Exiled Lives on the Stage: Turkey’s Artists at the Crossroads of New Aesthetic Practices and Political Subjectivities

The twentieth century has seen many waves of migration and exile, including those caused by war, authoritarianism and dictatorships, escalating conflicts and economic crises. Of course, migration and exile have shaped practically all civilizations throughout history, but not to the same extent and shape as the twentieth century, which Renato Camurri therefore appropriately calls, ‘the century of exiles’ (2014, p.1). With the exiles, migrants and refugees travel also their languages and cultures, including the theatres.
In the present chapter¹, I will be looking at the works and practices on the theatre stage by Turkish artists who have left Turkey recently for Europe, under varying circumstances as President Erdoğan’s rule has become more autocratic and the country has been sliding into economic and political crises. This regional focus is informed by my own experience, since I previously lived and worked in Turkey, where I lived through the political events from the Gezi Park uprising in 2013 up until the post-coup witch hunt in 2017. The latter caused my Turkish partner and me to lose our jobs and to move away for security reasons due to our support of the peace petition, titled ‘We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime’, which drew public’s attention to the acts of violence perpetrated by the state in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. Thus, this research comes from a place of practical risk and a profound need to start collecting the voices and works by Kurdish and Turkish theatre practitioners and other artists in response to urgent cultural, political and aesthetic debates.

Among my interlocutors I observe a disparity of reasons in recent years why Turks and Kurds have been relocating to Germany and other parts of the world, while still relating to a general sense of exile or self-exile even when the displacement has no clear political or legal reasons. Most relate to the decline of civic space since the Gezi protests in 2013 and the July 15 coup attempt in 2016, which led to the curbing of freedoms, including the freedom of association, assembly and expression, as well as a steady decline of democracy and civil society. Following figures provided by CIVICUS, Pınar Akpınar reported in 2018 that the two-year state of emergency (2016-2018) led to the shutdown of more than 1,400 associations with parliamentary decrees, 151,967 layoffs, 136,995 detainments with 77,524 people arrested. 5,822 academics lost their jobs, and 319 journalists were arrested in Turkey on grounds of alleged links to the attempted coup (Akpınar, 2019, p.62). Moreover, 15 universities were closed and whole departments were purged, like the Department of Theater at Ankara University that lost almost of all its faculty. The seeming randomness of the decrees and the arbitrariness of the layoffs played a hand. As a result of this climate and politics of fear, mediated by a crude propaganda offensive that normalized every dramatized political event into an issue of the state-organized purge, many decided to leave.

The most prominent examples in the performing art institutions were the closure of many Kurdish institutions after the coup. Private theatres also suffered, as Adak and Altinay (2018) reported, like Barış Atay’s Emek Theatre in Kadiköy that was briefly put under quarantine in January 2018 due to his performance of Onur Orhan’s Sadece Diktatör (Just a Dictator), which explored the social and political factors that produce dictators and keep them in power in a long monologue that directly addresses the audience. Although the play ran for years already since 2015, in the wake of an upcoming election the emergency regulations were used to ban the play across Turkey, despite a court ruling, after governors of Artvin and Hopa in northern Turkey had banned it earlier that month. In response, a call for a live-reading to reclaim the play was launched by Kadiköy Theaters Platform, after which the play was read by theatre groups in several locations, on Twitter over Periscope, and on different radio stations, even in Kurdish. The initiative was supported by the ‘Do Not Touch My Theatre’ Platform (Öztüran, 2018). This case shows that, despite the dynamics of oppression and the risk of public scrutiny, artistic production is not completely curtailed and it also, at times, still inspires performances of resistance. Barış Atay also brought the performance to Germany, where he showed it first at Theater28 and later at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, which functions as a major hub for artists from Turkey though the demand is overstretching them. HAU, Bi-Bak, Radialsystem (with its #disPlaced-#rePlaced program) as well as the Akademie der Künste have also occasionally supported artists from Turkey, on project and residency basis.⁷

In DW (Deutsche Welle), Atay is quoted saying: “If today we are already too fearful to say some things, we must realize that it will soon be impossible to say anything at all” (qtd. in Acer, 28 Jan. 2018). We hear a similar battle cry in the play #WeAreArrested (2019) by the exiled Berlin-based Turkish journalist Can Dündar, titled after his final tweet from the courtroom before his imprisonment: “I ask myself if I’m afraid. But I know that fear breeds silence. And we have a responsibility to speak out before silence takes hold” (RSC, 2018, p.68). Can Dündar was arrested in November 2015 and later sent to prison for publishing footage of weapons being sent by Turkish intelligence services to rebel fighters in Syria. The play was adapted from Dündar’s memoir, We Are Arrested (2016) by Pippa Hill and Sophie Ivatts; the latter also directed the play for the RSC’s Mischief festival in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2018, which was then taken up in the repertoire of Arcola Theatre in Hackney in 2019. The play did add to a self-fashioning of Can Dündar’s persona as a freedom fighter yet it also celebrated the power of words and the struggle for freedom of speech, or as we hear Can Dündar musing in his prison cell: “My mind is made up: I will transform this dungeon into a microphone, make my voice heard as far as it will reach” (ibid., p.108-9).

