Magnificent Memories: Back To Kemalism?

What a TV show can tell us about Turkey's opposition

On weekend mornings, we usually turn on Halk TV, currently Turkey’s major opposition channel, to watch a show called Görkemli Hatıralar (Magnificent Memories.)

We love the format. The host Serhan Asker and his crew travel to different parts of the country, set up a makeshift studio against a backdrop of stunning natural or historical beauty, and invite some of the most accomplished musicians, writers and visual artists in Turkey today.

The musicians perform to a live audience. Here, for example, is Kardeş Türküler performing the Kurdish song Kerwanê in Mardin:

It’s a nice way to start the weekend.

The episodes go well over two hours (we dip in and out), and they often honor great artists like nationally treasured actor Kemal Sunal, director Yılmaz Güney, novelist Yaşar Kemal, legendary bard Neşet Ertaş, Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, and usually heaps and heaps of Nâzım Hikmet. They also feature new work, such as the film on Şeyh Bedrettin, so it’s a good way to keep up with what’s happening.

The guests and artists mostly lean towards the political left, which is what you’d expect from Turkey’s most popular opposition channel after two decades of right-wing government. As in many countries, the left also generally claims the mantle of culture (high and low), which Magnificent Memories certainly does as well.

The problem starts when you notice that the artists aren’t alone. There’s usually the CHP mayor hosting the show in his district that day, a few local notables who seem to be his friends, as well as the odd CHP parliamentarian. These men hog up incredible amounts of time. One moment you’ll be mesmerized by a beautiful musical performance, and in the next, the Kemalist gerontocracy have elbowed their way into to the frame to talk about their “projects.”

The host doesn’t provide much relief here. Serhan Asker is eager to make his roster of artists feel welcome, but his gargantuan ego somehow always gets in the way. He likes to read messages praising his show, either on live social media, or famous people who WhatsApp him. He keeps bragging about how wonderful of a job he is doing, and how it’s going to be the locomotive force for a new and enlightened government after the AK Party. He likes to hold up books he sort of implies he’s read, and repeat his motto “an empty sack does not stand straight, we will read books!” (it sort of rhymes in colloquial Turkish). Judging from some of his passive-aggressive comments, Asker has been told that people find him to be irritating, but like most famous people on TV, he plows on undeterred.

The journalist and documentary filmmaker Nebil Özgentürk is a friend of the show, and even if he isn’t in the moving studio, often FaceTimes in. They sometimes cut to his “mini-documentaries” about figures features on the program, which invariable end up being mini-hagiographies. This is tolerable when it’s about the famous trio of leftists students (“the three saplings” Deniz Gezmiş, Hüseyin İnan and Yusuf Aslan) who were hung at an early age for their militant leftism, but less so when it’s on someone like Yılmaz Büyükerşen, the long-serving mayor of Eskisehir. We have warm feelings for Büyükerşen, who - considering circumstances - has done a remarkable job at his post for the past two decades. Even even then, however, watching cut scenes of the octogenarian walking around his city, being praised as a peerless visionary, man of culture, and immaculate manager by Özgentürk’s sensitive, deep voiceover for close to 10 minutes, was too much. Far too much.

Good culture programs are luxurious things, and require either the government backing (PBS, NPR, BBC 4, Arte) or some deep well of capital (Netflix). Magnificent Memories doesn’t enjoy either. Its first episode seems to have been aired in June of 2019. In those days, Halk TV was a fringe outfit run and watched by old hat Kemalists. In those early episodes, Asker sat in a tiny studio, against a backdrop of a fake brick wall and a rather sorry-looking bookshelf. Flanking him were usually two writers who were there to discuss their books. We didn’t watch it back then, and we don’t know anyone who did.

Then two things happened.

First, regional elections were held in the summer of 2019, and the mayoralties of the country’s largest cities - including Istanbul and Ankara - switched over to the opposition. The CHP’s strategy was now to show voters that it could govern on the municipal level, then build momentum for a national campaign.

