Ethnographic context: Okmeydanı and Alevis

The politicization of Alevi youth in urban space is rooted in the history of Alevism in Turkey and best understood in light of the long-term discriminatory cultural and political practices inflicted upon Alevis. Alevis are the largest religious minority in Turkey, varying between 15 and 20 percent of the population,Footnote ¹² with their syncretic aspects deriving from interactions with different religions and cultures, differentiating from Sunnis in terms of “beliefs and ritual practices.”Footnote ¹³ While Alevis and Alevism have theologically constituted a heterogeneous structure, throughout the Ottoman era they were stigmatized as “heretics,” “infidels,” “unbelievers” (kâfir), and “enemies of Islam,” “frequently condemned to death” by the Ottoman ulema. Footnote ¹⁴ Alevis, especially from the sixteenth century, suffered both exclusions and massacres during the Ottoman era, resulting in their isolation in villages in distant mountainous regions in central Anatolia, and a tendency to keep their religion and identities secret.Footnote ¹⁵

In the Republican period, while Alevis, by and large, embraced the secular ideas of the new republic, the secularization project of the Kemalist regimeFootnote ¹⁶ did not prevent Alevis from experiencing discrimination in the public sphere and persecutions such as the Dersim Massacre (1938). Alevi presence in urban spaces began to be visible only after they began to migrate to cities in the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁷ In the 1970s, Alevis became potential targets of Islamists and right-wing nationalists due to both their religious identity and left-leaning politics. Several anti-Alevi pogroms were sparked in towns such as Kahramanmaraş (1978), Sivas (1980), and Çorum (1980), leaving Alevis vulnerable to massacres. As a result, many more from Anatolian towns had to migrate to neighborhoods in İstanbul and Ankara, such as Okmeydanı. The powerful existence of revolutionary/socialist groups in these neighborhoods and Alevis’ increasing affiliation with them made these cities safer places for Alevi communities compared to rural towns in Turkey.

The history of Okmeydanı, as one of the first squatter settlements, parallels the history of shantytowns (gecekondu) in Turkey, which began with rural to urban migrations in the 1950s. Although the first immigrants came to the area in the 1960s, the main Alevi population came to the district after the 1970s, along with other neighborhoods such as Gazi, 1 Mayıs, Nurtepe, and Gülsuyu neighborhoods in İstanbul. During the 1970s, the demographic formation of the district, which was mainly structured by this wave of migration, coincided with the political mobilization of socialist/leftist movements in Turkey. In the 1970s, various revolutionary leftist groups, organizing around different political strategies and actions,Footnote ¹⁸ played important roles in the establishment of many shantytowns, in terms of securing the settlers’ land from destruction and state interventions and providing basic needs for the new incomers. Okmeydanı was one of them.Footnote ¹⁹ For Alevis in Okmeydanı, therefore, from the very beginning, the district has been coupled with revolutionary struggle (devrimci mücadele). Yet, as Yonucu points out, “working-class Alevis’ relations with the revolutionaries” in this period “cannot be reduced to a matter of mere protection.”Footnote ²⁰ Rather, Alevis in such neighborhoods constituted a significant part of revolutionary organizations providing a space for urban Alevis to be active and visible in political life in the domain of Marxist organizations, “even though they appeared not as Alevis but as socialists.”Footnote ²¹

In this sense, the 1970s witnessed “not the politicization of Alevism as an independent politics of identity, but rather the politicization of Alevis through their affiliation with leftist politics.”Footnote ²² In this era, a specific confluence of social factors led to the alliance between the Alevis in urban space and revolutionary movements: while the socialist groups embraced Alevis as “proto-communist”Footnote ²³ due to their historical opposition to the establishment, on the other hand, Alevis as a socially and economically marginalized group became more open to the possibility of Marxist ideologies—especially the young generation—solving the historical problems of oppression; and “for the most part identif[ied] themselves with the universalistic worldviews offered by socialism and Marxism,”Footnote ²⁴ bringing about an attraction and overlapping between the social-political culture of Alevis and the political agenda of revolutionary movements. Political Alevi youth, however, were integrated into revolutionary movements in the way that many disowned the traditional aspects and institutions of Alevism, such as dedelik,Footnote ²⁵ as remnants of the feudal order, and predominantly glorified Alevism as a rebellious social order thanks to its history replete with revolts against the state. Alevi youth’s break from tradition created a situation censured by the older generation of Alevis, which later engendered a religious and cultural criticism of the overemphasized political aspect of Alevism in the post-1980 era. Indeed, as Çamuroğlu argues, “at that time, these ideologies [such as Marxism], while defended by a great number of Alevis, were not identified with Alevilik [Alevism] itself. On the contrary, their protagonists emphasized the necessity of abandoning Alevilik in favour of new, secular ideologies and identities.”Footnote ²⁶

