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Politics of privacy: forced migrationand the spatial struggle of the KurdishyouthHaydar DariciPublished online: 23 Dec 2011.

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Politics of privacy: forced migration and the spatial struggleof the Kurdish youth

HAYDAR DARICI

In the Gundogan1 Neighbourhood in the city of Adana where I conducted myfieldwork, I witnessed an interesting demonstration organized by the Kurdishyouth for no apparent reason at all, which, I think, can be seen as a challenge tothe dominant culture of resistance2 in contemporary Turkey. Young people,whose faces were covered by T-shirts, got together in front of the police stationand started throwing stones at the police. There was no placard in their hands; noslogan was being chanted. They had no intention to walk down the main street tomake their demand publicly visible. Nor did they intend to make a publicstatement. There was no response among the Kurdish adults. Hearing thedemonstration, women stayed at home. Men were playing cards in the coffeehouse in front of the police station. The only thing they did was to close the doorto avoid the pepper gas that the police use very generously from getting in. Thestruggle was indeed between two rivals: Kurdish youth and the police.

It seems to me that this incident pertains to the ways in which Kurdish youthmobilize in private and public spaces in urban Turkey. The purpose of this paperis to analyse the political subjectivities of this youth through its multi-layeredstruggle over space. Based on an ethnography and oral history researchconducted in the Gundogan Neighbourhood, I argue that the Kurdish youth re-appropriate urban space every day anew by means of violence and struggle.Appropriation of space here means ‘gaining a foothold within a given socialimaginary’.3 Its aim, however, is not ‘to make society hear their messages andtranslate these messages into political decision making’,4 but solely to create aspace of intimacy, a space exempt from the state’s intervention and parentalauthority, through which the subjects produced by the same history andexperience can inhabit a hostile world. I also argue that the struggle of theKurdish youth is directed against both the ethnically marked public space of the

city and the norms of the Kurdish community that are informed by age andgender hierarchies and shaped by state violence.

ISSN 1944-8953 print/ISSN 1944-8961 online/11/040457-18 q 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2011.623869

1 I have used pseudonyms to protect my interviewees. This is also the case for the name of theneighbourhood.

2 Perhaps over a decade, the political demonstrations organized by the Turkish left and Kurdishmovement particularly in urban space increasingly have been in the form of press statements andrallies.

3 Zeynep Gambetti, ‘Politics of place/space: the spatial dynamics of the Kurdish and Zapatistamovements’, New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 41, Fall 2009, p. 51.

4 Alberto Melluci, ‘The symbolic challenge of contemporary movements’, Social Research, 52(4),1985, pp. 789–816.

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In his study of the public sphere, Habermas has theorized the ‘public’ as aspace mediating between state and society, where strangers freely come togetherand get involved in discursive exchange.5 Habermas’ model of the public spherethat was supposed to be accessible to everyone was emancipatory as well as non-violent.6 On the one hand, citizens gathered information about the state’sactivities through the public sphere, as a consequence of which the state becametransparent. On the other hand, the public sphere made their voices heardthrough the use of the freedom of speech, and through the press and othermedia.7 In this modernist formulation, there was a clear divide between thepublic and the private. As Warner suggests, the public is the space in which werelate to anonymous others, while the private would then take on the meaning of‘familiarity’ in the double sense of being the sphere of family or of people whomwe are familiar with.8 I argue on the basis of my research that the boundariesbetween the private and the public are fluid and can be established by ethnicityinstead of ‘stranger-relatedness’ or ‘commonness’ or ‘publicity’.

Considering the shifting meanings of public and private through the everydaypractices of the youth, my second argument concerns the space of politics formarginalized groups. Fraser and Eley have criticized Habermas for ignoring theexclusions and conflicts that are embedded in the bourgeois public sphere.9 ToEley, the public sphere was rather ‘an arena of contested meaning, in whichdifferent and opposing publics manoeuvred for space and from which certainpublics (women, subordinate nationalities, popular classes like the urban poor,the working class and the peasantry) may have been excluded altogether’.10 Eleyand Fraser’s critiques also question the singularity of ‘the public’. As far as theyare concerned, there are multiple and conflicting publics within time and space.Fraser, for example, uses the term ‘subaltern counterpublics’ to designate thepublics of marginalized groups.11 Counterpublics are ‘parallel discursive arenaswhere members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretationsof their identities, interests, and needs’.12 Both in the Habermasian formulationand in those of his critiques, however, public space is considered to be the onlysite of politics, whereas private space is supposed to concern merely privateproperty, personal life or what is called ‘the domestic’. As Warner states:

Fundamentally, mediated by public forms, counterpublics incorporate thepersonal/impersonal address and expansive estrangement of public speech as

5 Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois Society, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989.

6 Zeynep Gambetti, ‘The conflictual (trans)formation of the public sphere in urban space: the caseof Diyarbakır’, New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 32, 2005, p. 2.

7 Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existingdemocracy’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992,p. 58.

8 Michael Warner, ‘Publics and counterpublics’, Public Culture, 14(1), 2002, pp. 49–90.9 Fraser, op. cit.; Geoff Eley, ‘Nations, publics, and political cultures: placing Habermas in the

nineteenth century’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press, Cambridge,MA, 1992.

10 Eley, op. cit., p. 326.11 Fraser, op. cit., p. 67.12 Ibid.

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the condition of their own common world. Perhaps nothing demonstrates the

fundamental importance of discursive publics in the modern social imaginary

more than this—that even the counterpublics that challenge modernity’s social

hierarchy of faculties do so by projecting the space of discursive circulation among

strangers as a social entity, and in doing so fashion their own subjectivity around

the requirements of public circulation and stranger sociability.13

Counterpublics thus challenge the hegemonic public sphere through whichdomination and subordination take place, as Eley suggests,14 but they do so inthe same way as the hegemonic public. Therefore, counterpublics re-enter thechain of signification in the Butlerian sense.15 And yet, I ask whether we areentitled to imagine any political mobilization that cannot be characterized as acounterpublic in the strict sense. Can we think of the private as a space of politicsrather than merely as a domain of private property and personal life? Andaccordingly, can we conceptualize the domestic not only as a site of intimacy, butalso as an ambivalent domain that combines intimacy with alienation?16 Howwould such a mobilization change the meaning of the political and of resistancethrough its relation to privacy and publicity? In other words, I argue thatKurdish youth movements in urban sites in Turkey do not correspond to thetraits of counterpublics as they cannot be considered either as based on stranger-relationality or as entailing the circulation of (counter)discourses. Rather, theyredefine the public as an ethnically marked domain and the private as a site ofpolitics, and by so doing, blur the boundaries between the two. The private,furthermore, is not located in the domestic sphere. In the margins of the citywhere state violence and extreme poverty go hand in hand, familial relationsand home become spaces where intimacy is replaced by alienation. Thus, homeis not where the youth take refuge and create intimate relations; they do so instreets, guerrilla camps, public religious houses and the like.

