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This is from an essay in progress. I deal with the conception of (national) identity in relation to colonial discourse. Colonial discourse is built upon a difference between the West and the rest, that is other. It centres West as the dominant norm and situates the rest as its other. Inevitably, the other recognises itself, and hence constructs its cultural identity, only in relation to the West.(A specific form of colonial discourse is orientalism whose operations are illustrated by Edward Said in his seminal Orientalism. The literature on colonial discourse, orientalism and eurocentrism also includes works by Homi K. Bhabha, Robert Stam, Ella Shohat, Gayatri Spivak, Mahmut Mutman and Meyda Yegenoglu). Colonial discourse constitutes its subjects as coloniser and colonised. Just as every discourse constitutes and is constituted by its subject, both parties (the coloniser and the colonised) are responsible in producing and legitimising the colonial discourse. They share the guilt. There need not be an administrative colonial power for this, the discourse is so strong that it suffices to justify colonialism which is no more administrative but virtual.
Colonial discourse is very complex in nature and it has countless variations and versions. One reason for this is that it is shaped by the specificities of various cultures and another is that one of the dynamics of the discourse is "ambivalence", in the sense that psychical structures contain their opposites as well. Karagozlum (Atif Yilmaz, 1970) is a perfect example of this. It demonstrates not only that even a critical approach to the West may indeed register it as the norm (thus serving as colonial discourse) but also the difference, (West/rest) upon which colonial discourse is built, takes the Woman as its ground.
Azize (Turkan Soray) is a fisherman's daughter who enjoys singing in public. One day she meets Kenan (Kadir Inanir), an idealist composer who disdains all kinds of music but Western classics. As an irony alluding to his pretensious cultural preference she calls him " Chopin ". As is the case with many melodramas, Azize coincidentally becomes a famous singer, finding herself in an entirely different network of socio-cultural and economic relations. Kenan, having failed to find a decent job, begins to work as a waiter in the same place. They, eventually, fall in love. Kenan drops his musical (ie cultural) taste in favour of composing Turkish songs for Azize (" I retire from Chopinhood "). He mails his work anonymously and does not give away his identity. One night Azize is discovered by Hollywood producers and offered to co-star with Rock Hudson in a film (Mihrace'nin Gozdesi) on the condition that she will bring her " unknown composer" along with her to Hollywood. She is delighted with the idea that she would enjoy world-wide recognition until her mysterious, hitherto unknown composer shows up and instead of accepting the offer, accuses her of " being drifted in a Hollywood dream". Azize quits her job, goes back to fishing. But Kenan will show up again.
Perhaps one of the most significant features of Turkish melodrama is its frequent and various uses of split and multiple identities. Azize changes classes and becomes someone else (to which Kenan draws attention every now and then: "My Azize smelled of sea".) The case of Kenan is even more complicated: Kenan - the Chopin/the waiter/the unknown composer. A genre so blisfully playing with identities must give away clues about its own cultural/national identity. Karagozlum is not a typical film, actually it is rather a limit-text, and that is why I think it is capable of representing the Turkish cinema.
The film takes Hollywood as Yesilcam's rival and signifies a radical change of cultural preference: Chopin (western-oriented cultural policy) becomes the "unknown composer" (local culture) in favour of Azize (Aziz Vatan/precious land). Please note how the Woman is articulated as the site where cultural values concerning national identity meet.The dream sequence is especially significant in this respect. Kenan bombs and destroys not the Sultan's palace but the very dream he is having at the moment, which actually serves as the screen unto which the Other (not the West's other but the big Other which sets the Law) projects its oriental fantasy, the white male possessing the native woman. The transformation Kenan experiences (from Chopin to the native "unknown composer) is a sign of deviation which, just as the deviation we witnessed in Kocek, refers to the norms set by the West.
The aggresivity the film displays towards Hollywood/the West is the other side of fetishism which traces its roots back to the constitutiton of the subject in the mirror phase. The image the child recognises in the mirror is both the object of narcissism (because the child assumes the image its own) and aggressivity (because the image is external to the child). This is the same mechanism at work in Karagozlum.
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