Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey 9780520973350

Citation preview

Sacrificial Limbs

Sacrificial Limbs masculinity, disability, and political violence in turkey

Salih Can Açıksöz

university of califor nia pr ess

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2020 by Salih Can Açıksöz Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. Names: Açıksöz, Salih Can, 1976- author. Title: Sacrificial limbs : masculinity, disability, and political violence in Turkey / Salih Can Açıksöz. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: lccn 2019015012 (print) | lccn 2019018670 (ebook) | isbn 9780520973350 (Epub) | isbn 9780520305298 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520305304 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Disabled veterans—Turkey—Social conditions—20th century. | Disabled veterans—Turkey—Social conditions—21st century. | Political violence—Turkey. Classification: lcc ub365.t8 (ebook) | lcc ub365.t8 a27 2020 (print) | ddc 362.4086/9709561—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015012 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Preface: Entering a Gray Zone xv Abbreviations xxiv Introduction 1 1 2

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Being-on-the-Mountains 15

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The Two Sovereignties: Masculinity and the State 45 3 4

Of Gazis and Beggars 75

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Communities of Loss 102

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Prosthetic Revenge 138 •

Prosthetic Debts 161

Epilogue: Bodies and Temporalities of Political Violence 175 Notes 187 Bibliography 215 Index 235

i l lust r at ions

A conscript resting in the mountains, 1993. 16 Satellite image showing spatial inscription of sovereign violence in Şemdinli, Hakkari. 18 Soldiers on a “captured” hill. 21 Conscripts marching, 1996. 27 A symbolic military service ceremony for men with disabilities. 46 A pro-PKK protest. 49 CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu visits injured soldiers at the TSK Rehabilitation and Care Center. 66 2018 Gazis’ Day commemoration at Taksim Square. 78 A young man begging on the Galata Bridge. 92 “Martyrs’ gallery.” 104 Ramadan charity sacks. 108 Antigovernment protests at a martyr’s funeral in Manisa. 127 Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery. 134 Milliyet newspaper, June 5, 1999. 143 The fifth anniversary of Hrant Dink’s murder. 149 A prosthetic protest during the Öcalan trial, June 29, 1999. 156 A prosthetics company’s store window display. 166 Milliyet newspaper, October 20, 2014. 169 Firefighters praying for the martyrs inside the 15 July Martyrs Memorial. 182

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It is often said that a director’s first film is always somewhat autobiographical. The same can be said for ethnographies. This book is a product of being a lifelong witness to political and state violence in Turkey. It is an effort to confront and come to terms with the destructive and generative effects of that violence, which I (along with many others) have encountered repeatedly over the course of my life. First and foremost, I am grateful to all my interlocutors, who shared their tea, cigarettes, pain, and joy with me. I can only hope that I’ve done justice to their stories. I embarked on this project during my years as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. I owe thanks to my advisor, Kamran Asdar Ali, and dissertation committee members, Kathleen Stewart, Ann Cvetkovich, Pauline Turner Strong, and John Hartigan, for their mentorship. I am grateful to my cherished friends Hişyar Özsoy, Ruken Şengül, and Halide Velioğlu. This project has been deeply inspired by many stimulating insomniac conversations with them. I also thank fellow graduate school travelers Calvin Jones, Mathangi Krishnamurty, Ken MacLeish, Mariana Mora, Ömer Özcan, Mubbashir Rizvi, Ali Şengül, Ufuk Soyöz, and Raja Swamy for their intellectual and emotional camaraderie. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the memory of the late Özlem Okur, whom I will always remember with a deep sense of love and loss. I am grateful to many colleagues across various institutions for their friendship and collegial support. Jonathan Glasser, Gül Özyeğin, Sibel ZandiSayek, and Ayfer Karakaya-Stump generously welcomed me to the College of William and Mary during my Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship year. I had many wonderful colleagues and students in the departments of Middle xi

Eastern and North African Studies, Anthropology, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona. I am especially thankful to Sapana Doshi, Jamie Lee, Adela Licona, Tracey Osborne, Brian Silverstein, and Susan Stryker for enriching my life in Tucson as friends and colleagues. UCLA is the most stimulating and supportive academic environment that I have ever known. I am indebted to all my colleagues and friends in the Department of Anthropology and beyond for the various ways they have supported and intellectually nourished me over the past three years. I would especially like to acknowledge a couple of beloved friends. Jason Throop has been a source of great advice and holds responsibility for introducing me to Kate Marshall, the editor of this book. Laurie Hart and Philippe Bourgois have provided a sense of home in Los Angeles; not only that, they also graciously read an earlier draft of this book and shared their insightful feedback. Aomar Boum and Norma Mendoza-Denton have generously opened their home to my partner and me during our difficult arrival in Los Angeles. I am very fortunate to have Aslı Bali, Jessica Cattelino, Erin Debenport, Alessandro Duranti, Laura Gomez, Akhil Gupta, Sondra Hale, Purnima Mankekar, Elinor Ochs, Sherry Ortner, Jemima Pierre, Sherene Razack, Michael Rothberg, Susan Slyomovics, Shannon Speed, Tim Taylor, Yasemin Yıldız, and Noah Zatz as friends and colleagues. Finally, I thank all the participants of the interdisciplinary Mind, Medicine, and Culture discussion group for enriching my thinking on several of the issues that I tackle in this book. Various institutions funded the research and writing of this project: the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I am thankful to all of them. Earlier versions of portions of this book appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Ethnologie Française, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Journal of Turkish and Ottoman Studies, and the edited volume Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures. Chapter 6 was originally written for the Wenner-Gren Disability Worlds symposium, and a later, expanded version of it is included in the forthcoming special issue of Current Anthropology. I would like to thank the editors, guest editors, and anonymous reviewers of these publications for their feedback. In particular, many thanks to Faye Ginsburg, Banu Gökarıksel, Seth Messinger, Gül Özyeğin, Rayna Rapp, and Kent Schull. The following people also merit special thanks for reading and xii

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commenting on earlier versions of parts of this book: Hannah Appel, Sherine Hamdy, Emma Varley, and Scott Webel. Parts of this book were presented at panels, symposia, and workshops at various institutions. I am especially grateful for the invitations from the Wenner-Gren Disability Worlds symposium, the Military Bodies workshop at the University of Michigan, the State of Democracy in Turkey conference at the London School of Economics, and the Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches in the Field of Turkish Studies conference jointly organized by Northwestern University and the Institute of Turkish Studies. I would like to extend my thanks to the members of the Reproductive Health Working Group (RHWG) who attended the annual meetings in Istanbul, Beirut, Aleppo, Muscat, and Tunis where I presented rough drafts of parts of this book. I would like to thank my editor, Kate Marshall, for being supportive of this project from the very start and Enrique Ochoa-Kaup at UC Press for answering my endless questions. My gratitude goes to my amazing reviewers Esra Özyürek, Chris Dole, and Elif Babül. This book greatly benefited from their constructive criticism and insightful suggestions. I owe thanks to Theresa Truax-Gisch, who meticulously edited the entire manuscript and made substantive suggestions to improve the flow of the text. I thank Sinan Bilgenoğlu for capturing several key images with his professional photographic eye and the artist Hakan Topal for allowing me to use an image from his Sceneries exhibition. I am grateful to the artist İsmet Doğan for granting me permission to use his impactful work as a cover image. I want to thank a number of people who shaped my thinking long before I started this project. Belgin Tekçe, who introduced me to medical anthropology and the Reproductive Health Working Group, deserves my deep gratitude as a lifelong interlocutor. I also extend my appreciation to the late Dicle Koğacıoğlu and the late Ferhunde Özbay and to Nükhet Sirman, Nazan Üstündağ, Çağlar Keyder, Ayşe Öncü, Meltem Ahıska, Suna Ertuğrul, and Ferda Keskin. During my fieldwork, I found fun and solace in my old friends in Istanbul: Nafiz Akşehirlioğlu, Berk and Elif Balçık, Can Belge, Özgür Ergüney, and Elif Özkılıç. Thank you for being such wonderful friends through thick and thin. In Los Angeles, I thank Sinan Olcayto for long conversations about anything and everything that made writing breaks much more enjoyable. I couldn’t have written this book without my family’s support. Thank you to my parents, Ayla and Selim Ant, for their unflagging love and backing. ac k now l e d g m e n t s

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Also thanks to my family members Fatma Budak and Güneş Cansız for their loving presence. My deepest gratitude goes to Zeynep Kurtuluş Korkman, who has been my partner, confidante, comrade, coauthor, feminist moral compass, and endless source of inspiration over the past twenty years. I dedicate this book to our child, Mavi Açıksöz-Korkman, who, even before he was born, started to teach me new lessons about the body and masculinity and made procrastination disappear from my life. I hope that by the time he grows up there will be justice and peace.

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pr eface entering a gr ay zone

“True journey is return.”1 Ursula K. Le Guin’s words from The Dispossessed echoed in my mind as my plane landed in June 2005 in my beloved hometown of Istanbul. For the coming twenty-nine months, I was to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict in Istanbul and Ankara. Given that my aim was to trace the multiple physical, mediatized, and virtual spaces in which disabled veterans were embodied, represented, and governed in contemporary Turkey, my field site was a dynamic and ever-shifting one. The tangible spatial foci of my research were two support and advocacy associations in Istanbul—one “official” and the other “popular”2—that brought together disabled veterans and martyrs’ families.3 I spent my days attending these organizations, meeting dozens of disabled veterans whom I would follow to hospitals, state institutions, coffeehouses, weddings, picnics, nationalist commemorations, political demonstrations, and martyrs’ cemeteries. I collected life histories from disabled veterans and carried out interviews with retired military physicians and officers, disability activists, social workers, and journalists. I conducted extensive archival research so as to understand the broader sociohistorical forces that impinged on disabled veterans’ bodies and subjectivities. While this smooth linear narrative of my fieldwork conforms to a customary academic convention, it is one that erases all the ambiguities, vacillations, fears, and enjoyments of ethnography in exchange for an illusionary sense of mastery. Such linear narratives are indeed rarely possible while conducting “fieldwork under fire.” 4 When I arrived in Istanbul in 2005, I was ecstatic to be back home, yet clueless and nervous about where and how to begin my study. People grimaced when I explained the topic to them. “You’ve chosen a sensitive topic,” they grumbled, pointing out the possible risks of conducting xv

research on such a politically volatile issue. But I had known that before choosing my topic. As a child raised in a leftist family broken in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, one of my first lessons in life was that things related to the state were “sensitive” in Turkey. For my generation, the spectral persecutory power of the state was an intimate force.5 “Even if you are able to conduct the research, how are you going to publish it?” my reproachful family and concerned friends asked. Because I wasn’t sure, I grew more and more edgy. Weeks passed. Tarrying daily at the Atatürk Library in Taksim set against the magnificent view of the Bosphorus, I put off my entry into the field. Autumn came. As Istanbul’s colors turned to red, I called the official association from the number I found on the Internet. Approaching it as a perfect stranger, I was allowed entry first as a “student doing homework,” then as a “welcomed guest,” and later as the “adopted son” of the organization’s head. It was through this organization that I met my first disabled veteran friends, who introduced me in a snowballing effect to others until I learned of the popular association on the other side of Istanbul. As I found myself immersed in these organizations’ daily rhythms, I realized that they were at once hubs of mourning, healing, redistribution, and activism, knitting disabled veterans and martyrs’ families together in politicized communities of loss.6 Participant observation in these spaces allowed me to learn about the places, objects, and practices where disabled veteran activism set anchor and helped me decipher the relevant processes of collective identity formation.7 Becoming a regular at the associations provided a unique opportunity for dispelling the aura of suspicion that surrounded my middle-class, able body and my waist-long hair, signaling an undue Westernized masculinity. Disabled vets I met in the privacy of these secluded spaces mostly welcomed, or at worst kindly refused, my interview requests. With those I met outside, I was not always so lucky. I first had to “pass some tests,” I was often told. Disabled veterans were used to the prying gaze of journalists, but I was not from the press. Was I a “terrorist”? As I observed them, my interlocutors gazed back at me. In attempts to make out my ethnic and thereby my political background, I was asked repeatedly about my paternal hometown. My car’s license plate number was noted down. People told me that they had me checked out and that I came out “clean.” Despite all these intrusions, I remember feeling uncomfortable only twice. The first was when a veteran I was visiting at his apartment told me only halfjokingly that he had placed his gun within hand’s reach, in case I had something bad up my sleeve. The second incident occurred when I was waiting in xvi

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the garden of a veteran’s workplace in Ankara. Because I had only ever talked to him on the phone, I assumed that the suspicious stranger staring at me from a distance must be him. When I approached, the man began to interrogate me hostilely, asking to see my ID, making me think he was an undercover intelligence officer. To my surprise, he turned out to be my original interviewee’s coworker, a disabled veteran himself. In the course of my fieldwork, I would come to understand how these performances of vigilance and statehood and the associated feelings of vulnerability and sovereignty permeated disabled veterans’ experience of publicness in ethnically mixed urban spaces. In Istanbul and Ankara, I collected life histories from disabled veterans from very different backgrounds. I was not in a position to be picky, but I ended up succeeding in incorporating differently structured experiences segmented across age, class, ethnicity, sect, military branch, rank, and type of injury. Interviews often took place in my interlocutors’ homes, which were mostly located in working- or lower-class neighborhoods that I had never been to despite being a native of Istanbul. These home visits allowed me to observe their neighborhoods, houses, and families and to record their life histories without being frequently interrupted. Sometimes interviews took up to seven hours to complete, leaving piles of cigarette butts, hoarse voices, puffy eyes, and exhausted bodies in their wake. The interviews I carried out at my interlocutors’ workplaces often produced shorter, disrupted, and poorquality recordings and less intimate conversations. Even so, these workembedded interviews offered an unanticipated but welcome opportunity to get a sense of the working conditions and power dynamics within the state institutions where most of my interlocutors were employed as blue-collar workers. These dynamics would later help me to conceptualize the sacrificial crisis that I describe in chapter 3. Life histories were portals to the subjective worlds of my interlocutors.8 They provided me with a deeper understanding of how my interlocutors performatively renegotiated the boundaries of their selves as they narrated and made sense of their experiences of warfare, injury, and disability. Such performative narrativization notwithstanding, reconstructing their testimonial life stories was not an easy task for disabled veterans. The flow of their narratives was often disrupted by long pauses, silences, inarticulate expressions, and emotional outbursts while they recounted their experiences of military clashes, injury, dismemberment, amputation, and the social isolation caused by disability. Sometimes we had to take breaks or smoke a few more cigarettes before resuming the interview. Sometimes we wandered, pr e fac e

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entered blind alleys, or took long detours in our conversation. All these moments were, to say the least, as important as the biographical and semantic content of my interlocutors’ stories as they carved out an affective space for “understanding the pain of the other.”9 Pain and trauma stand at the threshold of our understanding, presenting epistemological challenges to our ability to know and to represent.10 Because of this precarious placement, traumatic experiences cannot be easily assimilated into language and symbolism, and even when they are they often produce fractured and erratic narrative structures that “will not sustain integrated notions of self, society, culture, or world.”11 What makes testimonial narratives valuable is not only their recording of an often silenced past, but also their ability to bear witness even when words do not work. Bearing witness in testimony, some scholars assert, is only possible through the breakdown of representation at the moment of traumatic reenactment.12 This is the only way, they argue, to learn from one’s history. History itself is a symptom that cannot be cured, but merely transmitted through “the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.”13 I would not go as far, but I have to admit that the vicarious effects of witnessing on my own body and psyche were more useful than any other source data in understanding the process of subject formation. Through their life histories, disabled veterans introduced me to a narrativized “gray zone” in which the categories of perpetrator and victim became increasingly blurred.14 In this ethically ambiguous zone, which I call “beingon-the-mountains,” they were both perpetrators and victims of sovereign violence as involuntarily conscripted soldiers. Before entering the field, I had prepared myself for the ethical dilemmas of this gray zone of life history gathering. But the gray zone that I witnessed through participant observation was something I was not expecting and for which I was wholly unprepared. During my fieldwork, my disabled veteran associates joined an ultranationalist witch hunt against public intellectuals, including some of my favorite writers and journalists, who had questioned official nationalist paradigms about minorities in Turkey. These protests constituted the limits to my “participant” observation and placed me along multiple lines of “ethnographic seduction”15 and ethnographic “betrayal.”16 I had ample political, ethical, and practical reasons not to attend these highly mediatized ultranationalist demonstrations. Nevertheless, I increasingly began to feel that the space for ethnographic witnessing was getting thinner. One day, I encountered one of the intellectuals being protested against at a pricey breakfast café overlooking the Bosphorus and found myself dealing with strong feelings of xviii

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complicity. But complicity with whom? The answer was disturbingly unclear. On one hand, I felt the urge to express solidarity with her and apologetically explain why my interlocutors’ rage was directed at her. On the other hand, being aware of the class base of my interlocutors’ political resentment, I was ashamed to have shared in that upper-class breakfast. The murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, a key target of my veteran acquaintances’ protests, by an ultranationalist hitman in 2007 was a threshold event that slowly but gradually alienated me from disabled veteran activist circles. However, leaving the field was not easy, I found, when the field would not leave you. As clashes with Kurdish guerrillas escalated, nationalist demonstrations became after-dinner entertainments even in middle-class residential neighborhoods, including mine. Gigantic flags enshrouded the city. Disabled veterans were constantly on TV. Before soccer games, cheerleaders announced the names of the latest martyrs, making the whole stadium chant “Present!” in newly invented ghostly performances. Soccer players made a soldier’s salute after each goal. The militarization of public life became more suffocating than ever. On top of it all, I now had conspiracy theories to explain it all. Leaving the field is not easy when the field does not leave you. Gray zone has, of late, become a commonplace term in anthropology for describing the ethical dilemmas of conducting ethnography among perpetrator-victims of violence. Yet it is often seen as something that belongs to the interlocutors’ world rather than the anthropologist’s, even if it does temporarily seep into the anthropologist’s life in the context of the ethnographic encounter. Once the anthropologist gets out of the field, such gray zones are supposed to be sublimated into narrative, activism, and advocacy, even when the gray zone continues to haunt the anthropologist. In that sense, it is ironic that it was after I left the field that I was further sucked into the gray zone through my own becomings and encounters with the state. In 2011, I was conscripted into the military, something that most young men from my background dreaded. I too dreaded it. A few years earlier, I had been petrified to read on a yellowed piece of paper that I was listed as a draft evader. Although I knew that it was a bureaucratic mistake, I lived in apprehension until the day I was ultimately tried and acquitted in the military court of an armored brigade. Evading the draft would end my academic prospects in Turkey. I was not courageous enough to declare conscientious objection, an act of political resistance and a de facto civil death decree. Medical exemption was a real possibility since, according to military medical regulations, I was “rotten” (unfit for military service) because of my high myopia, pr e fac e

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and I thought that might be a way out of conscription. Yet the so-called medical examination at the draft office consisted of a military doctor collectively asking us—hundreds of half-naked young men standing against a wall in the office’s garden—if anyone had a medical problem, only to dismiss any issues mentioned with insults and threats. When I mentioned medical exemption to my maternal uncle, who had served in the Kurdish region before the rise of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, or PKK) and whose son had recently been enlisted as a commando stationed in a hotbed of guerrilla activity, he reacted intensely. “We do not have rotten [people] in our family!” It took me a couple of seconds to process his reaction. “Rotten report,” the popular term for the certificate of ineligibility for military service, was assigned not only to people with disabilities, but also to openly gay and transgender men, who were classified as having psychosexual disorders in the military’s psychiatric episteme. My uncle was teaching me a lesson I already knew: regimes of (dis)ability are always intimately co-constituted with gender and sexuality, especially under conditions of militarization and political violence.17 Another lesson from the field was that class privilege and resentment always lurked in the background of nationalist spaces like military service. Through my teaching assistantship at the University of Texas, Austin, I had access to a paid exemption option, always available for Turkish citizens working in foreign countries. By paying the state $7,000 (US) in cash, I was able to buy myself out of service but not out of the three-week basic military training set in a hot and dry interior Mediterranean town. The town’s economy was almost wholly dependent on military service exempts, most of whom were the children of emigrants living in Europe. “Here come the new Mehmet Beys,” soldiers greeted us at the entrance of the barracks. Mehmet Bey (Mr. Mehmet) was a wordplay on Mehmetçik (literally, Little Mehmet), the archetypical and affectionate name for the common Turkish soldier. Replacing the diminutive -çik ending with Bey, a courtesy title with upperclass implications, it disdainfully distanced the paid exempts from common people. I had first heard that phrase from disabled veterans, who teasingly used it to underline the classed and gendered lines between us. Now, hearing it again, I felt a strange mixture of guilt and relief. A disabled veteran had once baffled me by asking if I was more afraid or more willing to serve after listening to their stories. At that point I realized that despite my deep apprehension, the anthropologist in me craved military service as an autoethnographic experiment. And it was. During basic trainxx

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ing I would realize that many fellow soldiers refused to eat military food, believing that potassium alum was added to it as a way of curtailing their sex drives, and instead ate snacks they bought from the canteen. Castration anxieties produced by submission to the military authority of the state were also reflected in the man-high pyramids of Viagra boxes displayed in surrounding pharmacies’ shop windows. Theatrically staged military souvenir photos also served as prostheses of masculinity. The barracks housed professional photographers whose bread and butter was to produce fake, Rambo-like counterguerrilla war photo souvenirs, using sandbags, heavy weaponry, and even commando makeup as décor. As an anthropologist working on the gendered and sexualized predicaments of military masculinity all these ethnographic moments fascinated me. The anthropologist in me would eventually get more of the field than he had asked for when the commander of our troop of Mehmet Beys was dispatched to this small, peaceful city after being injured while fighting guerrillas. It was for a change of air, the rumor went. Whenever someone complained about wearing winter uniforms despite the 100°F-plus heat, not being allowed to take showers, eating decomposed or expired food, or medication being confiscated rather than given to the sick, the commander would line us up and start berating us. “I won’t take crap from you worthless scum! My Mehmetçik died on my lap so that you can sit comfortably on your ass!” I was already well versed in this sacrificial military discourse, as the entire country had become increasingly steeped in it. Immediately after I left the field in 2008, a group of high school students became national celebrities after painting a large Turkish flag with their own blood and presenting it to the head of the military staff along with a petition to be conscripted as soldiers in the war against the PKK.18 What I was not well versed in was how to become an intimate subject of such militarized discourse, within which sacrificial death was the only index of the value of life. My becoming-soldier process moved ethnographic knowledge to a more visceral level. I was immersed in the intense military sociality that affectively bound disabled veterans to their buddies and, through them, to the military and the state; I learned how to load, fire, disassemble, and reassemble the HK G3 assault rifle, which I knew well, like a bad friend of a friend, from my interlocutors’ firearm malfunction stories; I came to know the noise of rifle and the smell of gunpowder. Now I was acquainted with many of the spaces, objects, practices, and sensations in their narratives, but not with the war, the “enemy,” the fear, the rushing adrenaline, the act of killing, the witnessing of pr e fac e

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dying, the encounter with mortality, the destruction of flesh and bone, the pain, the loss, and what follows. While the becoming-soldier process made me complicit with the production of sovereign violence, my critique of that very violence gave way to a process of my becoming-terrorist.19 Responding to the eruption of violence after the failed peace negotiations in 2016, over one thousand academics from Turkey, including me, signed a petition criticizing human rights violations and asking the government to resume peace negotiations. In return, the government launched a witch hunt that would spiral into one of the biggest academic purges in history. Labeled as “traitors,” “zombie slaves,” and “terrorists with pens” by President Erdoğan, the signatories were faced with job terminations, house raids, detentions, and criminal prosecutions. Their names and photographs were published in the pro-government media, their campus offices doors were marked with red crosses, and they were threatened by ultranationalist crime leaders, who swore an oath in public meetings to spill and take a shower in signatories’ blood. Under such dire circumstances, hundreds of academics for peace have lost their civil freedoms and livelihoods, and many have had to leave the country under conditions of exile. As a US-based academic, I was among the relatively privileged, but there was a specific loss awaiting me. Criticizing the state’s counterinsurgency practices meant my banishment from the field. My fieldwork friends were no longer friends. How does an ethnographer become the enemy of his own “informants,” about whom he deeply cares? This is a question that has preoccupied me as a peace petition signatory, especially as I’ve learned that the prosecutor’s indictment included the accusation of terrorist propagandizing as well as charges under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation, or Turkish government institutions. Public intellectuals, including the assassinated Hrant Dink, had become targets of ultranationalist protests as a direct result of being tried under this law. Now I—the ethnographer-cum-“terrorist”—was also turning into a scapegoated object of disabled veterans’ hatred for having spoken out against the cycle of militarized violence that had originally injured them, but which they clung to as its fallen heroes. It chilled me to the bone when I read that the head of an association of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families told the media, “The [missing] arms and legs of disabled veterans will call traitor academics to account.”20 Disabled veterans’ sacrificial limbs were now turned against me. Against this backdrop, my ethnographic scrutiny of the connections between the somatic and the political is motivated by a burning question of xxii

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our times: How do right-wing nationalist movements manage to affectively mobilize whole groups of people, especially those most harmed by their policies? As the global electoral victories of the populist Right push conspiratorial ultranationalist ideas from the fringes to the political center, increasing numbers within the discipline of anthropology voice concern about the lack of ethnographic attention to Far Right movements and the scarcity of fieldwork with people we tend not to like.21 Yet an anthropological awareness of the ethical and political complexities of working within Far Right worlds is often missing. In worlds like the one I depict here, there is rarely such a thing as a neutral ethnographic position; one is either a part of the imagined community or a traitor, enemy, “terrorist” in relation to it.22 In the attempt to attune to a political world outside one’s own, the anthropologist is unavoidably sucked into a gray zone, where questions of ethnographic conversion,23 seduction, and betrayal become more pressing than ever. It is only from within this gray zone that we can come to grips morally, intellectually, affectively, and politically with the suffering of those whose politics we find reprehensible, even inimical, to our lifeworlds, political ideals, and understandings of truth and justice, especially when their suffering is directly put into service of their politics. This book is an attempt in that direction.

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a bbr ev i at ions

AKP ASALA CHP GATA MHP PKK SGK TRT TSK

Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) Gülhane Military Medical Academy (Gülhane Askeri Tıp Akademisi) Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi) Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) Social Security Institution (Sosyal Güvenlik Kurumu) Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (Türkiye Radyo ve Televizyon Kurumu) Turkish Armed Forces (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri)

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Introduction “where is zafer’s arm?” demanded the voice from the TV rhetorically, conjuring a nationalist drama around a disabled veteran’s missing limb. The question gave me goosebumps. I knew Zafer and recalled that he believed his amputated arm was buried in the backyard of a hospital.1 As a nationalist specter, though, his arm was haunting the entire country.2 It was the winter of 2006. As the armed conflict between Turkish state security forces and Kurdish guerrillas escalated, nationalist fervor was being heightened through media reporting of “martyred soldiers” and “neutralized terrorists.” I was watching a televised debate program3 that featured my gazi (disabled veteran) interlocutors, whom the show called “unknown and unseen heroes who have sacrificed their arms and legs for the perpetuity of the state and the homeland.” Overlaid with television banner ads for cell phone wallpapers of the Turkish flag and ringtones from mournful nationalist ballads, the opening line accompanying the theme music asked again, “Where is Zafer’s arm?” The program traversed an uneasy tension between the exigencies of the TV genre and the militarized nationalist cant and efforts at self-expression of its agitated guests. The celebrated television host, who under normal circumstances enjoyed provoking strife and disagreement, strained every nerve to regulate the discourse and quell the surge in affect.4 He appeared to be disoriented by the disabled veterans’ narratives, which rewound in time, made sudden jumps, changed tempo, and were interrupted by expressions of loss and pain. “Where does the blood we bleed go?” asked a disabled veteran in the middle of his life story, lapsing into silence. “Will they be able to fill in the endless void I feel?” asked another, leaving the host puzzled as to whom precisely the word they referred. Some guests grew impatient and started 1

shouting. “We are not disabled! We are gazis!” “Being seen and treated like we are disabled offends us!” “We don’t want pity. We want respect!” To contain his guests’ resentment, the host resorted in the end to a clichéd strategy straight out of state propaganda crib sheets, urging them to speak through the idiom of sacrifice. When a disabled veteran framed his loss in terms of a willing sacrifice made for the survival of the state and the nation— such as when one said, “If allowed, I’ll fight the terrorists even on my prosthetic leg”—the host asked the audience in the studio to give a round of applause. He encouraged disabled veterans to connect their own sacrifices to those made by past generations. “We inherited this land from our forefathers who fought in the wars of Gallipoli and Independence. When I die, I will be called to account before my grandfather.” But even with such prodding and corralling by the host, his guests’ remarks bordered dangerously on populist critiques of the state and of neoliberalism. “[The youth] should go and die fighting. It is better than dying for nothing here.”5 The next morning, I met several of the program’s guests at a disabled veterans’ association I regularly attended. They were furious with the host for not allowing them to voice their everyday problems and, characteristically, they used the discourse of terrorism to express their feelings. “The host,” they said, “is the real PKK terrorist!” They expressed even more exasperation with those veterans on the show who reproduced the masculinist and militarist banalities of state discourse. “This guy says he would fight on his prosthetic leg. What a weasel! Are we that stupid? We’ve already paid the price. I’m telling you, none of us would go back.” Among the disgruntled was a vocal young man who went even further in his aggressive remarks. “My benefits have still not been approved. I feel worthless, as though I were a beggar! I can’t take care of my wife and children. One day, a gazi will shoot a statesman dead,” he exclaimed furiously. “He will!” The association head wagged his finger in disapproval and channeled the young man’s rage and resentment back into nationalist politics: “If gazis are provided with adequate financial means, no one will be able to stop this nation’s sons from fighting blindfold, no one will ever be able to stop Turkey. There are people trying to prevent this from happening. They are the ones who treat us like we are disabled. They are the people we fight against!” The war-damaged bodies of disabled veterans are a ubiquitous but ambivalent presence in modern warring states.6 Ambivalent because the disabled veteran body embodies the horrors of war yet is often mobilized militaristically as an icon of sacrifice, thereby serving as an affective and ideological impetus for further bloodshed. Ambivalent also because it occupies both the 2

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center and the margins of normative masculinity, lionized through the masculine ethos of nationalism, while also being violently expelled from ableist forms of masculine privilege and public citizenship. Ambivalent, finally, because it inhabits an indeterminate space, a sort of “gray zone,” 7 where the distinctions and boundaries between perpetrator and victim, sacred and profane, hero and abject get puzzlingly blurred. It is from this indeterminate space that Sacrificial Limbs tells the story of disabled veterans—gazis—of the Turkish Army injured while fighting as conscripts in Turkey’s seemingly endless Kurdish conflict.8 Since 1984, the Turkish state has waged counterinsurgency war and deployed over five million conscripted soldiers against the guerrilla army of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, hereafter PKK) in a conflict that continues to define the political terrain in contemporary Turkey. Thousands of these young men have returned home with varying degrees of physical disability after being made into soldier-subjects of counterinsurgency in the mountainous geography of the armed conflict. This book explores the ways in which these veterans’ gendered and classed experiences9 of warfare and disability are hardened into politics. Chronicling veterans’ postinjury lives and political activism, the book demonstrates how self, community, and the world-making practices of disabled veterans get tangled up with ultranationalist politics in contemporary Turkey. Sacrificial Limbs is a study of the gendered relationship between embodiment and political subject formation in an ethnopolitically divided, war-torn nation. As such, it assays the processes by which conscript-cum-disabled veteran bodies are subjected to and become subjects of multiple forms of power and violence—first in counterguerrilla warfare, then in hospitals and communities of loss, and finally within the textures of lower-class urban life and political activism. The book indexes the ways in which disabled veterans fashion masculine political subjectivities as they remake a world unmade by war through intersubjective forms of care, fleshly intimacy, and activism. This newly assembled world is populated by supernatural beings, the ghosts of dead friends, shadowy political figures, and “terrorists,” all affectively charged by the senses of crisis, betrayal, conspiracy, emergency, and agency. By bringing the reader into this magical realist world, this book illustrates how the bodily effects of ethnopolitical violence generate new forms of embodied subjectivity,10 community, and political agency. Although idiosyncratic to Turkey in certain ways, this book’s story has much to say about wars and disabled veterans elsewhere. In retrospect, I see I n t roduc t ion

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that the seeds of this project were sown in 1989, when I saw Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July in a movie theater in Istanbul.11 Dramatizing the biography of the paralyzed Vietnam veteran and antiwar hero Ron Kovic, the film deeply impacted me as a teenager just discovering the undeclared civil war in my own country. The figure of the disabled antiwar veteran, lacking in Turkey, was in the back of my mind while conceiving this project, which came right on the heels of America’s most unpopular war since Vietnam, the Iraq War and occupation. That twenty-first-century war had instigated another wave of veterans’ peace activism,12 beautifully captured in the 2007 documentary Body of War, which portrays the antiwar activism of paralyzed Iraq veteran Tomas Young.13 But as soon as I entered the field, I realized that if there was any affinity between Turkey and elsewhere, it was not with post-Vietnam or post-Iraq America, but rather with interwar Germany, where disabled veterans’ welfare activism and resistance to cultural stereotypes about disability had been intertwined with political demands for a strong state and the recognition of veterans’ sacrifices.14 Disdainfully painted as grotesque bodies in German artist Otto Dix’s works (War Cripples of 1920 being a prime example),15 those disabled veterans, through their political activism, played a key role in the demise of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi Germany. Such historical convergences and divergences remind us that the interplay between masculinity and war disability does not propel veterans and their societies along a preordained trajectory of politicization. They thus underline the importance of understanding the sociocultural and ideological work it takes to make disabled veterans particular political subjects and perhaps hint at the work it would take to unmake such articulations.

masculinity, disability, and political violence In a country with compulsory military service, any inquiry regarding war disability and masculinity must begin with an analysis of the ways in which the production of gendered and militarized bodies is knotted together with the making of the state, citizenship, and sovereignty. This story begins, therefore, where it all began for veterans—with conscription. Compulsory military service is one of the most entrenched institutions in Turkey, thanks in large part to its imbrication with heteronormative masculinity. Enlistment is mandatory for all (temporarily) able-bodied male citi4

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zens with the exception of openly gay and transgender men. Because draft evaders are all but stripped of their citizenship rights and because the completion of military service operates socially as a prerequisite for employment and marriage, all young men are expected to submit themselves to the sovereign power’s grip if they are to become sovereign masculine citizen-subjects. Thus, compulsory military service operates historically as a key rite of passage into normative adult masculinity, sealing the heteropatriarchal contract between the state and its male citizenry. Masculinity, the military, and the state are often construed as existing in harmonious and mutually affirming relations.16 War disability, however, disrupts, attenuates, and subverts the possibility of such a political equation remaining unproblematic. For my interlocutors, conscription failed to deliver on its gendered promise. Confronting them with the intimate violence of the armed conflict, it instead brought about bodily loss and disability, turning them into what the ableist Turkish public calls “half-men” or “the half-dead.” Nearly all the disabled veterans I knew hailed from poor working-class families and were further marginalized by being denied access to blue-collar wage labor, a situation that persisted until consolidation, in the early 2000s, of a special welfare regime for disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict. This social and economic dependency resonated within Turkish society with the abject figure of the disabled street beggar and catalyzed their exclusion from the marriage market and forms of domestic and public citizenship. In short, through their embodiment of war disability, they were disenfranchised and stigmatized as gender-nonconforming bodies.17 Standing at the intersection of disability, class, gender, and sexuality, veterans’ embodied predicaments are subjectively felt and socioculturally constructed as a masculinity crisis for which the state is accountable. In the following pages, I provide numerous examples of the ways in which this crisis is addressed and mobilized, and at times subverted, both by disabled veterans and by different social actors invested in ameliorating or instrumentalizing their social suffering.18 Yet even as I highlight this strong sense of crisis, I want to resist the urge to simply equate disability with emasculation, and more so with feminization.19 As I hope to show in this study, the relationship between masculinity and disability is much more nuanced and historically contingent, in this case on the vicissitudes of the armed conflict and the changing biopolitics of war disability. Fracturing the militarized gender-production machine and state-enforced heteronormative and ableist conceptions of adult masculinity embedded in I n t roduc t ion

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compulsory military service, disabled veterans’ gender trouble is a driving force behind political and biopolitical efforts to remasculinize them. Utilizing multiple forms of power and knowledge, state and medical institutions act upon the intimate details of veterans’ lives, technoscientifically fixing their embodied capacities and refashioning them into productive and reproductive bodies. Nevertheless, the efforts to draw disabled veterans into the world of conjugal domesticity and heteroreproductive sexuality are not straightforward or unproblematic. I trace the quandaries entailed in this process across a variety of fields, ranging from nationalist representations, to TV mafia series, to veterans’ intersubjective practices of care and fleshly intimacy, to veterans’ welfare and political activism. One idiosyncratic element of the state-led project to recuperate the (hetero)masculinity of disabled veterans is particularly important for the story told here. The state bestows on disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict the honorific military title of Gazi, a religiously loaded and symbolically dense nationalist title that has historically been associated with medieval warriorproselytizers of Islam and with Ottoman sovereigns and commanders, as well as with the founding father of the secular republic, Gazi Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). Harnessing the Islamic models of warrior masculinity for the militaristic ends of the secular nationalist state, this symbolic act has provided the secular state with a much-needed religious legitimacy in the ongoing ethnopolitical conflict. Drawing the disabled veteran’s body, violently made “unfit for military service” by injury, back into the militarist imaginary, the conferral of the Gazi title has also fixed veterans’ masculinity crisis by inscribing them with a sanctified hypermasculine moniker, with the expectation that it will counter the gendered stigma of disability. In the process, the state has firmly anchored veterans’ entitlements and welfare benefits to their status as transcendental political subjects who embody the unwavering military spirit of the Turkish nation. With their governmental remasculinization process tethered closely to the state’s ethnic nationalist politics, disabled veterans have easily transitioned to ultranationalist politicization. In contemporary Turkey, Kurdish conflict veterans’ disabilities render their bodies simultaneously sacred and abject. Disabled veterans, especially amputees, are valorized as saintly gazi warriors—sanctified heroes and “living martyrs” who have attained the highest spiritual rank before martyrdom by sacrificing their bodies for the Turkish nation-state. Potent objects of nationalist reverence, their lost limbs are imagined through sacrificial discourses and imageries as bodily relics whose absence sanctifies the remainder-body of the 6

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disabled veteran20 and, by extension, the Turkish body politic.21 But while their bodies and sacrificial limbs accrue political value that intensifies the governmental project of remasculinization, they are still stigmatized as beggarlike, dependent men who evoke pity and revulsion in a deeply ableist society. Subjected to the structural and symbolic violence of ableism, class inequality, and a rapidly neoliberalizing economy, they face anxieties about socioeconomic marginalization, discrimination, and emasculation. It is precisely this gendered double bind which structures their everyday lives and steers them toward political activism. Exploring the tensions between the ideological construction of the disabled veteran body and veterans’ embodied experiences, this study pries open the dialectic between political rites of sacrifice and quotidian moments of desecration to reveal the generation of impactful nationalist affects. Condensed in the bodies of disabled veterans, these political affects have been culturally articulated and politically mobilized by a novel ultranationalist movement that has stamped the political culture of the country.22 In the 2000s, an emergent ultranationalist movement that had begun to challenge the hegemony of the governing neoliberal Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AKP) cashed in politically on disabled veterans’ embodied predicaments, taking on their work safety problems in state institutions (chapter 3) and their failed prosthesis payments (chapter 6) as pet political projects. Putting the government under fire for having compromised state sovereignty by pursuing membership in the European Union and peace negotiations with the PKK, the ultranationalist media presented veterans’ welfare and disability problems as a manifestation of the government’s betrayal. Explaining to disabled veterans why they are profaned by the same state that has sanctified them as gazis, this strategy has proved remarkably successful in interpellating disabled veterans within the circles I attended during my fieldwork. Hitching disabled veterans’ arduous quest to recover their masculine sovereignty to the ultranationalist political agenda of “restoring” state sovereignty, ultranationalism has opened up a political space where the former soldiers who are now disabled veterans can once again become the masculine subjects of political violence in the name of sovereignty.

bodies of sovereignty and sacrifice By following disabled veterans’ political agency over a crucial period during which inter- and intrastate sovereignty relations were reconfigured through I n t roduc t ion

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Turkey’s EU membership process and peace negotiations with the PKK, Sacrificial Limbs explores how sovereignty and sacrifice are co-constituted in an ethnopolitically divided nation. The chronicle of disabled veteran activism in this period concerns three bodies that are linked one to the other through a series of sacrificial transactions and sovereignty performances: the disabled veteran, the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, and the scapegoated intellectual, the latter exemplified by the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was murdered in the wake of ultranationalist protests against him. These sacrificial performances of sovereignty highlight the way that individuals’ bodies become launching pads for the internal constitution of sovereign state power through violence. Sovereignty has recently been reconceptualized in anthropology as a tentative form of authority grounded in violence.23 Theorized as such, sovereignty is seen not as something that the state possesses but rather as a contingent and therefore unstable effect of the state’s practice of creating itself as sovereign through the exercise of violence. Sovereign power needs to be constantly reenacted, reproduced, and reiterated in the matrixes of everyday life and people’s encounters with state institutions, particularly through public performances of violence, to create a singular and stable sovereignty effect. The fact that sovereignty is not something given, but is itself a terrain of struggle over bodies, life, death, and afterlife, becomes especially palpable in an ethnopolitically divided nation like Turkey, where sovereignty relations undergo major recalibrations and where political struggles over sovereignty entail contestations over the meaning, affective resonance, and political value of bodies agentivized or victimized by violence. That the body is the key site, target, and object of sovereign power, especially in times of war and political violence, is of central relevance in this story of disabled veterans’ sacrifice-mediated relation with state sovereignty. Performances of sovereignty often manifest as violence inflicted upon the bodies of humans who are branded as threats, enemies, traitors, and terrorists. This macabre relationship between sovereignty and the body, which Achille Mbembe insightfully calls necropolitics,24 finds its most elaborate exposition in Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer.25 Rejecting Michel Foucault’s notion of sovereignty as an archaic form of power unseated by modern biopolitics,26 Agamben suggests that sovereignty has been biopolitical from the very beginning. The founding act of sovereignty is the production of a biopolitical body, a bare life that is stripped of social, legal, and religious protection and included in the political order only through its 8

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exclusion. Agamben theorizes this biopolitical body by using the ancient Roman concept of homo sacer, “the sacred man” in Latin, a man who has been abandoned by both divine and profane laws and may therefore be killed by members of the political community, with impunity, but may not be sacrificed because he has been stripped of the worth required for such a divine gesture. Agamben’s insights are especially valuable in an ethnographic context where the state is constantly engaged in the banishment of certain forms of life from the national community, condemning them to a death without funeral rites or mourning in order to assert its spectral power. Consider, for example, the now banalized counterinsurgency practices institutionalized in the context of the Kurdish conflict that serve to reduce certain citizens to the status of mere bodies: extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, burials of leftist militants and guerrillas in mass graves and potter’s fields, secret interments, the persecution of mourners, and the destruction of guerrilla cemeteries.27 Or more recently, consider how during the coup attempt in 2016, the state’s official religious body, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), declared that no funeral services would be provided to coupists, who would be buried in a newly constructed “traitors’ cemetery.” The homo sacerization of certain bodies and populations, their production as bare life, is an essential practice in the Turkish state’s efforts to exercise its authority. As much as Agamben’s framework is inspirational for the analysis of the nexus of violence and sovereignty, from the perspective of an anthropology of violence there is a strange side effect of the popularization of homo sacer as an analytical category. While recovering the ancient Roman figure of homo sacer as an example of the always already biopolitical nature of sovereign power, Agamben argues that the “sacredness of the sacred man consists not in any residual religious sense of the sacred but rather in the inextricable link between sovereign power and human existence.” There is nothing sacred about the sacred man, he suggests, because homo sacer is a product of “an originary political structure that is located in a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane.”28 In order to bolster this argument, Agamben goes to great lengths to debunk anthropological notions of sacrifice and the sacred as misunderstandings and myths that have nothing to offer for our understanding of sovereign violence. In so doing, his theory leaves no room for grasping sovereignty’s dependence on sacrifice in the production of homo sacer. I n t roduc t ion

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Sacrificial Limbs makes two interventions into Agamben’s homo sacer paradigm. First, it places sacrifice at the center of understanding sovereign power. Especially in times of political violence and crisis, struggles over the meaning of violence and violently altered bodies become a key component of claims to sovereignty, which involve contestations not only over the monopoly of violence, but also over the “monopoly of sacrifice—that is, control over sacralized, transcendental loss.”29 Sovereignty claims embody presumptions about the meaning (or meaninglessness) of violent loss, assertions about whether violent loss has a transcendental dimension, and pronouncements about whether injured or dead bodies have some sort of worldly or otherworldly political and symbolic value beyond their immediate materiality. Sovereignty is the alchemy of making bodies sacred through the logic of sacrifice, as illustrated by the ways in which the socially abjected bodies of disabled veterans were officially rendered sacred in Turkey. And here we arrive at my second intervention into Agamben’s antisacrificial theory of sovereignty: The production of some bodies as homo sacer always depends on the sacralization of others in the name of whom the former can be rendered killable. The Turkish state’s counterinsurgency regime, which I elaborate on in chapter 1, provides us with an exquisite example of this dialectic. The ethno-necropolitical structure of counterinsurgency has entailed two interlinked processes: the sacralization of Turkish soldiers and the homo sacerization of Kurdish guerrillas. The mirror image of the production of sacrificial gazi and martyr bodies has been the conversion of the guerrilla-body into a “carcass,” an animality beyond human and divine orders. A similar dialectic can also be observed in the political relationship between disabled veterans and the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. In 1999, Öcalan was captured by Turkish forces and put on trial in arguably the most elaborate ritual of sovereignty in the history of modern Turkey. A stage for the dramatic reenactment of the state’s power over life and death and a “critical event”30 for disabled veterans’ activism, Öcalan’s trial involved multiple sacrificial transactions that I analyze in chapter 5. One of those transactions was an exceptional act passed in July 1999 that officially sacralized disabled veterans by inserting them into the symbolism of sovereignty as gazis through the logic of sacrifice. The timing of the decree that constructed disabled veteran bodies as sovereign sacrifices in the midst of Öcalan’s trial was not coincidental but symptomatic of sovereign power’s body politics. The resignification of disabled veterans’ bodily losses as sacrifices has been predicated on the 10

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vilification of Öcalan as the embodiment of everything that stands against law and morality. Later, when Öcalan was drawn into the sphere of politics from his absolute abjectness during the 2009–15 peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the PKK,31 the sacralization of disabled veterans would lose momentum, only to resume when negotiations failed and armed clashes recommenced with renewed vigor. A deep, tacit knowledge of this sovereignty-sacrifice dialectic underpins disabled veterans’ political activism. Disabled veterans often articulate a structure of feeling that their sovereign sacrifices are being betrayed when the state tries to reintegrate homo sacerized bodies into the body politic or does not kill them but simply lets them live. This “structure of feeling”32 has played a key role in the emergence of their political activism. Disabled veterans’ first wave of nationwide nationalist protest started right after Öcalan was sentenced to death in 1999 and then, when the death penalty was suddenly abolished as part of EU accession requirements, the penalty was commuted to life imprisonment.33 After their unsuccessful campaign for the carrying out of Öcalan’s death sentence, disabled veterans once again hit the streets during peace negotiations in 2009 when a group of Kurdish militants and guerrillas were allowed to enter the country as peace envoys. In spectacular protests, they publicly removed their prostheses in outrage, dramatically reenacting the sovereignty-sacrifice dialectic they embodied and thereby symbolically resacrificing themselves in the name of sovereignty. During my fieldwork between 2005 and 2008, my disabled veteran associates joined an ultranationalist witch hunt against public intellectuals who voiced antinationalist opinions about the military, the Kurdish conflict, and the Armenian genocide. A key term that I deploy in my analysis of disabled veterans’ political subjectification in this period is sacrificial crisis. The concept was originally coined by the French philosopher René Girard, who uses it to explain a mythic moment of a generalized state of violence that is characterized by the loss of socially salient distinctions of identity and alterity.34 Endangering the entire social edifice, such moments of political crisis can only be resolved, according to Girard, through acts of sacrifice that channel, displace, and cathect violence onto an arbitrary victim. For Girard, such social production of a surrogate victim—a scapegoat—is the bare logic of sacrifice.35 In chapter 5, I show how these protests against intellectuals are undergirded by a sacrificial substitution mechanism, whereby disabled veterans’ anger and resentment were channeled onto the scapegoated body of the intellectual. Pondering the historical continuity between veterans’ protests I n t roduc t ion

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against Öcalan and intellectuals, I also raise the possibility that the intellectual’s body replaced Öcalan as a surrogate victim. Building on the work of anthropologists Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss on ritual sacrifice,36 I use sacrificial crisis in another sense too. Hubert and Mauss see the sacrificial victim as a means of communication between sacred and profane worlds. Sacrifice confers a sacred character—not to be confused with the character of the homo sacer, who is outside both sacred and profane laws—on the sacrificial victim, who both separates and unites the sacred and profane worlds and who thus has an ambiguous character.37 Split between the stigma of disability and the symbolic weight of the title Gazi, the disabled veteran body is a perfect example of this ambiguity, which I analyze in chapter 3. This ambiguity is experienced and politically incited as an affectively charged staging of sacrificial crisis whereby the disabled veteran’s officially consecrated body is desecrated through its symbolic contact with socially abject matter or persons: feces in janitorial work and the disabled street beggar. In chapter 6, I focus on how instances of veterans’ prosthetic limbs being threatened with repossession due to financial debt are politically articulated by disabled veterans and the larger nationalist public as moments of sacrificial crisis and then folded into critiques of the government. In this book, I show how these two senses of sacrificial crisis converge and amplify one another as they shape disabled veterans’ activism. Through their political activism, veterans turn their dismembered bodies into spectacles of sovereignty and sacrifice, political surfaces upon which nationalist fantasies of unity and wholeness and the anxieties these fantasies breed can be projected. In these spectacles, veterans’ sacrificial limbs take on a spectral form and haunt the country in a political phantom limb syndrome that yearns for the “indivisible unity”38 of the body politic through the ritualized repetition of sacrificial violence.

narrative structure This book’s narrative is organized around disabled veterans’ biographical temporalities and follows their life course trajectories through a series of shocks, conversions, and transformations—from conscription and war, to hospitalization and disability, and thenceforth through processes of political identity, community, and agency formation and forfeiture. As such, the book traces a series of disjunctures that both permeate these young men’s wartime 12

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and postwar everyday lives and refashion their political attachments and disattachments and their relationship to the state, marked by the aesthetics of sovereignty, sacrifice, and debt. Chapter 1, “Being-on-the-Mountains,” explores the formations of the counterinsurgency military assemblage that structure disabled veterans’ narrativized war experiences. The chapter illustrates how conscripted soldiers’ shock experiences on the mountains leave lasting ideological, sensorial, and affective impacts on their bodies and psyches, impacts that will later be brokered into nationalist protest of a particular kind. Chapter 2, “The Two Sovereignties: Masculinity and the State,” analyzes the ways in which disabled veterans’ bodies manifest, destabilize, and renegotiate the militarized sovereignty relationship between masculinity and the state, now ruptured in the Kurdish conflict by injury and disability. Having once been conscripted by the state so as to be sovereign social and political soldiersubjects, veterans find that disability has radically disrupted the course of their heteronormative adult masculinity. Together, the gendered social embodiment of war disability, biopolitical and medical regimes, media representations, and nationalist politics conspire to resituate disabled veterans’ sovereign masculine subjectivities in a critical and rivalrous relationship with the state. Chapter 3, “Of Gazis and Beggars,” examines the sense of sacrificial crisis that emerges as disabled veterans navigate the gendered tensions between the stigma of disability in an ableist society and nationalist state symbols. Condensed in the diametrically opposed figures of the exalted gazi soldier and the abjected disabled street beggar, this crisis was experienced by disabled veterans as moments of political emergency in their everyday postinjury lives. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the ways in which disabled veterans come to feel class and disability issues as matters of sovereignty and ethnopolitics that are eminently amenable to conscription by ultranationalist political rhetoric. Chapter 4, “Communities of Loss,” explores the spatial, organizational, and affective infrastructure of disabled veteran activism, while also introducing the reader to some of the dramatis personae of my fieldwork. Predicated on the commonality of loss, activist communities formed jointly by disabled veterans and martyrs’ families fashion new forms of belonging, political intimacy, and intersubjective fields of healing that are then harnessed to ultranationalist political agendas. Chapter 5, “Prosthetic Revenge,” follows the vicissitudes of disabled veterans’ political careers as their subjectivities and subject positions are I n t roduc t ion

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transformed—first into national victim-heroes sacrificed in the name of state sovereignty; then into nationalist protestors pursuing a vengeful politics that demands state sacrifice of Kurdish, Armenian, and ideological “enemies of the nation” in exchange for the sacrifice they have made in the war; and finally, when betrayed by the state, into dismembered “sacrificial limbs” proper through their symbolic resacrifice in nationalist spectacles of prosthetic protests, a final gesture of sacrificial sovereignty aiming to restore, or even to become, the sovereign state. In the course of this process, the prosthesis emerges as the privileged object of disabled veteran activism and nationalist material political culture. Chapter 6, “Prosthetic Debts,” analyzes the brokering of gendered and militarized debt relations between disabled veterans and the nation-state through the lens of prosthesis repossessions—debt collection due to failed prosthesis payments. Illustrating how veterans get caught up in a new economy of indebtedness as they seek prosthetic rehabilitation in a changing welfare system, the chapter muses on the overlaps and frictions between the debt economies of capitalism and nationalist sacrifice under neoliberal militarism. Finally, the epilogue illustrates how bodies disabled by political violence and charged with sacrificial aesthetics have proliferated in the Turkey of the 2010s against a backdrop of failed peace negotiations between the state and the PKK, the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the failed coup attempt of 2016, and Turkey’s military campaigns in Syria. Such proliferation reflected a contested field of sovereignty and sacrifice within which disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict were pushed to the background of the political scene through the ruling party’s disinvestment from nationalist sacrifice, only to return with full force with the new Turkey’s authoritarian-militarist performances of state sovereignty.

