Mourning in the collective memory: Remembering or forgetting?

 

Dilan Babat

 

NEWS CENTER - Stating that mourning is not only an emotional reaction but also a fundamental right arising from being human, Prof. Neşe Özgen said that social and individual reactions to death are part of the human sense of identity and belonging. Neşe Özgen added that the prevention of the right to mourning not only increases the traumatic effect of loss, but also makes it difficult to accept death.

 

Death is an inevitable fact of human life and mourning is one of the most basic human ways of coping with this reality. The mourning process, which is shaped by longing, sadness and memories of a lost relative, is not only an individual but also a social experience. However, throughout history, the right to mourning has been violated in many societies, and people have been deprived of the opportunity to say goodbye to their loved ones through practices such as the displacement of funerals, the destruction of bodies and the prevention of burial processes.

 

In this part of our dossier, we talked to Prof. Neşe Özgen about the shaping of social memory in the process of mourning and burial.

 

How does mourning take place in people? 

 

Neşe Özgen said that many violations such as the displacement of funerals, disruption of bodies, violation of the right to mourning, violation of the right to burial have been going on for a long time, and added: "Mourning after death is our spiritual right, our right to be human. A large part of living beings actually feel this when a being that is in them passes away. They become stagnant, in the same community, if there is a son, father, mother relationship between them, they feel it. Animals living with us at home feel the mourning at home and become stagnant, they feel sadness. How does this happen in human beings? Preventing the right to mourn destroys the acceptance of death. We have human rights recognised by all human communities and international law. We can live in a community with other members by keeping our own free spaces within certain limits. This includes mourning and death."

 

Two stages of death and mourning

 

Stating that death and mourning have two stages, Neşe Özgen explained these two stages as follows "One is the personal stage. One of them is the right to mourn the people we want to mourn, our relatives who have died, or the people we find spiritually close to ourselves. The other is a social issue. The process of separating our libido, which has been hurt behind a lost object, from the lost object is mourning. We can mourn over a period of time, over a part of our life. As a result, it applies to the individual. We need to go through a process of acceptance, because when the mourning is over, the person begins to prepare to join the world. 

 

The mourning process starts with the loss. It starts from the moment we realise the loss. It is like mourning the person who we can no longer cure at the end of a long illness. How long it lasts, how it is experienced and how to cope with it varies according to individuals and cultures, but mourning is an inherent state of human beings and communities. On the one hand it is a confrontation with death, on the other hand it is a state of healing and purification.  During this mourning process, various rituals, which have taken place in every society and culture since ancient times, enable us to experience our grief and get through the process more easily. Funeral and burial is one of them."

 

Rituals according to religions

 

Neşe Özgen pointed out that the society in Turkey mostly believes in a single life, but there are also those who believe in reincarnation within the communities they live with. Neşe Özgen said, "Belief in a single life affects both our understanding of religion and the way we live in different faiths. If we believed in more than one life, many things would be different, from our understanding of morality to the way we ask for accountability and our social relations. Communities that believe in a single life and communities that believe in more than one life have different ways of evaluating life, different understandings of justice and law. We live in a society and when we mourn, we believe that we have only one life, just like the society.

 

Some religions and beliefs develop various rules regarding the afterlife, but these beliefs are based on a single understanding of life. We started the tradition of burying the dead about 3 thousand years ago, and this ritual has found its place in different religions and has continued until today. The peoples living in Turkey are not among the communities that have a tradition of cremation; we prefer to return the dead to the earth.

 

There are certain rituals at funerals: mourning for a loss, realising the loss and coping with the great anger arising from the loss... All these take place with the sending off of the body. The anger, pain, grief and great sense of loss that we experience during this process are alleviated to some extent by these rituals. One of the most important functions of funeral and burial rituals is to slow down the mourning process.

 

The funeral and burial process prepares us for our loss, helps us to internalise it through our faith and rituals, and helps us to complete the stages of the grieving process. The soul and body need to slow down, gather strength and turn inward in order to carry this deep grief and to heal afterwards. Being together with our loved ones and friends in this process, even temporarily, surrounds us with a circle of love and makes the mourning process more bearable."

