For the extraparliamentary, illegal leftist opposition in Turkey, the adoption of the weaponization of life as the predominant tactic of struggle entailed an existential and passionate commitment to Marxism. The radical organizations that participated in the death fast struggle subscribed to different currents of Marxism, which provided diverse readings of world politics and Turkey’s role within it, the history of the country, the level of its socioeconomic development and nature of its production relations, and the character of the state, prescribing in turn the different revolutionary strategies to be followed and the forms of organization best suited for their favored strategy. While these differences, further complicated by local debates, historical events, social networks, and particular experiences, soon hardened into distinct group identities and endowed the left with a highly sectarian culture, the commitment to Marxism nonetheless constituted a common moral compass, which guided generations of militants against the injustice of the capitalist economy and the oppression of the state. As a moral compass, Marxism drew the dividing line between right and wrong, between the just and the unjust. It was therefore thanks to their existential commitment that militants of different organizational affiliations and ideological convictions could see themselves as standing together on the same side of that line, transcending the differences among them.
In prison this existential commitment found its expression as the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the revolutionary cause. It developed out of and in turn further developed a cultural repertoire of conduct that was deeply oppositional to the forms of conduct required, encouraged, and affirmed as appropriate for prisoners by the state, laws and regulations, governmental decrees and circulars, and the orders of prison administrators. Collective life in ward communes as alternative modes of sociality already prescribed in detailed manner how each prisoner should conduct oneself in prison. Moreover, the intense periods of collective resistance against the arbitrary and violent intrusions of the state, built upon the spatial experience of the prison wards, further delineated a clear framework of counterconduct based on corporeal practices that required self-discipline, solidarity, dedication, and conviction. This repertoire of conduct helped transform prisoners on an individual level and gave them the power, determination, and courage to refuse obedience to the state. It enabled them to carry out acts of self-destruction and assert their political agency as a group from a position of intense marginality.
However, the growing centrality of necroresistance as a form of collective counterconduct also enacted a profound transformation in the politics of Marxist organizations and their supporters. The novel orientation toward death in the discursive and practical world of the radical left led to the development of what Foucault has called a “political spirituality.”1 This political spirituality not only altered the ideological views of these organizations and those of their militants but also produced elaborate rituals that have come to assume a vital function for the way in which ideology is lived and reproduced. Martyrdom became the main element of this spirituality and the resource with which collective and existential opposition could be justified and sustained in a highly asymmetric situation. Marxist martyrdom, as a secular theology, turned into the paradoxical vehicle of a sacrificial, vanguardist militancy. It brought into being the militant-martyr as the new revolutionary subjectivity of necroresistance conceptualized as collective counterconduct. This chapter explores the ideological leanings of the extraparliamentary left in Turkey and the theologization of their politics through necroresistance. It analyzes the rituals, metaphors, and symbolisms that mark, politicize, resignify, and commemorate death. It thus gives a portrait of the rituals by which the Turkish left has produced a movement that has grounded its very existence, meaning, and legitimacy on the sacrifice of life for the attainment of political ends, without, however, openly relying on an organized religion for support.
THE MULTIPLE MARXISMS OF THE DEATH FAST STRUGGLE
Mapping the extraparliamentary left in Turkey is a difficult task. The tapestry of radical organizations, having largely been woven in the aftermath of the 1960 coup d’état, includes many shades of red.2 This is because the spread of social-democratic, socialist, and communist ideas in the 1960s and the 1970s produced, through the contentious splintering and radical sectarianism of different factions, over forty groups, circles, and organizations, which carved themselves unique places on the left.3 However, the suppression of civilian politics, the repression of dissent, the imprisonment of leadership cadres, and the dissolution of organizational ties rendered most of these groups defunct by the end of the 1980 coup d’état.
On the other hand, struggles in prisons and the Kurdish armed struggle have been the practical transmission belts of radical traditions across the decades interrupted by military takeovers. At the same time, growing disparities of wealth and increased inequalities arising from rapid socioeconomic transformations caused by the neoliberalization program of the 1980s have contributed to their survival. During the 1980s, internal migration from rural areas to urban centers facilitated the substitution of the traditional working class with a less qualified, flexible, and precarious labor force, lacking in customary rights and welfare provisions. At the same time, economic development achieved by export-oriented growth strategies, integration with the world market, privatization of state economic enterprises, and shrinkage of the welfare state as part of the complex process of globalization endowed the left with a new constituency and renewed militancy despite the worldwide collapse of the socialist bloc. As a result, a handful of extraparliamentary groups were able not only to survive the destruction of the left the 1980 coup put into motion, but also to thrive further.
The illegal organizations that participated in the death fast struggle represent a rich array of Marxist thought as interpreted in the vernaculars of local class struggle and traditions of resistance. These groups are inheritors of various distinct syntheses of Marxism with Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Hoxhaism, Castroism, on the one hand, and with currents such as focoism (focalism), workerism, and syndicalism, on the other. In addition to the general ideological differences between these currents and the world-historical events that have triggered their divisions, the specific history of the Turkish debate on the left has created many splits and separations that have, through intense rivalries across factions, solidified into different group identities. These identities have in turn shaped a highly sectarian culture that has generally foreclosed cooperation and collective action. That the death fast struggle became the coordinated effort of a dozen different organizations (despite the presence of internal disagreements) is all the more remarkable given this history.
In spite of the organizational multiplicity and ideological heterogeneity of the organizations that make up the radical Turkish left, certain common threads can be identified as providing the conditions of possibility of the joint effort of the death fast struggle and thus making up the ideological core of their coalition. First, these organizations share a highly secular, materialist worldview, with a firm commitment to establishing justice in this world. Marxism is first and foremost a secular morality for those on the Turkish left, one that frames the world in dichotomous, partisan terms as a contestation between justice and injustice, right and wrong, friend and enemy. Second, the Marxist militants of Turkey diagnose the injustice of the current order and contend that the exploitative and oppressive capitalist relations of production must be abolished. They see the antagonism between classes as the main political divide and all agree in principle that the struggle of the working class is the means through which existing power relations can be overturned. However, depending on how they read Turkey, namely, its political history, path of development, imperial heritage, position in the global economy, presence of feudal remains in its economic and social structure, class composition, and the belated and warped process of industrialization, they espouse different revolutionary strategies.
Third, the organizations that make up the death fast struggle all share the contention that the existing order cannot be changed solely by democratic, legal means and that therefore its revolutionary overthrow is necessary. Moreover, they agree that revolution cannot be achieved without violence. While some of these organizations privilege urban guerrilla warfare and argue that the revolution should first be carried out in cities and then spread out into the countryside, others argue that rural guerrilla warfare should take the lead, spreading the revolution from the countryside into the urban centers. Some defend the thesis of general strike while others argue for the necessity of a people’s war. In general, all these organizations advance a combination of legal and outlawed struggle and argue for the coordination of organized resistance among students, laborers, intellectuals, and across institutions of civil society, with violent forms of struggle undertaken by specifically trained and selected cadres.
Fourth, especially in light of the relative weakness of the industrial labor force in Turkey, these organizations place great emphasis on the vanguard role of the party as the political organization of the working masses and the representative of their authentic interests. The party is in charge of delineating the strategy of revolution and developing tactics suitable for the concrete situation. Among its objectives is the training of cadres, the dissemination of propaganda, and the education, organization, and mobilization of the working class. The revolution should be the work of the people, but the vanguard organization is responsible for directing, motivating, channeling, and leading the people toward victory. Interpretations of vanguardism differ across organizations, but the common denominator is the expectation that the party will exercise political, cultural, moral, and ideological leadership to guide the masses toward the appropriate analysis of the existing order and prescribe the right course of action.
Finally, a fifth commonality is the historically intimate relationship of these groups with Kemalism, a relationship which has become radically severed after the 1980 coup d’état. We have already seen how leftist opposition in the early republican period, after consecutive attempts of elimination by the nationalist forces, trod a fine line between support for the transformative elements in Kemalist reforms and opposition to their bourgeois limitations. An important claim that resulted from the experience of this period was that the Kemalist revolution was left incomplete by the founding cadres or, worse, was purposefully betrayed by subsequent governments.4 One of the central goals of the Turkish left has therefore entailed continuing or deepening the Kemalist revolution in a more socialist direction.5 With the attainment of full national independence and socioeconomic development as the central concern of progressive forces, the various factions on the left have shown remarkable consistency in their allegiance to the Kemalist revolution as a historical and foundational source of legitimacy.6 The purpose of deepening the Kemalist revolution has revealed a stagist philosophy of history, in which Kemalism was seen as the necessary precondition for progress in a more socialist direction.
Economically, the left has enthusiastically defended the Kemalist revolution as a break from the feudal, imperial past, which, by setting up a national capitalism (or preferably, a non-capitalist “Third Way” of development) would prepare the grounds for a socialist economy. However, the left has been more hesitant about the political achievements of Kemalism, especially its relationship to democracy. On the one hand, the left has argued for greater rights and liberties against the authoritarian tendencies of Kemalism; on the other hand, the left has been lukewarm about “bourgeois” democracy and inclined to a Jacobinist, top-down approach to social change, an inclination it shared with the Kemalists. On this note, it is significant that the left, despite initially welcoming the transition to democracy in the 1950s, was quickly disillusioned with Democrat Party’s authoritarianism, interpreted it as a counterrevolutionary step away from Kemalism, and welcomed the military intervention of 1960 as the restoration of a radical republicanism. According to Ahmet Samim, “by its failure to accurately understand the meaning of the 1950 and 1960 events, the Turkish left was theoretically and politically shackled to an obsolete and romanticised vision of an alliance between the working masses and a ‘progressive’ state bureaucracy.”7 This halfhearted loyalty to democracy and the attempts to synthesize Kemalism and socialism in a specifically “Turkish way,” has largely set the tone for the debate of the 1960s and limited the ideological spectrum of the left to a left-wing Kemalism.8
However, in the second half of the 1970s, and especially after the coup d’état of 1980, the left’s relationship to Kemalism changed dramatically. Since then the radical left has approached the Turkish state with caution, if not enmity, diagnosing it to be a “fascist,” “oligarchic” dictatorship and the organized power of the “class enemy.” The disillusionment with whatever progressive elements the left once saw in the Kemalist civilian and military bureaucracy has further radicalized the left, but it has not dissuaded these organizations from the desire to capture state power to utilize it according to their own transformative agenda. As a result, this distancing from Kemalism and the state has stopped short of a critique of sovereignty, with the implication that anarchism has never found a significant following in the radical left of Turkey.
In order to make sense of the ideological positions of the array of organizations that partook in the death fast struggle and to map their interpretations of Marxism beyond the commonalities identified so far, it is necessary to take into account how the intellectual-political debate has unfolded in the local vernacular. Two moments of this debate, which combined Marxist currents from around the world with the particular history of Turkey, have been seminal for many of the subsequent divisions and independent formations on the left. First is the split that materialized at the end of the 1960s between the proponents of the national democratic revolution (NDR) thesis and the socialist revolution (SR) thesis. Second is the splintering of groups following the NDR line into three main currents: Maoists, vanguardists, and workerists.
The first split between NDR and SR depended primarily on a diagnostic disagreement as to what the Kemalist revolution had accomplished and a prescriptive disagreement as to how the “correct” revolutionary strategy must be formulated. The thesis of socialist revolution, advocated by the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) in the legal sphere and the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) in the illegal sphere, entailed the claim that the bourgeois revolution in Turkey was more or less completed and that therefore the next step should be the establishment of a noncapitalist path of development.9 For the Workers’ Party of Turkey, the contradiction between capitalism and feudalism in Turkey had been solved in favor of capitalism because of the development of market relations since the late Ottoman era.10 Similarly, Kemalist reforms and the transition to multiparty democracy had led to the withering away of feudal ties and the influence of religion in society, strengthening the working class.11 Because the bourgeois revolution had been achieved, the democratic struggle against feudal remnants could not constitute a separate stage of struggle by itself.
However, the party also concluded that it was impossible for Turkey to develop further on a capitalist path, as European countries had done in the past, because the conditions of development had changed with the entry of Western capitalism into the phase of imperialism. In order both to prosper and to advance according to the schema of societal evolution, Turkey had to free herself from the web of dependency created by the imperialist countries and attain real political independence. Because the collaboration of past governments with the world bourgeoisie foreclosed this option, independence could only be regained through socialism. Accordingly, the anti-imperialist and antifeudal struggles should be subsumed under a socialist struggle.
The proponents of SR advanced a blend of parliamentarism, trade unionism, youth organizations, and illegal activity. The Workers’ Party pursued parliamentary means (and attained an electoral victory in 1965 by gaining parliamentary seats), but the Communist Party supplemented the legal struggle with an underground organization. Treading a pro-Soviet line, offshoots of the advocates of SR gained strength in the second half of the 1970s with such parties as the Socialist Workers’ Party of Turkey (TSİP).12 Two of the dozen organizations that participated in the death fast struggle, namely Communist Party of Turkey/Spark and Revolution Party of Turkey (TKP/K and TDP, respectively), came out of variants of the Communist Party tradition. While the latter group advocated the SR thesis, to direct forces of struggle under the leadership of the party toward a popular socialist revolution carried out by mass mobilization and armed struggle, TKP/K, following the unique Dr. Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, stood closer to the NDR thesis with its advocacy of democratic revolution.13
Despite its short-lived success, the Workers’ Party of Turkey is often venerated as a school for the Turkish left. As an important center for the dissemination of Marxist thought, the party became the wellspring for later radical politics in Turkey. The socialist revolution thesis advocated by the Workers’ Party, however, was rapidly challenged by the thesis of national democratic revolution, which advocated the establishment of complete independence and democracy as the first revolutionary stage ahead.14 In contrast to the SR position of the indivisibility of the bourgeois and socialist revolutionary stages, the proponents of NDR argued that the main task of socialists should be to struggle for a “real” bourgeois democratic revolution to be carried out against feudalism and imperialism, exemplified by the collaborationist bourgeoisie and the landed oligarchy.15 According to Mihri Belli, the main theorist of NDR, Turkey was a semifeudal, semicolonial, and dependent capitalist country. The interests of the dominant classes were tied to the persistence of dependency relations with imperialist centers. The purpose of NDR should be to attain “complete independence” and institute democracy, signifying the completion of the Kemalist revolution that had been abandoned halfway through.16 The revolution would then create a favorable environment for the development of productive and democratic forces. Afterward, the ripening socioeconomic conditions would require a second stage of socialist revolution. In a third-worldist perspective, the idea of national liberation, now interpreted to encompass the liberation from relations of economic dependency, took center stage.17 Anti-imperialist rhetoric replaced anticapitalism as the rallying point of leftist opposition.
The followers of the NDR thesis built their revolutionary rhetoric on the idea of a national front, based on an alliance of the proletariat, the petty and national bourgeoisie, the army, the bureaucracy, students, and intellectuals. This grand alliance would fight against imperialism under the ideological leadership of the proletariat. But much of the real expectation was placed on the progressive sections in the army.18 The early proponents of NDR hoped for a pro-socialist military junta that would enable the swift conquest of state power, the enactment of democratic reforms, grand-scale nationalization of industries, and top-down social transformation. In order to install democracy, Belli argued, it was possible, if not necessary, to go beyond the limits of democratic contestation. NDR’s opposition to the legalist line of the Workers’ Party of Turkey soon paved the way for alternative struggle methods beyond the framework of legality.19 The youth organizations that subscribed to this line such as the Revolutionary Youth Federation of Turkey (Dev-Genç) soon advocated the use of violence, supporting a possible progressive coup d’état and, when it was seen that the 1971 intervention proved conservative, gliding toward guerrilla warfare. Ironically, despite the rhetoric of establishing the broadest possible national coalition against imperialism, the most vanguardist groups came out of the splits among the proponents of NDR.
Without going into the intricate details of internal debates that produced a great many divisions, we can sketch out the genealogy of groups within the NDR sphere in three major branches. The Maoist branch developed against the proponents of a progressive junta, advocated by Belli, and argued instead for the broadest possible national coalition. This coalition should also include the peasantry and organize a people’s war from the countryside under the leadership of the proletariat. Advocated by the pro–Chinese Revolutionary Workers’ Peasants’ Party of Turkey (TİİKP), Maoism accused the Soviet Union (and its followers in Turkey) of social imperialism, identified the contradiction between the two great powers of the cold war and Turkey as the determining element of the struggle, and supported national liberation movements in other parts of the world.20 Claiming the revolutionary heritage of Mustafa Kemal, TİİKP (and its successor TİKP) became an ardent defender of the ideological underpinnings of the Kemalist regime and treated them as goals to be taken to their natural conclusions. The distinction that was drawn by TİKP in its early years, between the heritage of the national liberation movement and Mustafa Kemal as the national hero, on the one hand, and Kemalist ideology as the ideology of the bourgeoisie, on the other, was lost in time, as the party line drew closer to nationalism.21
Even though the two sister Maoist organizations that participated in the death fast struggle had roots in the circles that splintered from the NDR line, they are the inheritors of groups that broke from TİİKP, soon after it was formed, espousing a more critical line vis-à-vis Kemalism and advocating revolutionary violence.22 The groups in this branch, led by İbrahim Kaypakkaya, evaluated the Kemalist revolution as the movement of the comprador bourgeoisie and landed oligarchy and moved toward a categorical rejection of Kemalist ideology.23 The collaboration of the Kemalist republican elite with imperialism, argued Kaypakkaya, prevented it from transforming the semifeudal and semicolonial structure of the country into national capitalism. He underscored the dubious relationship of Kemalism with democracy and maintained that in reality it was a “military-fascist dictatorship” that oppressed other ethnicities.24 His views on the oppression of the Kurds as a people were also markedly different from the largely nationalist orientation of other factions.25 The followers of Kaypakkaya argued for a “democratic people’s dictatorship” based on a worker-peasant alliance that would replace the Kemalist government, which they condemned for its promotion of a national bourgeoisie, exploitation of the people, and making the country part of the international imperialist front. In the struggle against the regime, the three weapons of the people were the party, the militia, and the united popular front, all to be built within armed struggle.26 Following this branch, we can locate several organizations within the death fast struggle: the Communist Party of Turkey (Marxist Leninist)–Workers’ Peasants’ Liberation Army of Turkey [TKP(ML)–TİKKO], which later renamed itself the Maoist Communist Party (MKP), and the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) are direct descendants of this Maoist line.
The second branch of the NDR thesis consists of groups and organizations that have grown out of the People’s Liberation Army of Turkey (THKO). This line followed the NDR thesis in maintaining that Turkey was a semidependent, semicolonial, and backward capitalist country. With the aim of establishing a “completely independent” Turkey, THKO identified the fight against American imperialism as the precondition for liberation. As such, the impending war would take place between the revolutionary front of compatriots (formed by national classes, with an emphasis on the rural poor) and the reactionary front of imperialists and their local allies, i.e., the non-national strata.27 This group strove to complete the Kemalist revolution by overthrowing the order that had displaced the achievements of Mustafa Kemal. Highly influenced by the Cuban, Algerian, and Vietnamese revolutions, and the writings of Carlos Marighella and Che Guevara, the group adopted the strategy of guerrilla warfare, based on small groups of militants, to incite the rural proletariat to a popular war.28 After the leaders of this organization were hanged by the 1971 military intervention, the movement distanced itself from Kemalism, continued illegality, and guerrilla warfare, and developed relations with the Palestinian and Kurdish struggles. Some factions moved toward a Maoist line, others adopted an Albanian line, still others criticized the focoist past as “adventurism” and sought to establish connections with the traditional working class. These factions moved further toward anticapitalist struggle, combining the organization of poor peasants through rural cooperatives with the militant organization of the working class, directing acts of violence against the military and bureaucratic apparatuses of the Turkish state. The groups that started out as Guevarist and evolved into different forms of Leninist workerism led to many splinter groups. Three of the organizations that participated in the death fast struggle, the Communist Labor Party of Turkey/Leninist, Communist Workers’ Party of Turkey, and Revolutionary Communists’ Union of Turkey (TKEP/L, TKİP, TİKB) come out of this lineage, emphasizing the necessity of the revolution to be built on the support and active participation of the traditional working class.
The third main branch of the NDR thesis is the group advocating “vanguardist warfare,” represented in the 1970s by the People’s Liberation Party-Front of Turkey (THKP-C). This organization, led by the charismatic Mahir Çayan, espoused the idea of a “continuous revolution” between the democratic and socialist stages and defended the ideological vanguardism of the proletariat in the democratic revolution over the primary force of the peasantry.29 The distinguishing feature of this line was the adoption of what Çayan called a “politicized military war strategy” in which all democratic and economic struggles would be subjected to armed struggle.30 It diagnosed the historical moment as the “covert occupation” of the country by a neoimperialist, globalizing capitalism, leading to relative economic prosperity.31 This prosperity kept the oppressed masses pacified by the neocolonial “oligarchic” dictatorship (of the comprador bourgeoisie and feudal remnants) through an “artificial balance.”32 The People’s Liberation Party-Front of Turkey insisted that this artificial balance could only be destroyed by means of “armed propaganda” or sensational acts of violence carried out by vanguardist military forces comprising urban guerrillas, against the agents of imperialism and finance capitalism, on the one hand, and state officials, torturers, and the “enemies of the people,” on the other. The impact of these sensational actions, it was argued, would be to display the vulnerability of the existing order and expose the political “truths” that are concealed from the masses by the “artificial balance”; hence these actions would shake up the masses, raise their consciousness, and trigger mass mobilizations that would lead to anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic revolution.33 The “vanguardist warfare” strategy espoused by THKP-C came very close to the anarchist “propaganda of the deed.”
After the death of Çayan and the leadership cadres of the organization, different factions emerged. Among the offshoots of this branch, some circles distanced themselves from armed struggle and moved toward a pro-Soviet line, such as the Liberation Group (Kurtuluş), others placed a greater emphasis on popular organization, such as the Revolutionary Path (Dev-Yol), and still others became more ardent defenders of vanguardism, such as the Revolutionary Left (Dev-Sol). Several organizations that stem from the further splits within this current participated in the death fast struggle. These include the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), Resistance Movement (DH), People’s Liberation Party-Front of Turkey/Marxist Leninist Armed Propaganda Unit (THKP-C/MLSPB), and Revolutionary Path (DY). Finally, the Marxist Leninist Communist Party (MLKP) was formed by groups that broke away from the main descendants of each of the three branches of the NDR, promoting its unique blend of Maoist, workerist, and vanguardist warfare.
As this brief portrait of the complex mosaic of leftist organizations and their evolution suffices to show, the organizations that made up the radical left in Turkey represented a wide array of political positions. Each organization waged an endless, hairsplitting ideological battle in its publications against the rival organizations it considered to reflect reformist or revisionist deviations from the “correct” revolutionary position, represented, of course, by their own. The distances between these positions, even when they were not theoretically insurmountable, were compounded by practical differences: distinct histories and localities of struggle, leaders and social networks, organizational cultures, favored markers of identity, all worked to distinguish groups from one another and to exaggerate differences even further. The sectarian culture and intergroup conflict on the radical left produced a rich spectrum of radicalism while also preventing coordinated action.
