Jenny White is an academic and novelist. her upcoming graphic novel is a harrowing look at the violence that built up to a crisis point in Turkey in the 1970s. She, very kindly, agreed to sit down with Luke to talk about her book.
Luke: Could you start by telling me a bit about yourself and your background.
Jenny: Well, I’m an immigrant twice over. I emigrated to the US from Germany when I was a child. Now I've emigrated to Sweden and back to Europe again. Most of my family is still in Europe, so it's easier to see them. I learned English as a second language. People say that they can’t tell where I'm from in the States. That's because I learned to speak English from books and at school. Also, I lived abroad for many years in Turkey and in other places, so I have expat enunciation along with my book-English.
Ever since I learned English, I’ve carried a notebook with me. When I was about eight years old, I had this tiny red book, a mini calendar, and in it, I wrote things in English. I just felt this drive to put things down in words. At some point, I started carrying bigger notebooks around. I remember lying in a park and thinking, “What is the best way to describe those clouds?” And trying all the different words. I just fell in love with language. I studied psychology at City University of New York, Lehman College, which is a university set up for immigrants. I could work and pay the tuition at the same time. During that time, I did study abroad in Germany because German was my first language. When I was in Germany, I lived in a dormitory. I wasn't able to make friends with the German students there, but the Turks were very friendly. They were the first Turks I had ever met. One of them taught me how to cook. I returned to the States and got my degree. There was a social psychology program at Hacettepe University in Turkey that I had heard was staffed by really good professors. I went to Turkey in 1975 to get my master’s degree, not having any idea that there was a low-scale civil war going on. I was young. There was no internet. I should have read the newspapers, but I didn’t really know how to get that kind of information. I knew straight away when I got off the plane in Ankara that something was up because right at the base of the stairs when you got off the plane was this giant armored vehicle with a gun mounted on top. It turned out to be an armored personnel career or APC. Some time later, I was walking down the street with my laundry amid a group of people chanting slogans. Several APCs lined up in front of the crowd. I had no idea what was happening. I thought, “Oh how interesting, they are parked there.” And then they sped into the crowd. Somebody pulled me out of the way in the nick of time. I ran. These things chased me. They were like roaches. They went up on the sidewalk.
At Hacettepe University, people were shooting each other in the hallways. There were bombs going off. So I learned rather quickly. Anyway, I lived there for three years while things got worse and worse. Between 1976 and 1980 there were 5000 people killed in street violence. What is interesting is that you get used to it. You get more and more strung up and you don’t realise it. People go about their lives, they get married, have children, go to work in the midst of all of this. You think it's normal. The economy was in a terrible state, the government was useless, spinning its wheels. I left in 1978. One friend wrote and told me she was putting oranges into the refrigerator to stop them from freezing. People were burning wood because the government couldn’t pay for the gas to fuel the trucks that were bringing coal to the capital from other parts of Turkey. In 1980, the military carried out a coup.
After I left, I realised that I had some sort of hidden reaction to these events. One day, I was in a cafeteria when someone dropped a tray and I screamed. But I had my M.A and I went on to get my PhD in social anthropology. At that point, I already spoke the Turkish that I had learned on the street and from friends. In graduate school, I learned to read and write and speak more sophisticated Turkish. Then I went back in the 1980s to do my dissertation research on the effects of Turkey's economic opening on the people in squatter areas who suddenly were producing for export, like a factory without walls. In these neighborhoods, women were paid by the piece to produce things that would then be exported. I wanted to know how that system worked.
Luke: Your first book’s about that right?
