From an aca­d­e­m­ic, fired by a decree relat­ed to the state of emer­gency in Turkey, a reflec­tion more pro­found­ly rel­e­vant than it may seem at first glance.


Fun­da Can­tek pub­lished Decem­ber 8 on Gazete Duvar.

So, what do you do now?

In my youth, when I could no longer con­trol my cere­bral hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty – a genet­ic inher­i­tance – I would recite all the poems I knew by heart, one after the oth­er. Lat­er, I read the mem­oirs of a polit­i­cal per­son­al­i­ty long held in iso­la­tion and per­se­cut­ed by being deprived of books, pen­cils and paper, and learned that he had done the same at that time. Con­trol­ling cere­bral activ­i­ty is not so easy!

One of the poems I would recite was by Edouard Galeano. These lines are from that poem: “To live, stand­ing upright/is this small vic­to­ry / stay­ing alive / being joy­ous despite the good­byes and the assas­si­na­tions… / In the end, we are used to pain / and joy demands more courage than sad­ness does”

*Taken from “Patas arriba: La escuela del mundo al revés” (With no access to the book, this is an English translation done from a French translation taken from a Turkish one… If anyone has the original, we are takers…) 

Liv­ing as we do in the era of good­byes and assas­si­na­tions, when remain­ing upright is tru­ly a vic­to­ry, these lines by Galeano take over my brain even more often now…

Yes, from one gen­er­a­tion to the next, we are expe­ri­enc­ing a per­se­cu­tion  last­ing not only for a peri­od but over an era, and  repeat­ing after a few breaks. First, my eldest sis­ter, a stu­dent, whom we would wait for, trem­bling on the bal­cony when dark­ness fell ear­ly on win­ter nights, not know­ing if she would man­age to make it home safe­ly; the fact she was removed from her school due to fas­cist oppres­sion and, upon return­ing from the uni­ver­si­ty, mak­ing her way to exams in a mil­i­tary vehi­cle, for rea­sons of secu­ri­ty. The sev­en­ties. Then, my father, a vic­tim of the Sep­tem­ber 12 exile, the rea­sons for which I could­n’t under­stand as a child. But the trau­ma lay heav­i­ly on me. The eight­ies. Grow­ing up, and becom­ing aware not only of what is hap­pen­ing around the fam­i­ly cir­cle, but of the respon­si­bil­i­ty of shar­ing the wor­ries of an entire people…

You know what has hap­pened to us since last Sep­tem­ber because of our sign­ing the dec­la­ra­tion “We will not be par­ty to this crime”, after pro­duc­tive years spent in sol­i­dar­i­ty and resis­tance at Ankara Uni­ver­si­ty where I was almost a refugee fol­low­ing my dis­missal from Gazi Uni­ver­si­ty, where I worked for years while strug­gling against moral harass­ment and sym­bol­ic violence.

Housewife or household waste?

As with many oth­er decrees, the one affect­ing us was announced close to mid­night. The tim­ing is mean­ing­ful. They await mid­night to pro­tect them­selves from reac­tions and spur-of-the-moment protests, and to lim­it the mas­sive spread of infor­ma­tion. When a friend called to break the news of my “liq­ui­da­tion”, my 12 year old son jumped out of bed. Despite my efforts to hide the con­tent of the phone calls that con­tin­ued into the ear­ly morn­ing, when he re-awoke from fit­ful sleep his first ques­tion was “Mom, are you a house­wife now?” He looked dis­ap­point­ed. He was try­ing not to sad­den me while tak­ing stock of the deba­cle in which we live. Being a house­wife is not a sta­tus we despise in our home. We can­not despise the sta­tus of house­wife, nei­ther from an eth­i­cal nor from a polit­i­cal point of view. Our son was raised in this cul­ture. But for a child that age, the fact that a moth­er con­stant­ly work­ing, with no clear notion of what is a work peri­od and what is not, who reads, who writes, and who sud­den­ly finds her­self with­out work was some­thing that would leave her dis­ori­ent­ed and dis­mayed. In total idle­ness. Lat­er, I under­stood this was his main con­cern. Per­haps also, with child­ish self­ish­ness, the fact that the fam­i­ly’s rev­enue was thus cut by half…

