Nükhet Sirman

As the local elections are approaching, I wanted to rethink what we understand from local and if we go further back, from place. Going back because local (yerel) is a word that is derived from locus/place (yer) and today it is more often used to refer to scale. Along with local, we think of words like regional, global and these indicate the covered area discussed. With these words, we can differentiate the covered area from the largest. It is possible arrange from the most area covered to the smaller ones: the largest area being the global and the smallest local.

Place as a word would turn our heads around with the meanings and the uses it includes. It carries the meaning of a location in space, to have a place, to know your place and with words attached to it carries various other metaphorical meanings. Maybe the best is to imagine place as an empty box to be filled in. It is such a box that both shapes what’s inside and defined by what’s inside. In space any place is defined and expressed through social relationships and how what happens in these places is remembered. Thus, for a place to be a place it is necessary that one should make it so.

A huge history welcomes us when we wander about how our places, cities, streets are made place. For me, what I most often use place for are the streets of the Marmara islands where people once spoke at least five different languages. Its history is the slow disappearance of these languages and being replaced by the mother tongue produced by different accents. It was not easy to create this. One of my friends told me. He could never approach the girl he liked and chat with her. The girl must have liked him too because one morning she called him and said “kalisperasas.” My friend was so excited and could not think of anything else to say other than: “Citizen, speak Turkish and teach who does not know!” The girl never looked at him again. This place becomes a place for me through this story. With the things experienced, encounters, stories, emotions…

This must be a story from the end of 1950s; must be during the time when language campaigns were the most pervasive. It is the local projection of the politics made in Ankara… Who would know that the politics to extend the use of Turkish language established on paper in the center would cause the loss of a beloved for a young man. But it is something like that. Something abstract becomes a life experience; time and location coincide to produce an event or an experience, and makes a piece of land a place.

This place is where there is everyday, concrete, life, time and history. Here there is, besides time and location, birth and death, men and women, friend and foe, production and consumption. A place produced by the particular, what cannot be repeated, generalized. However the center is general; the plans and politics produced here ignore and exclude some things to be general. At the center, life is put in order and set according to priorities. Instead of the dependency of everyday life on location and time, plans are organized with respect to scale: Global, national, local. Place is given the last priority. Viewed from the center, the local carries meaning only as the basis to actualize global and national plans. Exactly for that reason, everyday life is rendered to capitalism and profit.

While what’s rendered to profit becomes local, everyday is rebuilt as the projection of the center. Wide boulevards for fast cars, huge shopping malls, tall skyscrapers as business centers, jammed traffic, exhaust fumes, dislocated neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal, living complexes for people that have become the subject of European urban sociology, and in the end all alike, characterless cities are the consequences of this general outlook. The little grocery stores that people can walk to, market places, pavements, human scale places for maintenance to reproduce everyday life, in short where the particulars that form women’s everyday life are destroyed. The production of spaces that are not a place is realized like this. There is yet another local elections in the horizon. In the elections women will not be elected nor women’s everyday life will the subject matter for the elections. They will retell the necessity of large scale construction projects and define service to citizens as forgetting our stories and becoming alike. To protect these interests everything will merge into one another. National, global and local will suddenly be connected. The complexities of life are flattened out promising that one big project will resolve everything. Showdown has already started. Because the elections are not about place but about the local.

Ka-der (The Association for Supporting and Training Women Candidates) had a dream when they started to work for women’s equal representation: there will be women from Ka-der everywhere, we were going to learn about women’s issues in every city by phone. The dream has become a reality almost but with one important difference: instead of learning more about women’s issues in every city, the problems became alike: poverty and violence. This generalization echoes in our ears constantly. Women instead of telling stories are repeating these generalizations on morning TV shows and in newspaper columns.

However these issues are lived differently in different places and carry different meanings. As these differences are covered up and replaced by formulas like “my husband used violence against me” , the words are emptied out. Our lives become no longer ours and women turn into the proofs of the generalizations in life. Forgetting of place is putting life into the space of numbers. The stories as the useless excess of the small scale are thrown to the side of fast flowing large boulevards. Zeynep Direk has well summarized this in an interview: “to apply the general rule to every concrete situation is called fascism.”

Localization of Place by Nükhet Sirman, PDF Version

From Amargi- Issue 11