Adana in the early 1970s, under martial law. A night in autumn, still relentlessly hot. Humid fumes pass for air, the only profusion to be found is in the crowded rooms and the liveliest place is the police station. This is how our night starts. Most of it will be spent in various forms of incarceration.

The novel Dawn [Şafak], written by Sevgi Soysal and published in 1975 unfolds in three parts and dissects the various manifestations of such imprisonment. Most of the twelve hours which it documents takes physical place in a police station, alternating between a cell and an interrogation room. Before we get there we must witness the farcical police raid of a rakı table at an Alevi textile worker’s home to round up the suspects. Once inside the station, we move between internal dialogues of all participants in the police game, fragmented recollections of their previous moments of hurt. As much as a stark critique of the prison administration, police, fascism, and the repressive state it is therefore also an examination of the imprisonment of the mind, the different forms which estrangement may take and the perplexing question of freedom.

Oya, our protagonist who is loosely based on Soysal herself, is serving out an exile sentence in Adana. The police raid forces a moment of rupture, "abandoning her to a self she’d too long taken for granted, a centre that could no longer hold". But the raid is less an Event in a Badiou sense – a rupture to the dominant order that allows invisible truths to become evident. What follows is a series of staged encounters of various figures in relation to that order, and their meandering inquiries of it. She contemplates the collection of peculiar strangers with whom she’s sharing the fateful night. Mustafa, a mathematics teacher who was released from Selimiye Prison as a political inmate the previous day, Hüseyin, a young lawyer and former member of the old Workers’ Party with the look of a "provincial playboy", their Uncle Ali, a worker and CHP supporter, "half child, half old man" with the body of a worker, but the face of an intellectual. Later we meet her interrogator, Zekai Bey, a petulant and self-important man desperate for status, whose "only aim in life is to put himself in situations that allow him to forget". Her gaze blends with that of an omniscient narrator. The more their gaze circles them, the more the subjects seem to recede further from view.

Writing in Indefinite Detention, Judith Butler describes how ‘legal fictions’ such as Kafka’s The Trial worked to close the gap between law and violence.

Fiction can articulate the operations of legal violence if only because legal violence makes a fiction of the justice of law. But the two senses of fiction are not the same: one shows the lie, and the other offers a perspective on the temporal and spatial structures by which that seizure of mind and body takes places, establishing a narrative distance from within that seizure, like an elusive body compressed into words, uncaptured[1] 

This ‘uncapturing’ is traced by Soysal in the movements between the different voices and their internal dialogues, as she lays bare their circular reasonings in their different justifications between means and ends – between justifying what decisions they will make, and choosing justifications for decisions already made. These are parts of endless calculations in which their final actions sometimes emerge like the bullet of a Russian roulette game – unpredictable and fatal.

Oya is "carrying her fears, frail and small, on her back", questioning herself and her political integrity. The dinner is a rare moment of freedom she allows herself at the end of her internal exile. It is a peaceful gathering, devoid of explicit politics on the one hand; a reminder that the act of sharing a table with strangers is political on the other. Clumsily interrupted by the police. A string of interrogation scenes follows, concise, stark, at times almost hallucinatory, dealt with by Soysal in sharp and unforgiving humour. The concerns of everyone laid out like a pack of cards. The raid is a dud ["first they told us to do the raid, and then they lost interest ... What did you hear, god damn it?” one police officer asks the other. “One of them…one of them was talking about the bourgeoisie, sir…”]. But it, and its alleged criminality, is not important. It merely sets the scene for the imposition of power and a certain hierarchy of society.

These men knew how to put a doubt into a person’s mind. Their aim was to shake you up. Because that’s what a single doubt can do: at a time when you need to have all your wits about you, it shakes you up.

Oya and Mustafa are interrogated by Zekai with what he describes as “reasoning” – a mixture of deluded raving and physical violence. By dawn, the prisoners have been released. Oya is left "counting her doubts", turning over in her mind how to re-engage with life. Mustafa escapes Adana to "mend his shattered life". The largest material injustice is suffered by Ali, the worker and host of the meal, who is docked three days pay when he arrives at work late, his eyes puffy from the police beatings.