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on e

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on my first visit to “the Region,”1 I travel from Diyarbakır to Bingöl in a minibus with a Kurdish anthropologist friend who introduces me to the geography of war. As our minibus ascends the snake-like mountain roads, our trip is frequently interrupted by military checkpoints. Every so often, my friend points out a crack in the mountain walls to show me the mark left by a rocket-propelled grenade or gestures to a now barren hill once covered with oak trees to recount how the Region’s forests were burned down in an effort to destroy guerrilla hideouts. Here, violently inscribed mountains function as mnemonic artifacts that store “repertoires of historical narrative and collective action.”2 Gabar, Cudi, Kato, İkiyaka, Buzul—these are the names of mountains located in the Region that have become familiar to any regular follower of Turkish news since the 1990s. Frequently referred to as having “the most inhospitable terrain in the world,”3 these mountains are where the dialectics of guerrilla-counterguerrilla warfare takes place—where the soldiers of the Turkish Army, the paramilitary village guards,4 and the guerrillas of the PKK engage daily in a deadly hide-and-seek game. These mountains form the spatial and chimerical contours of the uncanny geography of war, formed through historically sedimented practices of violence, terror, and resistance. As in other countries, the mountainous regions of Turkey have long been the stronghold of those wishing to escape or defy the centralizing and regulating practices and violence of the state: outlaws in hiding, social bandits challenging corrupt local authorities,5 nomadic tribes resisting the forced settlement policies of the Ottoman Empire, smugglers violating physical and economic borders, Marxist guerrillas struggling to topple the state. The mountains possess a mythical charm in popular memory through their place 15

A conscript resting in the mountains, 1993. Credit: Depo Photos.

in local oral epic koçaklama poetry as the last bastion of those facing down injustice, sloganized in the verses of the nineteenth-century folk poet Dadaloğlu: “If the law belongs to the sultan, the mountains belong to us.” This epic tradition has been celebrated as the authentic core of Turkish national culture by the republic, which construed itself as a radical break with the Ottoman Empire. But it has also inspired the folk music of the revolutionary Left, such as Ahmet Kaya’s Şarkılarım Dağlara (My Songs to the Mountains), Turkey’s all-time best-selling album. The symbolism and cultural meanings of the Region’s mountains have followed a historical trajectory that differs starkly from that of the now tamed and touristic mountains in other parts of Turkey.6 Since the foundation of the republic, the modernist discourse of Turkish nationalism has constructed the mountainous topography of the Region as the source of its historical alterity.7 In this figurative discourse, the backwardness of the Region, articulated in the tropes of tribal organization, feudalism, and customary law, is linked to the Region’s precipitous and impenetrable nature.8 In this way, the mountains here are viewed as material forces that generate and sustain difference, above all claims to ethnic difference. The state’s radical denial of the Kurds’ existence as an ethnic group until 1991 was legitimated on the grounds that Kurds were in reality Turks who had been alienated from their own ethnic identity by their isolation from the rest of the 16

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country, the dispersion of local populations into scattered settlements, and transportation difficulties. This official historical narrative goes so far as to attribute the origin of the word Kurd to the sound that Kurds’ boots make while walking on the snowy mountains: kart, kurt. Pejoratively dubbed “mountain Turks,” Kurds became Turks whose identity had been lost or—to put it more geographically—stolen by the mountains. While Turkish nationalism blanketed the Region’s mountains in an aura of negativity, Kurdish nationalist discourse celebrated the mountains as the only reliable source of refuge in a hostile and politically volatile environment. Hence the saying in Kurdish political folklore, “Kurds have no friends but the mountains.” Sacralized in the poetics of national struggle, mountains are the privileged sites of Kurdish political memory, which accumulates sedimentary layers of resistance and martyrdom.9 In the first published eyewitness account of guerrilla life on the mountains10 and in Kurdish guerrilla memoirs,11 the border between mountains and plains is constantly recoded as the border between life and death, dignity and submission, good death and bad death. “The plains mean destruction for the guerrilla,” guerrillas say, adding, “But no one can dislodge us from these mountains.”12 From the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 through to the 1990s, the Region’s mountains remained an alien presence within Turkish national geography, serving to mark the de facto boundaries of state sovereignty. In the first decades of the republic and with more urgency during the Kurdish rebellions of the 1920s and ’30s, the only acts of sovereignty targeting the mountains were bombing and naming. In an attempt to dissociate meanings from the fabric of social space and thereby erase local memories, the state gradually replaced Kurdish place-names with novel Turkish ones so as to make these places its own. Periodically, the state would supplement these mountain renaming drives with aerial bombing campaigns designed to expunge the Kurdish rebels from the newly Turkified mountains.13 Taking a bird’s-eye perspective, this nationalist gaze at the mountains registered its geography from a distance and with a sense of mastery. But this gaze also carried the anxiety of a lack created by the elusive materiality of mountains that were beyond the reach of soldiers who for several months each winter had to return to their barracks at night and remain locked there. After the introduction of counterguerrilla warfare techniques in the early 1990s, the social geography and ecology of the mountains and the nationalist imaginary’s relation to them changed. Through a constellation of anatomopolitical14 and necropolitical15 techniques that I examine in the following Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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Satellite image showing spatial inscription of sovereign violence in Şemdinli, Hakkari. “Sceneries” Series—Duratrans Digital Prints, 2013. Photo courtesy of Hakan Topal.

section, a new soldier-body/sensorium and a new army were created in the mirror image of the guerrilla and the PKK. Soldiers began living on the mountains day and night, sometimes uninterruptedly for months. Military units were altimetrically reorganized in accordance with a dominant/ subordinate location dichotomy that referred to higher (safe) and lower 18

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(unsafe) ground, respectively. With the exception of those villages converted to paramilitary village guard posts, all regional villages remote from heavily populated areas were evacuated. The Region’s mountains became preeminent spaces for inscribing the nationalist fantasy of the omnipresent Turkish state; not a single piece of land within the borders of the motherland existed beyond the reach of “the hand of the state.”16 The spatial doctrine of counterguerrilla warfare has radically transformed soldiers’ experience of being-on-the-mountains,17 as well as the meanings and emotional tones attached to the Region’s mountains. As their status within the Manichaean nationalist metaphysics of place has shifted—from demonized spaces to sites of an antagonistic copresence of soldiers and guerrillas—these mountains have become incorporated into the nationalist imaginary as enchanted sites of heroism, adventure, and martyrdom. In twenty-first-century Turkey, this fascination with the mountains has made its mark on the output of cultural products that circulate widely among an emergent nationalist public—films, poems, songs, soldiers’ photos and diaries, ex–military officers’ memoirs, and the personal videos of former recruits on the Internet abound with representations of mountains.18 The most striking feature of this new nationalist fascination with the mountains is the mimetic assimilation into the nationalist discourse of those aesthetic, emotional, and narrative structures previously associated with leftist and Kurdish struggles. Through this assimilation, the mountains are recast in the nationalist imaginary as objects of reverence, sites of redemption, silent witnesses of sacrifice, and tombs of heroic fighters “who go to their deaths as though they are going to their nuptial nights.”19 Yet old nationalist anxieties regarding the “loyalty” of these mountains to the nation have not vanished. On the contrary, they are deeply embedded in the nationalist glorification of the mountains; it is the coexistence of contesting discourses and emotional moods and regular shifts of rhetoric and tone that gives the nationalist veneration of the mountains its peculiar character. On nationalist websites one can find tawdry, sentimentalist mountain poems in the hundreds illustrating these ambivalences. In a typical poem, titled “Mount Gabar, Mount Cudi,” the author fuses two different images of the mountains as abominable abettors and beloved partners so as to enact the slippery structures of Turkish nationalist feeling toward them.20 The poem evokes gory images of dark peaks shrouded in blood or rivers of blood to describe the murderous nature of the Region’s peaks. Then, with an unexpected emotional twist, the stanzas hit an apologetic note as the poet sympathetically Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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cries out to the mountains, “I don’t reproach you, but understand my affliction!” Most of these poems indulge in such hyperbolic tonal twists as the mountains are made to vacillate wildly between sacred and profane domains. Their nationalist authors blame soldiers’ deaths on mountains that hide and harbor enemies, but they cannot help but venerate these places of soldiers’ deaths; death has rendered them sacred and transformed them into sites and material witnesses of martyrdom. This nationalist ambivalence toward the Region’s mountains both structures and is structured by soldiers’ being-on-the-mountains. It also characterizes my interlocutors’ personal and public recollections of their military days in the Region. In disabled veterans’ narratives, these mountains are simultaneously sublime and monstrous, objects of awe and contempt, spaces to redeem and to conquer. During my fieldwork, I frequently heard statements like “Gabar is a cursed mountain; its soil smells of blood, its rivers flow with blood,” “Gabar must be drilled from its peak to its base by oil drillers to be filled with explosives and blown up,” and “You can only appreciate the fact that our country is the most beautiful in the world after you see those mountains.” Sometimes statements such as these all appear in the same narrative. At times, my interlocutors remembered the mountains as animated enemy spaces. They recounted favorably how soldiers changed the name of the Hayırlı (loyal and auspicious) Mountains across the Iraq border to their antonym Hayırsız (disloyal and worthless) Mountains because they harbored and hid “terrorists.” They described in pictorial detail each individual mountain so as to spatially anchor their stories about how they “couldn’t find the terrorists hiding in an underground cave just below their feet” or how “an army of terrorists could fit into just one of the hundreds of tunnels beneath the mountain.” Mountains are enemies not only because they harbor enemies and help them hide, but also because they wear out soldiers through their “ill-tempered” nature. In disabled veterans’ narratives, surviving on these rugged mountains is itself an act of heroism. Their accounts depict a desiccated landscape so steep that even mules and ibexes cannot climb the slopes. My interlocutors frequently emphasized the absence of inhabitants and plant growth on the mountain peaks as evidence of their incompatibility with life. Reminiscing about mountains as enemy spaces conjured up conquest (gaza) imagery for my interlocutors. In spirited performances, they narrated the “adrenaline” of the ritualized combat practices of charging mountain peaks chanting “Allah, Allah”—the war chant associated with the Ottoman Janissaries—and raising flags after peaks have been captured. These customary 20

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Soldiers on a “captured” hill. Credit: Depo Photos.

practices closely echo the ritual structure of the Islamist-nationalist annual commemorations of the conquest of Constantinople. By building an analogy between the Janissaries climbing the city walls of Constantinople and presentday soldiers seizing the Region’s peaks, these exercises represent the “struggle against the PKK” as a holy war—in other words, a war against infidels. Through such practices, the Region’s mountains are marked as lands to be conquered and converted in order to remake the eternal home for the Turkish nation. The reconquest of the mountains is further accomplished through the mechanical reproduction of the soldiers’ conquering gaze, as depicted in souvenir photos in which my interlocutors pose on the peaks or point their weapons at the mountains on the horizon. But disabled veterans’ narratives of their military service days are also tinged with lamentation and longing for a lost pastoral landscape: a pastoral devastated by war and littered with ruins and military garbage; a “traumatic pastoral”21 in which both nature and humans are perpetrators, victims, and witnesses of violence. Their narratives portray the sublime views from mountain peaks or the idyllic scenes of evacuated and then mined or booby-trapped mountain villages where spring water wells up in the inner courtyards of houses. My interlocutors affectively conveyed the ghostliness of these scenes by pointing out where on their bodies they had got the chills, usually on the Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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napes of their necks or the back of their shoulders, when they first saw them. With pangs of guilt, they related how they had burned the beautiful orchards of empty villages so that they would not bear fruit for the consumption of “terrorists,” or how they shot down the “beautiful-eyed” mules of the guerrillas. They described despondently how the mountains have been turned into dumping grounds, rendering mine detectors useless in a land covered with bullet and shell casings and discarded tins of canned food. The mountains are affectively charged locations in these disabled veterans’ life histories, and they repeatedly and achingly voiced a desire to return to them. How should we understand this form of attachment, given that the mountains are where they received injuries that would ultimately lead to their disability? To answer this question, one needs to ponder what the experience of being-on-the-mountains was like for them and how this experience was structured through the biopolitical, necropolitical, ideological, and sensory formations of counterguerrilla warfare.

the body politics of counterguerrilla warfare On August 15, 1984, the outlawed PKK declared guerrilla war against the Turkish state by organizing coordinated attacks on the provincial towns of Eruh and Şemdinli. While several revolutionary leftist organizations had made attempts to initiate guerrilla war in rural Turkey in the 1970s, they did not pose a real challenge to the ample security apparatus of the Turkish state and were decisively crushed in the 1980 military coup. As a result of not having faced a serious “internal” threat since the Kurdish rebellions of the 1930s, the Turkish Army was caught off guard by the spatiotemporal strategies and dynamics of the all-out Kurdish guerrilla onslaught of 1984. In an otherwise tedious chronicle of his time spent in the Region, martial law deputy commander and brigadier general Hasan Kundakçı 22 narrates the 1984 surprise in satirical language. According to Kundakçı, in the four months between the initial attacks and the capture of the first PKK guerrilla, soldiers were disheartened by stories ascribing supernatural qualities to the guerrillas. Based on his previous experiences in the Region, Kundakçı inferred that these stories derived from local popular legends surrounding prominent social bandit figures like Hamido and that they had been deployed in “the same kind of propaganda to demoralize soldiers.” One such fabrica22

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tion recounted by Kundakçı concerns a talking bear living on Mount Ararat in the 1960s, known for scaring soldiers who had gone down to the river for water. The talking bear immediately disappeared from the scene once Kundakçı realized that it was a smugglers’ trick and responded by establishing hunting teams, disseminating the news in the nearby Kurdish villages. Kundakçı concluded that the first task of a counterinsurgency commander was to dispel such stories of the supernatural and convince soldiers that guerrillas were ordinary humans, not untraceable, bulletproof beings. On August 19, 1993, headlines across Turkey read “I Won’t Ask My Soldiers to Collect Carcasses,”23 quoting another famous brigadier general, Osman Pamukoğlu, a chief figure in the organization of counterinsurgency and an admired ex-commander of several of my interlocutors. Pamukoğlu had uttered the sentence during Operation Hedgehog, a large counterinsurgency operation in the Region, in response to journalists who had asked him to order his soldiers to collect guerrilla corpses so that they could take a photo gory enough to serve as both a journalistic and a political commodity.24 Whether or not Pamukoğlu’s real motive had been to hide the actual number of PKK casualties and inflate it for propagandistic purposes is less relevant than the ramifications of his use of the word carcass to refer to guerrilla corpses. The Turkish word for carcass, leş, is sometimes idiomatically used for a beaten or exhausted human body; yet through Pamukoğlu’s literalized use, the word acquired a new political meaning that became further incorporated into the military argot of the Region, coining new phrases like leş almak (literally, taking carcasses). The use of the word leş for guerrilla corpses finalized the homo sacerization25 of the guerrilla-body through its relegation to the outside of both human and divine orders. This reduction to bare, nonhuman, biological life served to strip guerrillas of their human rights and entirely nullified religious responsibilities regarding the tending to and burial of the dead and the Islamic principle of the sanctity of the corpse. This utterance must therefore be viewed as a symbolic marker of the start of counterinsurgency proper, often referred to as the “1993 Concept” both in leftist/pro-Kurdish and official/nationalist accounts of the war. When we juxtapose these two anecdotes related (nine years apart) by Kundakçı and Pamukoğlu, it is impossible to miss the shift from anthropomorphic to zoomorphic themes in the representation of the guerrilla-body. In both anecdotes, the body serves as an outer shell that conceals the true identity of its wearer. In the first, the talking bear has the appearance of an animal, but in reality it is a human inside the fur of a dead bear. In this anecdote, the Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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most urgent requirement of counterguerrilla warfare is to convince soldiers that guerrillas are ordinary flesh-and-bone human beings. In the second anecdote, by contrast, the guerrilla-body is construed as a human skin that harbors an unassimilable animalistic presence. Understood in this way, the guerrillabody belongs neither to the imagined national or religious community nor to a generic humanity. It is obvious that the military discourses and practices targeting guerrilla-bodies have been notably transformed in the nine years that passed between these two anecdotes. The guerrilla-body’s metamorphosis into animalistic forms within the militarist nationalist imagination can be traced through the objects of material war culture—souvenir photos that display soldiers posing with their weapons while stepping on guerrilla corpses or war trophies such as necklaces made of chopped-off guerrilla ears. The transformation of material and symbolic forms of state violence against guerrilla-bodies is intimately linked to the processes through which new soldier-bodies were fashioned in line with the counterinsurgency doctrine, infamously deployed in Vietnam and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq after having been initially developed in colonial contexts like the Philippines and Algeria.26 Between 1984 and 1993, the Turkish Army slowly but gradually metamorphosed from a conventional army devised for interstate warfare to an increasingly multifarious machinery of counterguerrilla warfare. This metamorphosis was modeled upon a set of military technologies alternately referred to as counterinsurgency, low-intensity, or unconventional warfare in the military “science” literature. Some of these technologies, such as forced displacement, had already made their way into the public realm because of their devastating macroscale effects or their flagrant violation of basic human rights. Others, such as the creation of a new soldier-body, were too subtle and procedural, too contained and limited in their goals and reach to become publicly visible or controversial. However, through their effects on soldiers’ bodies and psyches, these microtechnologies have profoundly shaped the nationalist ideology and public culture of post-1990s Turkey and reconfigured the meanings of and relations among military service, masculinity, and the disabled male body. While reading recently popularized memoirs or chronicles written by retired generals of the Turkish Army who served in the Region, one becomes aware of their fixation on the idea of “beating terrorists with their own tactics.”27 Indeed, this idea reveals one of the guiding principles of the reorganization of the Turkish Army: the remaking of the conscripted soldier-body as the mirror image of the guerrilla-body. 24

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In his war chronicle, Pamukoğlu,28 now a nationalist celebrity and political party leader, builds an analogy between soldiers’ relation to guerrillas and a fox hunter’s relation to the fox. In order to be successful, Pamukoğlu asserts, the hunter has to learn to think and act like a cunning fox by mimicking its behaviors. Continuing the analogy, he argues that to defeat guerrillas, soldiers must learn their ways and become like them—mobile, small, flexible, and not bound by stations, bureaucracy, or legality. The retired general narrates in detail the process through which soldiers under his command were trained, encouraged, and forced to mimetically reproduce the military tactics and embodied practices of guerrillas. I call this one-way mimetic process through which the soldier-body is transformed into a mimetic copy of the guerrilla-body becoming-guerrilla. Becoming-guerrilla entails a move away from conventional military drills, inter-rank relations, discipline, and enemy conception so as to inculcate conscripted soldiers with the skills, daily life patterns, and sensorial and physical capacities associated with guerrillas. It also involves a spatiotemporal rearrangement of military units so as to replicate guerrilla tactics. Below, I reflect on this process of becoming-guerrilla, paying particular attention both to the soldiers’ embodied experience of this mimetic transformation and to the overdetermining effects of the metamorphosis on guerrilla-bodies. The sine qua non aspect of becoming-guerrilla is the permanentization of military activity and its temporal and spatial expansion. Borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology,29 this process can be best understood as the state’s seizure of a “war machine” that has flourished in domains outside or at the margins of the state’s regulatory practices. Through becoming-guerrilla, the military captures smooth time-spaces (mountains, nights, winters, cross-border zones), striating them in order to restrict nomadic flows like the movement of guerrillas. In this process the military itself becomes partially nomadic. In the early 1980s, the movement of soldiers and guerrillas resembled two waves traveling in opposite directions and forming a matrix of smooth and striated time-spaces with destructive interference zones. The principal force overdetermining soldiers’ movements was the rhythm of nature. Soldiers conducted patrol and military operations during daylight and in summer and remained locked in their barracks at night and through the winter. Guerrillas, on the other hand, followed the rhythms of soldiers and restricted themselves to hit-and-run attacks when the military units were mobile and dispersed and to full-force attacks when soldiers were stationary and condensed. This flexible and unrestricted movement in smooth time-space had Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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always afforded the guerrillas a structural initiative advantage. This was to change when the Turkish Army shifted from a static territorial defense strategy of permanently protecting the land to the strategy of field domination. Kadri Gürsel—a journalist abducted by the PKK in 1995 and held hostage for twenty-six days, during which he and a group of guerrillas struggled to reach a PKK camp on Mount Gabar—describes the striation of time-space on the mountains in his book Those on the Mountains.30 In a thrilling account, Gürsel narrates how their journey, once a short and easy passage according to the guerrillas who had captured him, became virtually impossible due to the omnipresence of military units and paramilitary village guards, technological surveillance, and the increasing compression of sanctuary time-spaces. This journey reflects the effects of the temporal and spatial expansion of the military to the other side of the mountains through the strategy of field domination. While the rearrangements and reconfigurations required for this change in strategy were many and various, certain aspects are particularly relevant here. To begin with, the shift demanded the technological upgrading of the army through the introduction and routinization of the use of transportation technologies such as four-by-four off-road motor vehicles and military helicopters, sensorial technologies such as thermal imaging and night vision, winter gear, and nonrecoil artillery. It also required the reorganization of soldiers under small, flexible, and mobile teams with the ability to act as an organic totality with specialized sensory organs and firepower capacities. It even involved the renegotiation of certain national memories concerning past wars, such as those of the military catastrophe of the Battle of Sarıkamış, the worst single defeat in Turkish national history. The collective memory of eighty thousand Ottoman soldiers ill-prepared for winter conditions freezing to death in the Caucasus still haunted military officials of the time who, even after seventy years, remained unwilling to conduct winter operations. Like the stories of bandits past that still haunted soldiers, such memories had to be dispelled. Most importantly, though, this shift in strategy required the invention and deployment of various anatomopolitical techniques that addressed soldier-bodies at a pre-individual level, “below the human body and above the human subject,”31 and enabled the formation of a new embodiment and sensorium with which to live and fight on the mountains. The most immediate manifestation of the becoming-guerrilla process in soldiers’ everyday lives was the obligation to live on the mountains and be constantly on the move, 26

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Conscripts marching, 1996. Credit: Depo Photos.

just like guerrillas. “You want to know what I did in my military service? I walked and walked and walked. That’s what I did in military service,” declared one of my interlocutors acerbically. The theme of walking dominates my interlocutors’ narratives. Indeed, one of the most frequently used words in my interviews is a rather odd phrase that one hears very rarely in ordinary speech—intikal etmek, which means “changing place.” For most of my interlocutors, arduous mountain walks characterized by unbearable moments of thirst, hunger, fatigue, and pain were the main source of suffering in military service. They remembered and described, in an unusually Foucauldian way, how during their basic training their bodies were broken into embodied capabilities of walking and carrying weight so that they could walk great distances on a rugged terrain while carrying over seventy pounds in their backpacks. They recounted in detail, for example, exercise hikes during which they were forced to carry backpacks loaded down with heavy stones until their commanders decided that their mental and physical resistance to bodily exhaustion had been broken and that they had learned the lesson that immobility equaled death in the Region. But they also described how they would nod off for a few seconds whenever they had to crouch on the ground and how, in desperation, they hoped that the group would be ambushed so that they could finally stop walking and rest. Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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Oftentimes, these walking stories came to a close when the narrator recounted how he was injured during a walk, either by stepping on a land mine or in an ambush. One day, out of the blue, a mischievous interlocutor asked me if I knew the reason why most amputee veterans were missing their left foot. I didn’t know the answer. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware of the fact (if it is a fact). But as usual, he was successful at arousing and directing my attention, so I asked him to explain. Smirking, he replied that the explanation lay in the way soldiers were trained in marching drills. “Left, right, left,” he loudly reminded me of the military cadence, adding, “They take the first step with their left foot.” Regardless of its empirical validity, this observation carries an insightful kernel of truth regarding the close connection between the anatomopolitical regime of military institutions and the soldierbody’s differential exposure to bodily harm and injury. The strategic investment of the military in mobility as a part of counterinsurgency turns certain body parts, especially feet, into extremely valuable and vulnerable organs. Several of my interlocutors told stories about buying expensive boots out of pocket or spending the last drops of drinking water to clean feet covered with sores and blisters. The same “feetology” also exists on the other side of the mountains: the best gift to give a guerrilla is said to be a pair of walking boots. Ironically and poignantly, in a landscape so littered with land mines, the counterpart to increased mobility in military service is death (total immobility) or injury (loss of mobility in civilian life). The majority of my disabled veteran acquaintances had lower-limb amputations following injuries caused by land mine explosions.

mimesis and alterity Mimetic success in the becoming-guerrilla process constitutes a source of both suffering and masculine warrior pride for conscripts. In disabled veterans’ narratives, the moment of return from the mountains to the station with uniforms filthy and ripped, skin covered with blood-sucking body lice, boots riven, faces bearded, and hair matted—states that violate the norms of military discipline and bodily comportment—is often recounted with excitement and pride. “You should have seen me! I was just like a terrorist [Tam terrorist gibiydim]. No one could tell that I was a soldier.” Best exemplified in the archetypal figure of Rambo, a tough survivor and master of guerrilla tactics, the investment in and enjoyment of the unconventionalization of 28

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warfare is not an unfamiliar phenomenon; indeed, Turkish media accounts are full of braggadocio about Rambo-looking Turkish soldiers. Yet I was still surprised each time a disabled veteran who abhorred everything to do with the PKK so casually boasted that he was “just like a terrorist.” Such swagger is clearly marked by the enjoyment of becoming something else through mimesis, of turning into the other and draining his power through mimetic magic.32 The erasure of differences between soldier-body and guerrilla-body is intimately linked with the increase, after the 1990s, in different forms of violence targeting guerrilla-bodies. The more the soldier-body resembled the guerrillabody through the mimetic structure of becoming-guerrilla, the more guerrilla-bodies were exposed to emergent violent practices. Especially during the consolidation of the becoming-guerrilla process in the early 1990s, the mutilation of guerrilla corpses—cutting off ears as a war trophy—became a widely shared public secret in Turkey. Discharged soldiers carried the material culture of this “space of death” on the mountains to the cities in the forms of necklaces made of cut-off ears and personal photos of themselves posing while stepping on the severed heads of slain guerrillas. Interestingly, while the existence of these practices was constantly refuted by the state, gory photos of guerrilla corpses, a vast majority of whom were citizens of Turkey, circulated not only within the underground image economy, but also on the front pages of mainstream media as weapons of psychological warfare. The relationship between the escalation of such violent practices and the blurring of boundaries between self and other is well documented in ethnographies of violence. Often hinting at but rarely tackling the question of mimesis, such ethnographies are illuminating in their focus on the mechanisms through which the human body becomes a surface for the inscription and reading of otherness in contexts where social uncertainty and “doubts about who exactly are among the ‘we’ and who are among the ‘they’ ” take over.33 Fueled by the narcissism of minor differences, violence in these contexts becomes a “forensic means to establish sharp lines,”34 especially in vivisectionist and verificationist forms of violence.35 If the becoming-guerrilla process erases the bodily marks of difference between the soldier-body and the guerrilla-body, violent practices targeting the guerrilla-body reconstruct and verify its otherness “in its dismemberment and disfiguration.”36 In that sense, it is striking that one of my interlocutors, a primary school graduate, consistently used the medical term otopsi (autopsy) to narrate how he and his comrades handled guerrilla corpses. Several of my interlocutors Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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argued that they found what they were looking for in these “autopsies”: an unremoved foreskin marking the otherness of the guerrilla at the bodily level, implying that he is a non-Muslim. Without witnessing it personally, others believed the “uncircumcised terrorist” myth created by decades of state propaganda claiming that the PKK was in fact a continuation of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), the armed organization that launched a wave of assassinations against Turkish diplomats in the 1980s. This uncircumcised terrorist figure reflects the crisis in the national order of things in contemporary Turkey, propelled by the ethnopolitics of the Kurdish armed struggle. The uncut foreskin brings a fleshly closure to this crisis by suggesting that guerrillas are not (Muslim) Kurds, who are mountain Turks anyway, but in fact (Christian) Armenians already violently cast outside of the religio-national community. The uncircumcised terrorist figure is a reminder that constructions of identity and alterity are always gendered and sexualized.37 Like compulsory military service, circumcision operates as a rite of passage not only into a religio-national community in Turkey but also into normative masculinity.38 With his uncircumcised penis, the terrorist of the political fantasies of my interlocutors and of the state is neither a member of the religio-national community nor a manly man.

gender formations “This is not a manly war” is a phrase I heard countless times from veterans during my fieldwork. The manly war is understood here as the extension of the embodiment of delikanlılık (literally, crazy-blooded), which refers to male youth but also to moral masculine subjecthood, which rests on a man’s courage to risk his own body and dignity in the attempt to create, maintain, or extend his “space of violence.”39 Guerrilla warfare is deemed an unmanly war because it does not involve direct confrontation of the enemy and is therefore always mediated by the spatial logic of guerrilla/counterguerrilla tactics such as pusu (ambush). My interlocutors used the gendered trope of ambush as a narrative device of othering while remembering their experiences on the mountains. In their accounts, guerrillas never fight like men; unlike the brave Turkish soldiers who actively seek out a face-to-face clash, they run away and hide when

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attacked and tenaciously wait for an ambush opportunity. Thus, guerrilla tactics such as ambush and stealth are resignified within the symbolic economy of manly fighting to indicate the cowardice of guerrillas. Not only tactics but also weapons associated with guerrillas, especially land mines, are articulated within this symbolic economy so as to emasculate guerrillas. Like ambush, land mines are nearly always used with the gendered swear word kahpe in my interlocutors’ war narratives and the Turkish media. Kahpe is a very dense and multilayered word; it literally means “whore,” but its connotations metaphorically extend to backstabbing, double-crossing, betrayal, untrustworthiness, and traitorousness. In short, kahpelik, the condition of being kahpe, entails any deed that violates the gendered codes of honor that have long fascinated the anthropologists of the Mediterranean basin.40 Land mines are frequently referred to as silahların en kahpesi (the most kahpe weapon) or kahpelerin kahpesi (the most kahpe of all kahpes) since they violate the masculine ethics of violence by allowing the disembodied presence of the enemy, hence enabling harm without the risk of being harmed. Needless to say, as the pejorative notion of kahpelik always denotes an unassimilable transgression, the labeling of certain weapons and tactics as kahpe functions as a marker of the other’s moral inferiority. While the demasculinization of guerrillas through the idioms of cowardice and kahpelik provides the constitutive outside of military masculinity, it also creates problems for disabled veterans’ self-fashioning as manly heroes. One cannot become a manly hero merely by fighting cowards. While tackling this problem, veterans often resort to a narrative strategy that resembles the survival trope of one of their favorite movies: the first installment in the Rambo series, First Blood.41 In their accounts, guerrillas are always in an advantageous position, no matter how absurd the ramifications of this conviction may seem. Guerrillas, forming a more or less permanent cadre, are thought to be better trained and better equipped than conscripts. Moreover, in my interlocutors’ narratives, the fight against the guerrillas is constructed as a fight against “the imperialists and their pawns,” given that guerrillas are allegedly backed up and harbored by superpowers and neighboring countries. What transforms disabled veterans’ narratives of an unmanly war against cowards into stories of masculine prowess and heroism is the fantasized power disparity between guerrillas and soldiers. In and through this fantasy, the armed struggle with guerrillas becomes the tip of the iceberg of a larger

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and tougher struggle against wild nature and rugged terrain, against masked superpowers and betrayer neighbors, and, importantly, against the nefs. Nefs (nafs in Arabic) is frequently translated into English as self, nature, or ego; yet none of these words captures the particular significance of the term within Islamic philosophy and popular culture. Nefs is most commonly used to denote a human being’s lower self, the self with appetites and worldly passions, and to refer more specifically to what drives the self to commit evil or wrongdoing. In my interlocutors’ accounts, being-on-the-mountains is a constant struggle against the nefs, in which soldiers have to curtail even their most basic bodily needs and desires, whereas guerrillas are presumed to have the means to hedonistically indulge themselves. In these accounts animated by desire, resentment, and moral condemnation, the financial and logistical support of Turkey’s enemies enables guerrillas to spend their winters in luxuriously warm cave shelters, while soldiers freeze to death desperately searching for them. These shelters are often likened to a supermarket where one can find any type of food or medical supply in abundance. But the birth control pills and condoms reportedly found in these shelters most captivate my interlocutors—even those who are aware of the revolutionary puritanism of the PKK cannot hide their envious resentment of the mixed-gender structure of guerrilla groups. The contrast between the implied sexual activity among PKK members and the celibacy of soldiers constitutes another dimension of the struggle against nefs. Some disabled veterans tell stories about soldiers who were seduced by Siren-like Kurdish girls who tempted them by bathing in the rivers. These seduction stories always end in punishment—in one case, the beheading of the tempted soldier—that strikes down those deceived by their nefs. In disabled veterans’ narratives, there are also figures that subvert or complicate the foundational dichotomy between the lionhearted Turkish soldier and the kahpe PKK guerrilla. One such figure is that of the fearless berserk, which emerges without exception in all oral histories I have collected. In contrast with the cowardly guerrilla figure, this fearless guerrilla directly charges soldiers from the front, ignoring flying bullets and without taking cover. In that sense, the berserk guerrilla is an excessive performer of manly fight and valor. His valor is excess akin to imprudence, since he cares neither for his own nor his comrades’ lives. The fearless guerrilla is “conditioned to fight like an automaton,” and his running amok, “swinging like a drunk,” stops only when he is dead. All of my interlocutors are firmly convinced that

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such valor is unnatural and that such fearless guerrillas are the product of a chemical substance called the “bravery pill” (cesaret hapı). In the course of my fieldwork, I must have looked dubious every time I heard the name of this enigmatic substance, since several of my interlocutors tried to assure me that such a pill “really” existed and that they had found such tablets in PKK storage places. Whether or not there is a referent for the signifier “bravery pill,” and notwithstanding its magical realist and cyborg undertones, the ideological function of this trope is clear. The implication is that guerrillas can acquire the natural masculine qualities of prowess, altruism, and self-sacrifice only by chemically altering their consciousness. Ironically, guerrillas are also sure that it is the bravery pill that causes the crazed charges of Turkish soldiers to the Janissary war chant of “Allah, Allah.” According to guerrilla memoirs, compulsorily conscripted soldiers can face death with such serenity only through a combination of months of brainwashing and drug use. Another subversive figure in my interlocutors’ narratives is the “terrorist woman.” 42 In these narratives, the guerrilla woman appears as a ghastly figure; she is cruel, cold-blooded, and totally merciless. She does not panic, however grave the situation; she never hesitates and, most importantly, her hands never shake. Because of these deadly qualities, my interlocutors claim, the guerrilla woman is a natural sniper and forms a hair-raising duo with the Dragunov sniper rifle, known in the Region as the Kanas. She also possesses the silence and stealth of a cat. If she ever sneaks into an emplacement, she can calmly detonate herself and surprised soldiers with a grenade. She incites dread even among “the most lionhearted Turkish soldiers.” This woman guerrilla figure of the military folklore of the Region goes against the grain of mainstream representations of guerrilla women in the Turkish media, which portray them as passive victims who were abducted from their villages and endured rape and forced warfare. Yet as a trope of gender inversion the figure operates through the cultural logic of othering.43 Affectively charged figures like the uncircumcised terrorist, the fearless berserk, and the terrorist woman animate the surreal war geography of the Region’s mountains. On the mountains, the mimetic process of becomingguerrilla and the accompanying movement of alterity inscribe soldiers’ bodies not only on the body’s surface or at a merely cultural, psychic, or ideological register. They are carved deep into the flesh and the viscera and affectively mapped onto the senses. This is precisely how they seep into the conscripts’ “postwar” present in quite unexpected ways.

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the war of the senses Walter Benjamin44 describes the everyday experience of walking in the anonymous urban public spaces of the nineteenth century as a visceral sense of shock. For Benjamin, this shock can be generalized as the emblematic feature of modernity wherein human senses are flooded with stimuli through the forces of mass media and commodification and subjected to a “complex training” in diverse social spaces like streets, factories, battlefields, and movie theaters. In line with the general thrust of his work, Benjamin simultaneously finds both a crisis/loss and possibility/salvation in this transformation of the human sensorium. While enabling revolutionary changes in humans’ experience of the world through tactility and the technological extension of the human senses, this change also opens the human sensorium to new kinds of trauma.45 Benjamin’s reflections on the malleability of the human sensorium and the shock experience associated with modernity provide crucial insights for our understanding of the transmutation of the sensory apparatus of conscripted soldiers in becoming-guerrilla, but in a rather inverted way. To my knowledge, despite Nazism’s constant evocation of a pastoral idyllic landscape harboring an organic community, Benjamin never speculated on the possible sensory effects of the move to nature from the city. But for the conscripted soldiers deployed in active duty in the Region, this move is one of the most pressing concerns, since the relative or absolute absence of electricity, mass media, noise, pollution, anonymous crowds, and the distractive force of commodities on the mountains engenders a strong sense of shock and disorientation. This shock of being-on-the-mountains is not the kind of worldhistorical, epochal shock on which Benjamin meditates; nevertheless, it is a generational one. Moreover, this generational shock needs to be situated not only in relation to the decolonization of the senses on the mountains, but also to their simultaneous recolonization by the military. Every type of war demands the reeducation of soldiers’ senses. The becoming-guerrilla process, too, entails a reconfiguration of conscripts’ sensorial capacities through the cultivation of new modes of attention and the utilization of sensory prosthetic devices. In a guerrilla/counterguerrilla war characterized by mutual exchanges of stealth and ambush, soldiers have to learn the intimate relationship between perception and death and to develop new modes of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic attention, especially in order to deflect the constant threats posed by scattered antipersonnel land mines. A slight crunch, a whisper in Kurdish, a momentary image caught by the corner 34

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of the eye, a shade in the dark, a small heap of stones, or the softness of the soil may be the harbinger of death. Most of my interlocutors were injured on arama tarama (search patrol) missions during which they walked, often aimlessly, to cover a terrain or with the hope of coming across a guerrilla group. Since they very rarely lead to encounters, these search patrols are often construed as pointless and meaningless in my interlocutors’ narratives; nothing happens while they wander around without a clear sense of mission or orientation. Then, suddenly, their narratives change speed and intensity as violence erupts in the middle of nothingness: someone steps on a land mine and blows up. Covered with his blood and bits of his flesh, his friends carry him to a helicopter and place his torn leg beside him. In these reconstructive accounts, moments of serenity, silence, and boredom become indexical of violence, death, and gore. This indexical relationship says something important about the sensory formations of counterguerrilla warfare, which have a profound effect on soldiers’ senses of normality, temporality, and existence. The omnipresence of life-threatening dangers conveys a generalized sense of uncertainty and vulnerability, shaping soldiers’ perception of place, time, objects, and people. Death can come from anywhere—on the road or in sleep, from booby-trapped mundane objects or seemingly innocuous social encounters. Keeping our awareness of this mode of heightened perception and sense of vulnerability ever in mind, it is possible to chart out two more specific sensorial formations of being-on-the-mountains. The first belongs to long nights spent at guard posts and in trenches and is characterized by extended periods of sensory deprivation in which all stimuli are reduced and a soldier’s visual sense is often completely cut off. These are the sensory deprivation contexts in which the soldiers’ sense of the uncanny roams free.46 The second sensory formation belongs to interludes of armed engagement, when the sensorial impact of modernity is intensified through mechanized warfare and the optical unconscious47 of military technologies like night vision. Soldiers’ senses are strained in both of these cyclical periods of sensory deprivation and sensory overload, and the intensity and terror of these moments is inscribed in soldiers’ bodies through sensory means. There are other moments that literally strain not only the senses but also the soldiers’ very sense of being. I was so soaked in blood. There’s no way for you to imagine it. It soaked my uniform and my beard, got stuck under my nails. So much blood. I can still Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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smell it. You can’t imagine what human blood smells like. Human carcasses all around, everywhere. Mountains teeming with carcasses everywhere. You enter a forest and see carcasses. Then you realize that they belong to humans not animals. Can you believe it? You suddenly bump into a wormy corpse. They’re all around. Climb the mountains of Şırnak; they’re teeming with corpses. It’s impossible not to come upon one. That’s what it’s like.

In the accounts of moments where my interlocutors are overpowered in the death fields by the sights and smells of burned and rotting bodies, there is an unsettling recognition of mortality and a bewildered repudiation of the illusory sense of bodily unity. These moments are shocking encounters with the dimension of human existence that Jacques Lacan48 calls the Real, that dimension of experience that resists assimilation into symbolism, language, and meaning. Such extraordinary experiences resist classification and lead to supramundane feelings of fear that are felt and expressed in various forms of the uncanny. In disabled veterans’ life histories, the sense of the uncanny is often framed in the cultural idioms of warnings and premonitions.49 Injury always comes with warnings; soldiers “see” or intuitively know that something bad is about to happen before it happens. That night, I had a shave at the barber, got a shower, changed my underwear, and called everyone I knew. I called my wife last for helalleşme [the practice of giving and receiving blessings and forgiving each other before saying farewell, particularly when death appears near]. She asked me why I was talking like that. I said, “I’m going and maybe I won’t return.” I must have had a hunch because that was the only time I ever did something like that. I called every single person I knew, even those I barely knew at all. It was around midnight that night when the bullet found me.

Warnings come in many forms. They often appear in dreams, a culturally salient medium of divination and communication with the supernatural in Islamicate contexts. In their narratives, most of my interlocutors mention seeing themselves dead, wounded, or troubled in their dreams before actually being injured. Warnings sometimes come as “gut feelings”—affective intensities felt through body parts, such as an anxiety in the chest, a hunch in the stomach, or gooseflesh at the back of the neck. Commonly, these intensities are felt as bodily resistance against daily routines and the commands of the brain and as a sort of temporary blockage that restricts the embodied capacities of the subject. Typically the feet, the primary organs of war on the moun36

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tains, receive the warnings: “My feet would not allow me to walk that day. I was actually in good shape. But no, I couldn’t walk! My feet simply would not move. I wondered what was going on. ‘What is happening to you today?’ I asked myself. I knew that I was going to be shot.” In some veteran narratives, spectral, saintly figures known as evliya (plural of veli, meaning “friend of God”) are the emissaries of warning. Those narratives shift the agency of warning from the body and into a divinely ordained supernatural encounter. Evoking the popular image of evliya as Allah’s helping hand, offered as a blessing and help for those faithful in need, these narratives reconstruct beneficial encounters with them as a portent of imminent danger. Materializing in the fleeting collapse of the worldly and otherworldly realms, evliya invoke the uncanny as benevolent safeguard. In the following account, a veli in the form of a soldier-apparition saves the narrator from his unbearable thirst shortly before he is injured. We were on an ambush. I had taken my rations and two plastic water bottles with me. On the way I had spent an hour climbing. I was tired and washed my hands and face. I sipped some water knowing that I still had two bottles. One hour passed, two hours passed. . . . The heat was hitting me hard. I finished one bottle. I poured some on my head. I wasn’t worried about the water since I still had another bottle left. The clock was ticking. Roughly three, four hours passed. I was constantly gulping down water till there was little left in the bottle. I was so thirsty! I felt sleepy but couldn’t sleep. There would be trouble if I slept. If only I could wash my face. I don’t remember what happened next. I must have dozed off. I woke up to a noise. A crack. I turned back to see who it was. I pointed my gun. Nothing. No noise at all. Whatever. I looked right and left. I checked the radio. There was no signal and no incoming call. I rose up, took a few steps, and saw a crawling soldier. “Stop,” I yelled. “Who’s that?” He didn’t stop, so I opened fire. Then I heard the radio asking me what was going on. I told my commander that we had been infiltrated. “How could he have passed in front of us and reached your spot?” he scolded me. I swore I had seen him, and he told me to be careful. When I turned my head, I saw that the water bottle was full. I don’t believe in the existence of such things, but the water bottle was filled to the brim!

Occurring as a consequence of soldiers’ pre-objective perception of impending danger, the sense of the uncanny is articulated in warning and premonition narratives. Resonating with the occult soldier representations that have proliferated with the rise of mediatized popular Islam in twentyfirst-century Turkey, these narratives constitute the otherworldly realm of the secular state. Providing a closure to enigmas of survival and loss by Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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evoking a sense that my interlocutors’ experiences were not accidental but ordained by fate or divine will, they sacralize and assign metaphysical meaning to injury and disability. Yet as the next section demonstrates, not all the ways in which soldiers’ bodies remember and reexperience the sensory traces of being-on-the-mountains after war can be contained in such culturally resonant narratives. If the experience of being-on-the-mountains is a shock in the Benjaminian sense, so is the return to the city. After hearing about it dozens of times, I have in my memory a vivid picture of the panoramic night scene one views from the windows of the sixth floor of the Gülhane Military Medical Academy (Gülhane Askeri Tıp Akademisi, hereafter GATA) in Ankara where severely wounded soldiers from the Region are treated. This bird’s-eye view of the capital city’s bright neon lights reflects the visual sense of those soldiers transferred from the Region, who had rarely, if ever, viewed such artificial brightness during their military service. There is a sense of pleasure, dazzlement, and also threat in the fascination with lights, anonymous crowds, buildings, and traffic. The sensorial requirements and arrangements of city life are radically different from those of the Region. Many ex-soldiers cannot comfortably walk on asphalt roads for a while, since walking on this smooth surface requires a completely different kinesthetic coordination than walking in the rugged mountains. Moreover, the modes of attention habituated as lifesaving strategies on the mountains are only distractive forces in civilian life. There is little point in the endless tracking of land mines or the automatic search for signs of terrorists in people’s faces, gestures, and talk. Yet such habits endure as they become hardwired into the body and the sensorium. It is through such habits that the sensory formations of being-on-themountains erupt in the postinjury lives of disabled veterans.

affective memories On a foggy and rainy winter night, I pick up Kaya from the meeting point we had set up a day earlier and head toward his rented apartment in one of the oldest squatter settlements of Istanbul. As soon as he gets in the car, he asks me whether he can smoke. “It’s pouring outside. I had to throw away two soaked butts,” he murmurs grumpily. “It’s fine,” I say, even though I detest the tobacco smell left in the car, not to mention the particular smell of Tekel 2001, which is nearly as bad as its more expensive counterpart, Marlboro 38

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Reds. He offers me one and I politely decline. He goes ahead and lights his cigarette and voilà, he is immediately cheered up. On our way, he wants to stop at a grocery store to buy more cigarettes. “I need to stock an extra pack just in case we finish this one tonight,” he explains. While Kaya tells me his life story in his living room, we both chain smoke. I have a pack of Camels, and he says he is very fond of Camels but recently can’t afford them. So I offer him one from my pack and we both light up. Soon he reciprocates with his Tekel 2001, and this time I don’t decline. We spend the evening in a thick cloud of smoke as we exchange and light cigarettes one after another and drink endless glasses of hot black tea served by his wife. He tells me how his parents used to be heavy smokers, how much he hated the disgusting smell and the choking smoke as a child, and how he thought that he would never, ever smoke. We chuckle together as I tell him that I have the exact same smoking history. We also discover that we both started out smoking the same brand, Camels. Kaya tells me how he started smoking in the poorly dug trenches and ambush emplacements in the mountains where he and his teammates stood guard for months. Because “grandpas”—more experienced soldiers who had been actively involved in “operations” and especially those who had taken “heads”—regularly evaded their guard duties, “grandsons” like Kaya had to stand guard up to twelve hours nonstop every day in pitch-black pits perpetually covered in snow and ridden with lice. With no light, no sleep, and no stimulation other than rare moments of conflict, even fear abandoned Kaya after a few weeks. For Kaya, as for others, this confrontation with nothingness disclosed the primary mood that ruled the guard posts, namely the boredom: “How are you going to spend twelve hours in a hole with people who had already told you several times over all the minute details of their lives and every story they knew? Sometimes we just made stories up to kill time. But your imagination has its limits. How are you going to spend twelve fucking hours if you are not going to smoke?” Smoking under these conditions of semiconfinement is a way to maintain a semiautonomous space for desirous bodies, which together form a carcinogen community through exchanges of cigarettes and fumes. It breaks the long temporal chain of military discipline and counterguerrilla warfare into a relatively autonomous circular temporality governed by the body’s craving for smoking and marked by the acts of lighting and putting out cigarettes. Yet what gives smoking its particular flavor in the context of counterguerrilla warfare is not merely resistance to boredom or discipline. Smoking on the Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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mountains is primarily an experiment in and a flirtation with the possibility of death, combining the mundane in-breath/out-breath pleasure of smoking with the extraordinary pleasure of cheating death and once again surviving in the face of it.50 Every narrative I heard from ex-soldiers about the pleasures of smoking on the mountains starts with a joyful account of how dangerous and deadly smoking can become. “One can detect the light of a cigarette from two kilometers at night. That is also the range of Kanas assassination rifles. You light one cigarette and boom!” Needless to say, that never hinders anyone from smoking. But one does have to acquire certain skills—how to hold a cigarette in a tightly closed palm or how to use an empty Coke tin as a light screen. Kaya used to buy his cigarettes from a small general store located in a mountain village near his barracks that was totally dependent on the counterguerrilla war economy and inhabited by paramilitary village guards and their families. He would buy Camels, an expensive foreign brand, rather than the cheaper local brands, as he had nowhere else to spend the subsistence allowance given to soldiers deployed in the Region, several times higher than minimum wage. He was not married then and his brother made enough money to take care of their parents. The only problem was that one could not stock more than a few packs in the barracks, especially not the foreign brands, unless one wanted to “share” them with other soldiers. So whenever he had a chance to get a day off, Kaya visited the general store to replenish his stock. One day, Kaya and his teammates were ordered to chop wood for heating stoves in the barracks at a location near the village. Because his feet were blistered that day, Kaya asked to be excused. His commander granted permission, but at the end of the shift he didn’t let Kaya join the group of soldiers going shopping in the village, telling him that shirkers didn’t deserve time off. Realizing that he would be out of cigarettes, he begged his commander in vain. Enraged by his commander’s arbitrary punishment, Kaya became insubordinate and discharged his G-3 in the air, joined by a mate, until he heard a cracking noise coming from the bushes in front of him. Ambush! Before he could point his gun, he was shot several times. The last thing Kaya did before losing consciousness was to ask for a cigarette from the medic. Like the narration of his military service days, the rest of Kaya’s life story is organized around the taste and trope of smoking. The first thing he remembers upon waking to his extended stay in the military hospital is how he asked for a cigarette before learning about “the leg.” Kaya says that he understood that his injury was serious after the first puff because “that wonderful cigarette left a bitter taste” in his mouth. “It’s the only cigarette I’ve ever 40

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wasted in my life.” This anecdote anticipates the rest of his story about his “hospital adventures.” In his edgy narrative style, the period Kaya spent in the hospital becomes an endless search for a spot where he could smoke without getting caught, an event that could result in his eviction from the hospital. There are lighthearted moments in this gloomy quest, as when he and other veterans huddle smoking in restrooms like high school teens, leaving someone as a lookout. Blended into his recounting of these moments are the deep bodily pleasures of smoking, the feelings of belonging and transgression, and anxieties over the disciplinary hospital regime. After leaving the hospital, Kaya, like most others, had to endure a long period of financial deprivation while his application was pending in the bureaucratic maze of courts, the military, and the national retirement fund. In this period, he had to rely solely on his natal family for financial support, since his physical and psychological condition hindered him from working in his premilitary job as a low-skilled blue-collar worker. In his narration of this period, smoking again emerges as the central theme that condenses postinjury angst and accompanying social and moral concerns. Kaya tells me how he didn’t have a single penny to buy a pack of cigarettes and how ashamed he was to ask for cigarette money from his father like an “unblushing high school kid”; how he had to break the social norm of not smoking in the presence of his father during his convalescence period, and how this slowly but gradually destabilized his relationship with patriarchal authority; how he constantly had to ask for cigarettes from his friends like a “disgraced cigarette bummer”; and how nicotine deprivation became the sensual lens through which the whole set of destitutions he faced during this time of financial deprivation and infantilization made sense. Then he lights a new cigarette and concludes his narrative by telling me how, after finally receiving his “blood money” from the state, he bought cartons of cigarettes for the few friends he had left in an excessive gesture of reciprocity. He cannot help adding the fact that he misses the taste of Camels on the mountains. Despite the dramatic twists and the overarching narrative function of the trope of smoking in Kaya’s tale, his story is not exceptional in a country where more than half the adult male population smokes. Being-on-themountains has its own pleasures, and smoking is one of the most popular and accessible ones. Another is the abundance of canned tuna, a luxurious food item for most soldiers. My interlocutors’ narratives of their life on the mountains are saturated with sensuous accounts of carnal pleasures. For example, one of my interlocutors interrupted his story about a military operation to Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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tell me in detail about the mouthwatering kebabs he cooked for his commander. Another told about the steaming hot pides (a kind of pizza) with ground beef that were served for the troops returning from patrols. Another spent ten minutes narrating in detail how his buddy managed to carry eggs and tomatoes in his already heavy backpack for days without cracking the eggs or squeezing the tomatoes; how they chopped the tomatoes on a flattened tin can with a soldier knife and cooked menemen (scrambled eggs with tomatoes) on a mountain peak using a pan that had not been washed for a very long time; how it was the most delicious menemen he ever had in his life; and how he even recounted this to his mother at the expense of upsetting her. Yet another told me repeatedly how he and some other soldiers brought “mellow-flavored authentic Bitlis cigarettes” or smuggled in tart tobacco from the Region. He and his friends, he added, still smoke tobacco sent from the Region, both because it is cheap and because they “cannot give it up.” In these accounts, there is a sensual dimension that both singularizes the experience of the Region and reproduces it through the sensory channels of everyday life. This sensual dimension is a leftover trace of the war, as are the blue mine scars, spinal decay, ugly feelings, and wounded, dismembered, amputated, or disfigured body parts. The war experience affectively shapes tastes, appetites, and structures of desire and repulsion. In this sense, the generativity of war experiences within the postwar lives of disabled veterans has to be understood not only in relation to the traumatic reenactment of war experiences, but also in relation to mundane pleasures inculcated by the war. Consider the following anecdote from my time in the field: I visit Serkan in his cozy house for an interview on a terribly cold winter day. He tells me that we cannot smoke inside as his wife is pregnant. He leads me to a bedroom that opens to a small patio surrounded by tall, narrow apartments without plaster. The patio, full of flowerpots with numerous types of flowering plants and trees, looks like a green oasis in the grayish neighborhood. Rejoicing in my apparent surprise, Serkan explains that he has been working on this garden ever since he “got over” his injury. Looking around, I notice mouthwatering pickle jars stuffed with a colorful array of vegetables. He explains proudly that he is quite skillful in pickle making and then cautiously adds that he is a vegetarian. While I think about how vegetarianism is feminized to the point that it is shameful for a man to admit to it, Serkan goes on to say even more hesitantly that he stopped eating meat after his military service. Then, taking his courage in his hands, he puts an end to the tension in the air: “I cannot stand the smell of meat anymore. It reminds me of how it smelled when I stepped on that land mine.” 42

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This anecdote brilliantly illustrates the importance, in our attempts to grasp the formative force of “traumatic” experiences, of attending to the frequently overlooked minute enjoyments and pleasures, in addition to the suffering and pain. This force is commonly understood solely in its negativity in terms of shattering, at the expense of the myriad ways in which intense experiences cling to bodies. The examples above clearly demonstrate that my interlocutors’ military service, warfare, injury, and healing experiences are brought to the present not only through the ordinary or traumatic work of memory, but also through their visceral memories, their pleasures and pains, and their “ordinary affects.”51

lingering attachments and disattachments The cognitively and culturally unarticulated bodily intensities that traverse violently altered bodies are often subsumed under the category of traumatic memory. Although the notion of trauma provides the hegemonic conception of the aftermath of violent events, the way that the notion of trauma posits “a clear, linear, causal link between present suffering and a specific past event . . . to address experiences that are collective, chronic, generalized, or obscure in their origins”52 makes it less useful to talk about the lingering bodily effects of being-on-the-mountains. Moreover, trauma discourse often pathologizes these effects on the basis of a very specific etiology, only to assume that these effects can be cured.53 But the ethnographic examples I have discussed here stage more subtle and ordinary affects through which being-on-the-mountains erupts in the textures of my interlocutors’ lives. Using the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5),54 Serkan’s story about not eating meat can be explained (away) as an avoidance symptom, his attempt to stay away from the smell that serves as a trigger prompting traumatic memory and causing distress. But the medicalized framework of trauma would provide an account neither of my interlocutors’ passionate attachment to smoking or pickles or the mountains or the military nor of their becomings in the present. Being-on-the-mountains is an assemblage of intense collective experiences that my interlocutors and millions of conscripted young men deployed in the Region have undergone over the last two decades. Structured by the spatial, Be i ng - on-t h e -Mou n ta i ns

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bodily, and cultural formations of counterinsurgency, this assemblage shapes embodied soldier-subjects’ engagement with the world and forms them as particular “coagulations of intensities, surfaces, sensations, perceptions, and expressions,”55 that is to say, as particular subjects they did not exactly intend to become. One can become a smoker or a vegetarian through the visceral forces of this generative assemblage. As being-on-the-mountains finds unexpected ways of permeating disabled veterans’ postwar everyday lives and fashioning their attachments and disattachments, it not only subtly produces wayward subjects, but turns nationalism into something palpable. The next chapters tell the story of how this assemblage is brokered into a militarized civil society and ultranationalist protest in contemporary Turkey.

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The Two Sovereignties Masculinity and the State

military service became compulsory for all male citizens in Turkey in 1927.1 Reinforcing the newly founded state’s aspirations for monopoly on violence, compulsory military service also consolidated the “sexual contract” underlying the republic’s gendered citizenship regime.2 From the point of view of the modernizing state, this homosocial institution provided governmental access to the male half of the population, enabling the making of desired masculine citizen-subjects out of generations of young men from different ethnic and class backgrounds. Recruits were taught Turkish, literacy, “correct” forms of belief and worship, bodily care, and social decorum and hence were molded into educated, modernized, disciplined, docile, and productive laborers and citizens.3 In exchange for their submission to the military authority of the state, compulsory military service placed men in a horizontal comradeship of sovereign male citizens, all equally enjoying a legally endorsed authority over women.4 The patriarchal language of the 1926 Family Code codified this gendered citizenship regime by defining the husband as the head of the family, as representative of the household and responsible for the wife, with his last name as the family name. The code relegated women to a dependent citizenship status whose rights, including the right to work outside the home, were subject to the husband’s permission. In short, compulsory military service operated as a key institution of gendered citizenship that embedded the republic’s gendered promise for its young male subjects: masculine sovereignty. Compulsory military service is often called vatan borcu (debt to the homeland). Although the constitution defines military service as “the right and duty of every Turk” and in military drills soldiers chant “Every Turk is born a soldier,” debt to homeland is a classed, abled, gendered, and sexualized debt, 45

A symbolic military service ceremony for men with disabilities. Credit: Depo Photos.

as are all debts. It is a debt an able-bodied man owes to the state for his heteropatriarchal privileges as a gendered and sexualized citizen and social subject. Military service is compulsory only for able-bodied men and excludes men with officially recognized disabilities, women, and openly gay and transgender men.5 At this juncture of the regimes of “compulsory able-bodiedness” and “compulsory heterosexuality,”6 compulsory military service operates as a financial(izable) political transaction through which male citizens pay— either through military labor or by monetary means—for their initiation into hegemonic heteromasculinity and the national community. The state takes harsh measures for debt enforcement. Being a draft evader (yoklama kaçağı/bakaya) practically means facing the suspension of basic citizenship and social rights. Because evaders are taken into custody and forcibly recruited upon being caught, they must avoid everyday encounters with state institutions, meaning that they cannot renew ID cards, get married, travel outside of the country, open bank accounts, or vote. The debt enforcement is also implemented at a societal level; potential employers and prospective inlaws often require that a young man complete his military service to become eligible for work and marriage.7 In newspaper job ads, for example, employers typically seek employees who have completed their military service, and job seekers must write down their military service status on job application forms. Families rarely favor marriage before the prospective 46

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husband completes military service. This debt is so interwoven into the fabric of heteromasculinity that, in a crip militarist8 gesture of inclusion, the military recently introduced a voluntary one-day “symbolic military service” for male citizens with disabilities. In this context, military service operates as a masculine rite of passage9 that seals an ableist and heteropatriarchal contract between the state and the male citizenry: by paying the financial(izable) political debt of military service, young male citizens become full-fledged masculine citizens/workers/ consumers who are eligible for marriage and employment. No matter how strong the moral and judicial mechanisms of enforcement are, with any debt there is always an immanent possibility of default.10 Despite extremely harsh measures taken by the state against evasion, the record number of Turkish draft evaders (recently reported as around 627,000)11 and the increasing number and political visibility of conscientious objectors after the 1990s12 testify to this central insight of the anthropology of debt. During the conflict, the middle and upper classes increasingly capitalized on their social and economic resources to develop strategies for dodging the draft and, more importantly, avoiding deployment in the conflict zone. These included strategies such as paid exemption from full-term military service, becoming and remaining enrolled in college and graduate school for extended periods, and obtaining a medical report documenting ineligibility for military service, aka the “rotten report” (çürük raporu). Young men have been reported to mutilate themselves by cutting off their index fingers or having their spleen removed with the purpose of obtaining medical exemption. Yet there is another social complication with debt that has not attracted as much attention. What happens when a debtor clears his debt, in this case the debt to the homeland, but the transaction fails to deliver on its promise, in this case the gendered promise of sovereign masculinity? What distinct kinds of debts accrue through war disability?

a failed gendered promise Compulsory military service produces and reproduces not only unmarked masculine subjects, but also the constitutive outside of hegemonic masculinity: queer and disabled bodies that fall outside of compulsory ableism and compulsory heterosexuality—“rotten” (çürük) bodies, as they are hailed13 in Turkish medico-military parlance. This starts in the screening and recruitment T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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process when bodies are classified in terms of their fitness and health according to an ableist matrix and inspected through gendered and sexualized medical procedures that (mis)recognize nonnormative sexualities as psychosexual disorders.14 More important for the purposes of the argument here, military service also produces nonnormative bodies through the violence of armed conflict. Among the five million conscripts deployed in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, an unknown number of soldiers have been wounded and traumatized and have experienced different types and degrees of disability. Rendered socially and economically dependent rather than becoming sovereign masculine subjects, these disabled conscripts became the embodied symbols of this destabilization of the co-constitutive relationship between state sovereignty and masculine sovereignty, evoking intertwined crises of political legitimacy and masculinity.15 During my fieldwork between 2005 and 2008, I visited dozens of disabled veterans in Istanbul to collect their life histories. Most of these visits took place in my interlocutors’ homes in working- and lower-class neighborhoods at the peripheries of the city, neighborhoods I had never visited before despite being a native of Istanbul. These neighborhoods are often colloquially called gecekondu mahalleleri (squatter neighborhoods) although most of the buildings are legally no longer squatter houses, having been legalized through zoning amnesties. Their gecekondu history nevertheless persists in their unasphalted roads and unplastered brick walls, and in the iron bars that protrude from their flat roofs, indicating plans for the addition of another story in the future. Disabled veterans coinhabited these neighborhoods, often but not always in separate quarters, with the politicized Kurdish communities who migrated to the city after the systematic implementation of the state’s forced internal displacement policies of the 1990s, the exact period in which my disabled veteran interlocutors carried out their military service, evacuated or burned Kurdish villages, fought against Kurdish guerrillas, and were wounded and became disabled. This volatile cohabitation had a direct bearing on veterans’ sense and experience of urban space, as well as on their political identities. The ethnically mixed and politically turbulent class character of these neighborhoods cast an aura of uncertainty and fear on disabled veterans’ lives in public. Disabled veterans often expressed these feelings through a distinction between urban life and life on the mountains that I described in the last chapter. As one veteran told me, “It’s easy to discern who is an enemy and who is a friend on the mountains. In the city, you can never be sure.” 48

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A pro-PKK protest. The cloth banner reads “Mr. Öcalan is our political will. His health is our health.” Credit: Depo Photos.

