Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured Lives in a Time of Violence

by Jenny B. White, Ergün Gündüz (Illustrator)

A powerful graphic novel that traces Turkey's descent into political violence in the 1970s through the experiences of four students on opposing sides of the conflict

Turkish Kaleidoscope tells the stories of four unforgettable protagonists as they navigate a society torn apart by violent political factions. It is 1975 and Turkey is on the verge of civil war. Faruk and Orhan are from conservative shopkeeping families in eastern Anatolia that share a sense of new possibilities. Nuray is the daughter of villagers who have migrated to the provincial city where Yunus, the son of an imprisoned teacher, was raised in genteel poverty. While attending medical school in Ankara, Faruk draws a reluctant Orhan into a right-wing nationalist group while Nuray and Yunus join the left. Against a backdrop of escalating violence, the four students fall in love, have their hearts broken, get married, raise families, and struggle to get on with their lives. But the consequences of their decisions will follow them through their lives as their children begin the story anew, skewed through the kaleidoscope of historical events.

Inspired by Jenny White's own experiences as a student in Turkey during this tumultuous period as well as original oral histories of Turks who lived through it, Turkish Kaleidoscope reveals how violent factionalism has its own emotional and cultural logic that defies ideological explanations.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, History, Graphic Novels Comics, Middle East, Nonfiction, Politics

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2021

Reviews

[Rod Brown]

A dull and detached bit of historical fiction about a complicated, turbulent, and violent period in the 1970s for the citizens of Turkey. The book centers on four university students in Ankara. Ohran and Faruk are on the right. They consider themselves religious idealists, but are called fascists by the other side. Nuray and Yunus, on the left, hope to elevate workers and the poor through socialism, but are simply denounced as Communists. There is some perfunctory stabs at romantic relationships, but nobody really has personality beyond declaiming and then questioning their political allegiances in the face of hatred and violence not only from the other side but through endless internecine squabbles.

It's a bit off-putting to slog through the four and a half pages of tiny print in the introduction in order to get some background before getting tossed into the alphabet soup of political organization acronyms that are also footnoted throughout the book.

The end result is a book that is pure muddle -- neither good history nor good fiction -- and a chore to read.

[Frankie]

I had high hopes for this book! I like historical fiction and learning about politics, and given that I know nothing about Turkey in the 1970s, I was pretty confident I would learn something interesting from this book. I didn’t really. This book does not do a good job of explaining the Turkish political scene of the 1970s. It’s an acceptable overview: there were many factions, generally divided into left and right, and violence between groups was an everyday occurrence, but I couldn’t tell you more than that. It lacks the information of a historical text and the compelling narrative of a fiction. Not only does it not really address any concrete historical moments (except the 1980 coup), none of the characters were interesting. Further, it had some of the least consistent illustrations I have ever seen and the dialogue was not natural at all. So, overall, all I can say about this book is at least I know that this time period happened, even if I can’t say I know anything about it. Would not recommend.

[John Blacksad]

Bu kitabı çok merak ediyordum. Kapağı ve ismi çok hoş! Hani bende özel yeri olan bir işi olmasa da Ergün Gündüz’ün yetenekli bir çizer olduğunu düşünürüm. Çevirilir mi, çevirilmez mi derken Instagram vesilesi ile tanış olduğumuz Miraç’ın koleksiyonunda bulunmasıyla okuma fırsatı yakalamış oldum.

“Önsöz” de gördük ki metin sahibi Jenny White 80 ihtilali öncesi bizzat Türkiye’de, Hacettepe Üniversitesinde bulunmuş bir sosyal antropolog(?). Böyle kritik bir dönemde bizzat Türkiye’de bulunması ve alanı beklentiyi kuvvetlendiriyor. Kitap ihtilal öncesi sağ, sol çatışması eksenine odaklanacak derken geniş kapsamlı, neredeyse günümüze uzanan bir özetle başlıyor. FETÖ ve PKK’dan dahi bahsediyor. 70’lerde yaşananlardan yola çıkarak bugünle ilgili çıkarımlar yapılabileceği iddiasında bulunuyor.