For the marginalized groups, speaking to other publics requires speakingin a certain way;17 the language of victimhood or trauma must fit the norms ofthe universal discourse on human rights. In the modern world, as Chakrabartyclaims, ‘the capacity to notice and represent suffering (even if it be one’s ownsuffering) from the position of a generalized and disembodied observer is whatmarks the beginning of the modern self’.18 While Chakrabarty points to theconnection between pain and the creation of the modern self and his interiority,Berlant shows how that ‘interiorized’ self relates to the outside world, that is, tothe public, only through pain. To her, pain is:

[ . . . ] separating you from others and connecting you with others similarly shocked

(but not surprised) by the strategies of violence that constantly regenerate the

13 Warner, op. cit., p. 87.14 Eley, op. cit.15 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Routledge, New York, 1993.16 Veena Das, Jonathan M. Ellen and Lori Leonard, ‘On the modalities of the domestic’, Home

Cultures, 5(3), 2008, p. 351.17 Nazan Ustundag, ‘Belonging to the modern: women’s suffering and subjectivities in urban

Turkey’, unpublished Thesis, Indiana University, 2005, p. 27.18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,

Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2000, p. 119.

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bottom of the hierarchies of social value you inhabit. In this sense, subaltern pain ispublic form because its outcome is to make you readable, for others.19

This means that pain becomes the only intelligible language through whichthe subaltern can speak to a public. The subaltern tells the public: ‘Know me.Know my pain, you caused it.’20 Quoting Berlant again:

Yet if the pain is at the juncture of you and the stereotype that represents you, youknow that you are hurt not because of your relation to history but becausesomeone else’s relation to it, a type of someone whose privilege or comfortdepends on the pain that diminishes you, locks you into (a collective, and thereforesubuniversal) identity, covers you with shame, and sentences you to a hell ofconstant potential exposure to the banality of derision.21

It is my contention that rather than speaking to indefinite strangers through thelanguage of victimhood and reconciliation, and thus making their pain the onlypublicly readable sign, the Kurdish youth struggle to inhabit the world. It is indeedthrough violence that the youth transgress the norms of state and society and maketheir space inaccessible to attain what Bataille might call ‘violent freedom’.22

Ethnographic Context

I conducted my fieldwork in Adana, a city that has long been a place whereseasonal and permanent workers from south-eastern Turkey come to work in theagricultural sector. Situated on the periphery of the city, Gundogan was formedin the 1980s when Kurds who migrated for economic reasons started to build ashanty town. Yet, mass migration to Gundogan took place during the 1990s whenthe Turkish state used internal displacement as a strategy to fight the PKK(Kurdistan Worker’s Party) under its State of Emergency regime. DisplacedKurds who were already mobilized within the Kurdish movement in the villageinitiated a mass upheaval in Gundogan and hence the neighbourhood became animportant base for the Kurdish movement in the 1990s. As a stigmatized space,both the inhabitants and (Turkish) outsiders associated various memories withthe neighbourhood. For the Kurds, it was a safe haven; for middle-class Turks, itwas an object of fear. Yet, by the end of the 1990s, the PKK shifted its strategy:rather than establishing a separate nation-state, the PKK aimed at becoming ademocratizing force in Turkey. Accordingly, militants began to retreat to outsidethe borders of the country or to remote areas within, which weakened thepresence of the PKK in the neighbourhood and made the state more visible.Furthermore, this process coincided with the emergence of radical Islamicorganizations, gangs and drug trafficking.

My interviewees were born mostly after the forced migration, in theneighbourhood. Thus, they did not personally experience the explicit forms of

19 Lauren Berlant, ‘The subject of true feeling: pain, privacy, and politics’, in Jodi Dean (ed.),Cultural Studies and Political Theory, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2000, p. 56.

20 Ibid.21 Ibid.22 George Bataille, cited in Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction, Pluto Press,

London, 2000, p. 9.

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state violence that took place in south-east Turkey. Yet, they grew up in the wake ofthe forced evacuation, hearing stories of state violence narrated repeatedly by oldergenerations. The reiteration of these stories constructs a collective repertoire thatanyone can utilize and perform and that creates relational subjects. Besides thememories that the children and youth inherit, the urban context in which they liveplays an important role in the formation of their subjectivities. The transformationsthat occurred in the neighbourhood led to the emergence of new ways of belonging.It could be said that the objects and subjects of all of these transformations arechildren and youngsters as sellers and users of drugs, members of gangs or ofradical Islamic organizations. Furthermore, children constitute the most radicaland mobilized segment of the Kurdish movement since the beginning of the 2000s.

Kurdishness and Privacy

Privacy is a luxury unavailable to people living in poverty, squished in smallhouses and crowded streets. Men and women in Gundogan must struggle overspaces and become innovative, at times flexible and at others fierce, in order tocarve themselves spaces of their own. For young people who have little say in themaking of geography and landscape, it is even more difficult to find privacy. Addto this the fact that in an environment where all public places are ethnicallymarked as Turkish, minorities like the Kurds are often made to feel like they areinvading other people’s privacy when they are in public. This is the caseparticularly for Kurdish youth and children as they have been largelycriminalized as they became visible in western Turkish metropolises. Depictedas purse-snatchers, glue-sniffers, handkerchief-sellers, sexual assaulters or kidspredisposed to violence, Kurdish youth and children have become ‘thenightmare of polite society’.23 However, in the 2000s, the Turkish public beganto consider the violence of Kurdish children also as an increasing political threatdirected against the state and the existing order since there was a sharp increasein the number of children within the Kurdish movement. Consequently, the morethe Kurdish youth became part of the public agenda, the more they wereperceived as undesirable bodies that should be erased from public space.