After the 1980 coup d’état, which crushed leftist politics, and especially in the 1990s, the public sphere in Turkey witnessed an “Alevi Revivalism” and “re-politicization of Alevism,”Footnote ²⁷ which stressed an Alevi identity, by emphasizing the religious and cultural dimension of Alevism rather than just a part of a socialist movement. Of equal interest was the struggle by means of Alevi cultural and religious associations for recognition of Alevi religious identity and equal citizenship. The reasons for this “revivalism” are multiple: on the one hand, the rise of Sunni political Islam, or “Turkish-Islamic synthesis,” after the 1980s exacerbated the anxiety of Alevis in Turkey, coupled with the marginalization of Alevis in the employment sector and other public domains;Footnote ²⁸ on the other, the rise of identity politics in Turkey significantly enlarged the cultural domains of Alevis through new spaces of belonging and identity, forming new modalities to re-evaluate “Alevism as a distinct worldview, way of life, cultural practice and religion.”Footnote ²⁹

Moreover, as the revolutionary movements had been severely damaged by the 1980 coup d’état, along with the collapse of the socialist bloc, the radical left lost its preponderance among the Alevi population as their main way for struggle. Concurrently, new emerging Alevi movements, with a cultural-religious-oriented struggle, superseded the encapsulation of the Alevi movement in the radical left, of which they were critical due to the dissolution of Alevi religious heritage and culture in these movements. In this framework, the “revivalism” of Alevi politics witnessed a plethora of Alevi organizations comprising a varied structure in the sense of interpretations of Alevism, ranging from “Mystic-Islamic Alevism” to “Kemalist-Humanist approaches.”Footnote ³⁰ These organizations have predominantly remained distant from the revolutionary movements and employed policies consonant with the state against any form of radicalism. Alevi youth in working-class neighborhoods, however, have increasingly felt alienated from these state-consonant approaches since the state emerged as the primal threat in their immediate everyday experiences—let alone a longstanding historical distrust. Moreover, cultural rights-based policies have not alleviated the anxiety of these young Alevis, which now comprises not only sectarian discriminations but also class-based problems in the marginal sphere of neoliberal policies. This anxiety as well as a public outcry among Alevis climaxed after the Sivas massacre on July 2, 1993, which occurred in an Alevi cultural festival, ending in the death of thirty-five people including artists, intellectuals, and young Alevis. With another incident, the 1995 Gazi Neighborhood event, public tension in Alevi neighborhoods was most intensely experienced in a squatter settlement of İstanbul, following the attack of unknown gunmen on an Alevi coffeehouse. Brutal clashes between Alevi residents and the police continued in the immediate aftermath of the attack, causing the death of twenty-three neighborhood people. The Gazi riots and the Sivas massacre “created widespread trauma and frustration among the Alevi communities in Turkey […] They acted as catalysts for Alevi identity politics and Alevi institutionalization in the post-1980 context.”Footnote ³¹ Yet, at the same time, they widened discrepancies between interpretations of Alevi politics among Alevi movements. While urban Alevi youth have also examining their identity, it was revolutionary movements, not Alevi movements, that gained popularity among Alevi youth in working-class Alevi neighborhoods and became a convenient space for radical youth politics. The 1990s was the time when a politics of Alevi identity became vividly sharpened and intermingled with a revolutionary political struggle. Anxieties and grievances stemming from ethnic, religious, and class problems were channeled into and made publicly visible in the revolutionary struggle, though in a variety of revolutionary groups.