Jenny: Yes, the book is called Money Makes Us Relatives. Then in the 1990s, I studied the Islamic movement under the leadership of Necmettin Erbakan, particularly the Welfare Party. By that point, I had gotten to know some families in the large working-class district of Ümraniye. Ümraniye had previously elected a mayor from the secular opposition CHP. I noticed that this time they had voted in an Islamist mayor and I wondered why they switched? They didn’t become more religious, as they were already very religious. So, what happened to change their vote? That led to write the book, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey. After it was published and translated into Turkish, I brought copies of it to the people who appeared in the book. I also brought copies to some politicians I had interviewed. One of them looked at the title and said, “Thank you very much, but we're not Islamists anymore.”. I wondered what they had become, and that was the start of the next book, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. That book examines Turkey's authoritarian politics and how Islam transformed Turkish nationalism in the 1990s and beyond.
Luke: I have a bunch of questions based on what you’ve said. What took you so long to return to writing about the 1970s, because there is a large gap there?
Jenny: That is a really good question. If you think about it, I’ve written a book for every decade except for the 1970s. I've also published some books of fiction about the 1890s. Why did I not write about the 1970s earlier? Why now? I think I didn’t write about it in part because it was traumatic for me. It was traumatic for everybody. After the 1980 coup, there was a kind of amnesia in Turkey about that period. When I returned in 1983, even my friends wouldn’t talk about it. In the late 1980s, there were new commodities to buy, you wanted to be upwardly mobile, you really didn’t want to revisit what happened in the 1970s. Also, there was the trauma of what happened during and after the 1980 coup, when so many people were arrested and tortured and exiled. In 2012, there was a trial of the two surviving generals who had carried out the 1980 coup. At that trial, people came to court to testify about their own experiences, about how the coup had destroyed their lives. I noticed that the media wrote about the coup and what happened afterwards, but not about what preceded it.
My new book, Turkish Kaleidoscope, is full of people who wanted to be bystanders but got sucked in, like me. There are things I witnessed that are in the book, but it is also based on interviews I carried out with thirty-two people about their memories of that period.
Luke: About that process, you interviewed people about their recollections of this time. How did you move from those interviews to a piece of fiction? Tell me about how you distilled those narratives into a piece of fiction.
Jenny: It wasn’t supposed to be a work of fiction. I remember at the time thinking that I had to combine the stories somehow because you can’t just publish so many separate stories. So I asked the people I spoke with if they agreed to being anonymised and their stories merged with other characters and stories. They said that was fine, but I didn’t really know at the time what I was going to do with it.
I got the idea of a graphic book when I started analysing the interviews. I interviewed people on the left and right, men and women, people who had lived at the time in the city and in the countryside, people who were Kurdish, Alevi and non-Muslim, a factory owner, a worker, a shopkeeper, a wealthy housewife, leaders, followers, and bystanders. The different angles allowed me to triangulate. Some of the interviews went on for hours. People didn’t want to stop. They were reliving those moments. It was like no one had ever asked them, and it was this incredibly important moment in their lives. They had all been young at the time and they talked about turning points in their lives and coming-of-age stories. I wouldn’t let them talk about ideology. I wanted to know about their relationships, how they got involved in political groups, what it was like. What was the effect on their lives? What happened that made them want to leave and what happened then? I let myself be surprised by the content of the interviews. To my surprise, a lot of it was similar across the board, between left and right.
Luke: I wanted to ask about exactly that. During the research process, you spoke to people on the left and the right, so I am curious to know to what extent those accounts differ and in what way they are similar.
Jenny: The big difference between the left and the right is that the right was more coherent and stayed more coherent. There were some differences within the right over how much Turkish identity consisted of Islam and how much was Central Asian shamanistic Turkic nationalism, so that was a difference. But they had a laser focus on being anti-left. They considered the left to be communists working for outside governments that were trying to take over Turkey for its resources. So they had a coherence that the left didn’t. The left kept splitting until by 1980 there were dozens of leftist groups, many of them going after each other, sometimes violently. In the interviews, I learned that ideology was not always the cause of violence, it could also be personal offense taken at something, an affront to one's honor or masculinity. People joined political groups for reasons not always related to ideology. Often it was because their friends had joined. Once in a group, people might fall out, for instance, over the interpretation of a line from Marx, and break off from the group.
