As generations who witnessed the genocide pass away, our relationship with Dersim 1937-1938 becomes increasingly mediated through photographs, books, songs and laments. The photograph below was taken after a commemorative event hold in Jiyare Bava Duzgi in 2019. It temporally and spatially re-situates the photograph of Sey Rıza, Rıza the son of Bertal and Hüseyin taken in Erzincan in 1937 in contemporary Dersim. This photograph and many others are indispensable for commemorative events. They are the only tangible objects which enable people of Dersim to remember, commemorate and relate to the atrocities of 1937-1938. Yet we do not hold these photographs in our hands, we look at them. In this sense, our engagement with Dersim massacre is mainly textual.
Unknown photographer, Pirha News Agency
The visual legacy of Dersim is also fragmental: the photographs are not available in public archives with a few exceptions, nor are they exhibited in a museum. They are reproduced in books or collected in appendices as visual cues embedded to textual narratives of the massacre. They accompany news and articles, often with no photographic context. The visual legacy of Dersim is ‘politically sensitive’ and unwanted in public spaces. When photographs were installed on the walls of contemporary Dersim by the local municipality, they were painted over to erase the city’s atrocious past and disconnect photographs from the dwellers. They are only allowed in temporarily through open air exhibitions, events and demonstrations.
The photographs of Dersim 1937-1938 are also the visual objects of perpetrators. Those who hold the weapons against the people of Dersim were likely to be the same people who hold the camera towards their faces while they were walking towards their death along the paths on Dersim mountains. Meaningfully the lens, which can be regarded the eye, of a camera is called ‘objektif’ in Turkish. Considering the documenting function of photography, this translation makes sense. At the same time, it implicitly refers to a particular way of seeing that is the gaze of the photographer, an ‘objective’ perspective which is able to capture the ‘truth’ through camera. The privilege of holding the camera towards the victims was granted to those who represented the political power, that was the Republic of Turkey.
When we engage with the photographs in commemorative events or on computer screens, we see the victims because we relate to them, not to the perpetrators. As well as mourning for individuals massacred, we mourn after a collective victim, the anonymity of the actual people massacred in Dersim, in our words, ‘those who were buried without a name, without a shroud’. This embeds us to the collective victimhood, makes us part of the genocidal history of Dersim as members of the surviving generations.
Only when we see the hand holding the camera, when we identify the gaze behind the ‘objektif’, the perpetrator, we step out of collective victimhood and claim the post-mortem rights of the massacred to be recognised as victims of the Dersim genocide. Only then we activate a potential history, in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s term, for Dersim and a future that is radically different from 1930s and its aftermath. Potential history is an act of unlearning, an informed detachment from the history ‘made’ by the perpetrators. In the context of Dersim, it is a call for seeing ‘untaken photographs’ through family histories, survivor accounts and laments as they would not tell the story of the massacres without mentioning the perpetrators.
The visual legacy of Dersim 1937-1938 is a potential history to be lived and it is lived in commemorative events, pop-up exhibitions and jiyares. It is a legacy crafted by perpetrators, yet re-appropriated by surviving generation of Dersim people as an emotional, cultural and political act.