With time, when he saw that his unem­ployed moth­er was not idle, that she pur­sued her work out­side the insti­tu­tion­al chan­nels, he relaxed some­what. But a dif­fer­ent ques­tion arose, the one we encounter willy-nil­ly dur­ing the entire peri­od of school­ing. Instead of tar­get­ing the chil­dren’s increase in knowl­edge, it is the ques­tion of the moth­er’s occu­pa­tion, fol­low­ing on that of the father at the fore­front: “What kind of work do your par­ents do?” At first our son replied “teacher”. When he real­ized that the chances of his moth­er return­ing to work were dimin­ish­ing, he start­ed to answer “house­wife.” But real­iz­ing that this did not match up to his moth­er’s work sched­ules, nor to her mock­ing per­son­al­i­ty, to those who asked, he start­ed reply­ing “house­hold waste” . House­hold waste. In what first appears as a despis­ing put-down, I found heart­en­ing black humor in his efforts to light­en the trau­ma.   My son had learned to over­come it, at least par­tial­ly, by call­ing on humor. Just like his moth­er, he was con­vinced that liv­ing, stay­ing alive, is a small vic­to­ry. He was say­ing “this does­n’t even hurt a bit”.

Heroine or traitor?

While events unfold­ed in this way at home, mat­ters were dif­fer­ent out­side. As our names appeared on the lists of those who were purged because of their involve­ment in the attempt­ed coup d’é­tat, we had to con­vince even those clos­est to us that we had been fired for sign­ing (a peti­tion) in sup­port of peace. In the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate, sign­ing for peace could deter­mine whether we were con­sid­ered heroes or trai­tors. Sur­pris­ing­ly, those who con­sid­ered us heroes out­num­bered the oth­ers. What’s more, peo­ple of var­i­ous lean­ings all shared this opinion.

Let’s face it, the aca­d­e­mic’s pride and ego exist among us. They are hard to dis­guise. Yet, almost none of us took on the title of hero. We said “Every­one would have done the same thing.” While peo­ple die, while oth­ers lan­guish in jail, what is the impor­tance of a sig­na­ture we penned while sit­ting in our chairs” said oth­ers.   We thought “You can­not dis­so­ci­ate the aca­d­e­m­ic from the work­er. We are all sub­ject­ed to injus­tice.” But we also had col­leagues who enjoyed play­ing the left­ist mil­i­tant and who repeat­ed left and right in front of the stu­dents that we had become heroes because of this sig­na­ture. When Erkan İbiş, then direc­tor of Ankara Uni­ver­si­ty, opened an inves­ti­ga­tion against us fol­low­ing which we were fired, those same ones did not lift a fin­ger, or claimed that they, of all peo­ple, had been the most combative.

Let’s ignore those who said “that’ll teach them!” They don’t even deserve a men­tion. I want to pay homage to those of our col­leagues who offered their unwa­ver­ing sup­port and who, after our depar­ture, looked the oth­er way when walk­ing past our offices (so as not to see our absence) and who said that being inside the walls (of the uni­ver­si­ty) weighed more on them than being out­side, as well as to a num­ber of oth­er peo­ple of diverse opin­ions; I salute all those in oth­er pro­fes­sion­al branch­es who were also evict­ed sim­ply for being in oppo­si­tion, and now return to our topic.

Although months have gone by, almost a full year since my fir­ing, I still find myself fac­ing this ques­tion that becomes more and more press­ing. “So, what do you do now?” Some­times, a for­mer stu­dent asks, some­times a friend I haven’t seen in a long time, a fam­i­ly friend, a neigh­bor. But most of the time, the ques­tion comes from a demo­ti­vat­ed for­mer col­league I encounter, and who asks how I am doing while not nec­es­sar­i­ly approv­ing what we did.

In the into­na­tion, there is embarass­ment tinged with pity. Should he/she ask or not? I don’t know if I can con­vey this tru­ly when I say…with an into­na­tion such as “Oh, so sor­ry, but you should have kept qui­et, you see what hap­pened to you?”  or “Eh, after such a pres­ti­gious and well paid job, you must be like a fish out of water?” The misty eyes that go with the ques­tion pic­ture you like an image out of Küçük Emrah [a famous singer giv­en to pathos]. But if truth be told, they are the piti­ful ones with their raised eye­brows and furtive glances. It’s quite dis­gust­ing, in fact.