Furthermore, not only individual but also familial and communal privacy isalways at stake in Kurdish lives. Similar to numerous sites all over the world wheremarginalized groups live under siege and under the gaze of the state, Kurdishhomes are continuously under state surveillance in the form of frequent policeraids and house searches. All of my interviewees repeatedly narrated such stories:

Firat:24 Soldiers came to search us. I remember very well, we were in the village.Their boots were muddy. It was a winter day. They went and stepped on the carpetwith that mud. The carpet got all dirty. At that age, I resented it. For us, the carpet

23 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Reflections on youth, from the past to the postcolony’, inAlcinda Honwana and Filip DeBoeck (eds), Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in PostcolonialAfrica, Africa World Press, Oxford, 2005, p. 13.

24 Fırat is a 21-year-old man. He has 12 siblings. His father married twice; Fırat was one of thechildren from the second marriage. His family is from Diyarbakır and was subjected to displacement.The family moved to Gundogan at the beginning of the 1990s. He graduated from high school andworks with his family, which sells fruits and vegetables in the market. Fırat was six years old when thedisplacement took place.

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lying inside the house is kind of like honour. Nobody enters the house with shoeson owing to our customs.

Ozhan:25 I remember, not long ago, 16 years ago, the satellites were just emerging,the Kurdish satellites, Roj TV, Med TV26 were new. Not many people had them, wedid. In the neighbourhood one or two people had them. The satellites were on theroofs of the houses, we were hiding them under pieces of cloth. I remember once, thepolice raided our house at 2 or 3 in the morning because of Med TV. They stepped onus to go into the other room. I mean they were not able to put up with us even a weebit. They took my brother’s saz [a musical instrument]. They said, ‘You play Kurdishsongs with this’, and took the saz away. We begged them: ‘This saz is not ours, weborrowed it from someone.’ They said: ‘Curse Apo27 so that we know you’re not anApoist.’ They were stepping on us while moving. They told us to let them enter theroom, we opened the door, they said things like, ‘What’s this smell? What kind of asmell is this? Your house stinks.’ They humiliated us like that by stepping on us. We,I mean, how can I say, there’s nothing they won’t do to you.

Interestingly, more than the explicit forms of state violence such as killing andtorturing, it is the invasion of the state into private spaces that marks psychesdeeply. The sense of being humiliated dominates all the narratives about housesearches. Unlike other encounters experienced in the streets, during the housesearch, youths both experience state violence and witness how the police harasstheir family members.

Analysing the stripping of Irish female political prisoners in their cell, theironly private space, by the guards, Aretxaga argues:

The stripping of women prisoners in their own cells instead of in the usual spaceof the cubicle represented a double violation that deprived women of a securepsychological space. There is nowhere to go after the assault; the cell istransformed into an estranged space that acts as a constant reminder of theirvulnerability.28

In the Kurdish case, facing state violence at a moment when family members aretogether at home signifies that there is no longer a safe place inaccessible bythe state. Therefore, Kurdish people in Gundogan cannot count on the separationbetween the public and the private that other citizens often take for grantedin Turkey.

Surely, not only the state but also societal norms make it impossible for youthto have a space of their own. This is particularly true for young women who areconfined to interior spaces. For girls, paradoxically, not the domestic space but

25 Ozhan is a 26-year-old man born in Gundogan. His family was forcibly displaced at the end ofthe 1980s from Mardin. He has 10 sisters and brothers. After he finished primary school, he could notcontinue his education since he had to work. He was arrested 13 times, most of which were due totheft. He was put in prison for six years in total and saw many Turkish cities because of beingtransferred back and forth between different detention centres. Even his first look at Mardin—hisbirthplace—was from the window of a police wagon when he was being transferred to a correctioncentre in Elazıg.

26 Pro-Kurdish TV channel that is banned in Turkey.27 Alluding to the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.28 Begona Aretxaga, ‘The sexual games of body politics: fantasy and state violence in Northern

Ireland’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 25, 2001, p. 20.

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the site of stranger-relationality gives the young women privacy, as the former iswhere they are under the gaze of family members. I argue that oscillations suchas these between private and public indicate how individuals and groups contestthe spaces to which they are confined and how they re-appropriate urban space.The desire for privacy among the youth is a highly political desire, and the act ofprivatizing the public is a political act that unveils the ethnic and adult nature ofpublic space.

Gendered Spaces

The spatial confinements based on gender play an important role in theconstitution and de-constitution of social relations among groups within theneighbourhood. If the interior represents the place of girls, the exterior belongs toboys. Accordingly, both genders feel claustrophobic and employ strategies tomake the places to which they are confined ‘theirs’. I would go as far as to arguethat the radical politics of Kurdish children and youth is, in a way, a struggle toestablish a modicum of privacy within an urban space constantly under the gazeof the state and of their own community.29

Young women in the neighbourhood generally work in bourgeois houses ascleaners or go to religious reading houses (Okuma Evleri). A few young womenare also involved in the Kurdish movement as political actors.30 It can be said, onthe one hand, that only through the privatization of public space can youngwomen inhabit those sites where they also create public links. On the other hand,young men who are confined to the exterior carve out their private spaces in thepublic through political activities, hashish and gangs. It is in the encounter withthe state in demonstrations that gendered, faith-based or status differencesbetween groups in Gundogan become blurred and once again politics emergesas that activity which marks people as Kurdish and as residents of Gundogan.At the moment of police attacks, the whole neighbourhood becomes a privatelabyrinth whose map is legible only to those who live there.

29 There is indeed an interplay between these two gazes because in both, the young are constitutedas problematic. They are considered a threat by the state primarily because of their political characterand their criminal activities leading to disorder in the city. For Kurdish adults, however, it ispredominantly the criminality of boys and the honour of girls that are seen as problematic. Althoughthe majority of parents do not want their children to enrol in radical politics in the neighbourhood,they do not make a big issue out of it either. They think that there are two options for the youth:politics or criminality. Some parents told me that they know their children will eventually end up injail either because of their political or criminal activities. However, it would be better if they went tojail as political prisoners, since the parents would at least have won a status within the Kurdishmovement as the parents of those who sacrificed themselves in the name of the Kurdish community.The other option is, however, humiliating for them. I would also say that the interplay between thesegazes signifies a more profound relationality: the criminal (drug related and otherwise) and politicalactivities make kinship relations amongst the Kurds vulnerable to the interventions of the state. Inother words, since kinship relations are shaped by state violence, the relationship between Kurdishparents and their children cannot be grasped without considering the relationship between theKurdish community and the state. See Das, Ellen and Leonard, op. cit., for a similar analysis inthe USA.

