.
28. Temple UP, 2008
29. See Ted Cohen, “Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative” in
“Philosophy and Literature,” 21.2 (1997): 223–244; 236. Ted Cohen’s example of
this parable is particularly interesting—although he does not call it mise en
abîme—also because of the topic: In the passage, King David, who has a harem,
takes the virtuous soldier Uriah’s only wife and has him killed in battle.
Nathan tells him a parable about a rich man, an owner of herds who slaughters a
poor man’s only and beloved lamb for a banquet. This story makes David
recognize his own act as reprehensible. What is mysterious is how a feeling
about the self that was not there before arises in response to a displaced
metaphorical analogy. That response would require two steps: the (morally
motivated) story-teller and the reader/listener responding to a character in
the same way, and then the reader/listener responding to themselves as they
responded to their counterpart in the story.
30. For key research on rape, representations of rape,
rape narratives, and criticism by/of feminist theory on rape, see: Sorcha Gunne
and Zoë Brigley Thompson, eds., Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives
(Routledge, 2010), especially the editors’ “Introduction: Feminism Without
Borders: The Potentials and Pitfalls of Retheorizing Rape” (1–20) and Sorcha
Gunne’s “Questioning Truth and Reconciliation: Writing Rape in Achmat Dangor’s
Bitter Fruit and Kagiso Legeso Molepe’s Dancing in the Dust” (164–180); also
see: Carine M. Mardorossian, “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape” (Signs,
27.3 [2002] 743–775); Jane Monkton Smith, Relating Rape and Murder: Narratives
of Sex, Death, and Gender (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Amy Greenstadt, Rape and
the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England (Ashgate
2009); Sabine Sielke, Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American
Literature and Culture, 1790–1990 (Princeton UP, 2002); Corrine Sanders, Rape
and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (D.S. Brewer, 2002);
Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled
Speech (Palgrave Macmillan 2011, c1999); and Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape and
Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (Oxford UP, 1996).
An earlier reference was made to Bill Lueders’ Cry Rape: The True Story of One
Woman’s Harrowing Quest for Justice (Terrace Books, 2006).
31. See
http://www.taraf.com.tr/ahmet-altan/makale-roller-degisti.htm.
32. See the first column quoted, note 8.
33. In addition to the key sources in note 30, see
http://goodmenproject.com/good-feedblog/as-victims-men-struggle-for-rape-awareness/,
www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/africa/05congo.html, and
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/14/health/military-sexual-assaults-personality-disorder/index.html.
34. In addition to the attention on this subject in the
arts and film, for specific literature see: Lisa Sharlach, “Rape as Genocide:
Bangladesh, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda,” New Political Science 22.1 (2000):
89–102; for an excellent review of the literature in the topic as relating to
the Armenian Genocide: Matthias Bjørnlund, “‘A Fate Worse Than Dying’: Sexual
Violence during the Armenian Genocide,” in Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and
Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan
2009), 16–58. Also see: Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (U Minnessota P, 1996); Patricia A. Weitsman,
“The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence: A Review of Bosnia and Rwanda,”
Human Rights Quarterly 30 (2008): 561–578; Vahé Tahjian, “Gender, Nationalism,
Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian
Genocide,” Nations and Nationalism 15.1 (2009): 60–80; Keith David Watenpaugh,
“The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of
Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” The American Historical Review, 115. 5
(2010): 1315–1339.
1 yorum:
Can't wait for part 3 , editor!
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