THE FRIENDS OF

into the city, or the stroll down Lennox Avenue, choreography was an art, a practice of moving even when there was nowhere else to go, no place left to run. It was an arrangement of the body to elude capture, an effort to make the uninhabitable livable, to escape confinement of a four cornered world, a tight, airless room. Tumult, upheaval, flight — it was the articulation of living force, or at the very least trying to, it was the way to insist I am unavailable for servitude. I refuse it.

Freedom, here, is not a specific destination or a single thing that can be gathered by way of a document or a promise. Freedom is self-determination and self-possession. It is the ability to move in the world free of economic, political, social coercion. It is the ability to say, “yes” — or “no” — and mean it; it is relaxation; it is:

[t]he swivel and circle of hips, the nasty elegance of the Shimmy, the changing-same of collective movement, the repetition, the improvisation of escape and subsistence, bodied forth the shared dream of scrub maids, elevator boys, whores, sweet men, stevedores, chorus girls, and tenement dwellers — not to be fixed at the bottom, not to be walled in the ghetto. Each dance was a rehearsal for escape.

Hartman is consumed with the movement, the physical locomotion and literal vibration of Black people as a rejoinder to the stasis and supposed predictability of Black life, especially as rendered by the social sciences that predicted the inevitability of Black extinction in the early 20th century. For Hartman, the range of Black movement from migration to dank dance halls to the chorus line to the palpable sexual energy that courses through the women in the text is life, expectation, hope. It is a different kind of movement, certainly distinguished from the motion required to “strive,” where all is succumbed to the movement up or down an imagined social ladder.

How does this connect with Hartman’s description of Black women as progenitors of the modern? There are two ways to understand this. The first is through the recognition that modernity is a highly contingent and cumulative expression of the previous epoch. In other words, the supposed new world of American Progressivism stood high upon the shoulders of the society it was intended to replace: its prehistory was absolutely central to its 20th-century emergence. If the “rosy dawn” of capitalism, as Marx called it, came dripping into existence with the blood and dirt of slavery and genocide, then its maturation — measured in the innovations of war, imperialism, industrialization, and urbanization — were only possible because of the exploitation and abuse of Black women’s bodies. The resistance to this order could also be read through the violent thrashing of Black women’s bodies against the new order, boundaries and borders that distinguished the supposed modern age. Hartman invokes this paradigm when she describes how social reformers dismissed Black women and girls as “ungovernable” or when she describes the sonic upheaval of young Black women who resisted their imprisonment with

relentless screaming and destruction of the prison’s interior.

In 1917 and 1918, Black women and girls, imprisoned for imagined and real transgressions against a social order erected on the mores of white supremacy, rebelled within a New York State prison to protest their conditions and so much more. Part of the ritualistic violence and abuse endured by these women and girls involved torturing them by hanging them from handcuffs so that their feet could barely touch the ground. The point was to get these women and girls to conform to the norms of a brutal social order — exemplified by all parole routes leading to domestic work in the homes of white people in Upstate New York. Black domestic work was considered a normal part of the social hierarchy, and the regime of brutality in the prison was intended to domesticate Black women into accepting the role. The technologies of torture, the prison itself, were markers of modern life even as they were activated in regressive ways against Black women’s bodies marked the bridge between the past and the contemporary. In opposition to this order, these Black women and girls led a multiracial rebellion of “ungovernables” by trying to physically destroy the prison and then settling on a noise strike where their screams were recorded as resistance. It was one of the first political rebellions of the young 20th century and provided a model of resistance that African Americans returned to repeatedly over the remainder of the century.

Hartman finds hope in the qualities that marked ordinary Black women for premature death at the turn of the century — qualities like waywardness and a desire to find freedom in their everyday acts of existence. She is not just writing about the past but also mapping a direction for the inevitable future struggles that must arise from the persistence of white supremacy, misogyny, police abuse and violence, and the ever-radiating violence from the state itself. Hartman insists that engaging these questions requires more than theory or even “good politics.” She calls upon us to look at the lives of those who are on the bottom of the social hierarchy: How do they move, what gives them pleasure and not just pain, and most importantly, what do they want? How do we read resistance from the mundanity and alienation of life under capitalism as an actual desire to be free? Saidiya Hartman would tell us to watch and listen to ordinary Black women. She is not romanticizing the margins, though she suggests that we can find romance — the implacable pursuit of freedom — within the margins’ constraints.

THE FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM

KAYA GENÇ

Alittle more than 500 days has passed since Orhan Pamuk opened the doors of his Museum of Innocence to the public in Istanbul’s Çukurcuma neighborhood. It has been a lively, intense, and dangerous 500 days, during which time Istanbul witnessed frequent outbursts of violence and the destruction of any trace of innocence it might still have possessed. The loss of Istanbul’s innocence had been a gradual process: on May 1, 2013 (four days after Pamuk’s museum celebrated its first anniversary), the city’s governor abruptly canceled the May Day gathering in Taksim square. When the government had opened the square for the May Day gathering in 2010, after a 32-year-long

ban by previous administrations, the move was much praised by the country’s leftists and liberals. Four weeks after the cancellation of the May Day gathering a small group of die-hard environmentalists kick-started the events in Gezi park, struggling to protect one of the last green areas in Taksim, where the government wanted to install a kitschy shopping mall. During the early days of protests, when local youths marched to the park, tourists continued to fill Pamuk’s museum. As the violence snowballed and spilled onto the streets I walked past the museum door, looked at the building’s red facade and tried imagining the silence inside. The museum stands at the entrance of a street that connects Karaköy (which is adjacent to Bosporus) to Cihangir (which is close to Gezi Park) — a neighborhood that had its share of tear gas during the events.