Following Judith Butler’s line of reasoning, the vulnerability of the self-exiled in the face of a stifling civic space in Turkey can be mobilized and mobilizing in terms of an act of resistance, revealing the interdependency of places like Turkey and Germany, but it also adds on new layers of vulnerability as we know from migration and refugee studies. Many interlocutors report of a living and work situation that can be best described as a permanent temporariness, as proposed by Bailey et al. (2002): “both the static experience of being temporary (i.e., in suspended legal, geographic, and social animation, and so on) and the secretion of strategies of resistance (strategic visibility) in the acquired knowledge that such temporariness is permanent” (qtd. in Collins, 2011, p.322). This underpins the belief that that which immobilizes exiles, like the suspended legal status, can become a force for action and reaction, for movement through tactics of active resistance in their daily lives or in artistic expressions.

At this point, I think it is useful to acknowledge the urban context in which self-exiled artists reside since the exilic experience is foremost a spatial one. Looking at the policies and cultures of support that certain cities, like Berlin, and their ‘affective societies’ have nurtured, I suggest to embrace Alexis Nouss’ observation on the exilic city (which was also the topic of my first podcast episode on “Exiled Lives”):

“The city knows nothing of exile. This can be understood in two ways. First, the city ends exile by receiving the exiled subject and erasing his or her exilic condition or retaining it only as folklore. In offering asylum and refuge, the city bestows a new identity on the exiled, which for an artist can mean acquiring a specific profile. … Second, the city can welcome the exiled but not exile. Home excludes whatever lies outside it. In the urban order, there is a place for everyone, and everyone has a place. However, exile is precisely an absence of place, in not only its empirical but also its metaphysical dimension: exile declares the impossibility of place” (Nouss, 2016, p.143).

Cities and metropoles have become more important over the years in affecting domestic policy but also in the management of the greater influx of people, since the refugee crises, so it is interesting to understand that cities have the capacity to welcome exiled and self-exiled but it does not deal with ‘exile’ as such, as this affective realm lies outside of its borders, outside its current urban order. The lived experience of cities by exiles is indeed often one of a lack of place, of not quite fitting, or finding a place to continue on the life and career pathways that were once imagined. Nouss points to a historical paradox here as cities are much the work of exile, though “the urban order must erase any trace of exile to ensure its vocation… based on principles of permanence, durability, and immutability, a stasis that shares its dogma with the state” (p.144). This self-claimed durability on the part of the city stands in contrast to the permanent temporariness of many of its citizens.

Nouss’ quote also talks of identity, of the exiled self. I see resemblance of that idea with Yana Meerzon’s Performing Exile, Performing Self (2012), namely in how the destabilization caused by the exilic living situation demands to be “worked through” in creative ways, through the ‘exilic performative’ that produces a new kind of artist identity (‘performing the act of self-fashioning’) and new works that can be characterized by self-reflexivity, hybridity of styles, and a tendency to avoid representational form. This is in contrast to the rather bleak musings of the exilic situation, as we find in many literatures on the topic. Notwithstanding the underlying psychoanalytical or even therapeutic aspirations that are ascribed by Meerzon to the work of exiled artists, I am questioning how much of this is actually produced by expectations that are brought upon from the art community or even governments, rather than from a profound reflection on the self, or on the identity of the exiled artist.

From a policy perspective, Carola Tize (2020) describes in this respect how Germany’s longstanding attitude towards migrants as temporary and transient, starting with the Gastarbeiter between 1955 and 1973, and particularly confirmed after the fall of the Berlin wall with the need to control the influx of ‘foreigners’ to secure the German identity and social unity, led to a concept like Ketten-Duldung (chain tolerance) which often refers to those whose toleration status is particularly insecure, long-lasting or has no end in sight, but whose repeated approvals of short-term permission to stay adds another ‘link’ to the toleration chain. With the memory of the 1930s and Turkey’s present state of politics, one can understand how Germans are welcoming now a new diaspora of mostly white-collar Turks as a permanent temporariness to appear in their civic landscape, while it also serves their image as a tolerant country at the political center of the European Union. But within that policy climate, migrant artists have been often instrumentalized, fetishized or led to a self-fashioning – and thereby domestication – in their struggle to end their permanent becoming in that chain tolerance, both as tokens of citizenship and as artistic labourers who are dealing with racial inequality and the glass ceiling on a daily basis.

This perpetual becoming of the exile, as indicative of our liquid modernity, is even more tragic when it is inscribed in border-control policies like in temporary protective measures and strategies, including temporary residence status and temporary access to employment, where the temporariness of the migrants is actually appealing to governments. The similarity with precarious work or temp labour in our current neoliberal job markets is not coincidental.

Exilic life and the exiled can give us a moment to pause and look at our own fragile state of democracy. Their theatres can offer us representations that are not mere reflections of a social reality beyond ourselves. They can be models for a reality, where the workings of aesthetics and performative affects aim to impact our debates of community, conviviality, social justice, peace, dignity, free speech, to name a few. They remind us of the larger realms of geopolitics, hegemony, imperialism and power in the world. And even so, the precarious state of its interlocutors reveals to us the predicaments of neoliberalism and the need for an agonistic solidarity (Arendt, 1998). The latter may be an embodied subject position for the exiled artists, who are constantly negotiating their exilic identities and political subject positions through their works of art or just in their daily life struggles. But in the end, it concerns all of us, including the very institutions and democracies who claim to be responsive.

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