[An American in Avcılar] Memory and forgetting

However, for more than 100 years, sociologists have challenged this idea of memory and have worked to show that our memories are mostly not our own, but rather constructs that live only within a social framework. Our personal memories take shape and are realized and expressed within a network of social, collective memories. First, a society remembers, then the actors create memories within a specific society that set limits and vistas within which my memories are possible.

My memories are like one cobblestone that in combination with thousands of other cobblestones forms the streets that thread throughout Avcılar. The street and the town itself provide the framework within which the single cobblestone makes sense. Further, the street is not just a bunch of cobblestones; the street is a higher pattern, a more inclusive ordering that determines where the cobblestones are placed. If the cobblestone is my memory, then the street [indeed all of Avcılar] is a collective memory. That collective memory arranges the individual cobblestones and, in fact, makes the individual cobblestone meaningful.

The members of the Praxis Club -- a group of sociology students at Fatih University who “foster sociological knowledge” and put that knowledge into practice -- hosted an international conference last week on “Cultural Memory and Coexistence.” The hope that motivated all the participants at the conference was coming to understand how individual and collective memory work together. Further, as we become more alert to memories outside our own lives and groups, we can better hear the stories of others and, by hearing, find ways to live together where we are no longer strangers. By learning to participate in the memories of others, their stories also become our stories. Our memories grow to include an ever larger human family.

The presenters at the conference paid particular attention to monuments as prompts to memory and as locations for struggles over memory: What story does a monument tell and what rival stories are squashed? How does power shape what is memorialized? Whose story is being told? How do the viewers of monuments come to understand the history mounted in stone? How do people negotiate differing approaches to the monument?

As I listened I recalled the recent controversy over the “Monument to Humanity” by Mehmet Aksoy in Kars. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan found the statue a “monstrosity”’ and was the catalyst for the monument’s demolition. One wonders, what is “monstrous” about memorializing “humanity” -- what story did the prime minister and his aesthetic supporters find unacceptable? What did the prime minister want to be forgotten? Whose story was hidden in the demolition? How did the controversy represent the use of political power to privilege one story while erasing a competing story? What is the story of the Turkish Republic that was challenged by the Kars monument? The case of this monument exemplifies how groups with different levels of power work to craft collective memories that set the winner’s vision in stone.

Environment encapsulating stories and memories

Other presenters at the conference focused on cities and landscapes, how the built environment encapsulates and preserves complex stories and memories. Cities are more complex than monuments -- they are deeply layered -- one set of memories overlies another, neighborhoods laden with very different memories jostle shoulder-to-shoulder with one another, the process of accretion builds one set of experiences atop another, and the same sites can carry very disparate understandings. Neighborhoods are different from monuments in two other ways as well: Neighborhoods are living spaces, shaped by daily life and myriad individual decisions and practices as well as the lives of the cultures within which those lives unfold. Further, neighborhoods are less likely to be locations shaped by conscious political power: Neighborhoods grow less intentionally than official monuments or constructions.

As a small example, in my Avcılar neighborhood of Denizköşkler, a short stretch of an older highway lies alongside the newer E-5. This short stretch is named Eski Edirne Asfaltı, echoing a slower time when Avcılar was a humble way station between Constantinople and the earlier Ottoman capital in Edirne. The E-5, in its cold and abstract name, sets our sights to a far faster and far more general connection between Istanbul and “E”urope and Turkey’s participation in the economy and culture of Western Europe. Edirne fades into insignificance; it has become a kilometer marker.

Now, my neighborhood is not on the way to anywhere, but a sidelight in a faster, less personal panorama. Before expressways, themselves in many ways a monument, travelers paused and lingered in those places on the way to their destination, but on an expressway the traveler focuses on the destination -- on a place always in the future. The journey is defined by its end, not by the process of getting somewhere.

In addition, my neighborhood has also forgotten that the Eski Erdirne lies atop the Via Egnatia, a Roman road that tied Constantinople to the city of Rome. Those memories, however, are faint -- eroded and replaced through the Ottoman policy of “Turkifying” the suburbs of İstanbul. Avcılar, itself, is named after the sultans’ hunting lodges located here.

The past is malleable, and our memories live within the larger narratives of our contemporary society. Avcılar’s pre-Republican past is forgotten and a new narrative ties the neighborhood to a nationalistic story. When I first moved to Avcılar, I was surprised to note signs leading me to the Atatürk Evi. I was pleased to discover that I had moved into a neighborhood where the founder of modern Turkey had also once lived. Imagine my surprise to learn the house was a recreation and that Atatürk had no real connection to Avcılar; however, the Avcılar house relocates Atatürk from Thessalonika -- in Greece -- to lovely Avcılar.

A fictive collective memory detaches Avcılar and its neighborhoods from connections to a more contested, less settled, more contentious past. The homes of the Greeks who lived here in the recent past and the church where they worshipped have been torn down -- a mosque now occupies the spot where the church told its story. The neighborhood and its landscape are now inescapably “Turkish” -- a much more diverse and less monolithic set of memories are forgotten in a more uniform story, a story leading our memories to Istanbul and Ankara rather than to a world of difference and variety.

Memory cannot exist without the simultaneous presence of forgetting. Memories, individual and collective, are always selective -- not everything can be remembered. And, in many ways, memories are intentional -- they are not neutral, but serve to support the person and the society we think we are in the present. We live, after all, not in the past but today, and our memories exist not in the past but in the now.

The conference reminded me that those who build, support, shape and control our collective memories also attempt to build, support, shape and control our present -- our lives as individuals and our lives as a people. So, if we wish to be freer, we must cultivate multiplicity in our memory and forgetting, and we must ever again learn to hear the stories of those disempowered through being pushed aside from our collective memory.

I want to thank the members of the Praxis Club, the conference presenters and my friend Ismail who helped me recall memories that question the narratives that we too often take for granted.