On the other hand, more important than the scientificity, accuracy, persuasiveness, and even popularity of the specific theoretical diagnoses and strategic prescriptions espoused by each organization was perhaps their proponents’ naive but genuine and passionate commitment to the struggle for justice under the banner of Marxism. This struggle took on convoluted theoretical forms and obscure vocabularies hard to master even by those who defended them, presented the world in binary terms that oversimplified conflicts and reduced everything to opposites, was highly patronizing, absolutized differences, and took pride in not compromising; however, its role as a moral compass was not obliterated by these shortcomings. Militants of different stripes were dedicated to uphold this secular morality that distinguished between the oppressors and the oppressed and were willing to sacrifice their lives in its defense. Without this commitment, it is difficult to explain the fervor with which ideological battles were waged, names were called, relations were broken, and violent conflicts broke out. It is also impossible to understand that what so vehemently separated these organizations from one another was also what put them on the same side and eventually brought them together in the same struggle.
Given the highly divided nature of the Turkish left and the militant defense of ideological differences, we may wonder how the death fast struggle was indeed conducted as a coalition of a dozen organizations. In fact, the collective experience of the prison, with its isolation from the world, propensity to expose prisoners to violence, precarity of rights, as well as its alternative forms of sociality and experiments in self-government through ward communes, was crucial in creating a common ground among individuals with different affiliations and the collective will to struggle together. The experiences of collective prison resistance since the 1980s also enabled the convergence of these otherwise different organizations on a common set of demands. As we have already seen, the coalition was never free of tensions and disagreements, but coordinated action was nonetheless possible. As prisoners forged their lives into weapons, their existential investment in the struggle against high security prisons was less about advancing the particular current of Marxism they subscribed to than about preserving their common political identity and “way of life” as defined by Marxism in general. However, the widespread adoption of necroresistance transformed its practitioners in unexpected ways, producing considerable ideological effects. The most significant ideological effect was the emergence of a sacrificial Marxism through the theologization of their politics.
SACRIFICIAL MARXISM
In his much acclaimed study, Benedict Anderson views the cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers as the most important symbolic expressions of the culture of nationalism: “Void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.”34 The ability of nationalism to inspire people to die and kill has always been a perplexing feat. For Anderson, these emblems of nationalist imaginaries point to the intimate relationship of nationalism with death and, ultimately, with religious thought. In search of an explanation for their power, Anderson turns to the cultural roots of nationalism.35 He argues, “the cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism are much concerned with death and immortality.”36
Notwithstanding the irony of an embalmed Lenin, the Tomb of the Unknown Marxist will perhaps never be erected. However, the growing centrality of necroresistance on the left has rendered such a tomb less of an absurdity. The death fast struggle raises the question of how the development of such a direct and metaphysical relation with death within Marxism (or different currents of Marxism) has been possible.
As one of the early critics of the worldliness of Marxism, Ernst Bloch has argued that there is an inherent lack in the materialist and atheistic “fixation” of Marxism, preventing it from adequately responding to the problems of the soul, community, and hope.37 According to Bloch, “throughout all the movements and goals of worldly transformation, this [utopian tendency] has been a desire to make room for life, for the attainment of a divine essence, for men to integrate themselves at last, in a millennium, with human kindness, freedom, and the light of the telos.”38 Hence, Bloch argues, while the problem of sustenance and well-being might be solved by Marxist reason, Marxism fails to address the experience and desire for transcendence. “Dialectics has voided the economy, but the soul and the faith it was to make room for are missing,” contends Bloch. He holds that the only way to realize the “freely self-chosen community above society … and above a social economy thoroughly organized along communist lines, in a classless, and therefore non-violent, order” is to follow a metaphysical guide that complements communism to answer the “socially irremovable problematics of the soul.”39 Hence Marxism does not do away with the human need for mysticism.
Yet, unlike movements that are motivated by religion, the participants of the death fast struggle avowed their atheism. Unlike varieties of liberation theology or Judeo-Christian socialism, the death fast struggle did not weave together Marxism with Islam. Nor was this a form of Alevi leftism.40 While it is true that part of the constituency of the radical left came from an Alevi background, it would be simplistic to reduce the ideology of the death fast struggle to the sociological profile of its participants, who nonetheless professed atheism. While it could be argued that the movement appropriated some aspects of Alevi cultural symbolism (such as the red headband and references to a Shia and specifically Alevi history of oppression and sacrifice), the identification of the death fast with Alevism is misleading because of the overall absence of religious belief and Islamist politics in the movement. It would be more accurate, instead, to observe that the death fast struggle reconfigured Marxism into a political mysticism, a secularized political theology. As Bloch suggests, the necessity of giving meaning to life and death especially in relation to acts of self-destruction paved the way for a theologization that created its own solutions to the problem of faith in the absence of commensurate spiritual resources that could be tapped from within Marxism: the political cause and its victory was transformed into a new form of faith, and rituals that reproduced and disseminated the convictions of its participants were invented.41
In the death fast struggle the theologization that accompanied the adoption of the weaponization of life occurred through a displacement of two major theoretical components central to the indigenous interpretations of Marxism.42 First was the transmutation of the stagist view of revolution. We have already seen that the schism between the socialist revolution and national democratic revolution theses was one of the major fissures on the Turkish left. With the adoption of necroresistance, this fissure, which had already lost its significance in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, was replaced with the understanding of a continuous and unified stage of revolutionary action, but one whose main line of contention was now constituted by the role envisioned for sacrifice. The new alignments on the left were no longer really driven by the diagnosis of the country’s economic and political status, based on modes of production, class composition, and integration into the world economy (and their corresponding strategies of democratic and socialist revolution), but by the prominence accorded to self-destructive forms of struggle in advancing the revolutionary endeavor. The new alignments were based on the centrality of sacrificial action. It was not that any group categorically rejected the resort to necroresistance, but there emerged a significant difference between those who deemed it secondary versus those who considered it central. Either way, what was displaced from centrality was class struggle as the motor force of history. In the emergent vision the revolutionary process now stretched from oppression to final and absolute victory as a unified chain of struggles that would be driven forward by self-sacrificial acts, if not as the sole tactic then at least as one prominent as any other.
The second displacement concerns the reinterpretation of vanguardism. Despite their multiple differences, organizations on the radical left largely concurred on the necessary role of the vanguard party in the revolutionary endeavor. With the adoption of necroresistance, the party’s ideological, political, and cultural leadership of the masses was redefined to constitute the conduct of exemplary and heroic deeds based on the performance of acts of sacrifice on behalf of the working and oppressed classes. The vanguardist expression of class struggle would henceforth be played out in the persons of communist militants and their confrontation with the state. This reinterpretation, particularly prevalent in the factions coming out of the “vanguardist warfare” branch of the NDR thesis, involved the transformation of the “politicized military war strategy,” which advocated carrying out sensational acts of violence against official and economic targets of strategic value in order to expose political “truths.” Now the conduct of heroic acts of self-sacrifice became the novel form of propaganda aiming to disrupt the “artificial balance” of the existing order and to expose the “truth” of the state. Sacrificial propaganda could be armed or unarmed, depending on whether the chosen form of weaponization of life was offensive or defensive. On the other hand, for factions that came out of the Maoist or workerist traditions, which placed greater emphasis on popular participation in the struggle, this displacement also grew to be apparent in the reconsideration of the vanguard role of the party, but in a different way. Accordingly, the party was no longer simply the political representative of the interests of the masses; it became their allegorical embodiment. If the person of the communist militant now stood for the people, the sacrificial acts conducted in struggle could be understood as standing in for popular warfare. As a result, martyrdom became a new form of vanguardist militancy for large sections of the Turkish left despite their ideological differences.
Indeed, the central vehicle for this double displacement has been martyrdom, ensconced in ritual practices that have become crucial for the reproduction of the cause.43 For a long time the word for martyr in Turkish, i.e., şehit (derived from the shahid in Arabic) has been commonly used in mainstream discourse for the soldier who has lost his life in combat or on duty.44 The same word is now frequently used in the lexicon of the Marxist left for anyone who has died in the name of the cause, whether this death has been intentional or unexpected. This usage has short-circuited debates in Islam regarding whether self-destruction is admissible by applying the expression “to fall martyr” to those killed in armed conflict as well as those who lost their lives as a result of self-starvation, self-immolation, or suicide attack. However, while disengagement with such controversy has helped in circumventing the negative connotations that the religious prohibition on suicide might have for self-destructive actions, it has not been able to resolve the tension between the left’s lack of belief in the afterlife and investment in the attainment of immortality. This tension has become even more pronounced with the intriguing slogan of the death fast struggle: “Martyrs of the Revolution Are Immortal!”
From a materialist point of view, the prominence that martyrdom has attained on the left is a paradox.45 This is not intended to imply that either sacrifice or martyrdom has hitherto been completely foreign to revolutionary struggles. The communist movement has incurred many losses, renowned or anonymous. What is paradoxical is the celebration of death as sacrifice, the growing quest for heroism and immortality, and the yearning for martyrdom. What I would like to draw attention to is the qualitative difference between what could be termed Marxist sacrifice and a sacrificial Marxism. The latter, exemplified by the death fast struggle, concerns the systematic appropriation of martyrdom as a central ethico-political value and its transformation into a vehicle for the ideological and cultural propagation of the revolutionary struggle and the dissemination of its heritage.
The most telling symptom of sacrificial Marxism in the context of the death fast struggle is the shift from the hunger strike of unlimited duration to the fast unto death. We have already seen how this shift, announced one month after the initiation of the hunger strike, was part of the escalation of the struggle. Its declared purpose was to stress the determination of the militants to continue their hunger strike until death if their demands were not met. The practical expression of this determination was the adoption of a harsher nutritional regiment, limited to the intake of sugary water and salt only, aimed at accelerating the process of dying. Discursively, however, while the idea animating the hunger strike is a combination of the perennial Marxist concern with hunger and the common political strategy of the labor strike, the death fast shifts the focus from life to death, with unmistakably theological, particularly Islamic, connotations associated with fasting.46 This is the case even though the politics of self-starvation has nothing to do with religion.
We could interpret this change in vocabulary as a strategic move that aims to up the ante for the struggle. We could interpret it simply as a tactical utilization of popular culture in a country whose population is predominantly Muslim and for whom fasting has immediate relevance. However, it is also possible to read this transformation as symptomatic of the theologization of Marxist politics related to the politicization of death in the context of resistance. Just as the religious fast expresses the unquestionable conviction in God, the death fast expresses a similar conviction, this time in the righteousness of the revolutionary cause. Just as the religious fast is motivated by the idea of self-discipline in the attainment of the purity of faith and submission to God, the death fast utilizes self-discipline in the attainment of the purity of militancy and submission to the revolutionary cause. The willingness to sacrifice is elevated into the marker of conviction for both.
This theologization is both a result of the adoption of necroresistance and its precondition. On the one hand, it is understandable that the ability to continue fighting for the communist cause in the growing absence of a popular following, combined with the general passivity and disinterestedness of the masses, necessitated a strong, unqualified, and unconditional conviction, especially in the face of the difficult nature of the corporeal struggle ahead. On the other hand, the repetition and elevation of sacrifice perpetuate this unconditional conviction, suffusing the gaps and silences of the otherwise secular worldview of these militants and transmuting Marxism into a new faith. Consequently, the theologization of the fundamental ideological views of these organizations has culminated in a sacrificial Marxism, which has in turn proven to be fertile ground for the reproduction and dissemination of these convictions through the exaltation of martyrdom.
An important implication of sacrificial Marxism is the transformation of the communist militant into the militant-martyr. In this transformation there is a double theoretical movement as well: on the one hand, there is the profanation of self-sacrifice, which is rationalized and secularized as an ideological weapon of revolutionary struggle rather than a component of religion and faith-based struggles, while, on the other hand, this comes with the attendant sacralization of the communist ideal, which becomes a new transcendence. As the communist ideal is sacralized and relegated to an imaginary and mythical future, through a continuous deferral of victory, the chain of revolutionary martyrs stretches endlessly from the depths of history to an imagined end point of final victory, an end uncharted and unconfined by geographical, cultural, or historical boundaries. Built painstakingly by each death, communism becomes the ultimate reward not in the afterlife but for those who will live afterward: it is posterity who will benefit from the actions of those who sacrifice themselves and who will commemorate the martyrs as immortal.
The theologized politics of the weaponization of life operates as a dialectic between the militant and the martyr, the human and the weapon, the living and the dead, steered by the “consciousness of sacrifice,” which now replaces “class consciousness” in more conventional Marxisms. In the first moment of this dialectic, the performer of the self-destructive act moves from militancy into martyrdom, even prior to her departure from the world of the living. The second moment is the unique fusion of the militant and the martyr in the dead body, the only tangible material artifact of the spectacle of death. The final moment is the movement of the martyr into a new (perhaps higher) stage of militancy. The dead are appropriated by the communities who espouse self-destructive practices; their memories are incorporated into practices of everyday life and cultural and ethical codes; the images, utterances, and recollections of their sacrificial acts reenter circulation in the political imaginary. In the presence that the militants establish through their absence, they are endowed with a new agency that contributes to the organization of the past, present, and future experience of the living and becomes an ongoing wellspring of legitimacy for the perpetuation of a radical politics built on necroresistance. Their absence gives meaning and legitimacy to the continuation of the struggle through the repetition of the sacrificial act itself. Each death begins a new dialectic as others, motivated by the memory, legacy, and example of the martyrs, conduct new acts of sacrifice in their honor.
In what follows we will look at the preparatory, funerary, and commemoratory rituals enveloping this dialectic. These rituals are important because they express, in condensed and stylized form, how ideology is actually lived. Insofar as rituals are corporeal technologies that frame experiences, they reveal the practical substance of necroresistance as counterconduct. At the same time, rituals have a generative quality because they also shape the experience, social relations, and subjectivities of those who perform and participate in them. According to Nick Crossley, rituals are “embodied forms of practical reason” that have important effects on the constitution of (inter)subjectivity.47 Through the analysis of these rites, we will be able to trace how these corporeal technologies function in the constitution of the militant-martyr into the subjectivity of necroresistance as well as in the making of the insurgent community as a collective subject.
Relatively new in the culture of the radical left, rituals around the weaponization of life emerged in the late 1990s and became more prevalent with the death fast struggle of 2000, even though significant variations remained in their adoption across different leftist organizations. Undoubtedly, these rituals were much more pronounced and common in the social circles of the hardliners in the death fast struggle, the militants and supporters of those organizations that initiated and continued the death fast to the end. For participants of the second group who joined the struggle after Operation Return to Life, investment in these rituals was less pronounced and dramatic and, at times, involving a critical distance. Both the variance in the attributed centrality of the self-destructive practices and sectarian considerations of political identity seem to have played a role in this diversity. The following account, therefore, aims to present a generalized sense of these rituals, without asserting that each participating organization and militant followed the same routines in exactly parallel ways.
FROM MILITANT TO MARTYR
Due to the contentious and militarized atmosphere that striated politics in the Turkey of the early 1990s, the risk of death was no stranger for a militant who was a sympathizer, supporter or member of an outlawed leftist organization. A myriad of situations, involving writing slogans on the walls, taping up posters and flyers, participating in illegal demonstrations, or attending clandestine meetings, could easily expose a militant to violence. The most traumatic and marking of these encounters with the state was torture under interrogation. Each violent encounter experienced or witnessed in the struggle tended to confirm the militants’ conviction that justice could only be attained by violence and paved the way for greater violence. As one of the participants of the death fast struggle succinctly put it, in Turkey, “if you are going to be a revolutionary, death is always in your side pocket.”48 As a militant, you should always “carry your shroud with you,” as it were, and be prepared for the worst.49 The very lifestyle of being a communist militant, a Marxist revolutionary, had come to be associated with living on the edge in the culture of the radical left.
Nonetheless, there was a difference between the serious but still routine risks that a militant would take on an everyday basis and the decision to perform self-destructive acts in which death became a more immediate, tangible, and willed outcome of the planned action. Of course, the risk of death still depended on the particular form of self-destruction: death might be a more or less certain outcome (as in the offensive modalities of the weaponization of life) or a relatively high risk that stopped short of certainty (as in long-term hunger strikes). The fast unto death was on the border between actions of high risk and certainty because of the indefinite duration of the hunger strike (bounded only by the attainment of articulated demands), so it brought together the certainty that at least some participants would die (because of the expectation that demands could only be won through the occurrence of some deaths) and the high likelihood of long-term health consequences for many participants (considering that the fast would eventually be terminated). Because of the serious risk of death involved in the death fast, those who volunteered to forge their lives into weapons would pass through elaborate and sophisticated stages of selection, ideological training, and preparation.
These detailed and complex preparatory rituals, as “rites of passage,” singled out the participants of the fast unto death from the rest and marked their transition from one world to another. They constituted public acknowledgment of their new status and mission. They communicated the relation of the militant to various interlocking collectives (the party, the community of revolutionaries, the “people”) in concrete form and provided a script within which self-destructive acts could be situated and disseminated. They transcribed the meaning of the self-destructive act as “self-sacrifice”—a counterconduct against dominant forms of conduct prescribed by the state, a selfless, ethical performance for the revolution, potent with symbolic and political significance.
These rituals acknowledged the tragically destructive nature of self-sacrifice, as the last and most significant political act of the militant, expected to end in death, but the emphasis was on the generative nature of the same act. Self-sacrifice was also expected to have productive force: not only would it complete the constitution of the militant into the martyr, but, through the martyr, it would create a new militancy whose power and vitality would flow back to the struggle. Through the death of the militant, the party and the nascent revolutionary community, whose symbolic representative the militant was, would gain new life. As rehearsals of funerals, in which militants participated in their own untimely parting ceremonies, preparatory rituals provided the possibility of politically and socially recognizing death before its actualization, thereby rendering its biological consummation secondary.50 At the same time, they were occasions in which political regeneration could be celebrated. It was the firm belief in the productive aspect of self-destructive acts that injected into the preparatory rituals a strong dose of optimism, one that permeated them with jouissance: hope, excitement, and celebratory joy, rather than grief and mourning.
The dual quality of the weaponization of life as an end and a new beginning rendered these rituals the expression of the uninterrupted and indeed interminable continuity of the struggle. They brought the past into the present and ensured that the present would be transmitted to posterity. Through these rituals the dead reached out to the present, they structured the ethical and cultural codes of the living (codes of honor, loyalty, and commitment), illuminated the path of action to be taken, and helped shape the future of their communities. Martyrs achieved a strong and deep presence that haunted these rituals by way of the recitation of their names, invocations of their exemplary deeds, and the ornamentation of the physical spaces in which these rituals took place with their pictures. At the same time, these ceremonies were performative acts in themselves, acts that not only initiated the transformation of the militant into a martyr but also constituted the revolutionary community through, and perhaps above, history. They joined the dead and the living, the martyrs and the martyrs-to-be, while they announced the meaning of their deaths to the living and the not-yet existing.
Volunteering for Sacrifice
In the early months of 2000, well in advance of the launch of the hunger strike, militants in different prisons began to volunteer to participate, communicating their interest and enthusiasm by oral declarations, personal letters, and communiqués, addressed particularly to their comrades of higher rank.51 In these messages they explained how they perceived the current political conjuncture, the role of the prison as an arena of struggle, the meaning of F-type prisons, the moves that the state might be expected to make, and why they thought a response in the form of a hunger strike was necessary. They expressed their expectation that the hunger strike would necessarily be a protracted battle and proclaimed their readiness to endure its consequences. They voiced their desire to take part in this “historic initiative.”52 In their messages they also recounted their reasons for volunteering, trying to convince their comrades not only of their eagerness, preparedness, and determination but also of the correctness of their motivations. Each militant who put his or her name forward for the hunger strike had to write a statement, but each statement did not automatically guarantee participation.
These statements, which the party hierarchies involved in recruitment and selection took very seriously, were important indications about the level of political consciousness the militants had attained and whether they were in fact ready to undertake self-destructive actions. Motivations of the volunteers were considered particularly important for a protracted hunger strike in which participants should not only be willing to starve themselves but also be able to sustain their starvation over a long period of time. Each organization to which individual militants pledged allegiance had to evaluate their candidacy, examining every militant’s personal history and qualities, character traits, political experience, role and rank in the organization, and level of political consciousness. The leadership needed to decide, according to the specific details of each case, whether the militant was capable of carrying out a fast unto death and deserving of the lofty honor of being a martyr.
At the same time, each organization had strategic considerations beyond the merits and weaknesses of particular militants that factored into the decision making process. One of these considerations was to maintain a delicate balance between the length of the struggle and the level of participation. Organizations had to estimate the probable duration of the hunger strike as a whole, calculate the number of volunteers necessary to conduct the protest, and allocate the number of volunteers they should accept at the beginning, reserve for the future, and keep without harm. These organizations were also concerned with maintaining a proper ratio in several different ways: (1) between the size of their own prison constituency vis-à-vis that of other organizations; (2) between leadership cadres and rank-and-file militants; and (3) between females and males. Maintaining variance in the legal status of participating prisoners was also important. As the party organizations made their selections, they kept an eye on a potential amnesty (rumors about which had already began to circulate). Thus some volunteers were to be selected from those prisoners who were detained but not yet convicted, while others were to be selected from those who would most certainly remain inside, even in case an amnesty was proclaimed by the government.53 Finally, organizations also aimed to maintain participation across different prisons over time, so the location of militants was also a criterion.
Most important, it was necessary for organizations to ensure that their volunteers wanted to participate for the right reasons. For example, a willingness to die would be prime reason for disqualification. Similarly, those who had a fatal illness were also immediately excluded because of the view that in such a situation death by starvation would be escapism, only a substitute for what was already inevitable or, even worse, an instrumental way to hasten death. The physical strength of the body was an important element, factored in to calculate how long the militant would be able to sustain the fast. If the militant’s body suffered from certain ailments that rendered her weak and could potentially cause an early death, the militant would be excluded from participation, at least in the early stages of the struggle.54 Militants who had not participated in previous hunger strikes had priority because they had not suffered any health problems due to self-starvation.
Similarly, if a militant wanted to participate primarily for self-fulfilling reasons, such as seeking personal glory, she would most surely be rejected by the party organization. “There were those volunteers,” a participant of the death fast struggle explained, “who were really in this [struggle] for revolutionary heroism and they attributed themselves a chivalry. We tried not to include them in the list [of participants] as much as possible. Because we had concerns. For example, if [participation] were a personal thing, something connected to populism [i.e., being popular] and an adventurist feeling, this could lead to breaking down [before the end of the struggle]. Even if one did complete the resistance with success, one might become real trouble for the revolutionary movement and the people in its aftermath.”55 Big egos were not promoted.
Militants who volunteered themselves had to be motivated by a sound conception of the “objective” responsibility of a revolutionary, which was supposed to be altogether different from an eagerness to die. It was almost as if the decision to participate was a moral good in the Kantian sense, an autonomous and rational act of duty not only in conformity with but done for the sake of a categorical imperative to sacrifice.56 Accordingly, the ground of the militants’ obligation to sacrifice had to be sought in pure reason (and not in the particular circumstances, expected rewards, or natural inclinations of each militant). Sacrifice was a revolutionary duty. A participant explained this revolutionary duty as follows:
Nobody asked me if I would like to participate [in the death fast]. I myself volunteered and persuaded them [the leaders in the organization]. But this is not volunteering for death. Let it not be misunderstood. I have been in the struggle for thirty years. In the struggle people cannot make these calculations: where do I die, where do I survive, what if such and such happens to me there. There are things that must happen, things that must be done. It is like that in life. You think [about life] through those things that must happen. Insofar as you become one with things that must happen, you are no longer yourself, you are what you must be, you live according to what must be done. You evaluate yourself, too, according to what [you] must be, the goals, ideals you are trying to achieve, objectively. To the extent that you can approach yourself scientifically, seeing your place [in the world], seeing yourself and what you can do, you can place yourself within [what must be]. It is a matter of becoming one with it. Because I don’t see revolutionary struggle only as belief; it is something scientific. When I looked at myself that way, I thought: I can do the death fast. I must do it. I volunteered. … And in none of my sentences [written to persuade my comrades] was there a wish to die. A person who wants to die cannot sustain this struggle. The volunteering of whoever wants to die would be rejected.57
Accordingly, the hunger strike was a task that needed to be carried out for the revolution, so it should be undertaken only by those dedicated militants who viewed their place in the world through the lens of their role in the struggle for revolution and considered it their duty to take on this task. For individual militants, participation in the death fast was also an opportunity to test the strength of one’s own convictions and to renew one’s commitment, without which their lives would lack meaning. Only with a “scientific” basis to their conviction, one that enabled them to understand what “must” be done correctly, could they evaluate themselves accurately and make the right decision to volunteer. Their decision could not be impulsive or meant as a reaction to circumstances; it had to be based in firm self-knowledge and political acumen, combining the scientific rationality of a materialist worldview with the moral imperative to sacrifice for the revolutionary cause.
Once candidates were selected, they were notified ceremonially and usually in front of their peers in prison gatherings. Depending on the situation of each individual and the overall political assessment of the party, hunger strikers were grouped into teams who would conduct their action together. With the conversion of the hunger strike into the fast unto death, these preselected teams would be launched consecutively. The timing in between the launching of these teams was arranged in order to spread out the expected times of death of the participants over the duration of the struggle, relaying the flag of struggle from one group to another, leaving a hiatus between each team, ranging from several days in the beginning to several weeks and months in the later stages of the struggle. Overall, the process of identification, selection, and grouping of the candidates, and the arrangement of their concatenation were arduous and intricately complicated tasks for these political organizations, involving a multiplicity of factors and complex calculations, in order to strategize in advance and prepare their forces in the most effective way for the anticipated confrontation with the state.
A Wedding with Death
Preparations commenced upon notification of the candidates. Long discussions about the meaning and implications of the hunger strike were carried out as part of ideological training. In addition to personal preparations such as the writing of parting letters, testimonies, and wills, this period was marked by collective ceremonies made in anticipation of the hunger strike. One of the most noteworthy rituals almost exclusive to female militants was the henna ceremony.
The henna night is a traditional ceremony that takes place as part of wedding rituals in Turkey. Despite local variations in how it is carried out, the core of the ritual is the decoration of the palms of the bride-to-be with henna in the presence of female guests. It takes place in the family home of the bride the night before the wedding day, signifying the bride’s departure from her family home and entry into her husband’s household. The bride sits in the middle of the room dressed in red clothes, her head and face covered with a transparent red scarf. The ritual continues as her guests walk around her in a circle with candles, praying and singing traditional songs about separation from loved ones to make the bride-to-be cry. Once she cries, the ritual proceeds with the mother-in-law putting a gold coin and henna in the hand of the bride-to-be, tying it with a piece of cloth that is kept there until the early hours of the morning in order to fix the ornamentation in place. After the hand of the bride is decorated, the henna cup is passed around for the guests to decorate their own hands. In some cases, the remaining henna is sent to the quarters where the groom-to-be is celebrating with male guests in order that he dye his fingers with henna as well. The night continues with singing, dancing, and celebrations.
As part of marriage celebrations, this highly gendered ritual does not only signify the passage of the bride-to-be into womanhood, but it also reproduces the relations of patriarchy.58 It denotes a transfer of possession, the handing over of the woman from the father to the husband. This transfer is represented by the sad parting of the girl from her own parents and her reception by her future parents. The role of the mother-in-law in putting the henna in the hand of the bride-to-be signifies the new authority of the in-laws and her husband over her. The sacrificial connotations emphasize the woman’s devotion to her new family. The red of the henna as well as the red of the dress of the bride-to-be connote blood, both as the end of her virginity and the sacred seal of the marriage. The ritual also involves the marking of all other women who have come of age alongside the bride-to-be, designating their readiness for the institution of marriage. The subsequent celebrations grant social approval to the marital union.
It is important to note that another use of henna is the religious ceremony that involves the marking of the sheep and rams that have been chosen for sacrifice (kurban) in the Islamic sacrificial fest commemorating Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his first-born son in order to obey God’s command and the divine interruption of this sacrifice. This marking separates the sacrificial animal from the rest, and the henna is believed to purify the sacrifice. Occasionally, henna is also used to decorate the hands of young men who are being sent away to do their military service in order to signify their devotion to the nation and willingness to sacrifice their lives in its protection.59
As such, the henna ceremony has many sacrificial connotations. The appropriation of the henna ceremony by the female militants about to embark on the fast unto death underscores the role of the ritual as a rite of passage and accentuates these sacrificial connotations. Through this ritual, the ones selected for the journey toward death come of age; they move to a different stage of militancy, having reached the kind of political consciousness that enables them to devote themselves exclusively to the cause. The decoration of other women as part of the ritual, like the marking of girls eligible for marriage, signifies that others are also coming of age. And if they might not yet be among the elect few who were accepted to participate in the fast unto death, their turn too will eventually come.60
The militant iteration of the henna ritual also implies that the promise to conduct the act of self-sacrifice is congruent to the promise of marriage. Through this ceremony, female militants are prepared for a marriage with the revolutionary cause, a marriage that will last until death. At the same time, this is a marriage with death for the revolutionary cause.61 Just as the traditional henna ritual celebrates the union of woman with man, while, at the same time, it laments the woman’s exit from her father’s house, the revolutionary iteration celebrates the union of the female militant with the political cause, while it laments her exit from the world of the living. Just as the traditional ritual signifies the woman’s entry into her husband’s household and subjection to her husband’s and his parents’ authority, the revolutionary ritual signifies the female militant’s entry into the world of the dead and her submission to the authority of the political cause represented by the revolutionary party. The henna seals this sacred bond with the color of blood, which is the same as the color of the revolutionary flag. The ensuing celebrations, similar to the traditional ceremony, signify the recognition and approval of this new union by the revolutionary community.
According to the testimony of female political prisoners in Uşak Prison, where a henna night was celebrated, this ceremony was a preparation for death: “In this path, which will be taken so that oppression is tamed with death, volunteering for death comes to mean that those who are left behind will be able to live a humane life. That’s why people prepare for death like they prepare for a wedding. This is the celebration for a great sacrifice.”62 The henna ceremony embellished the act of volunteering for sacrifice with the connotations of a marital union, while it also marked the passage between life and death. On the one hand, this was an experience most of these women would probably never have due to the political path they had chosen for themselves. On the other hand, having this ceremony in a militant form further propelled them on the same political path, sealing their promise to the revolutionary cause and marking a point of no return. The women imagined themselves as brides, “brides of the revolution.”63 Yet their wedding dress, as they pictured it, would not be white but scarlet—the coffin wrapped in the scarlet flag of the party, adorned with red carnations. “‘We are brides, too,’ one of them sa[id], ‘our coffins will be all red.”64
Overall, the revolutionary appropriation of the henna ceremony presents a complex image, both affirming and subverting gender roles.65 The analogy between conducting self-destructive violence and getting married is both an affirmation of the idea and institution of marriage (as the proper thing for a woman to do, as the sacrificial act par excellence) and its subversion (in the association of marriage with death). On the one hand, it inscribes the act of self-sacrifice into the continuum of sacrifices expected from a woman as wife, mother, and daughter. It reveals that patriarchal and paternalistic values attached to the institutions of family and marriage are internalized and that the father and husband as structural positions in the gendered web of power relations continue to frame the female experience, even on the radical left. On the other hand, the same ritual is reinterpreted by these women as a means of empowerment and self-assertion. The idea of marriage with the political cause and, eventually, with death, is, at the same time, a forceful declaration of the female militant’s free will and political agency. It transforms the experience of self-destruction into a joyous rite of passage and opens this form of militancy, otherwise reserved for their male comrades, to women. It constitutes a tacit critique of the patriarchal order, which expects women to get married. It enables women to refuse this path, albeit by substituting a political union in place of a familial union. The political agency of these women, therefore, denies the construction of womanhood solely according to patriarchal norms and unsettles the gendered nature of the ritual itself.66 It is interesting to note that this unsettling was further reinforced when male militants also participated in the henna ritual alongside female militants and ornamented their palms together, particularly in settings where women and men could begin the hunger strike jointly. The revolutionary iteration of the henna ceremony also points to its profound politicization and militarization. This can be observed in the transformation of the bride’s act of parting from her family house into a parting from the world of the living.67 Similarly, the bride’s entry into the new family now signifies her initiation into the world of martyrs. If the self-destructive path of action becomes the venue to attain the posthumous glory otherwise inaccessible to women, the choice of the communist star as the pattern with which to decorate their palms reinscribes traditional signs of marriage into this new, politicized sphere of meaning, marked by violence and guided by the light of the red star.
Of the 122 martyrs that the death fast movement has claimed for itself, 48 were women, making up 40 percent. Of these women, 31 died of self-starvation, 6 burned themselves to death (5 of these women were also on a fast unto death), 9 were killed by the state’s security forces (5 of these women were also on a fast unto death), and, finally, 2 others died on suicide missions. Since female militants constituted such a significant part of the death fast struggle, the reappropriation of this gendered ritual and its reconfiguration in political terms were not insignificant. They symbolized in a poignant way how the cultural codes of these militants were radically reconfigured, in line with their political consciousness and orientation toward martyrdom. Ironically, however, this ritual, even in its subversion, could also be taken to signify how men and women were finally able to obtain a more equal start in the “race of death,” one that was usually beyond reach in the gendered experience of female militants in the race of life.68
Tying the Red Headband
The principal ritual that set the stage for the self-destructive act was one that cut across gender, however. This ritual combined taking an oath in public, putting on a red headband, and making a speech, which announced the transformation of the hunger strike into a death fast. It thereby marked the initiation of a new stage in the struggle in which death would henceforth always be at arm’s length, if not closer. It made the commitment of militants public and the possibility of withdrawal socially and politically more difficult. Due to its centrality, this ritual was highly anticipated, elaborately planned, and performed as a memorable event.
