When silence speaks

Drawing on fieldwork in Istanbul, this article explores the practices of silencing characterizing relationships between parents and children in Turkish leftist families affected by state violence in the wake of the 1980 coup. It shows how silence and secrecy can be understood as a set of embodied experiences and reflective actions that are intersubjective and which convey emotions, values, and a tacit knowledge of the state. Moving beyond the trauma paradigm, such practices are interpreted as a field of meaning-making through which political cultures, generational boundaries, and collective representations are produced and negotiated. Likewise, former revolutionaries’ habit of silencing personal memories in favor of we-centered narratives is seen not as a sign of traumatic unspeakability or political oppression, but as a collective process of intimate selving through which they reconstruct their revolutionary moral economy in the present.