Finding a Polity in Prison Writing
โ€” Polity of Literature (43/51)

Finding a Polity in Prison Writing

We want to find living examples of a functioning Polity of Literature. A friend suggests, why not look at prison writing?

We recently asked the early contributors to the Polity of Literature series to tell us about projects or persons or places that make them believe a โ€œpolity of literatureโ€ is real and can be found here and now. Duygu Erbil, a scholar of literature and activism at Utrech University (who earlier wrote for us about the American Prison Writing Archive), found one example in an anonymous Turkish group of โ€œprison-associated artists and writersโ€ called GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz (a salutation prisoners use, meaning we will see each other again). GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz posts writing and art by prisoners using a variety of online platforms. Presenting the old and canonical alongside the new and unvettedโ€”while also performing as anonymous hosts who model a kind of general appreciation for every act of expression, every disclosure in what is a decidedly egalitarian โ€œspace of appearanceโ€โ€”GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz maintains the pluralism that is necessary for a polity. If this is โ€œliterature,โ€ then GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz is a functioning Polity of Literature.

GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz thus forces the question, can โ€œliteratureโ€ exist without a hierarchy? Can there be literature apart from designations of โ€œgoodโ€ or โ€œbad,โ€ โ€œhighโ€ and โ€œlow,โ€ or โ€œnecessaryโ€ versus โ€œdisposable?โ€ To enter a polity we must leave our hierarchies at the door. If GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz can teach us how to read and write togetherโ€”without always talking about our tastesโ€”maybe it can give us a living Polity of Literature, here and now.


I received my sentimental education reading prison literature. Many of us who read in Turkish haveโ€”in part anywayโ€”and itโ€™s not a new thing. If you think about it, most readers of so-called World Literature have also studied the work of a lot of cons and ex-cons: from Dostoyevskyโ€™s jail-house humanism to Jean Genetโ€™s queer sensibilities. But itโ€™s slightly different in Turkey, the historic capital of political prisoners, where incarceration has been considered a rite of passage for authors for a very long time. A canonical book of poetry from 1973,ย Tutuklunun GรผnlรผฤŸรผย [A Prisonerโ€™s Diary], by Attilรข ฤฐlhan, called imprisonment theย โ€œtwo-hundred-year-long fate of the Turkish intellectual.โ€

Long before Selahattin Demirtas, the currently incarcerated co-leader of the left-wing political party, HDP, became a celebrated (and widely translated) prison writer, the Turkish intelligentsia had embraced and largely defined the category of prison writing. The tradition is now being recalled and developed by an anonymous collective of prison-associated Turkish writers called GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz. Not that we need any reminders. In Turkey we never forget prison writing. But the deep tradition of prison writing is gaining new meanings and a new function as contemporary cultural production in Turkish prisons alters a time-worn script.

Stylized sketch of the word GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz in front of the Turkish flag.

GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz was formed recently, starting a twitter account in May 2021. The name comes from the phrase that prisoners commonly use to end their letters: we will see each other again. I could find little information about the group, except that they describe themselves as โ€œprisoner friends and relativesโ€ who share prison art and literature on social media, and depend on โ€œword of mouth,โ€ in part to preserve the anonymity necessary to continue functioning. They do function, at least for now, and I am not interested in who they actually are. The complexities that push prison activists into anonymity are not confounding. What interests me as a reader of prison writing is the fact that they have, in a truly amateur spirit, bracketed all questions of โ€œgoodโ€ vs. โ€œbadโ€ literature and placed the canonical authors of Turkey alongside anonymous inmates who have no (or limited) readership. GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸizโ€™s modus operandi is quite simple and does not involve any institutionalizing methodology: they collect art and writing produced in prisons through friends and friends-of-friends, and then post it on their social media accounts, where they also share prison writing from โ€œold masters,โ€ whom they commemorate.

In this act of commemorationโ€”this mobilization of cultural memory in activismโ€”contemporary prison writing is framed as the legitimate offspring of a canonical Turkish literature. A continuum is implied between those whom everybody reads and those who are hidden from everybody. What interests me, as someone who studies the relationship between cultural memory and activism, is whether or not this implied continuum has the potential to shape prison writing in Turkish prisons into a โ€œpolity of literature,โ€ where readers, โ€œold masters,โ€ and new authors all come together as equals. I find the question difficult to answer.

GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz transmits prison writing directly; no editing is involved. They either transcribe and upload the writing themselves, or they post links to published work from prisoners (usually from very small publishing houses) with a brief summary or explanation. If itโ€™s a short piece, as with poetry, they sometimes circulate the text as an image on Twitter. If itโ€™s longer they use other platforms. For a while they used Wattpad, but recently switched to JustPaste.it, an ad-free text-sharing platform that promises better privacy and anonymity. Currently, very few people read what they share. When I was reading their Wattpad posts the views per piece ranged between 2 and 27. My first question (because I didnโ€™t know how view-counts work on Wattpad) was, Does that โ€œtwoโ€ include me? And swiftly following that question: Is this a failure?

What is the point of putting effort into this project if a story is only going to be read by two people? I became curious who that other reader was and why they read the piece. But then, why did I read it? I could obscure my motivations behind the handy fact that this is my jobโ€”Iโ€™ve been hired to write about GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz for this series. But my job, which is to say all the professional subject positions Iโ€™m paid to takeโ€”that of researcher, critic, teacher, etc. (call it dรฉformation professionnelle)โ€”makes it difficult to hold, let alone indulge, the incredulous hopes that animate my real engagement with literature, that precarious belief in what Derek Attridge describes as โ€œencountering the otherโ€ (see also Anna Polettiโ€™s โ€œSix Contracting Theses on Literature in the Polity of Literatureโ€). Could I read GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz this way? My earlier, related engagement with writing in the American Prison Writing Archive had a well-defined political motivationโ€”to bear witness, decolonize, and decarcerate literacies, via this intimate encounter with the other. But Iโ€™m skittish about bringing the same desires to bear when reading prison writing in my mother tongue, Turkish. And the reason for that is codified in long-established metrics of aesthetic value measuring prison writing in Turkey.

The story I know begins soon after the 1971 Turkish military memorandum that the people of Turkey call โ€œMarch 12.โ€ It involves Marxist-Leninist militants and cultural actors on trial (the so-called โ€™68ers), their incarceration, their prison testimonies, and the disapproving literary elite (also occasionally incarcerated), whose aesthetic ideals for prison literature still shape the Turkish discussion of literature and politics today.

Prison-Literature-Politics: 50 years ago

To briefly recall the standard sketch offered by Demet Lรผkรผslรผ, the Turkish โ€˜68 Movement began with student protests aimed at reforming the universities then quickly evolved into a revolutionary movement because of Turkeyโ€™s geopolitical position in the Cold War. Turkey was a NATO ally neighbouring the Soviet Union, and had obligations to stand against Soviet expansion because of its treaty agreements. In the revolutionary language of the time, Turkey was a tool of U.S. imperialism. The protests turned violent in response to attacks by right-wing groups and riot police, and many students were radicalized. An iconic and telling instance of this shift came during protests against Robert Komer, or โ€œBlowtorch Bob,โ€ who was appointed as the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, thanks to his โ€œsuccessโ€ in Vietnam, and whose car was set on fire by students protesting his visit to their campus at the Middle East Technical University. Some Leftist students joined the Palestine Liberation Organization to receive guerrilla training (you may be familiar with other, more famous iterations of this story, such as the case of Ulrike Meinhofโ€™s Red Army Faction in West Germany). Several of the radicalized students (including Deniz GezmiลŸ, who is the subject of my PhD study) formed guerrilla groups committed to armed resistance.

In the revolutionary language of the time, Turkey was a tool of U.S. imperialism.

In scholar Charles Tillyโ€™s terms, the 1968 โ€œbrawlsโ€ among Leftists and right-wing students turned into โ€œcoordinated destructionโ€ by both sides during 1969 and 1970. On March 12, 1971, the Turkish military intervened (for the second time in Turkeyโ€™s young history) in a โ€œcoup by memorandum,โ€ imposing military law and order by decree. Historian E.J. Zรผrcher characterized it as, in the Cold War spirit of the time, โ€œthe high commandโ€ฆmesmerized by the spectre of a communist threatโ€ (Zรผrcher, 1993, p.258). On April 27 the newly formed National Security Council proclaimed martial law in 11 provinces and a witch-hunt was launched in the guise of an anti-terror campaign, targeting Leftist intelligentsia (Zรผrcher, 1993, p. 259). Thousands of people with left-wing affiliations were arrested and held in prisons and secret torture chambers. The so-called โ€œMarch 12 wardsโ€ became a seed for the generalized carceral state that Turkey would soon become. Under martial law the mass media became a channel for announcing custody lists and search warrants while the weft and warp of day-to-day Turkish society was ruptured by the broad shift to incarceration. The 1976 prison memoir of celebrated Turkish writer Sevgi Soysal, Yฤฑldฤฑrฤฑm Area Womenโ€™s Ward, offers an eloquently mediated memory of the March 12 era. She writes:

Every night people were hunted in Ankara, every night houses were raided. Houses were patrolled. One that accidentally went to the patrolled house was then taken to somewhere unknown [. . .] Houses and police stations got mixed in Ankara. Friends and the police, acquaintance and the informant were muddled.

Her gece insan avlanฤฑyordu Ankaraโ€™da, her gece evler basฤฑlฤฑyordu. Evlerde karakollar kuruluyordu. Karakol kurulan eve rasgele giden de bilinmedik yerlere gรถtรผrรผlรผyordu. Kimse kimsenin evine rasgele gidemez olmuลŸtu. Evlerle karakollar karฤฑลŸmฤฑลŸtฤฑ Ankaraโ€™da. Dostlarla polisler, tanฤฑลŸlarla muhbirler karฤฑลŸmฤฑลŸtฤฑ birbirine. (2013, p. 75)

Insiders and Outsiders (and the Politics of Literature)

โ€œActually, March 12 literature is an elegy,โ€ argues literary critic A. ร–mer TรผrkeลŸ in his encyclopedia entry on the novels of the Left in the 8th volume of Political Thought in Modern Turkey: The Left (2007, p.1060). His claim for the centrality of mourning in Turkish literary production after the coup of March 12, 1971, voices a consensus among mainstream Leftist literary critics since the 1970s: the writings from that struggle, and especially the prison writings, were elegiac. The other shoe drops with the party-line belief that โ€œitโ€™s not useful for the revolutionโ€ to mourn defeats nor to represent the revolutionaries as passive victims of state violenceโ€”therefore, March 12 literature is not โ€œgood literature.โ€ Prison writing produces false consciousness. Insistent mourning and repeated commemoration of past political defeats must have seemed disspiritingly sentimental, a cultural constraint that the Marxists despised. For these critics (who acted as tastemakers dominating the cultural field that they themselves had defined), literary production should take realist forms depicting and analysing the socio-historical conditions of the time. An analytical mode of writing was preferable to elegiac forms. Accordingly, TรผrkeลŸ also claimed that the genre of criticism provided โ€œthe most correct and clear analysisโ€ of March 12 (2007, p.1061), dismissing the elegiac writing as the work of โ€œoutsidersโ€ trying to claim the revolutionary movement and a handful of favoured revolutionaries for their Kemalism (a nationalist movement named for the founding figure of the secular Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Atatรผrk, who shaped the nation in 1923).

The dismissal of prison writing as โ€œelegiacโ€ played out in prominently published debates among Turkeyโ€™s Leftist critics. A number of important distinctions were made, adding nuance to the accepted framework for reading prison writing. Among these was academic and literary critic Murat Belgeโ€™s distinction between โ€œinsidersโ€ and โ€œoutsiders.โ€ Originally published in February 1976, in the journal Birikim, Belgeโ€™s seminal article โ€œMarch 12 Novels,โ€ claimed that in an era of mass incarceration, there is an imposed divide between those โ€œinsideโ€ of prisons and those โ€œoutside.โ€ If the โ€œinsidersโ€ are revolutionaries, he explains, the โ€œoutsidersโ€ are the peopleโ€”the reading publicโ€”and it is the job of the March 12 novelists to tell the outsiders about the insiders (2012, p.115). Belge reasons that the novelists need to be โ€œcloseโ€ to the insiders (by being โ€œinside the movement,โ€ essentially) but not necessarily inside the prison itself (ibid.). Imprisonment alone does not de facto make one a perceptive writer about โ€œthe inside.โ€ Being incarcerated was not a consecration; the true โ€œinsiderโ€ of the revolutionary movement also had to analyze the socio-political conditions through a Marxist analytical gaze.