What were the temporal and spatial structures in which Dawn was located? Loosely based on Sevgi Soysal’s own arrest(s) in the wake of 12 March 1971 coup, the narrative marks the increasingly harsh political climate of the ensuing months and years of crackdowns on the left. Martial law was in effect in ten provinces, denunciations of ‘informant citizens’ plagued the streets, and ceaseless detentions and prosecutions created an atmosphere of suspicion and uneasiness. It is estimated that between 1970 and 1980 more than 5,000 people died in politically motivated violence in the country. Soysal’s first imprisonment came on the charge of not carrying an ID which reflected her new husband’s surname, for which she spent 27 days in Yıldırım District Women's Ward. Shortly after, she returned for 8 months on trumped-up charges of insulting the military.

Her prison memoirs, Yıldırım District Women's Ward published in 1976, a year after Dawn, describe with great clarity the relations between politics, the spokespersons of different factions and the daily practices of individual imprisoned women. She details the intimate routines of female militants and revolutionaries, as well as well-known names of the socialist movement such as Behice Boran, the former leader of the Workers' Party of Turkey, and Gülay Özdeş, one of the founders of the People's Liberation Army of Turkey (THKO). Her account is an open testimony of torture and sexual violence and a sharp mockery of the militaristic ideology to ‘keep in line’.  

'Ready, align!' in the counting, 'Ready, align!' in the air, 'Ready, align!' when going to get money, 'Prepare, align!' when going to the doctor. Align!', while going to court, 'Get ready, align!', while going to have a bath, 'Get ready, align!'. But, like everything out of measure, this readiness has lost its effect on us. Who can align our hearts and minds? Who can keep them to attention? This is what matters.

The publication of Dawn (1975) and Yıldırım (1976) in quick succession present two different registers through which Soysal publicly translated her prison experiences – one in memoir form and one through narrative fiction. The difference between them might echo something similar to artist Nil Yalter’s 1974 Paris-based installation La Roquette, Prison de Femmes[2] which presents the testimony of a former occupant of France’s women’s prison. Her work consists of grids of panels containing monochrome images and handwritten texts which describe the routines and rituals of incarceration. One panel tells how the prisoners ate pictures of salads and chicken snipped from recipe magazines. Photographic images are displayed on one side, translated into clunky, childlike drawings on the other. Critic Gabriel Coxhead describes how

Even more jarring are the occasional moments where the accompanying texts bizarrely repeat across successive panels, like a sort of narrative stutter or glitch. Gradually, the sense develops of some kind of semiological slippage having occurred, of the usual workings of signification fraying at the edges – so that signs sometimes get treated as things; and conversely, things become signs, as when the prisoners write messages in pen across their bodies.[3]

In one respect, Dawn is a drawn out examination of this slippage – the ‘elusive body ... uncaptured’ in Butler’s term. Varying meanings can be attributed to the interior meanderings and words of the interrogation subjects. Elusive glitches accumulate across the page. They are apparent in the cracks of the heaving police bureaucracy and its hopeless human enactors, the struggles of individuals as they question the meaning and stakes of their political ideals, the estrangement in human relationships which open up as people seek their own refuge from the punitive law. One of the central questions running through the text – where did betrayal begin and end? – is directed less at a specific subject (although all characters are asking it of each other) than at society and the state itself. Here is Mustafa, thoughts whirring as he strategizes how best to navigate his interrogation

Here he is, giving substance to their very idea of crime. And what does that mean? It means that we too are slowly coming to accept ourselves as guilty on their terms. That it’s a crime to have done something. That innocence is to have done nothing. Since when did we start thinking the struggle was a crime, and doing nothing was innocence and brilliance? He’s all knotted up inside. Is he beginning to weaken?

