434 Resisting Publics
sites, the Turkish state directly impeded inhabitants from producing their
“own contexts of alterity,” and thus paved the way to the “regulated public
life” needed to reinforce nationhood and silence any other allegiance.^24
Through these sociospatial daily experiences, the whole ordinary process
of (re)production of rules and norms of coexistence was obstructed. The
landmarks used by inhabitants to behave properly and to produce catego-
ries to understand their environment were silenced. State officials obvi-
ously intended to leave no room for conflicting spatial meaning-making.
Anything displayed “in public” out of the national space and time—from
the color of clothes and the amount of facial hair to the music listened to
in the street, to locally rooted or religious commemorations—could be
interpreted as subversive and lead to one’s identification as an enemy.^25
Even within what used to be more “intimate” circles, like the neighbor-
hood or one’s house, transgressing the dominant norms (by speaking in
Kurdish for example) could have dangerous consequences: wiretap and
denouncements were quite frequent practices.
A challengeable public grammar?
National time and space was, in turn, extensively performed through vari-
ous commemorations and ceremonies. The “Square of the Republic,” at
the core of the main city of the province, functioned notably as the scene
of the flag ceremony, occurring twice a week. Sixty-odd soldiers would
perform the national anthem and every person passing the square at that
time would have to stop, stand and pay respect. This performance, a dis-
play of power, also reminded inhabitants, through a strict discipline of
bodies, of the “proper” loyalty. This staging device arguably produced its
public, demanding compliance with the normative expectations entailed
by the ceremony itself (silence or singing, standing still, eyes on the flag).
It did not tolerate, in discourse or in attitude, any negotiation or con-
testation of the procedures or of the message conveyed: that of Turkish
hegemony. On 30 June 1996, however, a young PKK sympathizer, wearing
maternity clothes to dissimulate the bomb under her shirt, blew herself
up in the middle of the ceremony. It was the first suicide bombing ever
committed in the name of the PKK. Along with the activist seven sol-
diers were killed and thirty-three others injured. This put an end to the