Welcome, Metin Turan!
Since Metin Turan Went Inside: Technology, Class, and Resistance
Since Metin Went Inside: The Story of Thirty-Two Years
Thirty-two years ago a door closed; yesterday a door opened again, and from within, a folk song whose voice had never been lowered in thirty-two years spilled out. Dungeon walls swallowed many comrades and tried to smother many voices — but some voices do not pass through walls; they pass through history, and history brings them back. Grup Ekin’s vocalist Metin Turan has been released.
Words catch fire on the tongue and turn to ash; feeling finds no room in the chest. Thirty-two years — long enough for a baby to be born and become a father, for a sapling to fall and a forest to rise in its place, for an age to close and an entirely different age to open. And for all that time there is no corresponding crime; because there was never a crime at all. While thieves ran rampant at their tables and enemies of the people in their seats of power, this country’s patriots, artists, and laborers left half their lives behind iron bars. In this Turkey that changed its name from the “old” to the “new,” the one thing that did not change was that justice still stands on its head.
Joy to those who love him; our eyes are bright.
Who is this voice?
Metin Turan was born in Samsun in 1967. In the years when youth and class struggle were rising in Turkey, he completed METU’s Department of Economics in 1990 as an honors student; he began a master’s degree but was forced to leave it unfinished for political reasons. Rather than place his economic training in the service of the capitalist order, he chose the ranks of revolutionary art; he sang as a vocalist in Grup Ekin and Grup Yorum, and with songs such as “Kavgayı Seçtim,” “Kızıl Karanfiller,” “İstanbul Şafakları,” and “Sevdalınız Hapistir,” he carved his voice into the memory of a generation.
Arrested in 1994, Turan was held in prison for thirty-two years. Despite severe vision loss in both eyes and a Forensic Medicine Institute report that he “cannot remain in prison,” bourgeois courts delayed his release until 18 August 2026. Yet he lived those thirty-two years not as a period of idleness but as a ground of materialist will and production: from prison came stories and novels such as Siyah Gökkuşağı (2018), Keşfetmenin Güzelliği (2018–2019), Her İnsan Bir Zamandır (2019), Ama Bir Gün Bir Şey Olur (2020), Başka Türlüsü (2021), and Parçalanmayı Bekleyen (2022); in 2019 he won the Ümit Kaftancıoğlu Short Story Award. The dungeon could not silence him — his pen became the continuation of his voice.
Let us try to tell this to young comrades — because remembering 1994 is, for most of you, something like a page in a history book; for Metin it was a thirty-two-year cell window.
When Metin went inside, the mobile phone was only just beginning to be talked about in Turkey — Turkcell was founded that year, in 1994, but a telephone still meant the landline on the wall of the house or the token payphone at the street corner. Sending a letter took days; learning the news meant waiting for the evening bulletin. What we call the internet was, in this country, a research network circulating only in the corridors of a few universities, whose very name an ordinary person had never heard. Organization moved through cassettes passed from hand to hand, physical leaflets, and collective spaces built face to face.
Now, since Metin went inside, that telephone first entered the pocket, then merged with the internet, then turned into a small world in the palm of our hand. In place of the letter came messages that arrive in a second; in place of the news bulletin, a screen that never stops flowing. Facebook was born, Twitter was born, YouTube was born, Instagram was born, TikTok was born — Metin saw none of them. And now the programs we call artificial intelligence, which write, speak, even draw pictures like a human being, are part of everyday life. But let us not read this change as a pure fable of “emancipation”: the tools bourgeois ideologues present as “connection” and “freedom” have at the same time become an apparatus of surveillance and control unprecedented in the history of the capital-accumulation regime. The worker’s attention is scattered by algorithms; the working day now spreads into the home, the street, the pocket — a flexible exploitation divided across twenty-four hours.
Now, since Metin went inside, the face of the class struggle has changed as well. When he went inside, the smoke of the Soviet Union’s collapse was still rising; the “end of history” had been declared — but history did not end. In 1994 Turkey, shaken by the 5 April Decisions and bowing to the IMF, was driven toward the 2001 crisis and then the 2008 global crisis. Public enterprises were privatized one by one, unions were pushed back, subcontracting spread. When Metin went inside, a significant section of the working class was still a classical proletariat in the factory, in a stable job, under a union roof, standing together in space; now capital has smashed the production process to pieces — millions of young people live as a “courier” or “platform worker,” carrying orders by motorcycle through an app, uninsured, precarious, isolated from one another and from organization. Labor was made invisible, atomized, indebted — but exploitation was never invisible.
Now, since Metin went inside, the Gezi resistance took place; there was the 2016 coup attempt and the years of emergency rule that followed; the 2018 currency crisis emptied pockets; a pandemic shut the whole world indoors; in the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes tens of thousands of people died under the rubble of illegal and rent-driven construction. Inflation, unemployment, and impoverishment continued without slowing. In the world, new wars broke out; the climate crisis is no longer a distant threat but a daily reality. Metin learned all of this from behind the walls, from newspaper columns, from what visitors told him.
And still something has not changed: today thieves and enemies of the people still run rampant; today the lives of patriots, laborers, and artists are still being stolen. Thirty-two years ago and today, the real crime is to stand against injustice, to sing the voice of one’s people, not to be silent.
Young comrades, Metin’s story teaches us this: technology can change from top to bottom; phones can evolve from the pocket to the palm and from there to artificial intelligence; factory gates can close and give way to app screens; but so long as the class struggle continues, paying the price, resisting, and hoping continue as well. That a voice which said “Kavgayı Seçtim” comes out unsilenced after thirty-two years is the most concrete proof of this. Metin may hold a mobile phone in his hand for the first time, may speak with an artificial intelligence for the first time — but the songs he brings will still remind us of something that never aged through those years: the language of resistance and of hope. Our love is still with those who remain in prison; our voice is still from where Metin left it.
Joy to those who love him; our eyes are bright, Metin.
Kavgayı Seçtim
