It was the spring of 1984. My first year at college. Born
and raised in a humble town by the Aegean sea, I was amazed by the intensity of
life in Istanbul. Thinking back, I realize now that I was kind of shell-shocked
by the immense variety of images, sounds, and smells this rapidly changing city
provides on a daily basis.
Life was confusing for everybody in those days. It was a
period of transition, a time of change. The military rule was over, but its
effects were still felt everywhere in the country. The 1980 coup had brought a
regime of horror. The military had arrested thousands of people who were then
tortured, with hundreds killed or went missing. It was a difficult period. But
it was over. Or so we were told. In the year 1983, when the parliamentary elections
were held and the neoliberal Özal government came to power, newspapers
announced that democracy had returned to the country. But from what I saw in
Istanbul, democracy seemed to be taking its time.
The year I went to college, there were portraits of Kenan
Evren (the leader of the military coup who was later elected president) hanging
everywhere: in state offices, shop windows, even apartment entrances. There
were still hundreds of missing people. Their mothers had started gathering in
squares chanting slogans. Expelled academics had returned to the campus with
long and tired faces. Nobody asked where they had spent the last couple of
years. Everybody knew. Those who had managed to keep their positions in
academia had carefully avoided talking politics in class. A certain style of
mustache was deemed ideological and was banned on campus. There was a new dress
code to ensure “appropriate clothing” of the state officials. In fact, there
were regulations for almost everything. It seemed that the military had taken a
step back but still kept an eye on Turkish democracy – like an overbearing
father letting his daughter go on her first date. Reluctantly. Very
reluctantly.
Of course, later we would find out that worse was to come.
The military was going to be replaced by its even more evil twin: The capital
holders and warlords guarded by an army of specially trained police forces
would take over the country in the 90’s. But it was 1984 and none of this had
happened yet. The only signs of the country’s changing economy were observed in
the appearance of imported whiskey and cigarettes on the shelves – an outcome
of the lifting of the ban on foreign trade. Turkey was entering a new era, a
new form of capitalism, but very little of this was known to me. I would sit
around and smell the faint scent of freedom in the air.
In 1984, in the girls’ dormitory on the university campus, I
remember lying down in my bunk bed, and thinking about the infinite possible
ways my life could go. When I look back now, I feel that somehow my fate was
linked to that of my country. After long years of suppression (my teenage years
spent in the hands of my protective parents seemed no different from living under
a military regime), I had finally landed on freedom—and I was at a loss about
what to do with it.
The upper bunk belonged to a girl from the Political Science
Department. She was friends with the coolest people on campus, and while I was
always distracted and given to flights of fancy, she seemed as focused as a
clear summer day. She was also a member of the Students’ Cooperative – the most
popular campus hangout for leftists at the time. The Cooperative was a
mysterious place. Nobody knew what it was they did exactly. Their only activity
seemed to be the monthly book club meetings, where they talked about the works
of some socialist thinkers. One day, this girl from the upper bunk asked me
whether I would like to join her for one of those meetings. I guess she was
tired of watching me lie in my bed all day. She said it was going to be “fun.”
I was not particularly keen on reading theory (I was an ardent reader but my
taste was for fiction). What is more, the somber atmosphere of the Cooperative
did not really correspond to my idea of fun. But there was this boy (dark wavy
hair, thick mustache, piercing green eyes)… and before I know, I found myself
asking: “What book is on for this month?” “Something on Latin America,” she
said. She did not know who the author was, but the book itself was supposed to
be really good. “Everybody is talking about it,” she added. Still toying with
the idea of meeting the boy with the thick mustache, “Yes,” I said, “I will be
there.”
The book turned out to be Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of
Latin America.” It was translated into Turkish and printed in 1983. On the
book's cover was a detail from Diego Rivera’s famous mural “History of Mexico”
depicting the early years of what is called “The Age of Discovery” with conquistadores enslaving the natives of
the continent. Even then I could sense the artist’s contempt for the
triumvirate of “Banker, Army, Church” which dominates the whole picture.
“Open Veins” was a
revelation. No wonder everybody was talking about it! I was expecting to be
drowned in yet another boring piece of theory. But this book was different.
Galeano’s story-telling skills had turned Latin America’s history of cruelty
and violence into a gripping narrative. I shed tears for the natives of Haiti
who committed suicide in groups upon realizing their grim fate. I could not
stop thinking of how they had poisoned their own children rather than have them
suffer at the hands of their white oppressors. I was horrified to find out that
the unsuspecting natives of the continent had fallen prey to the epidemic
diseases brought by the Europeans, and that the small pox alone had killed
hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. I could not believe my eyes
when I read that half of the population of America died from contamination
after their first contact with white men.
I grasped the scope of colonialism when I found out about
how many Bolivian miners had to die with rotten lungs so that the Europeans may
consume cheap tin. Galeano, with his skilled language and vivid depictions,
took my hand and led me through the graveyard in Catavi, “where blind people
solicit pennies to pray for the dead, a forest of white crosses stands over
small graves scattered among the dark headstones of adults.” I learned in
terror that “of every two children born in the mining camps, one dies soon
after opening its eyes.” The other one is bound to become a miner when he grows
up, and “before he is thirty-five,” Galeano says, “he will have no lungs.”
At times, I was entertained by the way Galeano tells the
stories of the European conquerors trying to adjust to their new lives in
America, particularly the ones that talk about how they failed to handle their
newly acquired wealth. I still remember the episode of the two señoras that
engage in a contest to show off their income from the mines in Potosi. In a
lively fashion, Galeano tells the reader how they used to end their lavish
fiestas by throwing their silver service and golden vessels from their
balconies to be picked up by lucky passersby. I also appreciated the author’s
subtle humor, as in the case of a former Jesuit church, turned into a movie
theatre in the 70’s, which advertises its forthcoming attraction as “It’s a
Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
In Galeano I found a great story-teller. Thirty years after
my first encounter with “Open Veins,” I am still of the same opinion. However,
the book does not owe its value only to the author’s narrative skills. To me
what is more important even today is that “Open Veins” made me see the world
under a different light. Not only did I get an insight into the mechanism of
global capitalism and imperialism, I started suspecting that our veins in
Turkey might be “open” as well.
I began to understand that our new liberal government is
actually a continuation of the previous system. I got a glimpse of the fact
that the ideological discourse of the military intervention, which rested on
the establishment of law and order in the country, served the
internationalization of capital. The military dictatorship acted as a
facilitator to implement neoliberal policies in Turkey, which would initiate
privatization and enable multinational companies to get hold of the resources
of the country. It would also mean the silencing of the workers’ and socialist
movements as well as the rise of a more conservative and religious society.
Lying in my bunk bed reading “Open Veins,” I felt for the
first time that things might not get better in Turkey—that the apparent winds
of freedom may in fact be poisonous. And indeed, they had already started
smelling of corruption.
I still admire Galeano for that valuable insight. Though it
would have felt better if he were proved to be wrong.
As for the book club, I never went to the meeting. Because
the boy with the thick mustache started dating the girl in the upper bunk the
very same week I bought “Open Veins.”