Kitap ihtilal öncesi farklı ideolojik kamplardan insanların Ankara’da yolları kesişmesi üzerine kurgulanmış. Neredeyse tüm kitap sağ sol çatışması dönemi üzerine kurulmuş. Önsözdeki daha geniş bakış, çıkarım iddiaları yetersiz kalmış. O döneme dair anlattıkları ise Türk okur için çok sıradan, yüzeysel ve klişe. Yabancı bir müellif ve İngilizce baskı ile yabancı okur hedefleniyor desek, onlar için de yeterince ilgi çekici mi doyurucu mu hiç emin olamıyorum. Bugünden bakışla ideolojik kamplaşmaların aksayan yönlerine, otoriterliklerine değinilmiş. Fakat dediğim gibi oldukça klişe. Sağcılar fazlasıyla sert ve şiddet yanlısı, solcular franksiyonlara bölünmüş, falan falan…

Bir süre sonra kitaptan aklımda çarpıcı bir şey kalacak mı pek sanmıyorum. “THERE WASN'T ANY JOY REALLY, THOUGH THERE WAS TALK OF BRIGHT HORIZONS, OF THE GLORIOLS FUTURE, SOCIALISM.
BUT IT WASN'T A SMILING THING.” cümlesi gözüme takılıyor bir yerde. Bu da öyle yer etmeyecek ama şimdi taze okuduk… İdeolojilerin, inançların, adanmışlıkların gerekli olduğunu düşünenlerdenim. Fakat din, fikir, yönetim her nevi sisteme dahil olursak olalım o joy/neşe hali kıymetli. Kuralsızlık, azgınlık, koşulsuz haz değil bahsettiğim. Bu sistemler, kendi çatıları içerisinde insanoğlunun “neşe”sine müsade etmeli be kardeşim :) Ki ancak böylesi payidar olacaktır.

Ve nihayet, finalde kısacık bir kaç sayfa içerisinde zamanı kaydırıp günümüze geldiği kısım yok mu… Gezi Olayları, yaş almış karakterlerimiz, onların nesilleri üzerinden çok tek kutuplu, oryantalist bir bakış açısı. Satır aralarında PKK ve FETÖ’ye dair ifadeleri ise klasik bir batılı yaklaşımı diyeyim, siz oradan anlayın… Hiç Türkiye’de bulunmasa herhalde böyle şeyler yazardı yine. Bazı şeyler hiç anlaşılmamış görünüyor. Yani böyle kuru, klişe bir okuma bu kadar tenkit bile gerektirmiyor aslında…

İlave: Karakterlerin Ankara’da buluşmasının hepsinin Hacettepe Tıp öğrencisi olması ile kurgulanmasına bir ufak tebessüm ettim. Çocukluğumdan beri o dönemle ilgili insanlardan, yakınlarından şu hikayeyi onlarca(!) defa dinlemişimdir; “Ben Hacettepe Tıp’ı kazanmıştım. Öğrenci olayları olduğu için gidemedim.” veya “Benim babam Hacettepe Tıpı kazanmış, ortalık karışık, büyük şehirler karışık diye dedemler göndermemiş.” Hepsinde hayatta bambaşka işler yapıyor bu arada. “Hepiniz mi Hacette Tıpı kazandınız kardeşim, yemeyin bizi” diye içimden geçirirdim. Böyle şeyler yaşanmıştır da bu kadar sık hikayenin bana ulaşması istatistik açısından biraz sallantılı geliyor :) Bu tespitimi hatırlatıp muzip muzip güldürdü beni.

[Ali]

A reasonably didactic, beautifully drawn, graphic novel covering a small group of students in Ankara in the 1970s and 1980s. A little understanding of history would help going in, as White's strength here is in evoking the sense of rapid change and semi chaos, perhaps sometimes at the expense of clarity. I very much enjoyed it though, and we have too few tests which cover what intense periods of social upheaval were like to those at the centre.