Second, Halk TV was sold to UK-based businessman Cafer Mahiroğlu, which meant a healthy injection of cash. It quickly became a life raft for journalists who were getting edged out of mainstream media outlets (many from CNN Türk), including stars like İsmail Saymaz. This grew Halk TV’s viewership very quickly.

It seems that as a result of these two events, Magnificent Memories was able to upgrade its format dramatically in late 2020. Asker took his show on the road, visiting CHP municipalities all over the country, inviting musicians and gathering live audiences. What started as a quiet program about books now became a stage for the CHP. Culture was now mobilized towards a political goal. For decades, the Erdoğan government has hammered home that CHP = incompetence (“these guys can’t even herd sheep”). Magnificent Memories became part of a push to change the equation (or perhaps to revert it) to CHP = enlightenment, and all the things that come with it: rationality, scientism, meritocracy, public spaces, transparency, high art, environmentalism. The CHP mayors and MPs on the program showcase their bona fides on these points.

If they can govern in an enlightened way on the local level, the program seems to suggest, imagine what they could do once they attain power on the national scale. Turkey would awaken from its long nightmare. Not only would day-to-day concerns of paying bills and getting through traffic be resolved, we would all have time for high quality leisure activities. We would be our best selves.

This strategy might make sense from the CHP’s point of view, but it takes a toll. In the heat of the moment, the program can skid to “CHP = culture,” thus implying “being a CHP member = being cultured.” This is becoming more pronounced as the Erdoğan government’s power recedes. The most magnificent of memories in Magnificent Memories are without a doubt those of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The greatest praise the show has to bestow is to peg something to the great founder’s magnificence. Guests and host often opine how the founder of the Republic was not only a soldier-statesman, but a man of culture who spoke multiple languages, enjoyed music and dance, and was a great patron of the arts and sciences. Those who don’t feel comfortable with these bouts of praise often just stay quiet.

In the bayram episode two weeks ago, Zülfu Livaneli and Onur Bilge Kula talk about how Atatürk “read more than 4,000 books” (more than 252 of which were on on language and linguistics) and was an immensely enlightened man who understood his time in the deepest possible way. The praise of the early Kemalist period gets pretty aggressive in this episode, to the point where Zülfü Livaneli (an ultra-popular left-Kemalist singer/novelist) intervenes to point out that there were some things in the early Kemalist period that weren’t quite ideal, and that we should do better in future.

In this sense, Magnificent Memories reflects the diversity Kemalism, the broad spectrum of political tendencies that it contains. Kemalism can still seem a monolithic thing in commentary on Turkey, but that never really reflected reality. Kemalism always harbored conflictual movements. Magnificent Memories is remarkable for containing a very wide spectrum of these movements, and it might be why it is so attractive and cringe-inducing at the same time.

It’s this diversity that allows those outside of the Kemalist vision to come on the show. Nowhere is this as evident as on the Kurdish issue.

In January, Istanbul police interrupted a group of young street musicians who were singing in Kurdish in the city’s central Taksim square. There is a lot of street music in that area, but these officers seemed to have a problem with Kurdish language singing in particular. They arrested the musicians and confiscated their instruments. The incident was filmed and put on social media, and made national news. It was only with the involvement of opposition politicians (CHP MP Sezgin Tanrıkulu and former HDP parliamentarian Ferhat Encü seems to have been involved) that the musicians were able to get their instruments back.

Soon afterwards, Magnificent Memories invited the musicians on the show. Asker asked Muhammed Daşdemir, a member of the group, to explain what happened on the day they were arrested:

Daşdemir: That was the first time we encountered police officers who were that angry. We separated that as racism, because it was just because we sang in Kurdish”

Asker: let’s say it’s probably not that way, let’s be more constructive - I mean we are trying to look at it from a positive perspective - of course - Kurdish songs - there were others who sang in Arabic, but they didn’t go to them, they went to you, didn’t they?

…

Daşdemir: we encountered angry police

Asker: let’s say they were angry, let’s say they might have had a bad day, they are security officers after all.

This whole exchange (like many others on the show) was painful to watch.

