{"id":3517,"date":"2021-08-15T15:16:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-15T15:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/2021\/08\/turkish-kaleidoscope-tells-of-1970s-upheaval\/"},"modified":"2023-05-10T17:02:25","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T15:02:25","slug":"turkish-kaleidoscope-tells-of-1970s-upheaval","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/turkish-kaleidoscope-tells-of-1970s-upheaval\/","title":{"rendered":"An Anthropologist Tells of 1970s Upheaval in \u201cTurkish Kaleidoscope\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
A new graphic novel from Princeton University Press tells the story of Turkey in the 1970s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

In which the author of a graphic novel describes the process of working with an illustrator to create a book that traces Turkey\u2019s descent into political violence in the 1970s, through the experiences of four students on opposing sides of the conflict.<\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

Jenny White<\/h4>\n

<\/p>\n

It started out as a straight-forward research project, an oral history of Turkey in the 1970s, a time of great upheaval and violence. As I flattened the vivid stories told to me\u00a0during the interviews into scholarly analysis, I wondered whether there was another way to get my analytical\u00a0observations across while retaining the vividness of the stories \u2014\u00a0perhaps in graphic form. Then the saga began: find the money, find an artist, learn an entirely different way of writing so that the artist knows what to draw, and package ideas in a way that makes a reader want to keep turning pages. Below, I share with you the (to me)\u00a0surprising\u00a0technicalities and intricate\u00a0process of writing a scholarly graphic novel.<\/p>\n

I first arrived in Turkey as a young MA student in 1975 in Ankara, the capital, in the middle of a vicious civil war. There were bombings, gunfights, and street battles across the country. Between 1976 and 1980, 5,000 civilians were killed in street violence between the left and the right. The left had split into numerous groups that often shot at each other. Bystanders were caught in the middle. Twice I stumbled into a hail of bullets while walking past a cafe or a door on campus that suddenly flew open. One day, I learned that even school buses were segregated, when some fellow riders pulled a young man from his seat, hit him on the head with a hammer, and pushed him out of the rolling vehicle. The passengers then sang merry fascist songs all the way downtown. At the national level, there were dueling government ministries, parallel police forces and a failing economy.<\/p>\n

I left with my degree in 1978. A coup d\u2019\u00e9tat in 1980 replaced street violence with state violence that brutally repressed activists, particularly on the left. Three years later, the military allowed new elections. The civilian government that came to power opened Turkey\u2019s closed economy to the global market and new consumer products and hopes for upward mobility preoccupied Turkey\u2019s population. Amnesia about the 1970s set in and little was written about the period until very recently.<\/p>\n

I returned to the U.S. and earned a PhD in social anthropology, specializing in contemporary Turkish society and politics. This led to further years of living in Turkey as I carried out a variety of research projects and published several scholarly books, none of them about the 1970s. In between, in an act of nostalgia for the lost civilities of the Ottoman Empire, I wrote three historical novels set in 1880s Istanbul. My most recent book, Turkish Kaleidoscope<\/em>, required the skills of both genres. A graphic book, it is set in Ankara in the 1970s and follows four medical students as they become involved in violent political activism on opposing sides. It\u2019s an exploration of memory and place from the perspective of everyday lives, rather than an account of the main actors, ideological factions, or metrics of social change.<\/p>\n

This project, like others before it, began with applications for research grants to support a trip to Turkey to carry out interviews, mostly in Turkish. Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies invited me to visit for a sabbatical and underwrote the research. I carried out 32 oral histories in Turkey with a wide range of people: left\/right\/nonaligned, male\/female, activist\/bystander, Muslim\/non-Muslim, Turk\/Kurd, student, factory owner, and so on. This triangulation produced a rich and textured picture of the period, a history from below. When doing the interviews, I had no specific agenda, though I discouraged any discussion of ideology. I allowed myself to be surprised by people\u2019s stories and motivations. People\u2019s memories of the time were vivid and what I recorded were fascinating, poignant coming-of-age stories and turning points in their lives. Often they seemed to relive their experiences in the telling. They clearly thought that this was an important story that no one had asked about before.<\/p>\n

As with my previous research, I analyzed the interviews but noticed that my analysis flattened the stories as it folded them into discussions of abstract issues, like factionalism. I wondered whether there was some way to make the same points, but retain the exceptional quality of the stories and the nuances and contradictions they contained.<\/p>\n

\"Turkish
Turkish artist-illustrator Erg\u0171n G\u0171nd\u0171z.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We analyze data and build models to try to explain the origins of factionalism and descent into political violence, but the reality always involves complexities of real actors negotiating cultural, social and historical pressures. I wanted to capture that. My editor at Princeton University Press encouraged me to write a graphic book and sent me proofs of two serious graphic books they were publishing.\u00a0It was an intriguing idea. I\u2019m a fan of Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco and Jason Lutes, and had myself used Persepolis<\/em>, Marjane Satrapi\u2019s graphic account of her childhood during the Iranian Revolution, to teach classes about the Middle East. I had read \u00d6zge Samanc\u0131\u2019s book, Dare to Disappoint<\/em>, a graphic account of her childhood in Turkey. The problem was that I couldn\u2019t draw.<\/p>\n

This led to another round of grant proposals to pay an artist for the extensive amount of time needed to illustrate a book-length manuscript. I had moved permanently to Sweden by this time and was awarded a grant by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond that allowed me to go ahead. I thought that the book should be drawn by a Turkish artist who could capture the nuances of the society and who could remember the 1970s, which looked very different from today, without becoming ensnared in the politics, that is, who wouldn\u2019t balk at being asked to represent both right and left sympathetically. Through a mutual friend, I was introduced to Erg\u0171n G\u0171nd\u0171z, a highly experienced and talented artist who was sensitive to these nuances and could evoke Turkey in the 1970s (when he was a teenager). We met for lunch and I was impressed by his professionalism as well as the broad range of styles he had mastered. Once we agreed to work together, I sent photos and descriptions to Istanbul and he sent back sketches to me in Stockholm. He developed a distinctive style for this book.<\/p>\n

The process of writing a graphic book, though, was new to me. Drawing on my background as a novelist as well as anthropologist, I combined ethnography, memoir and life history with techniques of storytelling and dialogue more commonly used in writing fiction. I sent Erg\u0171n an 80-page single-spaced \u201cstoryboard.\u201d His response was puzzlement: \u201cI can\u2019t draw what\u2019s in people\u2019s heads.\u201d<\/p>\n