[Özge]

3.5 stars. I guess it is more for the foreign audience who doesn’t know anything about the 70s and 80s in Turkey. I found the story line a little bit confusing as it was jumping through the years to 70s and then 80s and it wasn’t obvious that the timelines were changing. Also the characters were very one dimensional, we didn’t understand why they made a certain decision besides they just read Marx or they were born into a nationalist conservative family. Obviously the author is an expert on Turkey but this book was way too simplistic

[Ar]

Turkish Kaleidoscope is a sociological study of sorts about the political scene in Turkish universities in the 1970's, written in English by an American academic who was a visiting student in Turkey back the 70's. She collaborated with a graphic artist to turn her interviews with survivors of the era into a graphic novel in order allow these personal accounts flow better and to avoid the stiffness of academic papers. The vignettes actually do a good job of establishing certain stereotypes of people and dynamics that marked the era.

As a graphic novel about coming of age in Turkey written in English it is perhaps reminiscent of Dare to Disappoint : Growing up in Turkey Paperback Ozge Samanci or as a personal account politics in people's lives one can even go to Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

I was a little kid in Turkey during this time. I have memories of my daily life being effected by street violence. For instance, everyday after school my mom took me to art and dance classes at the local Community Center (Kadikoy Halkegitim). I remember walking to my after school classes with much caution, watching for any signs of armed conflict, negotiating whether to proceed to the next block or turning the next corner. I remember panicking when my dad was slightly late to return from his work in Taksim, one of the liveliest parts of the Istanbul.

Being reminded of this sense of chaos, funny I think of my childhood and this era with nostalgia. I'm surprised that I largely felt peaceful and happy as a child. I guess the mind remembers what it wants to remember. Maybe it's a level of that conflict weariness that made our generation so apolitical and today we the country is in such state that we develop nostalgia for the good old days described in Turkish Kaleidoscope.

[Jesse]

Another reminder that good historians are not automatically good novelists. I love the idea of taking ignorant non-Turkish people back to a crucial period in the formation of the country's political climate, and I can go along with composite characters who are meant to convey experiences from different strands and strata of society, even though the experiences in question originally belonged to real people. But none of the characters come to life, mostly because they're so thinly imagined. One got to be a Marxist because of the books he read, so we duly see him reading a book. And so on. There's an endless quantity of political infighting, most violently between right and left but especially within the left, though none of the leftist groups' ideas are differentiated or even explained (we just get quasi-helpful footnotes reminding us of the 20-odd factions listed in the front of the book), and so, though I hate to say this, it reminds me most of Life of Brian, with the infighting between the Judean People's Front and its sworn enemy, the People's Front of Judea.

The right-wing groups are brutal and intolerant, the left-wing ones similarly so (their leaders are depicted as inflexible authoritarians), and though several characters enjoy glimmers of insight as to the applicability of orthodox Marxist categories, and both sides sporadically entertain the notion that there are people on the other side whose humanity may escape the slur of "fascist" or "communist," I didn't care enough about or feel connected to any individual character enough to feel much of anything. I'd probably learn just as much, if not more, from a straightforward historical retelling, which at least would tie everything that happened to specific stories.

[Vansa]

In 1975, Jenny White went to Turkey to study at Haceteppe University, unaware that there was a minor civil war going on that involved different left-wing factions and the conservative right wing. This graphic novel is a beautiful evocation of her experiences, told through multiple perspectives and incidents in the lives of 4 students. I was drawn to it because many aspects of Turkey’s 20th Century history are like my country’s. This is a very empathetic, but also objective look at a society trying to figure out where it belonged, after the death of a talismanic leader who held it together, and what it wanted to be. She shows you how the multiplicity of violent left-wing factions was self-defeating, but a difference of opinion is what defines liberalism, unfortunately it’s also what’s allowing conservatism, a monolith of uniform thought, to flourish. This book has issues that echo well into our present now, and deserves ore than one read.

[Ajk]

Its very short and very episodic in a way thats not bad per se but definitely isnt what i expected. It follows a few different young people in turkey’s tumultuous 1970s in a way that feels classroom-ready. It reminds me a lot of something like Jason Lutes’ Berlin trilogy, but with so much less space the characters are necessarily thinly drawn. I would love to read more about what actual life was like - not just the political meetings and brawls, but being young and dumb and thinking youre smart in ankara in 1977.