The engagement of Alevi youth in revolutionary groups in their neighborhoods has also underpinned the rupture between the youth and their families, the significant portion of which were ex-militants in the 1970s revolutionary struggle but now envisaged a cultural democratic policy around Alevi movements. Furthermore, these families increasingly have become increasingly silent regarding the new challenges posed by socio-economic problems and discrimination that Alevi youth experience under the AKP government.

Haunting past, precarious present: Explorations of an anxious \generation of Alevi youth

In the context of Okmeydanı, the experiences of Alevi youth are structured around both political violence and social suffering based on religious discrimination and, related with these, social and economic exclusion. Moreover, although the repertoire of victimhood in Alevi history is transmitted to the youth in multiple ways, the experiences of victimhood and the plight of the youth differ from those of families. For young people, Alevism, in this context, is reconfigured and appropriated within not just the historical context but also in current compelling situations. Frustrations about education, unemployment, and discrimination are compounded by families’ failures to understand youth’s experiences; in return, the youth feel distanced from the anchor of family to respond to the question of what kind of a life they will have, being forced into searching for new possibilities of collectivity and socialization.

The emergence of discriminations did not begin in the era of Okmeydanlı youth, but the grievances of Alevi identity became more complicated, and the youth increasingly felt at an impasse regarding their future with the AKP’s increasing sectarian practices. Alevi youth in Okmeydanı spent most of their lives under the AKP government which came to power in 2002 and has remained in place ever since. The AKP’s policies toward the Alevi community, especially after the AKP’s authoritarian and sectarian turn since the 2010s,Footnote ³² worsened Alevis’ grievances, embracing past injustices and ignoring Alevis’ long-term demands, such as legal recognition of the cemevi as the place of worship or the removal of mandatory Sunni-based religion classes.Footnote ³³

Okmeydanı is a safe zone for Alevi youth in terms of expressing and securing their identity. They could become visible as Alevi in Okmeydanı, but public places outside Okmeydanı require many young people to be careful in expressing their identities. For instance, school has mainly been the place where the youth first encounter discrimination. Memories of mandatory religion classes after the 1980 coup d’état—an infamous issue for Alevi families and youth—continue to trigger anxiety in Alevis, worsening their confidence in the educational system. Burcu, a seventeen-year-old female high-school student, remembers her experiences about being Alevi in school:

While Alevi families point toward educational success for a better life, educational success itself has become a contentious topic for young Alevis in Okmeydanı, who mainly study in public high schools. What is expected by families is already curtailed by much more systemic changes. Education, which once appeared as the best option for social mobility and self-improvement, has increasingly faded from the imagination of Alevi youth. The AKP’s increasing Sunni-Islamic indoctrination reflected its effects on education and youth policies, following Erdoğan’s declaration of the goal to raise a “pious generation.”Footnote ³⁴ Many imam-hatip (religious education) schools and new elective Sunni-based religious courses were introduced, along with the replacement of administrative cadres with new staff compatible with the new policy, increasing sectarian pressures on Alevi youth.Footnote ³⁵ Accompanied by neoliberal policies on the educational system that are widening inequalities,Footnote ³⁶ Alevi youth from low-income households have gradually become alienated from education, experiencing both sectarian and economic challenges.

In this context, families usually warn the youth to conceal their Alevi identity to protect them from possible exclusion and discrimination. Yet the question as to why Alevi identity should be hidden remains unanswered, or families provide superficial explanations. The youth are deprived of answers to questions regarding discrimination based on the identity into which they were born. Silence is the main answer they get. To be sure, such evasion is doomed to failure as Alevi youth inevitably encounter Sunni-biased harassment in the urban environment. In this sense, Yeşim, a young sixteen-year-old woman, remembers her family’s warnings not to reveal her identity.

