6 February 2010 / BEJAN MATUR ZAMAN,
When Abdi İpekçi’s daughter appeared on television with her father’s bloodied shirt, which she has kept carefully for the past 31 years, I looked specifically at her hands. I looked to see how she pressed the shirt, marked by blood and bullet holes, to her chest.
Then I listened to her words. Her own contemplation of what mourning really means lasted for a long time. She said: “I have lived with this shirt for 31 years. There are others who also did the same in this country.” As a child who was wounded by her father’s death, Nükhet İpekçi was more worried about not being able to fully express her story, rather than about having to somehow suppress it. She questioned the need for blood to flow and the relationship between society as a whole and this spilled blood. We are the people from a nation that somehow sees guns and killing as something native to us. And what binds us together is our shared silence in the face of the deaths, the killings. So many people were involved in her father’s death; Ipekçi acknowledges that “I know all those names, but I am tired now.”
