Introduction by Suzy Hansen

After the 1971 coup in Turkey, the military generals who had deposed the government declared martial law and took to radio and TV to read out lists of names. They were the names of so-called fugitives conspiring against the state, most of them leftists. “These manhunts were like a horror film,” Sevgi Soysal writes, but “at the other end of the spectrum were the silly arrests”. Everyone from the café owner who cheated his customers to the “bar girl who refused to lower her price” were disappeared into prison. Soysal, a 35-year-old novelist, socialist, feminist, and mother of one, had been with a friend who screamed “Enough!” while fighting with his fiancée – and this “enough” was enough for the police. (She was also accused of not carrying her identity card.)

Soysal was jailed in Ankara’s Mamak prison for nine months. Her prison diaries recount how the absurd became macabre, how the military’s persistent effort to annihilate the left would leave its survivors shredded and decaying, a parallel country of living dead. Originally published in Turkish in 1976, the book was translated into English by Maureen Freely two years later, but it remained unpublished until now. Yildirim Bölge Women’s Prison is forthcoming from Archipelago Books in 2027.

Soysal is one of Turkey’s great chroniclers of the Cold War. Her four novels were written in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the intellectual and political efflorescence that followed the establishment of the 1961 liberal constitution gave rise to a tempest of radical leftist movements – from the socialists to the Marxist-Leninists to the Maoists to the Guevarists, all of whom denounced American influence – who battled the Grey Wolves, an ultranationalist militia that flashed sinister hand signals in the shape of a wolf’s ears. More powerful than both groups were the Turkish military, the Counter-Guerilla Agency, and the CIA – all fearful of the supposed communist threat to one of Washington’s most strategically important allies. Soysal’s Turkey is a country with empty jeeps on every street that in the evenings fill “with dark heads” as well as “faces hidden behind newspapers”, submachine guns and barbed wire.

Freely, who also grew up in this milieu, is an astute observer of the Cold War herself. As an American, she was trapped on the wrong side, but she witnessed and shared the pain of the outcasted and disappeared. Her spellbinding novels Sailing to Byzantium, Enlightenment and The Life of the Party capture Istanbul shrouded in mystery and menace, military ships gliding like sharks through the Bosphorus and shady Americans claiming to be “businessmen.” She has translated some of Orhan Pamuk’s most famous works and, in recent years, has also resurrected for a wider audience some of Turkey’s most eminent writers, many of them dissidents: Sait Faik Abasıyanık, Tezer Özlü, Fethiye Çetin, Sabahattin Ali and Soysal.

These diaries begin on a darkly comic note. “Who can I ask to bring me some other clothes?” Soysal wonders. “My husband is also in prison. Suddenly my troubles gain a new dimension. Damn! What will Mümtaz do now?” (Mümtaz Soysal, a well-known professor and magazine editor, had been arrested for distributing communist propaganda. At university, he taught Mahir Çayan, the leader of the militant People’s Party-Front of Turkey.)

Soysal finds herself living among many luminaries of the left, such as Behice Boran, a prominent leader of the Turkish Worker’s Party; Oya Baydar, a socialist novelist; and Sevim Onursal, an artist and safehouse-keeper aligned with Deniz Gezmiş, the leader of the armed Marxist-Leninist People’s Liberation Army of Turkey, whose members trained at PLO camps, robbed a bank, burned the car of the US ambassador and pushed American servicemen into the sea.

In the barracks, the atmosphere of Girls, Interrupted prevails at first: “Pandemonium reigns in the prison …The girls are jumping from bed to bed, having pillow fights, cooking secret meals, playing tag.” They do a lot of covert knitting and dub the place “Yildirim Finishing School”; they make fun of their jailers, as well as each other: “Now that they’ve shut down your party, you’re finally able to relax,” says one leftist to another. Later, they will fight over whether to stage a hunger strike: “In any case you’re a pacifist. You’ll always betray us like this,” goes one accusation. After a bittersweet visitor’s day – “we’re like marionettes whose strings have been snipped” – Behice Boran sings a folk song: “Oh soldier, we are socialists, it is only us, we’re your friends.”