The youth do not know how to deal with this identity. Alevi identity for the youth is the source of an unknown past, manifested in the forms of silences, whispers, and gestures, which emerges as “transgenerational hauntings”Footnote ³⁷ in everyday interactions. It triggers both fear and anger in the youth’s imaginations. In Okmeydanı, this identity is eventually appropriated and redefined by many young Alevis not in families but in political collectivities, associating their personal stories with the broader political context of Alevi history. As Yeşim narrates, they learn the political and historical reasons of Alevi grievances through sharing with their peers in the political realm. Indeed, many of my interviewees said that they watch documentaries and read books about Alevi massacres in political groups and discuss with each other and adult political figures about how they position themselves within the Alevi community.

However, the search of urban Alevi youth for an identity is not the only reason leading them to a political collectivity. Fear, anger, isolation, and collective memory of Alevi victimhood are rekindled repeatedly by the presence of police violence in the neighborhood. The period of political mobilization in Okmeydanı coincided with police violence and militaristic approaches by marking out and targeting the district, ending in the neighborhood being segregated from the rest of the city through constant police surveillance, identity checks, and police raids, and thus being stigmatized as politically dangerous in İstanbul from the 1990s to the present.Footnote ³⁸ Police violence here functions as a mnemonic tool that reminds Alevi youth of being historically targeted, and the current police violence makes them hold on to the idea that they are still exposed to potential danger of persecution and assimilation. Violence does not come from a distant past, but rather it is very tangible in everyday relations in Okmeydanı. Memories of massacres and violence inherited from the past are therefore activated and materialized by the constant presence of the police.

Gökhan, a seventeen-year-old man, who identifies himself as a revolutionary young person, does not make sense of his encounters with police violence in the neighborhood as singular events that happened to him but rather within the collective memory of the Alevi community. He now reinterprets the violent experiences of the Alevi community, creating a kind of knowledge that conflicts with his family’s passive attitudes toward violence and gives the formation of his political subjectivity moral force:

In his narrative, the effect of violence underlies the place of the subject in the community. The subject experiences an uncanny encounter with his/her own vulnerability (the constant killing of Alevis), an experience based on the feeling that what happened to them could happen to me. The collective memory of violence urges Okmeydanlı youth to think about their own vulnerabilities. Testimony regarding the devastating consequences of violence is transferred to the formation of subjectivities in the way that young people realize in the mirroring relationship that their lives are insecure, and their mere existence is subject to question.

Moreover, in Gökhan’s narrative there is also a generational rupture both within families and the wider Alevi community about experiences of Alevism and how to defend it. Here, as Schwartz argues, “collective memory works by subsuming individual experiences under cultural schemes that make them comprehensible and, therefore, meaningful.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Those “cultural schemes” create the relationality of memory between the self and the collective as well as a shared cultural identity to make sense of their past and present within the community.Footnote ⁴¹ In this sense, the formation of the youth’s subjectivities is articulated as a collective process of recoding their history and personal experiences and construction of social memory “through their membership of a social group”Footnote ⁴²—in my context, revolutionary political groups. Thus, under the shadow of violence, the youth reconstruct the meanings of Alevi history in their political imaginations. To shatter silence in the familial realm and to react against everyday encounters of both structural and political violence, Alevi youth in Okmeydanı are oriented toward a revolutionary politics on the street.

Reclaiming the struggle: Youth subjectivities in the sphere of \revolutionary politics

Youth agency in the political realm is neither a recent phenomenon nor specific to Okmeydanı. Many focused on the relationship between youth agency and political struggle as well as political violence in different worldwide contextsFootnote ⁴³ and in Turkey.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the context of Okmeydanlı youth, revolutionary political identity becomes a way to define themselves and Alevi identity anew, and to make political ground for themselves operative in the public sphere. Beyond its mere political embodiment, revolution provides a framework for young people to bridge the gap between themselves and the community as well as between memories and present shared experiences. Revolution functions as “an anchoring point,”Footnote ⁴⁵ in other words as “a ‘story’ or a ‘paradigm’ about how the world works”Footnote ⁴⁶ retroactively and prospectively. Indeed, revolution as a “paradigm” creates a screen onto which young people project their failure, anger, hope, and struggle and around which they build their narratives and performances. Many residents identify themselves as a part of a revolutionary/socialist struggle, though some are not actively engaged in the political groups, and many families have members whose backgrounds derive from the membership of revolutionary groups in the neighborhood.