30 The involvement of women in political activities in the neighbourhood is a complex issue. Theirinvolvement is acceptable if they are under 15 or 16, since they are still considered children. However,those who are past this age are not much welcomed in the political space as they are then consideredas women.

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The Interior

Young girls in the neighbourhood are responsible for domestic work. Cleaningthe house, cooking and caring for their siblings are their main duties.Accordingly, they are expected to stay at home most of the time. The rules ofconfinement for girls might show variations depending on the religious creed thefamilies belong to. Since Alevi families are relatively more flexible towardswomen, Alevi girls can leave home for work and education. Yet, once they comeback from school or work, they are again confined to the borders of home:

Kader:31 They do during the day, but they never give me permission in the evenings.Sometimes they let me go to my aunt’s, but never to the market or the street.

Alevi women are usually employed as cleaners in bourgeois homes. Theirfamilies think that it would be better if their daughters work as cleaners becausethey would be in a ‘private space’ and be controlled by the family for which theywork and be protected from the risks associated with public space.

K: What was in my parents’ mind was that housework is better. In other jobs,girls do bad things. They were sending us to do housework, as it is more secure.They are afraid. Especially if acquaintances are going to take you [to the houseyou will be working at], they come and tell your family that they are taking theresponsibility that definitely such things will not happen, meaning that even if shesleeps there or works during the day, nothing will happen. But think of it, youcome from the village, you have never known city life and you are in the house ofpeople you don’t know. And you do their work. I resented it a lot. We felt likestrangers; we were going through difficulties, we were young. We started work lifewithout experiencing childhood, but we had to.

Sunni women generally work in gardens to collect fruit or vegetables sold inthe market by the male members of their family. Some work in the textile sector.Interestingly, since Sunni girls are veiled and since the headscarf is supposedto protect girls from the outside dangers awaiting them, they can also worksometimes in workshops alongside men. While the headscarf is perceived ascreating a private space for the bodies of Sunni girls, bourgeois families that areunknown to both parents and girls are considered to be a private space for Alevigirls. This is the perception of the parents. The following is expressed by the girls,which implies that this perception is internalized by the girls themselves:

K: Now housework is our second life. Our second home is there. If you were to askwhy, it is because we work there from morning until evening. We only go home tosleep. Really. You start to have a life there as well. With its good and bad sides, itbecomes just like how it is with your own family.

It seems that for the girls there is privacy in a public place (relations withstrangers) but lack of privacy in the privacy of home. They do not have their own

31 Kader is a 27 year-old young woman from Bulam, Adıyaman. Her Kurdish–Alevi familymigrated to Adana in the 1990s due to the economic problems caused by lack of land to farm. She haseight sisters and brothers. After she completed primary school, her family left the village. She did notcontinue her education as she had to work. Since she was 12 she has been working as a cleaner.

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room in their houses and generally sleep in the same room with their siblings.However, in bourgeois houses where they work, they are mostly alone as thepeople they work for are away most of the time. Some girls even say that afterthey finish cleaning, they invite their friends who also work in bourgeois housesin the vicinity. In other words, bourgeois houses are theirs, when the bourgeoisare not there. These public spaces give them an autonomy that they cannot find intheir own homes, where their sexuality and behaviour are strictly controlled.Here, they gain a public identity to which they have no access under normalcircumstances and can at times even act politically.

In the neighbourhood, there are many reading houses established by radicalIslamic organizations.32 Particularly, Sunni girls go to these houses to receivemedrese (theological) education. These girls cover their whole bodies except theirface or eyes with a chador. They are not allowed to be in a public space wheremen are present and not even allowed to watch TV. In the life history of Ayse33

that I quote below, one can detect the ways in which social and economicrelations within Islamic communities become mediums for the youth to bear thedifficulties of living in a marginal place like Gundogan:

A: Believe me, my mom curses all the time. She hasn’t smiled at me even once; she

hasn’t said ‘my daughter’ even a single day. I swear, it is as if my dad has been in

prison since the day I was born. It is as if I’ve never seen my dad. As if what I tell

you is but a dream. It sounds like a dream to me. My dad has been in prison for two

years, but I feel like he’s been there since I was born. My dad and mom used to

fight every day. My mom talks a lot, she talks too much. She wouldn’t let my dad

eat properly. Once, my dad got angry, he lifted the dinner table, everything broke

into pieces.

H: Who is Zubeyde Abla? Is she person who is in charge over there [at the reading

house]?

A: She’s not in charge; she’s my sister, our sister. There is no teacher there; his

highness the Sheikh has forbidden that. He said, ‘don’t say teacher to one another,

no one is superior to anyone else’.

H: Do you call her ‘sister’?

A: Sometimes I say sister, sometimes I call them by their names. They are all older

than me and they are very warm towards me. They act in a very warm way; all of

them are very good, very talkative. I swear, I love them very much.

32 These reading houses that are established by Hizbullah, Furkan and Naksibendi emerged afterPKK guerrillas left the neighbourhood and the party ceased to be an uncontested political power.People say that radical Islamic organizations entered the neighbourhood with the support of the stateto depoliticize the Kurdish youth. If we consider the history of Hizbullah and its function in the state’swar against the PKK, this argument makes sense. Yet, state interventions in the form of the hashisheconomy, gangs and radical Islamism gradually turned against the state itself. All the people Iinterviewed and who are part of these formations adhere to the Kurdish movement and have apoliticized Kurdish identity. This also signifies that the line between the political and the criminal ishighly blurred, as those who are involved in gang activities or drug trafficking can also attend politicaldemonstrations.

33 Ayse is a 15-year-old girl born in the Gundogan neighbourhood. Her mother is from Adıyamanand her father is from Diyarbakır. After finishing primary school in 2008, she did not continue hereducation. Her father was sentenced to 10 years for theft. She has three sisters; one of them wasdisabled and died this year.