To such a ques­tion, you feel like answer­ing, “What do you expect of me, that I beg in the court­yard at the mosques fol­low­ing Fri­day prayers?” In reply to this appar­ent­ly com­pas­sion­ate ques­tion, they actu­al­ly mean to sug­gest the noise made by the fall of an “impor­tant pro­fes­sor, assis­tant” imag­ined “set­ting the amphithe­ater quak­ing by a look or the sound of his voice”, or the pride of a doc­tor­al stu­dent who had just man­aged to get a job in “research”. This will serve to make them grate­ful for their posi­tion, or to sad­den them. Either way, it will do them good.

Do you know what we do now? As would any dig­ni­fied per­son, most of us man­age to earn our keep despite the obsta­cles, with the help of orga­ni­za­tions that sup­port us and our close ones. And even if we have not found work relat­ed to our pro­fes­sions, and earn our bread at the sweat of our brow, we spend the rest of our time on our uni­ver­si­ty tasks. Those of our friends who, for a num­ber of rea­sons, have not found any work yet, are helped by oth­er friends and rel­a­tives who still have jobs. Also, we learn to get by on lit­tle. And this is an impor­tant expe­ri­ence that allows dis­tanc­ing from the cen­tre of the con­sumerist culture.

So, what do you do now? Will you con­tin­ue to behave as if noth­ing had hap­pened, and play the three mon­keys so as not to lose your chair? 

It so hap­pens that the ball­point I grabbed to make notes before writ­ing this text was a gift from Ankara Uni­ver­si­ty to com­mem­o­rate some meet­ing or din­ner. When I clicked the push but­ton, the ball­point shat­tered. I found this image so mean­ing­ful. Of course los­ing one’s work is hard to stom­ach, the fact that so many years of work can be sac­ri­ficed to the ambi­tions of incom­pe­tent lead­ers. But insti­tu­tion­al pre­rog­a­tives are not guar­an­teed for any­one. More­over, once you are freed from their tute­lage and con­straints, you feel as if a depen­den­cy had ended.

Fur­ther­more, uni­ver­si­ties are not places where one can gam­bol at whim or through ambi­tion for pro­mo­tion, behave in ways dam­ag­ing the lives of oth­ers. In Turkey’s short his­to­ry, there have been many exam­ples of this. There is always a boomerang effect. We know this, we try to keep our spir­its up and to win small vic­to­ries, as Galeano says.

When we were removed from our uni­ver­si­ties, our stu­dents are the ones who expe­ri­enced the great­est col­lapse. Tra­di­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic rules are author­i­tar­i­an and hier­ar­chi­cal. We had built friend­ly rela­tion­ships with our stu­dents, that went beyond the hier­ar­chi­cal clich­es, based on mutu­al learn­ing and sol­i­dar­i­ty. This is also why we were per­sonæ non gratæ for those in pow­er. Besides the learn­ing, our stu­dents also lost, to a cer­tain extent, those close rela­tion­ships and this trans­for­ma­tion­al potential.

On a poster pre­pared by a group of Ankara Uni­ver­si­ty’s women stu­dents to bid us good­bye, there was a very sen­si­ble verse by For­ough [Far­rokhzad con­tem­po­rary Iran­ian poet]. It could pro­vid­ed the answer, in the present tense, to the ques­tion “So what do you do now” : “I plant my hands in the gar­den. And I know, I know, I know I will turn green.” 

Funda Cantek
Born and raised in Ankara. She worked in the media sector while studying at Ankara University’s Faculty of Communications. She became an academic following her studies. She worked at Gazi University from 1994 to 2010, then at Ankara University, from 2010 until her firing by decree n° 686 in February 2017. She was Director of the Department of Women Studies where she taught. Her work focused on urban sociology, urban history, social gender, the history of the press. She has published five books and numerous press and research articles. She loves discovering towns, walking in the streets, taking pictures, digging through archives, reading. She is the mother of Tuna.

Français : Fun­da Can­tek • Alors, que fais-tu à présent ? Cliquez pour lire

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