Soysal is imprisoned twice. By her second internment, the situation has deteriorated; the barracks are freezing when she arrives. The authorities are searching for Mahir Çayan, who had assassinated the Israeli consul-general and broken out of Maltepe prison. After a furious manhunt, he is caught at Kızıldere, alongside eight fellow guerillas and three kidnapped NATO technicians, all of whom died in the gunfight. His fellow revolutionary Gezmiş and two others were later hanged by the state.

In that period, the barrack beds and floors become broken and filthy; many women become sick. New inmates arrive having been severely tortured; among the methods are electric shocks, falaka (foot whipping), and rape by truncheon. “You can mold your thoughts and discipline your mind so that it travels only in directions you’ve ordained for it,” Soysal writes, with characteristically thoughtful restraint. “But to train your body to follow your direction requires much more effort.” She was spared the worst in prison, but died of cancer just five years after her release. She was 40.

Four years later, in 1980, Turkey suffered another military coup. This time, the generals imprisoned or detained some 600,000 people and executed 50, both leftists and rightists, agitators and bystanders. The state’s next war would be against the Kurds.

The enormous vacuum created by the defeat of Turkey’s organized left arguably allowed for the rise and popularity of a new, seemingly democratic movement. At the turn of the century, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AK Party pilfered the language of human rights and solidarity; it promised, among other things, to improve prison conditions. But by 2016, after the country’s fifth attempted military coup, it was Erdoğan’s government, rather than the military, that issued the lists. Hundreds of thousands were arrested, including many women. Ten years later, many still languish in jail.

The Deputy’s Wife

I don’t like sunsets. I take them personally. It is as if the sun is using all its strength to press against my body and crush my soul, leaving me no choice but to follow it into the darkness. My dread lingers until night has truly fallen.

Out in the open you can pretend that sun and earth meet at the horizon, even though you know perfectly well that if you could reach there, the sun would appear just as distant. Perhaps it is this simple truth that leaves us feeling bereft.

Melancholy. That empty feeling overcomes me when I contemplate the smallness of man in the vastness of the universe.

By the seashore or on the open plains, dusk can sometimes come and go without affecting me. Nature has a way of making human problems drift away. But if I am indoors, or shut up somewhere, everything that brightened my day seems to disappear with the sun. That is why I prefer to spend the early evening in crowded places, ideally talking with others, not listening to my own voice.

When the iron door slammed shut on us the first time, I realised that sunsets in Yıldırım Bölge would be far more depressing than any I had known. Yet this was the place where I finally learned to overcome my evening depressions.

Oya sleeps in the bunk directly opposite mine. Her bed is very neat because she brought sheets from home. Like hers, Sevim Onursal’s and Naciye’s beds are covered in clean, carefully ironed cambric sheets, which immediately distinguishes them from the others. The rest of us make do with the standard army issue calico. The material is so poor that our beds never look neat or clean.

Oya has Sadun Aren’s Money, Banks, and Employment propped on her knees. She is taking notes as she reads.

Sema Karagözoğlu, the Ortadoğu student who was arrested for her part in the Dev-Genç affair, is giving the teachers an English lesson. Her husband, alongside mine, Mümtaz, are housed in the same barracks inside Mamak Prison. The two of us write from our prison to theirs. Imprisoned husbands and wives are legally entitled to visit each other every once in a while. But who respects the law around here?

Sema is tall, blonde, strong and muscular. She played basketball as a student, is an athletic girl. Having also been very athletic in my youth, I am highly conscious of the body’s strengths and weaknesses. We both do as much exercise as possible during our outdoor breaks.

Inside, Sema is restless and irritable. She speaks before she thinks, like a typical Dev-Genç student from those days before 12 March. She can lose her temper in an instant – and brighten up just as fast. Before you even register that she’s angry, she’s disrespected Behice Hanım in the true sense of the word. But spend time with her and you will learn that she has a good heart.

Now she’s breaking her back with the English lessons. Her good intentions are rapidly giving way to impatience. The girl’s ears, like most Anatolian ears, are firmly closed to foreign sounds. As they fail to make progress, she starts swearing at them. But the teachers don’t defer to her as they would to Oya, or to Behice Hanım. They consider themselves her equals.

