"With You, Time Flowed Like Water"

Geographies of Grief across International Research Collaborations

JESSIE HANNA CLARK

It's not as if an "I" exists independently over here and then simply loses a "you" over there, especially if the attachment to "you" is part of what composes who "I" am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who "am" I, without you?

When I left after my first summer of master's research in 2006 in Diyarbakir, Zeynep scribbled her contact information in my field book, neither of us knowing when I would be back. Underneath her address she wrote, "seninle zaman su gibi akiyordu" (with you, time flowed like water). That summer, we walked kilometers of Diyarbakir's oldest streets, home at that time to thousands of displaced families, on a quest to understand what a more urban, postconflict, and still deeply poor Kurdistan looked like in Turkey. Our friendship began as part of a three-month thesis project and turned into eleven years of dissertation and postdissertation research together. Again and again we returned to these same streets by foot to visit friends. Since summer 2015 and a violent renewal of conflict between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish state in urban centers in Eastern Turkey, however, time has not flowed like water; rather, time together is fleeting, broken, and uncertain. My regular and reliable visits to Diyarbakir and Zeynep's periodic visits to the United States are now as unpredictable as the political climate in Turkey. Even electronic communication is uncertain. During the state of emergency first implemented in the southeast region in 2015 and throughout Turkey in 2016, our daily communication over WhatsApp was interrupted for hours and sometimes days at a time due to state-sanctioned regional internet outages. The political transformations unfolding in Turkey, especially in Kurdish southeast Turkey, over the last two years have halted our ability to work together, transformed (and destroyed) the neighborhoods where we once worked, and brought into stark relief both the precarity existing in our relationship across vastly uneven political and economic conditions and the fundamental precariousness of our two lives now bound together as colleagues and friends.

OUR DISPOSSESSED LIVES

Precarity and precariousness, two distinct concepts for Judith Butler, might be best understood through the term dispossession, a follow-up theme that Butler and Athena Athanasiou explore in a series of dialogues recorded in 2013. To be dispossessed "refers to processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability." Precarity, then, describes the politically induced condition of being outside "norms of recognition" that cast certain lives as unlivable and, therefore, ungrievable. During the most intense periods of urban violence that beset cities in southeast Turkey in 2015–16, for example, the contours of human life were drawn in international and Turkish media to frame Kurdish lives, especially young Kurds' lives, as unlivable — as "terrorists." A common refrain heard in Diyarbakir refers back to a set of instructions given to Turkish soldiers in the early years of the Turkish Republic as they were tasked with suppressing any Kurdish resistance. The word Kürt, the soldier's service manual said, referred to the sound the snow makes when you step on it. The neighborhoods that flared up in conflict in summer 2015 in southeastern cities echoed the proverbial crunch of snow that has come to define life for many Kurds under the Turkish Republic, including Zeynep.

Butler and Athanasiou describe dispossession in a second way, as that which "encompasses the constituted, preemptive losses that condition one's being dispossessed by another: one is moved to the other and by the other — exposed to and affected by the other's vulnerability." In this sense, precariousness requires a recognition of the ontological human condition in which all life inherently and necessarily exists in relationships of dependence and vulnerability. In Frames of War, Butler specifically focuses on the experience of grief as a foundational moment in the understanding that "one's life is always in some sense in the hands of the other." In my case, I apprehended the precarious nature of my own life when I confronted deep loss and the possibility of loss beginning in 2014. In the United States, my mother was rediagnosed with cancer, a fight she ultimately lost in December 2016. In that time and since I continue to be haunted by one question: Who am I without you? Simultaneously, in summer 2015, the neighborhoods where Zeynep and I spent months and years listening to people's stories became the stage for fighting between a youth wing of the PKK and the Turkish military. The violence led to the mass displacement of families, several thousand deaths, and the destruction of physical communities. During this time, I would wait for a response over WhatsApp for an indication that Zeynep and her family were OK. The same question returned again: Who am I without you? My sense of self as a researcher, a teacher, a human is profoundly intertwined with my life in Diyarbakir, the sisterhood and familyhood that I entered into in 2006. My sense of self was upended in 2015 and 2016 as two pivots of stability and security spun out, faster together, probably, than apart.

Butler writes: "When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither...