By Derin Bohcaci
I wish to talk of ghosts when I speak of memories. Ghosts of cities, ghosts of alleyways, of darkened parks lit by construction lights. Memory for me congeals and warps into these apparitions, haunting each corner, hallway, and pavement. Yet who, I enquire the phantoms, made you such? Why have you come back with vengeance and cannot rest in the annals of history?
Who killed memory?
Visiting Gallipoli in the summer of 2019, I stood struck by the stillness of the Northern Aegean landscape. Kids splashing in the azure sea, pines stretching and bending to taste the brine mured the landscape in a calm idiosyncratic to the Eastern Mediterranean. A seeming paradise, it had been for over a century a site of pilgrimage for the nationalist: whether Turkish or Anzac. Monuments of the fallen strewn across the hills, commemorating the bloodiest of the Great War, had become temples to prostrate oneself to the ‘capital N’ Nation. Even within the calm, I couldn’t shake off the memories of the war my Baba kept recounting, teary-eyed, of soldiers my age running into bullets. Unrivalled bravery, for the love of the motherland, of course. Mothers burning henna into the hands of their sacrificial sons.
In motion was the transmission of national memories, real or fabricated, it did not very much matter; these memories of war were to take root and animate the land I was standing on with historicity; my Baba made it a point that I knew who I was stepping on as I walked.
A nation of memories imbued these into the landscape; the aforementioned pines turned into solitary soldiers standing guard on our burning beaches, the breeze carrying our mehmetçik’s last breath into our solemn Turkish night. What is a nation if not an accumulation of memory? Collective memory transformed this sleepy fishing town into a shrine to the birthplace of a people: a new race, the children of the Republic from which a Secular Turkey would rise. My father said so, the schools said so, the TV said so, and the marches on the street said so.
But when I kneeled over to place my ears against a rock, I was startled to hear another scream echo through the restful sleep of our martyrs. I stumbled back: it seems there is a haunting, ghostly stirring in this geography. A latent memory, it seems, has filtered through the sands and set up a haunting of its own kind. I dig through the sand to find who it is, yet to no avail. Instead, I turn to the memory of my dede, my grandfather. He tells me it must have been the dispossessed: the memories of the Greek and Turkish villagers expelled from their homelands in the population exchange of 1923 (Mübadele), 1.6 million forcefully relocated across the Anaolian and Greek Peninsulas. Lives ripped apart, languages forgotten, and lineages erased, the great ‘unmixing’ of the Greek and Turkish nations was taking place, predicated on eliminating the sedimentation the elimination of a sedimentation of a heterogeneous memory, these unruly memories blooming against the grain.
It seems certain memories get enshrined and laid to rest in textbooks and monuments, becoming a piece within the corpus of history, the annals of power. Others, meanwhile, were discarded and relegated to the realm of the abject. Left to scream through the sand. Unruly ghosts encapsulated within the hills, giving out their last breaths within the dying memories of the few. A trickle ebbing into the abyss. From Gallipoli, twenty thousand Greek speakers were sent across the Aegean; their memories turned into whispers in their ancestral villages, congealing and clotting into ghosts of the landscape.
However, silence doesn’t signify loss. These ghosts still have their sway, simply unheard. The Rum ghost of Western Turkey, still haunts the traditions of the village dwellers, poking its head out in the accented Turkish, every articulation punctuated with memory of a time past. These ghosts, their memories, and nightmares, are imbued into the boulders and wrangled trees of the coast.
I’ve taken it as my duty to seek these latent whispers, to tease out these ghosts into words and to ground these hidden memories into writing. To transmit and lay to rest, to birth new annals of history. These ghosts of feminine disobedience, queer riots, and defiance of the marginalised, I will pluck these memories out of old tongues, lost books, and secrets held in the topography, buried under urban sprawl or sunk under the waves and grave soil. I invite you to do the same with me, to recover forbidden memories, and to create a world anew.
