Zehra Ayman

In this presentation, I intend to depict the People’s Houses’s (Halkevleri) authoritatiran cultural/lingusitic practices for the purpose of “Turkified as long as civilising, civilising as long as Turkified” especially towards Kurdish population in Eastern Turkey in early Republican era. More specifically, “the single party” (Republican People Party) government’s major cultural institution’s People’s Houses’s linguistic assimilationist practices, their effects and the responses of the people in everyday and local context in “Kurdish East”, between 1932-1951, is the main subject. In this frame, I will analyse, the linguistic politics and practices of “Kemalist” state in 1930’s parallel to the quest of the state’s officials “to solving of the issue of Kurdishness” via linguistic assimilation of Kurdish speaking population. At first, I will discusss the research findings about the everyday indoctrination practices of People's Houses considering teaching Turkish and making it the morher-tangue of the locals. It can be said that, Turkish was taught with more sophisticated techniques besides open violence aimed to change their memory and "habitus". Howewer, it can be argued that the process of cultural/linguisitic assimilation was not simply a “top-down” process. Because, the cultural/linguistic assimilation have been performed by the officials using complex and sophisticated micro and horizontal power techniques in the central and local axes. Also, local actors having diversified different gendered, ethnic and socio-economical backround and subjectivities have also different and changeable everyday complicated responses either culturally or politically throughout micro and macro power networks. Hence, not only the interpretation of institutional practices and cultural techniques of state officials and People Houses’s members, but also the receptors’ responses are deserved to being made visible anymore. Consequently, I will try to reinterprete not only the “voices” but also the “silences” of the entire historical actors in the era that I collected from the different official and non-official sources during my comprehensive research.

Nationalist and Civilizing Discourses of People’s Houses in Eastern/Kurdish Provinces in Early Republican Era in Turkey (1932-1951)

In the early era of the Turkish Republic, the ruling elites, more radically than in the past, identified nationalism, which integrated the "civilization mission" with populism, as the basic characteristics of the regime. In this vein, the People's Houses were established, which would be directly affiliated with the only party holding the authoritarian state power, the Republican People's Party (RPP) in 1932. Thus, People’s Houses undertook the indoctrination of Kemalist principles and modernization on the way to the new republican state and the re-production of a nationalized and civilized society, individual and citizen in cities and rural areas. People's Houses had a wide field of activity, such as language and literature, history, theatre, cinema, folklore, music, fine arts, dances, architecture, sports, library, museology, peasantism and social aid, and its effectiveness is still discussed today. Until its closure in 1951, 478 People’s Houses and 4322 People's Rooms, mostly small models in villages, had been established throughout the country.

On the other hand, different discourses and practices from the west of the country were striking in 12 provinces in the two regions called the Eastern and Southeastern Regions of Turkey, where the Kurdish ethnicity was dominant. Because, in these areas, assimilation (temsil) and civilization (temdin) became clearer as an important power strategy in the 1930s, as well as extraordinary military security practices to “resolve” the issue of ethnic-motivated revolts and obedience to the state. In this direction, the one-party state administrators imposed representation and existence in the People's Houses instead of establishing RPP party branches in these provinces. It was now the main mission of People’s Houses to civilize the Kurds, which were coded as "backward and uncivilized", and the new "East" of the Republic, with orientalist and colonialist motifs, through assimilation based on making the new Turkish and cultural production in Turkish dominant and accepted. It can be said that, there was an assimilationist and civilizing republican Turkish nationalism based on “include all Muslim groups and Kurds in particular by excluding ethnic differences” at the state level. On the other hand, it is possible to say that there is a national identity and nation-state formation process in the pendulum of essentialist nationalism, which envisages to include only the Turkish ethnicity.

In this context, in this presentation based on my doctoral thesis, I would like to analyze what kind of a founding interaction between nationalisms of the members and intellectuals of the nation-state, and the Eastern/Kurdish perception and policy of the state, in the example of People’s Houses in Kurdish localities. For this, besides the publications of the People’s Houses, which are the primary sources that I obtained as a result of archival research, local bureaucratic texts, reports, correspondences; I will refer to some memory sources and selected secondary sources.