This sounds maybe overly negative, which i dont want to be. I really loved the visuals and the candid, nonexoticized, glimpse at these lives. I basically just wish there was more of it, which is probably less about the author than it is the editor and the necessities of editing a graphic novel that doesnt have broad interest in the states.

[Mark]

3.5 stars
This book gives a broad overview, through individual testimony & stories of their involvement in the various fractious & fractured student political movements in 1970s Turkey. Fractious is an absolute understatement, since the violence between political groups and from the police goes from false arrest & beatings to shootings on the streets, and in one case highlighted near the end of the book, on the beach.
The writing is disjointed, but that is driven by the various characters and their tales and very much by the many different rightist and leftist organisations featured throughout. If it wasn't for the violence, the multitude of almost-the-same group names, a la Monty Python's Life of Brian, would be funny...
Ergun Gunduz's art throughout is clear and mostly black and white; the sparing use of colour, with it's expansion beyond the 2000s is beautifully rendered.

[Matthew Petti]

Graphic novel about ordinary Turkish youth living through the Years of Lead, a late Cold War period of extreme violence and terrorism all across Europe. I finished it in a few hours.

The book has an interesting concept — the story of far-left and far-right students all caught up in a web of violence — but the execution isn't great. Its storyline, which jumps backwards and forwards in time, is hard to follow; its dialogue feels stilted.

I do like how the book humanizes everyone, including religious conservatives, and shows how confusing all the turmoil was. Overall, it does a good job getting across the message, which is that political violence is a senseless game that sucks in innocent people.

[Min]

Ease of Reading: 3✨
Characters: 2✨
Plot: 2✨
Overall: 2✨

Format: Graphic Novel
Month Read: Feb 2022
Recommend: No

I wanted to like this more than I did. I saw this in the library and being half Turkish but knowing very little about Turkish history I instantly picked it up. Its also my first graphic novel (bar Simpsons comics when I was younger...).

I didn’t feel like I learnt much apart from some overarching facts about the time period and the characters were quite flat. I definitely would try a novel on this time period and also further graphic novels on other things as I’m intrigued.

Honestly the most informative interesting part of the book was the introduction.

[Evan]

This is very good and represents a labor of love and understanding that belies most accounts—though part of the book's value is the fact that so few works have actually addressed this turbulent period. If I had one complaint—and it's an unfair one—it's that it wasn't long enough. One yearns to dive so much deeper into these characters' past lives and personas, and to learn what came of them. But the scenes in Istanbul toward the end are wonderful, one riveting revelation in particular. As good an introduction and overview of this period as any other I've come across.

[Kim Shively]

Graphic novels are becoming more and more popular in academic circles - I use them in several of my courses. This novel provides a more visceral sense of the political conflict and resulting street violence that plagued Turkey in the 1970s. I would recommend reading this in one or two sittings (it is a quick read) since it can be hard to keep track of the characters.

[Pat]

The intentions are more interesting than the result.
If you have little knowledge already then this book will leave you still confused due to all the different groups and their goals. Another issue was the page count at only a 116 pages it meant it was far too condensed.
The artwork was clear and easy to follow which was a major plus.

[ehk2]

Jenny White simply distorts the history. I guess, in order to appear to be impartial between two sides, she makes up a "Revolutionary Morality Police" with the abb DAZ. Ok, the leftwing attitudes to women nd morality still had patriarchal sides in those days but there was no such "organization" which beated people on streets because they walked side by sides with the opposite gender.

[Seha Ozgur]

I like the introduction (an essay), and the idea of tge book. However, it is too simple and does not do justice to the interwoven stories. It would have been a great novel, documentary or a movie.

[Dale]

A very interesting graphic "novel" depiction of Turkey in the 70's. Not really a novel as a depiction of oral histories from that time from both sides of the political divide.

[Liam Miles]

3.5. Tries it's best to tie together a lot of different experiences but its brevity leaves it all a bit vague and confused.

[Aurora]

True to its name, it was very chaotic. I often had trouble following the plot.

[Nesi Altaras]

Weirdly equating both sides and complaining abstractly of polarization, not engaging with the content of conflict of the 70s. The connection to the present is tenuous and confused