Carried out before an audience of militants in the prison wards (or before supporters in the shantytowns when the death fast spilled outside prisons), these rituals provide a precious window into the world of the revolutionary community. Attending to testimonies of prisoners and participants of the death fast, we can piece together the setting and procedures of this ritual in broad strokes (but it should be noted that the context, speeches, and details varied according to organization, prison, and timing of the ceremony). The focus of the ceremony was the public recognition of individuals who were chosen to pursue the fast unto death. They would be asked to come on stage and stand before their community. The stage would be adorned with flowers, mostly carnations, and the podium would be covered with party flags or red cloth. The background would also be adorned with large party flags, posters and banners that carried the slogans of the death fast struggle, pictures and paintings of martyrs, including, most notably, the figure of the leader.69
Before the militants took the stage, the meaning of the gathering would be announced in speeches delivered by party representatives. Solidarity messages from other prisons, from organizations outside the prison, national and international, would also be read aloud. Then each militant took the stage in turn, delivering speeches in which they promised allegiance to the cause, declared their determination to take the struggle to its victorious ending, proclaimed their commitment to their comrades, the martyrs, and the people(s) of Turkey in whose name they were struggling, and, finally, announced their desire “to conquer death” in the name of all.70 The high point of the ceremony came at the end of the speech when the militant received the headband. The headband, which became the main symbol of the death fast, was often a dark red piece of cloth (occasionally, it would also have the symbol of the party on the red cloth).71 It would be tied around the militant’s forehead by another militant (who was either already on the death fast or a higher-ranking militant in the party), who would thereby confer upon the militant the status of being a death fast warrior.72 The militant who tied the headband on the new warrior would usually end the procession by kissing the militant’s forehead upon the headband and embracing the militant. The audience would, of course, join in by singing marches, shouting slogans, clapping, and cheering.
While each organization carried out its own ceremony, joint ceremonies were also conducted in certain large prisons with high numbers of political prisoners with different affiliations. These ceremonies are particularly important since they reflect the spirit and ideological core of the coalition that was built around the hunger strike. The speeches delivered in these ceremonies are testimonies to how the movement understood, explained, justified, and presented itself to itself as well as to the broader revolutionary community. They show how the state’s high security prison project was perceived from the marginal spaces of prison wards and why it was considered to constitute a fundamental affront to the prisoners. Reflecting the formal views of these parties organizing the death fast, these speeches also set the stage for individual militants to situate themselves in the movement. They shed light on the ideational and symbolic content of ritual practices inaugurating the death fast.
The following speech, delivered by a male militant at the joint ceremony held at Sağmalcılar Prison in Bayrampaşa, Istanbul (where the Central Coordination of Prisons was located), communicates to its audience the views animating the movement, as understood by the representatives of leftist political organizations leading the death fast struggle, while it also marks the end of the first month of the hunger strike and its conversion into a fast unto death. It celebrates the 109 militants on hunger strike in this prison, 13 of whom would embark on the fast unto death on this occasion. As a telling artifact of the death fast struggle, it is worthy of a detailed analysis:
Friends, Comrades,
Our general resistance, which we started on October 20, [2000,] as TKP(ML), DHKP-C, and TKİP, has transformed into a death fast since November 19. As the Bayrampaşa Prison [sic], on November 25, our ten comrades from DHKP-C and three comrades from TKP(ML) have armored themselves with scarlet bands and embarked on a path to write a new death fast legend. Today, we have gathered to congratulate them once again and to share their feelings. Friends, Comrades,
We have talked and debated for months. We have concurred that imperialism and the fascist government have laid siege to the revolutionary movement of Turkey and that they want to liquidate the revolution. We have come to be in agreement on the fact that the center of this offensive is the cell policy and thus that prisons and revolutionary captives are the focal point for repelling this [offensive]. We have come together in word; we have diverged in action.
This was not a clash of spaces, but a clash of wills. This was an ideological war. And, in order to win this war, it was necessary to take upon ourselves the slogan “We will die, but we will never surrender” from our comrades whose blood has merged together. This was a holistic and comprehensive offensive, too, [one whose outcome] would determine the future of the revolution of Turkey, the peoples of Turkey. In order to write the history of liberation of our peoples, it was necessary to be the continuers of the bequest of unity that our martyrs of the death fast of ’96 have knitted with their bodies. The path of victory, the path of knitting together the unity of the people, and, before all else, the path of defending revolutionary ideology [and] socialism pass through this point. The path to erect the peoples of Turkey, who carry very strong revolutionary dynamics, as an organized force against imperialism and fascism, would pass through the addition of new rings to the [chain of] heroic legends that we have created in the ’96 death fast and in Ulucanlar [Prison].
As DHKP-C, TKP(ML), and TKİP we are honored and relieved to advance in the path shown by our martyrs and our history. We are proud to have made the unity we have created in ’96 the future, not past history. 1996 has shown us that where revolutionary unity comes together with correct politics, it creates magnificent victories. 2000 is also a date when revolutionary unity meets correct politics. And our victory will be magnificent with our comrades, who move toward death cell by cell, and with our martyrs, and it will increase the hope not only of the peoples of Turkey but also of the peoples of the world. It will demolish the liquidation by imperialism and fascism; the revolution will grow in the path opened by our comrades who break the siege with their bodies. We have no doubt about this; no one should have any doubts about this.
Friends, Comrades,
Our comrades with scarlet bands are the guarantees of the future of our peoples and our revolution. Those of us who lie down to death are the inheritors of the unity of the revolutionary movement of Turkey, created cell by cell in the ’96 death fast. And they are carrying the flag of this valuable bequest presented to the revolution of Turkey at the cost of twelve martyrs in 1996 in their hands, [the flag] of this honor on their foreheads. Saying that “it is as important to carry forward to the future a historic resistance, a legend of heroism, as it is to create it,” they are keeping the promise that we have made to our martyrs of the 1996 death fast and in Ulucanlar [Prison]. The power of the revolutionary will, the greatness of revolutionary values, the invincibility of the revolution will once again become flags through their bodies. Once again will the legend of self-sacrifice for the history of the revolution of the world and of Turkey be spread cell by cell. Through such resistance, in which victory is absolute, our peoples will win; we will win.
Who is revolutionary, who is not; who wants the revolution, who does not; who is determined to create the unity of the people, who is not … will once again become clear; our resistance will lead to polarization. This polarization will flow into the revolution.
To believe is the precondition of victory.
We believe!
To pay a price is the guarantee of victory.
We are paying a price.
Martyrs are the final point of victory.
One of the most immediate features of the speech is its military vocabulary; it is replete with references to warfare, offensive, assault, death, surrender, invincibility, blood, and martyrs. As its content is about war, its performance serves as a declaration of war. The text provides the political diagnosis of the present from the point of view of the prisoners, expressed as a confrontation between the prisoners and the state. The state’s policy of high security prisons is interpreted both as the imposition of a new penal regime and, more important, as an assault upon the people’s revolutionary impulse, an assault that is part of a new wave of oppression. Such a view results from the evaluation of the F-type prisons as part of a grand policy of “cellularization” that is not confined to the prison. “Cellularization,” according to the prisoners, is not simply the doing of the “fascist” state but is also supported by (Western) imperialist centers to which the state is seen as intimately tied and dependent; politics and economics go hand in hand in the making of the F-type prisons.
At stake in this confrontation is the wholesale repression of the left in the person of the prisoners, who view themselves as the vanguard of the people and facilitator of the revolution. The prisoners see themselves in a state of “siege”; they are besieged not so much because they are imprisoned but by virtue of the state’s imminent offensive on prisons. It is clear that prisoners see the prison wards as their spaces, islands under their control, as it were, surrounded by the hostile seas of the state. The speech intimates that the siege is becoming tighter and more constricting by the day and that the revolutionaries are in waiting for the intrusion or invasion from the outside.
According to the speech, since the assault is directed upon the prisons, placing them at the forefront of the struggle, the proper, most militant, response should emerge from the same spaces. It thus accounts for the decision on the timing of the hunger strike. We have already seen how this position, advanced by the hardliners, was criticized by other organizations who considered the launch of the hunger strike early and who postponed participation until after Operation Return to Life. This speech depicts how the hardliners’ position is placed within the perspective of a vanguardist orientation that provides the justification for launching the struggle from the prisons without waiting for social mobilizations to develop outside; in fact, as a means to incite them by leading the way. It also justifies the choice of self-starvation as the most militant tactic appropriate in fighting an “ideological war” based on the “clash of wills” between the state and the prisoners.
Another important feature of the speech is its performative quality, which attempts to confer unity and solidarity on the movement. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) internal disagreements within the prisoners’ coalition, which we have already explored, the speech constructs and emphasizes a shared tradition of resistance inherited from the past. Given the particularly sectarian culture of the Turkish left, the significance of this declaration of unity cannot be overemphasized. The common experience of repression in prisons, the multiple acts of resistance, and security operations in which many prisoners have lost their lives (such as the one in Ulucanlar Prison), the argument goes, have created solidarity among revolutionaries and paved the ground for further unified action. Although the speech mentions that consensus has not yet been attained (“We have come together in word; we have diverged in action.”), it signals the possibility of future cooperation by singling out the 1996 death fast as a defining moment in the history of the left with respect to attempts to achieve unity. Their “blood has merged together”; the left’s unity has been “knitted together” via individual bodies, cell by cell, death by death, martyr by martyr. The speech thus contends that those who have died in that struggle have been the exemplary force promoting leftist solidarity across otherwise acrimoniously divided factions, rendering 1996 the legitimate precursor for the current death fast.74 The victorious ending of the 1996 death fast is also utilized as an invitation for nonparticipating organizations to join.
The speech also reveals the logic of necroresistance: political gain can only be attained through death. Victory, the speech asserts, can only be accomplished by “paying a price”; in this case the price is “giving martyrs” for the attainment of the revolutionary cause. The political diagnosis thus offers only one prescription. The only way for the prisoners to fight is by forging their lives into weapons. It is the possibility of victory that allows the resignification of self-destructive acts into acts of self-sacrifice. However, the performance of sacrificial acts, it is expected, will accomplish more than simply to “repel” the offensive and to “break the siege”: it will produce the very spark that will ignite the fire of revolution. The necessity and inevitability of victory therefore hinge on the necessity and inevitability of sacrifice. In this light, it is important to note that the retrospective construction of a singular narrative of collective resistance is achieved by focusing mainly on sacrificial acts, each instance designating a different stage in the eschatological passage from oppression to emancipation. Such a construction reveals a historical understanding in which the past is “legendary” and the future is “victorious.” While the audience is invited to take part in the “heroic legends” of the past, they are also called upon to “write a new death fast legend,” to “advance in the path shown by [their] martyrs and [their] history.”
Martyrs do significant political, moral, and affective work in this speech as well as in other speeches. Their invocation attests to the continuing presence and influence of the dead in the world of the living. The speech thus solidly affirms the dual quality of sacrifice: what might have been an end for particular militants is, at the same time, a new beginning for the revolutionary collective, a leap forward in the establishment of strength that arises out of unified action and a common ideological stance, another step toward victory. As the present is built upon the sacrifices of the past, the future will be built upon the sacrifices of the present. The citation of martyrs affirms that true revolutionary behavior, the path to be taken, and the values to live by may all be found in their examples. The legacy of the martyrs gives meaning and endows legitimacy to new acts of self-destruction, which will be the means by which the struggle is maintained, unity established, and victory reached. The speech repeatedly assures that victory is certain: “We have no doubt,” “we believe,” “we will win.”
