Book Section
Umut Yıldırım

Mulberry Affects

Ecology, Memory, and Aesthetics on the Shores of the Tigris River in the Wake of Genocide
In: War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 27–66
Open Access
How can the Armenian genocide be considered in terms of its ecological roots and remnants? Umut Yıldırım explores the more-than-human flora and fauna indigenous to the banks of the Tigris river in Upper Mesopotamia — in particular, centenarian mulberry trees — as resistant roots that register the evidentiary ecologies of the Armenian genocide through the Turkish state’s denialist present and its ongoing war against the Kurds.
Keywords: Armenian genocide; Eco-redaction; Kurdistan; Kurdish movement; Mulberry trees; Resistant roots; Testimony; Tigris River
Rights: © by the author(s). Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Part of War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments Containing:
Foreword / Françoise Vergès
War-torn Ecologies: Human and More-​​than-​Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts
Mulberry Affects: Ecology, Memory, and Aesthetics on the Shores of the Tigris River in the Wake of Genocide
Who’s Afraid of Ideology? / Marwa Arsanios
Note the Ghosts: Among the More-than-Living in Iraq / Kali Rubaii
Great Sand: Grains of Occupation and Representation / Nadine Hattom
Hide Your Water from the Sun: A Performance for Spirited Waters / Jumana Emil Abboud
Of Goats and Bombs: How to Live (and Die) in an Explosive Landscape / Munira Khayyat
Title
Mulberry Affects
Subtitle
Ecology, Memory, and Aesthetics on the Shores of the Tigris River in the Wake of Genocide
Author(s)
Umut Yıldırım
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-27_2
Description
How can the Armenian genocide be considered in terms of its ecological roots and remnants? Umut Yıldırım explores the more-than-human flora and fauna indigenous to the banks of the Tigris river in Upper Mesopotamia — in particular, centenarian mulberry trees — as resistant roots that register the evidentiary ecologies of the Armenian genocide through the Turkish state’s denialist present and its ongoing war against the Kurds.
Is Part Of
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
19 September 2023
Subject
Armenian genocide
Eco-redaction
Kurdistan
Kurdish movement
Mulberry trees
Resistant roots
Testimony
Tigris River
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
en-GB
page start
27
page end
66
Source
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 27–66