Sketch of a game show set called "What's My Polity?" with three silhouettes sitting behind rectangles. A speech bubble asks, "Will the TRUE Revolutionary please stand up?"

Conspicuously, the contestation over who was an insider of this literary field was also contestation over who was a true revolutionary. Another article by Belge published two months later situated Marxist critical praxis on the โ€œinside,โ€ and a sentimental attachment to the movement on the โ€œoutside.โ€ Elegies, mourning the death of revolutionaries, and commemoration were thus โ€œoutsideโ€ practices, even when they came from inside the prison (Belge 2012, pp.140-150). At the centre of this discussion is the question of remembrance. Belge parallels the then-popular slogan โ€œdo not forget March 12,โ€ with the Christian โ€œmemento mori,โ€ which he translates as โ€œdo not forget deathโ€ (p.140), accusing the defeated revolutionaries of copying past struggles theyโ€™d been taught about and learned to revere in books (p.142). His grievance unsurprisingly resonates with the much-quoted passage of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx: โ€œThe tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.โ€ The ideal socialist should be involved in Marxist critique, not commemorating the past; โ€œMarxist rationalismโ€ should not be paralyzed by โ€œโ€˜revolutionaryโ€™ sentimentalityโ€ (p.148). Note the scare quotes.

The drama of the Turkish Left has always been its โ€œtrueโ€ and โ€œfalseโ€ revolutionaries, a restless game that is beyond the scope of my essay. But clearly the link they made between elegy and false consciousness continues to colour our expectations of literature. It structures the way we read (or donโ€™t read) prison writing in Turkey. Thus, the tastemakers of the past find their way between the reader (me) and the prisoner/writer, to claim that these often weepy, sentimental writings arenโ€™t worth reading. Having studied Judith Butler I can engage the fight by bringing to it a โ€œpolitics of mourning.โ€ I believe in grief, not as a privatizing, individualizing affect but as a political force that can โ€œbind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not our ownโ€ (Butler, Precarious Life, p. 25). Butlerโ€™s โ€œpolitics of mourningโ€ is writ large in the โ€œideologically impure,โ€ or โ€œconfusedโ€ accounts of the imprisoned, tortured, and murdered revolutionary youths of the 1970s, and it can still be read, for example in GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz, if we leave the search for (and censure of) โ€œelegyโ€ behind.

A more nuanced and accommodating approach to prison writing and the โ€œMarch 12โ€ literature was to read it as a form of testimony (Gรผnay-Erkol 2011; Toker 2014). A growing interest in memory studies in Turkey in the 2010s provoked a movement beyond measuring โ€œliterary valueโ€ to analyzing the memorialization of social trauma and state violence via autobiographicalโ€”or more precisely, testimonialโ€”literature. Prison writing can be valid as testimonial literature; thus, the position of the โ€œwitness-authorโ€ who resists the systematic erasure of memory can be read without measuring it against literary ideals (Toker 2014, pp.48-50). As feminist literary scholar ร‡imen Gรผnay-Erkol (2016) put it, the โ€œmainstream (and unsurprisingly male-stream) critics of the March 12 novels, such as Berna Moran, Murat Belge, Fethi Naci, Ahmet Oktay, and ร–mer TuฬˆrkeลŸ seem to overlook that March 12 novels stand for a dynamic refraction rather than a static reflection of historyโ€ (p.14). Hence, the new critical lens repositioned March 12 authors as โ€œeyewitnesses to the throes of the political chaosโ€ (Gรผnay-Erkol 2016, p.7), instead of dismissing their victim narratives as โ€œbad literature.โ€ Notably, such a lens brings prison writing into focus as an egalitarian space, and potentially a polity of literature.