Although none of my interlocutors had experienced or witnessed any incident of retaliatory violence against a disabled veteran, they were continuously alarmed by the Kurdish presence in the city, especially during pro-PKK demonstrations in their own or adjacent neighborhoods in which protesters built barricades; burned tires, cars, and buses; and clashed with the riot police, throwing paving stones and Molotov cocktails at armored water cannons and chanting slogans in support of the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. Political and sectarian belongings above or beyond ethnic identities further complicated the uncertainty produced in the absence of clear ethnic spatial divisions or bodily markers of ethnicity. Left-leaning Alevi populations, Kurdish ex–village guard (paramilitary state forces) communities, and a number of illegal Turkish leftist organizations whose activities had been confined to gecekondu areas after progressively losing much of their popular support and militia power in the wake of their short-lived resurgence in the mid1990s also populated these neighborhoods, producing an erratic cityscape. Walking in these neighborhoods and reading the slogans painted on walls—“Voice, authority, and power to the people,” “Down with fascism,” “The gangs of the deep state will pay for their crimes,” “Long live the fraternity of peoples”—I frequently felt that, bedecked with all manner of nationalist objects, disabled veterans’ homes looked like exotic pro-state oases in T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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these districts where the state was always present in some form of lack (of infrastructure) or excess (of police violence). In veterans’ houses, I was nearly always hosted in the salon (parlor), where we smoked packs of cigarettes and drank countless glasses of tea, often served by veterans’ wives or mothers, as we reconstructed their life stories. Nearly all my interlocutors were between thirty-five and forty years of age when we met, slightly older than me. Most of them were wounded during the height of the conflict, between 1993 and 1996. More than half had lower-extremity amputations after being injured in mine explosions, and the rest had orthopedic disabilities, bilateral vision loss, and paraplegia. Despite the differences in their bodily experiences of disability, their narratives of the changes in their life course trajectories shared striking similarities.16 In almost all the narratives, the moment of injury constituted a rupture, radically disconnecting veterans’ pre-conscription and postinjury lifeworlds.17 Upon leaving the military hospital, most of them had become dependent on their natal families for financial support and daily care, either temporarily (until their eligibility for compensation and welfare entitlements was eventually approved through a number of maze-like bureaucratic processes) or permanently (as in the case of most veterans with paraplegia). This reversed rite of passage brought about a striking sense of infantilization and shame for disabled veterans, moments condensed in tropes of the shame of being diapered by the mother and asking for cigarette money from the father. Most disabled veterans had lost their former blue-collar jobs and were employed at state institutions as unskilled laborers as a result of the state’s paternalist job-placement policies. Those who were single before conscription experienced desertion by their girlfriends or fiancées and difficulties in finding a spouse, whereas the already-married few faced marital problems exacerbated by financial troubles, intensified domestic violence, or bodily stigma. They frequently felt themselves cut off from their able-bodied friends, a feeling often reinforced by their inability to perform lower-class male bonding practices such as attending football games. Being both disabled and politically marked, their experience of urban space was transformed in a way that made them feel vulnerable to various forces, including street crime, political retaliation, and the ordinary performative violence of street masculinity. My disabled veteran acquaintances’ experiences of military service ended up being markedly different from the hegemonic “becoming a man through military service” narrative. Those injured in the first decade of the Kurdish conflict (1984–94), especially, found themselves in a zone of abandonment 50

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that materialized at the intersection of ableism, class inequality, bureaucratic indifference, and gender normativity. In this zone, they were not left to die but were made to live a life characterized by stigma and exclusion from public citizenship, heteronormative masculinity, and wage labor. Their postinjury lives were often characterized by the loss of breadwinner status in the discriminatory labor market, difficulties in getting married, and dependence on their natal families for financial support and daily care. In sum, they were disenfranchised, infantilized, and expelled from the institutions and performative practices of hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, they had to face the strong cultural stigma of disability and to live in a cultural climate in which people called them “half-men” (yarım adam) or even “half-dead” (yarı ölü), as a popular sports commentator infamously did once on live TV. All these experiences are squarely situated within the cultural politics and biopolitics of disability in Turkey. Historically, the country’s welfare regime has not offered disabled citizens much, constituting them as subjects of familial care and charity.18 Notwithstanding significant attempts at reform under the rule of the Islamist and authoritarian AKP within the context of Turkey’s European Union harmonization process, accessibility remains acutely limited in terms of urban infrastructure, transportation, and jobs.19 Finally, the strong socioeconomic and cultural stigma associated with disability, condensed in the figure of the disabled street beggar, persists despite an emergent disability rights agenda and national(ist) disability awareness campaigns that construct disability as “feel good diversity.”20 A nationwide research project dramatically reports that in Turkey the word sakat (impaired)21 is most commonly associated with the word muhtaç (needy).22 Still another recent finding suggests that 70 percent of Turkish people without disabilities do not want a neighbor with an orthopedic disability.23 In this milieu, my interlocutors honed their resentment toward a state that had failed to conform to the terms of the heteropatriarchal contract despite the fact that they themselves paid, or had in fact overpaid, their debt to the homeland.

public secrets Until the 1990s, the relatively few disabled ex-soldiers of the conflict had not constituted a distinct interest group or a public. Although they shared embodied memories of military service and violence, and arguably a generational consciousness,24 they were certainly not organized as a reflexive social group T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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with a shared political identity. Officially classified as “duty-disabled” in the absence of an interstate war, they had the same legal status as soldiers injured in noncombat activities and other state employees disabled during service and were subject to the same rights and entitlements. After the 1980 military coup, all disabled veteran organizations were banned by the state along with all other public associations, never to be opened again. This meant that military duty-disabled veterans could organize only under the roof of a sole legal association for military welfare recipients, the official association, established in 1983 by a special law (Law no. 2847) during the junta rule. Until the mid-1990s, when a number of competing organizations emerged by maneuvering through the gaps in the law and formed advocacy networks, this association functioned merely as a semibureaucratic institution to mediate the disabled ex-soldiers’ clientelistic relationship with the state. Yet by virtue of being formed top-down and strictly monitored by the state and having just a few branches in major urban centers only, this association was unable to facilitate a sense of community among disabled ex-soldiers. With disabled soldiers largely isolated from each other, only those who had had a prolonged stay in a military hospital could fraternize with fellow patient soldiers. As individualized victims of clashes with “a handful of bandits” taking place far away from major urban centers, disabled ex-soldiers were mostly invisible in public culture, a sort of “public secret” that everyone both knew but also knew how not to know.25 In the context of post-1980 Turkey, the public secret has a number of unique features, the first being that the conflict itself was a public secret until the mid-1990s. How could it not be? The shadow of the 1980 military coup, which had brutally destroyed all venues of public life and organization and rendered the very ideas of publicness and dissent impossible, was still upon Turkey. The armed contestation and the struggle between the state and the PKK for hegemony were largely confined to the Region, far from the industrial, financial, and cultural centers of Turkey, and would remain so until the forced migration waves of the mid-1990s. Talking about the Kurdish issue was virtually banned in mainstream political discourse because the Turkish state officially denied the very existence of the Kurds as an ethnic group, reducing the Kurdish language to a corrupted dialect of Turkish until 1991, when the ban on speaking Kurdish was lifted after then prime minister Süleyman Demirel’s famous statement “I recognize the Kurdish reality.” The “culture of terror”26 that flourished in the maddening violence of the 1980 military coup thrived by means of the state of emergency in the Region, 52

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imposing rampant political repression, censorship, imprisonment of journalists and intellectuals, disappearances, extrajudicial killings targeting leftist and Kurdish activists, systematic torture campaigns, and more. It was impossible to get any tangible news from the Region through the media channels. The state had complete control over audiovisual media, since the state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (Türkiye Radyo ve Televizyon Kurumu, hereafter TRT) enjoyed a monopoly as the public (state-owned) broadcaster until the first private television and radio channels started broadcasting in 1990. Print press and the distribution of print media were monopolized by a few multisector corporations engulfed in close economic ties with the state. None of the socialist or left-liberal dailies were around yet. A proKurdish newspaper, Özgür Gündem (Free Agenda), would not be founded until 1992. Mehmedin Kitabı (The Book of Mehmet), the first journalistic book bringing together the testimonies of conscripted soldiers, was not published until 1999.27 One would have to wait until the 2000s for memoirs of deployed soldiers and televised and movie representations of the conflict. If one wishes to trace the effects of the armed conflict on deployed soldiers in this period, the only appropriate public in Berlant’s sense28 would be the “third page,” the tabloid section of popular Turkish dailies, where one reads sensationalist, tawdry, pulp human-interest stories of all sorts, including crime, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. The ghostly presence of war haunts the third page. There one finds ex-conscripts committing all sorts of excessively violent acts, like blowing themselves up with hand grenades or blasting themselves in the head with shotguns after slashing their families. In the late 1990s, these incidents would be shyly called the “Southeast Syndrome” (Güneydoğu Sendromu)29 in the media, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were just part of a public “secret” that everybody knew: violence was brought back home and infiltrated the city. So, for example, one should be careful during incidents of road rage, especially with impertinent young cab drivers. I must have known it too; upon learning that the son of my landlady who lived just upstairs had “served in the East,” I felt too hesitant to ask him to turn down the Arabesk music he regularly listened to at full volume at any hour, day or night.

from the third page to the headlines This picture began to change in the 1990s after the state turned to counterinsurgency to address the Kurdish issue, a turn that was both a result and a T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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catalyst of the escalation to war level of the armed conflict between state forces and the PKK guerrillas. The deployment of counterinsurgency strategies has not only dramatically increased the number of permanently injured soldiers who now form the largest disabled “veteran” population in the history of the Turkish Republic; it has also paved the way to an increasingly militarized nationalist public culture which augmented the production, circulation, and consumption of the figure of the “citizen-soldier who metonymically embodies the united, sovereign, national community.”30 It is within this public culture that both the meaning of the disabled veteran body in nationalist body politics and disabled veterans’ material/symbolic relationship with the state have been reconfigured. Bora uses the phrase “the dark spring of nationalism”31 (milliyetçiliğin kara baharı) to describe the politico-cultural atmosphere of Turkey in the 1990s. Indeed, spring is a perfect metaphor not only because it conveys the prolific and volatile nature of Turkish nationalism in this period, but also because it allows us to picture how the seeds sown in the 1990s have matured in the early twenty-first century. In this dark spring, all variants of nationalism blossomed—popular, racist/ethnic, neoliberal—producing marginal hybrid forms like the Red Apple Coalition (Kızıl Elma Koalisyonu), which would later become a hegemonic one and form the ideological basis of the ultranationalist alliances and protests that would enroll disabled veterans in the 2000s. Nationalist imaginaries swung between apocalyptic and millenarian visions in the 1990s, a pendulum movement that was overdetermined on many levels by the Kurdish issue.32 The early 1990s were years of optimism articulated in the popular nationalist motto “The twenty-first century will be the Turkish century.” Yet this optimism quickly faded away in the face of escalating conflict, the drastic economic effects of the Gulf War, and the consequent formation of a de facto Kurdish state in Iraq. Optimism gave way to a language of crisis and an apocalyptic vision, ratifying the reactionary patterns of Turkish nationalist ideology and corroborating a structure of political feeling around the ominous premise that Turkey was once again being confronted with an international conspiracy endangering its very existence.33 The foundational trauma—dismemberment—that Turkish nationalists had inherited from the rapid loss of territory and collapse of the Ottoman Empire was reactivated. In the context of counterinsurgency, nationalist political parties incessantly expanded their political influence in the 1990s by cashing in on the popular discontent fed by the conflict’s toll. The Nationalist Action Party 54

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(Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, hereafter MHP), a fascist ultranationalist party infamous for its unabashed violence against socialists and Alevis in the 1970s, was the primary winner of this process, rapidly increasing its votes from 2.9 percent in 1987 to near the 10 percent threshold required to enter the parliament in 1995, becoming a partner in the coalition government by garnering close to 18 percent of the votes in 1999 and dragging the political center toward the Far Right.34 But more important than its electoral victory was the way the MHP brought an assertive and violent anti-Kurdish (or more accurately, anti-marginalized) discourse to public life by successfully mobilizing nationalist intensities in and through spectacular nationalist rituals. Attracting young men especially from the urban poor, the MHP organized seemingly impromptu political performances. Flag campaigns begun in neighborhoods with transgender or Kurdish residents spread to whole cities. Martyrs’ funerals turned into protests against the PKK in which angry crowds chanted nationalist slogans despite traditional burial conventions. Convoys of cars jam-packed with nationalist youths blocked roads and terrorized the streets in politicized soldiers’ farewell ceremonies. All these practices were harbingers of the formation of a war-induced nationalist public that would become vigorous in the 2000s. Even more important than the nationalist turn in politics was the rise of banal nationalism. In the 1990s, the very foundations of official nationalism were under fire from several sides: political Islam, the Kurdish movement, neoliberalism, and an intense skepticism among the public, who increasingly referred to the state in terms of excess, inefficiency, inflexibility, and corruption. While state-centered nationalism was criticized on several grounds, state symbolism began to proliferate in private and public places (in “civil” society, so to speak) in commodified forms, producing new symbols and consumption niches of urban middle-class citizenry.35 State symbols were starting to be displayed everywhere in gigantic forms, such as contending for the Guinness world record for the largest flag ever (the current world record belongs to Israel), and for the first time also in miniaturized commercial forms, producing a novel type of public intimacy through Atatürk badges, star-crescent necklaces, and the like.36 Pop icons in costumes decorated with stars and crescents sang reinvented (and remixed in techno) nationalist marches that evoked nostalgia for the “revolutionary” fervor of the early republican period.37 Pretexts to sing the “Independence March” (the national anthem) as an othering strategy multiplied in unexpected places: football stadiums, high-society parties, street fights. T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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In this pop age of Turkish nationalism,38 the body of the citizen-soldier, which had already achieved a privileged place in nationalist imagery through the mediation of “the myth of the military-nation,”39 turned into a palpable and intimate figure. Disabled soldiers became increasingly present in the media through cover stories, nationalist charity campaigns, politicians’ warmongering, and reality programs that merged the genres of epic, melodrama, and mourning. Produced en masse through counterinsurgency, instrumentally staged in the media, and consumed ideologically, the disabled soldier-body has turned into a political commodity imbued with national fantasies of heroism and sacrifice. In less than a decade, duty-disabled young men metamorphosed from volatile victim-figures—who, as the “embodied transcripts” 40 of the state’s failed promise of masculine sovereignty, invoked a variety of gendered, governmental, and political anxieties—into politicized victim-heroes endowed with the highest honorary military title in the Turkish nationalist lexicon, Gazi.

a new governmental regime From the mid-1990s onward, disabled veterans were increasingly hailed in nationalist public culture as tragic heroes who have self-sacrificed for the survival of the Turkish nation-state.41 These sacrificial discourses and imageries were anchored to the honorific military title of Gazi (in Arabic, ghazi), which can be roughly translated as “veteran” or “disabled veteran,” although none of these secularized words carry the historical weight and political charge of the term gazi, incorporated into secular Turkish nationalism in the early twentieth century with considerable Islamic historical baggage.42 In contemporary Turkish Islamic nationalist discourse, gazis are lionized as consecrated warriors, witnesses, and worldly representatives of martyrs (şehitler). They are often eulogized as having attained the highest spiritual rank after prophets.43 With the deployment of such potent sacrificial idioms, the disabled veteran body was thereby relocated from a zone of abandonment to a zone of sacrifice.44 The increasing currency of sacrificial discourses and imageries has rewritten the terms of the debt relationship between the state and disabled veterans. It is now the state that is said to owe a debt to my interlocutors. In the official commemorations I attended during my fieldwork and in their public remarks, political leaders constantly underlined the nation-state’s 56

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appreciation, gratitude, and indebtedness for the sacrifices of disabled veterans, who were owed “a debt of honor” (namus borcu, şeref borcu) or “a debt of gratitude” (vefa borcu) for the independence, survival, and “indivisible unity” of the state and the nation. This sacrificial debt was not conceived in abstract terms; rather, it mirrored the gendered logic of the debt to homeland, which was supposed (but failed) to initiate young conscripts into the world of hegemonic masculinity upon its payment. In order to pay the debt back, various bureaucratic, medical, and welfare institutions were expected to take drastic steps to fix this gendered crisis by ameliorating disabled veterans’ lives. The gendered logic of sacrificial debt is clearly reflected in the material and symbolic rights and entitlements that the state has exclusively bestowed on disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict, leaving aside the “duty-disabled” (vazife malûlü), conscripts who were disabled in incidents unrelated to the armed conflict. These include free high-quality prostheses that, at least in discourse if not in practice, “meet the highest standards in the world”; job placement; interest-free housing credit; firearm licenses; and even state-sponsored assisted conception.45 The lurking gendered agenda of recovering the masculinity of disabled veterans is obvious here. Prosthetic limbs restore normative body image and, if only partially, mobility. Interest-free housing credits aim at making disabled veterans into homeowners, thereby increasing their eligibility for marriage. Note that the Turkish word for getting married, evlenmek, is derived from the root ev (house) and literally means “getting a house.” The job placement policy seeks to restore their breadwinner status, whereas firearm licenses provide them with the masculine capacity for violence they are thought to have lost by becoming disabled. In sum, through the gendered logic of debt, disabled veterans are re-interpellated and recuperated as productive and reproductive male bodies through technoscientific and socioeconomic interventions operating at the corporeal and social levels. Such attempts to recover disabled veterans’ masculinity extended into even the most intimate aspects of veterans’ lives, including marriage and fatherhood, as exemplified by a state-sponsored assisted-reproduction program for veterans with paraplegia.46 One of the two veterans with paraplegia whom I met during my fieldwork was single, and his quest to find a marriage partner enlisted the help of several respected figures within communities of loss, including Berna Abla, the head of the official association, and Ferda Ana, the wife of a military physician.47 By contrast, the other paraplegic veteran was a constant target of rebuke among other veterans because he had “eloped” with a young girl and the common sentiment was that he would not T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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be able to satisfy his newlywed wife’s needs. “How will he give her a child?” my interlocutors asked as they frowned. At that point, neither they nor I knew that an assisted-conception unit for paraplegic veterans at Gülhane Military Hospital in Ankara was already being founded thanks to the efforts of the wife of another military officer who was revered by disabled veterans as a godmother figure. That clinic would be the first to specialize in methods specifically designed for individuals with paraplegia, such as testicular sperm aspiration/extraction, which involves the direct removal of sperm from the testicles to obtain viable sperm cells, either by surgical biopsy or through a needle. Playing into the “strong popular association between male fertility, potency, and masculinity,” 48 assisted-reproduction technologies would give paraplegic veterans not only a chance to have children, a major prerequisite of adult masculinity, but also the proof that they were sexual and reproductive beings, not “half-men” as ableist discourse presumed.49 All these discourses and practices—aimed at remasculinizing disabled veterans via discursive, institutional, and medical practices—constituted a new governmentality that enrolled a number of social actors within and beyond state institutions, including military officials, politicians, state bureaucrats, media personalities, and nationalist philanthropists.50 This new governmental regime has consolidated a militarized and exclusively male interest group whose relationship with the state is politically overdetermined by the vicissitudes of the Kurdish conflict. It is in the medical spaces of this regime that new masculine subjectivities and an emergent sense of collectivity emerged among previously isolated injured soldiers.

the sixth floor The first military medical institutions to emerge in the Ottoman Empire were founded in the late nineteenth century as a response to both modernization attempts and decades of continuous warfare. Founded after World War I, the republic did not actively participate in World War II and never faced the need to accommodate large numbers of hospitalized populations during the wars in Cyprus and Korea. Thus, the state was caught off guard by the unexpected escalation in the number of fatally injured soldiers after 1993. In practice, this numerical increase brought about not only political anxieties— concerning how to hide the real human costs of the conflict and neutralize populist criticisms of the state’s failure to care for the politically privileged 58

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bodies of soldiers in the context of psychological warfare—but also a grave medical and governmental crisis. The infrastructural and organizational problems, worsened by the disparities in health care across regions (including hospital overcrowding and the lack of adequate coordination between state institutions), hindered state institutions’ capacity to adequately address several basic problems: Who was going to pay daily stipends for hospitalized soldiers who mostly had nothing but their underclothes on them? How would they commute between their homes and hospitals, or between their hometowns and the metropolitan areas where all leading military hospitals were located? Who would take care of those who required everyday, round-the-clock assistance because of their disability? The way that these issues were tackled had a direct bearing on present disabled veteran identity and activism in that it shaped disabled veterans’ real relationships with state institutions and their imaginary relationship with the state. Below, I quote at length from the captivating hospitalization and postsurgical-care stories of two of my interlocutors, Yaman and Aykan, who were both injured in 1994, one year after the inception of counterinsurgency proper and just one year before the opening ceremony of the sixth floor of GATA, the first medical space designed specifically for the needs of soldiers wounded in the Region. In quoting them, I intend to show how these indignant black-comedy narratives from the rudimentary years of the new governmental regime communicate a deep sense of embitterment against the state that placed Yaman and Aykan in Kafkaesque encounters with the military medical bureaucracy. After being wounded in the arm, Yaman opened his eyes in the middle of being prepared for a traumatic limb amputation, which he resisted despite the doctors’ insistence. This is how Yaman’s Kafkaesque journey began. He was initially transferred to a military hospital in another city by ambulance. There he had a complicated arm surgery. Then he was dispatched to a central military hospital in Istanbul for postsurgery care and rehabilitation. According to Yaman, what they did at this hospital was simply to remove the arm cast, only to recast it and send him home. His arm stayed in a cast for a total of nine months, during which he visited the hospital every three months for follow-up doctor visits. In this period, the military medical bureaucracy could not reach a decisive evaluation of his medical condition because of his “ongoing” treatment, and hence Yaman was not discharged from the army. Officially a soldier on extended furloughs, he was turned away from every T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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single (civilian) state hospital he went to seeking a second opinion. After several futile attempts, Yaman decided to continue his treatment in Ankara, where things worked more smoothly “thanks to concerned military officers.” Yet in order to do so, he had to cut through red tape (obtain a dispatch paper and a residence certificate in Ankara), and he eventually succeeded with the help of some high-ranking military officers whom he had met in his previous hospital stays. As soon as he arrived at the central military hospital in the capital city, Yaman was disillusioned by the chaotic flood of injured soldiers from all over the Region, a terrorizing spectacle he depicted with biting satire. There were no vacant beds, not even stretchers. We had to share the stretchers. Those injured in the left arm shared their stretcher with those injured in the right arm. With that, there were no stretchers left for less serious cases such as ours and we had to lie on the ground. It was a torment to lie there amid the moans of friends. A real psychological torture! For forty-five days, I listened to their screams. The doctors were about to go crazy. They were amputating arms and legs one after another. You know, there are cemeteries in the backyards of these hospitals where hundreds of arms and legs are buried. The scene was horrifying. There were guys with smashed schlongs. But the worst was the guy who lost both eyes, both legs, and an arm in a land mine blast. He was constantly begging the doctors to euthanize him, saying he had no one outside to take care of him.

After he was “tricked” by a military physician who told him about a smaller and possibly less crowded military hospital, Yaman requested his transfer there. However, upon his arrival, he was immediately informed that there were only two available beds in the hospital: one in the ward of infectious diseases (where he was not allowed to stay) and one in the psychiatry ward, where Yaman agreed to stay, assuming that his wardmates would be “depressed soldiers.” Yet the ward turned out to be full of “cuckoos,” some of whom took refuge in madness in order to escape from the insanity of the conflict. They had told me that it was a psychiatry ward, but it was actually a ward for lunatics. There were all sorts of them. Just name one. Ethyl alcohol addicts, cologne addicts, paint thinner addicts, volatile substance addicts . . . slashers who cut themselves with razor blades. . . . There was one psychopath who smashed his commanding officer’s head in. One of them had religious obsessions, doing nothing but praying and counting prayer beads. There was

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another who thought he was an airplane. But the worst was the guy who mistook himself for a clock. He was constantly swinging his arms and ticktocking all the time. After seeing all this, I could not get to sleep until 2:30 in the morning. You know, I also had some cash my family had sent me. I asked the soldier guarding the gate to buy me cigarettes. I smoked there by the gate, thinking to myself, “I could have been a martyr, but I became instead a gazi, only to waste away here.” While I was smoking there, the psychopath came and asked for a cigarette. We kind of became friends. He confessed that he was faking insanity and promised he would keep the others away from me. Actually, he was a good guy, but still a lunatic. So I went inside and slept until 6:00 a.m. In the morning, I immediately called an ex-commander of mine to tell him that I would desert the hospital unless my discharge papers were prepared immediately. It took another day. Because the airplane guy was jumping from one bed to another, announcing his departure from the airport and making motor noises, I spent another night by the hospital gate. I finished eight packs of cigarettes in one day and two nights. The last thing I did before I left was to hide my watch and ask what time it was to the clock guy tick-tocking in a secluded corner. It’s hard to believe, but he guessed it right down to the second.

Aykan’s story, told breathlessly and with unfettered anger, is not much different from Yaman’s. His adventures through the labyrinths of the medical system began when he stepped on a land mine. After his left leg was amputated in a nearby state hospital, he was transferred to a military hospital in the Region for postsurgical care. From there, he was referred to the central military hospital in Istanbul. It was his family who took him to Istanbul (approximately 850 miles away) in the back cargo compartment of a relative’s station wagon. Once in Istanbul, Aykan learned that before he could see a doctor at the hospital he had been referred to, on the Asian side of Istanbul, he had first to get referral papers from the recruitment office on the Asian side and then have them stamped at yet another military hospital on the European side. Moreover, he had to do these in person with a leg stump still in a cast. After making a few unsuccessful attempts at securing an ambulance, Aykan ventured shuttling between these military medical institutions by personal means. I got my referral paper that day. Then I had to cross the Bosphorus Bridge. I still had that big cast on my foot. I hung it out the car window like this, and that’s how I drove my car. Now, I’m not the son of a Greek, thank God; I’m the Turkish son of a Turk. But this state makes me drive my car with my left leg hanging out of the window. I press on the clutch pedal with my left crutch

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and on the gas pedal with my right foot. I hold the steering wheel with my right hand and let go of it whenever I need to shift gears. Just like that, clickclick. But, uh-oh! The cops stop me as soon as I exit the highway. They must have seen me crossing the bridge. This police captain (komiser) comes over and starts yelling at me, “Are you a maniac? Are you retarded?” I explain to him that this is the only way I can drive. He gets mad and snarls back, “Who the fuck are you? How do you even dare think of driving like this?” He commands the police to impound my car and take me into custody. I was infuriated, you know, cursing nonstop inside, saying to myself, “Shoot this guy right away!” I wished that I had died instead of having to live through this. How could they torture a human being like that? You ask for an ambulance, they don’t send it. You ask for retirement, they don’t process it. So I asked the captain, “Have you finished talking?” Then, I started. “I’ve given my blood, my life to this fucking cunt of a country. What are you even talking about? I gave my blood, my legs. What else do you want from me?” Just like that! I threw my hospital files in front of him. There were so many of them. He was about to say something. I interrupted and said, “Look! These are my hospital reports. I’ve given my blood and my life, and I’m being treated like shit. I wish I had died like a dog.” He hunched over and began to cry. “Oh son! I’m sorry,” he said. “This is how this state works.” He offered a police car to pick me up and drop me off. I told him not to bother. “Don’t do anything, captain,” I said. “This is how the sons of this country have lived and died, and this is how it is going to be.” He gave me a police escort, gave me his phone number so that I could call him whenever I was in trouble, and told me, “I will make sure that you won’t be stopped by anyone again.” For the next six months, I traveled back and forth like that.

In stark comparison with the hospitalization narratives of Yaman and Aykan, the stories told by my interlocutors injured after 1995 are quite smooth and lack the marked tone of resentment toward the state. More than anything, this difference in narrative styles reflects the consolidation of a new governmental regime through the introduction of novel medical spaces in which injured and disabled soldiers from the conflict were exclusive and/or privileged patients. GATA’s new orthopedic clinic, “the sixth floor” as my interlocutors endearingly call it, was a fundamental breakthrough in this direction. Bringing together wounded soldiers exclusively from the Region, the clinic created an institutionalized suffering community under one roof. From the late 1990s onward, this clinic became a crucial site of the nationalist imagination of the conflict through the heavily mediatized visits of high-ranking military officers and politicians.

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The success of the sixth floor was followed by the establishment of similar medico-institutional spaces for disabled veterans. In March 1995, immediately following, or rather as a part of, one of the largest “spring cleaning” operations against the PKK, the state television channel TRT 1 launched and broadcast live a three-day-long charity campaign, Haydi Türkiye Mehmetçikle Elele (Come on Turkey, Hand-in-Hand with Mehmetçik) with the support of several civil society organizations. The collected amount of $61.8 million (US) was transferred to a military foundation, Elele Vakfı (Hand-in-Hand Foundation), to finance the construction of the “five star” Turkish Armed Forces (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri, hereafter TSK) Rehabilitation and Care Center (TSK Rehabilitasyon ve Bakım Merkezi) in Ankara, opened in 2000. Just a few months later, newspapers reported the opening ceremony of the Ali Çetinkaya First Bullet Rehabilitation Center, a unique holiday resort in Ayvalık on the Aegean coast, designed to accommodate the needs of persons with different types and degrees of disability. The resort was named after a famous army officer who commanded the troops that fired the first bullet against the Greek army in the opening battle of the War of Independence in Ayvalık. Later, the Elele Foundation also constructed a recreational facility, Gazi Uyum Evi (Gazi Adaptation House), encompassing restaurants, hobby gardens, a small zoo, and an artificial lake with waterfalls, which frequently appears in the media because of the many disabled veterans’ wedding ceremonies it hosts. Gazi Uyum Evi was opened on September 19, 2004, with the participation of the entire cohort of high-ranking military officers. The date chosen for the inauguration ceremony carries political symbolic weight: September 19 is the day in 1921 when Mustafa Kemal (later called Atatürk) was granted the rank of marshal and the honorific title of Gazi. Since 2002, September 19 has been “celebrated” as the state-designated Gazis’ Day. All these institutions but one are located in the political center of Turkey, the capital city of Ankara. Yet they host disabled veterans from across the country. Every disabled veteran I met during my fieldwork has been to one of these institutions at least once. In most cases, they have been to all of them for a combined period of months or even years. Because one of the rehabilitation centers includes a prosthesis workshop and a fifty-bed guesthouse that accommodates disabled veterans not under treatment, amputee veterans in particular visit the center at least once every couple of years to replace their prostheses. Many stay there for weeks at a time, even many years after their injuries and when they are not medically required to do so. In fact, for most

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of my interlocutors, visits to these institutions provide a sort of getaway from the everyday burdens of work and marriage, as jokingly articulated in expressions like “My wife is badgering me. I’ll go and stay in the rehabilitation center for a while to rest my head.” These new politically marked military medical institutions have played a key role in the formation of disabled veteran identity and activism that far surpasses their role as treatment and rehabilitation centers. During their stays at these institutions, my interlocutors were absorbed in a healing and dying community of fellow ex-soldiers that transformed their individual traumas into a generational (perhaps even a transgenerational) trauma, one they would address collectively and politically in the 2000s. It was also in these institutions that disabled veterans met and established social and political relationships with military officers who often became important figures in their lives through relations of paternalistic patronage, ultranationalist mentorship, or mimetic identification. Many of my interlocutors formed fictive kin bonds with these officers and their families, such as in the case of the charity-loving wife of one of the military physicians who was called “Mother” by several of my interlocutors and who reportedly facilitated the assisted-reproduction program for disabled veterans. Several worked at or became members of the ultranationalist foundations or strategic research centers that these military officers established upon their retirement from the military. Each of these relations has played a crucial role in the fashioning of disabled veteran identity and in the deepening of disabled veterans’ attachment to the military. Even more important, however, is the liminal function these institutions undertake. These military medical institutions are intermediate threshold spaces in which injured soldiers first learn to become disabled men and perform manhood with a new embodiment, rediscovering different domains of masculine experience, from violence to sexuality, as disabled men. Yet these liminal spaces also happen to be disciplinary total institutions51 where disabled veterans’ practices of reinitiation into masculinity often conflict with the temporal, spatial, and bodily discipline of a setting much like a halfway house. It is against this background that a new type of masculine subjectivity, akin to the adolescent masculinity of high schoolers in terms of its male bonding practices and its relationship with institutional authority, emerges in these medical-military settings. In recounting his time on the sixth floor, one of my interlocutors, Tahsin, introduces us to the characteristics of this emergent subjectivity. 64

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My stay at GATA was great. I mean, we would flirt with the nurses, misbehaving all the time. We ran wild in the corridors after midnight when everybody else was sleeping. The lights were off in other wards, but our lights and TV were always on. But we had to fight. With professors, captains, nurses. . . . The commander of GATA was a major general then, but because of problems surrounding our rights, we complained even about him to the chief of the general staff. We were so naughty! And that period was so busy. Every week, we hosted a brigadier general. Every month, a lieutenant general or a corps commander visited us. We were constantly in the store window, on the TVs. I mean, I had a very good time there, except maybe for the first few days of my stay. At first, I couldn’t accept that I was injured. I mean, I was there, but when I woke up each morning, I pinched and slapped myself to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming. But that lasted only for the first fifteen days until I adapted. Then I began to care less. We began meeting doctors, civil servants, interns, and nursing students as we wandered around. We learned all the dirty tricks. If we couldn’t exit from the door, we would exit from the roof. We wanted to get out, you know! We were not allowed to leave the hospital after 5:00 p.m. But we always left and then snuck back through the garden. We did all sorts of naughty things outside the hospital, chasing nurses’ tails and stuff like that. I mean, it was really good. We had a really good time there.

For the young men semi-confined in these institutions, challenging institutional norms and authority becomes a way of asserting masculine sovereignty in a fashion similar to that described in ethnographies of schooling.52 Indeed, hospitalized veterans’ practices—playing hooky in order to visit local sex workers (some of whom have developed strategies for accommodating disabled veterans, like renting first-floor apartments for wheelchair accessibility) or cruising the city streets in taxicabs as a group of disabled flaneurs only to run away without paying the driver—are all reminiscent of adolescent male bonding performances. But although their military rite of passage from adolescent to adult masculinity has been interrupted and complicated by a medicalized rite of passage from able-bodiedness to disability, these veterans are not (merely) young men subverting and resisting disciplinary power. As hinted at in Tahsin’s reference to the “store window,” these men are discovering not only their new embodied capacities but also their emergent political ones. The political commodity value of their wounded and disabled bodies becomes evident to them and rises further as they are visited again and again by a flock of famous journalists, senior politicians, high-ranking military officers, football stars, and pop icons. T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu visits injured soldiers at the TSK Rehabilitation and Care Center. Credit: Depo Photos.

The prime minister visited us that day. Interestingly, he had brought a sweat suit and a pair of sports shoes for each disabled veteran. Everyone got theirs, but there was grumbling. The last one in the line was a disabled veteran without legs. Who would give a sweat suit and shoes to this guy? The guy used to be a football player in the amateur league in his hometown but now he was missing both legs and eyes. The prime minister saw his photo on the wall behind his bed, taken while he was playing football. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You will be able to run and play football like before. You will recover and even be transferred to a professional team.” The guy boiled with rage [doing an impression of his Black Sea accent]: “Fuck off! You son of a bitch!” Of course, they immediately shut down the cameras. Can you think of someone else cursing at the prime minister like that in front of the cameras?

This emergent political subjectivity is best captured in the beautiful title of the first and only book to bring together autobiographical (but carefully edited) narratives of disabled veterans of the conflict, Biz Kınalı Bacaksızlar.53 The anthology’s compiler, Savaş Yücel, is himself a disabled veteran who spent quite a long time both on the sixth floor and at the TSK Rehabilitation and Care Center and later bought an apartment in the area so as to stay close to the social environment he had been steeped in during his treatment and rehabilitation. The first word in the title Yücel chose for the book, biz, means 66

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“we,” referring to disabled veterans. The second word, kınalı (“hennaed”), explicitly alludes to the popular religious understanding of henna as a marker of inscribed sacrificial body-surfaces and builds an analogy between the sacrificial animal and the soldier-body. The final word, bacaksızlar (bacaksız plus the plural suffix -lar), the key to our understanding of this new subjectivity, has two meanings in Turkish—one literal, the other figural. Literally, bacaksız means “legless” (consisting of the word bacak and the suffix of negation -sız) and makes reference to amputees like Yücel. Figuratively, though, bacaksız means “urchin,” or to put it more accurately, a mischievous child who bites off more than he can chew. “We, the Hennaed Legless Urchins!” Yücel’s title beautifully captures the masculinity problematic of disabled veterans who have been simultaneously infantilized and sanctified by their bodily losses, rendering them both governmental subjects under the disciplining gaze of the paternalist state and masculine subjects discovering their political potentialities. Yet an even more influential cultural product that plied the fraught gendered sovereignty relationship between disabled veterans and the state came from television mafia series, which created the first disabled veteran protagonist of Turkish cinematic history.

the nationalist resolution of the sovereignty question Just before the turn of the millennium, the new television genre of the mafia series emerged in Turkey. Becoming a sociological and political phenomenon in the 2000s, series about the mafia proved to be the most popular of primetime shows, earning the highest ratings except when rivaled by the most heated soccer games. Their popularity persisted despite their controversial status on many grounds, including accusations of encouraging the youth to violent crime and inciting civil war.54 The first example of this genre was Deli Yürek (Wildheart),55 featuring former Best Model of the World winner Kenan İmirzalıoğlu as Yusuf Miroğlu, a tough petty sovereign with a soft heart. The series aired between 1998 and 2001 and reached cult status, with a particularly enthusiastic reception among urban male youth, paving the way for the burgeoning of similar TV series and Hollywood-style blockbuster action flicks. Wildheart continued with its spin-off film, Wildheart: Boomerang Hell (Deli Yürek: Bumerang T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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Cehennemi),56 one of the first films to be shot in the Region and to explicitly deal with the armed conflict. The immense popularity of Wildheart provided Turkish producers and directors with a successful and ultimately de rigueur recipe: a handsome hero who simultaneously embodies and performs modernity and tradition, urban upper-class masculinity and traditional masculinity codes, all spatially anchored in a mahalle (an urban neighborhood). A show in this genre must also have two lovers who cannot unite, but who secretly meet against the background of breathtaking Istanbul panoramas. Along with an abundance of action and violent scenes, these shows must include conspiratorial nationalist references to real-life politics and (increasingly) to the armed conflict in the Region, all subsumed under the gimmick of mafia stories. The music— especially folk songs—must be deployed affectively in clip-like scenes. This genre has fully matured with the popular media franchise Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves),57 consisting of three separate TV serials and five exceptionally controversial spin-off films58 that articulated the political grammar and aesthetics of contemporary ultranationalism. Throughout the 2000s, the commercial breakthrough of the genre has inspired a number of other films, and just after I returned from fieldwork in 2008, it gave birth to the series Gazi,59 about a disabled ex-conscript who became paraplegic after being shot by PKK guerrillas. Gazi rendered the narrative structure of this genre clearly discernible by making explicit what had remained an undercurrent in the earlier examples of the genre, namely the strained sovereignty relationship between young men and the state in the context of the armed conflict. The hero of the mafia genre is always a single young man who was instigated to violence by the state, either as a conscripted soldier (Wildheart and Gazi) or as an intelligence agent (Valley of the Wolves). In each series, the story opens with the hero enduring a transformative event in which he is revealed to possess extraordinary courage and patriotism.60 Just after serving in the Region as a commando, Wildheart protagonist Yusuf Miroğlu witnesses a terrorist ambush in the city and intervenes, killing the terrorists and hitting the headlines as a reluctant hero. In Valley of the Wolves, the protagonist Polat Alemdar is given a special mission by the “deep state” to infiltrate the mafia, for which he has to “officially die,” erasing his real identity and taking on a fictive one. In Gazi, the conscripted soldier Fırat Kalender, whose name mimics and syllabically rhymes with Polat Alemdar, is kidnapped and shot by the PKK while he valiantly strives to save his platoon from an ambush. 68

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In all three series this opening event brings about a double loss for the hero. In Wildheart, the initial loss is symbolic: through his intervention in the penetration of terrorist violence into peaceful city space, Yusuf Miroğlu loses his status as an ordinary neighborhood resident, although he continually attempts to stick to his premilitary job as a car mechanic and to his neighborhood friends. In Valley of the Wolves, loss takes a more concrete and palpable form: Polat Alemdar undergoes plastic surgery, loses his real face and identity, and is cut off from his neighborhood and everyone he loves, desperately trying to reconnect with them in his new identity. In Gazi, the loss is fully grounded in the hero’s body: the protagonist Fırat Kalender is shot in the head by a PKK overlord, loses his ability to walk, and is confined to a wheelchair. In each series, the initial loss is always accompanied by and given its full significance through a second loss: the loss of the beloved. In Wildheart and Gazi, villains shoot and kill our heroes’ fiancées. Gazi’s Fırat Kalender regains his ability to walk exactly at this moment, reproducing the Turkish cinema’s entrenched cliché of miracle recovery from disability. In Valley of the Wolves, Polat Alemdar cannot reveal his true identity to his fiancée and tries to establish a relationship with her in his new identity, caught between his desire and the burden of watching her betray his memory with his new self. In each case, the hero is effectively banned from the domain of domestic conjugality and marriage and, by extension, from a heteronormative masculine life course trajectory through his double loss. But there is a trade-off. This same structure of loss also draws the hero deeper and deeper into the underworld as he pursues revenge for his losses. In the process, the hero refashions himself as a Robin Hood sort of mafioso, becoming a very peculiar sovereign male subject who occupies the threshold between illegality and legality, mafia and the state, crime and law making and enforcement. This murky zone is generally referred to as the “deep state” in Turkish political discourse, denoting an extralegal and ultranationalist “state within the state” composed of ex-members of the US-organized Cold War security apparatus Gladio, security and intelligence officers, and mafia leaders. Accordingly, these series have been called “deep state series.”61 Nevertheless, our heroes are a little more complicated than that. The heroes of these series constantly emphasize that they are not mafia leaders despite their mafia-like looks and language, honor code (racon), and criminal activities. They also insist that they do not work under the state, despite their nebulous “deep” connections and alliances. In Wildheart, the T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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hero is allied with his ex-commander in the Region, an ultranationalist military officer who goes by the Kurdish nom de guerre Bozo, and has an unstable relationship with an important deep-state figure, Ağabey (elder brother). In Valley of the Wolves, the hero initially works for an undercover intelligence agent, Aslan Bey, but gains autonomy after his assassination and allies with the state only when he sees the need. Finally, the disabled veteran hero Fırat Kalender of Gazi openly resists his former commanding officer, Lieutenant Ahmet, who tries to recruit him to work “unofficially” for the state. Here we see the distinguishing character of the hero of this genre: he refuses to submit to any sovereign authority, including the state itself, in his violent quest to exterminate the enemies of the state. One of the ten selfauthored “laws” that Yusuf Miroğlu’s men must obey or else die is “You shall have no friends or foes in the state.” Fırat Kalender frequently proclaims, “I take orders from no one. Not even from the state!” It seems that there is only one logical resolution of the tense relationship between the state and masculine sovereignty in the nationalist doxa of the 2000s: young men must become the state. Hence Polat Alemdar’s motto, “I am the state.” It is impossible not to see the parallels between the narrative structure of these series and my interlocutors’ life stories. These parallels are not coincidental. The animating force of this genre—the strained sovereignty relationship between young men and the state—is most culturally intelligible and politically visible in my interlocutors’ experiences. Just like the imaginary heroes of these mafia series, my interlocutors were introduced to violence in the service of the state and experienced a foundational loss that banished them from normative heterosexual adult masculinity and drew them into the murky field of ultranationalist politics, where their desire to become sovereign was channeled toward the fantasy of becoming the state through mimetic performances of statehood. Again, these parallels are not coincidental. Mafia series, especially Valley of the Wolves, are not merely representative but constitutive of the political (hyper)reality under which disabled veterans live. The Valley of the Wolves franchise has been cited as an example of contemporary post-truth politics.62 However, it would be more accurate to define the show as an ultranationalist stage of hyperreality,63 where the real and the fiction, the original and the copy, and conspiracy and conspiracy theory blend and become indistinguishable in novel ways. The franchise’s surplus of reality became evident in its very first days, when the fans held a real funeral ceremony and published obituaries in newspapers 70

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as a response to the death of a popular character in the show. The producers were quick to embrace that simulacrum effect. For example, they have hosted real ultranationalist political figures playing themselves on the show. In one episode, the guest actor was a disabled veteran, who was shown taking off his prosthetic leg and giving it to Polat Alemdar in protest of his (fictive) brokering of the government’s secret peace negotiations with the PKK. In another instance, it was Rauf Denktaş, then the founding president of the de facto state of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Shortly following his appearance as himself on Valley of the Wolves, warning about the unfolding conspiracies against the Turkish nation, Denktaş joined a small ultranationalist political gathering at a martyrs’ cemetery, which I attended with my disabled veteran friends.64 Moreover, the producers have based the plotlines of the serials on their airing week’s political developments, amplifying the simulacrum effect, and made conspiracy-theory-driven political “prophesies” that have made it to the national news.65 These simulacrum strategies have produced a widespread public belief that the producers have some deep knowledge about political secrets and reveal them in the show.66 My disabled veteran acquaintances mostly shared this belief. “We watch Valley of the Wolves in lieu of the news” is a sentence I often heard in our conversations. Finally, those parallels are also not coincidental, as can be seen in the complicated web of relations between disabled veterans and the shows’ producers, as I unexpectedly discovered during my fieldwork.

a nationalist rhizome In an ugly, glass-covered media tower in Istanbul, I entered the cubicle of a journalist who had made his career chronicling the lives and protests of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families. I had first met him at the wedding of an interlocutor’s brother, which took place in a wedding salon. There had been a group of young male relatives at the door welcoming guests, but in their dark suits without ties—the trademark clothing of the mafia series’ heroes—they looked more like they were guarding a crime boss who was inside. During the wedding, I obtained an appointment for an interview with the journalist, just before joining my interlocutors waiting in line to pin a “quarter gold coin” on the chest of the groom, as is customary in Turkish weddings. During this interview at the media tower, I was hoping to learn about the populist media coverage of disabled veterans’ lives. But as it happened, my T h e T wo Sov e r e ig n t i e s

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visit provided more than that. I had the unique opportunity to witness the process of disabled veteran news production when, upon the request of one of his colleagues who needed information concerning disabled veteran pensions, the journalist telephoned two veterans I was close with. The colleague, who seemed to be an ex-leftist and whose otherwise trust-inducing face was now overtaken by a sly grin as he listened in on the conversations, wanted to write a populist column about the poor salaries of disabled veterans for the following day’s paper. I too listened in as the journalist spoke with my interlocutors. He struck up a cordial relationship with both, buttering them up with the exact same phrase at the beginning of each conversation: “You must have been this country’s prime minister.” He then attempted to provoke them into taking action against their supervisors at the state institutions where they worked and organizing a protest against the AKP government. When he paused for a minute between the two phone calls, he informed me that he was one of the ghostwriters for Valley of the Wolves. I was caught completely off guard. So we began to talk about the mafia series genre. The journalist believed that their recipe for popularity was “our fondness for conspiracy theories: you must incorporate all manner of conspiracies, international agents, crime organizations, and secret societies in order to produce a successful series.” He told me he was writing a teleplay for a new series that would be a breakthrough in Turkish TV history with its realistic portrayal of the armed conflict. “The terrorists, for example, will speak Kurdish. For the first time in the history of Turkish television!” He was so excited and proud that he let me read the first few pages of his manuscript before I left the plaza. I was stunned by the script’s unprecedented verisimilitude in respect to the ethnic dimension of the conflict. This new series, Valley of the Wolves: Terror,67 first aired less than a month after the assassination of the Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, a political murder that created a strong antinationalist wave. At Dink’s funeral, hundreds of thousands chanted: “We are all Armenian! We are all Hrant Dink!” Within this context, series such as Valley of the Wolves were strongly criticized for their incitement to political violence, especially given that the ultranationalist youth who murdered Dink was what the media called a “Polat Alemdar wannabe,” with reference to his mimetic identification with the protagonist of Valley of the Wolves. The trailer for the new series consisted of animated text against a black background, ending in the slogan “Debt free, totally independent Turkey.” It 72

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resembled a low-budget political propaganda clip more than the trailer of a blockbuster TV series. The series itself, on the other hand, was a high-budget propaganda campaign that portrayed Polat Alemdar fighting against Kurdish urban terrorists and their masked financiers in Istanbul. The first episode sparked a heated public discussion, which soon turned into a deep public controversy when the Radio and Television High Council (Radyo ve Televizyon Üst Kurulu, RTÜK) banned the second episode and de facto banned the series itself. No clear explanation was given, but everyone knew that the series had transgressed the official representational limits of the conflict and had been deemed capable of inciting an ethnic civil war. Reha Muhtar, a famous anchorman, was one of the few who put this anxiety into words: “This is what happens if you make a series so realistic. Turkey is not ready for this.” Others faintheartedly repeated mainstream concerns about the series’ positive representation of violence and crime. The series’ supporters were not so timid, though. An angry group of youths organized a demonstration in front of the RTÜK building and chanted, “We are all Turks! We are all Polat Alemdars,” mimetically inverting the slogan of Dink’s funeral. My cell phone was flooded with text messages circulating among disabled veterans: “Terrorists are trying to have Valley of the Wolves removed from the TV so that their real faces remain unexposed.” Soon thereafter, the producers of Valley of the Wolves reciprocated this nationalist support. The banned second episode of the series was allowed to air only once, through an exceptional permission granted during a national fundraising campaign for disabled veterans, and the producers donated all the episode’s advertisement revenues to the campaign. A few months after I left the field, the protagonist of Valley of the Wolves, Polat Alemdar, would pass on his self-appointed duty of urban counterguerrilla warfare to Fırat Kalender, the first disabled veteran protagonist of Turkish TV, who would miraculously regain his ability to walk so as to take his revenge.

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mative masculinity. The resulting crisis in gender, militarism, and state legitimacy propelled the formation of a new governmental regime. This new governmentality sought to remasculinize veterans and draw them back into productive and reproductive conjugal domesticity, while also producing new masculine subjectivities and collectivities. Subjectifying disabled veterans as medicalized, gendered, and political subjects, this regime often enabled them to inhabit a less stigmatized social space as disabled men. Yet it also prompted them to turn their everyday experiences of infantilization, disenfranchisement, and emasculation into a clamorous critique of the state, which has failed twice to keep its gendered promises to those young men: first through the malfunction of the military rite of passage into adult heteromasculinity and again through the failure of the restoration of their masculine sovereignty. The ticklish dimension of this gendered governmental regime is that its full success can only lead to its ultimate failure since, in the very attempt to make them sovereign social subjects, it turns disabled veterans into the kind of men for whom the precondition of masculine sovereignty is to be utterly dependent on state welfare. In a society in which masculine honor is associated with independence and autonomy,68 this presents itself as a foundational paradox that lies at the heart of the disabled veterans’ political agency.69 How disabled veterans work through and act upon this paradox is deeply informed by a cultural discourse on the fraught relationship between the state and nationalist young men. This cultural discourse has been produced since the late 1990s through a genre of immensely popular TV series and has played a key role in the formation of the ultranationalist political culture that would enroll disabled veterans as both important symbols and emerging political actors in the 2000s. This genre distinctly communicated the idea that young men could become sovereign social and political subjects through a mimetic identification with the state, a promise that was particularly compelling for disabled veterans, who had already once been conscripted for sovereign power.

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Of Gazis and Beggars

sitting at a teahouse in a working-class district on the Asian side of Istanbul, I was waiting for a group of disabled veterans. The group was to attend an exclusive official ceremony at an officers’ club after having a few glasses of tea by the seaside. Recai, a foot amputee, was the first to arrive. He was wearing the gray suit he reserved for special occasions such as this one, or a banquet for disabled veterans and martyrs’ families thrown at a luxury hotel by a mayor, or when military officers visited him on religious holidays of Eid. It was his only suit. He was cheerful and looked his best, with his brilliantined hair combed back and his chest pinned with medals. When we had met at a nearby coffeehouse just a few days before, he had been sulky. He had told me that he was being mistreated at work. He worked as a janitor at a governmental office to which he had been assigned through the state’s job placement program for gazis of the Kurdish conflict. He had confided that his supervisor was a PKK sympathizer—meaning that the man was ethnically Kurdish or perhaps a member of a leftist trade union—and ordered him around with demeaning tasks, such as brewing tea or cleaning the sink. He had complained of not being respected as a gazi: “I can’t stand up for long. Is this how a gazi should be treated?” But now he was exuberant. “Today, I will live my standing as a gazi to its fullest [Bugün gaziliğimi doya doya yaşayacağım],” he said and added, “We should in fact not be sent to work. The state should pay our salaries so that we can truly live as gazis.” Recai’s daydream of a leisurely life of ceremony, ritual, and commemoration in the midst of his life as a state-employed janitor is a political fantasy projected on the screen of his double life. Disabled veterans live a double life as their bodies traverse two opposing regimes of value. In one they are subjected, as men with disabilities, to the classed and gendered exigencies of 75

a deeply ableist society. In another they are lionized as religio-national heroes sanctified by their sacrifices. The incommensurability between their bodies’ social and political worth has been the dilemma of disabled veterans across the globe for quite some time.1 But disabled veterans elsewhere are rarely, if ever, forced to reconcile the kind of radically contrasting subject positions they inhabit in Turkey, where they oscillate between two historically salient social figures: the gazi and the beggar. This oscillation between hero and pauper elicits potent political affects that are expressed in terms of a sacrificial crisis, which the conspiratorial logic of ultranationalism compellingly addresses while interpellating disabled veterans.

sacrificial bodies Chapter 2 explored the historical trajectory of how physically disabled soldiers of the Kurdish conflict became subjects of an exclusive governmentality and accrued political value over the course of the armed conflict. The year 1999—when PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured and put on trial in a spectacular performance of sovereignty—was a turning point in that regard. In the midst of this nationalist spectacle, the Grand National Assembly (the Turkish parliament) quietly and unanimously passed a bill that was presented as a trivial amendment to an existing law restricting the political activity of social groups associated with the military.2 “Politics shall not enter the barracks,” the spokesperson of the center-right Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi) stated in the opening speech of the assembly meeting. Ironically, this legal change would lay out conditions that would lead to the politicization of disabled veterans by conferring on them one of the most powerful and idiosyncratic terms in the Turkish nationalist lexicon, gazi. The evocation of the honorific title of Gazi, previously reserved for times of war, in the context of the Öcalan trial was a strategic gesture that provided the state with a vital political symbol when popular nationalist mobilization was needed most. Before 1999, the state had bestowed the title of Gazi only on those soldiers who participated in the country’s officially declared wars, such as the wars of Independence (1919–23) and Korea (1950–53) and the military invasion of Cyprus (1974), regardless of their status of disability. The amendment, allowing the use of the title for severely physically disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict, rested on two sovereign exceptions in that regard. First, the state for the first time granted the title in the absence of an 76

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official war by extending the eligibility criteria to instances where state sovereignty was under threat. Second, the title was given exclusively to disabled soldiers, leaving others who fought in the conflict zone outside the scope of the law. Using war veteran status for all conscripts would implicitly, if not explicitly, mean the recognition of the armed conflict as a war, which would render the PKK a legitimate player in the international arena as a bearer of rights defined by the international conventions of war. It would also bring about a daunting financial burden for the state in the form of veteran pensions for millions of conscripts who had served in the conflict zone. The amendment thus only targeted the sacrificial bodies of disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict, who, as described in chapter 2, had been expelled from masculine sovereignty. The parliamentarians who spoke at the legislative proceeding expressed their support for the amendment, which they said would furnish disabled veterans with spiritual satisfaction (manevi tatmin) and an “honorable standing in the society.” The meeting’s opening speech explained the rationale for codifying the title of Gazi in similar language. Despite being one of the most highly regarded spiritual values of the Turkish nation, the rank of Gazi does not have a clear legal definition. The clarification of the conditions under which members of the Turkish Armed Forces should be granted the title of Gazi is of great import to security personnel ready to sacrifice themselves for the country and the nation. A person who must sustain himself as a disabled individual must be satisfied not only financially but also spiritually so that he can cling to life. Given the critical condition of our country, it is against the traditions of the Turkish Armed Forces and of Turkish society to assign only the adjective disabled [malul] to those who became crippled [sakat] while fighting for the indivisible unity of the country and the nation.