References

  • Ahıska, Meltem, ‘Occidentalism and Registers of Truth: The Politics of Archives in Turkey’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 34 (2006), pp. 9–29 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0896634600004350>
  • Atılgan, Mehmet, Mehmet Polatel, Nora Mildanoğlu, and Özgür Leman Eren, eds, 2012 Beyannamesi: İstanbul Ermeni Vakıflarının El Konan Mülkleri / 2012 Declaration: The Seized Properties of Armenian Foundations in Istanbul (Istanbul: Hrant Dink Vakfı Yayınları, 2012) <https://hrantdink.org/tr/bolis/faaliyetler/projeler/kulturel-miras/149-2012-beyannamesi-istanbul-ermeni-vakiflarinin-el-konan-mulkleri>
  • Akarçay, Ayça, Nurhan Davutyan, and Sezgin Polat, Economic Consequences of Demographic Engineering: Turkey and WWI (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 15 April 2021) <https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3828518>
  • Başkaya, Zafer, ‘Diyarbakır İli İpekböcekçiliğinin Türkiye’de Yeri ve Mekansal Analizi’ [The Place and Spatial Analysis of Sericulture in Diyarbakir Province of Turkey], in Uluslararası Diyarbakır Sempozyumu, ed. by Ufuk Bircan, Aytaç Coşkun, Mustafa Temel, and Pınar Gürhan Kılıç (Diyarbakır: T. C. Diyarbakır Valiliği Kültür Sanat Yayınları, 2017), XVIII, pp. 2191–2217
  • Biner, Zerrin Özlem, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812296594>
  • Coulthard, Glen Sean, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816679645.001.0001>
  • Critchley, Simon, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso Books, 2007)
  • Dündar, Fuat, İttihat Ve Terakki’nin Müslümanları İskan Politikasi (1913–1918) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001)
  • Dündar, Fuat, Modern Türkiye’nin Şifresi: İttihat Ve Terakki’nin Ethnisite Mühendisliği, 1913–1918 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2008)
  • Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016) <https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804797191>
  • Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna, ‘Of Dark Pasts and Pipe Dreams: The Turkish University’, YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies, 3 (2021), pp. 185–93 <https://doi.org/10.53979/yillik.2021.12>
  • Gordillo, Gastón R., Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376903>
  • Hartman, Saidiya V., ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12.2 (2008), pp. 1–14 <https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1>
  • Hartman, Saidiya V., and Frank B. Wilderson III, ‘The Position of the Unthought’, Qui Parle, 13.2 (2003), pp. 183–201 <https://doi.org/10.1215/quiparle.13.2.183>
  • Hovannisian, Richard G., ed., Armenian Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2006)
  • Jongerden, Joost, The Settlement Issue in Turkey and the Kurds: An Analysis of Spatical Policies, Modernity and War (Leiden: Brill, 2007) <https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004155572.i-355>
  • Jongerden, Joost, ‘Elite Encounters of a Violent Kind: Milli İbrahim Paşa, Ziya Gökalp and Political Struggle in Diyarbekir at the Turn of the 20th Century’, in Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915, ed. by Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 55–84 <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004232273_004>
  • Jongerden, Joost, and Jelle Verheij, eds, Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915 (Leiden: Brill, 2012) <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004232273>
  • Kaiser, Hilmar, ‘Armenian Property, Ottoman Law and Nationality Policies’, in The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. by Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and Stephan Dähne, Beiruter Texte und Studien, 99 (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2006), pp. 49–71 <https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:3:5-91478>
  • Kouymjian, Dickran, ‘Confiscation and Destruction: A Manifestation of the Genocidal Process’, Armenian Forum, 1.3 (1998), pp. 1–12
  • Kuyumcuyan, A., in Tigris-Dikris Almanac (Aleppo: Digranakerd Compatriotic and Reconstruction Union, 1946), p. 97
  • Kévorkian, Raymond, Le Génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006)
  • Kévorkian, Raymond, and Paul Paboudjian, Ermeniler: 1915 Öncesinde Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda, trans. by Mayda Saris (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2012)
  • Lyons, Kristina, ‘Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the US-Colombian War on Drugs’, Cultural Anthropology, 31.1 (2016), pp. 56–81 <https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.1.04>
  • Masco, Joseph, ‘Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post–Cold War New Mexico’, Cultural Anthropology, 19.4 (2004), pp. 517–50 <https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2004.19.4.517>
  • Mgunt, Dikran, ԱՄԻՏԱՅԻ ԱՐՁԱԳԱՆԳՆԵՐ [Echoes of Amida] (Weehawken, NJ, Dikran Spear, 1950; repr. Antelias, Lebanon: Cilicia Bookstore, 2019)