Prison-Literature-Politics: 50 years later

Why did I tell this complicated story? Because the tradition of that not-so-dead generation of literary critics weighs on me like a nightmare. I turn to GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz to enter a polity of equals, yet the past shouts me down. Indeed, even GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz gives voice to the past, when they commemorate the โ€œold mastersโ€ alongside the new, and by recirculating some of the tropes of โ€œMarch 12โ€ literature. The Twitter account of GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz doesnโ€™t only commemorate the old martyrs but also โ€œGezi martyrsโ€ (showing the beadwork of prisoners that commemorate the losses of the Istanbul uprisings of 2013) and the โ€œmartyrs of the Suruรง massacreโ€ (when they post a commemorative poem by Figen YรผksekdaฤŸ, who served alongside Selahattin DemirtaลŸ as the co-leader of HDP). Itโ€™s worth remembering that Selahattin DemirtaลŸ published her first poetry book in prison, where editorial evaluation was done by other women in the high security F-type prison who had received the poemโ€™s drafts as โ€œkites,โ€ or in their F-type specific version, โ€œballs,โ€ thrown into the air, over the walls of the isolated exercise yards to reach the other prisoners. Political sentimentality in prison writing persists, even among those who resist, and it is still policed by critics and publishers who revive the โ€œprison literatureโ€ debate time and time again.

The policing of literature begins long before censorship, and is by no means solely imposed by authoritarians. Any institutional form of production, dissemination, and circulation is a means of policing to varying degrees. Take for instance the question of recognizing a piece of writing as โ€œrefugee literature.โ€ Matthew Stadlerโ€™s earlier essay for this series observed:

It really doesnโ€™t matter what the writers think theyโ€™re doingโ€”to become legible their compositions must conform enough with the frameworks of reading that theyโ€™re widely shared and talked about. Further, whatever aspects of their writing doย notย conform will prove hard to discuss, and probably be dismissed as flaws or shortcomings. Add the filters of professional editing and publishing, plus the marketโ€™s relentless needs, and itโ€™s not surprising to find a recognizable form common to all the refugee books.

The recognizability of the refugee book depends on the extent to which it conforms to laws across multiple jurisdictions: the law of genre, the laws of the market, and moral laws being the most prominent. The same is true of prison writing, as the long struggle over canons and quality in Turkeyโ€™s โ€œprison literatureโ€ shows. Now GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz pressures a handful of related questions to the forefront of our attentionโ€”Who are the legitimate arbiters of โ€œliterature?โ€ And what if there arenโ€™t any? What if GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz simply is literature?

Choosing boils down to the question of self-image and the subject positions one adopts: am I going to read with authority and pass aesthetic judgments on โ€œliterature,โ€ thus maintaining its value as a cultural coin; or will I suspend my aesthetic and moral judgment along with my disbelief? Any polity requires us to leave our heirarchies at the door. Whether suspension of judgment is naivetรฉ, a rational cognitive process, moral ascendence, or an ethical practice depends on your readerly subject position. Mine is a combination of a hard won, professional literacyโ€”my ability to discernโ€”and an adventurous generosity towards the writer who invites me into an encounter about which Iโ€™m ignorantโ€”the other. This can make me a bit socially awkward.

Sketch of a person reading a book with the words "the other" written across the front and back cover.

In The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge reminds us โ€œNot all works will have something to offer to a readerโ€™s openness to alterity [otherness], of course, but when one does, mechanical and instrumental interpretation is complicated by what we may term readerly hospitality, a readiness to have oneโ€™s purposes reshaped by the work to which one is responding.โ€ It is this readerly hospitality that, despite some social awkwardness, leads me to encounter the other, to let myself be affected and subjectified differently, without recourse to any heirarchy of value. How strange to find that literatureโ€”as defined in this series, that is as a polityโ€”is precisely and only an encounter with writing and reading free from imposed heirarchies. If literature is a polity, maybe GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz is what literature looks like.

The anonymous author of the founding essay in this series, โ€œPotatoes or Rice,โ€ situates literature as a site of politics and speaks of one basic condition for making literature a polity, which is equality: โ€œA polity is born in the decision to leave inequality behind and gather together as equals. It collapses whenever power congeals, or when purpose arises to designate a better or โ€˜bestโ€™ outcome. A polity exists only in the doing, in the open-ended enactment of conflict among equals.โ€ A polity, then, exists in the act of not reading like a corrections officer.

But we were taught to read like corrections officers. Itโ€™s strangely easy for me to imagine myself with a stamp in my hand and a bunch of pages in front of me: this is โ€œliteratureโ€, this is โ€œbad literatureโ€, this is โ€œgood literature.โ€ To judge prison literature I conjure a position of authority based on my academic qualification. I measure a piece of writing against the canon that I studied for many years. Surely my authority is worth at least the price-tag of my education? And then I buttress my self-image of skilled, authoritative reading with the taste I inherited from literary gatekeepers. Yet I would prefer not to. Refusing to read like a corrections officer begins by discerning a new variety of critical literacy, empathetic acts of engaged reading that replace โ€œjudgmentโ€ with delight or boredom, and then practicing it.