Sema gives up on teaching and, ignoring the demands of quiet hour, leads them in English songs instead. Their singing grows louder and louder.

Oya rattles her bunk. “Come on, sister! It’s quiet hour, remember?” She drops her book and stretches out face down on her bed.

I get down from my bunk and go over to pay her a visit, if only to conquer my evening depression. I touch her shoulder. “Can I come and sit with you?”

Once Oya’s anger has passed, we put a few spoonfuls of Oralet into two glasses and fill them with water from the tap. Making sure the girls don’t see us – or Behice or Naciye Hanım, for that matter – we sprinkle in a few drops of cologne.

I gingerly arrange myself on her sweet-smelling bed. Slowly we sip our cocktails. I feel good, sitting face to face with Oya and talking.

My depression passes. Were I not in prison, it might have been worse. And to cope I would probably have wandered the streets like an idiot, for want of anything better to do. Whereas here I am in the company of people I love. No, I don’t feel lonely here, not even at sunset.

Sevim Onursal joins our party. She tells us she has some nuts stashed away. Her bunk is the next one along; I remember a solitary apple hanging from its iron frame and, at its foot, a large photograph of a teenage boy. He has blueberry eyes and blond hair like his mother. “My son,” Sevim says. Once again, I think of my own son, who on 12 March was taken away from me. But it’s no use getting depressed. At times like this it is better to think of the things I am still able to do for him.

I discuss the whole thing with Oya. Our chat makes me feel better again. I pick up her knitting and do one or two loops. She had thought I was only pretending to be bad at knitting, but when she sees I was telling the truth we both laugh. The laughter spreads from bed to bed until everyone in the barracks has joined in. That’s one of the best things about this place: sharing pain as well as joy, sharing everything, learning to share with pleasure.

The Cake

The arrests continue in quick succession. Torture succeeds in breaking the spirit of the people. Bravery is not enough. Integrity, confidence, defiance and courage – all crumbles to nothing in the face of torture. It is a vicious arc that you cannot break it single-handed, no matter how many virtues you possess. No, only crowds can break this vicious cycle, which feeds on the weaknesses of those same crowds, rendering them ever weaker.

Imagine a whirlpool that sucks every living thing around it into its center and swallows them alive. Torture was such a whirlpool. The torturers were after a handful of revolutionaries, but in order to pull them into the whirlpool, they had to pull in – no, devour – the entire city of Ankara. How could anyone hope to triumph over the almighty whirlpool single-handed?

One by one they draw us in, leaving us to sink or hurl about like scum. One by one they tear us from our roots, our families, our lives. Until every single person who might have helped the fugitives has been sucked into the center.

It’s no accident that harboring fugitives is treated as the most heinous crime. They want to ensure that no one dares to take fugitives into their homes, or even provide them the most basic help. To punish the militants and their alliance with equal severity: this is an old and well-known tactic, with a record of success all over the world. Punish even casual passersby in the name of fighting militancy, and thus isolate the militants from the people.

They’d begun to detain fugitives’ close relatives. Şaffet Alp’s wife, Nazan, Mahir’s friend Ülker, and the Kurdish girl, Serdane – they are all brought into our prison, which is more tense than ever. Even jokes are out of the question now. We couldn’t laugh if we tried. Quiet hour is forgotten. Reading becomes impossible. Those of us who cannot find a way to relax sing marching songs or walk laps around the long table so as to escape the oppressive atmosphere.

One after another, friends arrive – degraded, bruised, squeezed like lemons – from the torture chambers of the Counter-Guerrilla Agency. Türkân and I prepare beds for the newcomers. We do our best to shake the spare mattresses and blankets clean of soot. We try to arrange the beds so that they’re equidistant from the stove. The effort leaves Türkân breathless. The hunger strike has weakened her. She lies face down on her bed. It is clear she is thinking of her friends.

“Being in prison is horrible, a disaster,” Türkân keeps saying. She would give anything to be outside, fighting side by side with her friends. Here she only bites her lips and awaits the bad news.