However, the existing revolutionary struggle in familial stories is not sufficient per se to understand the politicization of Alevi youth. How do these revolutionary groups emerge as powerful modalities in the youth’s lives and why do the youth become affiliated with this kind of politics while their families are increasingly distanced themselves from it? Why do Alevi youth utilize a political space whose history dates to the 1970s, rather than creating another space or engaging with Alevi movements and associations in the rise of identity politics? Considering the possible dangers of revolutionary politics such as arrests and violent clashes with the police, it seems reasonable for parents to employ inhibitive approaches to prevent the youth from joining revolutionary groups. Gökhan tells about his father’s engagement with revolutionary politics in the 1970s in a heroic manner, and how he and his comrades distributed the land to the poor and solved their problems in squatter neighborhoods, but he also complains that his father now shows his reactions just through staying home and warns him against attending demonstrations on the street. His parents, like many, think that while they situate themselves on the political left, for them revolutionary struggle is an obsolete activity, and it is neither reasonable nor favorable to engage in activities that they think further marginalize the youth’s conditions.

While acknowledging the revolutionary “aura” of the neighborhood, families substantially restrained themselves from engaging with revolutionary groups. On the other hand, Alevi organizations, with their moderate policies and attempts to mediate with the state, some of which indeed incur the burden of “snatch them [the youth] back from the claws of the left,”Footnote ⁴⁷ seem to the revolutionary youth a distant type of politicization. Alevi organizations are highly generationally hierarchized and very strict in not allowing Alevi youth to become politicized in street politics. Given deteriorating conditions, these movements become an ineffective way to channel the revolutionary youth’s politicization, and many young people accuse them of collaborating with the state. Revolutionary discourse and struggle, rather, have provided the socio-political matrix for their battle to create a counter-public sphere in urban space, and have emerged as the touchstone for their identities. Consequently, this has engendered generational conflicts between the youth and their families.

However, generational conflicts in the sphere of political radicalism are not novel issues and different generational approaches to an inherited political activism are not unexpected. In her comparative analysis of social movements in leftist radicalism in the 1970s across Europe, Donatella della Porta argues that the commitment of young activists to radical leftist groups entailed new loyalties and friendship ties, and increasingly “determined every aspect of their lives.”Footnote ⁴⁸ These new ties concomitantly brought about an isolation of young activists from “the outside world” and were accompanied by gradual conflicts with, and “independence from,” their families.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, generational conflicts in the revolutionary youth in Alevi families also existed in the 1970s, not least due to the militants’ disregard of Alevism as a religion.

There are also other similarities and continuities between the Alevi youth’s political engagement and their families’ revolutionary struggle in the past. Even slogans and ideological framings are directly inherited from their parents’ struggle in this era. While Alevi revolutionary youth in the 1970s discredited religious and cultural aspects of Alevism and absorbed Alevi identity into a Marxist class struggle, motifs and songs of Alevism in the revolutionary struggle did exist. Furthermore, revolutionary groups in the era also employed symbols of resistance and struggle from Alevism in their discourses, but in a rather latent manner.Footnote ⁵⁰

In my context, the revolutionary Alevi youth frame a unique struggle for Alevi cultural and political identity within a political radicalism, which their families and revolutionary groups in the 1970s did not directly correlate with Alevism. Not only do Alevi youth symbolically incorporate motifs of Alevism into their political engagements, but they also recast their Alevi identity in this very revolutionary struggle. In doing so, they do not necessarily subordinate one struggle to the other—i.e. the struggle for Alevi identity to a class-based Marxist struggle, as was the case with 1970s revolutionary politics—but rather both struggles coexist with each other, protecting their specific motivations and claims in this revolutionary political agenda rather than merging them into a single homogenous struggle. They redefine meanings of Alevism in their reclamation of the revolutionary struggle. At this juncture, Alevism becomes itself a nodal point of resistance, combining with revolutionary political performances.