Five faceless people wearing graduation garb with prison stripes on them.

GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz can show us how, and it begins by placing the โ€œold mastersโ€ of prison literature right alongside unvetted prison writers, so that we begin to recognize their literature, as such. The administrators of the service follow through with nuanced positioning that helps the nervous researcher find her feet in the flat ground of this egalitarian space. One example was in a Tweet on August 31 this year, announcing a new story by R.Meral TurmuลŸ from Bakฤฑrkรถy Womenโ€™s Closed Penitentiary. GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz commented that when they read the story it reminded them of Aziz Nesin, a canonical author, a socialist humorist whose attempt to translate and publishย The Satanic Verses, has been considered the trigger for the 1993ย Sivas massacre that targeted Alevis, another wounded memory in Turkeyโ€™s history. The Tweet continues: โ€œletโ€™s see what is going to come to your mind when you read it.โ€ Though it seems like a familiar social media tactic to ignite engagement, the self-conscious reference operates differently. As far as I could tell, nobody replied to the rhetorical question; but as I read it, I said yes, this resembles something Aziz Nesin would write: literature. The commentatorโ€™s aside rendered it legible as such. One could also answer, โ€œthis is not remotely comparable to Aziz Nesin, the great master,โ€ sure, and this is what I mean by reading like a corrections officer. The difference is between being hostile and being hospitable in the face of alterityโ€”the unfamiliar, the not-edited-for-legibility, the raw writing of the normal citizens of literature.

GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz has plenty of writing by โ€œnormalโ€ people (those who became writers in prison) and itโ€™s impossible to contain their growing collection of prison writing within recognizable genre categories. However, there is one quality common to all prison writing: unlike โ€œoutsideโ€ literature, every prison narrative comes with a home addressโ€”it is epistolary, a letter from inside the prison sent to the outside. Sent as a letter, it also invites a reply. The scholar of letters and Feminist sociologist Liz Stanley calls this, โ€œepistolary intent.โ€ GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz will include the authorโ€™s prison address with every new piece. Epistolary intentโ€”the affirmation that literature is collectiveโ€”is one lesson that the prison writers of GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz teach us, the outsiders, when they do this.

By reading we enter the confined and isolated authorโ€™s sociality, constituted by the promise of โ€œgรถrรผลŸeceฤŸizโ€โ€”that is, one day we will meet. I cannot guess the longevity of GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz. It might have disappeared already. I canโ€™t tell if theyโ€™ll ever extend their reach, or want to. But it is what prisoners call a โ€œkite,โ€ or a โ€œball,โ€ thrown or flown into the air to reach the outside. We can pick it up and play with it, pass it on to others, or leave it there for someone else to find. Why judge or condemn it? Why declare โ€œthis is not a ballโ€ when I can shout โ€œcatch?โ€

Four panel comic where a prisoner saws off the bars to their cell window, then uses one bar as a pencil.

This is perhaps the unique affordance of GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz and their amateurism. They donโ€™t stake claims on what literature isโ€”they simply make it possible for outsiders to glimpse the stories told inside of Turkish prisons. Some donโ€™t sound very โ€œliterary;โ€ some have syntactic issues; and some are too sentimental for me. But who knows what other readers see in the stories that I donโ€™t โ€œlike,โ€ the ones not to my taste. In the end, one or two will stake a claim on my subjectivity, and thatโ€™s plenty. Collectively, by attending to what GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz passes on to us, by recognizing ourselves in others (inside or outside) together in a polity, we bring a polity into being.

Beware the glow of generosity Iโ€™ve cast over this offering, my kind invitation into a game of โ€œcatchโ€ that might help the imprisoned writer enter a polity across prison walls. The polity Iโ€™m talking about, the one that I both seek and propose, is as arrogant and self-serving as, for instance, the division between โ€œgoodโ€ and โ€œbadโ€ prison literature imposed by the party-line critics of March 12. Who gets to impose these divisions, or say that weโ€™ll stop imposing them all together? In โ€œSix Contracting Thesesโ€ Anna Poletti writes:

Sometimes studying literature involves reading people who donโ€™t think of themselves as Writers of literature. When I do this (and I do), Iโ€™m sometimes recruiting people into a polity of literature without their knowledge or consent. I hand them a membership to a community they have not asked for.