In the early days following her arrest, Türkân liked to chatter. Of late she’s mostly been silent, either lost in thought or memorising Ahmed Arif’s poems. Now she repeats a line of his: “My visitor brought me fresh spring onions… ” Then, like a mechanical toy wound too tight, she springs from her bed and runs around the room, singing marching songs, until she tires.

Ülker has washed her long, light brown hair. I can understand why she finds it so important to do this over and over. She feels as if so much filth has penetrated her skin that she will never be able to rub it off entirely. They took her straight from the office where she worked to the place of torture. They were elated to learn that Mahir was her fiancée, as if they’d caught the man himself. They tortured her in that same spirit of celebration. There is no need to recount the familiar horrors they enacted to this young, slim girl with a thin face.

What’s the address? What’s the address? Where is the Mahir gang? Where? But Ülker has no idea. The Mehir gang are not in Ankara.

I am braiding Ülker’s long, light brown hair. She grows angry as she remembers all the things she had to live through – as well as the way another prisoner criticised her behavior.

“She never stops jabbering about how important it is not to break under torture. How can she know? She never had to go through it.”

“I don’t think you have to have been tortured to understand that under these circumstances it’s impossible not to break under torture,” I say.

“I didn’t want to break… I wasn’t supposed to break…”

Ülker is so thin that you half expect her to float away. Apparently, she refused to eat the food they gave her between torture sessions. She said that from time to time the soldiers posted at the door would shout: “They even give them food! Why don’t they just throw them in front of the firing squad and be done with it?”

“I only drank water. I was incredibly thirsty all the time. Apparently electric shocks do this to you.”

“Forget the whole thing,” I say, “Forget it.”

“How can I, sister, how can I?”

“You can’t.”

“You don’t know how they degraded me… If it had just been torture, I could have stood it… but they did such ugly things, they swore at me in such ugly ways. They degraded me so much.”

“Only according to their own dirty rules. Rules that aren’t your own can hurt you, but they can never degrade you.”

Ülker buries her head in her knees. Her shoulders shake.

Hüriye is at the bedside, cradling a cup of tea. Her eyes shine with the compassion only found among those who know life well.

“Why didn’t you stand up to them?” the law student had asked Ülker – a question that seems to have affected her as much or more than the torture.

“Don’t let what that parrot said bother you,” I say. “After all, the superman philosophy is a fascist philosophy.”

Ülker calms down.

“Sister, can you believe it? The thing they beat me for most was the cake.”

One day, Ülker had taken the Mahir gang cake, thinking that something sweet would help them after so much running around. When she admitted this to the torturers, they beat her with a club.

“You whore! You even gave them cake!”

You can see why they beat her with such vengeance. Here they were, bending over backward to ensure that a terrorised populace would not help the Mahir gang, and there was Ülker, a thin little political science student, bringing the fugitives cake.

If Marie Antoinette deserved extra punishment for suggesting that the breadless masses eat cake, didn’t Ülker deserve the torturer’s wrath for taking cake to the nation’s most wanted men? The image of a girl bringing them cake – and the image of them enjoying it –contradicts their own image, of fugitives trembling in a corner. How better to express your indifference to the state hounding you than by enjoying a piece of cake?

Tension

It’s the beginning of May. The weather is warmer now. Spring stands for life, for energy, but the hopeless spring of ’72 is more like a death sentence. And for us the word spring now stands for Kızıldere, for the siege and for the people who brought it to its conclusion, the people who, out of spite for the saplings of spring, would not give up until they had replaced all life with death. But we musn’t dwell on death; we must put the past behind us – change the full stop into a comma, as it were – and continue living.

I’m off to the Kızıldere Market of Mirrors, And Mother, it’s there that I’ll fight against death.

We will still sing songs about death, but only to rebuild our links with the past. We can’t conceive of a tomorrow that does not contain yesterday. We piece together the fragments of the Gordian knot ripped apart by the bombs of the spring of ’72 – the fragments begin to intertwine. Perhaps they will form a new knot. It’s too early to tell.

The splinter groups from the period before 12 March are patching things up. Kızıldere has melted the ice between factions. The Liberation Army prisoners make peace with the Liberation Front prisoners.

