Memory as experience in times of perpetual violence: the challenge of Saturday Mothers vis-à-vis cultural aphasia

Memory as experience in times of perpetual violence: the challenge of Saturday Mothers vis-à-vis cultural aphasia

Özgür Sevgi Göral examines the enforced disappearances carried out by the Turkish state in the Kurdish region during the 1990s, focusing on the weekly silent sit-ins of the Saturday Mothers in Cizre, a Kurdish town near the Iraqi border. She argues that these gatherings are a form of memory-making that ties personal loss to political struggle and keeps past violence present in everyday life.

Comparing the Cizre sittings with the better-known ones in Istanbul, Göral shows that in Cizre the participants are mostly Kurdish-speaking wives and mothers who frame their grief through poverty, faith and loyalty to the Kurdish movement rather than the language of human rights. She proposes the concept of “cultural aphasia” to describe how hard it is to find a vocabulary for state violence in Turkey, arguing that it captures the situation better than amnesia.

The study is based on fieldwork from 2012 to 2015, including 248 interviews and observation of the sittings, which were suspended after the 2015 curfews. It shows how the Saturday Mothers break a pact of public secrecy around the disappearances. The article is open access.

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