It is also worth underscoring that the metaphor of the cell [hücre], both in this speech and throughout other discursive artifacts of the death fast struggle, functions as a multifaceted and evocative emblem of its politics. Most important, the idea of the cell calls to mind two forces that the death fast struggle sought to construct as polar opposites: the disciplinary penal regime built on high security prisons with cells and the corporeal technique of struggle against them whose protracted labor of dying is experienced daily by the death of somatic cells. In the first sense the cell implies a premonition. Unless something is done, the speaker intimates, the whole country is in danger of becoming a “penal colony” in the Kafkaesque sense, a large prison cell where domination will be absolute, resistance will be stifled, and the revolution will be “liquidated.” Revelatory proof for this imminent danger can be found in the state’s desire to confine the revolutionaries in the cells. In the second sense the cell is a bulwark. In response to the policy of “cellularization,” the corporeal strategy of protest seeks to prove that absolute domination is not possible, that each cell of the body is a barricade against the attempts of government. The metaphor of the cell cogently encapsulates the contradiction between biosovereignty and necroresistance.
But that is not all. The cell also stands for the imagined relation of the militant to the collectivities in the name of which self-destruction is performed. The militants view themselves as the smallest clandestine unit—the cell—of their organizations. At the same time, each militant is a cell of the grand revolutionary organism that is the peoples of Turkey. Imagining militants as cells is an assurance that they will continue the struggle even as singular units, in case they are isolated from their comrades and put in a prison cell on their own, and that the grand revolutionary organism will be made to survive through the work of each cell. This organic metaphor reveals a reconfiguration of vanguardism from a relation of representative leadership to one of synecdochic embodiment. Each individual militant now stands for the masses. On the one hand, this means that what is done to them, to their bodies, is done to all. On the other hand, their struggle means the struggle of the masses, which will continue to advance through their bodies.
Finally, the cell also functions as the means for bringing into being the community-to-come that the hunger strikers proclaim themselves to be fighting for. The future community will be built “cell by cell” (hücre hücre); it will be called into being in and through the death of each cell, somatic and militant. The dispensability of the life of each cell in order to ensure the survival of the revolutionary organism connects the militant’s mortality to the immortality of the cause. The party’s longevity assures the possibility of eventual victory and therefore overrides the transience of the militant’s life; each militant is only one cell among countless others who personify the party’s will. The connection of the militant’s life to the larger-than-life cause is forged through sacrifice: the sacrifice of each cell will ensure that the collective lives on despite the deaths of its members. Martyrdom ensures both the permanence of the struggle and the immortality of the dead. The primary slogan of the movement gains particular importance in this light: “Long Live Our Death Fast Resistance!”
Permeated as it is with the pioneering role of sacrifice, the celebratory speech announcing the inauguration of the death fast is thus symptomatic of the intimate relationship with death and immortality forged within Marxism, transforming the latter into the expression of an existential, passionate, and total commitment. In the theologization of leftist politics, martyrdom combines the secular and the sacred, the past and the present, the living and the dead. The speech that launches the militant on the path to martyrdom culminates in tying the red headband. In the speech the headband is metaphorized as the “armor” that protects the militants in war; it signifies the sheer power of will, which guides them in their resistance. But the headband is also the tangible artifact that marks the militant as a sacrifice; it signifies that the militant has assumed a sacred quality by being chosen for the honor of martyrdom and has embarked on the path that will eventuate in it. The scarlet headband is the material incarnation of the connection that binds together martyrs and militants; it is passed on from martyrs to militants, through the party, and forward to new martyrs. It is the seal of the promise of death.
THE CORPSE AS MILITANT AND MARTYR
As the material remains of the spectacle of death, the corpse constitutes the second moment of the dialectic between the living and the dead through which the weaponization of life operates. The dialectical moment signified by the corpse fuses the militant and the martyr in the same body in a contradictory unity. The social construction of the corpse and the resignification of death are therefore critical for understanding the culture of the radical left in Turkey today.75
We have seen how preparatory rituals functioned as rehearsals of funerals. However, these rites do not replace the actual funerals that take place when biological deaths are consummated through the performance of the sacrificial act. Each death calls forth a communal gathering, which becomes a celebration of the fact that the militant, who had already stepped into martyrdom by taking the oath and tying the headband at the inauguration of the fast, has kept the promise to die. Like preparatory rituals, funeral rites are strongly imbued with the dual quality of the sacrificial performance, both as an end and as a beginning, through the collective meanings invested in the corpse. The corpse, as already dead but not yet evicted from the world of the living, becomes an interface that allows the living to interact with the dead. It contributes to the perceived continuity between the past, the present, and ultimately, the future, by constituting the most visible and immediate yet transcendent link in this continuity, both its relay and testimony. It is possible to read the relationship of the community to sacrifice through its reverence of the corpse: the endurance of the collective is predicated on the sacrificial deaths of its members and the endurance of martyrs on the continued existence of the collective itself. The revolutionary community gains its longevity through the mortality of the militant upon which it bestows immortality.
Funeral rituals include preparing the corpse for public display, demonstrations of respect and solidarity toward the corpse, and the performance of public salutations. One of the publications issued by the participants of the death fast struggle provides a detailed description of the various rites that take place until the burial.76 The description entails the immediate aftermath of the death of Gülsüman Dönmez, a thirty-seven-year-old woman and the single mother of a twelve-year-old boy, who passed away in April 2001, after 147 days on the death fast.77 The publication indicates that Dönmez joined the death fast struggle as a member of the Solidarity Association for the Families and Relatives of the Arrested (TAYAD) and was part of the first team of death fasters outside the prisons in a “resistance house” in the shantytown of Küçükarmutlu, Istanbul. Her participation was intended to highlight the continuity between the inside and the outside, with the purpose of showing that the state’s policy of “cellularization” was not limited to prisons and that, therefore, prison resistance against “cellularization” should be supplemented with resistance outside prisons.78
According to the anonymous and composite testimonial narrative, published and disseminated by the movement, the events after Dönmez’s death went as follows: news of her death was announced in the neighborhood where she had been fasting, upon which people began to gather for a funeral procession. Meanwhile, Dönmez’s caretakers and comrades prepared her corpse for display.79 Her body was placed upon a catafalque not too high from the floor in one of the rooms in the house. Candles were lit around her head. Her hair was neatly combed and her red headband was left on her forehead. A white piece of cloth was tied around her chin, fastened right above her head to keep it locked. Her body was covered with a large red fabric and her face left uncovered. The catafalque was decorated with carnations.80 The walls and floor around her corpse were ornamented with pictures and posters of other martyrs.
Once the corpse was ready, people were let into the room to say good-bye. The first ones to be allowed inside were other death fasters. Each approached the catafalque, kneeled before the corpse, and kissed the forehead of her dead body. The visitors uttered promises to continue the fight, shouted slogans, and paid their respects.81 After the completion of this initial farewell, the corpse was carried out of the house amidst slogans. After being taken around in the streets of the neighborhood on the shoulders of her comrades, surrounded by torches and lit candles, she was brought to the yard of the public building used as a common gathering and prayer space for the Alevi community (cemevi), accompanied by slogans, applause, and whistles (zılgıt).82 There she was placed upon another catafalque where young men took turns keeping vigil until morning, one standing before her head, the other before her feet. These men, according to the narration, stood like soldiers with their left fists in the air to pay their respects and guard the corpse as visitors came in to see the corpse throughout the night.83 Finally, the next morning, a large cortege gathered, in the front of which walked Dönmez’s son, carrying his mother’s picture, with his left fist in the air, shouting slogans. After the corpse was taken through the streets of the neighborhood one last time, it was placed in the ambulance that would head to the morgue. The final stages of the procession were accompanied by slogans: “Gülsüman Dönmez Is Immortal!”84
As a piece of political propaganda, this account is written in a way that glorifies the dead and paints the funeral in admirable terms. In spite of its didactic and lionizing qualities, it is still helpful in pinpointing the successive steps of parting rites that have emerged around the weaponization of life, containing clues to their overall significance. First of all, the gathering around the corpse demonstrates that these funerals are as concerned with the departure of the militant as they are with the arrival of the martyr. As the dead body is resignified into the militant-martyr, the body is elaborately prepared into a picturesque image—simple and humble, yet powerful in its presence and unwavering in its revolutionary claim, this style encapsulates much of the political message that the death fast struggle would like to convey to the world. The pronounced visibility of the dead in the revolutionary community presents a great contrast with the broader cultural context wherein death is experienced, mourned, and remembered in private, hidden away from sight.85
Second, the individual salutations of the corpse (the kissing of the red headband, taking oaths, shouting slogans, making promises, paying respects with fists in the air, and scattering carnations) are occasions for the militants who are also on the hunger strike to renew their oaths and for the supporters of the struggle to affirm their commitment to the cause. These salutations, while acknowledging the death of the militant-martyr, treat the body as if it were still alive, avowing the strong impact of its sacred aura upon the living. This aura largely emanates from the red headband, which is conspicuously left upon the corpse, thereby assuring its enduring and sacrosanct status. The militant has lived up to the honor of the red headband, carried it with grace, and fulfilled the oath she has taken. By kissing the headband, each militant partakes of its aura and reaffirms its honorable, sacrosanct quality.
Third is the way in which the corpse is not fully wrapped until burial, which defies the conventional separation between the dead and the living. Scholars have noted how in most societies the corpse is perceived as a symbol of danger, pollution, and abjection, leading to the invention of a host of funereal practices that eliminate direct contact with the dead as soon as possible.86 Traditional practices in Turkey are no different: the corpse is washed along with prayers, wrapped completely in white shroud, and sealed away in the coffin until burial, as soon as possible. By contrast, the militant-martyr is only covered with red fabric, with the face and the headband left completely visible, which amplifies the sacred aura. The opportunity for generous contact between the community and the corpse is intended to remind everyone of what happened, that there has occurred a great sacrifice, a sacrifice undertaken in their name, on their behalf.
Fourth, the applause, whistling, hymns, revolutionary songs, and slogans uttered while the corpse is carried around in the neighborhood add to the continued public presence of the militant-martyr. The silent presence of the corpse as a relic of the sacrificial performance, like a testimony to the raison d’être of the revolutionary collective, stands in dramatic contrast to the vigor and clamor of public salutations. If the dead body can no longer speak to the world, now the political voice of the militant-martyr speaks to posterity. In these salutations the community takes its turn to acknowledge the militant’s well-deserved status as a martyr and to fulfill the reverential obligations due her corpse. These salutations also function to allay the grief of those who are left behind and provide occasions for the collective venting of anger as a way to cope with loss. However, the awareness that the funeral is a public display, oriented toward the larger audience of the “people” and the state, makes these rites engineered occasions for the conveyance of the revolutionary community’s self-understanding and political message to the world.87 In these rites, mourning is accordingly constrained and the ways in which pain and sorrow are expressed are implicitly yet actively regulated.
Public expressions of mourning are channeled into selected slogans, hymns, revolutionary songs, and poems. Instead of wailing, there are whistles and applause.88 The regulation of bereavement circumscribes excessive manifestations of grief and relegates them to private enclaves away from the public gaze. By circumscribing the expression of individual sorrow, the community does not seek to upend a shared conception of the “grievability” of life so much as it attempts to convert the act of mourning into a collective manifestation of solidarity, resolve, and a pledge of retribution.89 The speeches and slogans emphasize the call for justice in the face of what is perceived to be an acute injustice perpetuated in a highly asymmetric situation between the state and the revolutionary community. It is hoped that sadness is replaced by fury, which, unlike sadness, is mobilizing and generative of further political action.
