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Abstract
National identification practices and nationalist historiography in Turkey have long focused on erasing differences and diversity and configuring a "homogeneous" nation. More recently, an increasing personalization of geography through familial attributes and memories became an anchor for self-identification in contemporary Turkey, traceable through family history and personal narratives in the public domain. This shift in the way people engage with the past is symptomatic of nostalgia for a traceable self-identification through family histories pursued to geographies of "origin" as opposed to the "administered forgetting" of such identifications by nationalist ideologies. We can track this change over the last two decades in cultural products, such as documentary novels, memoirs, and family cookbooks, which have opened a space in the public domain to reconsider the past and to rewrite history at an individual level. The dynamics of this change are particularly evident in the case of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange and its representation in Kemal Yalçin's documentary novel, The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange (Emanet Çeyiz).
It was a book presented as a novel that arguably most effectively broke the 65-year Turkish silence surrounding the 1923 Greek-Turkish compulsory population exchange. In 1998, Kemal Yalçin published The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange [Emanet Çeyiz] which tells the tale of the author, originally from Turkey, who goes to Greece to find his father's Greek Orthodox neighbors and to return their daughter's wedding trousseau. The trousseau was entrusted to Yalçin's family when their Greek Orthodox neighbors were forced to leave Turkey in the 1920s and thought that they would soon return. The book-a collection of oral accounts of the exchanged peoples from both Greece and Turkey whom the author met during his journey in his search for the owners of the trousseau-received immediate public attention and many awards in Turkey.1 But it raised questions regarding its genre: was this really a novel or a collection of oral history accounts? When I asked him why he chose to present this book as a novel, even though there was little fiction in it, Yalçin replied that, at that time, he did not think the Turkish public was "ready" for another genre to introduce this tragedy and that he reached a larger audience through presenting his...