The musicians were clearly on their toes. They were on the program because they were subject to state harassment, but they had to be very careful not to be too explicit about the nature of the prejudice they had encountered. They had to display a certain kind of diffidence (mahcubiyet in Turkish). The problem wasn’t the cops in general, it was with a few bad apples. Asker knew that this wasn’t the case, and hinted as much, but he sought to pretend as if it was.

This was a classic encounter between Turk and a Kurd. The Turk acts as the benevolent patron, while the Kurd has to express gratitude for having a voice. Asker presumably invited the musicians because he was making up for the state’s intolerance. This meant that throughout the program, Asker sought to channel the benevolent aspect of the state. Perhaps that’s why he felt that the accusation of racism was inappropriate. The CHP mayor of Şişli, who of course was also present, used the opportunity to burnish his credentials as an enlightened, yet inclusive man of the people. It felt like the screen was split between two worlds.

Something similar happened in O Ses Türkiye, the wildly popular local extension of The Voice franchise, where a Kurdish singer extended an apologetic appeal (“please, just 20 seconds”) for the host to allow him to sing a lullaby his mother, who he said, didn’t understand Turkish. This wasn’t surprising. O Ses Türkiye, is purely an entertainment program, and toes the state line. People there sing in various foreign languages, but Kurdish - Turkey’s second language - only made it on that one time. Magnificent Memories makes a point of inviting minority voices, it claims the banner of culture, yet the chemistry on screen remains essentially the same.

To be fair, the show is under immense pressure. Halk TV gets fined heavily on a regular basis (they have a budget set aside for these fines) for pushing the boundaries of nationalistic discourse. Last June, Magnificent Memories was penalized for promoting “terrorist propaganda,” which entailed having Hilmi Yarayıcı sing “Cemo”, a song by leftist band Grup Yorum that is also popular in militant circles. Commenting on the ban on air, Sehan Asker put up a chart of his ratings, showing how his program blew the government channels out of the water. The government, he implied, was scared of his program, and the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) was prejudiced against him (perhaps they good people at RTÜK had a bad day, no?)

The core tension in Magnificent Memories, its constant back-and-forth between the progressive and orthodox, tells us something about the CHP today. In the past couple of decades, the CHP has for the first time become an opposition force. It became subject to state oppression, and found itself on the same side with forces that have faced state violence for centuries - the Kurds, the leftists, the Alevi, the non-Muslims. The CHP’s chairman, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, reflects this shift, and has done much to transform the party in the last ten years. The CHP’s younger members, as well as rising stars like Canan Kaftancıoğlu, tell us that this shift will continue in the foreseeable future. These cadres want to reinstitute the egalitarian and inclusive promise of the Republic, to push back against the nationalist form of Kemalism.

Yet the more ancient parts of the CHP hangs on to its status as the party of the masters, the true owners of the state. This acts as a lid on the country’s potential for change, and it is the force one feels in the bouts of Atatürk-praising in Magnificent Memories. It prevents the crystallization of opposition ideas into something that presents an alternative vision for society.

In his famous opening talk at a conference on the “Republic of Fear,” professor Ayhan Yalçınkaya used Machiavelli’s notion of the perpetual republic, to argue that Turkey is an irresolute republic, one paralyzed by fear in the face of historical change. Republics can only perpetuate themselves by being willing to undergo radical revision:

When necessary, a resolute Republic has the will to abandon the logic inherent in its foundation. It is only in this way that it can continue its existence as a Republic through historical turning points.

Despite the progress it has made, the CHP is still paralyzed. It does not display the will for radical action, which is why the opposition still does not generate political energy of its own - it merely grows as the Erdoğan regime weakens.

If the republic is going to change, and change radically, the CHP is the only party that can do it. A year ahead of the promised election, there is still time for a new politics, one based on a vision of the future, rather than nostalgia for the past. As long as this doesn’t happen, the country will be stuck in a loop: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

In the meantime, we will continue to watch Magnificent Memories, not just for what it is, but what it could be.

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Announcement:

I’m going through an unusually busy time, and am switching Kültürkampf to a biweekly schedule until further notice.

I hope to be back to a weekly schedule in a few months.

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- Selim