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Ayse lives in a context where she does not see any hope for the future. As sheherself expresses, she lives in a violent and claustrophobic universe produced byextreme poverty. Islamic communities promise her a safe life. The materiality ofthe world no longer constitutes a source of desire for her owing to the spiritualperception she acquired in the community. She does not need money forfashionable clothes, as the chador is the only dress she wears now. She does notneed money for going out, since she sees the public space as inappropriate forwomen. She does not need to go to school or work, since she believes she isdestined to marry a disciple of her Sheik. The material things that she doesn’town and will never own have lost their value in her new life. In the midst of thepoverty and violence permeating the household and the neighbourhood, such aperception of the world not only refills her life with meaning, but also becomes astrategy to deal with the difficulties she faces in everyday life. Instead of herfather who is in prison, the Sheik of the organization, who is perceived as theembodiment of the prophet, emerges as a symbolic father, and his moralityguides her. She considers the women in the reading house to be her sisters. In thissense, the reading house, which is technically a public space, assumes the role ofa private home in which she can form intimate relations.

The Exterior

Whereas the house is where women belong, young men in the neighbourhoodbelong outside the home. During the day, women and girls do housework andthey want the boys out of the way so that they do not interrupt the routine. Infact, boys themselves do not want to be at home because mothers and sistersclean the house until the evening and hence there is nothing to do at home forthem. It is only in the evenings that boys enter the house to have dinner.Nevertheless, even the short time they spend at home is accompanied bydisputes among family members, mostly about economic problems. Thesedisputes often turn violent, and the youngsters describe their home as beingclaustrophobic and boring. Since the members of the family do not have privaterooms, the only way to escape is to go outside. The parents also want theirchildren to stay outside because the fighting ends only when the boys leave.Being excluded from home, boys do not have any space for themselves other thanthe streets. I should add that there is no gender difference in the perception ofhome. As mentioned above, girls also see home as claustrophobic, since they areconfined to the house and some of the fights take place between brothers andsisters because of the brothers’ attempts to control their sisters’ lives and becauseof the girls’ resistance to it.

Although streets are uniformly owned by men, how men utilize them differsaccording to the group to which they belong. For example, hashish-using youthand children linger in wide spaces, usually in the marketplace that is usedweekly and is empty the rest of the time and at nights. Hashish users break thelamps there in order to be invisible at night. Since this lot is known as the hang-out of hashish users, girls do not pass near there in the evenings. Yet, boys alsouse hashish during the day. Therefore, while they can be invisible thanks to thedarkness of the night and avoid people who walk around the marketplace, they

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become visible again during the day. This is what Ali narrates,34 while beinghigh on drugs as usual:

When we smoke hashish, our brain gets drowsy, we relax, the world appears to us

in a different manner, we forget our problems and our sorrow, we see the world

through pink glasses, everything appears a mere illusion, you get drowsy. That is

how I look at people, when I look at people, sometimes it does not make any sense,

and neither I nor other people make any sense. I muse about life and death; I

meditate into different worlds. Hashish makes you dream, makes you melancholic.

You don’t care about anything; you smile anytime people say something to you.

For instance, when I’m sad, when I have an argument with someone at home, I roll a

joint and smoke it. Then I come back home and don’t even care if I hear hundreds of

complaints, because I am in a different world then. Sometimes I go to my workplace

in the morning, and argue with the boss, but if I smoke I talk in a polite manner, even

in the middle of this war of nerves, you don’t hear any of the boss’ curses.

As can be observed, the use of hashish is very central in his life and narrative.Though he is confined to the neighbourhood as a residential area and workplace,hashish adds multiple dimensions to the place and provides him with the mentalspace of relief from his everyday anguish at home and at work. When he is high,the material world, which appears as hardly bearable in his narrative, loses itssignificance. Inhabiting the uninhabitable that is saturated with hopelessnessand anxiety becomes possible by disrupting reality with hashish. Anotherinterviewee narrates:

Ahmet: Actually you should not smoke hashish on the street, because people come

and say ‘just look at him!’ They look at us in a different way. But while sitting, you

don’t recognise the passersby, you are high, not aware, you don’t see anyone, you

don’t know what they think of you. But they see you.

Once again, youngsters transform these spaces through their performances.Unable to find a suitable place, Ahmet smokes in the street where he is seen butcannot see, since he is high. In other words, privacy for him is not being publiclyinvisible but isolating himself within the public and ignoring others.

Streets are also the space of politics for the young. Halil talks about thedemonstrations in the neighbourhood in the following way:

Halil: They organised a demonstration. I was curious, I set off. I saw them lighting

a fire. My brother said, ‘go home’. I said, ‘I am not going’. I joined them, then I saw

the police coming; we threw stones. A stone, that big, one very big stone, I mean a

small one, but it was like as if it was big, hit my back. I didn’t give in; we clashed

with the police. I guess we went near my aunt’s house. I entered my aunt’s house.

I hid there. The police got in the way. I mean I went inside and the police went up to

the roof, as the house I entered had four storeys; they couldn’t find me, and I went

in. Then the second demonstration I joined, maybe it was the third, we, only the

children, made a demonstration. There were many kids, almost 300 kids.

34 Ali is a 22-year-old young man born in Gundogan. His family is Kurdish Alevite and is fromAdıyaman. He has two brothers and one sister. He had two marriages and has a 5-year-old daughter.He sells bread in bazaars. He has been smoking hashish for eight years.

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The meaning attached to street politics is also what differentiates youngstersfrom the Kurdish adults. The young accuse the adults of being involved in ‘highpolitics’ and of negotiating with the state for their personal advantage. For them,the actual struggle is carried out in the streets, just as the PKK did in the 1990s inthe neighbourhood.

Fırat: Well, let me say this: we, as youngsters, are rather different here. There isindeed a specific form of youth. Like, I attended a meeting recently. Someonecame and said they would like to meet the youngsters here, but wondered whyyoung people weren’t interested in meeting them. The person who said this,however, is lacking a proper personality somewhat. That’s why, since wegenerally meet nice and sincere people, as another friend said, ‘they wouldn’twant to meet you because they haven’t seen you at the demonstrations’.