Bu doktora tezinde, 1932-1951 arası dönemde Doğu ve Güneydoğu Anadolu Bölgeleri'nde de faaliyet yürüten Halkevleri'nin, yerel toplumla, kültürle, mekânla ve merkezi devlet aktörleriyle kurdukları ilişkilerin tarihsel nitelikleri ve bu ilişkilerin cisimleştiği karşılaşma alanları incelenmektedir. Erken Cumhuriyet dönemi yöneticileri ve aydınları, "yeni milli özne" kurulması amacıyla Doğu olarak adlandırılmaya başlanan bu bölgelerde özellikle Kürtçe konuşan nüfusun Türklüğe asimilasyonu (temsil) ve medenileştirmesi (temdin) siyasetini öne çıkarmış ve bunun başlıca uygulayıcısı olarak da Halkevleri'ni görmüştür. Bu manada, bu çalışmada Halkevleri, Doğu'yu denetleme pratiklerini, zora ve açık şiddete dayalı tekniklerin yanısıra, sembolik şiddet içeren asimilasyon ve medenileştirme içerecek "halk terbiyesi" yoluyla toplumsallaştırma, kültürelleştirme ve ayrıca mekânsallaştırmanın başlıca kurumsal aktörü olarak nitelemek anlamlıdır. İlaveten, bölgede CHP'yi ve tek parti devletini temsil eden Halkevleri, bu konumuyla, merkez-yerel hattında siyasi ve idari pratikler ve bu süreçte, kurumsal aktörler ve yerel sivil aktörler arasındaki çok yönlü karşılaşma, iletişim ve etkileşimler açısından da önem kazanmaktadır. Literatüre bakıldığında ise, Halkevleri genellikle, devletin tek parti devletinin modernleştirme projesinin bir parçası ya da Doğu ve Güneydoğu Anadolu bölgelerinde, baskıcı ve ırkçı eğilimli nüfuz edemediği bir coğrafyayı kontrol etmekte kullandığı bir aygıt olarak resmedilmektedir. Bu halde, toplumu şekillendirmekteki gücü hakkında farklı yorumlar yapılsa da, Halkevleri, merkezi ve otonom bir devletin niteliğinin ampirik kanıtı konumunu aşamamıştır. Bu tezde ise, bu eksik bakışın ötesine geçme niyetiyle, kapsamlı bir arşiv ve kütüphane çalışmasına dayanılarak, 17 Doğu vilayetinde sayısı 70'e ulaşan Halkevi ve 700 civarında Halkodası'nın yönetici ve üyelerinin, toplum, kültür ve mekâna dair, bahsedilen niyetler etrafında yerel, gündelik ve mikro eksendeki söylemleri ve de pratikleri ortaya konmaktadır. Bu söylem ve pratiklerin de, yerel/merkezi devlet aktörleriyle, yerel halk arasındaki gündelik ilişki süreçlerinin yaşandığı karşılaşma alanları içindeki çatışma, uzlaşma, yeniden üretim ve kendine mal etme gibi değişik algılar ve deneyimlemeleri de içeren ne tür dönüşümler geçirdikleri ve nasıl sonuçlar ürettikleri araştırılmaktadır.

Walter Benjamin mentions the end of the importance of the experience as well as storytelling in modern times. The wisdom and truth is no longer substantial. The history with big type (H) has the potentiality to exclude the oral resources preferring the documents which are considered more “scientific”. Indeed, binary opposition between orality /literacy, text/context and fact/fiction is more problematic after the “cultural turn”. As Tri Minh-ha cites “speech…creates a bond of coming-and-going which generates movement and rhytim…life and action”. Hence, past and present interwaves and narrative reconstruct itself  at every turn as my mother’s one. In this presentation I’d like to decipher my mother Belkız’s  literacy and primary school’s story or experience as singular one which refers spontaneously the collective one. This experience represents also the complexive aspects of the forceful assimilation of the Kurds in Turkey in the case of Belkız as a Kurd, as a girl, as a poor and as a villager. In other words, this exemple reflects the ethnic, gendered and social aspects of the assimilative Turkish literacy and education process as the complexive one. Besides, it is possible to discuss the “hidden resistance” of Belkız and other students to learn Turkish and also their compromising attitudes...

Borders stand in between reality and fictionality through their specific organizations and representations. Moreover modernity rendered border as a space both visible and invisible. The dualistic character of borders, as a cultural and political component, started to be transcended within the post-cold war period and during the so-called globalization. Instead of fixed and compartmentalized place, the conceptualization of space, which enable permeable and flexible understanding of border, came to fore within the contexts of transnationalism, supranationalism and trans-localism. In parallel, the borders themselves reveal diverse readings and multidisciplinary researches in territorial, metaphorical and symbolic terms. Another change in the understanding of border stemmed from international politics. The wars on the horizons of nation-state, nationalism or imperialism from Israel-Palestine to Kashmir and lastly to Balkans and Iraq challenge the definitions of land, space, geography and border. These cases demonstrate that: the sovereignty of the nation-state as the founding principle of many international treaties can be violated frequently on the pretext of "security". Hence, as many countries quite obviously contradict themselves, eventually, all types of border conceptualizations (identical, cultural, territorial, etc) need to be reconstructed and de-constructed 1. 1 1 Although it is widely accepted that borders become transparent with the impact of globalization, I believe that one should be aware of the danger of overemphasizing this impact and becoming blind for the opposite examples.