These dialogues set up critical encounters with various ambiguities of the mind, caught between manipulation, competing interpretations, confusion – never committing fully to one. In doing so they make the point that the glitches and ‘uncapturings’ are not so much a question of representation or perspective(s), but embedded within the working of the law itself – in the psychological and physical forms of police violence. In his analysis of legal violence, Walter Benjamin argues that there is a structural similarity between legal and mythical violence and the uncertainty generated in the legal sphere “makes [law] all the more threatening, like fate”.[4] The elusive glitch is present in the abyss between regulated procedure and spontaneous enforcement. It emerges in the intertwined sets of relations between legal codes, bureaucratic apparatuses and the power games of individual state officers.

A narrative fiction account offers not only an insight into the strained articulations of the concerns of individuals, but an insight into the workings of this ‘mythical’ violence of the law – in which power is imposed through precarious decisions, operating seemingly like opaque fate. By detailing the circular psychological tests imposed in the interrogation, Soysal demonstrates how law is enforced using the bluntest of instruments – the insecure and power-seeking human. She documents how such ambiguity emerges within particular extra-legal spaces, mediated by the various terms through which different individuals are dispossessed.  This dispossession emerges within the textures through which the law might be pushed and manipulated for various political ends. Here, for example, is the opinion of Turgut Sabuncu Bey, owner of Mediterranean Industries, "refined and well-mannered", respected for his charity work, responding to claims that his workers’ strike is lawful. 

Who’s in charge of the law, I ask. Think about it. Who’s the law for? They say they [the workers] have rights under law! There’s only one law. The law we know. The law that guarantees the social and economic order. How can a law be a law if it stands against that order? ... Since when is the law meant to work for all?

Turgut Bey’s anger is directed towards Zekai Bey – which leads him, in turn, to beat up an Arab man guilty of smuggling cigarettes in frustration at being continually rejected by the bounds of class. As much as the Arab man is being beaten by the hands of the police, he is also being beaten by the hands of class power. The lapse of Zekai Bey’s control is part of the ‘elusive’ body, ‘uncaptured’ through which legal violence can manifest, rooted in particular relations and circumstances.

But as much as Dawn is an account of practices of domination, simultaneously, it is also a cognitive mapping of freedom – in which freedom is tied in complicated ways to these multiple forms of violence and their potential chains, and glitches emerge in the distinction between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. After their release, Oya contemplates a downcast Mustafa, with his eyes on the road.

He’s like her: thrashing about, looking for something to cling to. Trying not to drown. Liberty is so much more than that, and so much nobler. While he and I – we’re both still fighting for our lives ...  Each in our own way. It’s not such a relief then, to have been set free.

Liberty, life, freedom. Soysal takes seriously each, and takes seriously their infinite complications. She carefully teases out the competing concepts of freedom which shape the relationships and decisions of various people within this particular city on this particular night of the year. She demonstrates how freedom does not emerge from the spaces of resistance in clean or inevitable ways and various glitches emerge in its manifestation. It is rather within the dialectic between freedom and violence, within the messiness of human entanglements, that Soysal grounds her political vision – as something at once incomprehensible to an individual gaze, yet also not fully satisfied by the collapsing together of individual struggles.

This is an account about how, not why. About how certain actions are made legible in the spaces of violence, and others are not. Soysal takes seriously the act of storytelling – both in its potential to reproduce violence, and to disrupt it. She shows us both how certain narratives can be coded in place, through force or manipulation, in order to be made legible before the law. Simultaneously she reveals the narratives which other people tell, both to themselves and to others, and remains wary of how an authoritative narrative can flatten complicated experiences through the use of an apparently collective social vocabulary. Dawn is not an attempt to collapse the multiple experiences of police violence, but to share, exchange and question them. The violence of the imposition of the law is shown to lie between its narrative fiction and narrative fantasy – in which the limits of the two are constantly shifting. As such, her storytelling is an explicitly political document, part of the active struggle to transform the architectures of legal violence and the conditions that enable and disable particular ways of using and producing knowledge for violent ends.

