Işıl Cinmen ile Tempo Röportajı

Işıl Cinmen ile Tempo Röportajı

Tempo — February 2016
Interview by Işıl Cinmen

This interview shows a noticeably more pessimistic Teoman.

Earlier conversations had already revealed his complicated relationship with Turkey. He could criticize the country intensely while insisting that it remained the place to which he belonged.

By 2016, that attachment is still present.

But hope has weakened.

The conversation moves through political polarization, national identity, social anger and the story behind one of Teoman’s most explicitly political songs, İki Çocuk.

Tired of Turkey

When Işıl Cinmen asks how he sees the condition of Turkey, Teoman’s answer is unusually severe.

He says he no longer has much hope that people in the country will learn to like one another.

The important word is perhaps not anger.

It is tiredness.

Teoman does not present himself as someone preparing for political struggle.

He sounds exhausted by the emotional intensity of the country.

This is different from indifference.

A person usually becomes tired of something because he has already spent energy caring about it.

A Country That Cannot Calm Down

Teoman uses deliberately exaggerated language to describe Turkish society.

He jokes that the country might need tens of millions of psychologists.

The humor is characteristic.

But behind it is a serious diagnosis.

He sees a society in which people have difficulty regulating anger, fear and suspicion.

Politics becomes psychological.

Groups no longer merely disagree.

They imagine one another as fundamentally threatening.

Politics as Collective Psychology

This is an interesting continuation of Teoman’s sociology background.

He does not discuss politics only through parties or institutions.

He thinks about emotional structures.

Fear.

Resentment.

Aggression.

Fantasy.

Collective paranoia.

The political crisis therefore appears not only as a disagreement about policy but as a problem in how people experience one another.

The Kabataş Example

Teoman refers to the controversy surrounding claims about an assault in Kabataş during the Gezi Park protests.

What interests him is not simply whether a particular political narrative is correct.

He is disturbed by the kinds of violent images people are capable of constructing and believing about one another.

For him, such stories reveal the depth of polarization.

People no longer merely imagine opponents as wrong.

They imagine them as monstrous.

“Türk Olmaktan Nefret Ediyorum”

The interview also revisits an earlier controversy.

A humorous autobiographical piece Teoman had written was reduced in media headlines to the idea that he hated being Turkish.

He explains the original story very differently.

As a child in 1981, he visited Switzerland.

Turkey was going through a difficult period, and his own childhood was also unhappy.

Switzerland appeared orderly, wealthy and peaceful.

The child Teoman therefore wondered why he had not been born there.

The Child’s Switzerland

This memory is important because Teoman does not present it as a sophisticated political conclusion.

It was a child’s fantasy.

Elsewhere looks better because here hurts.

The adult Teoman considers it absurd that this childhood memory was later transformed into a definitive statement about national identity.

Context disappears.

The headline survives.

This is another example of the problem with public identity that Teoman had been describing for years.

Belonging Despite Criticism

Teoman then returns to an idea already visible in his 1999 interviews.

Turkey remains his country.

It is where he was born.

Where he lives.

Where he expects to die.

Criticism therefore does not cancel belonging.

He does not accept the simplistic equation:

If you criticize your country, you must dislike belonging to it.

For Teoman, the opposite may be true.

Criticism is possible precisely because attachment exists.

Homeland Is Where the People You Love Are

His definition of homeland becomes smaller and more personal.

Rather than relying entirely on abstract national symbolism, he links homeland with the presence of people one loves.

This is a recurring movement in Teoman’s thinking.

Large concepts are repeatedly reduced to individual human relationships.

Politics becomes individual suffering.

Country becomes loved people.

War becomes children.

İki Çocuk

The most historically important section concerns İki Çocuk.

The song had appeared on Renkli Rüyalar Oteli in 2006.

Teoman explains explicitly that it was written about Erdal Eren and Zekeriya Önge.

This is crucial because public discussion often focuses almost entirely on Eren.

Teoman insists that the song belongs to both young men.

Erdal Eren

Erdal Eren was executed following the 12 September 1980 military coup after being convicted in connection with the death of military police private Zekeriya Önge.

His age and trial became symbols of the injustice associated with the military period.

For many people on the Turkish left, Eren became a political icon.

Teoman’s relationship to that symbolism is much more complicated.

Zekeriya Önge

Teoman deliberately brings Zekeriya Önge back into the story.

Önge was the young soldier whose death was attributed to Eren.

In political memory, one figure can easily become highly visible while the other disappears.

Teoman resists this asymmetry.

His song is called İki Çocuk for a reason.

There are two deaths.

Two families.

Two interrupted lives.

