Meet Me in the Evening for a Kiss in Taksim Square

introduction

It was an afternoon in July of 2013. Umut came to my studio in Tophane with goggles he had bought in Eminönü. He said, ‘these are to protect our eyes’. We went out. Before climbing the steep Italian hill, we stopped by Yaso’s studio. She gave each of us two plastic bottles of water, mixed with acid reflux medication. What does one do with water mixed with Rennie at a protest in Taksim? I don’t remember from which corner we sneaked onto Istiklal. What I remember is that a plastic bullet tore the crowd in two. And all the rest of the bullets, skipping across our bodies, tear gas, sweat, panic, pushing, tear gas, bullets, sirens … Umut and I didn’t let go of each other’s hands. We learned that Rennie heals the burnings of tear gas. And we didn’t die that summer. ¹

What were the freedoms we risked our lives for? How did we queer the movement, challenge the polarised society, care for each other and exist together? With the help of the footage from my personal archive, I aim to take a journey into my memory. I would like to welcome you to a direct experience rather than an intellectual understanding of a context. Inviting you to enter this space, I would like to greet you as one of us; as ‘we fear those who speak about us’ (hooks, 1990, p. 343). I don’t want to speak about us, I want to speak to us, with us.

Gezi: a feminist and queer grassroots resistance from Turkey

Gezi is a tiny park in the middle of Taksim Square in the heart of Istanbul. At the beginning of the summer in 2013, a bunch of young people set up tents in the park in protest of the bulldozers cutting down the trees in order to turn the park into another shopping complex. Gezi was one of the few green spaces left in the city in which people could lay down, nap or read books; at night, gay men could cruise. The park was important because of its location as well. Taksim Square has always been a space open to free public assembly such as the Feminist Night Walk, the LGBTQI Pride parade and the workers’ walk; it was a symbol of democratic demonstration. As Judith Butler explains, ² the privatisation of the park felt like an ‘offence’ to people, a threat to the freedom of assembly.

It was 30 May, the middle of the night: the tents of these young people set on fire while they were sleeping in them. The park was evacuated forcefully, with water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets. ³ By dusk, thousands of people from all over the country had gathered in the park. With this act of solidarity, the largest grassroots resistance in the history of Turkey began.

The public started gathering every day in the park to reclaim that which should belong to the public. Day by day, the crowd increased and the spirit of Gezi spread to other cities in the country. Prostitutes, Kurds, secularists, Alawites, queers, Muslims, women, anti-capitalists, students, artists, leftists, football fanatics and hipsters: some arrived in organised groups but most came out as individuals. ⁴ Few were experienced in sustained resistance, and most were vulnerable in some way. As Zeynep Gambetti (2014, p. 96) characterises it: ‘Gezi was the struggle of disorderly bodies, of those who did not have any dispositif other than their bodies, against retaliatory machines’. But the struggle was not only between people with nothing but their bodies and retaliatory machines. The methodologies of struggle were deeper and the area of struggle was wider than that.

‘marginality as a site of resistance’

bell hooks (1990, p. 341) identifies marginality as a space of resistance, a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but also in habits of being and the way one lives. ⁵ That is exactly how Gezi protesters produced their own discourse.

After Prime Minister Erdoğan called them a bunch of çapulcu, which means marauders or marginalised in Turkish, they accepted that they are çapulcu, they claimed the margin. In fact, it was this marginality itself that they didn’t want to lose or give up; they took on marginality ‘as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine new alternatives, new worlds’ (hooks, 1990, p. 341). ⁶ So this usual polarisation tactic failed against Gezi protesters; indeed, it paved the way for the interdependency of protesters. Instead of othering one other, the group accepted that they are the other and used that space as a site of creativity and power. A space where everyone was the other became an inclusive space where everyone recovered and moved in solidarity.

I read this reappropriating tactic as a feminist and queer manoeuvre. Like individuals who identify as queer—queering the process through claiming the word ‘queer’—the protesters claimed the words which were targeted to trivialise the movement. This perception also threw the opposing power a curveball. The resistance freed itself through taking its power not from the opposition, but from itself.

the largest grassroots movement in Turkey’s history

Since they were çapulcu, the protesters started ‘çapulling’ the process of the protest. This opened a space to act freely, without any fixed agenda or tactic for sustaining the resistance. This disorder that nurtured the creativity of the movement is another fundamental difference between Gezi and all other grassroots resistance movements in the history of Turkey. Gezi was feminist, with no hierarchical order, leader or ‘father’ telling it what to do, when or how to do it. It was the subjects themselves making their own decisions together, independently and interdependently. While some were dancing, chanting and doing yoga, others were building barricades. While some were reading books, others were building a library or taking care of basic needs such as bringing food or making tea. But no one left the park or the square alone.