What arrogance authorizes me to do this?

It is the arrogance of The Reader who has been enchanted and changed by the thing they read.

While arrogance helps us claim the conjuring powerโ€”to say โ€œwelcome to this polity of literature, please, make yourself at homeโ€โ€”that act leads directly to the tempering of our authority, or else the polity will vanish. To sustain a polity we relinquish power over to the collective of writers and readers. Itโ€™s the only way we can read. While the classroom insists that only critics and academics can teach us how to read, the polity of prison writing puts the same power squarely in the hands of the prisoners. Their writing teaches us, ย โ€œthis is a ball, catch; this is how it is made; this is how you throw one back; and this is what happens when you doโ€ฆโ€ Their writing and our reading birth a sociality for โ€œthe socially deadโ€ through our belonging in a polity of literature.

In an earlier PoL piece I wrote: โ€œOne of the ways that the dehumanization of prisoners occurs is by assuming that they do not have an aesthetic cultureโ€ฆDecarceration at the level of the text, and as a reading practice, starts by learning to read these forms of writing without reshaping them to fit our expectations.โ€ In the same vein, but on refugee literature, Matthew Stadler wrote, โ€œwhile the stateless whose lives are held captive by this volatile future are learning how to write it, we who are less at risk must learn how to read.โ€ GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz offers us a chance to try.ย 


Further reading

Stories from GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz on Wattpad

GรถrรผลŸeceฤŸiz on Twitter

โ€œTurkeyโ€™s 1968โ€ by Demet Lukuslu on Verso Books

Article by Aytekin Yฤฑlmaz on prison literature (in Turkish)

Interview about prison writing magazine Mahsus Mahal (in Turkish)

Interview with Figen Yuksekdag about his poetry book Yฤฑkฤฑlacak Duvarlar (in Turkish)

References

Attridge, D. (2004). The Singularity of Literature. Routledge.

Belge, M. (2013). Edebiyat รผstรผne yazฤฑlar. ฤฐletiลŸim Yayฤฑnlarฤฑ.

Ergรผden, I. (2017). Hapishane ร‡aฤŸฤฑ โ€“ Kapatฤฑlan ฤฐnsan [The Age of Prison โ€“ The Enclosed Man].ย ฤฐstanbul: Sel Yayฤฑncฤฑlฤฑk.

Gรผnay-Erkol, ร‡. (2016). Broken Masculinities: Solitude, Alienation, and Frustration in Turkish Literature After 1970. Central European University Press.

Gรผnay-Erkol, ร‡. (2011). TaลŸ รœstรผne TaลŸ Koymak: 12 Mart Romanlarฤฑnda Gรถrgรผ TanฤฑฤŸฤฑ BelleฤŸinin YazฤฑnsallaลŸtฤฑrฤฑlmasฤฑ. Nasฤฑl Hatฤฑrlฤฑyoruz? Tรผrkiyeโ€™de Bellek ร‡alฤฑลŸmalarฤฑ, 41โ€“63.

Soysal, S. (2013).ย Yฤฑldฤฑrฤฑm Bรถlge Kadฤฑnlar KoฤŸuลŸuย [Yฤฑldฤฑrฤฑm Area Womenโ€™s Ward]. ฤฐletiลŸim Yayฤฑnlarฤฑ.

Tilly, C. (2003). Varieties of Violence. In The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge University Press, p. 1โ€“25.

Toker, H. G. (2014). Siyasi ve Edebi ฤฐktidara Tanฤฑklฤฑk Edebiyatฤฑ ile Direnmek. Monograf, 79.

TรผrkeลŸ, A. ร–. (2008). Solโ€™un Romanฤฑ.ย Modern Tรผrkiyeโ€™de Siyasi DรผลŸรผnce [Political Thought in Modern Turkey: The Left]. ฤฐstanbul: ฤฐletiลŸim Yayฤฑnlarฤฑ, p. 1052-1073.

Zรผrcher, E. J. (1993). Turkey: A modern history. London: IB Tauris.

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