While the politicization of young men occurs in the streets during periods ofstruggle, the politicization of girls occurs within the boundaries of the household.Thus, the process is more subtle and difficult to understand. One thing is clear:the arrest of girls poses a big problem for families, and as such, they have to avoidstruggle on the street. For example, Fırat said that after his female cousin wasarrested, her grandfather lamented that prison was not the proper place to be infor a girl, in spite of the fact that Fırat has many female cousins who joinedthe guerrillas. This means that when a girl joins the guerrillas and lives in themountains, this is not regarded as dishonour for the family. Thus, for girls, theonly way of being political is by becoming a guerrilla. In this sense, the risk ofbeing killed in the mountains is preferred to the risk of being imprisoned becauseof street fighting. The girls’ perception of guerrillas and of the mountains wherethe guerrillas reside is shaped by programmes on Roj TV (a pro-Kurdish TV) andby conversations within the household. Roj TV is on all the time in the houses inthe neighbourhood. The girls watch not only news about clashes between theguerrillas and the Turkish military, but also programmes that depict the social lifeof guerrillas where, for instance, male and female guerrillas sing and dancetogether in the open horizons of mountains. This depiction is radically opposedto what the claustrophobic home signifies for the girls.35 Furthermore, familymembers always talk about the Kurdish question and especially about theirrelatives who joined the guerrillas. Guerrillas call their family on the telephonewhen they have the chance, which is actually rare. However, families watch RojTV especially because they think they can see their guerrilla relatives in one ofthe programmes.36

In my view, this signals an implicit contract between the girls and theirparents. Since girls are not allowed to go out of the house, and since being inprison is not acceptable for them either, the only way to participate in the fight

35 Yet, I should note that girls’ preference of joining the guerrillas cannot be explained merely bytheir desire to escape from their current life conditions or the attraction of guerrilla life as such anexplanation might ignore the agency implied in their involvement in politics. The point I want tomake here is that political spaces are also determined by gender hierarchies.

36 One of the women in the neighbourhood told me that she never received a phone call from herdaughter who joined the guerrillas when she was a university student in the early 1990s. However,one day she saw her daughter on a programme on Roj TV where she was dancing (halay) with herfriends. It was the first time that the woman saw her daughter after she left. Thereafter, the familystarted to watch Roj TV all the time with the hope of seeing their daughter again.

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against the state is to enrol in the guerrillas. There seems to be an analogy betweenallowing girls to work only as cleaners and allowing them to join the guerrillas asthe only legitimate political activity. It seems that just as in the case of thebourgeois household, the PKK is seen as a private space in which girls are in ‘goodhands’. The state and prison, on the other hand, are viewed as unfamiliar entitiesto which girls cannot be entrusted.

Finally, I should say that in addition to the streets, there are workplaces inwhich male youngsters spend time. The majority of the youth are working toprovide sustenance for their families. They prefer to work predominantly in theneighbourhood. The main reason for this preference is that they are exposed todiscrimination and humiliation outside the neighbourhood where Turkishpeople compose the majority. It becomes clear in the following quotation that, forthem, workplaces are private places that are ‘Kurdified’ by music and in whichkids hang out with friends.

Erhan:37 It is better for me to work here, because generally there are Kurdishpeople here. I mean you can comfortably listen to music. For instance, when thereare Turks, you can’t listen to music. Here, there are generally Kurds, so you canlisten to whatever you want.

Body Space

As Judith Butler states, the:

[ . . . ] body implies mortality, vulnerability and agency: the skin and the fleshexpose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch and to violence, and bodies put usat risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well.38

She adds: ‘we struggle for the right over our own bodies, yet the bodies that westruggle for are not only our own as they have also a public dimension: the body isconstituted as a social phenomenon in the public space’.39 When, however, we talkabout cultures under siege, as in the case of the Kurdish community, the body alsobecomes the transmitter of ethnic domination.40 This signifies that bodies bear thetraces of social life where diverse struggles and conflicts are embedded. The bodiesof the Kurds constitute a site of struggle. The state tries to intervene and controlthese bodies, which are perceived as objects of fear. However, the Kurdish youth inAdana claim their rights over their bodies in a strikingly different way. Theyimplement violence on their own bodies and thus make their bodies ‘private’ sincethey thereby avoid state intervention and deal with the elders in the community.

That is to say that the youngsters in the neighbourhood intentionally performa psychopath identity by using hashish and by fighting to become untouchableby their elders. As a consequence, families give up trying to change them:

37 Erhan is a 17-year-old young man from Diyarbakır. His family migrated to Adana due to thestate violence in the village when he was 5. Erhan was put in prison two times, first when he was 8 andthe second time when he was 12 due to his political activities. Now, he is still a student in primaryschool and works in a barber shop in the neighbourhood.

38 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso, New York, 2004, p. 26.39 Ibid.40 Aretxaga, op. cit., p. 7.

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A: Especially in the morning, no one can interfere with my business. I mean, mysister, my aunt, my sisters love me very much. Rather than my brothers, since mybrothers’ wives get cross with me, and say ‘whatever Ahmet does, don’t talk backto him’. See, they deal with me this way. That is the hashish way.

Hashish users and gang members also commit acts of violence against familymembers, especially against their sisters and brothers. During fieldwork, Iwitnessed many fights within families. Parents are afraid of their hashish-usingchildren, to such an extent that they implicitly condone hashish because thechildren become more relaxed once they smoke their share of the day:

A: No one has ever asked me why I smoke hashish. For instance, when I arrivehome every evening, my eyes reveal that I have been smoking. My brothers cantell; they know whether I headed home high or sober. They’re my brothers andthey know me very well. When I’m high, I get tipsy, I mean, cheerful. I can hold achild in my arms and embrace him, caress him and play with him. I can jokearound with him. I approach my sisters in a way they don’t expect. I become veryaffectionate; I hug them and kiss them. That is to say, we joke around. At times likethis, my sisters say ‘since you’re behaving this way, it must mean that you smokedhashish. Otherwise you would never be this affectionate toward us.’ They tell methis. Let me tell you something, they aren’t against my smoking hashish, you knowwhy? Actually they’re against it in a way, of course, they don’t want me to smokehashish. They would prefer that I come home every day at an appropriate hour,that I behave the way they would like me to. But they already know that this isimpossible. And therefore they don’t object. Very calm, when I smoke, I becomevery relaxed and open-minded. My aggression disappears.

