Remembering Deniz Gezmiş
Authors:   , Erbil Duygu 
Published: May 2024

Remembering Deniz Gezmiş analyses the cultural afterlife of the Turkish Marxist-Leninist revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş within the agenda set by the Remembering Activism research project at Utrecht University that focuses on the study of the “memory-activism nexus” (Rigney 2018). This research focus entails the dynamic and co-constitutive relationship between the cultural remembrance of past activism, the uses of memory in activism, and memory activism, which refers to the activist endeavours to change collective memory. Accordingly, this study questions what makes remembrance activism and how Gezmiş became an intensely memorable historical figure through decades of cultural representation. Today, remembering Gezmiş is considered a common sense practice; that is to say, his life and death are considered inherently memorable, and his ongoing presence in Turkish cultural memory is taken as a given. In this way, the particular trajectory of his afterlife is understood as something natural and inevitable. But this assumes precisely what must be explained.

This dissertation shows that there was nothing inevitable about the ways in which Gezmiş has been remembered. It argues that the role that his afterlife has played in Turkish politics and culture was not inherent in his life but actively constructed and contested by a variety of actors. It was memory work that produced the cultural memorability of Deniz Gezmiş and defined the meaning of his afterlife. While memory activists in the 1970s used Gezmiş’s revolutionary life as a symbolic resource to forge bonds of political solidarity, these politics were gradually disarticulated from his memory so that he became a figure employed by a number of disparate actors to pursue their own goals. Critically engaging with accounts that naturalise Gezmiş’s memorability allows us to examine the precise processes through which this occurred and identify the relations of force that have shaped and reshaped the meaning of Gezmiş in Turkey since his execution.

In asking what makes Gezmiş so memorable, I seek the answers in the work of cultural actors who mediated his story in various media, including legal documents, biographies, tabloid magazines and television shows. Instead of looking solely at the representations of Gezmiş as end products that accumulate into a collective story, I analyse the cultural work of representing his life as a historically situated act whose limits are defined by historical processes and cultural repertoires. While treating Gezmiş as inherently memorable mystifies the particular relations of force that shape his afterlife and its use in different and often conflicting political projects, I put this common sense into perspective by historicising the mnemonic contestations over his cultural afterlife.

This study takes memorability as a discourse instead of a historical figure’s characteristic and analyses decades of memory work enacted by multiple historical actors who rendered Gezmiş memorable. It does so by developing a materialist methodology to analyse memory work as a politically motivated act circumscribed by shifting cultural, political and economic relations. Following the cultural materialist paradigm set by Raymond Williams, I recover the principle of intentionality in analysing cultural memory without losing sight of the structural constraints on social agency. Therefore, I approach intentional memory work as a cultural act embedded in the actors’ historical circumstances. I situate historical actors within the historical conjunctures that defined breaking points in Gezmiş’s afterlife. The materialist methodology I employ in this study draws on the political economy of media. Positioning historical actors in the conjunctures defined by political-economic changes reveals the possibilities and constraints in which they worked. At the same time, I foreground the intentional agency that characterises cultural remembrance and was the productive force behind Gezmiş’s memorability.