Song of My Mother

Abstract

In the 1990s, Bakur (also known as ‘Turkish Kurdistan’) was exposed to mass state-inflicted violence. To supress the Kurdish insurgence and cut off the logistic support of the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party; Kurdish: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), the Turkish state introduced new war strategies, such as forced disappearances and village evacuations executed by its security forces (TSK) and state- fostered counter-paramilitary forces (JİTEM, Hizbullah), leading to the displacement of three million people. Within a couple of years, thousands of Kurdish people were tortured, mutilated and forcibly disappeared. Their whereabouts remain unknown. This article investigates how state violence in the 1990s is depicted, represented, and recreated via cinematic narration. Erol Mintaş’s first feature film Song of My Mother (Annemin Şarkısı/2014) serves as a case study to analyse how forced displacement and resettlement of Kurds are visualised. Further, this account focuses on how the violence is remembered, represented, and recreated and which emotions are revealed while dealing with the traumatic events of the past and, finally, how the past is imagined and commemorated in the present. The visualisation and memorialisation of the 1990s in Kurdish culture contrast with the official Turkish discourse on memory and also provide a basis for collective societal confrontation.