Today, in a different conjuncture, Turkey has the highest incarceration rate among Council of Europe member states and the sixth highest in the world, with 326,960 inmates (including pre-trial detainees) in September 2022 – a 9.2 percent increase from the previous year. Since 2005, the imprisonment rate has risen fourfold from 80 to 371 (per 100,000 population). According to İHD İstanbul Chair Gülseren Yoleri, around 15-20 percent of this number are arrested for political reasons, often under arbitrary sentencing, imprisoned for longer periods and subjected to harsher conditions. Spaces of incarceration should also include the black holes of migrant removal centres and the police stations, which can also be sites of extrajudicial murder. These are the places where the unwanted and the dispossessed of society are held, helping to create excess ‘surplus’ populations vulnerable to disposability and abandonment. It is not possible to write about the subject of incarceration and freedom in an abstract sense, without calling attention to the concrete realities of thousands of political prisoners who remain un-free and behind bars. In the context of incarceration, freedom is not a subject of theoretical reflection for those with the luxury of being outside the prison gates, but of political action to emancipate those innocently held inside.

Albeit writing in a different political moment, Sevgi Soysal remains a helpful guide today for shifting our attention away from the prison as an isolated institution to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex. In her positioning, society itself is a form of incarceration, trapping its members in various forms of subordination. In this sense, it is possible to read together Soysal’s perspective in conversation with that of the anti-prison movements being practiced by her contemporaries in 1970s America and France, who drew connections between interlinked processes of domination and the complexity and the mobility of punitive and exploitative social relations which form the foundations of a carceral state. As Martina Tazzioli writes in her essay Producing the Intolerable, while these movements fore-grounded and challenged different aspects of carcerality, specific to their particular socio-political conditions, they nevertheless shared commonalities in the articulation of their claims.[5] In particular, she argues that the production of collective counter-knowledge about the carceral system played a major role in both anti-prison mobilisations. In France, The Prison Information Group (GIP), which included scholars Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze, aimed at building up transversal alliances between those inside and those outside the jail through amplifying the struggles happening within the prisons’ walls. The formation of the group in December 1970 coincided with the large number of Algerian citizens being held in French prisons and the conjuncture of movements including ‘the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes’; the ‘Front Homosexual d’Action Révolutionnaire’; and the student and workers’ revolt of May ‘68’. In the US, there was a more particular connection between abolitionist groups, socialist claims and anti-racist movements which was specific to the US context of the time – the politics and activities of the Black Panther Movement in particular. But anti-prison movements there also emphasised the importance of producing and distributing collective counter-knowledge about the carceral system – the prison letters of Angela Davis and George Jackson played a large role in channelling information about the realities of prison. Situating Sevgi Soysal within this international lineage of knowledge production restores her radical critical voice. Her writings, both in memoir and narrative form, about the workings of legal violence, the police and the realities of life in prison, are active political productions. By showing the mutual entanglements between imprisonment and other forms of class and socially produced subordination, she demonstrates how the production of criminality emerges within the existing contours of an unequal society. Moreover, by writing publicly about these entanglements her work was an active part of the counter-knowledge production in Turkey.

The work of the 1970s anti-prison movements in the US and France provides an important geneaology for the abolitionist politics being theorised today. For American scholar and activist Ruth Gilmore Wilson, abolition is a dialectical, not sentimental proposition, grounded in a geographic, historical and materialist sensibility. It emerges from sets of relationships which are rooted against any one-dimensional conception of what liberation demands, who demands it, or what indeed is to be abolished.[6] Tracing Soysal’s perspective into the current conjuncture in Turkey similarly asks us to question how new forms of criminal production are being realised, in which individuals are being made increasingly ‘illegal’ because of their politics, their class, their nationality, their sexuality and, increasingly, racialised identities. These are not isolated concerns, but intimately connected to the question of social marginalisation and labour subordination. A liberation which resists practices of domination is therefore not the privileged monopoly of singular events, heroic figures or spectacular manifestations but is rather intimately and collectively quotidian, recognising the inter-connected nature of social struggles and their insidious manifestation in everyday life.