Relations with state institutions, with family members and friends areconstituted through violence. Neither is the relationship of the youths to theirbodies exempt from violence. For example, it is a common practice to write onone’s body with a matchstick. Many youth and children have self-made tattoos ofwords like ‘anger’, ‘grudge’, ‘revenge’ and ‘hatred’ on their arms, and depictionsof weapons on their legs. In addition, their legs are full of traces of razor blades.As Ozhan explains:

Those were bad times, the young were really miserable; the state spent no effort toaid them. These children had no money and were bewildered; they were going forburglary. I also had sticky fingers, and the police would take us to the police stationeven when we didn’t commit a theft. We would stay there for days and they wouldelectrify us. They bastinadoed us or hanged us from the ceiling. We were cuttingourselves to avoid these. Either with razor blades or glass . . .

H: Why?O: See, we would sneak a blade into custody and when we cut ourselves up, theydidn’t torture us. I mean, they would refrain from doing that or something. Theywould not butt in on us, in order not to take responsibility. They would leave usalone.

Another interviewee, Bulent, a 22-year-old young man from Adıyaman whonow lives in the neighbourhood, narrated how he cut his legs with a razor bladebefore going to military service, for he thought that the traces would mark himas a psychopath, and no one would dare to attack him. In both of these cases,

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implementing violence to one’s own body is perceived as a strategy for avoidingpotential violence that could be implemented by others. In a context where theinterventions of the state to the Kurdish movement materialize on the bodies ofthe youth, these bodies come to be sites of struggle and all of the parties involvedfight over the right to exercise violence on them.

Another example of self-induced violence is exemplified in Ayse’s story. Aysewanted to attend a camp organized by the religious reading house of which shewas part. This camp would allow her to become a teacher in the reading house.However, her family did not permit her to attend. Ayse’s mother told me thatonce they told Ayse she was not allowed to go, she started beating herself andcrying in the presence of family members, including her grandfather andgrandmother. Shocked by the sight of Ayse destroying her own body, the motherended up allowing her to go to the camp. As this example shows, inducingviolence on one’s own body is not only a strategy for preventing state violence,but also a weapon to be used against the family.

Hashish can also become a means of self-destruction. On the one hand,hashish enables the youth and children to challenge the constraints around themby allowing them to carve up a private space, created simply by ‘ignoring’ others.When they are high, the children isolate themselves from the outside world aswell as from its oppressive rules. On the other hand, smoking hashish damagestheir bodies permanently. Ali says:

We smoke hashish every day. It causes difficulty in breathing and fatigue. Yourbones thin out, you get thinner. I’m twenty-two, but a 35-year-old man can runfaster than me. Our bodies are weakening more and more. Our faces, our eyesbecome droopy, we are going into decline, our facial appearance is changing, ourcolour, our skin is changing. On some days, we start in the morning, smoke ten orfifteen, or even some of us smoke thirty joints.

In Gundogan, the state manifests its sovereignty by transgressing all norms andby trying to control the accursed bodies of children and youth by implementingviolence, arresting and torturing. Indeed, as Agamben argues, the sovereignemerges in a state of exception in which all norms are suspended through violence.The sovereign is not the source of freedom; on the contrary, being within andoutside the law at the same time, it is that which oppresses, which kills without theexperience of loss.41 Yet, the youth of Gundogan continuously perform the stateof ‘having nothing left to do’ that precedes what Georges Bataille calls ‘violentfreedom’. As opposed to Agamben, Bataille analyses how the oppressed becomefree by performing sovereignty. While he also puts violence at the centre of hisconceptualization, sovereignty for him is the moment of emancipation of theoppressed. He writes: ‘Violence certainly is an undeniable feature of sovereigntyand the freedom that it promises.’42 This is because violence ‘breaks down theintegrity of the body or of things’, and by so doing, it ‘breaks limits’.43

While the sovereign tries to decide how to consume the surplus, in our contextthe youth in Gundogan, youngsters transform their bodies into both objects and

41 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford,CA, 1998.

42 Noys, op. cit., p. 66.43 Ibid., p. 63.

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subjects of violence and take the control in their hands by deciding how toconsume their own bodies. They consume their bodies through transformingthem into objects on which hate and anger against the order is transcribed; theyharm themselves, they cut themselves, such that their bodies come to be theembodiment of anger and hate against the state and the order without beingsubsumed under elements that serve towards its reproduction. By doing so, theytransgress the norms of power in the performance of consuming. I also argue thatin a context where the bodies of Kurds, particularly children, constitute a site ofstruggle and are accessible to the interventions of the state, violence enableschildren to reconstruct their own private space. In order to avoid the inter-ventions, children implement violence to their own bodies and thus they maketheir bodies untouchable. They take their freedom and fate in their hands albeitin different ways, by being addicted, by intentionally marking themselves aspsychopaths, by beating themselves and the like.

The Neighbourhood

During my fieldwork, I came to realize that the Kurdish youth do not desire to berepresented in public space. They were actually suspicious of my researchbecause they thought that it could be a means through which the state couldgather information about them. In other words, they thought my research couldserve the state by making them visible and knowable. They let me interview themonly after being told that I was a student, in need of their help.

This negotiation points to the emergence of a new form of political imagination.The Kurdish movement has long entertained the belief that if Turkish people listenedto the stories of the Kurds, this would increase the potential for reconciliation and forthe resolution of the Kurdish problem. Therefore, there is an ongoing endeavour toconvince the (Turkish) audience that Kurds have suffered greatly and that theirstruggle is legitimate. In a way, the movement speaks to an imagined other. The youthin the neighbourhood, however, do not want to be represented in a public space thatalways connotes Turkishness. They do not want to be known, identified and namedby the other. For them, there is no imagined other to whom one should speak. On thecontrary, Turkish people have a material presence in their lives, since they areconstantly discriminated against in school, in their jobs and in state institutions. Iinterpret this difference between the youth in Gundogan and the Kurdish movementper se to signify a politics that is based not on expressing grievances to the hegemonicpower and calling upon the conscience of the sovereign; but on self-realizationthrough violence, on transgressing the norms and performing sovereignty. As far asthe youth in Gundogan is concerned, the political is not about making themselvesreadable in public through the articulation and representation of pain. It is, rather, theway in which the inhabitants appropriate and re-make urban space. In this sense, theneighbourhood becomes a private space of belonging for the displaced Kurds.