 

Emphasis on Cain and Abel

 

Referring to the rituals of burying the dead, which differ from culture to culture, Neşe Özgen said, "Although it differs from culture to culture, similar reasons lie at the basis of our ways of coping with death. Although this situation has changed recently, the slowdown in the mourning process, the stopping of life around us for a moment and the interruption of the ritual of seeing off our loved one means that the mourning process cannot be completed. In this case, we cannot comprehend grief and live with an incomplete feeling forever. As Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Balkan peoples, we are communities who believe that the body should preserve its integrity while reaching the being to whom it will be held accountable. It is from this belief that the Diyanet's approval is sought in many matters ranging from organ donation, body donation to become cadavers, and blood donation.

 

Our societies are communities that care about the preservation of the dead body without deterioration and loss of organs by maintaining some beliefs that have been going on since ancient times through religion. This belief makes us all sensitive about the integrity of the body of the deceased. When Cain kills his brother Abel, he does not know what to do and God shows him how to bury his brother through a crow. Cain said, ‘Woe is me! I am as incapable as this crow to bury my brother's body'. This belief in the burial ceremony, which came from Abel and Cain, reached Islam and formed the basis of our funeral rituals. The rituals of shrouding, washing the dead and how they should be buried have survived to the present day, establishing a deep-rooted link between ancient cultural heritage and new religious beliefs."

 

Inability to mourn after 33 bullets

 

Neşe Özgen stated that she wrote a book titled ‘Van-Özalp and the 33 Bullet Incident: Remembering and Forgetting Forms of Social Memory’. Neşe Özgen said, "My starting point was to see that the villagers’ quest for justice had been fulfilled and that they were now satisfied. Something happened for the first and last time in the history of the Republic of Turkey: They beheaded a general. After very long trials and political debates, Mustafa Mughlalı was first sentenced to life imprisonment, then his sentence was reduced to 20 years due to his age. Immediately after his imprisonment, he was hospitalised under the pretext of an illness and somehow died there. As soon as I entered the village, I encountered an unsatisfied sense of justice and a search for justice that they did not know how to satisfy, because their dead were still unburied. The incident of 1948 was still going on. Even though a court result had been obtained through political endeavours, the villagers were in a very serious state of unrest because they had not buried their dead. I saw that the dead were still found in the massacre stream. Sometimes the villagers tried to cope with this in a mystical way, saying that light descended there, and sometimes they tried to share this pain by explaining how much the great mourning hurt and saddened them. They were in a mourning that had been going on since 1948."

 

Attacks on funerals

 

Neşe Özgen continued her words as follows: "Attacks on funerals, bodies, dead bodies only in recent times; the shooting of funerals during the great blockade in 2015, the destruction of the bodily integrity of funerals, bodies that are not taken across the border... Dead bodies that are punished again and again... In fact, there is a state tradition that goes back much further: Leaving the bodies of murdered Armenians lying around, leaving women who were raped or men who were murdered during the 6-7 September attacks lying around, harassing the bodies, removing the bodies of priests from cemeteries and driving stakes back into their hearts, breaking the tombstones of non-Muslim bodies, serious attacks on cemeteries... This great mourning is actually an individual mourning that cannot be held personally. But this also makes the whole surrounding social structure unsafe for us. Slavoj Zizek says, ‘In a society where the dishonest are not punished, you cannot make your children believe in justice’. If I do not see that the consequences of such an insult to my funeral end in punishment and the dignity of my funeral is not restored, I will become distrustful of my environment.

 

In 2004, an application was made to the Parliament, followed by a Constitutional Court decision. In 2004, the Constitutional Court ruled that the non-delivery of the bodies of Mehmet Okutan, Kadir Sümer and Mehmet Emin Kılıç, sons of Saliha Okutan, Hülya Sümer and Ömer Kılıç, to their families in Siirt Eruh was in violation of international conventions and human rights. In 2010, the family of Feyzullah Koyun, a PKK militant who was killed in an armed clash in Van and who was found to be registered in Kurtalan, Siirt, applied to both IHD and the court. They stated that there was a clear provocation. On 27 December 2017, the court stated that there had been a clear violation of the UN Protocol to Protect Human Rights Defenders, which Turkey had signed. In 2019, the Constitutional Court ruled that ‘respect for private life and family’ was violated as the convict was not given the right to attend his father's funeral and be accepted to condolences.