This political gesture officially marked disabled veterans as sacrificial bodies in that they had, as nationalist politicians love to say, sacrificed their arms and legs for “the indivisible unity of the state with its territory and nation”— in other words, for the sovereignty of the state.3 By redefining veterans’ bodily losses as sacrifices, the lawmakers sought to address the co-constitutive masculinity and political legitimacy crises that precipitated around the bodies of disabled veterans. They hoped that the hypermasculinized honorific of Gazi would draw veterans back into the nexus of masculine and state sovereignties by giving them a distinguished place in the national cosmology as the embodiments of the everlasting Turkish military spirit, side by side with past Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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The 2018 Gazis’ Day commemoration at Taksim Square. Photo by Sinan Bilgenoğlu.

gazi-heroes. However, the title of Gazi itself would be embroiled in crisis through its contact with the gendered, classed, and ableist formations of power and inequality that impinged on disabled veterans’ lives.

the gazi as genealogical object A historical genealogy of the political grammar and vocabulary of the honorific Gazi and, in particular, an analysis of the conditions of their possibility makes clear why the term mattered so much politically, both to the state and to disabled veterans. The word gazi is often translated as war veteran or disabled war veteran, depending on the context of utterance. Yet this translation risks erasing both the religious resonance and the historically polyphonic nature of this loose signifier. Gazi is the cognate of the Arabic word ghazi, which refers to those who took part in a raid (gaza). Historically, the words gazi and gaza share a similar meaning and have occasionally been used interchangeably with the words mujahid (the one who struggles) and jihad (the struggle or fight against the enemies of Islam).4 Over the medieval period, the term gazi grew to be a title of respect and honor denoting a distinguished “warrior for the faith against infidels”5 and later became the title of the Muslim sovereigns 78

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of tributary empires, particularly Ottoman sultans, before being incorporated into Turkish nationalist militarist discourse in the early twentieth century. Gazis first appeared as historical figures during the Samanid Empire (819–999). In this period, Khorasan and Transoxiana witnessed the emergence of “gazi corporations” that united bands of mercenaries and frontier fighters who relied on the booty won in gazas.6 These corporations attracted zealots, adventurers, and religious and political dissidents of all ethnicities who were economically dependent on war and plunder and turned into brigands during times of peace. In time, however, they were transformed from ethnically mixed popular movements into semi-chivalric fraternities in which soldiers of Turkic ethnicity predominated, especially along the Byzantine frontier zone to the west. These organizations reached their height during the Mongol invasions, when large numbers of Turkic tribes and dervishes fleeing into Anatolia from the Iranian provinces brought a new frenzy for gaza, which would eventually lead to the formation of the Ottoman Empire near the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, where I conducted my fieldwork approximately seven hundred years later.7 In the earliest remaining written Ottoman historical source, the poet Ahmedi, writing in the 1400s, defines gazi with sentences that burn with religious fervor: “A ghazi is the instrument of the religion of God, a servant of God who cleans the earth from the defilement of polytheism; a ghazi is the sword of God, he is the protector and the refuge of the Believers; if he becomes a martyr while following the paths of God, do not think him dead, he lives with God as one of the blessed, he has Eternal Life.”8 The first nine Ottoman sultans either included Gazi as part of their full throne name or, in some cases, were retroactively given this title of honor and leadership. Although the gazi corporations that had played an important role in the first centuries of the empire were eventually disbanded, the Ottoman sultans, who also constituted the last dynasty of caliphs, continued to enjoy their reputation as gazis in the Muslim world, even after they had stopped participating personally in wars. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the last Ottoman sultan to rule with sovereign power (1876–1909), gave himself the title of Gazi during the Ottoman-Russian War (1877–78) and included the title el-ghazi in his tughra (calligraphic seal) and on the money issued during his rule. Distinguished high-ranking military officers were given the title as well. During the Ottoman-Russian War, for example, the title was conferred on Osman Pasha in recognition of his heroic defense of Plevna in Bulgaria. It was this tradition that compelled the Grand National Assembly members to Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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pass a bill in 1921, in the midst of the War of Independence, that bestowed the title of Gazi on Mustafa Kemal, a former Ottoman military officer and the founder of the Turkish Republic, who would include the title in his personal signature until his death. Gazis as frontier warriors became obsolete in Anatolia and the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire consolidated its imperial power. Yet the historical figure of the gazi has survived the dissolution of gazi corporations, living on not only in official titles but also in popular imagination and expressive culture. Frontier narratives constitute an excellent example in this respect. Building on earlier frontier epics and saints’ tales in Arabic and Persian, these narratives have transmitted the oral lore of the frontier across centuries in the forms of epic poetry and hagiography.9 The image of a gazi constructed in these narratives depicts a warrior who lives for “battle and booty, glory and girls.”10 The epitome of this literary image is Seyyid Battal Gazi, a seventhcentury hero, whose ritual cult, localized in the complex built around his tomb, survives to this day near Seyyit Gazi village in central Anatolia. Seyyid Battal Gazi became an immensely popular figure, particularly because of his cult’s appeal among gazis and Janissaries, and was immortalized as the eponymous hero of the famous epic the Battalname.11 Consisting of successive episodes recounting the exploits of Seyyid Battal Gazi, the Battalname inaugurated “a famous cycle of religious-heroic prose narratives whose eponymous heroes . . . fight, oftentimes single-handedly, to achieve the conquest of Byzantium.”12 Below, to give the reader a sense of this genre, I quote the opening section of the Battalname, entitled “The prophecy of the conquest of Rum and the coming of Ja’far,” from its earliest known manuscript version dating back to the early fifteenth century. This section describes how Gabriel comes down from the heavens to deliver the divine message about Seyyid Battal Gazi to the Prophet Muhammad. “Two hundred years after your mission is over, a young man shall be born to one of your sons. He will be tall and straight as barley, and he shall have a handsome face. His name shall be Ja’far [Seyyid Battal Gazi] from the town of Malatya. In heroism he shall be equal to Hamza, but in cunning he shall be better than Umar b. Umayya. He shall march in all directions by himself. He shall learn the four books by heart and when he preaches or recites, birds shall come down from the skies to listen. He shall be the one to conquer this province of Rum and shall destroy the churches and build mosques and madrasas in their place. He shall be the one to open Istanbul’s gate and he shall roast the livers of the priests. So let your blessed mind rest in tranquility.” So Gabriel spoke and then ascended to the heavens again.13 80

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This passage makes evident how the notion of the gazi operated as an idealized model of warrior masculinity within the Islamically legitimated ideology of conquest underpinning the Ottoman tributary system. As an irony of history, this Islamic notion found a new host in Kemalist Turkish nationalism, which engineered a top-down Westernization and radical secularization project in the early twentieth century. In 1921, the Grand National Assembly awarded Mustafa Kemal the rank of field marshal and the title of Gazi immediately following the victory of the nationalist army under his command against the Greek army, “reinforcing the idea that his rise to power was a spiritually meaningful act by which the land had been cleansed of [nonMuslim] invaders.”14 The conferment of the title clearly aimed to provide Islamic legitimacy for the nationalist struggle, which had to win over the masses while the sultan-caliph was formally still in power. “The religious symbolism was obvious and suggested that Gazi Pasha, as he was often called until he took the name Atatürk, was not as opposed to Islam as he is said to have been.”15 In his speech at the ceremony in the assembly and in the short statement he issued the next day, Mustafa Kemal accepted the title in the name of the whole army, making a further gesture toward the nationalization and “democratization” of the title, which had been reserved for sultans and high-ranking officials for centuries.

gazis of islam, gazis of the nation The use of the title of Gazi for Atatürk constitutes an often-cited example of the sacralization of nation-making practices by the use of Islamic references in pre-republican Turkey.16 Yet what is often missed is that these incorporated and often instrumentalized Islamic idioms have survived even through the radical secularization project of the early republican decades. Even after the Surname Law of 1934 abolished all titles of the Ottoman moral-political order—titles that had indicated the bearer’s profession and social status—the title of Gazi was preserved as the only official honorific worth retaining from the Ottoman past, other than Şehit (martyr, shahid in Arabic). Mustafa Kemal continued to use the title until his death, even after he adopted the surname Atatürk (Father of Turks). More importantly, the state continued to address all war veterans as gazis, regardless of their rank or distinction on the battlefield. The holders of the Medal of Independence—awarded to the civilian and military cadres of the War of Independence—and soldiers who Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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had participated in the officially recognized wars in Korea and Cyprus were valorized as gazis. By appropriating the notion of gazi, Turkish nationalism placed the originally Islamic term under the ideological service of the secularist army of a secular republic, highlighting the epic character of the title while downplaying its religious underpinnings. But despite the secular shift in the meaning of the term, its popular religious resonances have persisted. During the Korean War of 1950–53, the first time that the Turkish Army fought outside the country’s borders, the “government publicly represented the bipolar Cold War as one between Muslim gazi warriors and atheist infidels, the communist forces.”17 In his 1969 classic Din ve İdeoloji (Religion and Ideology), the renowned Turkish historical sociologist Şerif Mardin noted that the four top-selling books for street vendors of the time were historical epics narrating the adventures of the Turco-Islamic gazis, including Seyyid Battal Gazi, and that two gazi frontier novels, one on Battal Gazi and the other on Abu Muslim Khorasani, had been serialized daily in the press. Mardin was a singular figure within the Turkish academy, both for his acknowledgment of the historical force of the concept of the gazi and for his early observations regarding the popularization and proliferation of the gazi image through the mass media. Mardin saw the concepts of gazi/gaza as cultural residues of the Ottoman social formation and argued that their endurance in modern Turkey was a result of the inability of Kemalism to produce alternatives to Islamic cultural and moral idioms, especially in rural areas.18 For Mardin, the cluster of meanings around the ideas of gazi/gaza provided an excellent example of Victor Turner’s conception of “root paradigms.” As axiomatic frames that serve social actors as models for action, root paradigms are “patterns of assumptions about the fundamental nature of the world and humanity which underlie all social action but must clearly manifest themselves when a culture encounters severe conflict situations.”19 By defining it as a root paradigm, Mardin asserted that gazi was a pivotal cultural cipher in modern Turkey that could be compared only with other key clusters of meaning, such as haram/harem.20 This was why a modern-day Turkish conscript could be seen as a Seyyid Battal Gazi in his village, Mardin suggested, prophesying that other incarnations of Battal Gazi were to follow in future.21 Indeed, the arrival of such incarnations was not long in coming. As Mardin had predicted, popular culture of the 1970s produced new avatars of the gazi. These years witnessed a wave of historical films in Turkish cinema. Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, the Yeşilçam film industry produced 82

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countless low-budget, epic action flicks that thematized the conquest of Anatolia by gazis such as Seyyid Battal Gazi. Renowned as much for his handsome figure as for his riding and martial arts skills, the Turkish film star Cüneyt Arkın was the ideal fit for the Battal Gazi image on the cinema screen and took the lead role in The Legend of Battal Gazi,22 The Revenge of Battal Gazi,23 Gangway! Here Comes Battal Gazi,24 and Battal Gazi’s Son.25 The recipe for success was simple for blockbusters targeting a lower-class male audience: reinterpret religious-epic myths as X-rated nationalist-epic myths. Combining embellished action scenes—in which the protagonist single-handedly fights off the entire Byzantine army, jumps over city walls with acrobatic flips, and smites a swarm of enemies with a single blow of his sword—with voluptuous Byzantine princesses and Sunni ultranationalist propaganda, these films are objects of derision in contemporary Turkey and favorite foils in urban middle-class humor. Yet in the context of the 1974 invasion of Northern Cyprus and the escalating political violence between the nationalist Right and socialist Left, these films were anything but a joke. It is again Şerif Mardin who noted that “it was around the concept of gaza that large masses were mobilized for action” in the Cyprus conflict.26 In her ethnography of a central Anatolian village around the time of the military coup of 1980, Carol Delaney observed that the notion of the gazi was still vibrant among villagers.27 The concept was popular not only among villagers, but also among junta generals who adopted the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis as the state ideology while pursuing the violent suppression of the Left and a neoliberal restructuring of the economy. Taking the family, the mosque, and the barracks as its three pillars,28 the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis was a conservative-authoritarian mixture of Sunni Islam and ethnic nationalism, strategically inculcated by the military government in the name of political stability and national unity. As Kaplan29 notes, the long-term repercussions of this ideology for the political culture of the country can best be appreciated through a focus on the school curriculum’s total reconfiguration during the military rule, when religious education classes were made mandatory and religious schools were established across the country. In his analysis of the post-1980 curriculum, Kaplan argues that a new representation of the Turkish soldier as a pious defender of the faith first appeared in the reworked textbooks of the period, reviving the gazi figure in state symbolism and language. The ideological restoration of the gazi hero was not accidental. One of the key tenets of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis was that nationalism and Islam, Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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long viewed in the course of Turkish modernization as two political rivals, were in fact perfectly congruent because the Turkish nation and Islam shared the same quintessence, a quintessence whose historical expression was to be found in the figure of the gazi. For its proponents, the root paradigm of gazi/ gaza constituted the nodal point, or rather the suture, between Islam and the Turkish nation. In their cosmology, the primordial essence of the Turkish nation—its martial spirit—historically realized itself in Islam through the practice and symbolism of gaza as Turks fighting as the sword of Islam. The ideological and affective power of the historical image of the gazi rested on a delicate balance between nationalism and Islam.30 Within the context of the Kurdish conflict, the state’s use of a title so encumbered by its Islamic past was not without disruptions. Despite the Marxist-Leninist legacy of the PKK, guerrillas were categorically not “infidels” but Muslims. One of my disabled veteran interlocutors with strong political Islamist convictions, for example, told me that the use of the titles of Gazi and Martyr for veterans of today’s conflict in the Region was not religiously legitimate since the war was not fought against infidels. In his view, the secularist state was abusing Islamic concepts and uprooting them from their religious seat. However, for the vast majority of disabled veterans, who were schooled during the rule of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, fighting for the nation and faith were automatically the same since the Turkish Army was the “hearth of the prophet” (peygamber ocağı), a phrase regularly used by politicians and military officers. State propaganda about the uncircumcised terrorist and the assumed link between the PKK and the ASALA played a role in hardening veterans’ Turkish-Islamist persuasion. In constructing the infidel, the communist, the Armenian, and the Kurdish guerrilla as interchangeable at the level of political fantasy and political violence, such propaganda would later facilitate disabled veterans’ interpellation into the anti-Armenian agenda of the ultranationalist movement of the 2000s.31 Through the bestowal of the title of Gazi in the course of the Kurdish conflict, the Turkish state rejuvenated the symbolic power and harnessed the popular Islamic resonances of the gazi/gaza paradigm. The state’s ideological apparatuses—in particular the top religious body, the Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs)—were instrumental in the construction of war disability as blessing by preaching that gazis were promised heaven. In 2018, the head of the Diyanet proclaimed in a Friday sermon that gazis “exchanged their most precious limbs for a place in heaven.”32 The Diyanet also took charge in the creation of religious fantasies regarding the otherworldly 84

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restoration of dismembered veteran bodies. In 2011, an official sermon issued by the Diyanet and disseminated in different cities by muftis—scholars with the authority to issue a legal opinion ( fatwa) on Islamic law—laid out the terms of this heavenly restoration: “A gazi is someone who has remained alive even though he fought in the path of Allah and for his country with the desire of becoming a martyr. A gazi is at the same level as martyrs since he fights in order to become a martyr and to be elevated to that level. He knows that the organs he has lost in war will be waiting for him in heaven.”33 Following the lead of Islamic martyrology, cemaats (religious communities rooted in Sufi traditions) aligned with the state also took part in the nationalist production of otherworldly gazi images. The popular website of the Nur Cemaat described the war damage on disabled veterans’ bodies as sacred wounds: “The person who cannot reach the rank of martyr but dies as a gazi having been injured while waging jihad in the path of Allah comes in front of the Lord with his wound still bleeding fresh and warm and smelling like musk. So gazis will arrive at judgment square like martyrs, who will also arrive with their bodies still bleeding and smelling like musk. This good news is an important solace for gazis who must continue their lives wounded, injured, and dismembered.”34 The notions of otherworldly “re-memberment” and sacred wound provide exquisite examples of how the carnal aesthetics of Islamic martyrology embellish nationalist constructions of the gazi and further sanctify the disabled veteran’s body. In the 2000s, the confluent imagery of a religiously inflected nationalism and nationalistically inflected Islam generated many sacrificial conceptions of and stories about soldiers through the channels of mass media and the Internet. A particularly interesting example for its elaborate sacrificial narrative and gendered implications is that of kınalı kuzu, “the hennaed lamb.”

hennaed lambs According to the dictionary of the Turkish Language Association (Türk Dil Kurumu), the official regulatory body of language, the term kınalı kuzu, which primarily refers to sacrificial lamb, is also metaphorically used for conscripts.35 The phrase became extremely popular after the mid-2000s as sacrificial discourses and practices of Turkish nationalism were vitalized and invented in the context of the armed conflict, which resumed with full Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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intensity after years of cease-fire. During this period, there was a new public appetite for military memorabilia and consumption that conjured up memories of the sacrifices of past generations. Posters featuring starving and destitute child-age Ottoman soldiers became newspaper giveaways; martyrs’ cemeteries in Gallipoli became popular heritage tourism destinations for the urban middle classes; gigantic monuments of martyrdom commemorating the Battle of Sarıkamış were erected; September 19, the day that Atatürk took the title of Gazi, was officially accepted as Gazis’ Day, while March 18, which had previously been the Day of Çanakkale Martyrs, was readopted as the Day of Martyrs. Films, plays, and stories featuring the notion of the hennaed lamb were both products of and further contributed to this renewed fervor in the nationalist cult of sacrifice. “Kınalı Mehmet” (Hennaed Mehmet), a nationalist story that is still taught in primary schools,36 provides the most well-known version of the hennaed lamb story.37 Although the story is originally about a recruit who fought in the Gallipoli Campaign, it has been popularized in relation to the disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict and provides an elegant expression of the sacrificial halo placed around them. I have read and been told many different versions of this story and recreate the most common one below. Mehmet is a conscripted young villager whose hennaed hands are ridiculed by his fellow soldiers. After being questioned by his curious commander, he sends a letter to his mother at home in his village to inquire about the meaning of the henna on his hands. His mother responds with an explanation of why she had smeared henna on him. “We traditionally use henna on three occasions. We stain the sheep for sacrifice with henna so that they may be sacrifices to Allah. We adorn brides with henna so that they may be sacrifices to their husbands. We smear henna on young men who go off to the army so that they may be sacrifices to the homeland.” We hear the mother’s words from the mouth of the commander, since by the time the letter arrives, the Hennaed Mehmet has already been martyred along with his ridiculing friends.

This narrative gives us the key to the patriarchal logic of (Abrahamic) sacrifice in Turkey through the symbolism of henna. Henna is used in various rites of passage and calendrical traditions throughout the Middle East and North Africa—henna night on the eve of a wedding and during the Feast of Sacrifice—to mark a liminal person and/or a sacrificial victim. In Turkey, the soldier’s farewell ceremony has also become an occasion for the use of henna; even if, as seems likely, the practice was considered in the past 86

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to be narrowly provincial, smearing henna on recruits’ hands became widespread in the wake of the popularization of this narrative. In the story of Hennaed Mehmet, henna signifies sacrificial blood spilled on three separate occasions. The first is the blood of the sacrificial animal, the only animal blood that is not considered taboo in Turkey, such that it is even smeared on the foreheads of children for protection against the evil eye. The second is blood from the hymen, which proves that a marriage has been consummated, that the bride was a virgin, and hence that she had retained her virginal sacrificial quality until marriage. The third is the blood of the slain martyr, which, according to hadith, smells like musk, and which, according to Turkish nationalist discourse, gushes from every parcel of the Turkish homeland and gives the Turkish flag its deep red hue. The symbolism of henna unites the carriers of these three types of sacrificial blood—the lamb, the bride, and the young man—in a single scheme of sacrifice connecting divine, state, and masculine sovereignties. Yet unlike sacrificial animals and women, young men occupy multiple positions in this gendered sacrificial scheme, respectively that of the sacrificer, the sacrifier (the one benefiting from the sacrifice), and the sacrificial victim.38 Indeed, these multiple positions reinforce each other for young men because military service is a social prerequisite to marriage and financial independence. Only by offering themselves as potential sacrifices for the state through compulsory military service can young men become eligible to offer sacrifice on the Feast of Sacrifice (a religious duty reserved for those who can afford it, especially household heads) and as beneficiaries of the “sacrifice” of women to marriage. The sacrificial logic that structures the story of Hennaed Mehmet also imprints the bodies of disabled veterans who are constructed in the nationalist imagination as the new generation of Hennaed Mehmets. However, as shown in chapter 2, disabled veterans’ “hennaed” limbs and bodily capacities put the entire sacrificial edifice at risk, provoking a sacrificial crisis through their simultaneous infantilization and sanctification. Moreover, unlike Hennaed Mehmet, who docilely and completely lacks a voice and whose body is reduced to a sacrificial surface for the inscription of sovereign power, disabled veterans I have met are anything but docile inscriptive surfaces. To understand this sacrificial crisis and the ways in which veterans politically articulate it, we must first understand how this patriarchal logic of sacrifice— according to which young men must earn the right to be the beneficiaries of the sacrifice of women to marriage by offering themselves as sacrifices to the father state—stumbles in the lives of disabled veterans. Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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“They don’t marry a kız [girl/virgin] to gazis” is a common grievance among disabled veterans, who, because of the social prejudices against men with disabilities, often have difficulties finding a “suitable spouse”—a euphemism for a woman whose hymen is socially interpreted as being intact.39 Although I had heard it numerous times before, I had not appreciated the gender and sexual politics underpinning this expression until I witnessed a failed matchmaking attempt at the official association of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families. Stepping in the door of the official association’s building one day, I immediately heard the angry voice of Berna Abla, the association’s female head, speaking in a loud voice on the phone with someone who later turned out to be the mother of a divorcée (dul) who had been proposed to by a disabled veteran. After she hastily hung up the phone looking terribly upset, Berna Abla explained that despite her pleas, the mother was indisposed to give the hand of her daughter to an unsound (sağlam olmayan) man. “OK, my guy may not be sound,” she cried out, shaking in anger. “What about your girl? As if she were intact [a virgin]! Isn’t your girl a dul?” The word dul signifies both “divorcée” and “widow” in Turkish. Especially for younger women, being a dul is a particularly precarious social category, burdened with the stigma of unchastity and exposed to the threat of sexual violence. So I was intrigued throughout the rest of our conversation when Berna Abla suggested that the best match for a gazi was in fact a dul. I later realized that this idea was shared by others in disabled veterans’ social circles. The head of the other association of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families, a martyr’s mother and a true matriarch, suggested the same thing during a heated conversation about a disabled veteran missing both legs who had eloped with a younger girl in her twenties. After criticizing him for his marriage decision, she stated: “I tell gazis not to marry young girls but duls. They are the ones who know the meaning of sacrifice [Fedakârlığın anlamını onlar biliyor].” Her verbiage posits a commensurability between a physical impairment and a broken hymen, the gazi and the dul. They have both lost their sacrificial potentialities by having already been sacrificed—he by losing his body parts, she by “losing” her virginity.

“rotten” bodies In the anthropological classic Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss argue that the “unity of sacrificial rite consists in 88

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establishing a means of communication between the sacred and profane worlds through the mediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that in the course of the ceremony is destroyed.” 40 It is exactly because of the necessary collapse of sacred and profane in the sacrificial victim’s body that the victim needs to be destroyed; the sacred must not be polluted through its contact with the everyday order of things. This crucial insight explains, for example, why the martyr is the quintessential sacrificial victim for nationalist and religious ideologies. The disabled veteran, on the other hand, is a much more problematic sacrificial victim. Unlike the body of the martyr, the body of the disabled veteran is consecrated in the ideologico-political realm but goes through countless moments of desecration within the ableist textures of the military medical system, state institutions, and everyday lower-class urban life. For Turkish disabled veterans, the sense of defilement starts with the first steps of the bureaucratic process that an injured soldier must go through as a gazi initiate. To apply for gazi status, a veteran must be medically discharged from the military and then obtain from within the maze of medical and welfare bureaucracy a set of medical reports certifying his disability. The first of these reports is known as the çürük raporu, the rotten report, which indicates unsuitability and exemption from military service. The rotten report is a stigmatized document because it is also issued to openly gay men who are considered unfit for conscription by a military medical establishment that categorizes homosexuality as a psychosexual disorder. For this reason, as Recai’s ill-fated story illustrates, injured soldiers often feel betrayed and therefore resist when they are asked to produce a rotten report as a precondition for becoming a gazi. When his age of conscription arrived, Recai knew that he would be given a rotten report because of the visual impairment in his left eye. Afraid that being marked as rotten, with its implications of homosexuality and frailty, would create problems in regard to employment and marriage, Recai decided to keep his disability a secret. During the routine enlistment medical examination, which involves little more than a general practitioner asking a group of half-naked men whether any of them have a medical problem, he remained silent. Then he was sent to the Kurdish region, where he lost part of his foot in a mine blast. When his treatment was over, the doctors announced the “good news” that he was eligible for a rotten report. He was shaken. He begged his physician insistently not to sign the report, clamoring for reevaluation. The physician, who only belatedly became aware of his affliction, Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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informed him that it was just a standard bureaucratic procedure. But Recai persevered until the physician resorted to his final persuasive trick: “Do you want to become a gazi, my son? Then, here is the paper that’ll make you one.” With this, Recai finally gave in to obtaining a rotten report, the very thing he had been trying to avoid, at the expense of a year-and-a-half of military service and his foot. Even after they receive the status of gazi and its accompanying benefits of job placement, the sense of defilement by the state continues. During my fieldwork, Volkan’s story of having been further disabled as a result of a workplace accident circulated among disabled veterans as an example of how their sacred wounds could be superseded by defiling wounds. Volkan, a handsome and talented young man, became a gazi after being shot in the arm in a clash with guerrillas and acquiring an orthopedic disability. He was placed as an unskilled worker in the warehouse of a state-owned company. Because he was unusually athletic, he was tasked with storing heavy parcels despite his disability. On an unusually busy workday, an unsafely stacked parcel toppled him over and broke his spinal cord, permanently paralyzing him from the waist down. “I was a gazi. Now I’m both a gazi and a cripple [hem gazi, hem sakatım],” Volkan told me once. His double disablement “at the hands of the state” (devletin elinde) and, especially, the fact that he was still single and was taken care of by his mother, were widely interpreted and felt by other disabled veterans as a betrayal by the state. Because most disabled veterans are employed as unskilled workers in workplaces with no disability accommodations or accessibility arrangements, they often end up in positions in which they are either, like Volkan, assigned to manual tasks that are incompatible with their disabilities or are expected to perform less physically demanding reproductive labor, such as janitorial work, which they often see as drudgery, feminization, and defilement. While Volkan’s story may be unique in terms of the dramatic impact of work conditions on his body and life course, the sense of defilement, sacrificial crisis, and betrayal that emanates from disabled veterans’ work lives at state institutions is commonplace. During the days I spent at disabled veterans’ associations, I encountered at least two disabled veterans who came to the association to seek help after being assigned to toilet cleaning, the paradigmatic example of a defiling chore. In both instances, the association sent out a number of complaints and petitions and also contacted high-ranking military officers with close ties to the association in the hopes that they could pull strings. In 2016, a below-the90

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knee amputee veteran who was punished with toilet-cleaning duty at a highways department field office had his picture taken with his prosthetic leg exposed while he was mopping the floor of a squat toilet and sent it to the media. The result was a nationwide sense of the violation of a sacrificial body through its contact with abject matter. A parliamentarian from the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, hereafter CHP), immediately submitted a vitriolic parliamentary question that defined the punishment as insafsız (merciless), haysiyetsiz (undignified), utanç verici (shameful), onur kırıcı (humiliating), and saygısız (disrespectful). The prime ministry responded by sharing with the media a circular note that it issued to state-owned companies requesting the employment of disabled veterans and martyrs’ family members in office jobs. In the above examples, disabled veterans could call on state authorities to keep their sacrificial bodies away from pollution by transmitting the affects of defilement through their organizations or the media. Yet the endless possibilities of deconsecration pervade anonymous public life, especially because disabled veterans avoid exposing their political/sacrificial status to public scrutiny, for example by wearing their medals of honor, because of their anxieties about possible retaliation from Kurds in the ethnically mixed urban spaces they coinhabit.

gazis or beggars If the historical figure of the gazi provides the epithet of sacredness for disabled veterans, another historical figure—the beggar—presents itself as the abject potentiality of disability in an ableist society.41 Begging constituted an important economic activity for the poor in the Ottoman Empire, where the Islamic legal distinction between the moral categories of “deserving” beggar and able-bodied beggar reigned supreme.42 Deserving beggars included groups of people who were deemed unable to work due to social-bodily conditions such as being blind (âmâ), paralyzed (mefluç), or crippled (kötürüm).43 Ottoman state authorities allowed deserving beggars to practice their profession by issuing them licenses and regulating and taxing them through a guild system, while punishing able-bodied beggars with corporal punishment and galley service.44 Therefore, for centuries, disabled bodies enjoyed a legitimate public presence as street beggars in Ottoman urban centers like Cairo and Istanbul.45 Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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A young man begging on the Galata Bridge. Photo by Sinan Bilgenoğlu.

As begging was increasingly governmentalized as an urban social problem after the early nineteenth century, “deserving beggars,” too, gradually lost their position as legally and religiously affirmed mendicants and privileged subjects of Islamic almsgiving. Yet, despite isolated attempts at their confinement or deportation to the countryside, beggars have never disappeared from the public space.46 Today, begging is criminalized under the Law of Misdemeanors (Kabahatlar Kanunu) and the municipal police (zabıta) frequently chase, detain, and even expel beggars from the city limits. Yet street begging remains a powerful symbol and social reality in urban Turkey and offers viable economic prospects, especially for lower-class disabled males.47 During my fieldwork in Istanbul, I sporadically encountered disabled street beggars performing their begging labor on street-corner pavements, in front of mosques, and on clogged highways. Calling attention to their bodies by exposing the dismembered or disfigured body part, wearing white medical masks, waving prescriptions and doctors’ notes, or carrying X-ray images as sandwich-board signs, they burst open and thereby lay bare the fabric of structurally ableist city spaces. In these encounters, beggars’ disability, poverty, and “neediness” were always already in question, reflecting the power of urban myths about dissembling beggars who are in fact rich and able-bodied. It is for this reason that beggars morbidly exhibited their impaired or deformed limbs so as to 92

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make them real and palpable enough to dodge the moralizing rebukes of passing spectators: “You’re as fit as a fiddle. Why don’t you get a job?” With its tacit equation of disabled and beggar bodies, such reproachful statements, demonstrating the ongoing resonance of the Ottoman moral distinction between able-bodied and “deserving” beggars, were themselves complicit with the process of making beggars out of people with disabilities. One of these encounters made a particular impact and impression on me. I was in a taxi, headed to the Roma neighborhood of Ahırkapı for the spring festival of Hıdrellez. Each time traffic stopped at a bend in the road, beggars with disabilities began to roam among the cars. The taxi driver pointed at a very young man with a twisted and disfigured arm sitting by the side of the opposite lane and clicked his tongue in disapproval. “They break kids’ arms and legs and turn them into beggars.” Familiar with the urban horror story of çingene (a popular pejorative label for Roma) kidnapping and maiming children for the purpose of turning them into beggars, I remained silent. In less than two minutes, we came across another street beggar, also lacking legs, this time sitting by the side of our lane. The driver started hurling insults. “Look at this pimp! He’s hiding his legs to fool us.” Uncomfortable with my not joining in with his discourse, he slowed down, turned around, and asked me, “Do you really believe that he doesn’t have legs? He begs all day, and at night he walks away and goes home.” Then he pointed his finger toward the Roma neighborhood and said, “These guys have bought all these houses.” What made this encounter so powerful for me was witnessing how the driver deployed, however contradictorily, every version of the negative stereotypes surrounding disabled street beggars—disabled beggars as cutthroats, organized criminals, malingerers, swindlers, tricksters, and, last but not least, the ethnic/racial pejorative others of the çingene—so as to mobilize negative affects directed at beggars’ bodies. But affects transmitted by maimed, disfigured, and ill bodies are not always negative. Such affects can range from feelings of unease, aversion, repulsion, anger, and trepidation to guilt, pity, and piety. It was also through such an affective encounter that I first realized disabled veterans’ anxieties over the conflation of their bodies with those of beggars. On a spring day, I left the official gazi association with Erdem, a disabled veteran in his forties who was missing his left arm. As we exited through the building’s gate, we came across a man around the same age as Erdem begging on the pavement, also missing his left arm. Unlike Erdem, who had skillfully placed his jacket on his shoulders so as to hide his missing arm, the beggar displayed his disfigured residual Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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limb openly for the benefit of the voyeuristic gaze of the passersby. There was a feeling of intensity in the air, generated by the uncanny encounter of the two bodies both familiar and strange to each other—corporeally so similar yet symbolically so set apart. Captivated by that intensity, we stood uncomfortably still for a protracted two seconds until Erdem made a hasty and somewhat angry attempt to walk away, grumbling inconspicuously. The following day, I found him in the association’s building telling other veterans about the beggar, trying to mobilize them to write a petition to the governor’s office barring beggars from the association’s doorstep. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but I never saw beggars around the association again. The corporeal proximity of disabled veteran and beggar bodies presents a striking contrast with their symbolic distance. The disabled beggar outside the association is a socially abject person relying upon the public pity that his disability evokes. Because of his total economic dependence and neediness, he does not comply with the gendered norms of sovereign individual status. More, he is a petty criminal, if rarely prosecuted. Erdem, on the other hand, is a generic national hero whose disability renders him the member of a privileged biopolitical group that exists in an intimate relationship with the state. This relationship can be traced through the objects that Erdem was carrying on the day of the encounter: a “gazi identity card” enabling free use of public transport, a tax-free metallic-colored pistol, and a medal of honor that Erdem pins on his chest only at commemorations. Yet despite these differences in status, the beggar figure constantly haunts disabled veterans in public, evoking deep anxieties about the meaning and worth of their sacrifices. These anxieties are not unwarranted. For disabled veterans, the paradigmatic rite of public desecration is to be confused with street beggars. Tahsin, a veteran with paraplegia, recounted to me how, as a person who rides in a wheelchair, he is often conflated with beggars: “I went to this bakery right after dawn. Since I couldn’t climb the store’s stairs with my wheelchair, I called out to the owner, ‘Can you help me?’ When he saw me in my wheelchair, he said: ‘Sorry, brother but I haven’t yet made the first sale of the day. There is nothing in the cash register. But I can give you a free pastry.’ ” Ironically, state institutions’ efforts to extricate disabled veterans from the beggar stereotype by furnishing them with more benefits further reinforce the stereotype rather than dispel it. Gossip and envy surround gazis’ welfare benefits in their neighborhoods and kin networks. Abdullah, a leg-amputee veteran, reported hearing envious comments from both his relatives and neighbors. 94

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We were having tea at a neighbor’s house. A distant relative of his was also with us. The following day, my neighbor’s wife blurted out that this guy had been gossiping about me. “Oh, what a great deal,” he was saying. “I wish that I had also been injured during my military service. I’m ready to give up a leg or an arm if the state is going to take care of me too.” What a bastard! As if I wanted this to happen! As if I’m a beggar! I was so close to [going and] chopping off this guy’s leg with a blunt knife and saying, “There you go! Now you can have my benefits.”

As Abdullah’s affectively charged narrative makes plain, such statements implying that disabled veterans abuse their disabilities to squeeze money out of the state under the guise of heroism have the potential of leading to violent confrontations. A common space in which veterans come face-to-face with such abusive remarks is public transportation, which constitutes the most ableist axis of urban life. The Law on Disabled People of 2005 prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities but does not mandate access to public transportation. In addition to poor accessibility, disabled veterans must also deal with private city bus drivers who question the authenticity or validity of their gazi ID cards, which allow them free public transportation. When this happens, there is always the possibility of a violent altercation. The wife of a disabled veteran told me that her husband once chased a driver with a pistol in his hand after a quarrel over his ID card and the bus driver had to quit working that route. In 2014, a similar confrontation that turned violent between a disabled veteran, missing two hands and an arm, and a driver in Ankara hit the headlines of national news outlets and sparked national controversy. While the veteran said that the driver had hurled insults at him, saying, “Allah took your arm because you deserved it,” the driver complained that the veteran had beaten him with his prosthetic arm. In 2018, a disabled veteran was turned out of a bus in heavy rain because the driver refused his ID card. These are extreme trajectories, but the conflict itself is quotidian. During my fieldwork, I realized that private city buses would regularly skip the bus stop in front of a disabled veterans’ association I frequented. When I inquired about it, I was told that several members of the association had heard one bus driver’s helper shouting, after seeing them waiting at the bus stop, “Hit the gas, brother! The moochers are coming” (Abi gaza bas, beleşçiler geliyor). Beleşçi is one of several humiliating epithets—among them such pejoratives as bedavacı (freeloader) and numaracı (malingerer)—disabled veterans hear in a variety of social settings, including their workplaces at state Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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institutions. The negative affects surrounding disability produced by such hurtful expressions, which persistently evoke images of beggars, fuel veterans’ sense of sacrificial crisis. But these negative affects are not only induced by disabled veterans’ encounters with the ableist public. In stunning irony, veterans frequently conjure the beggar image themselves, either by cynically comparing their stipends to “beggar handouts” or by blaming competing activist groups for being “beggars,” in other words for engaging solely in welfare activism rather than confronting the government politically.

performative defacements The blurring of the borders between the sacrificial body of the disabled veteran and the abject body of the street beggar epitomizes the sacrificial crisis that structures disabled veterans’ everyday lives. Within their intimate circles, disabled veterans often address this crisis by performatively questioning the veracity of their status as gazis, and with it the legitimacy of the state that granted them that status. It is enough to spend a single day within a disabled veterans’ circle to observe them criticizing the state by playfully defacing their gazi status. “Biz fasulyeden gazileriz” (We are fake gazis) was a commonly used phrase among my interlocutors. An activist disabled veteran uttered this sentence each time he saw me. “Are you still here? Haven’t I told you that we are fake gazis? If you want to do research on gazis, go and talk to the Korean and Cyprus gazis,” he would tease me before bursting into laughter. But he enjoyed even more saying, “We are not gazis but Niyazis,” making an allusion to the idiom “Ne şehittir ne gazi, bok yoluna gitti bizim Niyazi,” which can be translated as “Neither a martyr nor a gazi, our Niyazi was flushed down the toilet,” referring to someone who has been harmed in confusion or ruined for an unimportant cause. The objects representing their gazi status had their share of defacement, too. For example, they referred to their gazi ID cards as patates baskı (potato prints) because the word gazi was stamped on their cards in red ink and the cards still read “duty-disabled” on the back. The State Medal of Pride bestowed upon disabled veterans was also a target of scandalous jokes. Among activists, this gold-coated brass medal was nearly always called teneke (tin), a worthless piece of metal. A few days after someone broke into his

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apartment and stole his medal, a disabled veteran with a visual impairment joked that the thief had been stupid. “He could not even tell that it’s not gold. I’d love to see his face when he goes to sell it,” he said. The problem was not, or at least not only, about what the medal was made of. The State Medal of Pride was a civil decoration given to disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict and to families of soldiers killed in the conflict. Noting that it was not a military decoration, activist disabled veterans frequently compared their medals with the medals, decorations, and orders that the state controversially gave in bulk to successful sportspeople, musicians, actors, artists, and the like. Yaman, the mischievous leader of a clique of activist disabled veterans, took particular delight in defacing his medal through such comparisons: “One day we were visiting the prime minister. People around us were discussing in whispers if we were a football or a wrestling team. ‘Pimps!’ I shouted at them. ‘Don’t you see that one of us lacks a leg and another one an arm. What kind of a wrestling team would we make?’ ” Since football players and wrestlers were still masculinized bodies imbued with nationalist affects during international tournaments, Yaman was not satisfied with the defacing power of this anecdote, so he continued: “It’s made of brass. I’m not dying for gold, but you gave this medal even to Manukyan for being the top taxpayer. Am I a football player or pop singer? [Topçu muyum, popçu muyum?] Am I a pimp, a faggot, a whore? Why did you give this medal to me?” Although he was talking to me, the “you” in Yaman’s speech was the state. Comparing disabled veterans’ medals with those given to people who inhabited the constitutive outside of his gendered moral universe—such as Matild Manukyan, the famous Armenian businesswoman and madam who earned a fortune in the brothel business and became the top taxpayer in Istanbul for several years—Yaman’s sexist comments turned the state’s attempts at remasculinizing veterans inside out. These sorts of performative defacements are discursive strategies that allow veterans to hold the state accountable for the sacrificial crisis they experience. But even as they defaced it, my interlocutors were intensely invested in their status as gazis. The benefits and entitlements that symbolically and materially separated them from their mirror inversion, the street beggar, were strongly tethered to this status. They were very well aware that without it they would be further precarized and exposed to the structural violence of ableist social formations as working-class men with disabilities.

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we are not disabled, we are gazis! I was having tea in a state office located in a gorgeous rococo-style historical building with two disabled veterans employed there, Fahri and Hasan. They were complaining about how they were often asked to do tasks that lay outside their job definition. Fahri was particularly resentful, as his supervisor, whom he called a PKK sympathizer because of his labor union involvement, had asked him to brew tea for his visitors. As he was ranting on, a fellow worker, also a disabled individual, overheard him and joined the conversation to second Fahri’s complaints about the kinds of chores they were asked to carry out. With a sudden change of mood, Fahri brushed him off. “Of course they would ask you. I wouldn’t mind were I not a gazi.” Even when sharing the same problems and demands, disabled veterans relentlessly sought to dissociate themselves from the larger disabled community, both individually and collectively. Given that one of the main concerns of disabled veterans’ rights movements across the globe has been patrolling the boundaries between civilian and veteran assistance, working “to ensure that the assistance given to their members was always constructed as an entitlement . . . and mixed as little as possible with the civilian welfare system,” 48 this was not news to me. Still, I was surprised when Zeki, a veteran who had lost vision in both his eyes after a mine explosion, shrugged at my question as to why he stopped attending the association for the blind where he learned how to use the Braille alphabet and a cane. “Why should I go there?” he said. “I have nothing in common with those blind people.” Zeki’s comments were far from idiosyncratic. Most disabled veterans I met deemed the public use of one of the many Turkish words for “disabled”— sakat, engelli, özürlü—when referring to them as an explicit insult and a nonrecognition of their political status. During a protest in 2006, members of an association walked behind a banner that read “Sakat değil gaziyiz” (We are not disabled, we are gazis), which later became a prime political motto of disabled veteran activism. Endeavoring to disengage veterans from the stigma of disability, this slogan quickly turned into a constitutive trope for disabled veteran identity. There is a paradox inherent to this identity. “We are not disabled, we are gazis” is an oxymoronic statement. For disabled veterans, it is the title of Gazi that separates them from other people with disabilities, but within the context of the Kurdish conflict, one can become a gazi only by virtue of becoming disabled. My disabled veteran interlocutors, even those who adhered to a secularist 98

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political cosmology, dealt with this paradox by explaining their disability in terms of the realization of divine will, echoing the popular Islamo-nationalist construction of the gazi as a chosen subject of God whose place in heaven is reserved alongside prophets and saints. “This could have happened in civilian life. I could have been injured in a car accident! It was God’s will that I should reach this honor by becoming disabled in military service.” In so doing, they resignified their disabilities as a sort of stigmata that should not be confused with morphologically similar but ontologically different disabilities. Disability rights activists also respected these boundaries. For instance, the website of the Turkish Association for the Disabled (Türkiye Sakatlar Derneği) archived media coverage of disability issues but systematically left out news on disabled veterans. On the rare occasions when these boundaries were breached, disabled veterans reacted furiously. Such a case occurred when someone from a graphics-driven monthly news magazine contacted the disabled veterans’ association and explained that they wanted to include disabled veterans’ bodies in their disability advocacy campaign, which sought to showcase aesthetic images of disabled persons with the aim of dispelling stereotypes. The association members did not take this mixing with other people with disabilities lightly. Intimidated by the hostile reaction of the disabled veterans’ associations, the magazine abandoned its plan and printed images only of people disabled in nonmilitary contexts. I was told that its editor later called the association to personally apologize for the “confusion.”

making sense of the sacrificial crisis Sacrificial crisis narratives and images are featured as popular human-interest stories in the media, especially at times when the armed conflict is heated. Disabled veterans discovered the political commodity and spectacle value of their bodies long ago and learned that their sacrifices become amplified even further through mediatized representations of sacrificial crisis. At times they even document the moment of defilement themselves and hope, as did the disabled veteran who documented with a cell phone how he was made to clean toilets at work, that it will make its way to the headlines of the national news media. But the disabled veterans I met during my fieldwork often hated the paternalistic tone of such media stories. While I watched TV at a coffeehouse with a group of veterans, we heard a mournful tune come on in the background Of G a z i s a n d Beg g a r s

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and the news anchor ask emotionally, “Why can’t we protect and take care of our gazis? [Gazilerimize neden sahip çıkamıyoruz?]” The question was rhetorical, of course, meant to interpellate the audience as affectively capacitated moral subjects who would feel bad about the apathy, moral decay, and degeneration of traditional values and become nostalgic for the good old days when gazis were protected and taken care of. But it provoked those at our table. “Son of a bitch! Who are you to protect us? You’re nothing but a servant of the PKK!” The anchor’s paternalistic tone had left them no cultural or psychic space within which to reassert their dignity, agency, and masculinity. That space was produced in the interstices of the ultranationalist political culture of the 2000s. Over the two years I spent with disabled veterans, I never heard any of them address the afflictions that led to their sense of sacrificial crisis in the terms of an identitarian, rights-based, or class framework of disability rights and labor union activism. Instead, they resorted to a conspiracy-theory-heavy, occult-ridden, apocalyptic-millenarian framework that seductively offered “a coherent and comprehensive world view that . . . [was] at once ordered and charged with drama and urgency.” 49 Disabled veterans are often acutely aware of the “political etiologies”50 of their disabilities and narrate their everyday problems at the level of macroscale political issues. In their narratives, structural violence is translated into the terms of political violence and class and disability issues are construed as ethnopolitical ones. For example, the vast majority of my interlocutors blamed “Kurdish-looking” bus drivers for the problems they experienced on private city buses, explaining that drivers deliberately turned down their free transportation cards not in order to make more money but rather to impede veterans’ mobility in the city. Similarly, whenever they were assigned physical or demeaning tasks incompatible with their disabilities and/or their sacrificial status, veterans employed at state institutions accused their supervisors of being PKK sympathizers. In their accounts, rumors of a government plan to reduce disabled veterans’ pensions were interpreted as further evidence of the government’s complicity in the wicked imperialist plots of Western powers to shatter “Turkish national consciousness” and dismember Turkey. Through this conspiratorial logic, disabled veterans experienced the humiliating moments in their postinjury lives as moments of political emergency. Such a political emergency entails the involvement of the state. By affectively linking veterans’ everyday experiences and bodily knowledge to the question of the state, ultranationalist politics succeeds spectacularly in its appeals to disabled veterans. Ultranationalism establishes its hegemony 100

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among disabled veterans by making it possible to read the sacrificial crisis of being at once sanctified gazi and defiled beggar as a symptom of a broader crisis—as the manifestation of Turkey’s compromised state sovereignty. This structure of feeling, which harnesses disabled veterans’ arduous quest to recover their masculine sovereignty to the ultranationalist agenda of “restoring” state sovereignty, constitutes the key to understanding disabled veterans’ political agency.

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fou r

Communities of Loss

the istanbul branch of the official national association of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families is located in a worn-out apartment on a very busy street in one of the city’s central financial districts. Only a handful of the crowd of Istanbulites passing by the association each day would notice its modest signboards amid the jungle of commercial placards. Its slogans, amateurishly written with sticker letters and too small to be seen from the street, read “Soldiers die not when they are shot, but when they are forgotten” and “Martyrs do not die! The homeland shall not be divided!” Even the oversized Turkish flag that hangs occasionally from the association windows failed to captivate; during the nationalist flag campaigns common during my fieldwork every building along this street was hung with Turkish flags of all sizes. On my first visit, I couldn’t find the association and had to ask for directions at a small corner shop that had joined in the nationalist parade of flags by hanging a small, printed paper banner behind the counter. The shopkeeper told me that he had not heard of the association, but that he had seen “handicapped [özürlü] guys loitering” in front of the building just a few yards away. I was surprised to discover that even a nationalist shopkeeper located in the immediate vicinity of the association was unaware of its existence. In light of the nationalist melancholy and anger emanating from it, this struck me as odd. Exiting the elevator on the association’s floor, a huge signboard with the association’s name greeted me. “Strange,” I thought to myself as I knocked on the door. “Why don’t they exchange this sign with the small one outside the building?” A man in his forties warily half opened the door and asked who I was looking for. Upon hearing of my appointment with the association’s head, he grudgingly invited me in with a gesture of his hand that was missing all fingers but the thumb. The odd placement of the signboards and the 102

receptionist’s hesitancy in opening the door to a stranger would begin to make sense later, as I learned more about the level of political fear and anxiety disabled veterans’ lives were steeped in. Inside I began exploring the objects that lined the crowded walls of the corridor: the massive association emblem cast in bronze; pictures of the association’s previous presidents (all high-ranking male military officers) and its current president (a martyr’s widow); a quote from Atatürk that read “Sacrificing everything for the fatherland and the nation, the war-disabled are living monuments. They deserve more than we could ever possibly give them.” As I stood reading a panel displaying an article from the 1982 constitution that read “The state protects the widows and orphans of martyrs, and the military disabled and gazis, and provides them with the standard of living they deserve,” I felt someone’s gaze on me. It was another man in his forties, with an empty sleeve dangling from his left shoulder, looking decidedly uncomfortable with my presence. He questioned me unsympathetically before allowing me to walk into the main reception room. Months later, we would share a big laugh about how suspicious I looked that day. The first thing that caught my attention in the main room was the hundreds of pictures of young men hanging on the wall. They were mostly passport photos, but one could also spot the occasional military-service souvenir photo. I could tell from the way they looked that most of these pictures belonged to working-class conscripts. This wall was referred to as the şehitler galerisi, the martyrs’ gallery, a silent tribute to nationalized death that gave the room a palpable aura of mourning as the deceased young men gazed back at visitors. I learned later that with the escalation of the armed conflict in the early 1990s, there had been no place left on the main wall for the increasing number of photographs of fallen soldiers, and the martyrs’ gallery had been extended to an adjacent wall. Occasionally, a martyr’s mother came to the association with a picture of her deceased son and submitted it with shaking hands so that he might be placed within this literally horizontal comradeship of martyrdom. Day by day, death expanded across the whiteness of the empty walls, which mimicked the empty plots at Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery a few miles away. Diminishing in size each day, they were a reminder of the impermanence of life and the suddenness of death, leaving one in constant anticipation of the next gallery addition to come. In accordance with the spatial representation of national cosmology, a portrait of Atatürk the Gazi was suspended above the photos, watching over Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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“Martyrs’ gallery.” Photo by author.

everyone as usual with his fixed gaze.1 Located directly in front of the picturecovered walls was the desk of Berna Abla. To the right of her desk stood another Atatürk poster, a Turkish banner on a heavy brass pole, and a green plastic ceremony wreath bearing the association’s name and logo. Apart from these official adornments, the room and the rest of the apartment were meagerly furnished. Two leather armchairs faced the desk, a table was surrounded by several chairs, and there were a few pots of succulents. Two cabinets displayed a collection of nationalist monument souvenirs, Atatürk illustrations, and commemorative plaques and plates bestowed on the association by various branches of the military, several municipalities, and the Istanbul governor. In my first days at the association, I was confined to the main room as a “guest” of Berna Abla. A martyred military officer’s widow, she was a solid middle-class woman in her mid-fifties who fully embodied the Kemalist “modern but modest”2 female body aesthetic. She was a fervent secularist and, like most radical secularists in the Turkey of the 2000s, she defined herself politically as left of center. With her middle-class cultural capital, Berna Abla was the public face of the association. She often represented both 104

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the Istanbul branch and the national association as a whole to the media. Tough but affectionate, she also frequently became personally involved in disabled veterans’ problems. Now and again, a disabled veteran who had been assigned to degrading manual tasks like cleaning toilets or heavy duties like lifting boxes came to the association to ask for her help. While she sometimes lost her temper on those occasions, Berna Abla was mostly agreeable, especially toward me. Sharing the Kemalist sympathy for education, she was supportive of my research and within a few months had adopted me as her son. After a few visits, I began to explore the rest of the association’s flat, built not as office space but as a “three plus two” middle-class family residence. Loyal to its original plan, the gendered organization of the association’s flat replicated the spatial logic of bourgeois domesticity, but in an inverted fashion. In a typical Turkish middle-class apartment, there are two living rooms or parlors.3 The largest room of the house is used as the salon, the parlor reserved for receiving and entertaining guests. With its often tacky and uncomfortable furniture and glassed dressers full of rarely used porcelain and crystal items, the salon space indexes distance, formality, publicness, and rituality. The second-largest room is the living room proper, the space of conjugal domesticity, television watching, and children. In the association’s flat, the larger salon area served as a gender-mixed space wherein prestigious visitors were hosted, including military officers, charity givers, political party representatives, and all nonregular and female visitors. Thanks to the influential presence of Berna Abla, the salon sometimes turned into an exclusively feminized space, such as when a guest needed to breastfeed her baby. The living room, on the other hand, was a masculine space that resembled a coffeehouse in terms of its décor and leisure practices. Furnished with a sofa, a few armchairs, a TV stand, and a bookcase, the living room was where male members socialized. Over the two years that I regularly attended the association, I witnessed female presence in this masculine domestic space on only one occasion when the TV had been reserved for a disabled veteran’s daughter. Even Berna Abla hardly ever entered this room where disabled veterans and the fathers of martyrs quietly read newspapers (usually Hürriyet and the low-priced populist tabloid Posta), enthusiastically played backgammon (but no card games, given that they conjured an aura of illicit gambling), and watched TV nonstop. The small-screen TV was usually on and the news was always followed, especially when nationalist feelings were high, such as during a cross-border operation or after a PKK attack. Horse races were also rarely missed; a few regulars loved to bet on the Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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races, although they never seemed to win. Rarely, if ever, did someone pick out a book from the bookcase on whose shelves donated regional martyrdom catalogs, military journals, and prayer books jostled each other. Because coffeehouses were legally required to provide a library (most often never used) for their clientele, the pedagogical gesture of keeping one in this room only reinforced the coffeehouse analogy in my mind. Next to the men’s living room was a small office space furnished with a few office chairs and a desk upon which the association’s only computer stood, an outdated personal computer donated by the military to replace the old junky one. The computer was reserved for the exclusive use of Rafet, a disabled veteran who dealt with all manner of bureaucratic issues both within the association (memberships, dues, records) and between the association’s members and state institutions. Although Rafet had lost an arm in a military drill, he aptly handled the clerical work of the organization with the help of a black iron weight from a kitchen scale, which, as I would accidentally discover, he used as a paperweight. On an especially hot and humid Istanbul summer day when sudden gusts of wind constantly slammed doors and prevented us from getting fresh air, I dared to use this heavy object as a doorstop. As Rafet gruffly put the weight back on the desk, I puzzled over his charged reaction, a question mark hanging in the air. With the two of us too flustered to say anything, Berna Abla finally put an end to it by explaining the iron weight’s importance to Rafet: “It’s his arm!” Now relaxed and back to his usual state of serenity, Rafet performed for me the little tricks he did with the weight, amazing me with his embodied skills developed through a decades-long symbiosis with the cast-iron weight. One day Rafet, who had by then become one of my closest interlocutors in the field, “confessed” to me that he was Armenian and that his real name was not Rafet but Raffi. He preferred using the similar-sounding Turkish name, obviously in order to pass as an unmarked Turk. For a long time I thought of this as a big secret, until I overheard some disabled veteran activists using Rafet/Raffi’s Armenian descent as a pretext to criticize the association for not being nationalist enough. Yet even those activists could not imagine the association without Rafet, for he served as a sort of free legal counselor and provided more information on disabled veterans’ rights and entitlements than any lawyer could ever offer. Every so often he would make a call to a state institution to follow up on a disabled veteran’s job application or to help a martyr’s heir cut through red tape. He was often able to sway the person on 106

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the other end of the phone by using a combination of legal discourse and sweet talk: “If you could help this friend solve his problem, we would appreciate your labor of love for our association.” Sometimes he tried to bribe or seduce his interlocutor in a playful tone, promising to send a box of sweets if the person on the phone was a man and flowers if she was a woman. If none of these strategies worked, he and Berna Abla would call on the military benefactors of the association for help. The small office room was exclusively Rafet’s turf, its walls covered with corny framed proverbs, funny stories clipped from the newspapers, and mournful but peaceable martyrdom poems that reflected his blasé humanism and cosmopolitanism. “A young Eskimo at the pole or a poor black man in Africa, it makes no difference; neither race, language, nor religion can make one man better than another,” read a paper tacked to Rafet’s corkboard. Three adages formed a triangle on the wall across from his desk: “If you are holding out for a flawless friend, you will remain friendless.” “As I get to know humans better, I grow to love animals more.” “Do not bridle a donkey, for he will mistake himself for a horse; do not compliment an undeserving person, for he will mistake himself for a human.” Slightly above them, a story was posted. A ten-year-old Japanese boy wanted to become a Judo master despite having lost his left arm in a car accident. His father sent him to the most famous Judo master, who taught the child only one move for over ten years and then asked him to compete in a national tournament. Thinking that he had no chance of winning with only one arm and a single move to perform, the boy agreed to compete only out of his respect for his sensei. He ended up winning the championship by performing his only move against stronger and more experienced opponents. On their way home, the boy summoned the courage to ask his sensei how he could have won the tournament. “For two reasons,” the sensei answered. “First, you have mastered one of the most difficult throws in Judo and there is no one on earth who can do it better than you. Second, the only known defense for that move is for your opponent to grab your left arm.”

Highlighting the ways in which weakness can become strength through new embodied potentials enabled by loss, the story was pitched precisely for the room. Like the young boy in the story, Rafet was missing his left arm yet skillfully handled the paperwork with the prosthetic help of the battered iron weight that he liked to call his arm. On the other side of the corridor next to the salon was a small kitchen lined with annoyingly brash yellow ceramic tiles. Every weekday, the district Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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Ramadan charity sacks. Photo by author.

municipality dispatched three metal food containers for lunch. Soup, rice, beans, chicken with potatoes, fish with vegetables, meatballs—nothing fancy, but meals with enough animal protein to be viewed as a precious resource worthy of careful supervision. Just above the small dining table for three, a printed-out paper taped on the wall read “Because only a limited amount of food is available, please do not sit at the [lunch] table without permission.” As a prestigious guest, I was always invited to lunch. I often declined the meal, but I never said no to tea, which was virtually limitless. The stainless steel, samovar-style double teapot on the stove steamed up the kitchen all day long. Muharrem, the man who had opened the door on my first visit, was responsible for the kitchen and everyday manual chores. On crowded days, he served tea with his mischievous jokes on the side. On other occasions, he was my smoking and backgammon buddy. The last room at the very end of the hall was used for storage, stockpiling unused office furniture. During the month of Ramadan, however, the room was filled with hundreds of boxes containing basic food staples such as rice, flour, sunflower oil, beans, lentils, pasta, sugar, wheat, tomato paste, jam, tea, and dates (a Ramadan delicacy). The boxes were evenly distributed to the 108

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membership, who crowded the association’s flat during Ramadan to pick up their share. These visits also provided the association with a unique opportunity to collect annual membership dues, approximately ten dollars at the time, from delinquent members who had to clear their dues to receive a box. Ramadan also gave me the chance to meet dozens of new people whose faces I would not see again until the following Ramadan. During the remaining eleven months the association rarely became that crowded. Members flocked to the apartment only on important occasions to exchange Eid greetings, discuss the association’s board elections, or gossip after a prime-time TV program featured association members. The only two exceptions were Gazis’ Day (September 19) and the Day of Martyrs (March 18), when members from across the various districts of Istanbul met at the association before leaving for the official commemoration and luncheon held by the military at an orduevi (officer’s club). As I became habituated to the daily rhythms, personae, and activities of the association, there came a point when only eventful days such as these marked the passing of time. It was in the midst of this quiet sameness that I began to delve into the histories of the nationalist communities of loss.

the official association and its rivals I have heard the several slightly differing versions of the official association’s origin tale from many people. The story is set either during the Çanakkale Savaşı (Gallipoli Campaign, 1915–16) or during the War of Independence (1919–23), two conflicts that share mythic status within Turkish nationalism and constitute the “epic past” 4 of the Turkish nation-state. “Our association was founded by Çanakkale gazis in 1915,” Berna Abla proudly explained, drawing an uninterrupted line of descent from the epic past to the present. The president general of the association in Ankara, Mert Bey, had a more elaborate version: “Our association was founded by the gazis of the War of Independence, who refused to accept pensions from the state. Carpenters throughout Anatolia made wooden prosthetic legs so that the gazis could stand bolt upright in front of the state. Look, even the Greeks took care of the veterans of their defeated army.” The direct line of descent between the epic past and the ethnographic present suggested in this tale rests on a cyclical nationalist temporality in which sacrifice is passed from one generation to the next as an inescapable heritage. Constructing the association’s members as the contemporary Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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successors to this heritage, the tale serves as the association’s foundational myth. Like all myths, it has several performative functions. It locates the official association within the national cosmology by attributing the group’s origins to a national epic past. It extends through time disabled veterans’ present-day vexed sovereignty relationship with the state, writing it back into history by creating an imaginary gazi figure so honorable that he would not accept assistance from the state. And it carves out a space from which the state can be both criticized for its indecorous and paternalistic care of disabled veterans and shamed through a comparison with the defeated national “enemy,” Greece. In a country such as Turkey, where social memories and archives have, over the course of the last century, been frequently and summarily erased through overt acts of violence—military coups and the radical social-engineering programs of alphabet change and mass renaming—such linear historical narratives are always already suspect. The Disabled War Veterans’ Aid Committee (Malûlîn-i Guzât-ı Askeriye Muâvenet Heyeti), the Ottoman organization from which my interlocutors claim descent, had in fact long ceased to exist when the official association was founded in the wake of the 1980 military coup.5 The coup and the military regime that followed it (1980–83) was a turning point in Turkey’s history, one that marred all aspects of sociocultural and political life with a particularly authoritarian stamp. The military regime’s violent fantasy of suppressing the political Left and creating a docile citizenry in line with a neoliberal transformation of the economy realized itself at the expense of a wanton destruction of archives of social memory, obliteration of public culture, and eradication of the very notion of publicness itself. Suspicious of any civil activity, the junta banned all political parties and a total of 23,667 associations from activity. Among these were the separately organized associations of gazis from the wars of Independence, Korea, and Cyprus. According to the oral histories I collected, all these organizations’ possessions—finances, archives, books, documents, letters, photographs, weapons, and banners—were confiscated in this period, never to be returned. None of these associations was ever allowed to reopen. In 1983, the military government passed Law no. 2847, which stipulated the foundation of four new military-related associations. Two of these were reserved for retired commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Another brought together gazis, both disabled and nondisabled, of the wars of Independence, Korea, and Cyprus. The fourth and last organization, “the offi110

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cial association,” was initially designed for martyrs’ heirs (widows and orphans) and the duty-disabled, meaning conscripts injured in noncombat accidents. The law defined these four associations as working for the public benefit and rendered them eligible for funding from the Ministry of Defense. This law, still in force, also prohibited any other organization from operating in these associations’ areas of service and from using military terms in its name. Law no. 2847 reflected the state’s dual attempt to closely monitor the political activism of ex–military personnel and to monopolize the Islamically rooted honorary military titles of Gazi and Martyr (Şehit). With the consolidation of the military-sponsored ideology of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis as the official state ideology in the period following the military coup, these titles became more symbolically valuable than ever. What lawmakers could not foresee when these four associations finally began operation in 1984 was that the PKK would initiate a guerrilla war and an internal armed conflict (still ongoing) that would destabilize the tidy taxonomy prescribed by the law and transform the very meaning of what it meant to be a gazi. When I began my fieldwork in 2005, all my interlocutors save one or two were members of the official association. Most were not active members; they paid their dues, received their Ramadan packets and other sorts of charity distributed by the association, read the association’s news bulletin, and visited or called almost exclusively on special occasions. Despite this relative disengagement, they felt that the association was an indispensable part of their disabled veteran identity in that it offered them a concrete sense of belonging within a political community. The association offered them both strategic connections—with the military, government bureaucracy, and charity providers—and information on their constantly changing legal entitlements and welfare benefits. Notwithstanding the wide appeal of the official association, the organizational landscape of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families did not mimic the national unity envisioned by the military junta’s organization architecture. Despite the legal ban, three other well-established associations sprung up in Istanbul in the early 1990s. Two enrolled martyrs’ families, while the one that I call the “popular association” also recruited gazis of the Kurdish conflict. The official association occasionally filed complaints against these associations, only to get the Ministry of Interior to issue yet another circular letter to governors reminding them of the special legal status of the official association and asking them not to allow the activities of “unofficial” associations. Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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The unofficial associations were able not only to skillfully navigate between gaps in the law; they also built up enough symbolic value, political power, and prestige to discourage anyone from taking real action against them. While enjoying this legal tolerance, they also received financial aid from municipalities and other official bodies. Their representatives paid regular visits to high-ranking government officials and military officers. I was told that while they were protesting in front of the offices of then prime minister Bülent Ecevit, they were invited in to breakfast with him. But because these organizations’ intimate relationship with the state existed under the shadow of the law, the state maintained strategic control over their actions. Initially forged in the early 1990s by small groups of martyrs’ mothers drawn in their grief to cemeteries, most important among them the Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery, the unofficial associations functioned as congealed organizational venues for local communities of loss. According to the oral histories I collected, these communities were woven together especially by women who came to know one another during visits to their sons’ graves each Friday, during Ramadan, and at death anniversaries. The affective and material networks that martyrs’ families built around the exchanges of prayer, food, and information constituted the basis of the political networks yet to come. Bound by the affects and practices of mourning, these communities were initially politicized by the mevlit (Islamic memorial service) visits of the MHP, famous for its murderous anticommunist legacy. With the inception of counterinsurgency against the PKK in 1993, these communities acquired a new significance. Following the passage of the 1991 anti-terror law (Act no. 3713), the first unofficial association of martyrs’ families was founded so as, in the words of its founding president, “to be effective in the psychological warfare against terror.”6 Others followed in the mid-1990s by organizing under the flexible political form of association.7 The state strategically endorsed these organizations of martyrs’ families against “rival” communities of loss, most importantly the Saturday Mothers, an influential counterpublic made up of the relatives of leftist and Kurdish activists subjected to enforced disappearances after kidnapping or detention by security personnel.8 Inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza Mayo in Argentina, Saturday Mothers held vigils every Saturday by holding aloft the photographs of their “disappeared” kin after 1995.9 In the wake of the Saturday Mothers’ successful bid to call public attention to their dissident cause, the martyrs’ mothers visiting their sons’ graves in Edirnekapı on 112

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Fridays began to be mimetically hailed in the state-controlled media as the Friday Mothers. By the late 1990s, these communities of loss had completed their transformation from nebulous networks into significant political actors in the ongoing struggle for hegemony over loss, death, and mourning. One of these unofficial associations, the “popular association,” formed the second organizational space of my fieldwork. Its founders were a group of martyrs’ mothers, all lower-class housewives from the same neighborhood, who initially met in a dolmuş (a local form of shared taxi) while commuting to the Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery. One of these women, Hatice Ana, had the necessary charisma and aspiration to both unite these women and expand her own political career alongside this community’s influence. A banquet at an officers’ club organized by the military for martyrs’ families and disabled veterans sometime in the mid-1990s provided a unique opportunity in this respect. There, the members of the popular association were introduced to a group of similar-minded disabled veterans who had formed their own social circle after meeting at a State Medal of Pride ceremony. This informal disabled veterans’ group later joined the popular association. When I asked Hatice Ana why her association had started enrolling disabled veterans, her answer reflected the way in which the camaraderie of martyrs’ families and disabled veterans, initially brought together in the official association for governmental purposes, was justified through a religio-nationalist martyrology. “Can gazis and martyrs exist without each other? Gazis are the living witnesses of martyrs [Gaziler şehitlerin yaşayan şahitleridir].”10 I met Hatice Ana at a disabled veteran’s brother’s wedding. Wearing a loose headscarf (başörtüsü) around her head and shoulders,11 she was a sturdy woman in her early fifties, the spitting archetypal image of the imagined traditional Turkish housewife. Her softhearted face was very different from the one I saw contracted with anger in media photos taken of her at protests. I would later conclude that she had two essentially incompatible social faces—one affectionate and humble, the other revengeful and menacing— between which she performatively shifted in conversation and politics. “What would I know,” she would say and bow her neck in an embodied gesture of deference at the start a conversation. “I am just a simple and ignorant housewife.” But then she would continue. Prime ministers, presidents, they all come and go. Now we call them expresidents, ex-prime ministers. Ex-president this and ex-minister that. . . . But you wouldn’t say, “My son is an ex-martyr.” He is a martyr: he was a martyr yesterday, he is still a martyr today, and he will remain a martyr in the future. Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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You can’t say, “In the past, I was a martyr’s mother.” Who am I? I’m a martyr’s mother. No one can take away this title from me, even when I die. You wouldn’t say, “Atatürk was once a gazi.” So if you are a politician in this country for which I sacrificed my son, you must grant me an appointment, you must listen to me. Otherwise, I will raid your office. The cops at your door won’t even touch me, because they have also witnessed the martyrdom of their comrades-in-arms.

