Hüseyin Rahmi’s queer hauntology: (Un-)making of the secular nation/state/self

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hüseyin Rahmi’s works feature ghosts, jinns, living skeletons, monsters, and ghouls. Literary historians, citing the writer’s own words, often account for this by suggesting that it was for instructional purposes in that he was trying to dispel superstitious beliefs then prevalent in society. The commonplace conviction is that he was yet another modernisationist, nationalist, and secular writer who took it upon himself to enlighten people to help the nation modernise. A number of biographical sidenotes accompany this conviction, implying that Hüseyin Rahmi may have been attracted to men. Nevertheless, neither these sidenotes nor his enthusiasm for monsters and ghosts has significantly affected the understanding of his work. Reading his Cadı and Dirilen İskelet, I argue that there is a queer element in his works that resists the writer’s intention and the contextualisation of his work. Hüseyin Rahmi’s monsters and ghosts illustrate the making of the nation-state through an empty, linear, homogenous time in a disenchanted present but they also haunt this making by inscribing the so-called superstitions of the past into its core, thereby gesturing towards the unmaking of the biopolitical nation-state and its heteronormative-reproductive body.