In this context, Alevi youth in Okmeydanı channel their performances into street politics by reclaiming the revolutionary struggle that most of their families have renounced, and giving themselves authority over their conditions. Okmeydanı here becomes a spatialization of resistance, in that the belonging to this very space gives one power to achieve solidarity and resistance, creating a kind of spatialized knowledge that constitutes Alevi youth as revolutionary political subjects. In this politicization the youth overcome their fears, the silence in the family, and frustrations in their lives through obtaining a collective political identity. These revolutionary groups attract youth not just through political discourse based on class politics in the conventional sense of the term, but also in a broader one that claims to fight for the rights of the oppressed—Alevis’ rights, for instance—and protect the neighborhood. They offer a narrative and a conceptual framework of struggle to the youth through employing a rhetoric of historical repetitions of victimhood in the context of a long-lasting war between the oppressed and the oppressor. The very locality and experiences of the present resistance against violence are thus transferred to the historical narrative of the Alevi struggle, which is now being led by revolutionary groups and the political collectivity in the neighborhood. In this sense, the revolutionary youth in Okmeydanı achieve the possibility of engaging in the struggle and gaining public power on urban space through these collectivities. The youth, therefore, fill powerlessness and liminality in their lives with a feeling of collectivity, political kinship, and commitment to defend their lives and rights.

Emrah, a nineteen-year-old man who migrated to Okmeydanı from Balıkesir after primary school, tells of his changing approach before and after becoming a member of a political group in the neighborhood:

Emrah and his friends form an intimacy based on understanding each other, creating a common solidarity of standing together to reappropriate their past and change their future. He could transgress the feelings of guilt and exclusion through comradeship relations in the movement, which mobilize them in the vision of a just society. As Thiranagama discusses in the Sri-Lankan context, political movements offer “a horizontal form of kinship—one based on mutuality, a feeling of togetherness, ideological commitment— […] institute[ing] sibling relations as the valorized mode of egalitarian relations.”Footnote ⁵¹ She further adds that “the affective and far reaching processes of group formation” shows “the ways that participation itself engenders new forms of collective identity.”Footnote ⁵² The revolutionary youth could then create an environment in which they find a power not from families but from political collectivity. They could develop a kind of political kinship rooted in the formation of and search for an identity that defines themselves in new forms. In these relationships, victimhood, both inherited from families and personal experiences, is compensated by the power of collective identity.

Alberoni indicates that “collective group behavior calls into question the social and cultural background in which [the participant] found himself prior to the collective process itself and establishes a new kind of solidarity with fellow participants,”Footnote ⁵³ and through this collectivity, “it is also the personal history of the individual that is re-examined. He discovers his past and looks back over it reviewing every phase, and in this fashion explains his present and the reason for it being the way it is and not otherwise.”Footnote ⁵⁴ That is, providing “new epistemologies,”Footnote ⁵⁵ and obtaining an identity through political collectivities reframes the modalities of interpreting youth’s existing conditions and their past. Given the precariousness that the youth in my context experience in varying degrees about their future, family, and identity, individual experiences and histories are then subjugated to the process of restructuring in a collective re-examination. It is, therefore, through this political collectivity in the intimacy of solidarity and belonging that Okmeydanlı Alevi youth reappraise how Alevis should act and redefine meanings of Alevism in contrast with, and sometimes against, the perceptions of families and the wider Alevi community.

Therefore, many Alevi youth in Okmeydanı differ from their families in interiorizing violence and resistance as a way of struggle. Many young people in Okmeydanı reframe Alevi identity, associating it with spatialized relationships of resistance. Politically mobilized Alevi youth do not want to experience Alevi identity in terms of the peaceful and pacifist ways they attribute to their families. Gökhan narrates how resistance on the street could protect himself and his community:

For him, to express this identity in the public sphere is not related to a kind of acquiescence, as his family does. Rather he wants to show that he with his Alevi friends have a power to react against discrimination. He also attends cem regularly and describes himself as a good Alevi, but this Alevi identity involves a political much more than a religious or cultural dimension. As research on the spectrum of Alevi political identity points out, the politicization of Alevis around revolutionary politics quantitatively constitutes the smallest part.Footnote ⁵⁶ Qualitatively, however, this radical street politics ensures that the youth have a modality of the power and resistance against injustices, the power which is incomparable with those that other Alevi politics and associations provide. In this politicization, Alevi youth do not just reclaim urban space to build an authority over their agencies, but they themselves, not their families, struggle for the rights of the Alevi community, making publicly visible the victimization of their parents too.

