Our Wound is Deep – The Field of Memory and Colonial Aphasia

“Fascism is not a closed chapter; it has the capacity to reappear in other forms, in other words, with other weapons, in green instead of brown, in army boots or police truncheons, but also in parliament and in the courts, in the indictments of prosecutors, in government decrees, not against democracy but within democracy, always reappearing, always in different forms and with a great variety of appearances. Disasters repeat themselves again and again if we do not fight against them.”

Özgür Sevgi Göral invites us to re-evaluate the ways and methods of the (dissident) field of memory in Turkey in ‘Our Wound is Deep – The Field of Memory and Colonial Aphasia’. Thinking together with France’s experience of occupation, exploitation and war in Algeria, she questions the limits of the impact of a human rights-oriented political language that frames forms of state violence stemming from colonialism and racism as violations of individual rights, based on rights advocacy, which is dominant in the political framework of the field in question, in the era of rising neofascisms.