Hatice Ana’s emphasis on the timelessness of sacrificial martyrdom formed the basis of her biography and politics. For her, the transcendental temporal order of sacrificial politics was radically different from the secular temporal order of everyday politics. But at the level of biographical life, too, time froze for her at the moment of sacrificial loss. She kept her martyred son Ersin’s room untouched, “even his hair stuck on the soap,” as an intimate museum of sacrifice. When I first visited “Hatice Ana’s association,” as my interlocutors often called the popular association, I had been attending the official association on a regular basis for nine months. Thus, I always viewed the popular association in relation to the official one, starting with its origin myth. The popular association’s myth, remarkably enchanted in contrast to the secular myths of the official association, opens with Hatice Ana seeing a demonstration where the protesters unfurled PKK flags. I felt so offended. I took a [Turkish] flag in my hand. But, not the flag that draped my son Ersin’s coffin; it is still in his room. Another big one. I took the flag with me to the martyrs’ cemetery that day. I went in holding this folded flag in my hand. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s also unfurl this flag.” At first, people just stared at me. But something happened, like they were waking up. I will never forget that moment. I became a dragon emerging from its egg. What a moment! I must have been burning inside [suffering] so much that I could not come to terms with the PKK protest. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s unfurl this flag. Let’s march, too! Why can’t we?” We were all distraught, but some mothers were saying, “Let’s not disturb our martyrs. We shouldn’t scream while they’re under the earth. They should lie undisturbed.” Then I told them, “They will be disturbed as long as we keep silent. Let’s march!” They were hesitant. And rightly so. Such things are delicate matters, and they understood this very well with their mother’s hearts. Even though they are illiterate, they have a Turkish woman’s heart within which tremendous amounts of affection and culture reside. So much that none but the Turkish nation can appreciate it! I said, “If we march, our children will be happy.” Something came to me at that moment. These children are always . . . 114

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But I did not tell you about . . . I forgot to tell the most important thing. I had a dream before the march. I had told you how sick I was for a long time after Ersin’s death. My children took me to the martyrs’ cemetery a year later. I was so happy. Nowadays we go by car, but back then it seemed so far away. I was always thinking, “How can I go there whenever I want?” One day, I had a dream. [In the dream] the day is dawning, and it is twilight. I am at the martyrs’ cemetery. You see, I was so obsessed with how I would manage to get there, whether I would be able to travel alone. Normally, there are three stone covers on our children’s graves. In my dream, these stones have all been laid aside and all the graves are open, but there is no one inside them. I am at the martyrs’ cemetery with my other son Mahmut, also a soldier. I am carrying this huge cauldron, one like the ones in museums. I light a fire at the martyrs’ cemetery and cook soup with a ladle in my hand. Mahmut is collecting wood for the fire so that I can cook. “I cook this for martyrs,” I say. While he is gathering wood, I tell Mahmut, “The martyrs will arrive soon. If I don’t notice, let me know when your elder brother arrives so that I can kiss him before he goes to rest.” I swear that’s what I saw in my dream. I turn my head and see Ersin coming. I see his head, but I can’t tell whether he is wrapped in a white shroud or a military uniform. They [the martyrs] come and lie down straightaway. Click, click, click. The stones close up the graves one after another. I catch Ersin before his grave is covered over. “Ersin, my son,” I tell him, “I missed you so much. Let me kiss you for a while.” “We are so tired, Mom,” he says. “We were on a military operation till dawn.” That’s how I saw him, I swear. “I am so tired,” he says. “Embrace me quickly so that I can go to sleep.” When I bend down to embrace him and stroke his face, I see his grave is divided into two parts separated by a soil barrier. There is a corpse in the other part. “Who is this boy that you put here?” I ask Ersin. I cannot reach the boy, cannot kiss him. So I touch his face and caress his eyes. “Who is this boy?” I ask again. “Don’t touch him,” Ersin exclaims. “He is not a martyr!” Then, he explains. “Don’t you know who he is? He is my aunt’s son, Bekir. I brought him here so that he can sleep serenely.” Ersin’s paternal aunt’s son Bekir was going to become a soldier, but he died of cancer. I am shocked in the dream. I mean, all youngsters die sinless and, insha’allah, they will all become martyrs. I startle and wake up in twilight. “Oh God,” I tell myself, “I was cooking them soup. I was cooking soup for all the martyrs. I gave this promise to Ersin and I have to keep it.” That’s how I came up with the idea, when he said, “Mom! Cook soup for all the martyrs!” That’s how I put my mind to founding a martyrs’ mothers’ association. It is a blessing from God that I was able to come up with this idea in my sorrow, disturbance, and forgetfulness.

Hatice Ana was a great orator who skillfully adorned her speech with popular Islamic themes and moral stories. Her narration of the association’s Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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foundation myth reflects her command over popular Islam. At the center of the narrative, around which all other events revolve, is her posthumous dream of her martyred son and the landscape of Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery, a privileged spot of religio-nationalist imagination. Such dreams and their interpretation play a vital role in Islamic martyrologies.12 This particular dream incorporates strains of Sufi traditions and Islamic beliefs about martyrs. In the dream, Hatice Ana sees herself cooking soup for the martyrs while her surviving son carries firewood. Cooking is a pivotal practice and the cauldron a key symbol in the Sufi tradition, in that the kitchen is where the training of newcomers begins. The legendary Turkish poet and Sufi mystic Yunus Emre is said to have carried firewood for forty years for his dervish convent before he “ripened.” Hatice Ana’s dream narration thus clearly contains allusions to expiation, spiritual purification, enlightenment, and maturation. In the dream, all the martyrs are returning from a military operation, reflecting the popular belief that martyrs continue to fight alongside the living. There are also explicit references to martyrs’ posthumous quests and rewards bestowed upon them by God, also corresponding to popular Islamic martyrology. The dream’s audience is further assured of Hatice Ana’s son’s attainment of martyrdom through the presence of a deceased young relative sharing his grave, reflecting the belief that, in order to protect them from the torments of the grave, martyrs have the right to intercede on their relatives’ behalf and obtain forgiveness for them.13 Hatice Ana sees her dream as prognosticative, an interpretation that renders her decision to found an association culturally intelligible and her political career divinely ordained. Her resort to such religious justification resonates with the general Turkish-Islamist ideological tone of the popular association and stands in contrast to the secularist-nationalist framework of the official association. This ideological disjuncture is just one manifestation of a larger rift between the two organizations.

the popular association The popular association, too, is located on a busy street, but in the relatively peripheral area of Istanbul. On my first visit to its office, which coincided with the Friday prayer, I realized that all the shops in the area had signs on their doors that read “I’ll be back after the prayer,” indicating that this neighborhood was more religious than that of the official association, where one 116

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could not even hear the Friday call to prayer. Unlike the official association, the popular association had a colossal signboard outside. But I still could not locate its entrance. Then I discovered the ground-floor stairs to the association’s rooms inside a government office. I would later learn that the building belonged to the district municipality, which allowed the association to use the apartment on its second floor. The first thing that caught my attention while knocking on the door was the crowd of female shoes tidily lined up on a blue carpet outside the door. Except within a small circle of Westernized elites, one is expected in Turkey to take off one’s shoes when entering a residence. However, this expectation does not apply to public spaces. The shoes lined up outside the door therefore made the official association’s office feel more like domesticized space than bureaucratic space. When a headscarfed elderly woman opened the door, my surprise was doubled. The door opened to a salon, which made me wonder whether the association was in Hatice Ana’s own house. Sporting a dining set and sofa, the arrangement of the salon had nothing to do with an office. With lace spreads carefully placed on every piece of furniture, the décor further hinted at the feminized and private nature of this place. As a proper salon used almost exclusively for Ramadan banquets, this room often remained empty, especially in the winter when the lack of central heating made it hard to heat every room. Only one room of the apartment was used as an office, and this belonged to Hatice Ana. The office housed a massive desk, two armchairs facing it, several other chairs lining the wall, and a wall-to-wall china cabinet. The entire room was crowded with nationalist objects and images. There were red penholders with the Turkish star and crescent on the desk. The china cabinet was filled with plates and plaques issued on Mothers’ Day and dedicated to Hatice Ana or to the association by schools, political parties, businessmen, and local newspapers. The cabinet also displayed two tacky plastic soldier statues with plates addressed to Mehmetçik, “Little Mehmet,” an affectionate name for the archetypical Turkish soldier. The first one read “Mehmetçik is the bravest and most admirable soldier in the world.” The second, “Martyrs’ mothers wish Mehmetçik every success.” On the walls were Turkish flags and countless framed pictures—of Atatürk; Atatürk’s Address to the Youth; Atatürk’s mother, Zübeyde Hanım; the Turkish folk heroine Nene Hatun; and others. The central, eye-catching piece was a large photograph of Hatice Ana, her hair uncovered, signing the Anıtkabir honor book of Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara. The photo would Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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convey a clear ideological message in Turkey, where a woman’s unveiling in the presence of the state is a gesture of loyalty to the secular regime. As such, it served to locate the association squarely on the secularist side of the secularist/Islamist political debate. Hatice Ana and other martyrs’ mothers spent most of their time in this room of the association’s apartment. When Hatice Ana talked on the phone or welcomed guests, other martyrs’ mothers sat silently on the armchairs by the wall and crocheted or chatted among themselves in low voices. Male members of the association—martyrs’ fathers or disabled veterans—were very rarely present in the apartment; the interior space was female gendered. The association’s gender-segregated spatial organization and the fact that whenever I wanted to visit I had to call Hatice Ana on her cell phone to make sure that the office was open discouraged me from idly hanging out there as I was used to doing at the official association, which provided opportunities for both segregated and mixed-gender socialization. I later learned that the association had another small room on the upstairs floor where it had originally been located, until becoming powerful enough to claim the larger apartment below from the municipality. This room was now referred to as the Museum of Martyrs. When I told Hatice Ana that I wanted to see the museum, she immediately picked up her keys and took on the role of museum guide. She began with a tour of the huge collection of photographs and newspaper clippings from the Kurdish conflict that adorned the walls of the office’s main salon, which together formed a rather unconventional nationalist archive. Among the photos were quite a few showing Hatice Ana and other martyrs’ mothers posing with politicians, military officers, and famous Turkish actors. One of these featured martyrs’ mothers posing with Cüneyt Arkın,14 the film actor who had played the role of Battal Gazi in Turkish cinema. In another, Hatice Ana appeared with a group of children dressed like soldiers. Above this, I discerned pictures of nationalist pilgrimage sites such as Mount Karadağ, where an occult Atatürk-like silhouette is said to have appeared during sunset (now attracting droves of nationalist secular tourists). The wall also displayed gory pictures of civilian corpses massacred, it was alleged, by the PKK, to which small prints of a particularly ugly image of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan had been attached at each corner. As we climbed the stairs to the museum, Hatice Ana proudly told me how they initially came up with the idea of an archive wall so as not to lose facts and images, and how they were now planning to digitize their collection. 118

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The so-called museum was a half-empty room whose walls were covered almost completely with martyrs’ pictures of various sizes. Just by the entrance stood a shrine-like Atatürk corner consisting of several pictures and phrases from Atatürk the Gazi. The shrine was surrounded by a replica of a Gallipoli martyr’s letter from World War I and portraits of Ottoman pashas of the era. Opposite the door, mnemonic objects of lighters and rosaries that once belonged to slain soldiers were displayed on tables along the walls. Dispersed throughout the martyrs’ wall were pictures of disabled veterans, most of whom I knew personally, which gave me a keen sense of the uncanny. Habitually lionized as “living martyrs” and pitied as “half-dead” in the national media and in popular ideology, I had never seen their life’s relation to death expressed so conspicuously. To break the deep silence in the room as I took in the material around us, I began to ask questions about the museum. It was then that Hatice Ana told me about the association’s early days when they had been limited to the space in this room. In those days, we had been infiltrated by PKK supporters. They would come and say things like, “Oh dear! What a pity [that you’ve lost your son]!” Then one of their members’ brothers was revealed as a PKK bomber. Of course, we cleaned all of them out. Then they started ridiculing us. “You don’t even have a proper office,” they said. That’s when we bought all the furniture downstairs. We had reactionaries [political Islamists] among us, too. They protested us putting Atatürk’s picture above all the martyrs’ pictures on the wall, exclaiming, “Who the hell is this guy positioned above my martyred son?” Of course, we weeded all of them out as well.

In Hatice Ana’s account, the association’s move from the small room upstairs to the larger apartment downstairs was narrated in terms of its ideological purification. A symbol of its increasing influence and access to resources, the organization’s spatial expansion was a direct result of its ideological narrowing and its expulsion of former members with Kurdish/leftist or Islamist political convictions. In this ideological and political policing activity lies a crucial feature of both the official and popular disabled veterans’ associations. While they both function as hubs of ultranationalist activism, they also operate as extragovernmental instruments for regulating the words and deeds of their members, ensuring that disabled veterans and martyrs’ families are never inclined toward dissident political causes. Ironically, the official association was more democratic than the popular one with respect to its members’ political views and their freedom of Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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expression within the association. It was, however, notorious for containing its members’ public performances, especially in the presence of state officials. Every once in a while, a disabled veteran would burst out in anger against a state official, typically because he had not been able to find a job or because he had been made to wait standing at an official ceremony while VIPs were sitting. Even such individualistic and spontaneous protests stirred up great discomfort, resulting in a flurry of back-and-forth calls between the association and official bodies and often leading to an association apology for the “unstable behavior” of the veteran. Most disabled veterans loathed these attempts at governance and policing on the part of the associations, which further alienated them from the organizations and concomitantly strengthened the homosocial bonds within self-regulating, informal groups of disabled veterans.

the camaraderie of cliques “Fuck all the associations! They ain’t good for shit,” Yaman, a disabled veteran in his late thirties, exclaimed when I asked him about the political stances of the various disabled veterans’ organizations. A key interlocutor of mine, Yaman was the charismatic leader of a small clique of disabled veterans from adjacent neighborhoods. He was a very shrewd and charming person who had a way with words. He defined himself as an “action guy,” whereas those critical of his group’s direct-action style of political engagement called him a “spectacle lover” (gösteri aşığı) in a politically infantilizing gesture. I preferred to call him “mischievous.” Despite identifying as a “Turk, Turkist, Atatürkist”—in short, an ultranationalist—Yaman stored songs by the late singer Ahmet Kaya, a performer of mixed Turkish-Kurdish extraction known for his socialist/Kurdish stance, in his cell phone and played them with the express aim of provoking his friends. He often succeeded. One day, he told me that he was going to sell his car so that we could spend the money to go on a road trip through the United States and shoot a documentary showing the discrepancy in quality of life between American and Turkish disabled veterans. I never dared to ask him if he really meant to do it. Yaman’s Group, as outsiders often called it, consisted of not more than seven or eight men, some of whom were very close friends and met every other day. But the clique’s sphere of influence reached well beyond their 120

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immediate circle. The group’s population more than doubled when associate disabled veterans from other parts of Istanbul joined it for a protest, Ramadan dinner, or a picnic. As an activist circle, Yaman’s group was well known and respected among disabled veterans in other cities, too. Indeed, in the course of my fieldwork I met two other cliques of disabled veterans in Ankara who deliberately modeled themselves on Yaman’s group. In that sense, his clique can be regarded as the prototype for informal collectivities of disabled veterans in contemporary Turkey, where disabled veterans sharing the same neighborhood or workplace are drawn together into novel forms of community and biosociality. After initially meeting at a State Medal of Pride ceremony organized by the military, the members of Yaman’s group gradually developed a strong sense of camaraderie that therapeutically filled the gap left behind by the violent loss, through their disability, of their premilitary social environment. Although they sometimes also gathered en famille, the group often hung out together as a male exclusivity after work or on holidays in tea gardens or coffeehouses. Sometimes they played games such as Okey15 at these meetings. The loser paid the bill. It was often just a few glasses of tea, but sometimes they challenged one another for a box of Turkish delight or baklava to spice things up. On all other occasions, it was Yaman who paid the bill. Yaman played the role of the redistributive big man. He paid the bill and the others reimbursed him, generally as soon as they left the place. As a proper big man, Yaman was also the person who worked hardest to create and maintain the group’s cohesion and solidarity. If a disabled veteran’s child became sick in the middle of the night, Yaman was the first person to be called. If one of them was trying to put money together to buy an apartment or a new car, he worked hard to make sure that others loaned the one in need their under-the-mattress savings. If a clique member encountered marital problems, Yaman was also the one to mobilize other disabled veterans’ spouses to get involved to help save the marriage. While all members of this clique were enrolled in both the official and popular associations, they shared a cynical distance from them. This distance mirrored their skeptical stance toward parliamentary politics. Operating like a lobby group that depended on its influence within the military and bureaucracy, the official association was too apathetic for their political taste. They also felt overpowered by its large duty-disabled member population, a group of veterans who had been injured in non-combat-related accidents. Once in a while, they half-seriously conspired to “capture” the official association and put it in the service of an uncompromising political activism. Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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The popular association, on the other hand, seemed to them to be driven by private interests. Although they were attracted to the way it effectively used street politics as a means to negotiate rights, they were highly critical of its dependence on charity money and its electoral alliances with ultranationalist political parties. In other words, if the official association was involved too little in politics in their view, the popular association was too invested in it. As a consequence, while they played a vital role in the popular association, they took its political aspirations with a hefty pinch of salt. “We are not the stepping-stone for anyone’s political career,” they loved to recite when the conversation turned to their involvement in association politics. The clique’s direct-action style of activism became evident to me in October 2006 on the day we traveled together by train from Istanbul to Ankara for a political gathering under the banner of “Damn terror! End land mines!” After a long and sleepless night’s travel, jubilance was in the air over our economical breakfast at a small patisserie by the square where the gathering would take place that afternoon. Clique members cheerfully chatted with a group of undercover cops, who gave them a friendly warning not to get too “wild” during demonstrations in front of official buildings such as the prime ministry or the US embassy. The group’s elation quickly faded when the extremely low turnout for the demonstration became apparent. Suddenly, a rumor that a group of disabled veterans was being “locked down” at a rehabilitation center and barred from attendance under threat of early discharge rallied the exhausted group. In less than ten minutes, the clique was leading an angry party of disabled veterans from all over Turkey who had piled into a convoy of a dozen cars, driving at full throttle and not stopping even for stop signs or red lights. The situation further escalated when we were stopped at the rehabilitation center’s main gate by armed guards who were reluctant to let the whole angry group in. After slightly more than half an hour of altercation, during which the disabled veterans quarreled with a duty officer and demanded the resignation of the head of the rehabilitation center, the protesters were pacified and dispersed. Afterward, while on our way to a gazi facility for a late lunch, Yaman looked quite satisfied and said smilingly, “I blew off quite a bit of steam there” (Orada epey stress attım). This type of spontaneous direct action with no strings attached was not politically productive in the long run, and the clique members were well aware of the fact that they were politically dependent on the associations for their rights advocacy. The popular association under the lead of Hatice Ana 122

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successfully manipulated this dependency. On one occasion, some of the clique members declined Hatice Ana’s personal call for their participation in a political demonstration, initiated by the popular association, against the government. Their argument that the popular association played both ends against the middle by organizing a protest against the AKP while continuing to receive donations from the AKP-controlled municipality opened rifts both within the clique and between the clique and the popular association. Shortly after this incident, Hatice Ana and the clique members met at the wedding of a disabled veteran’s brother. I was sitting with five other disabled veterans from the clique in the wedding hall when Hatice Ana approached our table. Two disabled veterans from our table stood up and greeted her by kissing her hand, a gesture of respect toward authority, while others remained at the table in a mode of defiance. After scolding the mavericks for skipping the protest, Hatice Ana informed them that the government was planning to revoke disabled veterans’ free health service cards. Every disabled veteran sitting at the table was stirred to indignation by this news. Laughing at their excitement, Hatice Ana then triumphantly informed them that the revocation had been rejected only thanks to the association protest several of them had “irresponsibly missed,” and she urged them not to miss the next one. Once again, the association, as a mode of political assemblage, had sustained its hegemony over informal collectivities.

the fellowship of shared affect While the political structure of disabled veterans’ communities of loss is stratified into official and popular formal associations and informal biosocial cliques, becoming a community requires an affective infrastructure through which a sense of belonging, intimacy, and care is felt and sustained over time so that it can be translated into sociality and activism. Demarcated in terms of their various socioeconomic and political functions, such associations and cliques act as de facto intermediaries between the state and their clients. As gatekeepers of legal advice and support, they function as uniquely crucial resources for those members lacking the necessary cultural and social capital with which to navigate the most notorious bureaucratic institutions in Turkey. Through their political influence, the associations can break through bureaucratic inertia and put any number of formerly static things in motion—complaint petitions, job applications, deposits of benefits—within Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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the halls of state power. In her analysis of the spatiotemporal techniques through which Turkish state power is enacted, Anna Secor has argued that “this power operates through referral and deferral, circulation and arrest; it is the power both to set in motion and to suspend the circulation of people, documents, money, and influence that marks out the space-time of the state.”16 Formal disabled veterans’ associations thus work to grease the wheels, such that things keep moving through the state’s continuum of referral and deferral, circulation and arrest. Associations control other flows too. They redistribute nationalist charity in the form of money, Ramadan packets, and rare, one-of-a-kind windfalls— for example, a scholarship provided by a “rich businessman for the son of a needy disabled veteran.” Cliques, on the other hand, provide a strong sense of camaraderie and networks of homosocial support. And both formal associations and informal groups serve as influential hubs of welfare and ultranationalist activism around which disabled veterans and martyrs’ families can forge a collective identity through common political struggle. Insiders from these communities rarely defined their fellowship in relation to these functions. Instead, they talked in terms of the body in suffering and healing, both metaphorically and literally. “We come here [to the association] to be cured,” a martyr’s mother told me once. “This is our treatment facility. Here, we can commiserate, share and understand each other’s pain.” Elaine Scarry reminds us of the inexpressibility of pain and the ways in which pain destroys the sufferer’s language, reducing them to inarticulateness.17 Scarry is one of several scholars who rightly emphasize, at times overemphasizing, the challenges pain and trauma pose for representation, language, and cultural expression.18 My interlocutors were also aware of these challenges. Derdini içine atmak (suffering in silence) was a popular idiom that both martyrs’ families and disabled veterans used to describe their painful experiences after loss. “I could not tell my suffering to anyone until I started coming here. I suffered in silence, always in silence. This made me sick. So sick that I could not even raise my head to visit my son’s grave. On the one side, I was dealing with diabetes, on the other with low and high blood pressure that shifted daily.” Not being able to share the pain of traumatic loss distresses the body, slowly gnawing away at it. Among martyrs’ families, the pain of grief is often described as a burning sensation. Grief ’s pain scorches the chest (bağrımız yanıyor) and burns the liver (ciğerimiz yanıyor). Cardiac diseases, diabetes, hypertension, and hypotension are rampant. “The mental and the physical, the psychic and the social, and the internal and external locations or sources 124

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of the pain”19 get blurred in the accounts of veterans and martyrs’ families. “Its symptoms often emerge in the first few years,” a martyr’s father said about bereavement, “unless you find someone who can commiserate.” Like the families of slain soldiers, disabled veterans, especially those with amputated limbs, are haunted by the pain of embodied grief—the grief of losing a body part or function as well as the enigma of survival and the stigma of disability. The persistent neuropsychic presence of their absent limbs leads to phantom limb sensations that cause not only pain but also confusion and fear of madness. Their phantom pain is accompanied by physical pain, improvising on the full range of unpleasant sensations: pins and needles, piercing, wringing, throbbing, numbness, and more. Festering bedsores cover their bodies during treatment. Their amputated bones continue to grow, forming pain-inducing bone spurs. But wounds also hurt in another way, by causing abjection, disgust, and shame.20 Veterans with amputations complained about the fetid discharge from residual limbs that often made them feel sick at their own bodies. A veteran who suffered an abdominal wound told me how it leaked feces, making him smell “like shit,” and how people moved away from him in public spaces, especially on crowded buses. Another with a disfigured face and a dismembered ear recalled how gaggles of children from his neighborhood tagged along after him with their usual innocent cruelty and sang out insults like “earless.” All these moments cause pain that is difficult to communicate. “Everybody talks about their days in the military. Despite having the most to tell, you’re the only one who can’t say a word. How can you? To understand, people must have experienced the same thing.” “Ateş düştügü yeri yakar,” they say in the association to express an appreciation of the uniqueness and incommunicability of pain and grief (The ember burns where it falls). But they also say “Çekenler anlar” (Only a fellow sufferer can know the pain of another). Through the discourse and reality of shared loss, the negativity of pain and suffering becomes a therapeutic force that draws the members of these communities into an intersubjective field of nonmedicalized healing. The wife of one below-the-knee amputee veteran described to me how this therapeutic force affectively binds them to the community. Don’t be fooled by his current even-temperedness! You had to have seen Ali before he met Yaman and the others. He would get drunk and go to pieces. His friends used to tease him saying, “Did you mistake the land mine for a football and shoot at the goal?” He would break down and cry till morning. He couldn’t walk on dirt roads, only on asphalt. He had all these fears. Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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Meeting others and spending time with people who understand his situation, who know what he went through, has had a therapeutic effect on him. May God be pleased with these guys!21

Crucial in the processes of remaking the lifeworlds of martyrs’ families and disabled veterans, this therapeutic field entails embodied, social forms of mood22 that generate and are generated by particular corporeal and sociocultural responses to trauma and loss. Such a remaking takes place against the backdrop of two major social processes: the nationalist politics of mourning and the stigma of disability. The politics of mourning for martyrs is one of the most contested affective fields of Turkey’s Kurdish conflict.23 In martyrs’ funerals, crowds chant in Turkish, “Şehitler ölmez” (Martyrs never die). In the Region, the same sentence is chanted in Kurdish for slain guerrillas: “Şehit namırın!” Martyrs do not, in fact, die. Not only because the dead take on a new political life once they are recycled into national martyrologies, but also because on both sides of the conflict numerous obstacles stand in the way of the work of mourning that allows for the passing of the dead. Public mourning of PKK guerrillas has always been repressed through the state of exception’s posthumous techniques of state sovereignty: disappearances, mass graves, persecution of mourners, banning of funeral ceremonies, destruction of graves, and secret interment of guerrilla corpses. Attending the funeral ceremonies of slain Kurdish fighters and offering condolences to their kin is construed by the state as terrorist activity and has led to the imprisonment of several leftist/Kurdish members of parliament. In contrast with the production of guerrillas as ungrievable subjects,24 public mourning of soldiers is simultaneously stimulated and regulated by the state for the purposes of psychological warfare. Nationalist intimacies are forged through the images of slain soldiers’ next of kin crying, lamenting, and fainting at martyrs’ funerals, scenes often featured as opening news items on prime-time television. The media’s ideal image of a martyr’s family is that of a family member, ideally a child, standing next to a flag-draped coffin with a somber expression, determined not to cry. Martyrs’ families are continually invited to mourn solemnly next to politicians and military officers. “Don’t cry,” they are told. “Your tears brighten the terrorists’ days.” The pain they express in mourning is seen as a vital but volatile affective potentiality that can overshadow the nationalist logic of sacrifice. For this reason, martyrs’ families are expected to give the final nationalist gesture of closure through the discourse of sacrifice: “Vatan sağ olsun!” (Long live the homeland!). 126

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Antigovernment protests at a martyr’s funeral in Manisa. Credit: Depo Photos.

Under the control of the AKP during the 2000s, two media clichés circulated as a way to contain the potentially unruly affective energy of martyrs’ funerals: “We shall not cry for our martyrs” and “We should not chant slogans that disturb our martyrs.” These refrains indexed the fact that martyrs’ funerals harbored the potential for escalation and harnessing by the highly influential and, at times, violent nationalist protests against the government that became a feature of Turkish political life at this time, especially during peace negotiations with the PKK. Following a series of violent confrontations between AKP representatives and martyrs’ families during which several ministers and members of parliament were assaulted by funeral attendees, norms around the public mourning of fallen soldiers were reengineered with a recourse to invented Islamic funeral customs.25 In the process, a national prohibition on mourning was fortified through Islamic martyrologies. On a Sunday afternoon in 2006, I came across a religious daytime show hosting martyrs’ families on the political Islamist television channel, Kanal 7. An Islamic “expert” was answering audience questions read by a hostess in a cocktail dress. “Are martyrs aware that they are dead?” asked someone. In response, the expert quoted a verse from the Qur’an, saying that all living creatures would taste death. “But,” he continued, “martyrs are rewarded as Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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soon as their blood touches the soil. Angels embrace them. They do not experience the torment of the grave. Death comes sweet to them. They are given so many rewards that they wish to die and be resurrected over and over again. This is why it is not appropriate to grieve for them.” Against this backdrop of such religio-nationalist anxiety concerning the perilous potential of grief and mourning, communities of loss provide martyrs’ families with elegiac spaces where they can find comfort in their bereavement, grieve, and mourn together with people who have suffered through similar experiences. Some parents I met at the association had lost their sons nearly two decades ago, yet all these years later they continued to visit the association to mourn collectively. Theirs was a “mourning without end,”26 a mourning in which their loss refused to find closure. In his early works, Sigmund Freud had a term for this kind of mourning that does not enable the mourner to move on by resolving grief: melancholia.27 Initially considering the melancholic’s sustained libidinal investment in the lost object as pathological and antithetical to the ego’s well-being, Freud later rescinded the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholia,28 recognizing melancholia as an integral component of mourning and registering the permanent nature of normal grieving. Within communities of loss, the labors and affects of grieving bodies are not only interminable; they are also shared. In Turkey, where various modalities of melancholy play an indispensable part in belonging, sociality, and aesthetic experience, melancholy is not automatically or necessarily viewed as a pathological or even an individual affective state.29 Among martyrs’ families, a caring melancholic mourning is a community-making affect that binds people together in fellowship.30 In the associations, the elegiac mood at times becomes palpable through the use of objects, sounds, and affective practices. Especially when Istanbul skies are dark and overcast, the atmosphere within the associations becomes gloomy. Wet eyes linger on the walls of the martyrs’ galleries; hands stay clenched on laps; silences and instances of absentmindedness last longer; one can hear deep sighs and whispers of “Ya sabır” (God give me patience). As grief becomes atmospheric, mourning becomes an intersubjective mood that even an outsider like me quickly attunes to.31 Disabled veterans are also melancholic subjects with their own mournful attachments. The sensations they continue to feel in limbs that are no longer there, the ghosts of long-dead military buddies that appear to them in broad daylight, the way they reminisce about their days on the mountains by 128

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watching army shows, smoking the cigarettes they smoked in the service, and showing me their military service photos—all are different incarnations of their melancholic devotion to things long lost. Yet among my disabled veteran interlocutors, the primary collective mood and mode for dealing with traumatic loss was not mourning, but laughter, produced most often through gallows jokes about loss, dismemberment, and disability. Understanding why and how laughter becomes a unifying affective force among disabled veterans requires attention to the ways in which the double bind that characterizes disabled veterans’ social existence—the stigma of disability and Turkish nationalist political aesthetics—prescribes specific kinds of embodied and discursive practices around disabled veteran bodies. In the last chapter, I discussed how the figure of the disabled street beggar weighed on disabled veterans’ sense of embodiment and unpacked its imbrication in the visual politics of disability. Until the prosthetic protests and repossession cases at the turn of the millennium,32 the sacralized wounds of disabled veterans were not exposed in public, but were instead shielded from the national gaze via political taboo.33 Representations of veterans’ incapacitated bodies still cannot take comic, gory, grotesque, carnal, or corporeal forms. This taboo characterized my first months in the field, when my amputee respondents were extremely careful not to expose their residual limbs in my presence. Later, some “confessed” how badly they had wanted to doff their prostheses during our interviews, which often took place during my interlocutors’ precious after-work hours when they could minister at day’s end to their residual limbs by removing their prosthetic limbs but felt too awkward to ask me how I might feel about it. This hiddenness of flesh continued for me until a full-day picnic organized by Yaman’s clique. That day, Yaman and I met a dozen other disabled veterans and their families on a grass field just outside the Istanbul city limits. The men and the women and children sat in two close but strictly segregated clusters as we had breakfast and relaxed on rugs covering the grass. Then one of the veterans tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Now you are truly one of us,” as he took off his prosthesis. “Let the stump get some fresh air” (Güdüğe hava aldıralım). A year after meeting my first research participant, also present at the picnic, I was finally part of the fleshly intimacy of the group. Everyone in our exclusively male circle laughed a lot that day, mostly at gallows jokes about disability peppered with pejorative terms such as topal (lame) and çolak (one-armed), terms disabled veterans would take as serious offenses if uttered by others in a public setting. Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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Fieldnotes. 10:33 a.m. at the picnic: My very first interlocutor, Ramazan, approaches us, limping because of his worn-out artificial leg. I remember that he was considering using his prosthesis fund as a down payment on his new house. Other vets make fun of him: “Doesn’t he walk like a lame duck?” one shouts at him: “Hey, boy! You walk like a harlot!” Ramazan sits across from me with a sullen face and removes his prosthesis. Others scold him laughingly, “Whoa! Look at that! This prosthesis is so old-fashioned! Look at it! It’s a stone-age artifact!” Then they offer Ramazan tips to make the socket of his prosthesis more comfortable. 11:10 a.m.: Someone suggests that we play football. Gallows jokes start to fly over my head. “Let the goalkeepers be Sercan and Volkan,” they tease two blind vets. “Teoman should be the penalty taker,” someone else jumps in, pointing at a below-the-knee amputee. “A legless penalty taker against a blind goalkeeper!” they cheer. “Let’s see who wins.” “Let’s have blind Tufan as our referee.” We play, and my team loses, unable to stop the trick plays of the ten-year-old pro on the opponent team: two to three. As I, the worst player on the field, score the last goal of the match, surely no more than a consolation goal, one of the guys’ residual legs begins bleeding. The game ends and several amputees take care of their residual limbs. One guy suddenly grasps a prosthetic leg left by another on the rug and parodically shouts in panic, “Hey! Someone forgot his leg on the field!” It’s corny but we laugh. 4:02 p.m.: Gallows jokes take a sexual turn. “Disabled men are hornier than anyone else,” says an amputee in the group and cheerfully explains. “In amputees, the blood doesn’t lose any time in the legs.” Then one after another they begin exuberantly telling disabled sex jokes, like how a disabled veteran missing both legs went to bed with a sex worker, who, being unaware of the guy’s amputated legs, mistook his stump for his penis and panicked. Although I would later conclude that such stories exemplified narrative resistance to the stigmatizing stereotypes of disabled men as asexual and infantilized “half-men” by resignifying the residual limb, the corporeal symbol of lack, as the symbol of phallic excess, at that moment, I am tickled to death, just like everyone else in the group. The following week: We are on a train to Ankara for a nationalist demonstration. “Are you sleeping?” I ask Tufan Abi,34 a blind veteran wearing sunglasses. “I’m watching the scenery,” he responds in his usual tone. On our return, he challenges me to a chess game without a chessboard; we’ll play chess from memory, something ordinary for him, impossible for me! I get completely lost in the imagined spatiality of the chessboard after my second turn. Minutes pass as I struggle. Finally, Tufan Abi finds an opportunity to save us both when the train goes over a bump: “Damn! All chess pieces toppled over!”

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The following month: I am sitting in the official association’s salon with three other disabled veterans. All of them have amputated limbs and they are joking about phantom limb syndrome. “I still use my arm,” the arm-amputee vet says, missing the arm he uses. The other nods, “The nerve roots are still there.” The last one, a hand amputee, joins in joyfully, “I always open and close my [missing] hand, but no one ever notices. So I give them the finger!” We choke with laughter.

Freud describes gallows humor as the “triumph of narcissism,” “the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability.”35 The gallows humor I encountered, on the other hand, entails not an individual denial of vulnerability but rather an intersubjective process that transforms the negativity of traumatic loss into a therapeutic force by voicing vulnerability in a humorous way. Coming from politically consecrated yet socially stigmatized bodies, the laughter produced through gallows jokes about dismemberment and disability can be voiced only in the presence of those sharing a particular fleshly intimacy. And yet it also produces this intimacy, both normalizing and communalizing the experience of having nonnormative bodies.

communal tensions As community-making intensities, melancholy and laughter are not necessarily mutually exclusionary or antithetical. Yet their copresence corrodes the healing power of each affect, producing tensions within communities that bring together disabled veterans and martyrs’ families, two very dissimilar social groups with differing ages, losses, needs, and desires. Disabled veterans talked about a holiday resort/rehabilitation center for martyrs’ families and disabled veterans located in Ayvalık on the Aegean coast as a prototypical site where the tensions between these two groups become crystallized. “We had lots of problems with martyrs’ families in Ayvalık,” one of them tells me. “We wanna rollick and frolic, but they’re always sad. They can’t stand laughter. Lights-out was at 10:00 p.m. because of them. Thank God we have separate quarters now. That situation was offensive for both sides.” Another veteran complained about the way in which transference relations—the redirection of the feelings of martyrs’ families for their lost ones to disabled veterans, typically invested in both socially and psychically by disabled veterans and martyrs’ families—turn difficult when these two groups are too much in proximity at the rehab center. “I’m trying to

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swim for the first time after losing my leg. I must have looked very clumsy. One of the martyrs’ mothers calls out to me. ‘Oh my poor son, look at you! So be it. I wish that my son were still alive—half-alive like you but still alive.’” Like all communities, communities of loss have inner tensions and conflicts. Individuals and families receive differing levels of benefits from the state and someone always gets less. Someone is granted a 50 percent disability rating, and someone else is angry because he was assigned a disability rating of 40 percent despite having the same problem. Everyone has something to envy. Men injured in non-combat-related accidents envy the interest-free housing credit available only to gazis. Disabled veterans envy the ceremonial uniform that is exclusively worn by the veterans of the Cyprus and Korean wars. Gossip is rampant. Each individual, family, and association seeks to access more economic resources and accuses the others of corruption. “Others,” they say, “act like beggars and play up the agony. . . . They go door to door to collect charity from shopkeepers and businessmen and then they distribute only one-quarter of what they collect and sell the rest. People now get disgusted when they hear the words gazi or martyr.” After each protest, someone feels like he is being used as a stepping-stone for someone else’s political career. Someone does not answer the phone for a week. People are first ostracized for something, and then get reintegrated into the group for no apparent reason. Communities of loss muddle on, as do the political fault lines of Turkey. During my fieldwork, there was little space in these communities of loss for the public symbols of pious or political Islam such as the hijab.36 They maintained close ties with the military, which was then engaged in a power struggle with the neoliberal Islamist government. The official association’s general assembly and elections were held at officers’ clubs where bearded men and veiled women were rarely allowed entry. The fact that disabled veterans and martyrs’ families, abstractly celebrated in state discourse, were far from the ideally constructed citizen of the Turkish Republic—a secular modern, educated, and unveiled subject that speaks in an unaccented/unmarked Turkish—created tensions within these communities of loss. Associations gave priority to presentable and “civilized” members. While deciding, for example, on the invitees to an official dinner or TV show, they purposefully passed over “those wearing gaudy turbans and cheap mules, who have bigger eyes than their stomachs,” as one of my interlocutors put it. People frequently felt left out and complained, but no one really ever fully left the community. Things happened, scapegoats emerged, and people felt united again. 132

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the horizontal comradeship of edirnekapı martyrs’ cemetery “The cypress trees in this cemetery have very strong roots,” a disabled veteran once told me while passing by Edirnekapı Şehitliği (Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery), adding, “just like the Turkish nation. For they are both nourished with martyrs’ consecrated blood.” Located on the European side of Istanbul, just outside the historical city walls, the cemetery is an amalgamation of three early burial grounds. The legend is that the cemetery initially formed around the tombs of that generation of warriors who fell in the Muslim sieges of Constantinople in the seventh century, but this is unfounded.37 Until the nineteenth century, the part of the cemetery still in use allowed only figures of historical merit to be buried there. In the late Ottoman period, however, “ordinary” unranked Muslim conscripts were also interred on this site, in line with the nationalization and democratization of death.38 A tangible reminder of the intertwinement of death and nation making, this cemetery is a crucial site of national memory and eschatology. Martyrs of glorious victories and catastrophic defeats lie here in each other’s arms, forming a horizontal comradeship under the earth. Since the late 1980s, martyrs of the “war against separatist terrorism” with the PKK have joined them, revitalizing the necromantic power of nationalism and its ability to mobilize people through the power of the dead.39 Ruminating on all this on my way to the cemetery on a Friday afternoon, I reread the text message I had received from Yaman the night before. It said only that there would be a meeting at the cemetery attended by “Rauf Denktaş, the Atatürk of Cyprus.” Rauf Denktaş was the founder of a propartition paramilitary organization, the Turkish Resistance Organization (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı), and the founding ex-president of Turkishoccupied Northern Cyprus.40 “The Atatürk of Cyprus,” I thought. “What a suspicious coincidence that Denktaş should be showing off at the martyrs’ ceremony precisely at the point when Cyprus has become the primary obstacle in Turkey’s EU accession negotiations.” 41 I tried to visualize the episode of the ultranationalist TV series Valley of the Wolves in which Denktaş had appeared playing himself just a few weeks before. I couldn’t know that negotiations between Turkey and the EU would come to a halt less than three months later because of the Cyprus conflict.42 When I arrived at the cemetery, I saw an unusual crowd of martyrs’ families praying in front of their sons’ tombstones, cleaning around the graves, and Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery. Photo by Sinan Bilgenoğlu.

watering the roses planted there with water from fountains dedicated to martyrs. A young woman was distributing small pastries as a death rite. No one I knew was around, so I walked idly among the graves. Maintained by the military, this cemetery was clean and well organized, in stark contrast to the shabbiness of most civilian cemeteries. I glanced at the mini-flags on the tombstones, skimmed the epitaphs, and was surprised to read verses by the socialist poet Ahmed Arif in the middle of this nationalist setting: “Your absence is another name for hell / I’m cold, don’t close your eyes.” I spotted Yaman and a few other disabled veterans among newly arriving martyrs’ families. They were in business suits, wearing their medals and favorite colognes. Before I could ask them about the occasion, a luxury car with a driver and tinted windows rolled up. A middle-aged woman in stylish clothes, with heavy makeup and freshly coiffed hair, stepped out of the car and greeted the crowd. She immediately aroused my curiosity, since she definitely did not look like a martyr’s relative with her upper-class attire. Yaman could only recall her first name, but it was enough for me to fill in the blanks 134

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from what I had read in the newspapers. She was the spokesperson of a nationalist Turkish Christian church that had been without a congregation for the last eighty years. She was also, oddly enough, the cheerleader of a backlash against Christian missionaries and minority rights.43 A well-known ultranationalist figure, she would be arrested as a suspect in the Ergenekon trials a few years later, after I finished my fieldwork.44 Our next cemetery guest was a controversial lawyer who had made an ultranationalist career by filing criminal complaints against public intellectuals for “insulting Turkishness” or “denigrating the Turkish Army.” I immediately recognized his wily face from the news. He would become a key suspect in the Ergenekon trials and would be sentenced to “aggravated life imprisonment,” then acquitted after six years of imprisonment. That day, he looked in good spirits in his wrinkled gray business suit. Another ultranationalist lawyer, a muscular, bodyguard-looking man with piercing eyes, cleared the space for him. I also remembered him from the newspapers. He had a reputation for physically harassing intellectuals in front of courthouses where they were on trial. At the cemetery, the two lawyers distributed chest buttons juxtaposing Turkish and Northern Cyprus flags. A political pamphlet and petition arguing against Pope Benedict XVI’s planned visit to Turkey followed the chest buttons. The pamphlet asserted that the Pope’s visit was the first step in the dismemberment of Turkey through the establishment of a Byzantine (by which it meant Greek Orthodox) state in Istanbul, similar to the Vatican.45 The back page of the pamphlet was a petition to parliament. Led by Hatice Ana of the popular association, the people around me enthusiastically signed the petition without even looking at it. Cameramen from national news agencies and ultranationalist TV channels (Ulusal TV, Avrasya TV) surrounded us. I somehow managed to break free from the circle without signing the petition, despite outright social pressure. Suddenly, the noise of police and ambulance sirens indicating the arrival of Rauf Denktaş filled the air. The colossal ex-“president” hardly had time to get out of his car or catch his breath before he began hastily delivering a pointedly political speech. “We are not here today to play politics” was the first sentence uttered by this old hand at politicking. “We’re here to visit our martyrs.” “May God be pleased with you,” the crowd replied with heartfelt emotion. We walked slowly, following Denktaş as he continued his tirade on the geopolitical importance of Cyprus and how Turkey was about to lose the island. I understood that we had reached our destination when he stopped in front of a familiar grave, that of Hatice Ana’s son, Ersin. “The one who waits Com m u n i t i e s of L os s

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for you is your fiancée, Rana / The blood on your hair is your henna” read the epitaph. Denktaş quoted the only Qur’anic verse that circulated in Turkish secular nationalist circles: “Do not speak of martyrs as dead; nay, they are alive, but you perceive it not.” 46 There were silent nods. Hatice Ana placed a red wool scarf with the words “Martyrs’ mothers” around Denktaş’s neck. Yaman started to perform in front of the cameras. “You are the Atatürk of Cyprus,” he shouted theatrically. “We, gazis, the living witnesses of martyrs, support you!” That was it. Newspaper photographers took their last pictures and Denktaş took off. Having been publicly endorsed by the communities of loss, the ultranationalist visitors also departed together in the luxury car.

the reanimating field of shared space Historically formed in relation to the vicissitudes of state making and war making, nationalist and Islamist politics of mourning, and the cultural politics of disability, collectivities of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families function as communities of loss. Inhabited through practices of mourning, memorialization, and political activism, these assorted intersubjective communities are animated by the real magic of enchanted spaces, redistributive economies, and prosthetic objects. In these affective communities, the negativity of loss, pain, and suffering generates therapeutic community-making intensities that pull disabled veterans and martyrs’ families into an intersubjective field of healing. Such intersubjectivity lends disabled veterans and martyrs’ families a sense of community predicated on the commonality of loss, “where community cannot overcome the loss without losing the very sense of itself as community.” 47 Built into the community’s webs of belonging, what has been lost cannot be regained. Attending and attuning to these communities’ rhythms and labors of endurance and resilience, I have discussed two facets of the therapeutic force that creates community—melancholy and laughter—produced through elegiac mourning and gallows humor. Circulating between the bodies, objects, and spaces of these wartime communities and fashioning new forms of belonging and political intimacy, communal affects such as melancholy and laughter align, misalign, and realign disabled veterans and martyrs’ families with communities of loss, making them stick not only to each other, but also to political agendas that are not necessarily shared by all community members.48 The day described above at Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery—the site of countless similar visitations by representatives of nationalist political parties, 136

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ultranationalist youth organizations, and paramilitary networks, all of whom seek to further their political power and visibility through endorsement by the communities of loss—clearly illustrates this final point. The ultranationalist visitors at the cemetery briefly and instrumentally engaged in the commemoration ceremony only in order to extract political value out of violent death and disability and harness it to a conspiratorial right-wing campaign against the Pope’s visit. The instrumentalist use of these communities by nationalist politicians notwithstanding, it would be misleading to assume that the authoritative voice of ultranationalist politics is always an add-on for the communities of loss, since they often claim it as their own while voicing their pain, sacrifice, crisis, and revenge.49 The next chapter analyzes how disabled veterans come to take on this voice, becoming novel ultranationalist subjects in contemporary Turkey.

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five

Prosthetic Revenge

i don’t remember the first time the name Abdullah “Apo” Öcalan and the face associated with it entered my consciousness as spectral things. It must have been during my childhood, in the aftermath of the violence of the 1980 military coup. It must have been one of those days when I was allowed to stay awake and enter into the picturesque world of adults by watching an episode of Shogun on the only available television channel, the state-run TRT. I must have seen the news presented by the anchorman, whose face I still vividly remember. As a child, I had the suspicion that the anchor could see us from the TV screen, and I would never misbehave in his presence. I was learning to become a subject of sovereign power. Years later, recollections of those days came to me when I saw an ugly picture of Öcalan on the cover of a propaganda booklet published by the popular association. The picture showed him with a piercing, cruel look under thick eyebrows and a fiendish laugh in his wide-open mouth beneath a droopy and characteristically leftist mustache. The first picture of him that I saw as a child must have been a similarly grotesque one from the state’s visual repertoire. In the postcoup period, state control over the production and circulation of images was tight. Control over everything was tight. “Don’t read everything you come across,” a friend’s grandma used to warn us, telling us about a mysterious book by Öcalan that converted its reader into a “PKK terrorist.” Her fetishistic attribution of agency to the book had its all-too-real reasons, still valid in contemporary Turkey. Certain books, especially those of Öcalan, are banned and are often uncovered by the police and used by prosecutors as evidence of terrorism. In one case of excess and absurdity, a hapless citizen was detained in 2001 for something much more innocuous—buying a salt- and pepper-shaker set in the form of a 138

mustached brunette cook, which overzealous police officers decided resembled Öcalan.1 As the imprisoned founder of the PKK and the charismatic leader of the Kurdish movement, Abdullah Öcalan is the most hated figure in Turkish political culture.2 Demonized by state propaganda over the last quarter century, he is the embodiment of absolute otherness—an otherness so complete that the “constitutive outside”3 of the national symbolic-moral order in Turkey can be sketched merely by looking at how Öcalan is designated in Turkish political culture. In the 2000s, several Kurdish politicians, including mayors, were sentenced to one year of imprisonment simply for referring to Öcalan with the honorific Sayın, meaning Mister (literally, esteemed), under the charge of “praising a crime and a criminal.” Several other politicians, including then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, were sentenced for the same crime but spared imprisonment. In the media, “terrorist head,” “murderer of thirty-five thousand people,” “baby murderer,” “butcher,” and “villain” are the most popular descriptive phrases attached to Öcalan. In exclusively male spaces such as barracks, coffeehouses, football stadiums, and sports websites, swearwords like honorless, bastard, ırz düşmanı (literally, an enemy of chastity, a rapist), puşt (faggot, scoundrel), and kahpe (perfidious, whorish) circulate in abundance, expelling Öcalan from the masculine honor system of the Mediterranean basin. Öcalan’s religious and national alterity complements his gendered otherness. He is regularly referred to as “Armenian spawn” so as to position him outside the national and religious community. The symbolic potency of blood is conjured over and over again in this otherization process through expressions like kansız (literally, bloodless— meaning callous and cowardly) and kanıbozuk (literally, spoiled-blooded, degenerate bastard—used pejoratively for Christian minorities). Öcalan is also frequently reduced to subhuman status by the use of epithets like insan müsveddesi (poor excuse for a human being), cur, and monster. During my fieldwork, I heard these and similar phrases innumerable times from my interlocutors, whose political subjectivities have been deeply shaped by the ways in which the state has exercised its sovereign power over Öcalan’s body over the last two decades.

“the hunt” The capture and trial of Öcalan at the end of the millennium constituted a foundational moment for the contemporary political subjectivity of disabled Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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veterans. Everything began in 1998, when Öcalan was forced to leave his base in Syria following Turkey’s threats against the Syrian government over its support for the PKK. “The Hunt,” as it was popularly called in the media, was on. In this period, disabled veterans of the conflict, officially scheduled to become gazis in less than a year’s time, began to attract more and more media attention. Nationalist tearjerkers and human-interest stories about them flooded newspaper pages and television news shows. At precisely the same time, the journalist Nadire Mater was charged with insulting the Turkish military for having published recruits’ testimonies from the Region in her Mehmedin Kitabı (Mehmed’s Book), which was published and then banned in late June 1999 by court order and remained barred from circulation.4 The Turkish public was just completing its sentimental education concerning disabled veterans, learning how to feel for them. But the full-fledged instrumentalization of the disabled veteran body in the service of nationalist propaganda would occur during Öcalan’s trial a month later, in July 1999, when disabled veterans were finally granted the title of Gazi. After leaving Syria, Öcalan unsuccessfully sought asylum in a number of countries, including Russia, Greece, and Italy. It was during this time that disabled veterans were first drawn to the streets to protest the countries hosting him. Moved by their protests, a prominent journalist suggested that they should march on the streets of Rome too, as a visual testimony to the suffering of the Turkish nation and to protest the Italian refusal to extradite Öcalan on the basis of Turkey’s maintenance of the death penalty. The political discourse on the fate of Öcalan was increasingly tangled up with the nationalist ethics and aesthetics of suffering, the whole mesh condensed in the disabled veteran body. Öcalan was captured in Kenya in February 1999. According to the newspapers of the day and oral histories I collected, disabled veterans and martyrs’ families celebrated the event with religio-nationalist zeal. Martyrs’ cemeteries were visited for Islamic memorial services and the graves of slain soldiers were tidied. Cattle were sacrificed on the streets as if it were the Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha). “The happiness that I felt that day can only be compared with the birth of my first son,” a disabled veteran in his late thirties shared with me nostalgically. “That day, I felt as though all the suffering I had been through would not go unpunished. It seems that I was wrong, because Öcalan is still alive.”

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spectacle of sovereignty A stage for the dramatic reenactment of the state’s power over life and death, the State Security Court trial of Öcalan under crimes punishable by death was arguably the most elaborate ritual of sovereignty in the history of the Turkish Republic, for it involved multiple sacrificial transactions between political and biological bodies, including the bodies of Öcalan and of disabled veterans. This most important public drama of fin de millénaire Turkey took place on the prison island of İmralı in the middle of the Sea of Marmara, where Öcalan was being held in solitary confinement as the sole inmate of a maximum security prison guarded by over a thousand commissioned soldiers. Öcalan was charged under Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code, which concerns the formation and leadership of an armed group in order to separate a part of Turkish territory—a charge that carried the death penalty. Constructed as a criminal against the sovereignty of the state, Öcalan’s body was turned into a site for the performative reiteration of sovereign power. Throughout the trial, Öcalan was kept in a bullet- and explosion-proof glass cage that “protected” and displayed his body as a precious political commodity. As a sensory technology of proximity and distance, the glass cage in the courtroom worked like a shop window, seeming to place the commodified object within hand’s reach while also blocking access to it. It hinted at the vulnerability of Öcalan’s body while also protecting it from nonsovereign forms of violence. Through the glass, the Turkish state performatively declared to all interested parties that the body of Öcalan belonged to the sphere of sovereignty that he had violated. Among the interested parties were disabled veterans and martyrs’ families. At the beginning of the trial, the State Security Court accepted a small and carefully chosen group of martyrs’ families and disabled security personnel as co-plaintiffs in the case. A considerable number of my interlocutors had applied to be plaintiffs, some with the hopes that they would receive reparation payments, and all with the expectation that Öcalan would be sentenced to death. But only a few applicants were selected. Some of those whose applications were declined traveled to İmralı Island anyway, clutching their crutches, martyrs’ photographs and mementos, and Turkish flags outside the courtroom, while those selected sat impatiently inside. The courtroom’s spatial organization reflected the state’s ideological construction of the trial and, by extension, of the conflict. On one side of

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the room, by the glass cage, sat the blood relatives of Öcalan, who was held personally responsible for the thirty thousand deaths—of PKK members, civilians, paramilitary members, and security personnel—that had occurred to date during the internal conflict. On the other side were the martyrs’ families and disabled veterans, who stood for the whole nation through another type of blood relation—the spilling of their own blood and that of their blood relatives. In the middle was nothing. Precluding an intermediary party that could destabilize the expected tit-for-tat blood exchange, the spatial organization of the courtroom represented a near-certain death sentence for Öcalan.

the carnal language of pain Öcalan’s trial was replete with theatricality, scenes animated by martyrs’ relatives who expressed their pain and suffering as they demanded that retaliation be meted out upon Öcalan’s body. One martyr’s mother exclaimed in her moving testimony, “Only those who suffer know the pain. Only its wearer knows the shirt of fire. We have burned and turned to ashes. We want this pain to be over. I’ve undergone treatment for a long time. I want to claw him [Öcalan] for burning my liver [causing me great suffering].”5 In other testimony, the brother of a soldier killed in the conflict despairingly cried out, “I demand that the supreme Turkish justice punish him with the bluntest knife and the bluntest ax. I would burn the whole world for just a single hair of my brother. But I can’t do a thing to this man.” Making the audience and even the chief judge weep with their declarations, these expressions of pain and suffering shared three common characteristics: all were articulated in a carnal language that brought forward vivid, visceral, even gory images; this carnal language established an unyielding relationship between pain/suffering and revenge/retaliation; and the pain and suffering expressed in this carnal language always carried an exchange value equal to the prospective corporeal punishment of Öcalan. During my fieldwork seven years after the trial, the emotional power of this vengeful language was still pure. “If we were to tear his body apart into forty pieces and execute each piece one by one, all in a row, maybe then the burning of our hearts would be extinguished,” a martyr’s mother passionately scolded me in response to my question on Öcalan as she fought back her tears. Despite the centrality of martyrs’ kin in the examples above, it was the disabled veterans who made this carnal language literal during the trial. The 142

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Milliyet newspaper, June 5, 1999: “He held [Öcalan] accountable for his [missing] leg.”

newspapers of the day described the moment in the language of affect, relating how the intensity in the courtroom culminated and a veteran took off his prosthetic leg, swung it in the air, pointed it at the body of Öcalan, and cried out, “Who is going to pay for this?” The affective intensity was concentrated in and transmitted through the prosthetic leg. A martyr’s mother fainted. The newspaper Milliyet ran the headline “He held [Öcalan] accountable for his [missing] leg.”6 A new form of embodied protest had been born. Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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Materializing and literalizing carnal language in disabled veterans’ bodies, this new form of embodied protest enabled disabled veterans to raise questions of accountability and blame by unleashing the spectral power of loss. In the context of the trial, the prosthesis as symbolic weapon was pointed at the body of Öcalan, verifying its reciprocal exchange value in relation to the sacrificial gifts disabled veterans had bestowed upon the nation. Yet in less than a year, the public doffing of artificial limbs as an act of protest would extend beyond the walls of the courthouse and reach as far as the stairs of the Turkish parliament. In his final words addressing the court, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys employed the emergent carnal language of pain and revenge to ask for the death penalty. “The hanging of this villain will not only set an example; it will also lighten the hearts of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families.” When the chief judge announced the death sentence for Öcalan on June 29—the day of the anniversary of the execution of Sheikh Said, the leader of the 1925 Kurdish rebellion known as the Sheikh Said Rebellion7—the communities of loss brightened visibly. The news of the verdict was greeted in the courtroom with scenes of exhalation and tears of joy. The next day, all mainstream dailies shared the same headlines: “Martyrs, you can finally sleep in peace. For you shall have your revenge.” Those worried about why the judge had not followed tradition and broken the nib of his pen after announcing the death sentence would get their answer in a few months’ time.

an impossible gift During Öcalan’s trial and in its aftermath, the state harnessed disabled veterans’ bodily losses to its own project via two mechanisms: by redefining these losses as “sacrificial limbs of sovereignty”—that is, as gifts given in service of the establishment of sovereignty—and by actively preventing all other rival narratives from providing closure to disabled veterans’ grief. Yet in the eyes of disabled veterans, these gifts were never returned to them because the state failed to reciprocate in kind. The body of Öcalan—the “enemy” of Turkish sovereignty, marked with a reciprocal exchange value through the carnal language of pain—was an impossible gift given the international state of affairs. The European Council’s declaration that Turkey’s EU membership prospects would be dashed if the execution occurred stayed the nationalist coalition in power from carrying out Öcalan’s death sentence. International 144

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negotiations over Öcalan’s life were so blatant that less than a month separated the government’s announcement that Öcalan’s death sentence was not to be executed and the recognition of Turkey as a candidate country for EU accession. The idea of Westphalian sovereignty, according to which nationstates hold absolute power over the life and death of their citizen-subjects, was “betrayed” even by its most proponent supporter in Turkey, the Far Right MHP, then a government coalition partner. Enraged by this forfeiture of the right to sovereign sacrifice for the sake of EU membership, disabled veterans and martyrs’ families did everything in their power to push for execution. They organized angry protests in which Öcalan dummies were theatrically hanged in front of the cameras, including one that blocked the Bosphorus Bridge for several hours and another in which a disabled veteran threw his prosthetic leg at the prime minister. Ironically, disabled veterans and martyrs’ families even carried their case to the European Court of Human Rights, which nationalists had long attacked as a colonial kangaroo court that imposed foreign surrender on Turkey.8 The rancor notwithstanding, the Turkish state abolished the death penalty in 2002 as a part of the EU harmonization process and converted Öcalan’s death sentence to “aggravated life imprisonment.” This left disabled veterans embittered against the EU and in search of a scapegoat that could be substituted for Öcalan’s body within the carnal language of pain. This surrogate victim was found, or rather produced, from within the interstices of mid-2000s Turkish political culture and swiftly became a target: the dissident intellectual.

surrogate victim(s) When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand. r e n é g i r a r d, Violence and the Sacred

On the morning of December 16, 2005, an unusual crowd gathered in front of the Şişli Courthouse, where the world-renowned writer Orhan Pamuk was on trial, charged with having insulted Turkishness. “Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here and a million Armenians,” he had said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper. Lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, the head of the ultranationalist Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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lawyers’ group Great Union of Jurists, had filed a complaint against him. Such trials against freedom of expression had been everyday occurrences in 1990s Turkey, where the torture, imprisonment, and murder of dissident intellectuals was rampant. Yet it was typically the public prosecutors who filed complaints back then, not “civil” society organizations like the Great Union of Jurists acting in the name of the state. The crowds in front of courthouses, too, then typically consisted of left-wing supporters of the intellectuals on trial, not an ultranationalist amalgam of disabled veterans, martyrs’ families, and dark political figures with military or paramilitary connections. “Martyrs never die! The motherland will not be divided,” shouted the crowd fervently, waving Turkish flags. In an attempt to assault Pamuk and his supporters, some of whom were members of the European Parliament, a group of protesters confronted the riot police, chanting nationalist slogans targeting Pamuk and other “traitor” intellectuals. Then the cameras zoomed in on Pamuk’s car, pelted with eggs and trying to move hastily away from the scene with a smashed windshield. I watched these scenes on live TV in my Istanbul apartment, uneasy and trying to spot my interlocutors among the crowd. I had known about the protest a day in advance because I had received a group text message from a veteran inviting all “patriots” to the protest. Between 2005 and 2007, similar spectacular protests were repeated in front of different courthouses, each time sparking an international controversy. The common targets of these protests were dissident intellectuals like Pamuk, all being tried under the infamous Article 301, introduced by the AKP government in 2005, which criminalized “insulting Turkishness, Turkey, and Turkish government institutions.” This vaguely defined law made it possible to press charges against anyone who questioned nationalist ideology, official historiography, or militarization. Its passage was just the chance ultranationalists had been waiting for, united in their “hatred of the EU and the ruling AKP government that they reviled for ‘betraying’ Turkey by offering unacceptable concessions to the EU for the sake of membership.”9 Ultranationalist lawyers filed dozens of lawsuits against intellectuals, particularly targeting Turkish figures celebrated in Europe, so as to sow political tension between Turkey and the EU. Throughout the 2000s, the processes of globalization and Turkey’s EU membership destabilized the Turkish political structure, enflaming the paranoid tendencies of Turkish nationalists and drawing together previously incompatible political groups long in conflict with one another (right-wing nationalists, Kemalists, and national socialists) around the reactionary Red 146

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Apple Coalition. The basic ideological tenet of this decentered and loose nationalist network was that Turkey was experiencing a historical conjuncture similar to the dissolution period of the Ottoman Empire that ended with the partition of Turkey by the Sèvres Treaty after World War I. According to the geopolitics-obsessed proponents of this coalition, the imperialist powers, in particular the EU, were using democratization and minority rights as a means to dismember Turkey and forge separate Kurdish, Armenian, and Greek states in Anatolia. It is for this reason that the Red Apple Coalition’s primary strategy was to cultivate conspiracy-fueled public anxiety and launch fear campaigns regarding Turkey-EU relations. In 2008, some affiliates of the Red Apple Coalition, including the organizers of nationalist protests, would be tried and accused of membership in the alleged clandestine criminal organization popularly known as Ergenekon, whose purported mission was to overthrow the AKP government through a coup d’état and thus change Turkey’s geopolitical course away from the EU. Yet between 2005 and 2007, in great part thanks to the support of gazis and martyrs’ families, Red Apple Coalition members were viewed by many as fervent nationalists who acted with impunity. As foreseen, the trial of and protests against Orhan Pamuk, who only a year later would receive the first Nobel Prize ever awarded to a Turkish citizen, caused international outrage. The EU’s commissioner for enlargement, Olli Rehn, called the trial the “litmus test” for Turkey’s entry into the EU. Although the charges against Pamuk were dropped shortly after Rehn’s annoucement, the ultranationalist tactic had proved successful. As a result, similar demonstrations were held at every dissident intellectual’s trial. In addition to the one targeting Pamuk, disabled veterans participated in protests around three other high-profile trials. In June 2006, journalist and writer Perihan Mağden was tried for her commentary titled “Conscientious Objection Is a Human Right,” in which she wrote, “Here’s what I say. No, not every Turk is born a soldier. Not every Turk has to be born a soldier, die a soldier, and die as a soldier.”10 In September 2007, Elif Şafak stood trial for comments on the “Armenian question” made by a character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul.11 Finally, Hrant Dink—an Armenian socialist journalist and chief editor of the bilingual Armenian Turkish newspaper Agos—stood trial three times. Among these four intellectuals, only he was found guilty of denigrating Turkishness. After being acquitted in his first trial, he was dragged to court again for using the phrase “poisonous blood” in one of his articles, in the context of criticizing the Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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Armenian diaspora’s fixation with the historical memory of genocide at the expense of Armenia’s welfare. “The fresh blood to replace the poisonous blood emptied from the Turk exists in the great vein that will connect the Armenian with Armenia,”12 Dink wrote, calling Armenians to work through the trauma of 1915 in order to refashion a new national identity. Nevertheless, the court (deliberately) misconstrued his words as implying that “Turkish blood is poisonous” and sentenced him to six months of imprisonment, eventually suspended. While his third trial was under way in 2007, an ultranationalist gunman assassinated him in front of the Agos office. Building on the long-established nationalist tradition of scapegoating intellectuals as over-Westernized compradors/traitors, the ultranationalist witch hunt against dissident intellectuals followed a peculiar performative logic. First, ultranationalist lawyers filed lawsuits against the targeted intellectual on charges of “insulting Turkishness.” Then ultranationalist groups organized volatile protests against the intellectual being tried, thereby bringing the case to the attention of the media and rendering it a problematic issue in Turkey-EU relations. Finally, the ultranationalist media represented the emergent EU support for the intellectual as proof of an international conspiracy against the state, all the while construing the state’s unwillingness to implement penal charges in the face of international pressure as evidence of its impotence. These three steps completed the cycle of the self-fulfilling prophecy of ultranationalism concerning the compromised nature of state sovereignty. It was this self-fulfilling prophecy that enabled ultranationalists to reenact the social drama of the Öcalan trial through the trials of intellectuals. In each case, an intellectual was hauled down to the court while the spindoctors of the Red Apple Coalition portrayed them in the media as the sellout pawn of imperialist powers. With the exception of Dink, whose otherness as an Armenian was already a given for nationalists, fake genealogies were made to circulate in nationalist circles so as to otherize them. Regularly, a targeted intellectual would be misrepresented as a dönme (crypto-Jew)13 or an Armenian descendant—that is to say, as an intimate enemy and a perfect scapegoat. Meanwhile, the same group of ultranationalist lawyers who had initially pressed charges against the intellectuals would encourage my disabled veteran interlocutors to apply to become co-plaintiffs in the proceedings, providing them with legal counsel free of charge. Finally, just as with the trial of Öcalan, nationalist protests took place inside the courtroom and in front of the courthouse, where my interlocutors furiously confronted the intellectuals. 148

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The fifth anniversary of Hrant Dink’s murder. Photo by author.