Gambetti (2014, p. 96) describes this as ‘bodies persisting in gathering in public space instead of dispersing or disappearing outright’. Agreeing with this persistence, I liken these bodies to couch grass, a weed that persistently thrives despite being unwanted. You can never be sure from which corner of the garden the couch grass will pop up—just like the protesters who were being dispersed from one spot but were quickly gathering in another spot. Just as this grass is not easy to dig up or exterminate, neither are the protesters who are stubborn and wilful. When the police cut off all means of vehicle transportation from the Asian to the European side of Istanbul to hinder people from reaching the park, protesters gathered and decided to walk from Asia to Europe over the Bosphorus bridge. When the park was evacuated and gathering in groups, walking together or uttering slogans in Taksim were banned, one man came to the middle of the square and began silently standing without moving. Soon, people started gathering around him and stood together for almost eight hours. Modelling the first ‘standing man’ (a performance artist named Erdem Gündüz), everyone was filling the square at a distance from others that wouldn’t violate what could be considered ‘an assembly’ by the police. This happened just like couch grass that pops up suddenly, spreads quickly and stands together in solidarity.

As Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958], p. 190) writes: ‘the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation’.

‘If I can’t dance it’s not my revolution’

The life blood keeping the Gezi movement alive flowed through the many cracks that the protesters opened spontaneously every day, at any moment. ⁷ From every crack, there was laughter bursting out. Despite the danger of death and severe injury, the streets of Taksim were turned into a carnival and each act of protest was turned into a performance of protesters who themselves turned into performance artists, comedians, musicians, dancers or graffiti artists. ⁸ They became the creators of comedies and lived the humorous reality they created because the reality of the ‘real’ world and ‘real’ life was unbearably unreal: major news sources in Turkey didn’t cover Gezi and instead broadcast penguin documentaries at prime time while the major cities of Turkey were burning, with people overflowing onto the streets, getting wounded and dying.

Mikhail Bakhtin (2009) defines laughter as the spirit of carnival: an expression of subversion, a world turned inside out. In alignment with this definition, I am thinking that the power of humour helped the protesters in subverting a sense of fear. It turned the official language of retaliatory machines upside down (Tunali, 2018, p. 388). First, laughing releases an effect that spreads quickly. Laughing at the same time, at the same things, erased the borders between identities, sexes, classes and races, and created bonds that strengthened the sense of community in Gezi. Second, it eased the tension and fear that the oppression spread. When protesters were asking for more tear gas and, if possible, with strawberry flavour, the fear of being burned or choked by the gas lost its seriousness; it lost its power as a threat. ⁹

#ThisIsHowWeWin

It was this foolish humour that created mass laughter. The protesters used the laughter as a revolutionary act.

wanting the change, being the change

While this carnivalesque disorder and unpredictability were nurturing the movement, they were also encouraging the subjects of the movement to disrupt the sameness of their own existences that were rigid and grey. The protesters were not only asking for things to change but were also becoming the change. Demanding an anti-capitalist system, they created a communal togetherness in the park based on direct participatory democracy and voluntary labour. Decisions were taken together in the forums (open platforms); everyone had the right to talk and there was curiosity and respect when listening to each other. Free concerts and open lectures took place and there was free access to medical help, books, food and clean water. ¹⁰

What paved the way for constant transformation was also a chain of processes: intervention, self-recognition, change. For instance, the intervention of queers and feminists with football fans about their sexist language made the fans recognise that the swear words they were using targeted groups that belonged to Gezi. This resulted in their change of language. To me, this is significant not only on a personal level where a personal transformation took place through self-awareness; it is also that a simultaneous reciprocity occurred between a group openly calling for another group to refuse to conform with the expectations of a structure that they belong to. It was an agreement to fail in adhering to the codes of masculinity, of heterosexuality, of being a white Turk. It was caring for each other and each other’s demands; it was an attempt and a dare to smash locked, concrete structures. Because ‘the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us’ (Lorde, 2007 [1984], p. 208). ¹¹

‘why don’t we meet each other’s eyes? do we expectbetrayal in each other’s gaze, or recognition?’

Now I want to think about how the protesters managed to protest different things within a shared space, as well as how they managed to be a diverse group. ¹² Gezi was transformed into a space where it was possible for people coming from different identities and struggles to vocalise their own dreams. Besides claiming the park, people wanted independence, social recognition, secularity, freedom for hijab, sovereignty, workers’ rights, legal recognition, religious freedom, freedom of speech, trans rights … None of these demands conflicted with each other. I think the harmony of Gezi consisted in the opposing standpoints from which it was made up.