I was curious about these things. What causes somebody to join one of these political organisations? What causes them to become violent in an organisation? And what changes their minds about it? Splitting was much more prominent in the left than the right, but the way they were internally organised was similar. They had a hierarchy - a big brother in the case of the leftists- a group leader whom you obeyed in everything, how you dressed, the shape of your mustache, the clothing you wore, what you should read, what you should think about it, your relations with other people, if you were a man, your relations with women, if you were a woman, your relations with men. Attitudes toward women were very contradictory in both groups. You were not supposed to have girlfriends, but you did. The left even had groups that went out into the parks to make sure that nobody was kissing or holding hands and, if they were, they would beat them up because, as they said, it was an affront to the values of our folk. And that was the left. The right was very romantic about family life, and one of the characters in the book is that sort of a rightist. The other is an ultranationalist but also rooted in a nostalgic view of community and family. Part of the story is about how the romantic becomes a nationalist, what happens to him and why. Initially, I used the interviews and other data to analyse the development of factionalism and, in writing it up. I realised that this flattened the stories. The stories are fantastic and really come from a deep place and are very revealing. I was talking with my editor at Princeton University Press, who had published my Muslim Nationalism book. He urged me to do a graphic book. Princeton had just published a graphic book about the history of philosophy and a graphic book that explained a physics problem. The thing is, though, that I can’t draw.
Luke: Could we just return to that divide you were touching on there before we get onto the practicalities of writing a graphic novel? The first thing that struck me is that this fragmenting of the left happens everywhere, it happened in Spain, it happened with the Red Army factions in Japan, it is just something that seems to happen with leftist groups, whereas the right is able to keep itself together. I was wondering if it came out in your interviews that the right was able to hold itself together because it was being organised to a certain by MHP, their associate crime groups or factions of MIT?
Jenny: What you are asking is a really good question to which I don’t have an answer, which is partly why I wanted to write this book. My theory is that if the internal organisation is so hierarchical and based entirely on your relationship with and loyalty to the leader, that means any time there is a disagreement with the leader it becomes personal and you become the hain, the traitor, which is a very powerful word in Turkish even today. In an article I wrote, I called this spindle autocracy. This is the cycle: You enter, you become networked around this spindle of the leader, who appears strong and stable, but in fact, people are continually breaking off, taking their networks with them and starting new spindles. If you look at Turkish political parties in Turkey today, this is exactly what is happening. The question of why that didn't happen in quite that way on the right in the 1970s is one I wonder about since they appeared to be organised in the same way.
Luke: I ask because there is a moment in the book where a nationalist leader who I think is supposed to be Türkeş -but you don't name him- shows up, snaps his finger and solves the problem a factory owner is having, so I wonder if that is what you were suggesting.
Another part that came through in the book is that although the violence is within a context of struggle within Turkey, and the greater context of the Cold War, it all felt very local, very personal, between groups of students who all knew each other and were going to the same classes and university. How do you think that local scale affected the violence?
Jenny: Well that's true for the book, but it isn't how you get to five thousand deaths in four years. The violence wasn’t just in the universities, it was in the cities and towns. It wasn’t just students, kids attacked each other in grade schools. The whole country kind of seized up in a paroxysm of splitting apart, of being in opposed groups. In writing the book, I did wonder whether my research could shed some light on the present. A few years ago, someone in Turkey asked me if the same things that happened in the 1970s could happen now. How can we know? We need to know where the violence came from then and now, and what it has to do with political and social organisation. Why do people split into these factions and why do they hate each other so much? There are factions everywhere in the world, but not always engaged in such antagonistic "us" versus "them" relations. However, in Turkey, I sometimes think that is the default position. In-groups are very close and tight. When you're in an in-group, it's good. You feel close and taken care of. But between groups, there is enormous hostility. Why should that be the case? These are questions touched on in the book through people’s experiences. One of the advantages of doing a graphic book is that it lets you include all the nuances and contradictions that get ironed out when you do a scholarly analysis of something like factionalism. I can imagine students, not just in Turkish studies classes, but in many different subjects, using the book to discuss, to figure out why people join violent groups, how they are organised, how they get out of them, what they are thinking, what motivates them. Reading the graphic novel, they can analyse what the people are doing and saying and come to some conclusions about these questions that are on a much more complex level than the explanation I just gave about spindles.