The regulation of mourning strikes a delicate balance between the contesting claims of a “right to live” and a “right to die.” What is at stake here is the value attributed to the life of each militant in itself and as part of the life of the community. The latter, of course, rests on the transience of the militant’s life, its expendability for the cause, and its enduring political (rather than biological) existence through the continuity of the revolutionary cause. On the one hand, it is necessary to avoid creating the impression that the revolutionaries do not value life, that they view each militant’s life as merely dispensable political currency. On the other hand, life should not be overexalted by excessive mourning, which would jeopardize the whole struggle, particularly its overarchingly necropolitical strategy. So while the revolutionaries must treat the death as a loss, they must also make sure to emphasize its gains by focusing on its effects, such as its ability to convey their political message to the broader public.
Central to this message is that the power of life and death has been usurped from the state by the militant-martyr, through whom the revolutionary community expresses an alternative claim to power, a sovereignty hoped for. This alternative claim is lodged in the very bodies upon which the sovereignty of the state is built, robbing the state of its power one insurgent at a time. The gathering around the dead body of the insurgent dramatically rehearses this alternative claim to power as it enacts the emergence of a novel political community out of the “state of nature”—from the murky netherworld of Turkey’s revolutionary underground, militants surface as a collective, answering the call of the sacrificial death to unite them into a new whole. They come to pay their last respects to their deceased comrade while, at the same time, they assert their own existence, which is now endowed with a new dose of legitimacy through the performance of another sacrifice in their name. In the funeral gathering, grief and mourning for the insurgent’s body are therefore transformed into the assertion of power by the body politic of the insurgent community. The public interactions with the corpse disseminate its sacredness onto the living members, purifying, elevating, and consecrating them as a community for which the sacrifice has been made. As such, the dead body is treated with great reverence, as if it were a sacred canvas on which the whole history of oppression and the hope of emancipation have been painted in red.
The paradoxical conjuncture of the materialist centrality of the corpse with its transcendent and intangible aura highlights the dual status that brings together the militant and the martyr in a contradictory unity in the same body. It cogently conveys the ambivalent movement between the secular and the sacred that underlies the theologization of politics, contributing to the production of a sacrificial Marxism. The imbrication of the secular and the sacred is intensified as funeral rituals become more vital sources of endurance and reconstitution for Turkey’s radical left. Insofar as the history of the left now unfolds through a “chain of sacrifice,” the increasing centrality of the funeral only confirms the willingness to further the cycle of sacrificial violence, leading to further deaths and more funeral gatherings. Depressing as this prospect is, it can be interpreted to show that not only the bodies but also the hearts and minds of insurgent citizens remain devoted to an alternative order.
THE MARTYR AS MILITANT
The rituals surrounding the corpse sculpt the death of the militant into a glorious sacrifice, an honorable and sacred martyrdom, which becomes, politically and symbolically, no death at all. On the contrary; the corpse is the vehicle of rebirth: it rejuvenates and consecrates the community in whose name the self-destructive act has been performed, provides the rationale for its coming together, asserts its claim to power, and generates the continuity of the struggle.90 In funerary rituals the revolutionary community strives to memorialize the militant-martyr through the resignification of death and the reverent reappropriation of the insurgent’s body by the community. The funeral becomes the occasion of converting mourning into a unifying political stance for the community. The success of this conversion depends as much on the aftermath of the funeral, however, as it does on the funeral itself.
In the aftermath of parting rituals are processes that incorporate the militant-martyr into collective memory.91 In what Allen Feldman has termed the “sacrificial construction of memory,” the dead are integrated into collective memory by the translation of their act of sacrifice into a political narrative, the circulation of their bodies in “surrogate forms” such as images, and their integration into the everyday lives and spaces of their communities.92 The sharing of recollections about the militant-martyr, the recitation of the events that led up to the decision to participate in the movement, and the narration of the “correct” understanding of the act of self-destruction as a sacrificial death are mechanisms by which a collective history of the revolutionary community slowly shapes into being. This history is constructed piecemeal, by iterations of a myriad of memories concerning individual interactions with the militant-martyr.93 These memories are carefully filtered and the instances that are permitted to enter circulation are selectively reconstructed such that each of them reveals something about the militant-martyr’s strength of character, virtues, commitment, determination, courage, and exemplary conduct, at times in a didactic way. Disseminated in both oral and written form, these individual memories soon acquire a communal character.
Collective memory inserts the past into the present and projects it into the future. It conveys a past that is not past, a present that is imminent eternity, and a future that is prefigured by the past and the present moment. It becomes the conduit through which the martyr’s continuing presence in the world of the living fills the hovering void created by the militant’s death. But this presence is not a constant one. There are periods in which the memory of the militant-martyr lies dormant. This memory is revived again and again on occasions such as the anniversary of the militant’s death or the next instance of sacrificial death. Neither is the memory fixed; rather, it evolves as part of a living narrative within the trajectory of the movement. The survivors of the death fast struggle find themselves responsible for the way in which the memory of the militant-martyr is kept alive. According to a participant of the death fast,
When a comrade is martyred, you feel as if you have been pushed out of the trench. You feel as if you have been reduced to a spectator to your comrade’s fight until death, as if you have been swept aside. This is an incommensurable pain. Upon the death of your comrades, all the moments you have shared with them, all that you have gone through together rush to your heart. You feel upon your shoulders the immense responsibility of making them live on. You become the live witness of those comrades for the people. With all your actions, your words, your gestures, you need to reflect that those comrades live on through you. The continuity of our struggle depends on us, on how we narrate our martyrs, on how we carry forward the memories, the common heritage, and the struggle our comrades have left behind. The courage they have displayed as they died, the conviction of the rightness of our cause, the attitude toward the enemy, put forth with their blood and bodies, which all aim to destroy the last vestiges of fear: this is the stance that we have to incorporate, that we have to take as our guide, that we have to pass on to future generations. It is the responsibility of the living to make the dead live on.94
These evolving practices of remembrance evoke and appropriate the militant-martyr back into the community. The quotidian expression of memory is most commonly demonstrated by the decoration of spaces with pictures of the dead. Every headquarters of a leftist journal or newspaper, every cultural center operated by leftist organizations and their legal affiliates, every office of prisoner rights organizations and associations for prisoner families displays pictures and posters of martyrs on their walls, particularly of those who stand out among others for their exemplary deeds. Pictures of martyrs, with their gaze fixed upon the living, saturate the present and attest to the willful conflation of past and present. Sometimes, accompanying the pictures, are slogans or quotes attributed to the martyrs written on large placards. Occasionally, there are particular corners devoted to the martyrs in which memorabilia from the deceased, such as letters they have written, handicrafts they have produced, and other personal belongings are exhibited. These corners share the sacrosanct aura of the martyrs. Revered and decorated with fresh carnations, these corners become reliquaries that ceaselessly inject the memory of the sacrificial act of the militant-martyr into the continuum of the struggle in its presently lived moment. The immaterial permanence of the struggle meets the materiality of enduring images and artifacts that are left behind by the dead. These marginal sites of insurgent struggle are constantly remade by the dead that haunt them. “Our sons and daughters are not dead,” say the parents of death fasters who have become martyrs, “they live with us.”95
The images of the dead function as repositories of memory that “reinforce a sense of social order [and act] as a means to instigate social disorder.”96 On the one hand, these images have made up the essential backdrop to the preparatory rituals, where they set the stage for the headband and oath-taking ceremonies; they have been placed on the walls where the hunger strikers could easily see them as they lay in bed waiting for death; they have adorned the surroundings of the catafalques of corpses.97 The images of martyrs have thus been abundantly used throughout the hunger strike, embellishing the spaces in which performances of death were staged, constantly gazing upon militants as they lived and died. They have thus reinforced their communal bonds, their political purpose, and commitment to the cause. On the other hand, these images have also been used more subversively, as a moral-political indictment of the state, in public events, demonstrations, sit-ins, and protests. On these occasions their presence has been a silent indication of the oppression, injustice, and violence experienced at the hands of the existing order and an incitement to continue the struggle.
The names of martyrs have also made their way into the everyday world of the living, as places, offices, halls, cultural centers, and new teams of hunger strikers have been named after them, in recognition of the prominent and distinctive roles they have played. Even though no singular figure has emerged in the struggle to occupy the spotlight, some of these militant-martyrs have become, in their own right, iconic figures whose images were utilized in demonstrations outside Turkey in solidarity with the struggle. The image of one of the militant-martyrs, Sevgi Erdoğan (no relation to Turkey’s current prime minister, Tayyip Erdoğan), has traveled to Northern Ireland, where it has been memorialized as a mural.98
With the multiple ways in which they have been employed and the varied significations they have taken on, these names and images have not simply been mnemonic devices to aid the recollections of the living. They have also been instrumental in endowing militant-martyrs with a new capacity for agency, a higher form of militancy, as it were, in which they continue to be politically active long after they have departed from the world of the living. By continuously injecting the memorable past into the flow of everyday life in the present, the militant-martyrs have actively created the foundation for a shared heritage and countertradition that will be transmitted to posterity—the tradition of necroresistance. A “tradition of the oppressed” perhaps, in the Benjaminian sense, but one in which the dead have the central role. Militant-martyrs are the bearers of history: they constitute reference points for the past and become part of the oral almanac of their organizations. But they also give meaning to the present and help shape the future, structuring the temporal experience of the living in a continuum. Militant-martyrs thus serve to bind their community together with a sacrificial bond, constitute an ongoing fount of legitimacy for the struggle, affirm the longevity of their community, and act as vehicles by which their revolutionary ideology is spread and passed on to new generations of militants. They thereby contribute to the reproduction of their political cause through their iconic status, which, among other things, aids in the recruiting of new members.
The collective memory created in the margins is pitted against the history written by the state and the mainstream media, where these deaths are either repressed or converted into statistics. As such, collective memory becomes a counterhegemonic tool against official historiographies, endorsed and promulgated by the state, for those who remain at the margins of the political.99 The collective memory generated around martyrdom functions as a refutation of the hegemonic intrusion of the state’s unilateral and repressive narrative, which has no space for these militants within it except as casualties in the “war against terror.” In the face of the political asymmetry reproduced in the battlefield of memory, it is not simply the act of remembering these deaths, but, rather, the staunch refusal to forget them that becomes an act of resistance in itself. The counterhistory and sacrificial ideology that the cultural practices sprouting around the weaponization of life have engendered thus grow to be the necessary link between the performance of self-destructive acts and their desired political consequences.
The most potent symbolic expression of this counterhistory is the red headband. Because of its emblematic centrality as the primary abstraction for the militant-martyr as the new subject of revolutionary struggle, the stylized image of the headband itself serves as a commemorative symbol that stands for the death fast struggle. In the words of a participant:
For us, martyrdom is immortality. Death is not an end. True, biologically, humans are born, they live, and they die. What is important is not that we live and die, but how we live and die. If you know how to live, death is never an end. We prefer to live in resistance, to live a life that carries the beauty of our fight. It is crucial that the anger and the rebellion in our heart are never silenced. Instead of living a dirty life for sixty years, we would rather live ten years, or even an hour, but of an honorable life. We remember and revere the headband as the expression of this honor.100
The symbol of the red headband powerfully conveys the abstraction of political life from the material lives of bodies. It becomes the new material artifact of the collective will that supports each sacrificial act and attains a sacred aura that points to the theologization of politics. It is the strongest evidence for how the Marxism of the death fast struggle has been infused with a strongly sacrificial ideology, which is a new form of “political spirituality.” With its abstract and capacious anonymity, the red headband also approximates the Tomb of the Unknown Marxist, a paradoxical tomb that seemed so absurd to Benedict Anderson that he thought it could never exist. The headband is no monument, but it does share a “ghostly” quality that guides the revolutionary cause through its tragic dialectic between the living and the dead.