Once we realize that these protests mimetically reproduced the performative structure of the Öcalan trial, it is easy to see how disabled veterans made the political transference from the body of Öcalan to the body of the dissident intellectual as the site of vengeance. When the initial object of vengeance for their losses—the PKK leader’s body—became inaccessible with the abolition of the death penalty, disabled veterans found, or rather helped to forge, a new object through sacrificial substitution. Thus, in the eyes of disabled veterans, the body of the dissident intellectual, marked already as a traitor through the charges under Article 301, became a surrogate sacrificial victim that could take Öcalan’s place. After all, on the mountains, had not my interlocutors been ideologically initiated into a militarist nationalist political imaginary within which the Armenian resonated first and foremost with the phantasmagoric “uncircumcised terrorist” figure fabricated through decades of state propaganda? As we have seen, one of these surrogate victims, Hrant Dink, was murdered. As an outspoken Armenian socialist public intellectual in Turkey, Dink was as vulnerable as one could be in the political climate created by the ultranationalist campaign against intellectuals. A week before his assassination, he wrote an article titled “The pigeon-like skittishness of my mood.”14 I am like a pigeon . . . I am as obsessed as a pigeon about what is happening around me. I keep turning my head like a pigeon. Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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I am as obsessed as a pigeon about what is happening around me. And here is the cost for you What did the foreign minister, Abdullah Gül, say? And the minister of justice, Cemil Çiçek? “Come on, there is nothing to exaggerate about Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. Is there anyone who has actually been tried and imprisoned for it?” As if the only cost one might pay were imprisonment . . . Here is a cost for you . . . Here is a cost . . . Do you, the ministers, have any idea as to the cost of imprisoning someone in the skittishness of a pigeon? Do you know what kind of price that is? Don’t you look at pigeons at all? [. . .] Yes, I may feel like I have the spiritual unease of a pigeon, but I know that people do not harm pigeons in this country. Pigeons lead their lives deep in the cities, among people. Yes, somewhat timid, but just as free.

sovereign enjoyment In the act of asking the state to punish intellectuals as surrogate victims, disabled veterans misrecognized themselves as historical subjects who could restore the sovereignty of the state by performing statehood in the name of the state and thereby unmasking its compromised nature. It was through this misrecognition that disabled veterans enjoyed in these protests moments of sovereignty that they missed and craved in their everyday lives. As they confronted the police and the “traitor” intellectuals the ultranationalist movement had targeted, as they made the headlines, they did so not as disabled men but as vengeful emissaries. I did not participate in the protests targeting intellectuals. In this sense, the protests constituted the limits to participant observation in my research. But after each protest, I tried to meet with those of my disabled veteran interlocutors who had become main actors in and supporters of the demonstrations. My fieldnotes describe one of those days, during which a sense of emergency and agency broke into the everyday of my interlocutors and generated enjoyment beyond the political utility of the protests—a sort of sovereign enjoyment, as Georges Bataille would have it,15 a life beyond calculation 150

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and utility, a potentiality that reveals itself in the desire to revel in moments of useless enjoyment. The day after the protest against Perihan Mağden, I meet Burak for an interview in a mechanic’s shop. It is his day off and he wants to get the “interview business” over with while visiting one of his relatives who works in this garage near my neighborhood. But he is unlucky. The noise of the garage makes recording impossible. So we decide to call Yaman and see what he’s up to. We learn that he just left work and is about to meet with the other members of the clique. I am the lucky one today. We pick up Yaman in my car. With rolled-up newspapers tucked under his armpit, Yaman looks positively delighted. “Did you see us on television?” he asks me enthusiastically. “You were on all channels,” I reply and tease him a bit. “You didn’t go making trouble again, did you?” Yaman doesn’t hear my half-mocking comment, as he’s busy calling another disabled vet. As soon as the guy answers the phone, Yaman begins rebuking him for not coming to the protest. We hear the last minutes of the conversation when Yaman turns on his cell phone’s speaker to deliver his didactic harangue. “We made history yesterday. But you are unaware of the world. You can’t live up to the title of Gazi like that!” The voice on the other end of the call tries to explain that he couldn’t get the morning off at work. Yaman, who always has a medical report ready for protest days thanks to his ultranationalist contacts, doesn’t accept that as an excuse. He turns to us and includes us in his audience as he performatively explains on the phone the role these protests play in the construction of disabled veteran identity. “What do you think our pensions are for? Is it to compensate us for our loss? No! What would be the difference then between us and paid organ donors? We weren’t injured in a traffic accident while driving drunk after an orgy. We were injured while protecting the state. If we are being paid for this injury, we have to continue this mission.” We park somewhere and wait for the others as Yaman pages through the pile of newspapers. Burak looks quiet. I try to prod him to talk about the protest. He starts complaining about pain in his residual limb, induced by standing still on his poor-quality leg prosthesis for hours during the protest. “It is upon us, the disabled, to save the country,” he grumbles. But he too gets in the mood when Yaman unfolds the newspapers to show us the pictures of the protest. I realize that he has twelve different newspapers representing the different colors of the political spectrum: Sabah, Milliyet, Ortadoğu, Zaman, Bugün, Yeni Şafak, Hürriyet, Birgün, Cumhuriyet, Akşam, Posta, and Gözcü. “Even I don’t follow so many newspapers as a researcher,” I exclaim in Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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surprise. Yaman simply cannot hide how proud he is. “We set the agenda for the whole country,” he says. “We made history.” We start to look at the pictures. “This one shows only your chin,” Yaman makes fun of Burak, who in response points at another picture and asks, “Don’t I look handsome in this one?” They both approve of the newspapers that have extensively covered the protest, especially the ones that have included photographs in their coverage. To my surprise, the socialist daily Birgün receives special praise because it devoted its whole front page to the protest. However, they are not happy about its headline, “They were there again!” Yaman is especially angry. “What does that mean? As if we are provocateurs! We are not some guy’s men! Do you see how they have enlarged the headline so that they can cover over the part of the picture where a placard we were holding reads ‘Şehidim Emanetimdir’ [My martyr is my trust]?” Then they realize that the news about the novelist Elif Şafak has been placed at the bottom of the page. “Wait, Elif Şafak, just wait! We’re going to protest you, too.” They cheer up visibly. When the turn comes for the left-wing nationalist newspaper Cumhuriyet, which used the headline “Terror in front of the courtroom,” they begin swearing. They are especially annoyed with the association of the protest with the MHP. “We don’t need to learn Kemalism, Turkishness, or Islam from a political party! Thanks to God, we are in a position to teach them all these values.” When the topic turns to the protest again, Yaman starts spitting out sexist expletives against Perihan Mağden, who has just criticized militarist nationalism and defended conscientious objection in her news column. Wow! Look at that bitch! You slut! You don’t want [your son] to be conscripted, huh? You want to eat this country’s bread and drink its water, but you want it for free. No way! You have to pay your debt to the homeland. If you don’t want [your son] to get conscripted, then go and get a faggot report for him. Get the rotten report. Say that he has diabetes and is impotent. Hey, [she says] she doesn’t want to be conscripted because of her beliefs! Fuck your beliefs! Everybody lives according to his beliefs freely in this country. Look, no one cares if you take a shit in front of everyone, dump your waste, have your car leak oil, or, excuse me for saying it, fuck a woman in the street. They ask for democracy! This is the most democratic place! Do whatever you want! Everybody serves in the military. Every Turk must. Every Turk is born a soldier! If you don’t want to get conscripted, then get the fuck out of this country!

The rest of the group finally shows up. Since we are all hungry, we decide to eat something before going to a coffeehouse to play Okey. While we 152

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munch on unsavory pides, I ask how many of them have applied to be coplaintiffs in the trial against Mağden. “Definitely not Zeki,” Burak answers. He is trying to bait Zeki, who slept through the protest after chatting with a girl on the Internet all night. “We all applied to be co-plaintiffs,” Yaman says. Just like with the trial of Öcalan, I think to myself. He continues, “They didn’t let us in [the courthouse]. They allowed those without honor inside and left the honorable outside.” Everyone at the table nods. Macit is especially angry with a group of women accompanying Mağden. “They were looking at us and laughing. They had their bodyguards with them, as if we were going to eat them! This is why we were provoked!” He apes their timid behavior, making the whole table laugh. It is impossible not to notice the undercurrent of misogynist class resentment in his anger. But the way he places the blame for his own group’s incitement on Mağden and her supporters chills me. This discourse of “being provoked” mimics the way in which popular nationalist violence and lynchings have been justified in Turkey.16 While I muse on these issues, Yaman wakes me up. “Is it all our responsibility? Are we the only sensitive ones? Sometimes I think to myself, ‘If only I could get myself arrested.’ But they won’t arrest me and put me in prison. I wish they would! Then, I would lie on my back all day. Well! No work, nothing!” Macit doesn’t miss this chance to communicate his resentment of the state by discursively articulating connections between his social suffering and the imprisoned PKK leader’s imagined enjoyment. “Isn’t that what they did to Apo [Öcalan]? He enjoys the comfort of a five-star hotel. He has his private doctor, but we as gazis have to wait in line at hospitals. He is enjoying himself, watching television and reading books all day long, while I have to stand on my prosthesis for eight hours every day at work.” The air becomes dense, but not for long. Having placed the Okey racks and tiles on the table and staring at the female dancers’ sexually explicit moves in a hip-hop video clip on TV, Burak and Zeki have already lost interest in the conversation. Burak finally cuts in. “Are we playing for Turkish delights?” And the game begins.

a collective exhibit of loss The murder of Hrant Dink in 2007 quelled the protests against intellectuals. After I left the field in 2008, the legal excuse for the protests, Article 301, was amended in such a way as to make high-profile lawsuits and protests Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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practically impossible. Moreover, the key figures in these protests were arrested in the Ergenekon investigation, a multiyear inquiry targeting an alleged ultranationalist covert network that was said to have conspired to overthrow the AKP government by inciting a military coup through a series of provocative events, including the murder of Dink. Then the AKP government launched the Kurdish Opening, a vague package of democratization reforms ostensibly seeking a resolution of the Turkish state’s decades-long conflict with its Kurdish population. The Kurdish Opening provoked the largest wave of disabled veterans’ protests in Turkey’s history.17 On October 19, 2009, a group of thirty-four people consisting of PKK members and political refugees from Makhmour Refugee Camp in Iraqi Kurdistan walked across the Iraqi-Turkish border and willingly turned themselves over to Turkish authorities. This “peace group,” as they were hailed by the Kurdish movement, was a gesture of support for the Kurdish Opening. After being interrogated, members of the peace group, including some in guerrilla outfits, were released, sparking heated debates about legality and legitimacy. They had not availed themselves of Article 221 of the Turkish Penal Code, popularly known as the Active Repentance Law, nor were they tried as PKK members. Upon their release, the group traveled from city to city, joining in with mass Kurdish demonstrations organized by the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi), which celebrated the arrival of the envoys in a festival atmosphere. The group’s release, their “unrepentant” incorporation into the body politic, and their ensuing hero’s welcome elicited a strong nationalist reaction. Nationalist actors criticized the “opening” as nothing more than the recognition of the terrorist other as a sovereign party within the nation-state and repeated one after another a long-standing state motto, “We will not negotiate with terrorists.” From the perspective of hegemonic nationalists, the armed conflict could be resolved only after the PKK surrendered and its members fully recognized the power of the state over their lives and deaths. Within a few weeks, cities all over western Turkey erupted with angry nationalist protests led by the nationalist communities of loss. Once again, familiar melodramatic scenes flooded the TV screen. Martyrs’ mothers holding Turkish flags and pictures of their dead sons aloft sang laments, their faces streaked with tears, and cursed the de facto amnesty granted to PKK members. Their bodies communicated their pain in culturally recognized somatic forms: they groaned, staggered, fainted, and leaned against one another. Once again, however, it was disabled veterans’ bodies that became 154

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the vehicle for the most spectacular, violent, and self-injurious acts of protest. No longer content with smashing their medals to the ground or symbolically returning them to the authorities as a form of protest, in several cities disabled veterans took off their prosthetic limbs—eyes, legs, feet—waved them in the air, and threw them on the ground as an embodied form of protest. The removal and display of prostheses as a form of protest was not completely unprecedented in Turkey. While such protests had initially produced visceral shock in Turkish media viewers, previous instances of individual protest such as the one that occurred during Öcalan’s trial had not generated the same affective and political effect as did the groups of disabled veterans now engaging en masse in this political form of protest across the country. The public unveiling of disabled veterans’ prostheses in a collective exhibition of loss rendered the prosthesis uncannily visible and therefore a privileged object of the material culture of ultranationalist protest. The material attachment of artificial limbs to the affective and political force of the protests was so strong that rumors about prosthesis companies financing and organizing these nationalist protests found their way to mainstream media.

prosthetic protests To understand why this unusual form of protest had become so widespread among disabled veterans, we must first look at how the removal of prostheses as a form of protest derives its political meaning and power, its affective intensity and influence. Three protest scenes from my fieldnotes give possible answers. The first scene: Sitting in a wheelchair in a standing crowd in the city of Adana, which had received a large number of Kurdish immigrants from forcibly evacuated population centers, a disabled veteran in his thirties begins to talk to a bevy of cameras. Holding a framed medal of honor and having folded the left leg of his trousers in such a way as to display his below-the-knee prosthetic leg, he says in a weary tone, “They found this poem in the pocket of a martyr. It says, ‘Never remove this stray bullet from my body, for it is my true medal.’ ” I remember hearing the poem several times during my fieldwork. It is one among hundreds of similar aesthetic products of counterinsurgency that circulate among disabled veterans, particularly popular with ultranationalists, given its articulation of disabled veterans’ simultaneous victimhood and Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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A prosthetic protest during the Öcalan trial, June 29, 1999. Credit: Reuters Pictures.

heroism. As the veteran recites the poem, the intensity in his body is plainly visible from the contraction of his face as he unsuccessfully tries to hold back his tears. Then, with an unexpected gesture, he removes his prosthesis, lifts it in the air with one hand so that everyone can see it, and shouts, “This is the medal!” Smashing the framed State Medal of Pride to the ground with his other hand, he yells, “Not that! Not this piece of metal!” While people around him bend down to gather up the shattered glass, the veteran concludes his protest: “I was twenty-five when I became disabled. What for? For this country! For this soil! For this flag! Not for any other intent or interest!” The second scene: A disabled veteran in the city of Osmaniye, the stronghold of the MHP, walks to the center of the protesters and removes his prosthetic leg and its silicone socket in front of the cameras. “Have I sacrificed this leg for nothing?” he exclaims and throws his prosthesis on the ground. “You want an opening? Here is one!” Leaving his artificial body parts on the ground where a poster of Öcalan has been mock-lynched minutes before, he leaves the scene with his empty pant leg dangling. In the background, we hear the stinging voice of an old woman, perhaps a martyr’s mother, crying out, “How can they give this back?” The third scene: Aided by his fellow protesters in Osmaniye, a disabled veteran who has lost both his feet, both his eyes, and one arm in a mine blast quarrels with a police captain who is trying to negotiate the number of people he is going to allow in to visit the governor. “Are you speaking on behalf of the state?” a companion of the disabled veteran asks, boiling over with contempt. The police captain ignores him as little more than a nuisance and continues to address the disabled veteran, calling him “my brother” in a disarming gesture. “He is not your brother,” the man objects furiously. “Watch your mouth! He is a gazi who lost his arms and legs in the fight against terror.” When the captain calls for reinforcements, the man intensifies his confrontational stance, confident of the impunity that the presence of the disabled veteran provides. “Reinforcements! Are you trying to scare me? Go call for reinforcements in Diyarbakır and Kandil,” referring respectively to the Kurdish movement’s symbolic capital in Turkey and the PKK headquarters in Iraqi Kurdistan. The captain is embarrassed and realizes that the situation is slipping out of his control, but he is too late. “Are you threatening me?” the angry man asks the police captain. “Who are you to do so?” The captain makes another hopeless attempt, but the disabled veteran’s companion has already commenced the performance of sovereignty—performing statehood to, for, and against the state. “I’m a representative of thousands of people. Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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Who are you? Who are you, huh? I am the state here. Not you! If you were the state, you would lock up those [PKK guerrillas] coming from Kandil. The state? Pff!”

the return of the prosthesis Watching these scenes on television over and over again, hypnotized, certain memories came back to me. I remembered vividly how one of my interlocutors became overly apologetic for having to take off his prosthetic leg during an interview. Then I recalled how two arm amputees who refused to use prosthetic devices they found ineffectual had created a continual state of anxiety within the official association. I thought of the day one of these armless veterans and I came across a beggar missing an arm in front of the association, and of our shared but unspoken sense that something had gone awry. In the first months of my fieldwork, none of my interlocutors had ever removed their prosthetic limbs in my presence. Actually, I was not shown any prosthetic device, residual limb, or wounds for months. This was hardly surprising given the entrenched social stigma against disability, which the increasingly vocal disability rights movement had been campaigning hard to dispel over the past decade. An exposed residual or disfigured limb was culturally associated with the persistent street-beggar figure that still haunted disabled veterans during my research. Because of the “gaze economy” underlying the practice of public begging and the risk of “pollution” from being conflated with street beggars, veterans were reluctant to display their disabilities publicly. Until prosthetic protests, that is. I was first allowed entry into the fleshly intimacy of disabled veterans at a picnic day, when several veterans doffed their prosthetic limbs to take care of their stumps after a football match. “Now, you’ve truly become one of us,” one of them teased me as we sat, and everybody cheerfully nodded. One of my key observations that day was that the donning and doffing of prostheses were embodied acts of communication among disabled veterans. When and in front of whom one could remove the prosthesis drew the boundaries of fleshly intimacy and indexed privacy versus publicness. Why was it, then, that in these protests so many disabled veterans were now violating boundaries drawn by the donning and doffing of prostheses that they strictly obeyed in their everyday lives? 158

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The collective display of loss produced by prosthetic protests targeted the government’s Kurdish Opening because it hinted at a possible reconfiguration of the sovereignty relations between the Turkish state and its Kurdish population. It was only in 1991 that then prime minister Süleyman Demirel had declared, “I recognize the existence of Kurds,” in effect ending the state’s denial of the existence of Kurds as a separate ethnic group. During my fieldwork between 2005 and 2007, most of my interlocutors were still in doubt as to whether Kurdish, a language from a completely unrelated family of languages (Indo-Iranian), was really a language separate from Turkish or a corrupted dialect of it. In 2009, however, not only was a Kurdish channel being broadcast on state television, but discourses that had been associated with terrorism and violently suppressed during the 1990s, when most of my interlocutors were injured, were matters of open public and state discussion: cultural rights, multicultural democracy, regional autonomy, general amnesty for PKK members. The authoritarian sovereignty principle— “the indivisible unity of the state with its territory and its nation”—that rested on the notion of the organic unity of the body politic for which my interlocutors had fought and become dismembered seemed to be receding into the past. In such a context, just as the previously violently excluded bodies of guerrillas were incorporated into the body politic, disabled veterans increasingly felt that the value of their sacrificial limbs had depreciated. So they rendered their absent limbs, their “real medals,” visible in spectacle18 form as a way of calling on the state to demonstrate its loyalty to their sacrificial losses. The prosthesis is an unparalleled spectacle-object. As a reciprocal gift from the state to sacrificial limb donors, the prosthesis is a privileged icon of the symbolic and material relationship between disabled veterans and the state.19 This is because it materially embeds the ableist assumptions of the gendered project of the state to repair and rehabilitate broken soldier-bodies, with the ultimate aim of reinstituting their bodies as sites of heteronormative masculinity. Prosthetic protests performatively invert the gendered attempts of the state to restore disabled veterans’ bodies by symbolically reenacting the moment of dismemberment. Such moments enact “gazis’ second dismemberment,” as an ultranationalist politician put it. In so doing, the protests blur the line of distinction between the disabled veteran and the street beggar—a line that had heretofore been meticulously drawn by the governmentalizing and sacrificializing practices of state institutions—through an embodied performance of the depreciating value of their bodies. Pros t h e t ic R e v e ng e

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Prosthetic protests underscore the fact that the mimetic materiality of prostheses is capable not only of hiding and effacing loss, but also of revealing, augmenting, and affectively communicating it. By removing their prostheses, disabled veterans transmit a material reminder of a traumatic bodily loss that cannot be fully assimilated into the symbolic systems of exchange. The prosthetic limbs veterans remove, wave in the air, throw on the ground, or return to state authorities are returned gifts that announce the annulment of the terms of the reciprocal exchange relationship between the state and disabled veterans. Through these returned gifts, veterans remind the public and the state that their losses cannot be effaced, that their absent limbs cannot be returned or recompensed. Sacrificial limbs, they suggest, are unreturnable gifts that render the state forever in debt. What makes prosthetic protests politically powerful is the way they affectively mobilize the disabled veteran body as a metonymy of the body politic. The protests spectacularly link the prosthetic wholeness of the disabled veteran body to the imagined wholeness of the national body politic, the very body contested by the ethnopolitics of the Kurdish movement. They forge this link by stoking public fears about bodily integrity. Through the theatrical enactment of corporeal partitioning, a veteran’s dismemberment stands as an allegory of the dismemberment of the nation. Prosthetic protesters seek to induce shock and revulsion in an ableist public audience that cannot tolerate the sight of a dismembered body or an artificial limb.20 Riding the affective wave that follows in the wake of the violent and gruesome revelation of artificial limbs, the protests amplify nationalist feelings, making those feelings feel.21 Through prosthetic protests, sacrificial limbs become specters that unleash the power of loss against a traitor state. While the state continues to be a deep “fictional reality”22 that both disabled veterans and their ethnographers invest in deeply, the sacrificial narrative that connects veterans to the state remains the only one that makes disabled veterans’ losses meaningful, their bodies valuable, their welfare rights untouched in an era of neoliberal displacement. It is for this reason, perhaps, that disabled veterans continue to theatrically enact this narrative, sacrificing themselves again and again, as I show in the next chapter, in spectacles in which the state is called upon to pay its debt of sovereignty so that the disabled veteran body can redon its prosthesis and become whole again.

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Prosthetic Debts

“he left us nothing but debt,” said Serhat, a disabled veteran in his late thirties, as a response to my question about his father who passed away when he was young. “My whole life was spent paying off debt.” His words were more than mere metaphor. He had dropped out of school to work and to help his mother pay off his father’s debt and had then gone into military service to pay his “debt to the homeland,” as compulsory military service is popularly called in Turkey. After losing his right leg below the knee when an antipersonnel land mine exploded, he spent years trying to recover his health in the mazes of the then crumbling health and welfare systems, losing his manual job and accumulating a large amount of social and financial debt.1 Thanks to the prosthetic, financial, and employment benefits that the state had recently introduced for soldiers disabled in clashes with the PKK, he was literally and figuratively back on his feet when we met. He could walk without pain, had just paid off the debt on his car, and was paying the interest-free mortgage that the state provided exclusively to disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict. “I paid all the debts I owed,” he murmured and revealed his prosthetic leg, asking, “Who will pay the debt owed to me for this?” (Bana bunun borcunu kim ödeyecek?). Serhat’s narrative underscores the ubiquity and interconnectedness of different forms and understandings of debt in Turkish disabled veterans’ lifeworlds and life history narratives. Veterans I met over the past decade all had disability-related debts that accumulated as a result of loss of labor-market income and health expenses. Despite the state’s welfare and compensation policies, they also felt strongly that they were owed unpaid debts on which the state had defaulted. These financial and politico-moral debts were often mobilized as a populist critique of the state and turned into mediatized 161

spectacles of debt, sacrifice, and betrayal, both by veterans and by the larger nationalist public. The historical icon of many postwar state projects to recuperate male bodies,2 prosthesis also emerged in Turkey as the privileged trope of such spectacles of debt, sacrifice, and betrayal. Chapter 5 analyzed a nationalist spectacle of debt—prosthetic protests—that centered on veterans’ prosthetic limbs. Seeking to veto the state’s peace attempts with the PKK with their prosthetic protests, disabled veterans resignified their bodily losses as a form of unreturnable debt owed to them by the nation-state. Here, I turn my attention to another nationalist spectacle of debt in which debt relations between the state and disabled veterans are once again negotiated through the attachment and disattachment of prosthetic limbs to and from veteran bodies: prosthesis repossessions. Just like prosthetic protests, prosthesis repossessions are spectacles in which the removal of disabled veterans’ prosthetic limbs in connection with debt becomes a deeply charged moral and political issue. In the years following the prosthetic protests of 2009, financial debt caused by disabled veterans’ purchases of technologically advanced prosthetic limbs from private prosthetics companies and the ensuing debt enforcement proceedings against them fueled this new genre of nationalist spectacle. As mediatized human-interest stories concerning the threat of the repossession of disabled veterans’ prosthetic limbs proliferated, prostheses became the material epicenter of public debates around the moral, political, biopolitical, and financial debts of war disability in Turkey in the early twenty-first century. Expressing the gendered anxieties surrounding the amputee veteran body, these debates extended well beyond veterans’ welfare issues, engulfing nationalists’ populist critiques of neoliberalism and their political opposition to the government and its Syrian refugee policies. Prosthetic spectacles of debt are cultural venues for the elaboration of the intricate relations among gender, disability, debt, and sovereignty in a context marked by an internal armed conflict and militarist nationalism.3 Mediating, brokering, and reshuffling the debt relations between the state and disabled veterans by evoking the visceral threat of dismemberment, these spectacles allow us to ponder many key issues that pertain to the political and financial values of war disability and the economic logics and limits of care and recovery. Tangled up in gendered notions of sacrifice, the debts accrued through war disability are translated into each other or construed as incommensurable; some debts are financialized, others resist financialization. By honing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies at the 162

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nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare, we see that the two debts of war disability and of debilities produced by debt economies feed and collide with one another in the prosthetic worlding of war disability.4

prosthesis repossessions Media representations of the disabled veteran body have always been carefully monitored and regulated in Turkey.5 Since the state’s turn to counterinsurgency in the early 1990s, the mediatized display of the disabled veteran has become a strategy of psychological warfare and military public relations. The instrumentalist logic has been so evident that, depending on the specific phase of the conflict, the disabled veteran body has become either hypervisible or entirely invisible in the mainstream Turkish media, indicating either the righteousness of the nationalist cause and the cruelty of the terrorist other or the suffering of the nation due to the armed conflict. Yet such political commodification through mediatized circulation has also created its own affective genres, including sensationalist stories about the abandonment or betrayal of disabled veterans by the state. The human-interest stories in this genre refrain from criticizing the military, militarism, or nationalist ideologies. Operating through the affective channels of nationalism, they articulate a populist critique of the state and its neoliberalizing health and welfare regimes. Common themes of the genre include violation of the disabled veteran body’s sanctity (e.g., when a disabled veteran is tasked with cleaning toilets at work) and disabled veterans’ demasculinization (e.g., when a jobless disabled veteran cannot take care of his family and hence cannot perform his role as breadwinner). While reflecting and reinforcing the imaginary relationship of disabled veterans to the real conditions of their existence, this populist genre has also played an important role in the governmentalization of the disabled veteran body. Appearing at a critical point in time, news content of a particular kind had a direct bearing on the institutional mechanisms through which state institutions related to disabled veterans. In the 2010s, the new trope of prosthesis repossession was added to this genre. National newspaper headlines and TV news stories were crowded with captions like “Property repossession order for disabled vet’s prosthetic leg,” “Repossession order for disabled vet’s leg,” “Shameless repossession order,” and “Disabled veterans in the grip of repossession.” Such captions were sensaPros t h e t ic De b t s

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tionalist in the sense that they portrayed any debt proceeding tied to prosthesis debt as the repossession of prosthesis itself (protezine haciz geldi), evoking dismemberment of disabled veterans through the forced removal of their prosthetic limbs. In my inquiries within disabled veteran circles, I have not been able to verify a single case like this. Yet despite their sensationalism, such shockers also represented actual shifts in the material conditions of prosthesis ownership. With these shifts, an increasing number of disabled veterans faced debt enforcement proceedings due to nonpayment of their prosthesis bills or bank loans they had taken out to pay for their prostheses. Under Turkish law, a creditor can collect overdue debt by initiating enforcement proceedings at debt collection offices (icra daireleri) located in courthouses. As a result of such enforcement proceedings, a debtor’s property may be repossessed and sold in public auction to recover the debt, often for well below its market value. This vicious form of debt collection is vividly portrayed in popular culture. Some of the most famous Turkish films of the 1970s and ’80s involve indebted male protagonists who have their properties repossessed. Working multiple jobs but still unable to make ends meet, buying on credit, and indebted to the neighborhood’s shop owners for basic staples, these protagonists are symptomatic figures of the loss of breadwinner masculinity in a neoliberalizing economic milieu. The melodramatic scenes of protagonists’ home furniture being carried out of their houses under the reproachful gaze and remarks of their wives and in-laws are the epitome of failed heteromasculinity. Cinematic images of repo men forcibly entering a house and seizing private and often feminized property such as kitchen appliances allude to the penetration and violation of the mahrem (the domestic intimate in Islamicate contexts) space of the home by the masculine state and market forces through debt enforcement mechanisms, further emasculating and shaming the protagonist.6 This cultural repertoire informs news stories about prosthesis repossessions and disabled veterans’ mediatized voices. Prosthesis repossession stories are mediatized nationalist spectacles of debt. They represent in amplified form the gendered cult of sacrifice around the disabled veteran body by construing the moral debts of war disability as incommensurable with the financial debts that accrue within a neoliberalized welfare system. In these spectacles, the legitimacy of financial debt is interrogated through the notion of the unpayable debt of self-sacrifice. Specifically, financial debt is represented as a secondary form of violence that shatters the prosthetic recovery process through which lifeworlds unmade by a primary scene of violence are remade with great difficulty.7 164

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The anxieties regarding prosthesis repossessions were symptoms of a set of distinct but interlinked socioeconomic processes that transformed disabled veterans’ experiences of prosthetic recovery: the entry of a new generation of prosthetic technologies into the marketplace, the increasing availability of consumer credit, and changes in the country’s social security system. Under anti-terror laws, disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict were given the right to use “the most advanced prosthesis.” Yet until the late 2000s, most disabled ex-conscripts, in particular disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict, used prosthetic limbs manufactured by the TSK Rehabilitation and Care Center— the flagship, Walter Reed–like military medical center exclusively designed for the care of disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict. The kinds of prostheses that were made in the rehab center and used by most of my interlocutors throughout the 1990s and 2000s were lifelike plastic or silicone artificial limbs with custom-made and prosthetist-fitted sockets that had no myoelectric or microprocessor control mechanisms. With the increasing availability of more advanced and considerably more expensive prosthetic limbs through the private market in the late 2000s, many disabled veterans started to resort to commercial prosthetics providers for the replacement of their worn-out prosthetic limbs when their useful lifetime (five years by law) was over. However, that came with an extra financial cost. At the rehab center, disabled veterans were not charged for prostheses; but for prosthetic devices bought through the private market, they had first to pay out of pocket and then make a claim for reimbursement. Requiring large sums of payment beyond their financial means, privately sold prosthetic limbs forced disabled veterans into debt. During my fieldwork between 2005 and 2008, it was still very common among disabled veterans’ informal circles to pool money for things like weddings and new cars. But it was also clear that such cooperative financial practices, previously the economic backbone of disabled veterans’ collectivities, were increasingly undermined by the growing availability of consumer credit. This economic shift reflected the overall financial transformation of banking and household economies and the emergence of new indebtedness mechanisms after the 2001 financial crisis, culminating in a new program, led by the International Monetary Fund, targeting disinflation, fiscal discipline, and structural reforms in the banking sector. In this period, the demand for consumer credit increased, and banks pursued aggressive marketing and advertising strategies to encourage the use of consumer credit across social classes.8 The result was a rapid increase in consumer loan and credit card use, making Turkey the largest market for bank cards in Europe.9 Consumer Pros t h e t ic De b t s

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A prosthetics company’s store window display. Photo by Sinan Bilgenoğlu.

loans and credit card debt increased sharply from 1.8 percent of the gross domestic product in 2002 to 18.7 percent in 2012. The prosthesis repossession stories that I share in detail below were enmeshed in this debt-financed consumption pattern.

operation prosthesis Key to understanding how and why the prosthesis repossession stories emerged at this historical juncture is the restructuring of the welfare system and the introduction of new quantification, financialization, and audit technologies.10 During my fieldwork, I knew at least one disabled veteran, Ramazan, who made a deal with a prosthesis company and traded his fiveyear prosthesis replacement right for cash that he used to pay his mortgage, another novel technology of debt introduced in the 2000s. The company apparently issued a fake prosthesis bill, charged it to the state, and then split the profit with Ramazan, who kept on using his worn-out prosthesis at the expense of being taunted for his uncomfortable gait and walking problems by other disabled veterans who said, for example, “You walk like a harlot.” With the restructuring of the welfare system in 2008, such shady deals 166

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became harder to get away with, especially after a mediatized medical fraud scandal uncovered by a police operation named, importantly, Operation Prosthesis, revealed a network of doctors responsible for $100 million (US) of financial damage to the social security system through fraudulent prosthesis charges.11 In 2013, following similar stories of fraud implicating disabled veterans’ prostheses, the Social Security Institution (Sosyal Güvenlik Kurumu, hereafter SGK) established a set of regulations called “Health Care Implementation Communiqués” that listed prices and determined upper payment limits for each medical device sold on the market. Any payment above the limit was not ratified by inspectors or approved by auditors. These regulations led to many problems and much confusion in practice. The defined payment limits rarely reflected actual market prices and, as the lists were constantly changing, my disabled veteran acquaintances were never sure which prostheses were included in the communiqués and which were not. Thus, after buying prosthetic limbs from private companies through loans or certificates of indebtedness, many disabled veterans faced unpaid debt and prosthesis repossessions initiated by the manufacturers, providers, banks, or the SGK. Not all disabled veterans were equally influenced by the transmutations of the welfare system and the prosthesis industry. As mentioned earlier, exconscripts with disabilities who were officially classified as “duty-disabled” did not have access to the rights enjoyed by the gazis, including the right to use the most technologically advanced prostheses. The differential political valuation of disabled veteran bodies within a tiered military welfare system rendered some bodies more vulnerable to indebtedness and prosthesis repossession than others. Most of the amputee ex-conscripts who faced prosthesis repossessions due to the nonpayment of their prosthesis debts by state institutions were the duty-disabled. Their repossession cases were activated by the auditors of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, who concluded in their reports that government reimbursement payouts were unwarranted in their cases, given that they lacked the official status of gazis. Following each audit, the SGK initiated a debt enforcement proceeding against the ex-conscript in question, often adding on interest charges and attorney fees. These exconscripts often went to the media to complain about unfair treatment, bureaucratic indifference, the financial setups of the state’s welfare laws and institutions, and the violation of the gendered military contract between the state and its male citizenry. Pros t h e t ic De b t s

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The coverage of prosthesis repossessions stirred up a certain amount of popular reaction on social media and even led to the formation of a parliamentary commission to probe disabled veterans’ prosthesis debts. One repossession case caught the media’s attention when the duty-disabled victim iterated the form of prosthetic protest, turning it against the financial practices around prosthesis debt by attending an official commemoration at a martyrs’ cemetery without donning his prosthetic leg. He had turned his body into a spectacle of debt by refusing to wear his prosthesis, thereby embodying the threat of dispossession imminent in prosthesis repossession. This touched a nationalist nerve. Yet only in 2014 did public outcry about the relationship of (political) sacrifice to (financialized) debt became strident, when the political and financial limits of prosthetic recovery were made evident by another victim of a repossession order, Bülent Kocaoğlan, who was a gazi and hence a proper sacrificial hero. This veteran’s intricate debt story lasted for over a year, gaining extensive coverage in the media as it unfolded through multiple shifts of blame and responsibility. These involved numerous institutions and politicians, including the prime minister, leading to multiple press statements from the General Staff and the SGK, and to a parliamentary inquiry directed at the Ministry of Defense.12 The news stories about Kocaoğlan all detailed how he had lost his leg, framing him as a sacrificial hero. According to these media narratives, “Gazi Bülent lost his left leg in a terror attack in Hakkâri, Çukurca in 1996, during which his sixteen brothers-in-arms were martyred.”13 “Miraculously surviving” the attack, he had an above-the-knee amputation and a long rehabilitation in multiple military hospitals. In the end, he received a prosthetic leg, began working as a state employee, got married, and started a family. In photographic images that accompanied coverage of his indebtedness and the repossession of his prosthesis, he posed with his three children and his three old prosthetic legs, displaying an eerie correspondence between prostheses and fatherhood. By portraying his prosthetic limb as constitutive of the productive and reproductive masculine world he inhabited, these narratives constructed prosthesis repossession as unmaking his gendered lifeworld and, by extension, the entire gendered governmental edifice built to remasculinize disabled veterans. Kocaoğlan’s debt story reportedly began when he decided to use his legal right to replace his prosthesis with a more technologically advanced model through market channels. Like many of my interlocutors who wanted to buy 168

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Milliyet newspaper, October 20, 2014: “Repossession of the prosthetic leg of a disabled veteran.”

outside of the rehab center and start using their new prosthetic limbs before the completion of payments, he made a murky financial deal with the prosthesis company, allegedly via an under-the-counter advance payment, a common practice that left room for fraudulent transactions, leading to back-andforth accusations when the arrangement soured. To make an advance payment for his prosthetic limb worth TL 135,000 (Turkish lira; back then $65,000 US), he took a TL 50,000 loan from the bank and agreed to pay the rest upon receiving reimbursement from the SGK. Yet despite a seven-month wait, the SGK did not process the payment. Unable to repay his bank loan and facing multiple repossessions of his prosthesis, appliances, and furniture initiated by the bank and the prosthetics company, Kocaoğlan first tried institutional appeals and then resorted to social media by uploading a clip from his son’s smartphone where he voiced his grievances.14 The clip became a social media phenomenon right around the time when the government was under intense criticism for failed peace negotiations with the PKK, a period when a sense of sacrificial crisis pervaded Turkish society. The media immediately picked up the story and journalists flooded Pros t h e t ic De b t s

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Kocaoğlan’s apartment. In one of the more widely circulated news stories, a Hürriyet TV camera follows Kocaoğlan, who is walking with a limp, his medal of honor pinned to his chest.15 The scene goes like this: he sits on his living-room sofa with a jaded expression, wearing his new prosthetic leg with two different models of prosthetic legs lined up next to him. He shakes some papers, which turn out to be petitions that he has submitted to different institutions, seeking help. He voices his grievances about how he has been treated by the addressees of his petitions. “They say, ‘Submitted for necessary action.’ This is the only response I got from them. I wrote to the prime minister, still no response. Maybe he hasn’t seen it. I don’t want to accuse him wrongly. Only one of the ministers has responded to my appeal and referred my case to the governor. That’s it!” The audience is given a sense of bureaucratic indifference but no clue that institutions like the prime minister’s communications center have no bearing on his problem in terms of their bureaucratic functions and responsibilities. During my fieldwork, I collected a pile of similar petitions and institutional responses my interlocutors shared with me. Like those of Kocaoğlan, most of these petitions were addressed not to the bureaucratic institutions in charge of the issue under petition but to randomly chosen influential politicians, statesmen, or state offices in hopes that the performative power of their appeal might be enough to suck the potential influencer into their bureaucratic drama, rendering their target morally and politically accountable. These papers constituted intimate bureaucratic archives in disabled veterans’ homes, chronicling their vexed relationship with state institutions and state fantasies.16 Compiled and read by my interlocutors as archives of bureaucratic disinterest and political betrayal, these petitions produced and stored strong affects.17 My interlocutors especially loved to read aloud the very last sentences of institutions’ responses to their appeals—“Your request cannot be processed at our institution. Submitted for necessary action”—which they followed up with a mouthful of curses. Their angry responses to these documents were provoked by a sense of bureaucratic obliviousness to the bodily loss and suffering they had experienced. The neoliberal regime of so-called accountability functioned not only as a form of violence and slow death but also as a betrayal of their sacrifices. Their own regime of accountability, on the other hand, was a very different one predicated upon the nationalist logic of unreturnable sacrifice. The televised news story about Kocaoğlan similarly draws on the idea that moral and political accountability engendered by sacrificial loss cannot be over170

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ridden by financial and bureaucratic modes of accountability and governance. In the Hürriyet TV scene, right after he shows the audience the petitions, Kocaoğlan explicitly contrasts the immobility and deferred action represented by the documents with the mobility and enhanced embodied capacities enabled by his new prosthetic leg.18 The new prosthesis, he says, enables him to walk on uneven surfaces and, especially, down sloping surfaces. Then he violently manifests the very immobility that bureaucratic inaction creates for his life by taking off his prosthetic leg. “If the state did not pay, I would walk like this,” he says, holding the artificial leg in his hand while hopping around the sitting room on his real one. “I would make do! But was I like this when I went to do my military service?” Then he points at his son peeping through the door and adds, “When I went to military service I was fit as a fiddle, just like him.” In other media interviews, he continued to emphasize the sacrificial dimension of his bodily loss. “I took a loan to pay for the prosthesis, trusting that I would be reimbursed. But I’ve made a mistake by trusting the state. Now, my hearth and home are about to fall to pieces. Who is responsible for that? If I had known that I would not be reimbursed I would rather jump on one leg and not buy this prosthesis. This is unfair! I was a sapling when recruited. Not like this! They should find a solution to our problem.”19 Disabled veterans’ public performances of destitution, although rare and strongly reproached by other veterans, are often very efficient in eliciting results. An ex-conscript ineligible to receive gazi benefits despite getting injured in the Kurdish region told me that after many fruitless appeals he decided to organize a protest in the middle of the government district of the capital city of Ankara with a placard that read “I am gazi and I am jobless.” He was taken into custody by military police in less than half an hour but managed to reap some benefits after the event with the help of the commander of the military unit that detained him. Kocaoğlan’s appeals similarly received a response in no time. Precisely one day after the first news piece, various offices of the SGK began issuing contradictory statements one after another. The local office swiftly passed the buck to the central office of the SGK and the Ministry of Health by placing the blame for delay in payment on the new financial accounting practices of the neoliberal audit culture. Its statement argued that the delay was caused by a pileup of files in the central office after new regulations came into effect requiring auditors to review all prosthesis bills above the payment limits for financial wrongdoing before approval. The following day, it was the central office’s turn to issue a press statement and argue that the delay was actually Pros t h e t ic De b t s

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caused by the fact that the prosthesis could not be found in the list of medical supplies eligible for social security coverage. After detailing the back-andforth correspondence between different branches of the SGK, the statement reassured its readers that “the units responsible for processing this transaction have been informed and our institution thereby demonstrates the sensitivity necessary for the speedy resolution of the victimization of Gazi Bülent Kocaoğlan.” The General Staff also joined in the chorus of press statements so as to quell the public uproar, explaining the measures the military had undertaken to resolve veterans’ problems with prosthesis payments. Yet despite all these reassuring press statements, the debt story only became more labyrinthine when the SGK finally reimbursed Kocaoğlan at the upper payment limit (TL 98,000), a sum significantly lower than what he owed the company (TL 135,000). In the first round of media coverage of prosthesis repossession, he was portrayed exclusively as a hero who had been victimized by bureaucratic indifference and incompetence. The story then began to take strange twists and turns when the owner of the prosthetics company that had initiated the debt enforcement proceeding went to the media to contest the veteran’s debt story. Asserting that the company never received the advance payment allegedly paid through the bank loan, he rebutted the veteran’s media statements by saying that Kocaoğlan actually had not paid a penny for the prosthesis he was using at the time of his public complaint, implying that he had also misused the money reimbursed by the SGK. Maintaining that Kocaoğlan had deceived the public by appealing to the sensitivity around disabled veterans, he announced that he would file a lawsuit against the veteran. Although Kocaoğlan was quick to refute these claims, the alternative version of the debt story cast doubts on his victimhood. As his case burgeoned into a scandal viewed through the lens of nationalist representational politics, the media stopped following the story. The very idea that a disabled veteran’s complaint could be disingenuous could not be assimilated into nationalist discourses on prosthesis repossession. The government’s official response to a parliamentary inquiry into Kocaoğlan’s case by the main opposition party also tacitly verified the prosthetics company’s version of the story, while acknowledging the general problems of prosthesis payments. “The veteran had renewed his prosthesis six times between 1997 and 2014, had already received the upper-limit payment, and lacked receipts proving his alleged advance payment.”20 More strikingly, the official response argued that there was no debt enforcement or repossession proceeding against the veteran 172

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from the bank, the prosthesis company, or the SGK. As a result, Kocaoğlan’s case was dropped and disappeared from parliamentary politics and the governmental bureaucratic sphere altogether. Despite media and bureaucratic indifference, Kocaoğlan’s debt story has taken on a life of its own as a trope of oppositional nationalist populism. In the ultranationalist media, which sharply opposed the AKP government and its peace attempts with the PKK, the repossessed prosthesis came to symbolize the deep and pervasive politico-moral crisis that had bankrupted the nation. In one such news story, a disabled veteran challenged President Erdoğan by asking if his palace, the highly controversial luxury presidential palace built at the behest of Erdoğan, was constructed with the money he had denied for veterans’ prostheses.21 More importantly, Kocaoğlan’s case was circulated as a populist class critique with explicitly racist undertones and became the hashtag banner of the anti–Syrian refugee campaign #Suriyelileriistemiyoruz (#wedontwantSyrians). In social media posts, images of disabled veterans with repossessed prostheses were frequently juxtaposed with an imagined carefree Syrian refugee, whose in vitro fertilization and cosmetic surgery expenses were falsely rumored to be paid by the state. A particularly provocative tweet read “250,000 bicycles for Syrians, but not a single prosthetic leg for a veteran,” responding to a rumored government campaign to distribute free bicycles to refugees. Contrasting the imaginary leisurely mobility of Syrian refugees with the immobility of the financially dismembered disabled veteran, this last tweet epitomized how prosthetic repossessions have been mobilized for a diverse set of nationalist political agendas through the language of sacrifice and betrayal. Very much like the figure of the disabled street beggar, the tweet also demonstrated how the “needy” Syrian refugee had become a cultural figure set in juxtaposition against the disabled veteran so as to call attention to the state’s betrayal of those who had sacrificed themselves nobly in service of it.

unreturnable debt, sacrifice, and the financialization of prosthetic excess Political and moral debts imagined in terms of sacrifice render the debtor forever 100 percent in the red, thoroughly and indelibly indebted.22 Such sacrificial imaginaries can also be inscribed on bodies, limbs, and organs, as in the case of organ transplantation, where the donation of bodily substance is felt to Pros t h e t ic De b t s

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create an unreturnable debt tangled up with gift and sacrifice.23 Sacrificial limbs of sovereignty are one such generator of temporally unbounded sacrificial debt. “We can never repay our debt to our gazis” has been the rhetorical device underlining the state’s efforts to remasculinize disabled veterans through its governmentalizing measures. Yet the rights and entitlements the state offered veterans, including their mobility- and function-offering prostheses and financial remunerations for them, have not managed to clear the state’s sacrificial debts. With its nonsecular temporality and register of value, sacrificial debt has no possibility of full payment, and certainly no possibility of overpayment. In President Erdoğan’s words, “The designations of the martyr and the gazi are so honorable that they are incommensurable with any material value or secular title.”24 In such indebtedness, there is always an excess that exceeds material benefit and resists attempts at financialization. It is this excess—the spectral power of loss resignified as sacrifice and unreturnable debt—that disabled veterans mobilize in their political and welfare activism, in their spectacles of prosthetic protests and prosthetic debts. Such spectacles of prosthesis repossession illustrate the contours of the contemporary biopolitics of war and disability in Turkey as they are refracted through the gendered politico-moral economy of nationalism, neoliberal debt economies, and the new audit culture. In the nationalist politico-moral economy, the sacrificed body of the disabled veteran was deemed a creditor, rendering the state, as the beneficiary of sacrifice, a debtor. Yet such nationalist logic was incompatible with the reigning consumer debt economy and the neoliberal audit culture of the restructured welfare regime in which acquiring a cutting-edge prosthesis required a significant amount of finance. Within the logic of finance, the excess debt owed to disabled veterans did not enter the ledgers of accountability as credit. Despite all the gendered political value inscribed on their bodies and prosthetic recoveries, many disabled veterans still faced repossessions for failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Supported by the wider nationalist public, disabled veterans resisted this financialization of prosthetic excess by mobilizing the notion of sacrificial limb debt. In their attempts to overrule the neoliberal logic of financial indebtedness, disabled veterans invoked the burden of their health expenses from within a separate sphere of exchange, one requiring protection from the intrusion of market forces. Spectacularized in mediatized stories about repossession cases, the rival value systems of nationalist sacrifice and neoliberal finance competed, while in the everyday lives of disabled veterans prosthetic debts lingered on. 174

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Epilogue bodies and temporalities of political violence

political violence speeds up, slows down, freezes, and recycles time. Like other anthropologists conducting research in the Middle East during the era following the Arab uprisings, I had to attune, in the Turkey of the 2010s, to the oscillations in pace and direction of historical time bent by violence. As ethnography quickly became history and what was regarded as history lingered in the present, I often felt unable to capture the present tense in ethnographic writing. During that period, the pace of political change in Turkey was feverish. The country entered the 2010s with the appellations of an EU candidate, a successful blend of Islam and democracy, and a model for the rest of the Muslim Middle East. Yet in the years following the 2013 Gezi Uprising, it lost its glamorous international status and plunged deeper and deeper into a neoliberal blend of Islamic neoconservatism and authoritarianism. This process culminated in the 2016 coup attempt, which led to a two-year state of emergency during which President Erdoğan began ruling the country with new, unprecedented executive powers. Crushing any sign of political dissent and occupying Syrian territory, he initiated a new transnational phase in the Kurdish conflict by engaging a Syrian Kurdish militia group, the People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Ge, hereafter YPG), which the Turkish state deemed a mere extension of the PKK. The ebbs and flows of this political transformation had bewilderingly heady ramifications for Sacrificial Limbs. The shady ultranationalist figures that hovered around my interlocutors in chapter 2 were first arrested in 2008 for organizing a coup and being members of the alleged clandestine ultranationalist terrorist organization Ergenekon, only to be released a few years later to become new allies of the increasingly authoritarian AKP 175

government. During the peace talks of 2009–15 between the government and the PKK, a previously vilified Öcalan was transformed into a tolerable, in some circles even an esteemed, negotiating partner. Disabled veterans and martyrs’ families met and dined with the families of slain guerrillas (değer aileleri) in government-organized reconciliation banquets. But before I could reflect on the ostensible demilitarization of public culture, the armed conflict resumed with an increased intensity. Accompanying these frantic, high-speed occurrences was also a pervading sense that time was dragging and that things long gone kept returning, a sense that articulated a “temporality of immobilization characterized by suspension, stasis, and fear.”1 When a disabled veteran threw his prosthetic leg at members of the Wise Men Commission, a group of prominent public figures tasked by the government to cultivate public support for the peace process, thereby reenacting the prosthetic protest form one more time, I felt a profound sense of déjà vu. But I experienced the arrested temporality of the Kurdish conflict more acutely than ever when, after the collapse of the peace process, ghostly figures from the maddening violence of the 1990s reappeared: the white Renault Toros cars associated with “disappearances”—a euphemism for extrajudicial killings; police cars dragging dead Kurdish militant bodies; the public display of naked and tortured female guerrilla bodies. There was a sense of temporal loop-around back to the early years of the conflict described in chapter 1. Bodies disabled by political violence and charged with sacrificial aesthetics have proliferated within this double temporal structure of acceleration and arrest. So have the claims and contestations over the title of Gazi. In the Turkey of the 2010s, multiple perpetrators, victims, and perpetrator-victims of political violence vied unevenly for recognition, legitimacy, welfare rights, or monetary compensation via recourse to the title of Gazi, and in the process further shifted the meanings of that title and its capacity to affect bodies.

the dusk of disabled veteran activism The repeated cycles of war making and peace making in the period following my fieldwork were interwoven with internal power struggles within the ruling bloc, most importantly that between the AKP government and the military. The secular nationalist opposition against peace attempts was repeatedly articulated through the notion of sacrificial limbs, as in the spectacles of 176

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prosthetic repossession detailed in chapter 6. Martyrs’ funerals became political spaces where nationalist crowds regularly assaulted government representatives physically. Gradually, however, the AKP government imposed its hegemony on the by-now-unruly public through a series of high-profile political trials, including the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials, which led to the jailing of hundreds of top-ranked army officers and of secular nationalist politicians and journalists accused of plotting political murders and unrealized coup plans against the AKP. The 2009 prosthetic protests of chapter 5 turned out to be the last wave of disabled veterans’ mass political mobilization. Thereafter, disabled veterans turned to more surreptitious and sometimes more violent ways to oppose peace talks—refusing to shake hands with AKP representatives during commemoration ceremonies or opening fire on the offices of pro-Kurdish political parties.2 When I asked a disabled veteran in 2014 why they were not protesting on the streets anymore, he laughed at my apparent naiveté. “What protest? You can be arrested for even having your shadow out on the street.” The forms of antigovernment collective action of the previous period were no longer possible. With the hegemony of the increasingly authoritarian AKP came a new set of governmentalizing moral dispositions and political etiquette that the government deployed so as to stifle dissent within communities of loss. As may be recalled from the anecdote in chapter 2 about the on-camera hospital confrontation between an amputee veteran and the then prime minister, when the veteran shouted at the prime minister to fuck off, prior to the 2010s disabled veterans had the unique privilege of publicly taunting and cursing politicians with impunity. Yet when a disabled veteran confronted Prime Minister Erdoğan in 2013 with the words “You negotiate with baby murderers,” referring to the government’s negotiations with the imprisoned PKK leader, Öcalan, he was scolded for abusing his gazi status. Similarly, when images of a brawl between a municipal bus driver and a wheelchair-abled veteran missing an arm and a leg made it to the national news, the AKP mayor accused the veteran of being a “provocateur” who had used his prosthesis to beat the driver, associating sacrificial limbs with criminality.3 In 2013, Kurdish-Turkish peace negotiations were launched under the name “Solution Process” (Çözüm Süreci) amid heated debates over proposals to switch from a conscription to a professional army. Long-term security strategies aside, the immediate cause of this shift was the AKP government’s reasoning that the sacrificial debt owed to communities of loss was too E pi l o gu e

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politically burdensome in the context of on-and-off peace negotiations. Government representatives repeatedly asked disabled veterans, whose politicization owed a great deal to their instrumentalization for state policies, to stay away from politics—in other words, to become welfare subjects again. What the government had overlooked was the fact that inscribing violence on bodies in the name of sovereignty was much easier than effacing the generative effects of such violence.