No Heroes

Teoman makes one of the strongest political statements in the interview:

he does not see Erdal Eren as a hero.

This does not mean he approves of Eren’s execution.

His objection is to the romanticization of young people dying for politics.

He regards teenagers and very young adults who destroy their lives through political violence as tragic rather than heroic figures.

This places him at some distance from conventional ideological narratives.

Zekeriya as the Greater Victim

Teoman goes even further.

He suggests that Zekeriya Önge may in one sense have suffered the greater injustice.

His reasoning is not about legal responsibility.

It is about agency.

Erdal Eren possessed an ideology and consciously entered a political environment involving risk.

Önge was a young conscript performing a compulsory duty when he was killed.

Teoman therefore sees less choice in Önge’s path.

Two Children, Not Two Symbols

This is the core of İki Çocuk.

Political narratives transform people into categories.

Revolutionary.

Soldier.

Leftist.

State representative.

Martyr.

Hero.

Enemy.

Teoman tries to reverse that process.

Before any of those labels, they were young people.

Children from the perspective of the mothers who lost them.

The song removes ideological victory from the story.

Nobody wins.

Politics Without Heroes

This position is consistent with Teoman’s earlier statements about political songwriting.

In 2010, he had argued that politics entered his music more naturally through human consequences than through ideological declarations.

İki Çocuk may be the clearest example.

The song does not tell the listener which political side to join.

It focuses on death.

This is politics stripped of triumph.

The Problem with Romantic Politics

Teoman is particularly suspicious of romanticizing young political militants.

Words such as courage, sacrifice and revolution can make destruction appear meaningful.

But Teoman looks at the same situation from the perspective of lost life.

A young person may feel heroic at nineteen.

A parent may simply see a dead child.

This tension between political meaning and private loss sits at the center of his interpretation.

A Different Kind of Protest Song

For that reason, İki Çocuk is unusual as a political song.

It does not construct a clear villain and hero.

It does not offer a political solution.

It does not ask the listener to identify with one side against another.

Instead, it tries to create sympathy across a political division.

That approach matches Teoman’s 2016 frustration with polarization.

The problem is precisely the inability to imagine the person on the other side as human.

From Hope to Pessimism

The contrast with the 1999 Teoman is revealing.

Then, he spoke critically about Turkey but still seemed to believe in the possibility of creating distance from politics and finding individual happiness.

By 2016, the social atmosphere appears to him much more damaged.

He sounds less convinced that people can coexist comfortably.

The pessimism has become national rather than merely personal.

But He Has Not Left

And yet Teoman remains.

This contradiction matters.

He says he is tired of Turkey.

He says he has little hope.

But he also says Turkey is where he lives and expects to die.

Disillusionment has not produced detachment.

His relationship with the country resembles some of the relationships described in his songs:

difficult,

critical,

sometimes exhausting,

but not easily abandoned.

Why This Interview Matters

This interview is one of the strongest political documents in the Teoman archive.

It clarifies several questions that otherwise could easily be misunderstood:

• his criticism of Turkey does not amount to rejection of belonging,
• he sees political polarization partly as a psychological problem,
• İki Çocuk was written for both Erdal Eren and Zekeriya Önge,
• he rejects the romanticization of political death,
• he does not consider Eren a political hero,
• and his preferred political perspective begins with individual suffering rather than ideological loyalty.

The most important idea is contained in the title of the song itself.

Not one martyr.

Not one revolutionary.

Not one soldier.

Two children.

That choice captures Teoman’s political instinct better than any party label probably could.

When ideology separates people into opposing camps, he tries to return to the human beings underneath.

Source Note

Original publication: Tempo
Date: February 2016
Interviewer: Işıl Cinmen
Document type: Interview
Verification: Cross-verified
Confidence: High

The original Tempo web page is not currently available in an accessible archive. However, several contemporary publications independently identify the source as Işıl Cinmen’s interview with Teoman for Tempo’s February 2016 issue and reproduce overlapping passages from the conversation.

Medyafaresi published substantial excerpts on 7 February 2016, explicitly identifying Işıl Cinmen and Tempo and preserving Teoman’s discussion of Turkey, Erdal Eren, Zekeriya Önge and İki Çocuk.

Demokrat Haber independently published the same day and gives the same publication, interviewer and February issue context, while reproducing the same opening exchange about Turkey.

The existence of İki Çocuk and its place on Teoman’s 2006 album Renkli Rüyalar Oteli are independently documented by music catalog sources.

Because the primary Tempo page itself has not been recovered, this archive classifies the interview as cross-verified rather than primary-source verified.

This page is an archival summary and commentary. It does not reproduce the original interview in full.