Is the work of power done after death? In Nightmare Remains, I answer this with a definitive no. Indeed, neither the work of power nor the enactments of resistance are done after death. Instead, dead bodies very much make a part of politics: from how they died to what happened to the dead, whether they had a gravestone, whether that stone remained intact, whether they had a name written somewhere, a mortuary, a date of execution, or a death sentence: everything about the afterlives of death is political. Amid the horrors unveiling in front of our eyes for the last year, this conclusion hardly sounds surprising. Not only might one not be allowed to live, but they may not be allowed to die either. What remains are nightmares, and ghosts that haunt us for decades.
And ghosts always have something to say.
For me, this research started unexpectedly in Turkey. I was sitting at a meyhane table in my hometown Izmir with a family member and their friends. Not being amongst people I knew well, much of the conversation was small talk and niceties: what we do, our interests and such. They told me about what they were working on at the time: a documentary, about a landfill called Newala Qesaba in Siirt (Eastern Turkey), where there are bodies of ‘disappeared people’ that were thrown away decades ago, and never dug out to be recovered or properly buried. Everyone in the area knows, they said, there are dogs that dig up human bones; when the wind blows the wrong way, it smells funky. The documentary they prepared, Ölü ile Diri / Mirî û jî sax (The Dead and the Living), was completed in 2017: the documentary listens to different members of the community, from mothers to neighbors and landfill workers to journalists who investigated the area.
Indeed, everyone knows. There is something about the way they know. That kind of knowing despite not wanting to know, knowing in the absence of verified proof, knowing in the absence of records and justifications, is what makes up the key insight of Nightmare Remains. There is a kind of knowing that consists in mobilizing, in the absence of official records, in creating spaces in the absence of graveyards, in talking to and with ghosts, and doing so insistently.
As much as I started this work from my own home country, Turkey, this research has shown me that ghosts travel the world. The court documents about enforced disappearances from Turkey took me to examples from Latin America, the Saturday Mothers statements kept referring to Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, both strange and familiar. Newala Qesaba called to me, and so did other mass graves across the world, in Soacha, Colombia, Santiago, Chile, and Buenos Aires.
As these are the key examples that I focus on in Nightmare Remains, this past year between finishing the manuscript and its current publication has brought more examples than anyone could stomach. We all have been seeing, for the last year, an active example of the work of the kind of power that I call necro sovereignty: a kind of power that allows or disallows death to those who are gone, a kind of power whose principal mechanism is not only the dead or the living, but the afterlives of those gone. Massacres and mass graves are but a common symptom of its work.
Since October 7, 2023, according to the United Nations, over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed through vertical, horizontal, and infrastructural warfare. When it comes to the work of death, official numbers are often misleading if not outright false: testimonies suggest much higher death counts with piles of bodies around, many of them in multiple pieces and not countable. Necropolitics, according to Achille Mbembe, creates proximity between entire populations and death: they become die-able populations. The world has seen with painful clarity how this proximity is formed and sustained: spaces of life become spaces of death and the very hospitals that are supposed to keep innocents alive become spaces of the largest mass graves, such as in the cases of Nasser Hospital and Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
Nevertheless, there is something more than killing, so that even the dead are not safe. Rather dead bodies, names, memories, or what makes one ‘dead’ is simultaneously targeted: the multiplication of dead and mass graves is accompanied by the raiding of cemeteries and the removal and dismembering of bodies, where the dead disappear once again. Disappearance, as in the example of enforced disappearances across the globe that make the key protagonists of Nightmare Remains, but also in the case of disappearances in war sites: those who are left behind, in the absence of graves or bodies, live in that limbo where those gone might be alive, just as well dead.
Such attacks particularly target practices of mourning; where the disappearance of the person and the body often coincides with the disappearance of spaces of violence and records of existence. This goes beyond that of killing or taking lives, and similarly, it is an operation different from keeping alive: the opposite of letting die is not to ‘make life,’ but rather, it is to not let die. So many are eaten by the places they love, and yet not allowed to die.
All of this occurs in the context of and in the aftermath of colonialism. Much of the ‘war’ going on currently is taking place as a war of the dead, where hostages and the dead are set against each other. According to Decolonial Philosophers such as Aníbal Quijano and Édouard Glissant, colonialism, and its global aftermaths create violence by classifying the world population racially. Such stratification creates a new kind of loss and a new kind of horror, which is continually wielded. Wielding loss pits the dead and the lost against each other and belonging becomes an issue not only of birth but also of death.
The question of what remains is particularly important as we are now, as urgently and maybe as clearly as ever, living in a haunted world: what kinds of knowledge become obscured, obstructed, or disqualified in such a world? Nightmare Remains is a book that does not conclude, since neither those who are dead nor those who remain have a clean ending. Between finishing this book and its publication, a part of my work has become asking this question once again: what does it mean to have a haunted population? What are the nightmares and knowledges that remain?
The Mee-Ow Show: Past, Present, and Future