 

Mourning is personal, death is social

 

There is a funeral violation that was brought to the Parliament in 2015. HDP MPs stated that 13 cemeteries in Muş Varto started to be demolished in 2013. Subsequently, in provinces such as Diyarbakır, Şırnak, Hakkari and Ağrı, tombstones were broken or the inscriptions on them were covered with the orders of administrative chiefs. The cemeteries were declared special security zones and family visits were prevented. The Garzan Cemetery in Upper Ölek in the centre of Bitlis was demolished, 276 graves in the cemetery were opened and the bones of the bodies were removed for identification.

 

The attack on the funeral of Hatun Tuğluk, the mother of Aysel Tuğluk, the delivery of Hakan Arslan's body to his family in a box in August 2022, the delivery of guerrilla bodies to their families after their bodily integrity has been disrupted or burial in cemeteries without identity... The refusal to give the bodies of the Saturday Mothers... All these are things that increase the distance between society and each other. I may not be cared for while I am alive, but death is a social issue. Grief is personal, but death is a social issue. Failure to meet this sociality increases social distrust when the mourning process cannot be initiated by the relatives of the deceased. Those who insult my funeral in this way completely destroy my hope of living side by side."

 

What has changed after modernity?

 

Plato's statement in Tagaros: "O men here present, you are all relatives, neighbours and citizens by creation, not by law, but by the command of nature. The similarity of similar things is from nature. And tyronnos, the tyrant of men, is prone to many acts of violence against nature”, reminder Neşe Özgen said: "Our coexistence is a normal thing. No matter how much we quarrel, we cannot break away from each other. We are in need of being together; we are neighbours and relatives by birth, as a necessity of nature. This unbreakable unity binds us. Death is one of the most important things that bind us to each other. Death is not an individual thing, we have been dealing with death for many years. The dying person is part of the community of which he or she is a member and dies among them. Accompanying the dying, organising rituals, performing ceremonies, providing assistance have been seen as a human duty and a social value throughout history.

 

Until modernity, people were aware of death before they died. They could leave an inheritance, give advice to the people who came after them, and write words on their tombstone. We knew at least as much about death as birth. Until modernity, death was a value of the community. So what changed after modernity? The dead body began to be perceived as the opposite of life. However, death is a part of life. Death was regarded as an element that should not be present among healthy bodies, as if it were the sum of all diseases gathered in itself. Thus, death was detached from the system of values and turned into a new ritual by being professionalised under the supervision of the state."

 

When did the state become the decision-maker on death?

 

"Why did the state, the power, monopolise the issue of burial and death?” asked Neşe Özgen and expressed the following: "This is a question that goes beyond the commercialisation of the burial ceremony, its loss of social status and its transformation into a commercial ritual. ‘Since when did death become a matter decided by the state?’ At the moment, death is subject to state authority, just as it is with living bodies, also with dead bodies. Power approaches all kinds of material and immaterial assets with a motive of confiscation. Since when is death a matter decided by the state? According to some, death was a matter decided by God, nature and time. When did the state become a decision-maker about death? This is our main issue. Before we start thinking about how the state intervenes in the process of burial, we need to ask how it managed to become the sole decision-making body on death.

 

It decides in hospitals, in earthquakes, in fires, in mines, at the moment of birth, and it also decides on the dead body. This whole chain turns us all into dead bodies in the hands of an authoritarian power. A being whose initiative has been taken away, whose free will has been destroyed, is a dead body. Both the funeral is de-identified and while it is being de-identified, the ground is prepared for the sovereign power to make all kinds of dispositions on it, to cut off its ears, to expose it naked, to destroy its grave, to bury it, to exhume it after burial, to lose it, to destroy it... all of these. The destruction of spiritual feelings becomes a de facto gain and the power is entitled to it.

 

The state cannot decide on death; death is something that happens spontaneously. Sometimes things happen, but we have long since lost the sense of death. However, it has been much longer since we lost the authority to make decisions over our own and our dead bodies. These are Kurdish, Armenian, LGBT, trans, suicide, orphan, orphaned, died in a natural disaster, humiliated gypsy; all kinds of events distract us from sincerity, friendship, a real farewell ceremony.

 

All funerals have turned into a political tool. This issue is not limited to the bodies of Kurds, Armenians, LGBTs or raped children; all our funerals are in the same situation. None of them is a burial ceremony anymore, none of them is a symbol of saying goodbye to death. No funeral can be sent off with sincerity."

 

Tomorrow: Cemeteries, a policy of erasing identity!