The teachers and a number of leftist intellectuals thrown into prison during Operation Sledgehammer are excluded from this new alliance, however. And while the Şafak people haven’t yet been rounded up, four people in the prison – including Kâzime, Nina and Semra – will be implicated in that trial when it comes up.

We were all shaken by Kızıldere. Nevertheless, the ones with close ties to the victims separate themselves from the general mourning. You can understand why. No matter how heartbreaking the death, those closest to the dead will own it.

Our barracks has divided itself into two camps: those who have dead comrades and those who don’t. The former begin to act as if they are somehow superior to the rest of us. The ‘haves’ go to great lengths to underline how different they are from the ‘have-nots’, albeit with the modesty befitting a minority. They start out slowly, by greeting each other with raised right – rather than left – fists during exercise period.

Those of us who have not been graced with dead comrades cannot find the patience to let their sense of superiority die away of its own accord. We’re still too tense to let little gestures pass unnoticed. I have been afraid of a major explosion. And now, Nina, a hot-blooded, vivacious Jewish girl, has thoughtlessly ignited the fuse.

Thoughtlessly, but without meaning to cause trouble. Nina cares too much about people to be malicious. She wants to be friends and have long discussions with everyone. Unlike most true believers, she is by nature anxious to talk openly and warmly with people who do not share her view. More often than not, she offends her opponents. That’s what happened this morning, when she mentioned Kızıldere: “If only they’d included a woman in the operation, it would never have turned out this way.”

No sooner had the words left her mouth, than she realised she shouldn’t have uttered them. But it was too late. The only reason they didn’t start the fight there and then was because Nina’s remark had been so childish.

How could she seriously believe that her group had been kept alive because of its surplus of girls? Or that the scarcity of girls in the other group had caused the Kızıldere deaths? For that was the implication, even if she didn’t spell it out. Nina was in a minority in the barracks: maybe she said what she said simply to stand out?

As we ate our midday meal, the tension grew and grew. It was as if memories of old group quarrels became more vivid with every bite.

After the meal, during quiet hour, the silence was broken by the sound of a typewriter. Semra, who belongs to the Şafak group, was typing up a copy of the defense that their friends at Mamak had made in the TÖS trial. She was a rather large girl with green eyes. During the recent operation, she was badly tortured. She withstood torture to a degree that shocked the old hands in the movement. Yet torture has ruined her health.

You can almost see her seeking vindication, with every word she types. The defense does not just uphold her convictions but strengthens them. It proves that the Şafak gang are different and special – their final defense will be more of the same. By analysing history, you can enrich the present with the lessons of the past. All movements of the left analyse history from their own angle. Semra reads out the Şafak version in a steady, monotonous voice, which gets louder and louder. Much too loud for quiet hour, in my book.

The petty bourgeois façade of peace and quiet is shattered. Words fly.

“We’re not going to stand here and let you curse us.”

“They are insulting our dead.”

I spring from my bunk. There is certain to be a major fight. Gülay runs into the yard with two friends. When I notice how furious they are, my anxiety only grows. All the same, because they are in a majority, I speak to find a middle ground, to prevent an argument in which the minority is crushed. “Let’s not gang up on each other. When we have to share this barracks, we shouldn’t throw around such threats.”

Then I sit down at my typewriter, pretending to translate Brecht. Once Gülay’s friends tell her what I have said, she comes in seething, with Hatice and another girl who’s swinging worry beads.

“Sevgi, look here, if things continue like this there’ll be an awful lot of bad blood,” Gülay says. “You criticised me behind my back. Actually I’m trying to mediate, it’s the others who should be put in their place.”

“This is not a civil prison. So no one should be taking the role of Head Prisoner.”

Anger flashes in Gülay’s eyes, but she can see that I’m ready to fight her if I have to. She is bright enough to know that it would not reflect favorably on her if three of them were to attack someone sitting alone with a typewriter, and she’s also bright enough to know that, if they did, their actions would only prove my point. So she decides not to fight.

“We gave our dead for the cause, and we won’t allow them to be insulted here.”