new violences, new gazis The ruling party’s sacrificial disinvestment from disabled veteran bodies did not at all mean that Turkish political culture or the AKP was done with the culturally evocative gazi figure and its simultaneous embodiment of the gendered notions of victimhood and heroism. On the contrary, after its millennium-long semantic journey, the loose signifier gazi continues to be inscribed on new bodies in relation to transmutations of the state’s power over life and death within new configurations of sovereignty. One unexpected consequence of the unsuccessful peace negotiations with the PKK was the opening up of an odd, if temporary, legal and cultural space for the demilitarization, deturkification, and demasculinization of the Gazi title. Through a bill popularly known as the Civilian Gazi/Martyr Law, introduced in 2012, citizens who were killed or disabled in “terror incidents” were also included in the scope of state assistance provided to disabled veterans and martyrs’ families. With this new law, not only civilian victims of PKK attacks, but also victims of ultranationalist or state violence would be folded into nationalist symbolism and welfare regimes that had previously enrolled only male bodies of the state security forces. Government representatives initially mentioned the assassinated Hrant Dink’s family and victims of the Roboski/Uludere massacre of 2011, in which thirty-four villagers were killed in an airstrike by the Turkish military, as potential beneficiaries of the law. But the government quickly dropped the plan after being criticized for disrespecting soldiers’ blood sacrifices and abusing nationalist titles as “an absurd tool of redistributing economic benefits.” 4 In the same period, oppositional articulations and embodiments of the gazi figure began to nomadically flourish outside the law.5 The short-lived Union of Kurdistan Gazis (Yekitiya Gaziyên Kurdistan), a Europe-based Kurdish political organization that sought to deploy the symbolism of the 178

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gazi in order to glorify guerrilla fighters, was an earlier harbinger of this process, which culminated with the 2013 Gezi protests. During those protests, the police exerted the sovereign biopolitical prerogative of “the right to maim” by systematically inflicting disabling injuries on protesters’ bodies.6 Those who acquired disabilities due to police violence, especially those who had vision impairments, were soon hailed as “Gezi gazis,” with their eye patches serving as the embodied symbol of their sacrifices.7 The legitimacy of emergent communities of loss coalescing around martyr and gazi figures from Gezi, such as the Platform of Gezi Gazis and Martyrs, was palpable enough that the CHP, the main opposition party, nominated twelve Gezi gazis as candidates in municipal council elections.8 Online crowdsourcing campaigns to cover Gezi gazis’ prosthesis expenses became firmly established as a counterhegemonic gesture of solidarity with those whose debilities were left outside of the national economy of sacrifice and its financial compensation mechanisms. They would be repeated in 2015 after the deadly Islamic State bomb attacks against Kurdish and socialist activists. If protesters disabled by police violence constituted the political opposition’s gazi avatars, the protofascist pro-government militiamen who stormed the streets with knives, clubs, and machetes in the last days of the Gezi protests were the new gazis of the increasingly authoritarian AKP. In many of the cases of paramilitary violence against protesters, the militia members defended themselves with recourse to their socioeconomic status as small shopkeepers (esnaf ) whose livelihoods were negatively affected by the protests. In a speech he delivered during the court hearing of a murdered protester who was clubbed to death by a group of shopkeepers and police officers working together, President Erdoğan lionized this new shopkeeper/militia/gazi figure. In our civilization, in our national Geist, shopkeepers and artisans are soldiers and fighters when needed. When needed, they are martyrs, gazis, heroes who defend their country. When needed, they are the policeman who maintains order or the judge who secures justice. . . . You cannot underrate a cab driver as a chauffeur. He is the neighborhood’s custodian, elder brother, and watchman. You cannot underrate a grocer or a butcher or a tailor. He is in fact the Geist of the neighborhood. He is the conscience of the street and the neighborhood. When you take off the shopkeeper, nothing is left behind from the history of Turkey.9

Erdoğan’s remarks about gazi-shopkeepers were not throwaway lines but coincided with the formation of pro-government paramilitary groups akin to Egyptian Baltagiyya thugs, such as the Ottoman Hearths (Osmanlı E pi l o gu e

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Ocakları) and the People’s Special Forces (Halk Özel Harekat).10 The way that the state delegated and outsourced violence within this new reconfiguration of sovereignty has an interesting reverberation for Sacrificial Limbs. Within the representational politics of the first three decades of the Kurdish conflict, the disabled veteran was the only publicly visible violently altered body. As sole carrier of this signification, the disabled veteran embodied the state’s jealous sovereign monopoly over both the perpetrator and victim subject positions. With the Gezi Uprising, the perpetrator and victim subject positions that had been united in a single gazi body during the Kurdish conflict began to disintegrate into two separate bodies emblematic of the new Turkey’s form of state sovereignty: the blinded protester and the machetewielding paramilitary. Yet after the 2016 coup attempt, this disaggregation process would be rectified through the unexpected reintegration of victimhood, perpetratorship, and heroism within a single political body.

gazis against soldiers The violence that unfolded during the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, has shaken Turkey’s political culture on many levels, including in the relationships between gender, militarism, and nationalism. Both the brutality of the military against civilians and the collective violence targeting soldierbodies have created deep if transitory fractures in this relationship. On the night of the coup, low-flying military jets terrorized urban centers and the air force targeted the parliament and pro-government security forces, while unarmed civilians confronted and were killed by military troops and tanks. Yet for large sectors of Turkish society, some of the most disturbing spectacles of the coup night were the grotesque scenes of lynching in which surrendered conscripts were whipped and beaten to death by pro-government crowds. Video footage of a beheaded soldier—resonating with both Islamic State beheadings and the beheading of Mustafa Fehmi Kubilay, the iconic martyr of Turkish secularism killed in a Naqshbandi uprising in 1930— added to the shock people felt in the face of the violent defacement of a central gendered national symbol, the soldier-body. The AKP government addressed the ensuing deepening rifts between masculinity, the military, the state, and the nation by resignifying coupist soldiers as “terrorists.” The constant reiteration of the phrase “terrorists in soldier uniforms” evoked a political fantasy in which the coupist soldier-body 180

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was displaced onto the terrorist-body. While the government alleged that these terrorist-soldiers belonged to the “Fethullah Terrorist Organization,” the newly invented name for the US-based Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen’s followers, the mobilization of the terrorism discourse whose primary reference point had been the Kurdish conflict made it possible to subject soldiers to the forms of gendered and sexualized violence that have long been inscribed on Kurdish guerrillas.11 While justifying violence against soldiers, the political fantasy of the terrorist-soldier also shielded the generic soldier-body from defacement in the eyes of AKP supporters. One of the most ironic scenes I spotted during the “democracy feast” celebrations on the streets immediately after the defeat of the coup attempt was a young man dancing deliriously and waving a scarf bearing the words “He is a soldier now.” A familiar nationalist accessory of the farewell ceremonies where young men are sent off to compulsory military service, the scarf provided a powerful lesson about the rekindling of hegemony in the exact moment of its crisis. Attending to the irony of celebrating the failure of a military coup through a militarized object glorifying conscription is crucial to making sense of how the defeat of a coup attempt led to more militarization (and paramilitarization) in the country. Despite the fractures and defacements that the coup night created in the gendered economy of militarism, the religiously inflected masculinist fetishization of the military only intensified in the days following the coup, especially after the declaration of the state of emergency.12 Under the state of emergency rule, militarization was furthered through architectural martyrology that turned cities, especially Istanbul, into necropolises through memorials, such as the 15 July Martyrs Memorial, and renaming practices, such as the renaming of the iconic Bosphorus Bridge as the 15 July Martyrs Bridge. An even greater push for militarization became pronounced in child education. Grotesqueries such as toddlers performing martyrdom by lying in front of cardboard tanks in preschool renditions became ordinary events. Textbooks and educational material showcased children voicing their aspirations to martyrdom. This trend would reach a pinnacle with an internationally criticized televised incident in which President Erdoğan told a sobbing five-year-old in military uniform that she would be draped under a Turkish flag if martyred during a rally to support Turkish military operations in Syria. It was within the political climate of the state of emergency that the government announced that all civilians and security force members injured on E pi l o gu e

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Firefighters praying for the martyrs inside the 15 July Martyrs Memorial. Photo by Sinan Bilgenoğlu.

the night of the coup while resisting coupist soldiers would be eligible for the title of Gazi, regardless of their disability status. Legislated through a stateof-emergency decree, the government’s decision was a sovereign one in that it depended on its authority to suspend the law in a state of emergency.13 In that regard, it was analogous to the conferral of the title on soldiers disabled in clashes against the PKK in the absence of an international military conflict. Yet this time, in the case of the “15 July gazis,” the 40 percent disability rating was not a precondition for becoming a gazi. Among the approximately twenty-five hundred individuals who were given the title, some were policemen who were injured in clashes. Others were civilians who became disabled after being shot by soldiers or losing their limbs when they were overrun by tanks. Apparently, there were even fraudsters within the group, such as a man whose jaw was broken, who was initially lionized for single-handedly stopping five tanks but then was revealed to have been beaten by a relative on the night of the coup attempt. Given that civilians regarded as having helped thwart the coup attempt were granted impunity through another state-of-emergency decree, the new group of gazis also likely included injured perpetrators who had participated in the lynching of soldiers. In a great irony of history, Turkey’s twenty-first-century gazis ended 182

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up being civilians who had resisted and fought against the Turkish military, or at least against one faction within it. The hailing as gazis of those who would have been branded as traitors had the military coup been successful completed one of the most daunting tasks the ruling bloc faced in postcoup Turkey—the restoration of the military’s privileged place in the hegemonic constructions of masculinity and national identity. Yet it also posed new problems. While the 15 July gazis drew their legitimacy from the gazis of the Kurdish conflict by carrying the same title, they also superseded the gazis of the Kurdish conflict as the newly favored sacrificial victim-heroes. Lavished overnight with political attention and luxurious compensations, the new gazis soon eclipsed the old. This led to a mushrooming of publicly voiced grudges among the gazis of the Kurdish conflict and rampant accusations of favoritism and discrimination.14 The escalating tensions between these competing nationalist communities were partly resolved with a national drama that followed the physical assault of two gazis of the Kurdish conflict and their families after a traffic dispute in the capital city of Ankara. The beatings of two veterans, one with paraplegia and another with an orthopedic disability, with brass knuckles in the heart of the capital sent shock waves through every single nationalist public. The incident gave the AKP government a unique opportunity to display its staunch commitment to the militarist nationalism it had just two years ago sought to uproot during the peace negotiations. During their military hospital visit to the assaulted gazis and on multiple other occasions, government representatives underscored that they would never “discriminate between gazis” and that “all those who became gazis for the indivisible unity of the country” were equal.15 These statements were supported by social security amendments intended to partially level the differences in benefits between various gazi groups. Surfing this new nationalist consensus, the newspaper Karar ran a front-page story headlined “Being a gazi cannot be measured in centimeters,” thereby lending a phallic voice to a campaign to grant the status of gazi to the nineteen thousand soldiers injured in the Kurdish conflict and suffering from varying degrees and types of debilities but not currently benefiting from any state assistance because their disability ratings were below 40 percent—the legal threshold for disability pensions and the status of gazi.16 The ostensible reconciliation of these two gazi groups—gazis of the Kurdish conflict and the 15 July gazis—bode well for Erdoğan’s AKP. I have discussed in different parts of this book how the conspiratorial logic that unites different blends of Turkish nationalism reads every single episode of political violence E pi l o gu e

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in the country simply in reference to Western plots to undermine Turkey. In this grand scheme of things, the Kurdish movement and the Gülenists held responsible by the government for the coup attempt, or Öcalan and Gülen themselves for that matter, are nothing but pawns of an imperialist conspiracy that has continued since the Ottoman demise and are therefore easily replaceable, one for the other, in political discourse. Once the AKP, with the help of sacrificial discourses and images, had successfully cast the popular resistance to the coup attempt in terms of this conspiratorial logic, the night of the coup turned into an epic past in which the success of the War of Independence in thwarting Western imperialist plots was reproduced, if not surpassed. This meant that the symbols of the secular nationalist republic could now be harnessed in the service of the Islamist nationalist AKP. The best example of this process became evident during Turkey’s military operation, euphemistically dubbed Operation Olive Branch, against the YPG-controlled Kurdish city of Afrin in Syria, when an AKP parliamentarian prepared a bill that proposed giving President Erdoğan the title of Gazi for “having devoted his entire existence” to the sovereignty of the nation-state and the “survival of the ummah [community of Muslims].” Constructing Erdoğan as the new Atatürk, the Gazi of all gazis, this move was emblematic of the ways in which political violence bent time, recycling it with historical memory. While this book has offered a window onto Turkey’s recent history of political violence through the story of the disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict, it is important to underline that not all the violently altered bodies produced daily through the seemingly endless war within and beyond the country become gazis. Those outside the fold of the nationalist biopolitics of sacrifice continue to struggle for recognition, dignity, and sheer survival. They include Kurdish guerrillas whose disabilities constitute criminal evidence in the eyes of the law, injured Syrian refugees and ex-combatants navigating the thorny fields of Turkish and international humanitarian and welfare regimes, and the survivors of workplace accidents, which have skyrocketed with the AKP’s neoliberal developmentalist ambitions. They also include icons of political resistance like Veli Saçılık, a leftist political prisoner whose left arm was torn off by a bulldozer during the military’s prison raid in 2000, only to be found later in the mouth of a stray dog, and who recently started a sit-in in the heart of Ankara to protest the termination of his job by a state-of-emergency decree, or the Kurdish filmmaker Lisa Çalan, who, after losing both her legs above the knee in an Islamic State bomb attack targeting Kurdish and leftist activists, returned to public squares, dancing on her new robotic prosthetic legs. 184

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These others’ stories, too, will track unexpected trajectories through the shock of violent loss and disability, prosthetic reassemblage of the new bodyself, healing within newly found or forged communities, launches into advocacy and activism, and tumbles into debt and precarity. While theirs may not be stories animated by the nationalist biopolitics around sacrificial limbs of sovereignty, theirs too will pass through complex force fields that make die and let live, make live and let die. These stories are yet to be told.

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preface 1. Le Guin 1974: 386. 2. For anonymity purposes, I use the pseudonyms “official” and “popular” throughout this book for the two associations I attended during my fieldwork. 3. Although the analytical focus of this book is disabled veterans, it is important to note that the latter often coinhabit cultural, institutional, and political zones with “martyrs’ families,” the families of soldiers killed in the armed conflict. 4. Nordstrom and Robben 1995. 5. For the psychic power of the persecutory force of the state, see Aretxaga (2000). 6. Building on Judith Butler’s (2003) insightful remarks on the predication of some communities on loss, Serguei Oushakine (2006) also describes collectivities formed by the mothers of slain Russian soldiers as “communities of loss.” For Oushakine (2009), such communities are symptomatic of the affective landscape of postSoviet Russia, where a shared sense of loss and despair binds citizens to each other and to the nation. 7. These elements are described in detail in chapter 4. 8. Portelli 1998, Plummer 2001. 9. Sontag 2003. 10. Caruth 1996, Scarry 1985. 11. Robinett 2007: 297. 12. Felman and Laub 1992. 13. Caruth 1996: 24. 14. The paradigmatic concept of the gray zone was coined by the Italian Jewish author Primo Levi (1988), a Holocaust survivor himself, to describe the ethical dilemmas of survival, collaboration, and complicity in Nazi concentration camps. Forcefully describing the role of Jewish prisoners in Sonderkommando (special squad) units in the everyday logistics of genocide, Levi presses us to ponder on “zones of ambiguities that radiate(d) out from regimes based on terror and 187

obseqiousness” (58). See Bourgois and Schonberg’s (2009) study of homelessness and drug addiction for a discussion of less extreme cases of gray zones in the contemporary United States. 15. Robben 1996. 16. While coining the term ethnographic betrayal, I am inspired by Visweswaran’s (1994) analysis, which construes betrayal both as something inherent to ethnographic practice and as something that has the potential to disrupt ethnographic authority. 17. For works exploring the coproduction of corporeal otherness, gender and sexual identity, and inequality, see Clare (2015), Hall (2011), Kafer (2013), McRuer (2006), and Puar (2017). 18. For a more detailed discussion of this incident, see White (2014). 19. For a comparable study that describes how an anthropologist working on political violence in the Basque country in Spain was portrayed as a terrorist, see Zulaika (1995). 20. “Şehit Ailelerinden Akademisyenlere Tepki,” İhlas Haber Ajansı, January 15, 2016, www.iha.com.tr/sivas-haberleri/sehit-ailelerinden-akademisyenlere-tepki1281645/ (accessed December 12, 2018). 21. For these points, see Bangstad (2017) and Gusterson (2017). For exceptional studies on Far Right movements, see Ghassem-Fachandi (2012), Holmes (2010), Shoshan (2016), Smith (2013), and Westermeyer (2016). 22. Benedict Anderson (1991) defines “imagined communities” as socially constructed entities that are predicated upon the production of mediatized affinities with strangers. According to Anderson, the nation is a paradigmatic imagined community in the modern era. 23. For differing perspectives on the issue of conversion in ethnographic research, see Harding (2001) and Wacquant (2003).

introduction 1. Because of Islamic beliefs regarding the sanctity of the body, amputated limbs are not simply disposed of as biomedical waste in Turkey. Patients (or their families) are given the amputated limbs, which are then buried in cemeteries of their choice. If the patient refuses to collect, the hospital is required to get permission from the district prosecutor to have the limb buried. Nevertheless, according to life histories I collected, these religio-legal regulations seemed to have been bypassed in emergency amputations for soldiers. My interlocutors had only vague ideas as to the whereabouts of their amputated limbs. 2. While making this argument, I critically build on the works of Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon. In Specters of Marx (2012, originally published in 1993), Derrida suggests a rethinking of history and society in terms of “hauntology” rather than ontology. While ontology prioritizes being and presence, hauntology relies on the figure of the ghost, which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. 188

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For Derrida, a ghost is always a revenant and its appearance is always a return that haunts the social scene. Echoing Derrida in her book Ghostly Matters (2008), Avery Gordon construes the ghost as a sign of a repressed past violence that makes itself known through haunting. “A ghost demands its due, your attention” (xvi), Gordon writes, reminding us that a ghost forces us to recognize the lingering effects of unresolved violence. My work can be seen, on one hand, as a hauntological project that traces the different appearances of sacrificial limbs in contemporary Turkey to attend to the violence of the Kurdish conflict. Yet it is also a critique of hauntology, as it illustrates that ghosts can be harnessed in the service of not only progressive but also nationalist and militarist projects, even as they haunt these projects. 3. Providing a public venue for the discussion of hitherto taboo political subjects, the genre of the debate program emerged as a product of the “incitement to discourse” (Gürbilek 2013) that followed the 1980 military coup in Turkey and became immensely popular after the proliferation of private TV channels in the 1990s. 4. Like Cvetkovich (2012), I use affect in a loose sense that encompasses but is not limited to its Deleuzian conception. For different conceptions of affect that inform this study, see Ahmed (2004), Leys (2011), Massumi (1995), Stewart (2007), Protevi (2009), Puar (2007), and Williams (1977). 5. “Dying for nothing” (boş yere ölmek) is a cynical political comment that is part of a broader popular discourse on the “cheap value of life” in Turkey. Yael NavaroYashin (2002) observes that such everyday cynicism is the main cultural/psychic way through which Turkish citizens relate to the state. 6. David Gerber’s (2000) edited collection on disabled veterans provides an exquisite historical account of this ambivalence in the Euro-American world. For further historical scholarship on disabled veterans, see Bourke (1996), Cohen (2001), Koven (1994), Linker (2011), Poore (2007), and Serlin (2006). 7. Levi 1988. 8. The Kurdish issue is one of the longest-lasting transnational ethnopolitical conflicts in the Middle East. The predicament of the Kurds, who constitute one of the largest ethnic groups in the Middle East with no nation-state of their own, began with the elimination of Kurdish autonomous political structures under the force of Ottoman state centralization. After the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, the territory historically inhabited by Kurds was divided among what would become Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where more than half of the Kurds still live. The Turkish nation-state suppressed Kurdish political demands through repressive measures, including the ban on speaking Kurdish and the official denial of the existence of Kurdish ethnicity, engendering the Kurdish rebellions of the 1930s and the armed resistance led by the PKK in the 1980s. The PKK was founded in the late 1970s as a Marxist-Leninist organization under the influence of anticolonial national liberation movements. In 1984, it declared guerrilla warfare against the Turkish state with the aim of an independent and unified socialist Kurdish state, which it would abandon in the 2000s in favor of some form of Kurdish political autonomy. In the 1990s, the Turkish state launched a No t e s

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counterinsurgency campaign against the PKK. Especially during the height of the conflict in the mid-1990s, disappearances, deaths under torture, and extrajudicial executions became common in the Kurdish region. The scorched-earth techniques employed by the Turkish security forces, including the destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages, resulted in the forced displacement of millions of Kurds. Despite on-and-off negotiations between the Turkish state and the PKK since the 2000s, a peaceful solution to the Kurdish conflict still seems far off. For the emerging body of ethnographic literature on Turkey’s Kurdish conflict, see Açıksöz (2012, 2015, 2016a), Darıcı (2011), Düzel (2018), Günay (2019), Hakyemez (2017), Neyzi and Darıcı (2015), Şengül (2013), Özsoy (2013), and Yıldırım (2019). 9. For works that inform my understanding of experience, see Aretxaga (1997), Bourdieu (1977, 1990), Csordas (1994), Good (1994), Kleinman (1997), MerleauPonty (2002), Scott (1992), and Throop (2003). 10. Ortner (2005) provides a good working definition of subjectivity: “By subjectivity I will mean the ensemble of modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate acting subjects. But I always mean as well the cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke those modes of affect, thought and so on” (31). 11. Stone 1989. 12. Gerber 2000, Gutmann and Lutz 2010, Tidy 2015. 13. Donahue and Spiro 2007. 14. Cohen 2001, Poore 2007. 15. Dix 1920. The painting was displayed in the Nazi Party’s 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Munich with the caption “Slander against the German Heroes of the World War.” Since then it’s been missing and is believed to have been destroyed by the Nazis. A print of the painting survives. 16. Sasson-Levy 2003. 17. Disability is not a generic category, and different kinds of impairment and debility have different gendered implications, both in terms of the ways they are phenomenologically experienced and socioculturally constructed. When I talk about disabled veterans (gazis) of the Kurdish conflict, I am not referring to any conscript who incurs a disability while deployed. Not all impairments and debilities qualify one for gazi status. For example, posttraumatic stress disorder or other diagnostic categories of war trauma are not listed among the disability criteria in military-medical classification manuals (for genealogies of trauma in Turkey, see Açıksöz 2015, Dole 2015). In order to be eligible, one has to have a 40 percent physical disability rating. Within the labyrinthine matrix of the Turkish military-medical and welfare institutions, and especially given the heavy use of antipersonnel land mines during the height of the conflict in the mid-1990s, when most of my interlocutors were injured, disability often, but certainly not always, refers to traumatic limb loss. 18. For the concept of “social suffering,” see Kleinman et al. (1997). 19. In works that focus on the experiences and representations of disabled men, there is a recurring assumption that disability feminizes them. This is not entirely surprising given the many parallels “between the social meanings attributed to female 190

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bodies and those assigned to disabled bodies,” as Rosemarie Garland Thomson puts it (1996: 19). Yet such equations between disabilization and feminization reinforce the idea that masculinity and femininity are fixed and monolithic oppositional categories of being, rather than fluid, multiple, and contradictory processes of becoming. To avoid such binary understandings of gender, I pose the relationship between gender and disability as a problematic, which I try to address through an ethnographic scrutiny of the materialization and lived experience of gender in disabled male bodies. 20. The cult of bodily relics is not as pronounced in Islam as it is in Christianity, and human remains are often considered impure in Islamicate contexts (Meri 2010). The two historical exceptions are the relics of the Prophet Muhammad, which are kept in Istanbul, and martyrs’ bodies, which are cherished as inviolable. Although it concerns the sublimated idea and not actual material body parts, the current nationalist fascination with veterans’ (“living martyrs’ ”) lost limbs is informed by this Islamic legacy. 21. See the discussion of the three bodies in Lock and Scheper-Hughes (1987). 22. The rapid transmutations of Turkish nationalism and, more broadly, of the Turkish political scene in the twenty-first century make it unusually hard to use political terms like ultranationalism unproblematically. In my use, the term does not refer to an extremist deviation from a healthy form of nationalism, as all the elements of ultranationalism described here are already part of the larger nationalist repertoire espoused by the Turkish state. I use the term as shorthand for a novel nationalist political movement in 2000s Turkey. In this period, previously antagonistic political groups, such as right-wing fascists and left-wing neo-nationalists (ulusalcılar), organized together around a decentered reactionary bloc against Turkey’s EU membership, democratization, and minority rights as a response to the destabilization of the Turkish political structure through US Middle East policies and the processes of globalization and EU harmonization. In the late 2000s, some prominent members of this loose coalition, popularly known as the Red Apple Coalition, were later put on trial on charges of leading the alleged clandestine criminal organization Ergenekon, whose ostensible mission was to overthrow the AKP government through a coup d’état in order to steer Turkey away from the West and toward Eurasia (Russia and China). After the mid-2010s, however, important segments of this ultranationalist coalition have been aligned with the AKP government in a nationalist or rather “neo-fascist” (Tuğal 2016) front. 23. Recent anthropological scholarship on sovereignty by Agamben (1998), Mbembe (2003, 2005), and Navaro-Yashin (2012) suggests the need to shift “the ground for our understanding of sovereignty from issues of territory and external recognition by states, toward issues of internal constitution of sovereign power within states,” as Hansen and Stepputat (2005: 2) have aptly noted. This approach reconceptualizes sovereignty as a precarious effect of a state that seeks to create itself as sovereign “in the face of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed, and unpredictable configurations of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate violence in a territory” (3). 24. Mbembe 2003. 25. Agamben 1998. No t e s

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26. Foucault 1990. 27. For the necropolitics around Kurdish fighters’ dead bodies, see Bargu (2016), Glastonbury (2015), Özsoy (2010), and Sandal (2015). 28. Agamben 1998: 74. 29. Taussig-Rubbo 2009: 84. Taussig-Rubbo provides an analysis of US officials’ efforts to neutralize the language and imagery of sacrifice. For a discussion of how sacrificial discourses can be mobilized to resist the state’s military claim over citizens’ bodies in Israel, see Weiss (2014). 30. Das 1995. 31. I analyze this process in the epilogue. 32. Williams 1977. 33. The Öcalan trial, which I discuss in detail in chapter 5, facilitates an especially interesting discussion of the possibilities and limits of Agamben’s concept of homo sacer. It is theoretically tempting to interpret the state’s backing up from the execution of Öcalan’s death sentence as a confirmation of his homo sacer status. Nevertheless, I believe that Agamben’s (1998) observation in Homo Sacer of the symmetry between the bodies of the sovereign and the homo sacer in terms of their “unsacrificeability according to the forms prescribed by the rite of the law” (102) provides a more interesting line of thinking. The vilification of Öcalan in state discourse has been countered by the reimagination of his body as the locus of a charismatic authority that anchors an alternative Kurdish sovereignty; the more homo sacerized he was, the more sanctified his body became for the Kurdish movement. 34. Girard 1977. 35. For Girard (1977), sacrifice is the foundation of society and religion. In a rather conservative, Durkheimian argument, Girard sees in sacrificial violence a restoration of order and a rupture from undifferentiated forms of violence that ravage the social fabric prior to the purifying violence of sacrifice. In line with Allen Feldman’s (1991) critique of Girard, I show that rather than ending political violence, the political form of sacrifice facilitates its proliferation by being itself subjected to mimetic repetition. 36. Hubert and Mauss 1964. 37. This ambiguity of the sacred is precisely what Agamben rejects in his antisacrificial theory of sovereignty. For a similar argument, see Chow (2006). 38. The first article of the Turkish constitution dated 1982 defines state sovereignty as “indivisible unity of the Turkish state with its territory and nation.” Antiterror laws define terrorism as an activity aimed at “damaging the indivisible unity of the state with its territory and nation” (Tambar 2014).

chapter one 1. Naming is a controversial matter, particularly in the context of ethnonationalist conflict. The Region (Bölge) is a deliberately ambiguous term, used officially as an abbreviation for the term Southeastern Anatolia Region (Güneydoğu Anadolu 192

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Bölgesi), one of the seven regions designated by nationalist-modernist geographic discourse in Turkey. In leftist and Kurdish circles, the term has also been used as an allusion to the long-banned term Kürdistan, originally the name of an administrative district of the Ottoman Empire and later transmuted to that of the imagined Kurdish homeland. 2. Feldman 1991: 27. 3. Bulloch and Morris 1992. 4. Village guards (köy korucuları) are local Kurdish paramilitaries armed and paid by the state to fight the PKK. 5. For a discussion of social banditry as a preindustrial form of class resistance in frontier societies, see Hobsbawm (1981). 6. Touristic activities were allowed on Mount Ararat (Ağrı) after 2002, only to be banned again in 2015. The state’s promises of opening up the Gabar and Cudi mountains to tourism first in 2013 and again in 2017 have never been realized. For an experimental autoethnographic work that creates an uncanny effect by describing the Region through the genre of the travel guidebook, see Üstündağ (2012). 7. For an analysis of the ways in which soldiers’ mothers’ narratives are informed by this modernist discourse, see Kaptan (2017). 8. According to the sociologist Mesut Yeğen (1999), these tropes on backwardness exemplify discursive strategies within Turkish textual officialdom designed to avoid addressing the question of Kurdish identity as an ethnopolitical issue and are hence constitutive of the entrenched silence on the Kurdishness of the Kurdish question. 9. For an analysis of mountains as spaces of Kurdish utopia, see Düzel (2016). 10. Gürsel 1996. 11. Çiyayî 2002, Harun 2002. 12. Gürsel 1996. 13. The Dersim Rebellion (1937–38) provides one of the most interesting cases of this intertwinement of symbolic and physical violence and its relation to gender. Altınay (2004) notes that Sabiha Gökçen, the adopted daughter of Atatürk, became the world’s first woman combat pilot by bombing the mountainous Dersim province approximately one year after a law changed the name of Dersim to Tunceli. 14. Foucault 1990. 15. Mbembe 2003. 16. Just before the onset of counterinsurgency proper in 1992, the minister of justice, Seyfi Oktay, put this fantasy into words for the parliament: “To imagine that there is a place beyond the state’s reach within the borders of our country is to slander the Turkish state. There cannot be a place within our borders where the Turkish State cannot reach, cannot penetrate. It is out of the question.” Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi (Grand National Assembly of Turkey), “T. B. M. M. Tutanak Dergisi, 50’inci Birleşim,” March 14, 1992, www.tbmm.gov.tr/tutanaklar/TUTANAK /TBMM/d19/c006/b050/tbmm190060500250.pdf. 17. I coin the term being-on-the-mountains to conceptualize conscripted soldiers’ collective experiences of counterinsurgency. The concept is informed by Heidegger’s No t e s

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(1996) phenomenological analysis of the everyday mode of existence he termed Dasein, Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) conceptualization of the lived experience of the embodied subject, Foucault’s (1979, 1990) theorization of the body as the material site for the inscription and exercise of power, and Deleuze and Guattari’s (2002) emphasis on the immanent possibilities of becomings in relation to life and the body. 18. See, for example, the Turkish blockbuster films Nefes: Vatan Sağolsun (Semerci 2009) and Dağ (Çağlar 2012). 19. The famous Sufi poet Rumi described his death as a “nuptial night.” Today, this phrase is popularly used in reference to conscripted soldiers. 20. “Gabar Dağı Cudi Dağı Şiiri—Mustafa Ayar,” Antoloji.com, www.antoloji .com/gabar-dagi-cudi-dagi-siiri/ (accessed February 10, 2019). 21. Coffey 2007: 28. 22. Kundakçı 2005. 23. Gürbüz and Sevmiş 1993. 24. In his memoir, the journalist Macit Gürbüz (2004), who covered Operation Hedgehog for the newspaper Milliyet, describes this moment, and more broadly the production of state propaganda journalism, in candid detail. For the historical continuities in the propagandistic media coverage of the Kurdish conflict, see Aktan (2012). 25. Agamben 1998. 26. See Khalili (2012) for historical continuities in counterinsurgency practices. 27. Kundakçı 2005, Pamukoğlu 2004. 28. Pamukoğlu 2004. 29. Deleuze and Guattari 2002. 30. Gürsel 1996. 31. Goldberg and Willse 2007: 276. 32. For insight into the mechanisms by which soldiers’ mimetic faculty in becoming-guerrilla produces embodied copies of guerrilla-bodies while still maintaining the otherness of guerrillas, see Taussig’s (1993) work on the constitutive conjunction of mimesis and alterity in the slippery construction of identity and Girard’s (1977) analysis of how mimetic desire for what the other has sets up a rivalry between self and other that triggers exchanges of violence in which the imitator and the imitated become monstrous doubles of each other. 33. Appadurai 2006: 5. 34. Appadurai 2006: 89. 35. Appadurai 1998, Malkki 1995. 36. Feldman 1991: 64. 37. Şengül 2014. 38. The Turkish word for circumcision, sünnet, derives from Sunnah, the body of Islamic practice based on Muhammad’s words and deeds, and implies moral alignment with the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Note that compulsory military service is often referred to as the peygamber ocağı (hearth of the prophet) in state discourse. 194

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39. Jeganathan 2000. 40. Abu-Lughod 1986, Gilmore 1987. 41. Kotcheff 1982. 42. The PKK has quite a large number of female guerrillas who are organized under the semiautonomous PAJK (Kurdistan Women’s Freedom Party, Partiya Azadiya Jin a Kurdistan). Yet, as in other parts of the world (Aretxaga 1997), their voices are often silenced within mainstream representational politics. For a feminist anthropological account of the Kurdish female guerrillas’ militancy, see Düzel (2018). 43. The trope of gender inversion in the figure of the Kurdish female fighter can be traced back to the early republican novels of the 1920s and ’30s. Dağları Bekleyen Kız (The Girl Who Watches the Mountains), a novel first published in 1927 in the midst of bloody Kurdish rebellions by a fervent Turkish nationalist writer of Kurdish origin, Esat Mahmut Karakurt (1954), narrates the story of the Turkish war pilot Adnan, who valiantly fights against Kurdish rebels led by a sheikh. Adnan quickly spots a young Kurdish woman fighter who, unlike the other “brigands” who are afraid of planes, bravely and skillfully fires at Turkish warplanes. Karakurt writes through the hostile voice of Adnan, “I clashed exactly six times with this savage whore. The damned broad below the rocks knows how to use the mitrailleuse so well. I may have used up a thousand tons of bombs to crush the head of this female snake! I used up an armful of mitrailleuse ammunition. I have moved mountains and rocks, yet I still haven’t been able to kill the broad” (22). Both in my interlocutors’ accounts of war and in Karakurt’s novel, the Kurdish woman fighter is constructed as a skilled sharpshooter and a daring enemy who stands out amid her craven male companions. In both cases, the dramatic function of the trope of gender inversion is utilized so as to establish utter alterity through the gendering of Kurds with inverse gendered attributes. The analogous juxtapositions of demasculinized Kurdish men with the masculinized Kurdish guerrilla/ rebel woman in these two periods of ethnically informed state violence and popular rebellion draw our attention to the historical continuities in Turkish nationalist discourse. Yet a closer look at the attachments and disattachments of the owners of the (narrative) gaze—today’s conscripted soldier and Karakurt’s military pilot Adnan— to the masculinized Kurdish female illustrates the historical specificity of the woman guerrilla figure. Adnan meets and later falls in love with the Kurdish rebel girl, Zeynep, whom the reader soon learns is the well-educated daughter of the dissident Kurdish sheikh. Through their romantic love and sexual intimacy, Zeynep renounces all of her previous belongings and is incorporated into the Turkish nationalist community as a confessor. In Karakurt’s novel, the intra-ethnic love story between the Turkish soldier and the Kurdish rebel girl becomes an allegory of conversion and assimilation. In my interlocutors’ accounts, however, there is no such libidinal investment in assimilation. 44. Benjamin 1999. 45. Buck-Morss 1989. No t e s

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46. For a theorization of why experiences of the uncanny occur in contexts of sensory deprivation, see Levy (1975). 47. Benjamin 1972, Krauss 1994. 48. Lacan 2004. 49. For an elaboration on warnings in a comparable cultural context in Greece, see Seremetakis (1991). 50. For the sublime and mundane pleasures of smoking, see Stern (1999) and Klein (1993). 51. Stewart 2007. 52. MacLeish 2013: 15. 53. Summerfield 1999. 54. American Psychiatric Association 2013. 55. Stewart 2007: 79.

chapter two 1. Universal military conscription as a gendered condition of citizenship was first adopted by the modern French nation-state, soon followed by other centralizing states in Europe and beyond. Seeking a military recipe to save the crumbling empire, the Ottomans were quick to jump on the bandwagon. But their attempts at institutionalizing universal conscription, especially in a polity traditionally organized along confessional lines, were largely unsuccessful (Ágoston and Masters 2010, Zürcher 1998). Although the first conscription took place as early as 1848 within the context of the broader transformation of Ottoman imperial sovereignty, lack of comprehensive censuses and administrative infrastructure and privileges enjoyed by certain segments of the Ottoman polity (non-Muslims, civil servants, religious school students, and certain Muslim town dwellers) proved to be insurmountable obstacles standing in the way of universal conscription. 2. For the concept of sexual contract, see Pateman (1988). 3. Altınay 2004, Şen 1996. 4. Koğacıoğlu 2004, Sirman 2005. 5. The Turkish military medical establishment “scientifically” justifies its exclusion of gay men by strategically using the outdated second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—DSM II (American Psychiatric Association 1968), which defines homosexuality as a psychosexual disorder. Homosexuality was gradually demedicalized in the following editions of the DSM. See Başaran (2014) and Biricik (2008) for succinct analyses of the heteronormative frameworks that underpin Turkish military psychiatry and young gay men’s coping and resistance strategies. 6. McRuer 2006. 7. Sinclair-Webb 2000. 8. Here, I build on the concept of crip nationalism as articulated by Markotić and McRuer (2012) and Puar (2017). 196

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9. For works that examine military service as a masculine rite of passage in similar contexts, see Gill (1997) (Bolivia) and Kaplan (2000) (Israel). 10. Graeber 2011. 11. “Askerlik Çağında ‘Birikmiş’ 5.5 Milyon,” Bianet: Bağımsız İletişim Ağı, www.bianet.org/bianet/vicdani-ret/197836-askerlik-caginda-birikmis-5–5-milyon (accessed February 11, 2019). 12. For studies of conscientious objection in Turkey, see Alkan and Zeybek (2014), Evren (2012), and Çınar and Üsterci (2009). For Islamist conscientious objectors, see Kemerli (2015). 13. According to Althusser (2001), ideology operates by interpellating or hailing individuals as subjects. 14. Notwithstanding the burgeoning of a Western-style urban gay culture (Özbay 2010, Özyeğin 2015), same-sex sexual practices are often differentiated into penetrative-centered active/masculine (aktif ) and passive/feminine (pasif ) modalities in Turkey (Bereket and Adam 2008, Tapınç 2002). Military physicians’ understandings of homosexuality are very much informed by this local sexual epistemology (Başaran 2014). In addition to psychological tests, gay conscripts requesting exemption are regularly subjected to rectal exams and even asked to provide photos depicting sexual intercourse in which the conscript can be seen as the passive partner. A 2010-dated article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, titled “Porn for the General” (Popp 2010), brought this military-medical incitement to the production of photographic evidence of sexual orientation to international attention by controversially describing it as a state-owned porn archive. 15. Here, I would like to dwell on the notion of a “masculinity crisis.” Disabled veterans are not the only men who have experienced a crisis in the gendered order of things in Turkey. Historical transformations of the last decade, such as neoliberal economic restructuring and the rise of feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, to give only two examples that resonate deeply with the Turkish case, have broken down some of the socio-structural adjustments of traditional heteropatriarchy. Since the mid1980s, feminist groups have campaigned against legally endorsed patriarchal rights in Turkey, such as penal codes encouraging honor killings or the state’s unwillingness to legally interfere in domestic violence cases because they occur in the private sphere. However, it was the EU harmonization process that pushed the state to finally “clean” the civil code of patriarchal rights and gendered references and propelled the ongoing nationwide campaign against domestic violence. In short, the last decade has witnessed the state’s dissolution of the gendered entitlements that it had traditionally provided for its male citizens. The disestablishment of the patriarchal contract, coupled with the neoliberal retreat of the state from its promise of breadwinner status for men, manifests itself as a broader crisis of the particular mode of masculine sovereignty that served as the basis of the patriarchal contract in Turkey. Such challenges against experiences of masculine privilege are central to the galloping sense of “aggrieved entitlement” that steers reassertions of masculinity through violence (Kalish and Kimmel 2010), as reflected in the increased rates of the gender-based violence that is central to the neoconservative project of masculinist restoration (Kandiyoti 2016, Korkman 2016). No t e s

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Yet scholars of critical masculinity studies have also warned us against the unproblematic acceptance of the cultural discourses of masculinity in crisis (Connell 1995, Messner 1997). Connell (1995: 84) objects to the use of the term crisis of masculinity on the grounds that it presupposes a coherent system of some kind, which masculinity is not, but instead offers “gender order in crisis.” But gender is always already in crisis, as Butler (2011b) reminds us. Crisis is structured into gender because of gender’s unstable and iterative nature. “The radical and fundamental instability within the masculine” (Buchbinder 2012: 16) becomes especially visible in contexts where Herzfeld’s (1988) “performative excellence” is highly pronounced. This is the case in Turkey, where modern discourses of troubled masculinity, such as the trope of the over-Westernized effeminate dandy, are as old as the Ottoman novel and literary modernization. Thus, vernacular discourses on the crisis of masculinity can be read as symptoms of multiple historical processes that may serve multiple sociopolitical ends. Such discourses are often examples of what Berlant (1997) calls the scandal of ex-privilege, whereby normative subjects tell their stories of loss so as to articulate a patriarchal right-wing nostalgia for the idyllic, precrisis normative scene. But as Ali (2003) argues, they can also operate as an implicit political critique of the structural violence of neoliberalism or, as we see in Amar (2011), can be deployed by NGOs and security states to police, depoliticize, and racialize emergent political subjects. Therefore, any structural analysis of a masculinity crisis has to simultaneously entail the examination of the performative dimension of utterances of troubled masculinity—that is to say, what discourses of masculinity in crisis do and what people do with them. 16. For gendered life-course perspectives in the field of anthropology of disability, see Ginsburg and Rapp (2013). 17. For anthropological perspectives on the narrative construction of chronic illness and disability, see Good (1994), Good and DelVecchio Good (1994), Kleinman (1988), Mattingly (1998), and Mattingly and Garro (2000). 18. Yılmaz 2011. 19. The pace and scope of the changes in disability governance in this era are unprecedented. Constructing the disabled population as an object of state knowledge, while also responding to the need for statistics required by the EU harmonization reforms (Silverstein 2018), the first nationwide disability survey was conducted in 2002 (Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Administration for Disabled People 2002). The Turkish Disability Act of 2006 was passed while I was in the field, followed by the introduction of other legal reforms, classification systems, and welfare and social assistance programs. When I attended the World Disability Report Launch Event in 2012, the minister of family and social policy passionately articulated this governmentalizing drive in a “crip nationalist” (Markotić and McRuer 2012) developmental agenda: “Turkey’s progress no longer depends on the ablebodied, strong male body. . . . We will include whichever organ is functional in our economic growth efforts.” For Turkey’s changing disability politics, see Açıksöz (2015), Bezmez (2013), Bezmez and Bulut (2016), Bezmez and Yardımcı (2010), Evren (2012), and Yılmaz (2011). 198

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20. Friedner 2017. 21. Sakat is one of several Turkish words for “disabled,” which also include özürlü (invalid or handicapped), engelli (disabled), sakat (impaired, disabled, or crippled), and malul (impaired or disabled). Özürlü is now regarded as offensive. Engelli is considered the politically correct term, though the term sakat, which has a wide range of meaning, is also claimed by disability activists. The adjective that is officially used for disabled veterans is malul, a rather antiquated word that lives in the state’s welfare jargon. Unless the ethnographic context demands otherwise, such as instances where I want to stress the derogatory or pejorative nature of an utterance or the use of technical, medico-legal language, I use disabled throughout the text. 22. Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Administration for Disabled People, “How Society Perceives Persons with Disabilities,” 2009, www.ozida.gov.tr/ENG /?menu = data_bank&sayfa = projects. 23. “Halkının yüzde 70’i engelli komşu istemiyor,” Radikal, www.radikal.com .tr/turkiye/halkinin_yuzde_70i_engelli_komsu_istemiyor-1093058/ (accessed February 11, 2019). 24. Gerber 2000. 25. Taussig 1999. 26. Taussig 1991. 27. Mater 1999. 28. Berlant 2008. 29. In the late-1990s, the concept of Southeast Syndrome, which was modeled after the short-lived psychiatric category of Post-Vietnam Syndrome, became increasingly popular in the media and captured the political imagination by building on the stereotype of the crazy veteran. Yet PTSD has never become an officially accepted disability criterion in the Turkish military medical/welfare complex. For an analysis of the historical genealogy and politics of Southeast Syndrome, and the larger terrain of the militarized politics of trauma in Turkey, see Açıksöz (2015). 30. Kaplan 2006: 180. 31. Bora 1995. 32. This pendulum of nationalist political moods was once again in play during my fieldwork. Right around the time of the rise of the nationalist sentiments of crisis and emergency due to the resumed armed conflict in 2006, an obscure Turkish company announced the scientific discovery of the millennium during a press conference that was attended by large numbers of high-ranked military generals, judiciary members, and bureaucrats. The mysterious device (erke dönergeci) that the company presented was said to produce cold-fusion-like infinite energy that would end oil wars and eliminate the energy dependency of Turkey. The press conference created a fleeting moment of millenarian excitement in the official disabled veteran association I attended. 33. Bora 2003. 34. Bora and Can 1999. 35. Özyürek 2004. 36. Özyürek 2004. No t e s

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37. Özyürek 2004. 38. Bora 2003, Kozanoğlu 1997. 39. Altınay 2004. 40. Feldman 1991. 41. For works the 1990s nationalist public culture in Turkey, see Navaro-Yashin (2002) and Özyürek (2006). 42. For a historical genealogy of the Gazi title, see Açıksöz (2012). 43. I trace the political symbolism of the gazi in detail in chapter 3. 44. For an exploration of a very different constellation of sacrifice and abandonment, see Bargu’s (2014) work on the death strikes of leftist political prisoners. 45. Açıksöz 2016a. 46. Açıksöz 2016a. 47. Abla (elder sister) and ana (mother) are the main kinship terms that disabled veterans use to relate to respected female figures. These terms forge militarized intimacies, as well as respect, distance, deference, and hierarchy. For the use of fictive kinship terms and mechanisms in social, economic, and political relations in Turkey, see Isik (2010), Şengül (2014), Sirman (2004), and White (2004). 48. Throsby and Gill 2004: 336. 49. In 2010, the newspaper Hürriyet published a series of interviews that journalist Ayşe Arman (2010a, 2010b, 2010c) conducted with veterans with paraplegia, their spouses, and obstetricians who specialized in working with paraplegic veterans. Titled “Interrupted Lives,” the series provided the very first public accounts of Turkish disabled veterans’ sexual and reproductive lives. As I have noted elsewhere (Açıksöz 2016a), the gendered anxieties voiced by Arman’s interviewees demonstrate the volatile nature of technoscientific masculinization that new reproductive technologies enable. Writing in the context of Egypt and Lebanon, Marcia Inhorn (2004) observes a similar volatility: “Infertile men also worried about the stigma that might surround the child if its ‘test tube origins’ were revealed, due to the popular societal assumption that an [in vitro fertilization] baby might be the product of donor gametes” (175). Inhorn concludes that the stigma and secrecy surrounding male infertility are compounded by the “technological stigma” of the assisted reproduction itself; not only male fertility but also the very technologies designed to overcome it are seen as potentially emasculating and stigmatized. For men with paraplegia, the situation is even more complex than Inhorn describes, since there is no secrecy surrounding their presumed infertility. On the contrary, even if their partners become pregnant in a technoscientifically unmediated way, paraplegic men’s sexual and reproductive capacities and their masculinities are always already under question. Nevertheless, the meanings and social status attached to paternity and fatherhood allow paraplegic veterans to perform adult heteronormative masculinity and inhabit a respected social space (Açıksöz 2016a). 50. The notion of governmentality is a part of Michel Foucault’s broader scholarly attempt to reconceptualize power as not simply a repressive but a productive relationship that operates not only at the level of the state but also at the micro-levels 200

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of society that are not often associated with power, such as forms of knowledge and expertise or institutions like schools and hospitals (Foucault 1990, 2003, 2007, 2008). Ewing (2008: 6) notes that in Foucault’s work, governmentality refers to “an array of practices through which the population of a modern nation-state is governed, including institutions such as schools and the police, agencies for the provision of social services, discourses, norms, and even individual self-regulation through techniques for disciplining and caring for the self. These forms of governmentality encompass more than what might formally be called ‘the state.’ ” In other words, governmentality cannot be reduced to the activities of the state because, as Inda (2005: 6) argues, it “involves a multitude of heterogenous entities” that seek to “enhance the security, longevity, health, prosperity, and happiness of populations.” 51. Foucault 1979, Goffman 1961. 52. MacLeod 1995, Willis 1981. 53. Yücel 2005. 54. For example, right after the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007 by a seventeen-year-old ultranationalist assassin, the largest professional medical organizations in the nation, including the Turkish Medical Association, the Psychiatric Association of Turkey, and the Turkish Psychological Association, issued a joint press release against the most famous mafia serial, Valley of the Wolves, on the grounds that it incited and glorified xenophobic violence. 55. Sınav 1998. 56. Sınav 2001. 57. Sınav 2003. 58. The serials included the original Valley of the Wolves (2003–5), Valley of the Wolves: Terror (2007), and Valley of the Wolves: Ambush (2007–16). The blockbuster films were Valley of the Wolves: Iraq (2006), Muro: Damn the Humanist Inside (2008), Valley of the Wolves: Gladio (2009), Valley of the Wolves: Palestine (2011), and Valley of the Wolves: Homeland (2017). The franchise has circulated and made an impact beyond Turkey, creating an uproar in Germany because of its anti-Semitic content and becoming especially popular in the Arab Middle East because of its explicit stance against the US occupation of Iraq and the Israeli blockade on Gaza. For the reception of the franchise in the Arab world and its place in Turkey’s neoOttoman foreign policy, see Kraidy and Al-Ghazzi (2013). 59. Dalkıran 2008. 60. Although all disabled veterans I met followed Valley of the Wolves, their reception of the violent and masculine heroism of the protagonist Polat Alemdar varied. Some mimetically identified with Alemdar, comparing their ultranationalist activism with his political pursuits, while others frowned on his macho bravado, saying things like “It’s easy to be a hero on the screen. I would want to see Polat on the mountains.” 61. The 2003-dated original slogan of Valley of the Wolves, “This is a mafia series,” was changed to “This is a mafia and deep state series” in 2007. 62. Carney 2018. No t e s

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63. For works that inform my understanding of hyperreality, see Baudrillard (1994) and Žižek (2002). 64. I describe this political gathering in detail in chapter 4. 65. See, for example, the Posta news article titled “One More Prophesy by Valley of the Wolves.” Hundreds of similar news pieces have circulated in the national media since the beginning of the franchise. “Bir Vadi Kehaneti Daha Mı?” Posta, www.posta.com.tr/bir-vadi-kehaneti-daha-mi-98852 (accessed February 11, 2019). 66. When the production company trademarked the title “Valley of the Wolves: The Coup” just few months before the real coup attempt in July 2016, there were widespread rumors that the producers knew about, or even were involved in, the coup plot. These rumors led a prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation against the producers using conspiracy-theory-driven charges that were very much informed by the show’s simulacrum effect and the ultranationalist political imagination it disseminated. See Carney (2018) for further discussion of this and other examples of the “post-truth” politics of Valley of the Wolves. 67. Akgün and Şentürk 2007. 68. Abu-Lughod 1986. 69. I discuss this process in detail in chapter 5.

chapter three 1. Gerber 1994. 2. Law no. 4417 was accepted on July 23, 1999. For the parliamentary proceedings, see Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi (Grand National Assembly of Turkey), “T. B. M. M. Tutanak Dergisi, 50’inci Birleşim,” March 14, 1992, www.tbmm.gov.tr /tutanaklar/TUTANAK/TBMM/d19/c006/b050/tbmm190060500250.pdf. 3. “The indivisible unity of the Turkish state with its territory and nation” is how state sovereignty is defined in the current Turkish constitution, dated 1982. 4. Tekin 2001. 5. Baer 2008. 6. Melikoff 2008, Tekin 2001. 7. In Ottoman historiography, argues Anooshar (2009: 7), the study of gaza and gazis “has been tangential to a broader debate regarding the origins of the House of Osman,” the founder of the Ottoman (Osmanlı) Empire. After Wittek’s (2012 [1966]) suggestion that early Ottomans saw themselves as gazis and were driven by a religiously orthodox notion of gaza, one of the major debates in the field has concerned the role that the ideology of gaza played in the formation of the empire (İnalcık 1980, Lindner 1983, Kafadar 1995, Darling 2000). The proponents of Wittek’s gazi thesis scarcely had any historical hard evidence, other than an inscription from 1337 that ascribed the titles of “Sultan, son of the Sultan of the Gazis, Gazi son of Gazi . . . march lord of the horizons, hero of the world” to Orhan, the second ruler of the Ottoman dynasty. Today, it is widely accepted among nonnationalist historians that the inscription was the product of a later renovation. 202

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Most historians today are skeptical toward the argument that the early Ottomans were solely motivated by religious zeal and devotion, and many criticize Wittek for mistaking gaza for holy war and ignoring this-worldly motivations. As Darling (2000: 135) puts it, “The heterogeneous nature of Ottoman armies and alliances, mixing Christians with Muslims and often directed against co-religionists, their focus on booty and territorial expansion rather than conversion, and elements of unorthodoxy or even shamanism in Ottoman religious practice argue against literal readings of the portrayal of the early Ottomans as Islamic holy warriors.” Anooshahr (2009: 7) has recently proposed an understanding of Ottomans as gazis, “but with a flexible frontier air.” As Darling (2000: 137) points out, “The struggle for Islam did not preclude cooperation and intermarriage with non-Muslims, religious syncretism, or this-worldly motivations.” 8. Wittek 2012: 14. 9. Kafadar 1995, Darling 2000, Dedes 1996. 10. Darling 2000. 11. Dedes 1996. 12. Dedes 1996: 1. 13. Dedes 1996: 127. 14. Bryant 2002: 517. 15. Ahmad 1993: 64. 16. Ahmad 1993. 17. Kaplan 2002: 117. 18. Mardin 1969, 1989. 19. Biernatzki 1991: 51. 20. Mardin 1989. 21. Mardin 1969. 22. Yılmaz 1971. 23. Baytan 1972. 24. Baytan 1973. 25. Baytan 1974. 26. Mardin 1989: 4. 27. Delaney 1991. 28. Yavuz 1997. 29. Kaplan 2006. 30. During my fieldwork, I witnessed several instances when this delicate balance was shown to be susceptible to perturbations. When I first visited the official association for martyrs’ families and disabled veterans in 2005, the secularist head of the association, a martyr’s widow, took on the role of a lecturer and explained the notions of gazi and martyr to me. “You are preparing this project for America. So you have to carefully define them. Look, every country has gazis and martyrs. But a Frenchman does not become a gazi or a martyr. A Turk does. You see, they have Islamic roots.” However, it took less than a second for her to change her mind. “Don’t mention Islam at all. Just say that whoever dies while defending the state and the nation of the Turkish Republic is a martyr and whoever becomes disabled is a gazi.” This No t e s

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comment startled a disabled veteran missing an arm, who was silently listening to our conversation. “So,” he impatiently interrupted, “If [Marco] Aurélio [a naturalized Brazilian football player in Turkey and a Christian] is conscripted and becomes disabled, is he going to be a gazi too?” Another disabled veteran also missing an arm took a turn: “What does it have to do with that? If he loses his arm of course he becomes a gazi.” Puzzled but stubborn, the first disabled veteran replied after a moment of hesitation: “Yeah, OK. . . . He gets the title of Gazi, but he doesn’t become one.” 31. I discuss this development in more detail in chapter 5. 32. “Diyanet İşleri’nden ‘Şehitlik Ve Gazilik’ Konulu Cuma Hutbesi,” Milliyet Haber, www.milliyet.com.tr/diyanet-isleri-nden-sehitlik-ve-gazilik-ankara-yerelhaber2729151/ (accessed February 11, 2019). 33. T. C. Hatay Valiliği İl Müftülüğü, “2011 Eylül Ekim Hutbeleri,” September 2, 2011, www.hataymuftulugu.gov.tr/downloads.php?cat_id = 2&download_id = 7 (accessed on November 21, 2012). 34. “Şehitlerin yaralarının kanaması ne demektir?” Sorularla İslamiyet, https:// sorularlaislamiyet.com/sehitlerin-yaralarinin-kanamasi-ne-demektir (accessed February 11, 2019). 35. Search the term kınalı kuzu on the TDK site: www.tdk.gov.tr/. 36. Kaplan 2006. 37. Some versions of the same story have gone by the names of “Kınalı Hasan” and “Kınalı Ali.” It is noteworthy that Ali and Hasan are the names of the fourth caliph of Islam and his son, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, whose violent and tragic deaths are still mourned especially, but not exclusively, by Shia Muslims. 38. Hubert and Mauss 1964. 39. For feminist scholarship on the heteropatriarchal politics of virginity and female sexual honor (namus), see Koğacıoğlu (2004), Özyeğin (2009), and Parla (2001). 40. Hubert and Mauss 1964: 97. 41. For a study on disability in Arab Ottoman society, see Scalenghe (2014). 42. Özbek 2009. 43. Çelik 2017. 44. Özbek 2009. 45. Ener 2005. 46. Buğra 2007. 47. Kalfa-Topateş 2015. 48. Gerber 2000: 13. 49. Stewart and Harding 1999: 290. 50. Hamdy 2008.

chapter four 1. For the political power of Atatürk’s “penetrative gaze,” see Özyürek (2004). 2. Najmabadi 1991. 204

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3. For a further elaboration on the gendered organization of bourgeois domestic spaces, see Ayata (1988, 2002). 4. Bakhtin 1981. 5. We know from secondary sources (Çeliktemel-Thomen 2010, Scognamillo 1987) that this organization oddly played a key role in the emergence of Turkish cinema. When the propaganda branch of the army transferred its cinematic equipment to the committee so as to prevent its confiscation by the Allied forces after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the committee produced some of the earliest examples of cinematography in Ottoman lands. 6. The 1991 Law on the Fight against Terrorism did not actually lift the legal ban brought by Law no. 2847, which was discussed in chapter 2, but it did mark the onset of a new legal tolerance regime for the associations of martyrs’ families and disabled veterans. 7. Dernek (association) is one of the two main legal forms through which civil society is organized in Turkey. Regulated by the Associations Law (Dernekler Kanunu) and governed by the Ministry of Interior, associations are legal entities set up by a number of individuals acting on their own private initiative and with a specific objective other than profit making. See Kuzmanovic (2010). 8. For further readings on Saturday Mothers’ vigils, see Baydar and İvegen (2006), Ahıska (2014), and Tambar (2017). 9. Saturday Mothers’ vigils continued from 1995 to 1999, and then resumed again in 2009. 10. Note that the Turkish words for “martyr” (şehit) and “witness” (şahit) come from the same etymological root in Arabic. A similar etymological connection also exists in Greek, in which the word martyr originally meant “witness.” 11. Turkish political culture has made a subtle but politically important distinction between two types of veiling since the late 1990s. The first, türban, covers the head, neck, and shoulders and is associated with piety and/or political Islam. The second, the headscarf or başörtüsü, covers only the head, often leaving some hair exposed. This covering is associated with tradition and rural background and it is the one that Hatice Ana and all the other founding members of the popular association wore. For the politics of veiling in Turkey, see Çınar (2005), Gökarıksel (2012), and Göle (1996). 12. For the role of the poetics and politics of dreaming and dream interpretation in Islamicate contexts, see Ewing (1994), Kafadar (1994), and Mittermaier (2010). 13. David Cook (2007) cites the “five unique qualities” that the Qur’anic exegete al-Qurtubi (1272–73) specifies with regard to the martyr. “The Messenger of Allah said: God has ennobled the martyrs with five blessings never given to any of the prophets, even me: One, all of the prophets’ spirits were taken by the Angel of the Death, and he will take me [as well], but as for the martyrs, God is the one who will take their spirits in a way He wills and will not allow the Angel of Death to have power over their spirits. Two: all of the prophets were washed after death, and I will be washed [as well], but the martyrs are not to be washed, since they have no need of what is in this world. Three: all of the prophets were wrapped [in linen], and I will No t e s