  • Miroğlu, Orhan, Hevsel Bahçesinde Bir Dut Ağacı: Mehmet Uzun’un Sunuşuyla Canip Yıldırım’la Söyleşi (Istanbul: Everest Yayınları, 2010)
  • Mıgırdiçyan, Tovmas, ‘Letter’, Nor Dikaranagerd, 20.3 (1938), pp. 9–11
  • Naroyan, Mesrop, ‘Open Letter’, Nor Dikaranagerd, 21.2 (1938), pp. 9–10
  • Navaro, Yael, ‘The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 49.1 (2020), pp. 161–73 <https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-075549>
  • Nichanian, Marc, Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Taderon Press, 2002)
  • Nichanian, Marc, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. by Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) <https://doi.org/10.7312/nich14908>
  • Rancière, Jacques, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, trans. by Davide Panagia and Rachel Bowlby, Theory & Event, 5.3 (2001) <https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2001.0028>
  • Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373452>
  • Simpson, Audra, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376781>
  • Springer, Simon, The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) <https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816697724.001.0001>
  • Stoetzer, Bettina, ‘Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin’, Cultural Anthropology, 33.2 (2018), pp. 295–323 <https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.2.09>
  • Suciyan, Talin, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016) <https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755609024>
  • Tachjian, Vahé, Daily Life in the Abyss: Genocide Diaries, 1915–1918 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017) <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04f4m>
  • Taşğin, Ahmet, and Marcello Mollica, ‘Disappearing Old Christian Professions in the Middle East: The Case of Diyarbakır Pushee-Makers’, Middle Eastern Studies, 51.6 (2015), pp. 922–31 <https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2015.1044525>
  • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995)
  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) <https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873548>
  • Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1.1 (2012) <https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630> [accessed 9 March 2022]
  • Tîgrîs, Amed, and Yıldız Çakar, Amed: Coğrafya, Tarih, Kültür (Diyarbakır: Diyarbakır Büyükşehir Belediyesi Yayınları, 2015)
  • Vartanyan Dilaver, Aylin, ‘From Longing to Belong to Shaping the Longing: Dwelling with Armenian Women in Istanbul’ (PhD diss., European Graduate School, forthcoming)
  • Vega, Facundo, ‘On Bad Weather: Heidegger, Arendt, and Political Beginnings’, in Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 17 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 227–43 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-17_11>
  • Verheij, Jelle, ‘Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis of 1895’, in Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, ed. by Jongerden and Verheij (2012), pp. 85–147
  • Yadırgı, Veli, The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey: From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316848579>
  • Yıldırım, Umut, ‘Space, Loss and Resistance: A Haunted Pool-Map in South-Eastern Turkey’, Anthropological Theory, 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618783130>
  • Yıldırım, Umut, ‘Spaced-Out States: Decolonizing Trauma in a War-Torn Middle Eastern City’, Current Anthropology, 62.6 (2021), pp. 717–40 <https://doi.org/10.1086/718206>
  • Zavzavatcıyan B. Tovmas, ‘Letter’, Nor Dikaranagerd, 21 (1939), p. 5
  • Çelik, Adnan, and Ergin Öpengin, ‘The Armenian Genocide in the Kurdish Novel: Restructuring Identity through Collective Memory’, European Journal of Turkish Studies. Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey, 2016 <https://doi.org/10.4000/ejts.5291>
  • Çelik, Adnan, and Namık Kemal Dinç, Yüz Yıllık Ah! Toplumsal Hafızanın İzinde: 1915 Diyarbekir (İstanbul: İsmail Beşikçi Vakfı, 2015)
  • Çerçiyan, Yeğişe, Nor Dikaranagerd, 20.2 (1937), pp. 5–6
  • Öktem, Kerem, ‘Incorporating the Time and Space of the Ethnic ‘Other’: Nationalism and Space in Southeast Turkey in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Nations and Nationalism, 10.4 (2004), pp. 559–78 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1354-5078.2004.00182.x>
  • Öğüt, Tahir, and Çiğdem Çadırcı, ‘Cumhuriyet Dönemine Geçiş Sürecinde Diyarbakır’da İktisadi-Mali ve Sosyal Yapı’, Gazi Akademik Bakış, 7.13 (2013), pp. 141–70
  • Üngör, Uğur Ümit, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
  • Üngör, Uğur Ümit, and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011)
  • Քաղքըցի, in Tigris-Dikris Almanac (Aleppo: Digranakerd Compatriotic and Reconstruction Union, 1946), p. 36

Cite as: Umut Yıldırım, ‘Mulberry Affects: Ecology, Memory, and Aesthetics on the Shores of the Tigris River in the Wake of Genocide’, in War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 27-66 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-27_2>