Gökhan’s parents now support the Republican Party (CHP). Like his family, many Alevi families think that it is best to vote for the main opposition party whose leader is also Alevi, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, against the AKP. However, what the youth, whose lives are marked by violence, do desire is a violent struggle on the street. Their revolutionary politics subverts widely accepted codes of Alevism and its politics in the political imagination of the youth. In this sense, Sinan, a twenty-three-year-old man imprisoned for five years for political activities, is very engaged with the religious aspect of Alevi identity, but also reinterprets it through the gaze of a political/historical struggle of the oppressed, narrating his contradictions with his family:

He also correlates the resistant aspect of Alevism with his revolutionary struggle:

Sinan does not frame his Alevi identity around the peaceful images of Alevi history, but rather he searches for historical roots of Alevism in Zülfikâr, which itself embodies a violent struggle. Reconstructing Alevi history and identity, he imbues Alevi identity with symbols of resistance and violence and links Zülfikâr with the guns the revolutionaries carry on the street. The historical background of Alevism has, therefore, combined with his political struggle. This conflict between revolutionary youth and families and the wider Alevi community underlines how politics induces the reclaiming of Alevi identity by the youth in different ways. As Sinan’s interpretation of Zülfikâr shows, Massicard, on the semantics of Alevism, argues that there are different utilizations of signs or icons in Alevism in line with different ideological positions.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, she adds that there is a rivalry in Okmeydanı between left-wing groups and Alevi associations in attracting young people. For Alevi associations, “the spectre of left-wing politicization is something to be avoided,” which could complicate the already-existing marginalization of Alevi youth in marked spaces.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet, this kind of fear of further marginalization contradicts with the youth’s present experiences. They already feel they are in a marginalized situation, and the experience of violence and grievances are not located in the remote past but are renewed on a daily basis. In this sense, the youth feel not a kind of marginalization through their activities but feel an immediate sense of power to show the desire for a radical change in their already-marginalized conditions in the public sphere.

In this context, Yeşim gives meaning to the political in the sense of making herself and her identity “visible,” using the metaphor of a “mask”:

She wears the mask as an immediate strategy, to prevent police identification. Yet, her depersonalization as a masked persona in the political struggle creates ground on which she can exceed a broader “invisibility” in the society. For her, the knowledge of being on the street as herself to express her anger and protect her identity is more valuable than the media’s representation of her and her friends. The metaphor of the mask, which is utilized by the mainstream media to frame the youth as a threating mass, is thus reversed for Yeşim in the sense that performance in the political space through wearing a mask becomes the only way to gain visibility and agency, traits absent in both the family and society. Allen Feldman examines the formation of collective violence of masked people in “paramilitary visual propaganda” in the context of Northern Ireland:

Feldman’s argument is right in illustrating the power of collective identity “in order to attain collective representation,”Footnote ⁶¹ but also runs the risk of overemphasizing political collectivity at the expense of the self. From the perspectives of Alevi youth subjectivities in my ethnographic context, however, I argue that wearing the mask is not only positioned at a “trans-individual agency,”Footnote ⁶² but rather at the axis of collective and individual agencies. I contend that the mask here signifies two seemingly contradictory meanings: while masking their faces allows them to hide their identities and subject themselves to a collective struggle from which they find the source of resistance and power, which is not acquired in their personal lives, at the same time masking enables the performativity of unmasking their cultural identity and subjectivities on the public space. Here there is no metonymic displacement (from the self to the collective), but rather a condensation (of the self and the collective) in the imagery of the mask. The mask, thus, acts simultaneously as a metaphor both for political collectivity and for subjective struggles. In this way, the invisibility of young Alevis in society becomes visible in the transformed body of the masked political subject. From the outside, it seems to be a collective struggle of anonymous subjects, but for the youth, in the very anonymity of collective actions they also find ways of self-representation. The subjective, therefore, achieves its personal visibility by objectifying the body in the collective political realm.