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be wrapped [as well], but the martyrs are not to be wrapped, but buried in their clothes. Four: all of the prophets when they die are called ‘dead,’ and when I die, it will be said ‘He died,’ but the martyrs are not referred to as ‘dead.’ Five, all the prophets have the ability to intercede on the Day of Resurrection, as I do as well, but the martyrs have the ability to intercede every day that there is intercession” (42). 14. One of the most famous Turkish film actors, Cüneyt Arkın, played the lead role in most of the ultranationalist historical epics of the 1970s. His films popularized the hypermasculinized gazi figure in Turkish cinema. 15. Okey is a tile-based game, similar to Rummy and Mahjong, popular throughout Turkey and often played in coffeehouses and teahouses. 16. Secor 2007: 33. 17. Scarry 1985. 18. See, for example, Caruth (1996). For a critique of the nonrepresentational turn in trauma studies, see Leys (2000). 19. Cvetkovich 2003: 18. 20. For the concept of abjection as repulsion toward ambiguous things such as bodily flows that disturb the boundedness of the self and identity, see Kristeva (1982) and Grosz (1994). 21. Not all veterans’ wives in Yaman’s group shared Ali’s wife’s enthusiasm; too much homosocial investment in disabled veteran cliques ran the risk of conflict with the heteronormative ideals of conjugal domesticity. 22. For works that inform my use of the concept of mood, see Ahmed (2014) and Throop (2014). 23. For contemporary debates on the militarist politics of martyrdom, see Değirmencioğlu (2016) and Sünbüloğlu (2013). For comparable examples of the politics of martyrdom in other Middle Eastern contexts—most significantly in Palestine and Iran—see Allen (2006), Khalili (2007), Mittermaier (2018), and Varzi (2006). 24. For the politics of mourning in war and the notion of ungrievable life, see Butler (2006, 2016). 25. In a circular letter sent to all mufti offices throughout the country in 2012, the Presidency of Religious Affairs codified this newly invented tradition thusly: “Martyrdom represents the highest spiritual rank after prophecy in our religion. Our martyrs, who ascend into eternity by reaching this rank, entrust to all individuals of our nation the values that turn societies into nations, thereby encumbering them with important and heavy responsibilities. While we memorialize our saintly martyrs with grace, gratitude and thankfulness, certain measures must be taken to prevent words, attitudes, and behaviors that clash with funereal propriety so that funeral rites can be completed in compliance with the tranquility and reverence of worship. Before prayer, our citizens attending funeral prayer will be reminded that funeral prayer is not an ordinary ritual or ceremony, but a worship like Friday or Eid prayers, and that even loudly or collectively shouting the Takbir during worship is regarded as reprehensible. In that regard, they will be told in a proper language and style that mosque courtyards, coffin rests, and cemeteries are places of worship, 206

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prayer, and contemplation, that [mourners] are required to behave in the quiet, solemn, and mature manner that is becoming to a believer, and that attitudes and behaviors that disrupt the tranquility and reverence of worship and that clash with funeral propriety such as whistling, applauding, ovation, and chanting slogans are not religiously appropriate and will injure and disrespect the martyr’s soul.” “Diyanet de şehit cenazesinde slogana karşı,” www.ntv.com.tr/turkiye/diyanet-de-sehitcenazesinde-slogana-karsi,GslPE1EcTEGRzt6p1ja03g (accessed February 11, 2019). 26. Eng and Kazanjian 2003: 3. 27. Freud 1917. 28. Clewell 2004. 29. Gill 2017. 30. The most widely used term for such melancholic sentiment is hüzün, popularized by Orhan Pamuk’s (2006) description of the melancholy of Istanbul. According to Pamuk, hüzün is not the expression of an individual feeling of loss, but rather a collective emotion, a shared intensity that arises from the pain of the loss of a once glorious past, a sentiment that lends a sense of community to the inhabitants of the city, who see themselves in hüzün, as if through a smoky glass. In her book Melancholic Modalities (2017), Gill describes three additional terms that Turkish classical musicians use to describe the emotional modality of melancholy: keder, kara sevda, and melankoli. Among these, keder, which Gill defines as “care, grief, and melancholic affliction that occurs as a result of a particular event” (13), comes closest to the melancholy that I describe here. 31. I use the concept of attunement à la Kathleen Stewart (2011). For further elaboration on the concept of atmosphere, see Açıksöz (2016b), Anderson (2009), and Stewart (2011). 32. I discuss these developments and their repercussions in greater detail in chapters 5 and 6. 33. Compare Hoffman’s (2011) description of how Sierra Leonean civilian war amputees learn to display their residual limbs in the context of the international humanitarian programs targeting war disability in camps. 34. The Turkish word for “older brother,” abi, is used as a fictive kin term for an older man. 35. Freud 1927. 36. That has radically changed since the AKP established its hegemony over the secularist establishment in the 2010s, especially after the 2016 coup attempt. 37. Contrary to the legend, the oldest recovered tombstones in the cemetery date to the sixteenth century. For Ottoman cemeteries and tombstones, see Laqueur (1997). 38. For a historical cataloguing of Ottoman medals and decorations illustrating the transformations in the symbolic economy of death in the late Ottoman period, see Eldem (2004). 39. For the notion of “necromantic power,” see Klima (2002). 40. The Turkish Resistance Organization was a pro-partition armed underground group founded in 1958 by the leaders of the Turkish-Cypriot community, most prominently Rauf Denktaş (1924–2012), to counter the Greek-Cypriot No t e s

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National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, EOKA), which fought the British for the island’s independence and its union with Greece. As Navaro-Yashin (2012) notes, these organizations became the representatives of their respective communities after independence and, following EOKA member attacks on Turkish Cypriots, they also led the intercommunal conflict that parceled the island into ethnically segregated enclaves. Following a pro-Greek ultranationalist coup in 1974, Turkey invaded a third of the island to prevent massacres of Turkish Cypriots. This led to the creation of the self-declared state of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey, under the leadership of Denktaş, who served as the president of the state between 1974 and 2005. 41. In Turkish nationalist discourse, the island of Cyprus is often constructed as an extension of the Turkish “motherland” or “mother homeland” (anavatan), with occupied Cyprus depicted as the Turkish “baby homeland” (yavru vatan). Nationalists opposed the AKP government’s support for the Annan Plan for Cyprus of 2004, which stipulated the reunification of the island as a federation of two states. The plan was eventually voted down by Greek Cypriots, but Cyprus was accepted as a EU member despite continuing Turkish occupation. In 2009, Cyprus blocked Turkish EU accession negotiations, arguing that Turkey first had to normalize relations with Cyprus. Turkey’s EU accession process has since remained on hold. 42. Sınav 2003. 43. For a discussion of how nationalist Turkish Christian groups took part in anti-missionary campaigns, see Özyürek (2009). 44. The controversial Ergenekon trials targeted a suspected clandestine ultranationalist covert network that allegedly conspired to overthrow the AKP government by inciting a military coup through a series of provocative events, including the assassination of public intellectuals targeted by the ultranationalist protests discussed in chapter 5. Later, all the suspects were acquitted due to use of fabricated evidence. 45. The pamphlet made an allusion to the international contestation over the status of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul. Considered primus inter pares (first among equals) within the Greek Orthodox Church leadership, the Ecumenical Patriarch is regarded as the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians around the world. The Turkish state accepts the patriarch as the religious leader of the Turkish Greek Orthodox community but refuses to recognize his ecumenical status. The status of the patriarchate and the return of its expropriated property have been major issues in Turkey-EU relations as a part of the larger debate over minority rights in Turkey. Thus, when Pope Benedict XVI was invited to Turkey by Patriarch Bartholomew, with whom he made calls for the restoration of the unity of Eastern and Western Christendom, this alarmed not only Islamists but also secular nationalists, who saw the visit as a historical continuation of Western intervention into Ottoman affairs through religious protectorates. For an analysis of conspiracy theories about these issues, see Özyürek (2009). 46. The sura al-Baqarah reads, “And do not say of those who are slain in the way of Allah, ‘They are dead.’ Rather, they are alive, but you perceive [it] not” (Qur’an 2:154). 47. Butler 2003: 468. 208

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48. For an eloquent analysis of the circulation and “sticking” of emotions, see Ahmed (2004). 49. Writing on “ideological becoming,” Bakhtin (1981) argues that “the tendency to assimilate others’ discourse takes on a deeper and more basic significance in an individual’s ideological becoming, in the most fundamental sense. Another’s discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rules, models, and so forth—but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior; it performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive discourse” (342; italics in original).

chapter five 1. “Apo’ya benzeyen tuzluklar,” Hürriyet, March 2, 2001, www.hurriyet.com.tr /gundem/apoya-benzeyen-tuzluklar-39234827. 2. One can argue that Öcalan turned into a more benign figure during the 2010s peace negotiations, and the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom the government holds accountable as the mastermind of the military coup attempt in 2016, has partially replaced him as the object of hatred. See the epilogue. 3. Butler 2011a. 4. Originally published in Turkish in 1999, Nadire Mater’s Mehmedin Kitabı was later translated and published in English under the title Voices from the Front (2005). 5. All quotations from the court proceedings are from the BelgeNet website, currently archived at the Internet Archive. “Öcalan Davası,” BelgeNet/Internet Archive, June 29, 1999, https://web.archive.org/web/20051229152808/http://www .belgenet.com/dava/dava.html (accessed February 11, 2019). 6. “Bacağının hesabını sordu,” Milliyet, June 5, 1999, 18. 7. For the prominent place of the death of Sheikh Said in Kurdish memory and constructions of Turkish sovereignty, see Özsoy (2013). 8. For a discussion of Turkey’s politics of human rights in relation to the European Union accession process, see Babül (2017). 9. Taşkın 2011: 3. 10. Mağden 2006. The article is available at https://bianet.org/cocuk /medya/80142-vicdani-red-bir-insan-hakkidir (accessed January 25, 2019). 11. The Bastard of Istanbul (Shafak 2006) was first written and published in English and then translated into Turkish under the title Baba ve Piç (2006). Given the differences between the English and Turkish alphabets, Şafak’s English-language books have been published under the Anglicized version of her name, Shafak. The fact of Şafak having written her book in English and Anglicized her last name has particularly enraged nationalists. 12. Dink 2004. 13. Dönme is the Turkish word for a convert, specifically referring to the descendants of Ottoman Jews who converted to Islam at the end of the seventeenth century No t e s

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along with their messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Also referred to as Sabetaycılar, dönmes are favorite subjects of both ultranationalist and Islamist anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which portray them as crypto-Jews serving foreign interests. For a historical analysis of the pivotal role of anti-dönme conspiracy theories in Turkish politics, see Baer (2013). 14. Dink 2007. The full English version of Dink’s article was published recently (2016) and is available at www.agos.com.tr/en/article/14061/agos-archive-a-pigeonlike-unease-of-my-spirit. Here, I have slightly modified the translation. 15. Bataille 1991. 16. For a study of the “lynching regime” in Turkey, see Bora (2016). 17. The Kurdish Opening (Kürt Açılımı), part of the Democratic Initiative Process (Demokratik Açılım Süreci), was the Turkish state’s first serious attempt at policy reform to achieve peace after decades of armed conflict. During the opening process, secretive talks between the government and the PKK took place and the country optimistically seemed on the verge of a solution. For more details and analysis, see Gunter (2013). 18. I use the term spectacle loosely to denote something that is presented in such a way as to be seen and looked at, often in an objectifying manner. Spectacle implies an audience and emphasizes the primacy of the gaze and the image in the mediation of power relations. For work in the field of disability studies that draws on the concept of spectacle, see Garland Thomson (1996, 2009). 19. A large body of work examines the prosthetic relationship between veterans and the state. For particularly insightful examples, see Jarvis (2004), Koven (1994), Linker (2011), Messinger (2009), O’Connor (1997), and Serlin (2004). 20. When Şafak Pavey became the first woman with a (visible) disability ever to be elected to the Turkish parliament as a member of the CHP, the dress code for women was a suit jacket and a skirt. The resulting exposure of her prosthetic leg from under her skirt led to a months-long controversy about the visibility of her prosthesis wherein Pavey was harassed in the pro-government media for supposedly exploiting people’s feelings, putting on an act, and promoting the prosthetic company that had produced her leg. Meanwhile, MPs from the AKP proposed a change in the dress code that would allow women to wear trousers. Pavey’s response to the proposed change was a historic moment in disability politics in Turkey: “If possible, leave me alone with my prosthetic leg because we are very happy [together].” “Pantolon krizi’nde söz Şafak Pavey’de!” Haber Turk, October 12, 2011, www.haberturk.com /gundem/haber/678816-pantolon-krizinde-soz-safak-paveyde (accessed January 25, 2019). 21. Shouse (2005) defines affect as the intensity that “makes feelings feel.” 22. Aretxaga 2003.

chapter six 1. I choose debt over related and perhaps more established terms in anthropology such as obligation because it opens up a theoretical space that allows me to address 210

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the ways in which financial debt and different sociopolitical obligations, which are themselves often quantified and financialized, overlap and blend into each other. Debt is also a more ethnographically suitable term because my interlocutors use the Turkish word for debt (borç) to denote the various kinds of duties and obligations they have faced, such as military service. 2. For the history of postwar prosthetics in different contexts, see Bernstein (2015), Neumann (2010), and Serlin (2004, 2006). 3. There is an emergent literature on relations of indebtedness in the context of the Kurdish conflict. For a study on the relations of violence, compensation, and debt between the Turkish state and its Kurdish citizens, see Biner (2016). For an examination of the ways in which the state’s social welfare operates as a debt-producing mechanism, see Yoltar (2017). For a study on dissident notions of debt among Kurdish youth, see Neyzi and Darıcı (2015). 4. Here, I build on the insights of Friedner (2015) and Puar (2017), scholars who think critically about the relation between disability and economic value, as well as on the critical work by Graeber (2011), Joseph (2014), and Lazzarato (2012) on debt economies and by MacLeish (2013) and Wool (2015) on militarism. 5. For a discussion of changing media representations of disabled veterans, see Sünbüloğlu (2017). 6. For a further discussion of the gendered notion of mahrem in Islamicate contexts, see Sehlikoglu (2016). 7. For the making, unmaking, and remaking of lifeworlds, see Das et al. (2001) and Scarry (1985). 8. Karaçimen 2014. 9. “Turkish Consumers Have Most Bank Cards across Europe,” Hürriyet Daily News, January 27, 2016, www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-consumers-havemost-bank-cards-across-europe-94406 (accessed January 29, 2019). 10. For the restructuring of the Turkish welfare system, see Bozkurt (2013), Buğra and Keyder (2006), Eder (2010), Yılmaz (2017), and Yörük (2012). These works demonstrate that, rather than being a straightforward example of the neoliberal retreat of the state, the restructured Turkish welfare system is a unique amalgam of neoliberalism mixed with political patronage, populism, and containment strategies, which together have led to the expansion of state welfare spending. 11. Sağlıkta 100 milyon YTL’lik büyük vurgun,” Hürriyet, June 18, 2008, www .hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/saglikta-100-milyon-ytl-lik-buyuk-vurgun-9197818. 12. Although parliamentary inquiry is not a major mechanism of parliamentary control of the executive in Turkey, it is a principal means of collecting information. See Umut Oran, “İstanbul Milletvekili Umut Oran Tarafindan Verilen 7/54505 Sayili Yazili Soru Önergesinin Cevabi,” Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, January 2015, www2.tbmm.gov.tr/d24/7/7–54505sgc.pdf (accessed January 29, 2019). 13. Taylan Yıldırım, “Gazinin protez bacağına haciz,” Hürriyet, October 20, 2014, www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/gazinin-protez-bacagina-haciz-27414437. 14. Bülent Kocaoğlan, “VID 20141002 155102,” video, 7:25, October 2, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v = mS4HrTKKLt4 (accessed December 12, 2018). In No t e s

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the Turkey of the 2010s, cellular phones became another technology of debt when bank loans for mobile phones became widespread and mobile minutes of use reached the highest in Europe. 15. Hürriyet TV, “Gazinin Protez Bacağına Haciz Geldi,” video, 2:10, October 19, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v = Usxx5ShNoWA (accessed December 12, 2018). 16. The phrase “state fantasies” refers to psychic attachments to the state as a site of desire and fear. For the elaboration of the concept of state fantasy, see Aretxaga (2000) and Navaro-Yashin (2002). 17. In making this argument, I am informed by Navaro-Yashin’s (2012) work, which analyzes bureaucratic documents as affectively charged material objects. 18. For the theorization of the link between bureaucracy and deferral, see Secor (2007). 19. “Gazinin protez bacağına haciz geldi,” Cumhuriyet, October 19, 2014, www .cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/turkiye/132057/Gazinin_protez_bacagina_haciz_geldi .html (accessed January 29, 2019). 20. Oran, “İstanbul Milletvekili.” 21. Gazi Ast Subay Koray Gürbüz, “Gaziden Tayyip Erdoğan’a şok soru!” Ulusal Kanal, December 1, 2014, www.ulusal.com.tr/gundem/gaziden-tayyip-erdoganasok-soru-h42691.html (accessed January 29, 2019). 22. MacLeish 2013 (also see Wool 2015). 23. Scheper-Hughes 2007, Strathern 2012. 24. “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan: Şehitlik ve Gazilik Unvanları Dünyevi Payeyle Ölçülemez,” Milliyet, September 18, 2017, www.milliyet.com.tr/cumhurbaskanierdogan-sehitlik-ve-siyaset-2521738/ (accessed January 29, 2019).

epilogue 1. Hook 2015: 456. 2. Three of the four individuals detained for the 2009 attack on the Democratic Society Party’s office in Ankara were disabled veterans. The incident was completely hushed up in the mainstream media. “Dava da sürüyor saldırılar da,” Evrensel, December 10, 2009, www.evrensel.net/haber/194820/dava-da-suruyor-saldirilar-da (accessed January 29, 2019). 3. “Ankara’da ‘gaziye hakaret’ olayı büyüyor,” Hürriyet, October 29, 2014, www .hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/ankarada-gaziye-hakaret-olayi-buyuyor-27480129 (accessed December 12, 2018). 4. “MHP Leader Disputes ‘Civilian Martyrs’ Plan,” Hürriyet Daily News, March 28, 2012, www.hurriyetdailynews.com/mhp-leader-disputes-civilianmartyrs-plan-17051 (accessed December 12, 2018). 5. Unlike martyrdom, which had long constituted an integral feature of the leftist political repertoire in Turkey, the political Left had never before visibly claimed the gazi figure, despite its investment in sacrificial imageries and the high 212

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number of activists with chronic debilities who had survived systematic torture and/ or hunger strikes while in prison (e.g., the neurological disorder Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, common among hunger strikers). For the socialist cult of sacrifice, see Bargu (2014). 6. Jasbir Puar (2017) conceptualizes “the right to maim” as a register of the biopolitical control of populations that supplements the sovereign “right to kill.” During the Gezi protests, police deliberately aiming at protesters’ heads with riot control agents such as tear gas canisters and rubber bullets was documented (Açıksöz 2016b). As a result, over a hundred of the thousands of injured protesters were hospitalized with head trauma and at least twelve lost vision in one eye due to injuries. 7. For an analysis of a very similar ocular politics in the context of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, see Hamdy (2016). 8. “Gezi Parkı gazileri CHP’den aday,” Sözcü, January 10, 2014, www.sozcu .com.tr/2014/gundem/gezi-parki-gazileri-chpden-aday-439223/ (accessed December 12, 2018). 9. “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan’dan Esnafa Emeklilik Müjdesi,” Radikal, November 11, 2014, www.radikal.com.tr/politika/cumhurbaskani-erdogandan-esnafaemeklilik-mujdesi-1239491/ (accessed December 12, 2018). 10. For an anthropological analysis of the local interpretations of Baltagiyya’s attacks on protesters during the Egyptian revolution, see Ghannam (2012). For Turkish pro-government paramilitaries, see Akarsu (2018) and Tuğal (2016). 11. For example, detained soldiers were stripped half-naked and pictured in humiliating poses. Amnesty International (2016) reported that detainees were subjected to sexual abuse and rape. 12. An early example of such religiously inflected masculinist fetishization of the military can be found in the thoroughly militarized language of the Democracy and Martyrs meeting, a foundational event of the postcoup national consensus endorsed by all major political parties except the Kurdish-led leftist People’s Democracy Party and attended by millions, with its explicit and excessive emphasis on gazis and martyrs. 13. While making this argument, I build on Agamben’s (2005) reading of the work of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. 14. Also see Sünbüloğlu (2019). 15. “ ‘Gaziler arasında ayrım var’ iddiası gerçek değil,” Memurlar, November 6, 2017, www.memurlar.net/haber/705989/gaziler-arasinda-ayrim-var-iddiasi-gercekdegil.html (accessed December 12, 2018). 16. Kenan Butakin, “Gazilik santimle ölçülmez,” Karar, January 2, 2018, www .karar.com/guncel-haberler/gazilik-santimle-olculmez-709465 (accessed December 12, 2018).

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negotiations with PKK, 173, 177–79, 183; power struggles within, 176 Alevis, 49, 55 Algeria, counterinsurgency in, 24 Ali Çetinkaya First Bullet Rehabilitation Center, 63 al-Qurtubi, 205n13 alterity, 11, 16, 33; mimesis and, 28–30, 194n32; of Öcalan, 139; trope of gender inversion and, 195n43 ambushes, 28, 30–31, 40 amputation, xvii, 59, 125, 188n1; above-theknee, 168; lower-extremity, 28, 50. See also limbs, amputated; phantom limb syndrome; prostheses; residual limb Anderson, Benedict, 188n22 Ankara, 38, 60, 63; beatings of gazis in, 183; mausoleum of Atatürk, 117 anthropology, xix, xxiii, 8 Arif, Ahmed, 134 Arkın, Cüneyt, 83, 118, 206n14 Arman, Ayşe, 200n47 Armenians, 72, 97, 106, 145, 148 ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia), 30, 84 associations of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families. See “official” association; “popular association” Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 6, 55, 118, 193n13; Address to the Youth, 117; Denktaş compared to, 133; Erdoğan compared to, 184; honorific title of Gazi granted to, 63, 80, 86, 184; nationalist veneration of,

Abdul Hamid II, Sultan, 79 ableism, 3, 5, 48, 50; assisted-reproductive technologies and, 58; double lives of disabled veterans and, 75–76; public transportation and, 95; shock and revulsion at sight of dismembered bodies, 160; structure of city spaces and, 92; symbolic violence of, 7 Abu Muslim Khorasani, 82 Active Repentance Law (Article 221), 154 affect, 1, 160, 189n4, 210n21; affective memories of military service, 38–43; carnal language of pain during trial of Öcalan, 142–44, 143; fellowship of shared affect, 123–31; negative affects directed toward beggars and gazis, 93–96; “ordinary affects,” 43. See also laughter; melancholy; pain; pleasure Afghanistan War, 24 Agamben, Giorgio, 8, 9, 191n23, 192n33 agency, political, 3, 7, 74, 101 Ahmedi, 79 AKP [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi] (Justice and Development Party), 7, 72, 183–84, 191n22; Cyprus conflict and, 208n41; Ergenekon alleged plot against, 147, 154, 208n44; EU harmonization process and, 51; hegemony of, 177, 207n36; increasing authoritarianism of, 175–76, 179; “insult to Turkishness” law and, 146; martyrs’ funerals and, 127; military coup attempt (2016) and, 180, 181; peace 235

Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (continued) 118, 119; portrait suspended above photos of martyrs, 103–4, 104 Baltagiyya (Egyptian paramilitary movement), 179 Bastard of Istanbul, The (Şafak, 2006), 147, 209n11 Bataille, Georges, 150 Battal Gazi, Seyyid, 80, 82, 83, 118 Battalname epic, 80 becoming-guerrilla process, 25, 33; mimesis in, 28–30; reeducation of soldiers’ senses and, 34; soldiers living on the mountains and on the move, 26–27, 27 becoming-soldier process, xxi–xxii beggars, 13, 51, 173; criminalization of begging, 92, 94; “deserving” and ablebodied beggars in Ottoman Empire, 91–92; “gaze economy” and, 158; material and symbolic proximity of disabled veterans to, 94–96, 97, 101, 158, 159; in urban Turkey, 92–94, 92 being-on-the-mountain, soldiers’ experience of, 20, 32, 193–94n17; as assemblage of intense collective experiences, 43–44; sensorial formation of, 35, 38; sensory traces after war, 38; as shock and disorientation, 34, 38 belonging, 13, 41, 123, 136 Benedict XVI, Pope, 135, 137, 208n45 Benjamin, Walter, 34 Berlant, Lauren, 53, 198n15 Berna Abla, 57, 88, 104–5, 106, 107, 109 biopolitics, 5, 6, 13, 162, 180, 185; homo sacer concept and, 9; prosthesis repossessions and, 174; sovereign “right to maim” and, 179, 213n6; sovereignty and, 8, 9 Biz Kınalı Bacaksızlar (Yücel), 66–67 Body of War (documentary film, 2007), 4 Bora, Tanıl, 54 boredom, 35, 39 Born on the Fourth of July (film, 1989, dir. Stone), 4 “bravery pill” (cesaret hapı), 33 Butler, Judith, 187n6, 198n15

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Çalan, Lisa, 184 capitalism, 14 castration anxieties, xxi cemaats (religious communities with Sufi traditions), 85 cemeteries: destruction of guerrilla cemeteries, 9; of soldier martyrs, xv, 71, 86, 140. See also Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery CHP [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi] (Republican People’s Party), 66, 91, 179, 210n20 Christian minorities, 135, 139 circumcision, 30, 194n38. See also “uncircumcised terrorist” myth citizenship: disability and, 5, 51; draft evaders stripped of rights, 5; gender and, 3, 4, 45–46, 196n1 Civilian Gazi/Martyr Law (2012), 178 civilians, 81, 180; as gazis, 178, 181–84; as war victims, 118, 142 civil society, militarized, 44 class distinctions, 3, 7, 13, 51, 78; compulsory military service and, 45; consumer credit and, 165; draft evasion and, 47; ethnopolitics and, 100; intersection with disability and gender, 5; male bonding and, 50; Mehmet Bey versus Mehmetçik, xx, xxi; misogyny and, 153; populism and, 173; upper-class masculinity, 68; urban middle class, 55, 83, 86, 105; working- and lower-class neighborhoods, xvii, 48, 75, 113 Cold War, 69, 82 communism, 82, 84 complicity, xviii–xix, 100, 187n14 conscientious objection, xix, 152 conscription, 12, 46; as gendered condition of citizenship, 45, 196n1; heteronormative masculinity and, 4–7; medical exemptions, xix–xx; paid exemption, xx; as vatan borcu (debt to the homeland), 45–47 conspiracy theories, xix, xxiii, 100, 137; anti-Semitic, 210n13; conspiratorial logic of (ultra)nationalism, 76, 100, 183–84; TV mafia series and, 68, 70, 71, 72, 202n66 Constantinople, conquest of, 21

i n de x

consumer credit, 165–66 Cook, David, 205n13 counterinsurgency (counterguerrilla warfare), xxii, 3, 13, 59, 155; army created in image of PKK guerrillas, 18; being-onthe-mountain as soldiers’ experience of, 193–94n17; body politics of, 22–28; dramatic increase in disabled veteran population, 54; ethno-necropolitics of, 10; launching of, 112, 189–90n8; war economy and, 40. See also psychological warfare Cyprus: conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, 207–8n40; in Turkish nationalist discourse, 208n41; Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, 71, 135, 208n40 Cyprus war (1974), 58, 76, 82, 83, 96, 110; ceremonial uniform worn by veterans of, 132; intercommunal violence leading to, 207–8n40 Dadaloğlu, 16 Dağları Bekleyen Kız [The Girl Who Watches the Mountains] (Karakurt, 1954), 195n43 death: burials in mass graves and potter’s fields, 9, 126; civil death, xix; conceptions of death in Islam, 204n37; corpses, 23, 24, 29, 36, 118, 126; death fields, 36; death rites, 134; facing death with the “bravery pill,” 33; freezing to death in the mountains, 26; good and bad death, 17; heroic, 19; immobility and, 27, 28; nationalization and democratization of, 103, 133; Öcalan and the death penalty, 11, 140, 141, 144, 145, 149; relation between perception and, 34, 35; sacrificial, xxi; of Sheikh Said, 144; soldiers’ encounters with mortality, xxii, 36; space of, 29; smoking as experiment with possibility of, 40; state’s power over life and death, 10, 141, 178; under torture, 190n8. See also funerals; grief; martyrs; mourning debt, 161–63, 185; anthropology of, 47; military service as “debt to homeland,” 45–47, 152, 161; obligation compared to,

i n de x

210–11n1; owed by the state to disabled veterans, 56–57, 160, 177–78; prosthesis repossessions and, 14, 163–73, 169; spectacle of, 162, 168; unreturnable, 162, 173–74 “deep state,” 68, 69, 201n61 Delaney, Carol, 83 Deleuze, Gilles, 25, 194n17 Deli Yürek [Wildheart] (TV series), 67–70 Demirel, Süleyman, 52, 159 Democracy and Martyrs meeting, 213n12 Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi), 154, 212n2 Denktaş, Rauf, 71, 133, 135–36, 207n40 Derrida, Jacques, 188n2 Dersim Rebellion (1937–38), 193n13 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: second edition (DSM-II), 196n5; fifth edition (DSM-5), 43 Dink, Hrant, xix, xxii, 8, 153, 154, 178; demonstration at fifth anniversary of Dink’s murder, 149; mafia TV series genre and murder of, 72, 201n54; “The pigeon-like skittishness of my mood,” 149–50; trials of, 147–48 Din ve İdeoloji [Religion and Ideology] (Şerif, 1969), 82 disability: biopolitics of, 5; cultural politics and biopolitics of, 51; feminization and, 190–91n19; gallows humor about, 129–31; miracle recovery from, 69; negative affects surrounding, 96; social isolation caused by, xvii; stigma of, 12, 13, 51, 98, 125, 126, 129, 158; symbolic military service ceremony for men with disabilities, 46, 47 disability rights activism, xv, 99, 100, 158 disabled veterans (gazis), xv, xx, 2, 94; bodily losses as sacrifices, 10–11; collective identity of previously isolated soldiers, 58; communal tensions with martyrs’ families, 131–32; conditions for granting of gazi title, 76–78; defilement suffered by, 89–91; disability ratings and, 132, 182, 183, 190n17; distance maintained from larger disabled community, 98–99; double lives of, 75–76; employment situations of, 50; everyday lives of, 7, 44, 96; homosocial

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disabled veterans (gazis) (continued) camaraderie of cliques among, 120–23, 124, 206n21; living in squatter neighborhoods, 48; as “living martyrs,” 6, 119, 191n20; marital status of, 50, 51; meetings with families of slain guerrillas, 176; melancholic mourning of, 128–29; military coup attempt (2016) and, 180–84; negative affects directed toward, 93–96; Öcalan’s capture/trial and, 140–45, 156; with paraplegia, 50, 57–58, 183, 200n49; peace negotiations with PKK protested by, 159, 162; as protagonists of TV dramas, 68, 73; in protests against intellectuals, 150–53; as public secret in Turkey, 51–53; sacralization of, 11; ultranationalism and, xxii; as victim-heroes, 14; vision loss, 50; waning of activism by, 176–78 disabled veterans, narratives/life histories of, xv, xvii, xviii, 1, 28–30, 48, 161; on arduous marching, 27–28; on conquest of the mountains, 20–21; food in the army, 41–42; gray zones and, xviii; lamentation for lost pastoral mountain landscape, 21–22; on military medical bureaucracy, 59–62, 65–67; pleasures and dangers of smoking, 39–41, 42; uncanny warnings and premonitions, 36–37 Disabled War Veterans’ Aid Committee (Malûlîn-i Guzât-i Askeriye Muâvenet Heyeti), 110 disappearances, enforced, 9, 53, 112, 126, 176, 190n8 Dispossessed, The (Le Guin), xv Dix, Otto, 4 Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs), 84–85 dönme (Jewish convert to Islam), 148, 209–10n13 draft evasion, xix, 5, 46, 47 “duty-disabled” (vazife malûlü) veterans, 56, 57, 111, 206n14; legal status of, 52; prosthesis repossessions and, 167, 168 Ecevit, Bülent, 112 Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery, 103, 112, 116, 133–36, 134, 207n37

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Elele Vakfı (Hand-in-Hand Foundation), 60 emasculation, 5, 7, 74, 164 employment, military service and, 46, 47, 50, 90–91 Emre, Yunus, 116 enjoyment: of ethnography, xv; of counterguerrilla warfare, 28–29; of mimesis, 29; the other’s enjoyment, 153; sovereign enjoyment, 150–51; trauma and, 43 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 139, 173, 174, 177, 183; children performing martyrdom and, 181; constructed as new Atatürk, 184; intellectuals/academics attacked by, xxii; new gazi figures lionized by, 179; political dissent crushed by, 75 Ergenekon, 134, 147, 154, 175, 177, 191n22, 208n44 ethnicity, xvii, 49, 79, 189n8 ethnography: ethnographic betrayal, xviii, xxiii, 188n16; history and, 175 European Court of Human Rights, 145 European Union (EU), 8, 148, 191n22 European Union (EU) accession process, of Turkey, 8, 11, 175, 191n22; crisis of masculine sovereignty and, 197n15; Cyprus conflict as obstacle to, 133, 208n41; disability governance and, 51, 198n19; Öcalan’s death sentence as obstacle to, 144–45; Pamuk trial as “litmus test” for, 147; ultranationalist opposition to, 146 evliya (spectral, saintly figures), 37 Family Code (1926), 45 fascists, 55, 191n22 Feldman, Allen, 192n35 feminism, 197n15 feminization, 5, 90, 190–91n19 Ferda Ana, 57 “Fethullah Terrorist Organization,” 181 First Blood (first movie in Rambo series), 31 flag, Turkish, xxi, 1, 87, 114, 154; displayed in veterans’ associations, 102, 104, 104, 117; nationalist flag campaigns, 55, 102; raised on “captured” mountain peaks, 20, 21; on tombstones, 134, 134 Foucault, Michel, 8, 194n17, 200–201n50 Freud, Sigmund, 128, 131

i n de x

Friday Mothers, as mimetic rival to Saturday Mothers, 112–13 funerals: funeral rites, 9, 206n25; public ceremonies banned for Kurdish guerrillas, 126; martyrs’ funerals, 126–27, 127, 177 Gallipoli Campaign (World War I), 2, 86, 109, 119 GATA (Gülhane Military Medical Academy), 38, 58, 59, 62–66 gay men, xx, 5, 46, 196n5; conditions for exemption from conscription, 197n14; “rotten report” obtained by, 89 gaza (raid, conquest), 20, 78, 79, 82–84, 202–3n7 Gazi (TV series), 68, 69, 70 Gazi, as military title, 6, 56, 76, 111, 176; balance between Islam and nationalism, 81–85, 203–4n30; failed coup attempt (“15 July gazis”) and, 181, 182, 182, 183; history and genealogy of Gazi title, 78–81, 202–3n7; as hypermasculine honorific, 77; Öcalan’s trial and, 140. See also disabled veterans (gazis) Gazis’ Day celebration, 63, 78, 86, 109 Gazi Uyum Evi (Gazi Adaptation House), 63 gender, xx, 5, 74, 180, 198n15. See also masculinity geopolitics, 135, 147 Gerber, David, 189n6 Gezi Park Uprising (Istanbul, 2013), 14, 175, 179, 180, 213n6 Ghostly Matters (Avery, 2008), 189n2 ghosts: of dead friends, 3, 128; ghostliness of forcibly evacuated villages, 21; ghostly figures of war, 176; ghostly performances, xix; ghostly presence of war in the media, 53; hauntology, 188–89n2 Gill, Denise, 207n30 Girard, René, 11, 145, 192n35, 194n32 globalization, 146 Gökçen, Sabiha, 193n13 Gordon, Avery, 188–89n2 gossip, 94–95, 109, 132 governmentality, 58, 76, 200–201n50 gray zones, xviii, xix, xxiii, 3, 187n14

i n de x

grief, 144, 207n30: embodied, 125; inexpressibility of, 125; of martyrs’ families and mothers, 112, 124; melancholic mourning and, 128 Guattari, Félix, 25, 194n17 guerrilla-body: “autopsies” performed on, 29–30; as “carcass,” 10, 23; shift from anthropomorphic to zoomorphic representation of, 23–24; soldier-body remade as mirror image of, 24, 29 guerrillas, Kurdish, xix, 1, 48; accounts of Turkish soldiers by, 33; as “bandits,” 52; emasculation of, 31; fearless berserk guerrilla, 32–33, 33; gendered and sexualized violence inscribed on, 181; spatiotemporal movements of, 25–26; women, 33, 195nn42–43. See also PKK guerrilla war, 22, 30–33 Gülen, Fethullah, 181, 184, 209n2 Gulf War, 54 Gürbüz, Macit, 194n24 Gürsel, Kadri, 26 “half-men” (yarım adam), 5, 51, 58, 130 Hamido (social bandit figure), 22 Hatice Ana, 113–16, 117, 122–23; at Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery, 135–36; Museum of Martyrs and, 118, 119; uncovered hair of, 117–18 hauntology, 188–89n2 healing, xvi, 42, 131, 136, 185 Heidegger, Martin, 193–94n17 hennaed lamb [sacrificial sheep] (kınalı kuzu), 85–91 heteronormativity, 5, 13, 196n5 heterosexuality, compulsory, 46, 47 homo sacer (“sacred man”), 8, 10; biopolitical body and, 9; bodies of dead guerrillas as “carcasses,” 23; Öcalan’s status as, 192n33 homosexuality: demedicalization of, 196n5; military physicians’ understandings of, 197n14 honor codes, gendered, 31 hospitals/hospitalization, xv, 12, 58–62 Hubert, Henri, 12, 88–89 human rights, violations of, xxii, 23, 24 Hürriyet (newspaper), 105, 200n49

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identity, 11, 30, 194n32 ideology, 119, 197n13, 202n7: of conquest, 81; nationalist, 24, 54, 146; TurkishIslamic Synthesis, 83, 111; imagined communities, xxiii, 188n22 İmirzalıoğlu, Kenan, 67 infantilization, 41, 50, 74, 87 Inhorn, Marcia, 200n47 “insulting Turkishness,” crime of (Article 301), xxii, 135, 145–48, 150, 153–54 intellectuals, as targets of ultranationalist anger, xviii, xxii, 8, 146–48 Iran, 189n8 Iraq, 20, 54, 154, 189n8 Iraq War, 4, 24 Islam, 37, 78, 203n7; beliefs about sanctity of the body, 23, 188n1; cult of bodily relics and, 191n20; invented funeral customs, 127, 206n25; mevlit (Islamic memorial service), 112; political Islam, 55; synthesis with Turkish nationalism, 83–85; warrior masculinity models and, 6 Islamic State, 179, 180, 184 Islamism, 51, 119, 127, 132, 184 Istanbul, xv, 38; beggars in, 92, 92; Ecumenical (Greek Orthodox) Patriarchate in, 135, 208n44; military hospital in, 59; as necropolis of memorials, 181, 182; veterans’ associations in, 116; workingand lower-class neighborhoods, xvii, 48, 75. See also Gezi Park Uprising jihad, 78, 85 journalists, 26, 71–72, 140, 194n24, 200n49 Kaplan, Danny, 83 Karakurt, Esat Mahmut, 195n43 Kaya, Ahmet, 16, 120 Kerinçsiz, Kemal, 145–46 Kılıçdaroğlu, Kemal, 66 “Kınalı Mehmet” (Hennaed Mehmet) story, 86–87, 204n37 Kocaoğlan, Bülent, 168–73, 169 Korean War, Turkey’s participation in, 58, 76, 82, 96, 110, 132 Kovic, Ron, 4 Kubilay, Mustafa Kemal, 180

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Kundakçı, Hasan, 22–23 Kurdish conflict, xv, 5, 6, 58, 180, 181, 189n2; counterinsurgency practices institutionalized in, 9; endlessness of, 3; gazis of, 75, 111, 183, 190n17; history of, 189n8; international conventions of war and, 77; militarized sovereignty and, 13; nationalist archive of photos and clippings from, 118; rebellions of 1920s and 1930s, 17, 22, 195n43; resumption of, 176; Sheikh Said Rebellion (1925), 143; state of emergency and, 52–53, 181; Turkish military operations in Syria, 14, 175, 181, 184 Kurdish language, 34, 52, 72, 159, 189n8 Kurdish Opening (Kürt Açılımı), 154, 159, 210n17 Kurds: existence as ethnic group denied, 16–17, 52, 193n8; migration to cities after displacement, 48, 155; as neighbors of gazis in mixed urban spaces, 91 Lacan, Jacques, 36 land mines, 28, 34, 35, 190n17; hospitalization following encounter with, 61; traumatic memories of stepping on, 42; as unmanly war tactic, 31 language, xviii, 36 laughter, as veterans’ response to disability, 96, 129, 131 Law of Misdemeanors (Kabahatlar Kanunu), 92 Law on Disabled People (2005), 95 Law on the Fight Against Terrorism (1991), 112, 205n6 Left, Turkish, xvi, 16, 49; gazi figure claimed by, 179, 212n5; leftists disabled from actions of the Turkish state, 180; media and, 53; military regime’s suppression of, 110 Le Guin, Ursula K., xv Levi, Primo, 187n14 limbs, amputated: burial of, 1, 60, 188n1; invoked in (ultra)nationalist rhetoric, xxii, 1; land mines as cause of, 28, 50, 190n17; pain of embodied grief and, 125; as “sacrificial limbs of sovereignty,” 144, 174, 185

i n de x

loss, communities of, xvi, 13, 113, 123, 177, 187n6; inability to overcome loss, 136; inner tensions and conflicts, 132; marriage prospects of disabled veterans and, 57; ultranationalists and, 136, 137 Mağden, Perihan, 147, 151, 152–53 Makhmour Refugee Camp (Iraqi Kurdistan), 154 male bonding practices, 50, 64, 65 Manukyan, Matild, 97 Mardin, Şerif, 82, 83 marriage, military service and, 46–47, 57–58, 64, 87, 88 martyrs, 1, 19, 56, 84; bodily relics of, 191n20; cemeteries of, xv, 71, 86, 140; children performing martyrdom, 181; Day of Martyrs, 86, 109; “five unique qualities” of, 205n13; funerals of, 55, 126–27, 177; Islamic martyrology, 85, 116, 127; “living martyrs,” 6, 191n20; Martyr as official military title, 111; militarization of public life and, xix; mountains as sites/witnesses of martyrdom, 20; as quintessential sacrificial victims, 89. See also Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery martyrs, families of, xv, xvi, 13, 75, 88, 126; communal tensions with disabled veterans, 131–32; discourse of sacrifice and, 126; meetings with families of slain guerrillas, 176; melancholic mourning and, 128; Öcalan’s capture/trial and, 140–45; politics of mourning at, 126– 27, 127 martyrs, mothers of, 112–16, 117, 118, 132; Öcalan’s trial and, 142; in protests against amnesty to PKK members, 154 masculine sovereignty, 7, 45, 47; crisis of, 197n15; failed promise of, 54; nexus with state sovereignty, 48, 73–74, 77; sacrifice and, 87. See also sovereignty; state sovereignty masculinity, 4, 24, 57; breadwinner status and, 51, 57, 163, 164, 197n15; center and margins of, 3; crisis of, 48, 77, 197– 98n15; emergent political subjectivity

i n de x

and, 64–67; heteromasculinity, 46, 47, 74, 164; heteronormative, 13, 51, 73–74, 159, 200n47; Mediterranean honor system of, 139; prostheses of, xxi; Westernized, xvi. See also remasculinization Mater, Nadire, 140, 209n4 Mauss, Marcel, 12, 88–89 Mbembe, Achille, 8, 191n23 media, Turkish, xxii, 1, 7, 13, 29, 31; charity campaigns for veterans, 63; gazis in historical films, 82–83, 206n14; guerrilla women described in, 33; humaninterest stories, 53, 99, 140, 162, 163; Islamist, 127–28; mafia TV series genre, 67–71, 201n54, 201n58; newspapers, 151–52; prosthesis repossessions and, 168–73, 169; sacrificial crisis narratives in, 99–100; social media, 168, 169, 173; state control over, 53, 138; tabloid “third page,” 53 Mehmedin Kitabı [The Book of Mehmet] (Mater, 1999), 53, 140, 209n4 melancholy, 128–29, 131, 136, 207n30 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 194n17 MHP [Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi] (Nationalist Action Party), 54–55, 112, 145, 152, 157 militarism, 2, 74, 163, 180; crip militarism, 47; gendered economy of, 181; militarist imaginary, 6 military coup (1980), xvi, 22, 52, 110, 189n3 military coup attempt (2016), 9, 180–84, 202n66, 207n36 military medical bureaucracy, xix, 58, 59 Milliyet (newspaper), 143, 143, 169 mimesis, 28–30, 194n32 Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi), 76 mountains, of southeastern Turkey, 21, 25; fantasy of omnipresent Turkish state in, 18; flags raised on captured peaks, 20, 21; Kurds as “mountain Turks,” 17, 30; nationalist ambivalence toward, 19–20; in popular memory and epic poetry, 15–16; social geography and ecology of, 17; tourism in, 193n6; Turkish soldiers in, 16, 18. See also being-on-the-mountain, soldiers’ experience of; “Region, the” (Bölge)

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mourning, xvi, 56, 103, 113; homo sacer (“sacred man”) and, 9; melancholia and, 128; mevlit (Islamic memorial service), 112; nationalist and Islamist politics of, 126–27, 136; suppression of public mourning for guerrillas, 126 Muhtar, Reha, 73 Naqshbandi uprising (1930), 180–84 nationalism, Kurdish, 17 nationalism, Turkish, xviii, 54, 183–84; “crip nationalism,” 196n8, 198n19; Gazi title and Islamic legitimacy, 81; Kemalism, 81, 82, 104, 105, 146, 152; left-wing neo-nationalism, 191n22; modernist discourse of, 16; mountain poems and, 19–20; necromantic power of, 133; in pop culture, 55–56; sacrificial discourses of, 85–86; secular and Islamic, 56. See also ultranationalism Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 189n5, 191n23, 208n40 Nazi Germany: Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition (1937), 190n15; rise of, 4 necropolitics, 8, 17 nefs (lower self), 32 Nene Hatun, 117 neoliberalism, 2, 14, 132, 184, 197n15; accountability (audit) culture of, 170, 174; financial debt and, 164; Islamic neoconservatism and, 175; military regime in Turkey and, 110; nationalists’ populist critiques of, 162; state-centered nationalism at odds with, 55; welfare system and, 211n10 nostalgia, 55, 100, 140, 198n15 Nur Cemaat, 85 Öcalan, Abdullah, 12, 118, 184; capture of, 139–41; as demonized figure in Turkey, 138–39; disabled veterans’ protests against, 156, 157; imprisoned, 6, 49, 139, 153, 177; protests in support of, 49, 49; sentenced to death, 11, 143–45, 192n33; transformed public image of, 176, 209n2; trial of, 10–11, 76, 141–44, 143, 148, 155, 192n33. See also PKK “official” association of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families, xv, xvi, 93–94,

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102–3; “duty-disabled” veterans and, 52; ideological policing in, 119–20; male socialization in living room of, 105–6; martyrs’ gallery, 103–4, 104; matchmaking efforts for disabled veterans, 57, 88; official organization and rivals formed after military coup, 52, 109–16; origins of Turkish cinema and, 205n5; Ramadan charity and, 108–9, 108, 111; secular-nationalist framework of, 116; spatial logic of bourgeois domesticity in, 105; veterans’ cliques and, 121. See also “popular” association Oktay, Seyfi, 193n16 Operation Hedgehog, 23, 194n24 Operation Olive Branch, 184 othering, cultural logic of, 33 Ottoman Empire, 16, 193n1, 205n5; beggars in, 91–92; collapse and dissolution of, 54, 147, 184; failure of universal conscription in, 196n1; forced settlement policies of, 15; founding of, 79, 202–3n7; Janissaries, 20, 21, 33, 80; Kurds and, 189n8; literary modernization, 198n15; military catastrophe at Sarıkamış, 26; military medical institutions, 58 Ottoman Hearths (Osmanlı Ocakları), 179–80 Ottoman-Russian War, 79 Oushakine, Serguei, 187n6 outlaws and bandits, 15, 22 Özgür Gündem [Free Agenda] (Kurdish newspaper), 53 pain: amputation and, 125, 151, 161; carnal language of, 142–44, 143, 145; communicating pain, 125, 137, 154; cultural expressions of, 124–25, 142–44, 154, 207n30; of grief, 124; inexpressibility of, xviii, 124; loss and, xxii, 1, 124; military service and, 27; mourning and, 126; narrative of, xviii, 1; negativity of, 136; phantom pain (see phantom limb syndrome); physical, 27, 125; pleasure and, 43; representation and, xviii, 124, 125; revenge and, 142, 144, 145; sharing of, xi; suffering and, 43; trauma and, xviii,

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124; understanding pain of the other, xviii, 124. See also grief; suffering Pamuk, Orhan, 145–47, 207n30 Pamukoğlu, Osman, 23, 25 paramilitary groups, 179–80 patriarchy/patriarchal authority, 5, 41, 86, 197n15 Pavey, Şafak, 210n20 peace negotiations, 7, 8, 183; disabled veterans’ activism as obstacle to, 177–78; failure of, xxii, 14, 169; Kurdish Opening (Kürt Açılımı) and, 154, 210n17; Öcalan and, 11, 176, 209n2; resumption of, xxii; “Solution Process” (Çözüm Süreci), 177 Penal Code, Turkish, xxii, 141, 150, 154. See also “insulting Turkishness,” crime of People’s Democracy Party, 213n12 People’s Special Forces (Halk Özel Harekat), 180 phantom limb syndrome, 12, 125, 131 Philippines, counterinsurgency in, 24 PKK [Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê] (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), xx, xxi, 3, 52; Army strategy of field domination and, 26; civilian victims of attacks by, 118, 178; female guerrillas of, 195n42; general amnesty for PKK members, 154, 159; guerrilla war initiated by, 15, 111; headquarters in Iraqi Kurdistan, 157; history of Kurdish conflict and, 189–90n8; Kurdish Opening (Kürt Açılımı) and, 154; leftists and labor unions accused of sympathy for, 75, 98; Marxist-Leninist legacy of, 84, 189n8; peace negotiations and, 8, 11, 127, 169; protests against, at funerals, 55; public mourning of guerrillas repressed by the state, 126; revolutionary puritanism of, 31; “spring cleaning” operations against, 60; state’s struggle with PKK presented as holy war, 21; Syrian government support for, 140; in TV mafia series, 68, 69, 70; urban protests in favor of, 49, 49, 114; YPG deemed as extension of, 175. See also guerrillas, Kurdish; Öcalan, Abdullah Platform of Gezi Gazis and Martyrs, 179 pleasure: carnal pleasures, 41–42; death

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and, 40; of food, 41–42; pain and, 43; of smoking, 40–41; trauma and, 43; urban modernity and, 38. See also enjoyment “popular association” of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families, xv, xvi, 111, 116– 20; AKP and, 122–23; ideological policing in, 119–20; martyrs’ mothers as founders of, 113–16; Museum of Martyrs, 118–19; Turkish-Islamist ideological tone of, 116; veterans’ cliques and, 121–23. See also “official” association populism, right wing, 58, 173; critique of neoliberalism, 2, 162, 163; global electoral victories of, xxii; media, 71, 72, 105, 161 propaganda, 22, 23, 139. See also psychological warfare prostheses, 57, 109; affective intensity transmitted through, 143; artificial limbs and other body parts, 144, 155, 157, 160, 165; associated with criminality, 177; medical fraud scandals involving, 166–67; payments for, 7, 14; publicly removed and displayed in protests, 11, 155, 156, 157–60; replacement of, 63, 166; repossessed in debt collection, 163–74, 169; as spectacle-objects, 159; veterans’ dark humor about, 129, 130; visibility of, 155, 159, 210n20 psychological warfare, 29, 59, 112, 126, 163 PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder): DSM diagnostic criteria for, 43; “Southeast Syndrome,” 53, 199n29; Turkish military-medical classification and, 190n17 Puar, Jasbir, 213n6 racism, 54, 173 Rambo, as archetypal figure, xxi, 28, 29, 31 Real, the (Lacanian concept), 36 Red Apple Coalition, 54, 146–47, 148, 191n22 “Region, the” (Bölge), 15, 17, 21, 38; counterinsurgency operations in, 23; fantasy of omnipresent Turkish state in, 19, 193n16; military folklore of, 33; military jargon used in, 23; state of emergency in, 52–53; Turkish nationalism and, 16; TV series and films shot in, 68. See also mountains

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rehabilitation centers, 63–64, 122 Rehn, Olli, 147 relics, bodily, 7, 191n20 remainder-body, 6 remasculinization, 6, 7, 58, 74, 97, 174 residual limb, 130, 151, 158 Roboski/Uludere massacre (2011), 178 Roma, 93 “rotten report” (çürük raporu), xx, 47, 89–90, 152 RTÜK [Radyo ve Televizyon Üst Kurulu] (Radio and Television High Council), 73 Rumi (Sufi poet), 194n19 Russia, post-Soviet, 187n6 Saçılık, Veli, 180 sacrifice, 56, 76; Abrahamic, 86; Feast of Sacrifice, 86, 87; homo sacer concept and, 9; in “Kınalı Mehmet” (Hennaed Mehmet) story, 86–87; martyrs’ families and discourse of, 126; monopoly of, 10; sacrificial bodies of disabled veterans, 76–78; transgenerational, 109 Sacrifice: Its Nature and Sacrifice (Hubert and Mauss), 88–89 sacrificial crisis, xvii, 13, 76, 87, 169; affectively charged staging of, 12; defacement of gazi status and, 96–99; negative affects surrounding disability and, 96; origin of term, 11; ultranationalist political culture and, 100–101 sacrificial discourses, 6, 56 Şafak, Elif, 147, 152, 209n11 Said, Sheikh, 143 Samanid Empire, 79 Sarıkamış, Battle of, 26, 86 Şarkılarım Dağlara [My Songs to the Mountains] (Kaya), 16 Saturday Mothers, 112, 205n9. See also Friday Mothers scapegoats, 11, 132, 145, 148 Scarry, Elaine, 124 search patrols (arama tarama), 35 Secor, Anna, 124 self-other boundary, blurring of, 29, 194n32 Sèvres Treaty, 147 sexism/misogyny, 97, 152, 153

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sexuality, xx, 5; disabled sex jokes, 130; fertility and assisted reproduction, 58, 64, 200n49; heteroreproductive, 6 SGK [Sosyal Güvenlik Kurumu] (Social Security Institution), 167–73 Sheikh Said Rebellion (1925), 143 Sledgehammer trials, 177 smoking, soldiers’ accounts of, 39–41, 129 social suffering, 5, 153 soldier-body, 18, 28; analogy with sacrificial animal, 67; displaced onto terroristbody, 180–81; as political commodity, 56; remade as mirror image of guerrillabody, 24, 25, 29 “Southeast Syndrome” (Güneydoğu Sendromu), 53, 199n29 sovereignty, xvii, 191n23; Agamben’s antisacrificial theory of, 10; as authority grounded in violence, 8; bodies of sovereignty and sacrifice, 7–12; Kurdish, 192n33; military conscription and, 4; mountains as boundary of, 17; performance of state sovereignty, 14; sovereign violence, xxii; TV mafia series and, 67–71; of Westphalian nation-state, 145. See also masculine sovereignty; state sovereignty space of death, 29 Specters of Marx (Derrida, 1993, 2012), 188n2 spectral power, 9, 144, 174 state fantasies, 170, 212n16 State Medal of Pride, 96–97, 113, 121, 157 state sovereignty, 8, 77, 180; authoritarianmilitarist performance of, 14; defined in Turkish constitution, 192n38, 202n3; EU accession process and, 7; mountains as de facto boundary of, 17; nexus with masculine sovereignty, 48, 73–74, 77; Öcalan’s caged body and, 141; public mourning of PKK guerrillas suppressed by, 126; “restoration” of, 7, 101, 150; sacrifice and, 87. See also masculine sovereignty; sovereignty Stone, Oliver, 4 subjectivity: defined, 190n10; embodied, 3; intersubjectivity, 136; masculine, 64; political, 64–67, 139–40

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suffering: the body and, 124, 170; coming to terms with, xxiii; community and, 62, 124–25; cultural expressions of, 142; during military service, 27–28; ethics and aesthetics of, 140; institutionalization of, 62; instrumentalization of, xxiii, 5; nation and, 140, 163; political agency and, 114; social suffering, 5, 153; trauma and, 43. See also pain Sufism, 85, 116 Surname Law (1934), 81 symbolism, xviii, 36, 83, 86 Syria, 14, 140, 181, 184, 189n8 Syrian refugees, 162, 173, 184 Taussig, Michael, 194n32 technologies, military, 24, 26, 34, 35 terrorism, discourse of, 2, 159 “terrorists,” xvi, 1, 22; as affectively charged term, 3; coupist soldiers of 2016 as, 180–81; mountains as harbor for, 20; “terrorists with pens,” xxii; “terrorist woman,” 33; “uncircumcised terrorist” myth, 30, 33, 84, 149 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 191n19 Those on the Mountains (Gürsel, 1996), 26 torture, 53, 146, 176, 190n8; 213n5 transgender men, xx, 5, 46 trauma, xviii, 34; dismemberment as foundational trauma, 54; embodied grief, 119–20; gazi status and, 190n17; generational and transgenerational, 64; PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), 43, 190n17, 199n29; “Southeast Syndrome,” 53, 199n29; trauma discourse, 43; “traumatic pastoral” mountain landscape, 21; traumatic reenactment, xviii, 42 TRT (Turkish Radio and Television Corporation), 53 TSK Rehabilitation and Care Center (Ankara), 63, 66, 165 Turkish Army, 3, 15, 77; basic training, xx– xxi; crime of denigrating, 135, 140; field domination strategy, 26; guerrilla onslaught of PKK (1984) and, 22; as “hearth of the prophet,” 84, 194n38; hegemonic construction of masculinity

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and, 183; power struggles within, 176; reorganized for counterguerrilla warfare, 24; sacralization of Turkish soldiers, 10; spatio-temporal movements of soldiers, 25–26 Turkish Association for the Disabled (Türkiye Sakatlar Derneği), 99 Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, 83–85, 111 Turkish language, 52, 205n10; gendered swear words, 31, 139; relation to Kurdish, 159; terms for “disabled,” 51, 199n21 Turkish Resistance Organization (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı), 133, 207–8n40 Turkish state: becoming the state through mimetic performance, 70; cynicism of Turkish citizens in relation to, 189n5; denial of Kurds’ existence as ethnic group, 16–17, 52, 159, 193n8; ethnic nationalist politics of, 6; foundation of Turkish Republic (1923), 17; peace negotiations with PKK, 11, 127; populist critiques of, 2; spectral persecutory power of, xvi Turner, Victor, 82 ultranationalism (right-wing nationalism), xviii, xxii, 54, 64; ability to mobilize large groups, xxiii; “deep state” and, 69; disabled veterans’ associations and, 119, 124; historical blockbuster films about gazis and, 83; lawsuits against intellectuals, 146, 148; as political formation of Turkey in 2000s, 7, 191n22; political violence and assassinations, xix; prosthesis repossessions and, 173; public display of prostheses in protests and, 155; “restoration” of state sovereignty as goal, 7, 101; TV channels devoted to, 135; TV mafia series and, 70, 201n60. See also nationalism, Turkish uncanny, the, 35, 94, 119, 193n6; geography of war and, 15; in soldiers’ warning and premonition narratives, 36, 37 “uncircumcised terrorist” myth, 30, 33, 84, 149 Union of Kurdistan Gazis (Yekitiya Gaziyên Kurdistan), 178–79

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Valley of the Wolves [Kurtlar Vadisi] (TV series), 68–71, 72, 201nn60–61; coup attempt (2016) and, 202n66; criticized for inciting xenophobic violence, 72, 201n54; Denktaş’s appearance in, 133; reception outside Turkey, 201n58 Vietnam War, 4, 24 village evacuations, 19, 21 village guards (korucu), 15, 19, 193n4; Army strategy of field domination and, 26; counterguerrilla war economy and, 40; ex-guards in urban areas, 49 violence, 35, 51, 170; domestic, 50, 53, 197n15; ethnographies of, 29; during failed coup attempt (2016), 180; gendered and sexualized, 181, 213n11; masculinity crisis and, 197n15; monopoly of, 10; new configurations of sovereignty and, 178–80; sovereign, xxii, 8, 9; space of, 30; structural and political, 100; symbolic, 7; time and, 175, 176 Violence and the Sacred (Girard), 145 virginity, sacrifice and, 87, 88 Visweswaran, Kamala, 188n16 War Cripples of 1920 (Dix), 4, 190n15 War of Independence, 2, 63, 76, 80, 81, 110; mythic status within Turkish national-

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ism, 109; Western imperialist plots thwarted by, 184 war trophies, 24 welfare system, restructuring of, 166–67, 211n10 Wildheart: Boomerang Hell [Deli Yürek: Bumerang Cehennemi] (film), 67–68 Wise Men Commission, 176 women: disabled member of parliament, 210n20; exempted from conscription, 46; Kemalist female body aesthetic, 104; kinship terms for respected figures, 64, 200n47; Kurdish guerrillas, 33, 195nn42–43; “sacrificed” in marriage, 87; Saturday Mothers, 112, 205n9; veiling and unveiling of, 113, 118, 132, 205n11. See also martyrs, mothers of work safety, in state institutions, 7, 90 World War I, 58, 147 World War II, 58 Yeğen, Mesut, 193n8 Young, Thomas, 4 YPG [Yekîneyên Parastina Ge] (People’s Protection Units), 175, 184 Yücel, Savaş, 66–67 Zübeyde Hanım, 117

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