I had first visited the museum in midApril last year before it had even opened its doors to the public. Pamuk had arranged for me to visit the building for a short piece commissioned by a British paper. Early one morning I knocked on the door and was greeted by the museum’s first curator, who showed me around. After her departure I enjoyed, for more than an hour, being alone among the museum’s fictional objects and sound installations, which had been freshly installed in the building’s three stories.

Listening to Turkish contemporary artist Cevdet Erek’s brilliant sound recordings of a stilettoed woman’s walk among the streets of Nişantaşı was a priceless experience. So was the chance to get a close look at the small bed of the book’s protagonist Kemal and at Pamuk’s manuscript, in which I could see, in the writer’s longhand, the early sketches of Kemal’s character. In another installation I heard Istanbul’s birds as they clapped their wings; leaving the building I felt sure I would come back to the place and to its silent innocence.

Before he allowed writers and journalists like me inside, Pamuk had brought another group of people, a group that must have mattered much more — his neighbors, most of whom are antique dealers. I heard stories about how they had explored the objects of the museum with much pleasure. They were proud to have been the first visitors of the place. It made sense since they had been on that street long before the museum was even an idea in Pamuk’s mind.

In the days I passed by the museum I had paid little attention to its neighbors. When The New York Times had listed Istanbul in a “places to visit this summer” article last year, a picture represented the city that showed those neighbors and their families as they visited the museum. “How can those people represent Istanbul?” one user complained on Twitter. He might have preferred seeing smartly dressed Turkish businessmen on the page instead of those not-soglamorous locals. But then the neighborhood did belong to those people, in whose eyes we must have been little more than visitors. Some of them shared with Pamuk an impressive devotion to the art of collecting. Their shops, around a dozen of them in Çukurcuma, look like miniature museums of innocence themselves. They are similar products of meticulous labor spent collecting objects.

One morning in August I visited those antique shops. They seemed to me to have been placed there as an extension of Pamuk’s artistic vision, so brilliant was his choice of locale. I visited Esra Aysun, the museum’s new curator, in her office

adjacent to the building, and she described it as the museum becoming an “organic part” of a neighborhood those shops had defined for so long. “We didn’t change the neighborhood at all,” she said. “Instead we set up an institution that is looking after its objects just like they look after theirs.”

Çukurcuma’s antique shops (antikacılar in Turkish) had long witnessed the life in the neighborhood. They helped make it safe when Taksim was not so safe a place in 1990s — a time when the tension between the city’s Kurds, Roma people, sexual minorities, and the police force was at its peak. This was also a time when torture in police stations was widespread and street violence a basic fact of life.

Mahmut Gezmez, the owner of Yaşam Antik, seemed like a grave character when I first met him in his dimmed shop filled with many objects made of copper. He described how the number of his customers had dropped after the protests this summer. But when asked to talk about his neighborhood he cheered up. “Our customer profile changed dramatically thanks to the museum,” he said. “Young and beautiful people are now frequenting this street. They are not shopping that much, but you know, one can’t expect young people to shop that much. I totally forgive them.” When I asked him whether he approved of the way Pamuk’s curator displayed the museum’s objects, he said he didn’t feel qualified to answer the question. “Professional architects designed those object cabinets in the museum,” he said, “who am I to criticize them? I think the museum is very nice.” In an even more cheerful mood he told me how his fellow antique dealers learned English to better communicate with new customers. “Me? So far I have not managed to master the language,” he said. “My English consists of two words: hello and welcome.” Gezmez, who had traveled to Istanbul from Adana (a city which the country’s other major novelist, Yaşar Kemal, beautifully describes in his epic books), promised to read Pamuk’s books and improve his English before I left his shop.

I then visited Fikret’in Dünyası (“Fikret’s World”) owned by a young collector named Fikret Bilgin Yılmaz. Yılmaz said he had devoted his life to collecting; he focuses on toys and has been collecting them for the last 15 years. “Orhan Bey purchased many of the toys for his museum from my own shop in Cihangir,” he said. (Everyone I spoke to that day referred to Pamuk in this way, as “Mr Orhan.”) “Orhan Bey is not a collector in the classical sense of the word. He collected stuff in order to create this museum and then he seems to have quitted the habit. Another famous Turkish writer, Sunay Akın, is also a frequent visitor.” Akın owns a museum in the city’s Anatolian side named Istanbul Toy Museum (http://www.istanbuloyuncakmuzesi.com/eng/). “I think Pamuk is the better writer and Akın is the better collector,” Yılmaz opined.

Another shop I visited on the street was virtually empty except for its owner, Haydar Tekin, who said he had lately decided to turn his place into a “transportation facility.” “My family had lived here for more than a century,” said Tekin, whose surname means “deserted place” in Turkish. “The grandfather of my grandfather came here first. Our family witnessed the transformation of this neighborhood over many decades. We know who helped Çukurcuma and who did not. Let me tell you,” he said in a passionate voice, “Orhan Bey is a very good fellow. His museum