I can understand how the indiscretions earlier in the day awakened deep-seated anger in her. Still, I can’t help it. My tongue becomes as sharp as a sword.

“Some of us died, and some of us made grand speeches.”

It’s a provocative and unnecessary retort – a match for the fuse. But I’m worried about the absolute reverence with which they speak of their dead.

“Look Sevgi, let’s be serious.”

“Seriousness resides in the essence of a movement, not in its fine pronouncements.”

The fight is about to kick off. Proved by me, who was most convinced that a fight would be untimely and out of place.

But the other friends in the barracks try to patch things up. “Sevgi, we have nothing against you, why are you trying to force us into a confrontation?” Gülgen says.

Gymnastics

I’ve programmed myself like a computer. I rise at half past five. Half an hour of exercises. Then, using the rubber hose I attach to the tap in the bathroom, I take a cold shower. I get dressed and do a bit of reading before breakfast. I love these morning hours when everyone else is asleep. The fascist regimen I impose on myself each morning gives me a sense of freedom. I impose other demands on myself as well, like writing eight pages a day. That’s how I wrote Noontime in Yenişehir. In the end, the number of pages became more important than the novel itself.

A few people join me for morning exercises, including Olca and Nina, who has grown quite fat in prison. She tackles every new subject with enormous goodwill and tenacity; and she likes to introduce the theoretical angle: “All you’re actually doing when you exercise is exercising your individualism.” It’s true that the exercises I do at the crack of dawn are for my own good and no one else’s.

“You’re the one who seems to know so much about exercising. Why don’t you show us how, and we can do exercises as a group.”

“How can we possibly do exercises as a group in this tiny space?” I say.

“Why do we have to do them inside? Why not outside?”

The Şafak people take the outdoor proposal most seriously. They form a large circle in the yard and start exercising together. Outside the barbed wire fence soldiers stand with their submachine guns; inside, girls do their exercises.

Gülay can’t stand to watch the Şafak group exercising: “Come off it, sisters! How can you be so idiotic? Doing exercises in front of all those soldiers. Our countrymen take offense at things like that.” Nina finds remnants of feudal morality in this point of view.

The male prisoners at Yıldırım Bölge soon add their displeasure to the exercise controversy. They sent this message to the Şafak group: “The girls should put an end to this exercise mania.” And I am the one most angered by this message: “You’re not going to stop exercising just because those men don’t want you to, are you? Don’t you have minds of your own?” Of course, my views are immediately classified as feminist.

Sema Nuhret is another early riser. She’s quiet and hardworking. Each morning she gets up and reads the same typed text.

I tease Sema. “My father’s mother was just like you, she read the Koran every morning.”

“I’m reading the principles of Leninism,” she responds.

“Good for you, you must know them by heart now.”

Sema doesn’t lose her temper and answers with her customary modesty: “I find it helps to review basic truths.”

My objection is not to the basic truths, but to their repeated reading. I believe that when people repeat basic truths without applying them to real life, they become intransigent.

We’ve lined up for exercise period. We’re waiting to be let out. Officer Zafer opens the door and addresses us in her usual ironic manner.

“For a few days now you’ve been doing exercises. But you’ve been teaching them all wrong. From now on, I’m going to train you myself.”

The thought of exercising under Zafer’s instruction is too terrible to contemplate. Sweat pours down our backs , cold as ice. Our mouths hang open in dismay.

Outside, my eyes fall on Zafer’s black stockings. To this day, those stockings stand for fascism in my mind.

Zafer directs us with a voice that cuts through the morning air like a knife: “Line up. Arms in front. Heads to the right! Heads down!”

We lift our arms half-heartedly. People drop out of the exercises in ones and twos. Still, Zafer barks out orders, her voice echoing in the vegetable gardens of Kazıkiçi.

“Into line, I said, into line.”

But no, we won’t get into line, we won’t let her lead our exercises, and the expressions on our faces make it clear that we are ready to bear the consequences.

“That’s all for today,” she says

Zafer never tries to lead us in exercises again. One good thing about her is that she is always on the lookout for new ways to torment us. Which means that she never uses the same method for long. She does not know the power of persistence.