Here I am not talking about being a ‘civilised’ or proud-to-be diverse group embracing each other’s contradictions respectfully because it is dictated by the law or ‘the right thing to do’. Rather, it is a particular way of grasping the life immanent in Eastern philosophy which is in opposition to the principles of Aristotelian philosophy. Unlike the Aristotelian/Western logic which states that A is A, A is not non-A and A cannot be A and non-A, the paradoxical logic of the East says ‘that which is one is one. That which is not-one, is also one’ (Chuang-tzu, cited in Fromm, 1956, pp. 73–74). In this sense, it is possible to understand the conflicting harmony of Gezi. It is about recognising that we are different from each other, but we are the same in being ‘the other’. ¹³

For decades, Turkish governments have been programming the nation to fear and loathe the differences between its citizens. So far, all governments—from secular to neoliberal Islamist—governed the country by dividing the nation into groups according to their differences. They all encouraged the dominant group (heterosexual, white, Sunni Muslim, cis men) to destroy the ‘subordinate’. They constructed a macho, sociopathic, sexist society suppressing Kurds, Armenians, women, homosexuals, marginals. As suggested by Ertuğrul Kürkçü:

This ‘low-intensity war’ covered every cell of society like a tumor … Nationalism and racism, whose toxic effects are still as devastating as before; machismo, misogyny and sexism indispensable in nurturing the human raw material of state violence; hate speech, the most direct tool for suppressing the different and the marginal; xenophobia, which is necessary to block international solidarity, the oppressed and those who struggle; ceaselessly reproduced conservatism, stifling the potential for change inherent in creativity, knowledge and new forms of social relations, seeped into and grew in the 90s. (Kürkçü, 2014)

Co-opting the differences between us, the state has been producing systematised oppression since the 1990s. It has been separating us from each other. But upon occupying Gezi Park, people started meeting each other in the streets of Taksim Square every day, all day and all night. The square became an agora ¹⁴ where people assembled each day to claim the park and reclaim themselves and the terms of the society. After the police occupied Gezi Park as their base, they banned the public from its use. But people turned everywhere into Gezi, carrying the resistance everywhere. A collective call was made to assemble in local parks to continue the forums which had begun in Gezi Park. ¹⁵ The first park to be turned into a democratic public space was in Beşiktaş (a central district in Istanbul). The next day, other forum sites were declared. By 20 June, there were thirty-eight forums in Istanbul, all formed by civil initiative. In this way, ‘the protest movement extended its limits and created its own public spaces by decentralising the site of protest’ (İnceoğlu, 2013). ¹⁶

In each forum, there was an open mic where people expressed their ideas freely. It is in these forums where they met each other’s eyes and found recognition, not betrayal. These conversations made them see each other in their actual complexities, as human beings, rather than the troublesome but familiar stereotypes provided by the state. They acknowledged and accepted their differences with respect and they started ‘acting together in various ways to increase the visibility of certain disadvantaged groups and identity positions’ (İnceoğlu, 2013). In that year, an unprecedented 50,000 people walked the LGBTQI Pride Parade. With a call from a group calling themselves Anti-capitalist Muslims, people gathered in the streets for ‘iftar’ ¹⁷ and shared their dinner with each other regardless of their religions and belief systems. Additionally, when police killed a Kurdish citizen on 29 June, thousands of people gathered in the streets and protested police brutality (ibid.).

As Audre Lorde (2007 [1984], p. 194) reminds us, ‘there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation’.

We have chosen each other

and the edge of each others battles

the war is the same (ibid., p. 208)

‘away from the state, close to the clouds’

To conclude my piece, I was thinking of possible concepts, searching for a word so infinite as to embrace the very many things I have tried to describe about Gezi. ¹⁸ During this search, I thought of some Persian words, because of their capacity to embody most of the contexts I touched on; I also thought of various academic concepts. For instance, Gambetti (2014, p. 89) describes the movement as ‘an empty signifier under which diverse grievances could be subsumed’. Buket Türkmen (2015, p. 13) names it ‘“solidarist individualism”, challenging “competitive individualism” that is based on consumption created in line with the requirements of neoliberalism’. ¹⁹ Alain Badiou’s (2001, p. 41) ‘event’ describes it as ‘an unpredictable immanent break, an interruption in life that produces a new discourse, a new set of relations, and a new “way of being”’.

Ultimately, I realised that it is not going to be possible for me to convey the essence of a protest as such with words because language stops/fixes something in place whereas Gezi was all about acting, flowing, movement, appearing, reappearing and on and on and on. I recognised that the moment I describe Gezi with a single word will be the moment I seal it, congeal it and make it finite; this is exactly what was not happening in Gezi. Now I understand my intention from the beginning of this piece: it is not about explaining an intellectual concept but rather about inviting the audience into a direct experience.

Please access this video, Security Concerns, at https://vimeo.com/422163013.

The password ²⁰ is: WeCanBecomeHarderToManage

The girl they wanted to stop is me, but it was an interruption, not a full stop. At that very moment a friend came and stood by my side. From there, I went home. Some years later, I have managed to edit the video and wrote this piece. And now I have occupied several minutes of your time with Gezi. This act of occupation itself is the description of Gezi, an infinite continuum.

It is no longer about our ‘white father’, ²¹ telling us how to understand life and live accordingly. New discourses, new ways of seeing and new understandings of the world open new dimensions of life for us to experience. As Audre Lorde (1984) said, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. As in this case, the protesters of Gezi and many other communities around the world have already started creating their own tools to dismantle the master’s house. It is not only an activism; it is a form of art: art of living an an-other life.