According to Achille Mbembe’s famous definition, necropolitics represents the ‘forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’, in which death is instrumentalised by the ruling class, and dead bodies become the tool of politics.[7] As Banu Bargu points out in the volume Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory, his conception "enables us to theorise the new modalities and techniques of political violence that take life into its fold, not only but inflicting death but also by actively undermining, disabling, displacing forms of life that create living deaths".[8] This moves the emphasis from the binary between life and death to the focus on what forms of life are made possible. If necropolitics is broadly about the various tools used to create debilitating holds over life, Dawn and Sevgi Soysal’s broader politics, asks the question of what life is– whose, how, why, under what terms. She navigates the uncomfortable space in which any subject – freedom, death, resistance – can be turned into an ideology of superiority and dominance and tries to understand them, instead, in terms of their practice. Writing in Yıldırım District Women's Ward she criticizes the tendency to glorify death or martyrdom, and the replacement of critical thinking by superstition ("We are not Christians who sharpen their faith by increasing their pain."). As Hülya Yıldız notes, in contrast to the memoirs written by male authors of the time, where being able to stand long hours of torture was coded as heroism, Yıldırım reveals the pain of torture without romanticising it and highlights the collective material and affective support other women show to tortured bodies.[9] Soysal turns her attention instead to moments of tenacity, joy, anger – never afraid to criticise nor empathise, and always alert to forms of alignment demanded by societal expectations of domestic life, gender relationships and political organising. At times such a positioning seems contradictory in its practice, particularly in her building of emotional relationships while keeping distance from sentimental judgement. But her humour and mockery create an excess, a refusal to remain within the comfortable grounds of familiarity while simultaneously acting as a tool to puncture the multiplication of hierarchies produced by the carceral state.

How can we read the elusive ‘glitches’ which Dawn documents in relation to the ‘debilitated’ forms of life which legal and structural violence can produce? Are these glitches moments of destruction, production or displacement? Do they work to reinforce the mythical ‘fate’ of the law? Or do they obliterate the existing parameters of life and thus provide the potential for an alternative? Dawn helps to recast such glitches, and the ambiguous possibilities they hold, not as peripheral accidental moments but central both to the workings of violence and resistance to it. Soysal’s various levels of interrogation probe at the painful spaces of subjectification which emerge in the interstices of power – always partial, provisional and emerging within very specific relationships. But while sensitive to the neurosis inflicted by society on individuals, she doesn’t let anybody, least of all herself, off the hook.

The dilemmas and practices of freedom are sometimes harder to confront than a simple resistance to power, and contain their own forms of estrangement and inequality. Dawn ends with the reflections of Oya, grappling with the questions brought by the coming morning light.

Unless they can all live together in freedom, she will remain with them, behind bars. If she doesn’t, she’ll have only tricked herself into believing that this eye is really winking, and that she’s truly free.

Still winking at us, in mischief, in complicity, and solidarity, Soysal leaves a residual question and the shadow of a different interpretation. Individual freedom can be deceptive, and will be permanently elusive unless sought together with others. But it can also provide the grounds for different ways of seeing, imagining and resisting. A glitch or a wink reminds us that we must never give up looking, again and again, for the endless moments of possible rupture.

NOTES:

[1] Judith Butler, Indefinite Detention. Qui Parle 29: 1, June 2020, pp. 23

[2] Produced in collaboration with Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset

[3] Gabriel Coxhead, Nil Yalter, ArtReview,  17 June 2015. 

[4] Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence. In Bullock M and Jennings MW (ed) Selected Writings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1996): 242

[5] Martina Tazzioli, ‘Producing the intolerable: Anti-prison struggles, abolitionist genealogies.’ Radical Philosophy 213 (2022), pp. 66–76

[6] Ruth Gilmore Wilson. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso Books (2022)

[7] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 11-40

[8] Banu Bargu, Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Notes towards an Investigation. In Banu Bargu (ed.) Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democray, Violence and Resistance. Edinburgh University Press (2019) pp, 4-5

[9] Hülya Yıldız, Freedom in Confinement: Women’s Prison Narratives and the Politics of Possibility. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 60:2, 2019