Memory of Voices or the Voice of the Memory: An Outlook on Collective Memory in Recent Turkish Cinema

Abstract

Memory is mostly referenced to time. But, we have known at least since Bachelard’s Poeticsof Space or Nora’s Places of Memory that space is as a constituent of memory as time. As a dialectof existence and any moment of the human action, chronotope, that Bachtin conceptualized, is thebasis that memory was shaped on. So, how the memory is attached or embodied to time? Actually,almost by anything: Concrete and physical, abstract and non-material (Nora). It means that we cantake the voice as an element of collective memory, too. As Bijsterveld and Dijck remarked, despiteincreasing number of studies on the subject of sound technologies and cultural practices, a few ofthem has specifically focused on the relations between sound, music, and memory. In fact, voice isan element of narrative memory (J. Assmann) as a way of express and transfer of thoughts,feelings or experiences; and voice recorders are places of memory (Nora) as concrete materials.In this study, I am going to discuss the relationship between voice –as a way of remind orefface- and the collective memory over three films that are conspicuous pieces of recent,independent Turkish cinema: Voice of My Father (2012), The Song of My Mother (2014), and Zer(2016). Directed by three different directors, common characteristic of these films is that each ofthem has used the same metaphor, recordings or missing songs, to recall a social incident thatengraved traumatic traces on recent political history of Turkey. These social traumas of the lastcentury, incidents of Dersim-1938 and Maraş1978, and forced displacement from South-Eastvillages of Turkey in early 1990’s, has been desired to efface from the people’s memory in Turkeyand are still difficult to speak on. Narratives of these films are similar: All three youngerprotagonists are one of the child or grand-child of families who directly experienced one of thesetraumas. Protagonists trace tragic incidents or deeper traumas while they are chasing a song or arecording to seek the story of their family. Thus, over the voice or music metaphors, directors callaudiences to remember these incidents that occurred in a certain time and place, and to dust thecollective memory.