So far, I have tried to depict the lives of young Kurds through the lens ofthe distinctive ways in which they use space. However, this picture is disruptedduring demonstrations in the neighbourhood as distinct groups cooperate. As aconsequence, spatial confinements are broken down during demonstrations, andGundogan functions as a unique body. The demonstrations start in the streets, butthe doors of all of the houses are open to the demonstrators. If the police attack, thedemonstrators can enter into any house and hide. They can move from one house

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to another by jumping over the roofs and escape from the site of demonstration.Anyone who escapes from the police can go into other people’s houses withoutnecessarily knowing them and even without respecting gender segregation norms.In this sense, the interior suddenly becomes a place of refuge of the youth, whopreviously were unwanted even in their own homes. Thus, during demon-strations, the distinction between home/street and private/public is blurred.

In addition, the divisions among groups are also broken down as the majority ofyouth in the neighbourhood, including hashish users, participate in the demon-strations. Demonstrations and attacks by the police produce Kurdishness as apoliticized identity that marks all youth. This homogenization has the consequenceof setting youngsters against the state. As such, the everyday experience of thechildren and their inherited memories reinforce the real and imagined boundariesbetween the state and the neighbourhood to the extent that the residents ofGundogan regard everything that has to do with the state with suspicion andoppose its presence as well as all of its deeds. Gundogan becomes a ‘home’, a privatespace by pitting it continuously (symbolically and physically) against the state.

I claim that the strategy of re-making the urban space paves the way for aturning point in the politics of the Kurdish movement. The generation of the 1990sreferred to Kurdistan as a homeland. The discourse concerning the formation ofan independent Kurdistan mobilized people into struggle. The aim of politicizedKurds in western urban spaces was to return to the homeland. Furthermore,joining the guerrillas was a shared dream for the youth. Since the guerrillas thatfought the Turkish state were located in the mountains of the Kurdish region, thepoliticized youth entertained the desire to return to ‘Kurdistan’. Accordingly, theynarrated the village that they came from in a nostalgic way and as the homeland.However, the majority of people that I interviewed were born in Adana, and manyof them have never been in the Kurdish region. When I asked them whether theywanted to go to the village, they expressed ambiguous feelings. The village isgenerally described as being uninteresting and unattractive. One informant,however, stressed the irreversibility of displacement and hence once againexcluded the village from his contemporary geography:

A: There are too many old people there. To be honest, I can’t go and live there. Ican’t go and settle down in the countryside; I can’t live in a village. Imagine, youtake this glass in your hand, you throw it to the wall, you go out and then comeback in and you see it is still broken. Could it be the same [after being thrown to thewall]? No. The soldiers have ravaged all our places. The state is dishonest, writethis down too! It is definitely dishonest. We could have had gardens, trees, a trulygreen nature, but now there are only rocks and stones. They emptied out ourvillage, and banished everyone who lived there.The response of another informant to the same question is as follows:O: I have all my life here in Adana, it is here that I knew my people, I just can’tleave them. I can’t leave my party, my friends.

When they speak of Gundogan, however, youngsters almost exclusively use apoliticized language. I argue that for people in Gundogan Kurdishness isassociated with resistance. It does not refer to a specific land. If Kurdishness isresistance, Kurdistan is where loss due to displacement resides. Accordingly,while stories about the village denote the defeat of the Kurds, stories aboutGundogan refer to the struggle of the Kurds and their safe haven. Therefore, the

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word ‘Kurdistan’ does not refer to the Kurdish region anymore; rather, it hasbecome simultaneously an empty signifier, filled and given content byperformance, and a dream space that is always in a faraway location.

Conclusion

Going back to the theoretical framework that I discussed at the beginning of thepaper, the radical mobilization of Kurdish youth and children in a spatially andeconomically marginalized neighbourhood in the city of Adana shows that theline between the private and the public is fluid and can be drawn, not bystranger-relationality, but by ethnicity. As such, against the ethnically markedTurkish public space, Kurdish youth construct their privacy by means ofviolence and struggle, which redefines the meanings of public and private. Ihave argued that locating politics not in the public sphere, but in the privateand in the interplay between the two leads to an emancipating politicalimagination. This politics might be called the appropriation of space, yet its aimis not to access indefinite strangers through a language of victimhood andreconciliation, but rather to create spaces of existence by transgressing thenorms that surround the youth. Violence, here in Bataille’s sense, emerges as apossibility through which the Kurdish youth reclaim their spaces (theneighbourhood, the home and the body) that are accessible either to the stateor to the Kurdish community. In this sense, they take a subject position and areagents of their own lives. I have also argued that the youth’s struggle is not onlydirected against the Turkish state and its public, but also against the Kurdishcommunity whose kinship relations are shaped by its relation to the state andby extreme poverty.

Lastly, I believe that the stories of the young show that the line between thepolitical and criminal is also highly blurred. Most of the politicized children arealso involved in ‘criminal’ events. Similarly, gang groups in the neighbourhoodsupport the political demonstrations and clash with the police. This blurred linebetween politics and criminality also signifies that the long years of armedconflict have transformed Kurdishness into a new political subjectivity. Althoughchildren and the youth are involved in radical Islamic groups, gangs and dragtrafficking (as both users and sellers), they can enter the political domain, orperhaps transform different spaces perceived to be non-political into politicalones, since they see their ethnic origin as the cause of the violence and theextreme poverty they are exposed to. In this respect, the transformation of thepolitical can be interpreted as the politicization of everyday life.

Haydar Darıcı is a doctoral student in anthropology and history at the Universityof Michigan, Ann Arbor. He graduated from Bogazici University with a BA inTurkish language and literature and also has an MA degree in cultural studiesfrom Sabanci University.

Address for correspondence: Ella Baker Graduate Cooperative, 917–923 SouthForest Ave., Ann Arbor, MI, 48104, USA. E-mail: haydardarici@gmail.com

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