Luke: So talk to me about writing the story as a comic book. You worked with Ergün Gündüz who is a well-known comic book artist. His book Taxi Tales came out recently in English. Talk to me about the process with him. Did you write a script then say, “Have at it.” with the art or was it more of an Alan Moore style comic book-writing where you have very strict instructions about what you want each panel to look like?
Jenny: I found Ergün through connections in Turkey. I was very impressed by his professionalism and wide range of drawing styles. He designed a distinctive graphic look just for this book. I first gave him an eighty-page document that I thought was a “storybook". He read it and said, “I can’t draw this, I can’t draw what is in people’s heads.” I was like, “Oh, you’re right.” He very patiently talked me through some more drafts until I had what looked more like a screenplay. I flew back and forth to Istanbul and we spent months going through every single word, deciding whether it would be graphic action, a speech bubble or placed in a box. We talked about what I wanted to see and how I imagined it and he visualised what my vision was. So it was a total collaboration. It took a lot of time. The last time we met before COVID hit, we worked for thirteen hours straight in his studio to get the final glitches out. I don’t know how many drafts it went through. It was a huge project, but so satisfying.
Luke: I guess having his experience as an artist for comic books was probably invaluable. Talk to me about what kind of switches you had to flick in your mind to go from writing a comic to writing a novel.
Jenny: There are two switches. Going from academic to novels and from novels to graphic writing. This book is graphic fiction, but they are real people’s stories. They had to be merged in order to create a narrative arc that would draw the reader in. So in that way, it is similar to a novel. You have to have a character that the reader cares about and relationships that develop. Everything else is a backdrop. So I created four main characters, two on the left, two on the right; one is a woman. Then there are several secondary characters who I created as friends and relatives of the main characters. And there are some peripheral characters who are bystanders but appear in the stories of other characters.
The anonymous readers who read the manuscript for Princeton University Press indicated that they would like to have it brought up to date. It was Ergün’s idea to give the characters children. In their stories, I try to incorporate what has happened since 1980 that would have affected them: Globalisation, commercialisation, Islamisation, Gezi Park, then try to tie it back to the 1970s.
Luke: I wonder if you regret not giving yourself a little more time because now you seeing some of the characters from the 70s popping up, you’ve got Bahçeli in power, you’ve got gangsters like Çakıcı popping up and even street violence against the vice-chairman of Future Party in Ankara which is allegedly MHP-related. I wonder if you are thinking we are getting a little closer to the 1970s now or have I got that wrong?
Jenny: For the most part, national political leaders don't appear in the book. It is more about how leadership is structured and what motivates participants in political groups that so violently hate each other. Polarization continues today and groups hate each other with similarly extreme emotion. Gezi is a bright light that still shines, but to understand why the polarization continues, you have to look into the shadows also.
Luke: My last question is, could you recommend three books that have been important in your journey as an academic or an artist or that which speak to the topic we have been discussing today?
Jenny: I was influenced by Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Jason Lutes’ Berlin, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. But I should also mention Ozge Samanci’s Dare to Disappoint, and Lissa by Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye. Turkey in Turmoil, edited by Berna Pekesen, has excellent chapters by scholars from different disciplines that analyze the social history of the 1960s and 1970s from different angles. And, of course, anything written by the great scholar, Serif Mardin.
Luke: Thank you so much for speaking to me.