The “Onlar” (Them) multi-screen video exhibit can be visited at SALT Galata until June 28.(Photo: Kenan Sunar)

By JÜLİDE GÜNGÖR

An older woman wearing a yellow dress appears on the TV screen.

She is from Hemşin, and her maternal grandmother is a teacher of Islam. The woman in the yellow dress explains that many years later she returned for a visit. On doing some research, she discovered that she and her grandmother actually shared something unexpected — they were both Armenian. There are so many other stories like this in Turkey: the Jewish child not allowed to hold the flagstick at school, the young soldier not allowed to speak Kurdish with his mother, etc. The “others” of Turkey are all at SALT Galata in the exhibition “Onlar” (Them) right now. report ZAMAN

Let’s start off with the woman wearing red shoes about whom we know nothing, except that she is Jewish, before she starts talking: “When I was in primary school, our flag ceremony would always take place in a closed salon. A flag would be brought into the middle of the salon, and everyone had to put their hands out and hold the flagstick together; kids would volunteer for this. You’d raise your hand if you wanted to, and then go and hold the stick. Everyone wanted to do it, me included. So one day I went up to hold the flagstick, but I was sent back! I didn’t understand why at the time. Years later, I realized that it was completely identity based; I had been sent back because I was Jewish. I don’t know if it was thought that maybe Jewish peoples’ hands were dirty, or what, but I wasn’t meant to hold that flagstick.”

The truth is there are many citizens in Turkey who have shared similar stories. There are those who weren’t able to learn their native Zaza language, a Kurdish dialect from their grandparents for fear of retribution. The soldier who couldn’t speak to his mother for years as he was on military duty and couldn’t be overheard speaking Kurdish, though she only knew Kurdish. The youth whose mother would warn him whenever he left home, “Keep your Armenian identity a secret out there!”

Of course, these sorts of stories can be found all over the world, but in Turkey, the official version of events has been widely heard and accepted by the masses. This is why we sometimes feel strange when we encounter not the official, but the personal versions and accounts of what really happened way back when.

Citizen, speak Turkish!

İpek Duben deserves congratulations for her work. She gathered stories from 24 people of varying ethnicities, religions, languages and so on, and has put them all up for display and thought by those heading over to the SALT Galata gallery to see the “Onlar” exhibition.

The exhibition gives space to stories and memories from Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, Jewish and Roma citizens of Turkey. Headscarved women and women who are victims of violence are also included in this exhibition. Curiously, there is no Turkish Greek voice. Apparently, Duben was unable to find anyone from this group willing to participate in this exhibition.

What we have in this new SALT exhibition is a serious vista of Turkey, one that needs to be heard. Duben herself says, “Whether you agree or not, you need to listen to these voices,” adding, “Everyone seems to have their own ‘Citizen, speak Turkish!’ memory in this country, myself included.”

State’s minority policies responsible for all of this

But how do we meet on middle ground? We hear from a young woman in blue busy perusing the show: “When we remove the fear of being ‘other,’ this entire business goes back to the state. If high school students weren’t treated to half a page of information on the events of 1915, if the talk didn’t always circle back to the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia [ASALA] when the topic of Armenians comes up, well, if these things weren’t the case, maybe coming together would have been easier. I think the factor that has made us all so late to confront these realities, that has made things drag on for so long, has been the state policies on minorities. We are talking about policies that have simply never allowed people to stand as one, to come together.”

This multi-screened video installation is on display until June 28. If you are in the mood to allow your mind some new confusion or to dispel any doubts about the power of our state, head over to see this. Because as Celal Salik noted in his book recently, “The deep differences between our citizens’ personal views and the official views we hear reflects the power of our state.”