Some books recount what happened; others are written to prevent what happened from being forgotten. Deniz Kenan’s My Mother Had Hands belongs to the latter category. Published by Süreyya Publications in March 2026, the book brings together the true stories of people whose lives were upended after July 15, 2016, through emergency decrees, detentions, arrests, dismissals from public service, passport cancellations and social exclusion.
The preface explains that the book was prepared as part of the work of Advocates of Silenced Turkey (AST). Its accounts draw on the personal testimonies of those still alive and the life stories of those who have died. The book presents the experiences of 53 people, noting that some names were changed for security reasons.
My Mother Had Hands, therefore, is neither a conventional collection of stories nor merely a dry human rights report. Positioned between documentary narrative and literary storytelling, it is a work of remembrance that combines testimony with emotion and gives a human face to legal violations.
The book’s greatest achievement lies in making visible again the human beings buried beneath sweeping political terminology. Official and impersonal expressions such as “state of emergency,” “emergency decree,” “affiliation,” “association,” “membership in a terrorist organization,” “judicial supervision” and “passport restriction” became detached from real human lives after years of repetition in public discourse.
Yet behind every dismissal stood a teacher; behind every arrest, a child left without a mother or father; and behind every canceled passport, a patient unable to access medical treatment. This book restores names and faces to the lives rendered invisible by political language.
The Sentence That Gave the Book Its Title
The title comes from one of the book’s most striking stories. The chapter “My Daughter Had Forgotten Me” tells the story of Sena, an educator and mother of three. Shortly after July 15, police raided her home before dawn. She was taken into custody and subsequently imprisoned. When she was separated from her children, her youngest daughter, Nurşen, was only two years old.
Months later, during an open visitation, Nurşen refuses to sit on her mother’s lap. Instead, she clings to her grandmother and calls her “Mom.” The little girl has forgotten her mother. After a while, she carefully examines Sena’s face and hands before turning to her grandmother and uttering the sentence that would become the book’s title:
“Grandma, my mother had hands, too!”
This sentence carries the entire emotional world of the book. To the child, her mother is no longer a complete human presence, but a distant and indistinct memory. She must rediscover her mother’s face, scent and hands. The devastation inflicted on a child’s inner world by state action becomes visible not through statistics or legal terminology, but through a five-word sentence spoken by a child.
“My mother had hands, too!” describes more than a moment of forgetfulness. It reveals the fragmentation of a child’s world and the rupture of the most fundamental bond between mother and child. The words “had hands” are especially devastating because they express the rediscovery of a truth once known but subsequently forgotten. Of course her mother had hands—but imprisonment had deprived the child even of this most natural knowledge.
Small Lives Buried Beneath Grand Political Narratives
The book portrays the post–July 15 period through the destruction of everyday life: a child asking why his father cannot come home; a mother teaching her children at an early age how to cook and make their beds so they can manage in her absence; a woman traveling hundreds of miles to visit her imprisoned husband; a patient unable to obtain essential medication.
All these experiences demonstrate how political repression penetrates everyday life.
In the story “What If I Never Get Another Chance?”, a mother attempts to prepare her children for life in case her sentence is upheld. She teaches her son how to travel between cities at a young age and her daughter how to bathe by herself, prepare food and organize her belongings. From the outside, these may appear to be ordinary lessons intended to teach children responsibility. But the mother’s true purpose is different: She believes she may soon be sent to prison and will no longer be there for them.
For this reason, growing up ceases to be a natural process for the children in this book. They are forced to mature before their time. In the absence of their parents, they learn how to survive, conceal their fears and navigate prison journeys and visitation rules.
In “Isn’t This a Prison, Mom?”, a young girl has been told that her father works at a workplace. But after learning to read, she sees the sign at the prison entrance and confronts her mother with the truth. The story created to protect the child collapses as soon as she becomes literate. Education, which under normal circumstances should open the world to a child, instead becomes the means through which she discovers a painful truth.
Three-year-old Hifa, in the story “Don’t Give Them Feet,” lives in prison with her mother. Unaware that her father has also been arrested, she believes he has abandoned her. She does not want the toys she makes to have feet because she fears that if they do, they too will walk away and leave her. When a snail they kept in the prison ward disappears, she cries: “I wish you hadn’t had feet either. Then you wouldn’t have left me.”
Motherhood at the Heart of the Book
Women—and mothers in particular—stand at the center of the book. Motherhood, however, emerges here as another name for resistance, protection, sustaining life through absence and, at times, confronting indescribable loss.
The book includes stories of women detained while pregnant, women who lost their babies in prison, mothers separated from their children, women held despite serious illness and families forced onto dangerous migration routes with their children.
In “Two Lives Sent from a Dungeon to Paradise,” Berra loses two separate pregnancies under prison conditions. In “Twins Sent to Paradise,” a woman who underwent years of treatment to have children loses her twins. The chapters “Threatened Miscarriage in Police Custody” and “They Killed My Unborn Baby in Detention” recount how pregnant women’s medical complaints were disregarded while they were in custody.
Ayşe, a teacher who was eight weeks pregnant, was taken into custody. Despite repeatedly reporting that she was in pain, she was not provided with adequate medical assistance. After her release, she learned that her baby had died while she was in detention. Not only was no investigation opened into her complaint, but she was also ordered to pay the court costs.
At the heart of these stories is the failure to protect pregnancy, unborn children, patients and mothers—all of whom should have been under the state’s protection. Punishment thus ceases to be individual and extends to the unborn child, the children waiting at home and the entire family.
The book repeatedly demonstrates how the principle of individual criminal responsibility was violated in real life. One person may be arrested, but their children, spouse and parents are punished along with them. Hours spent traveling to prison visits, financial deprivation, social exclusion and shattered family life become a second punishment—one that never appears in the written court judgment.
Illness, Imprisonment and the Right to Life
One of the book’s most important human rights dimensions concerns seriously ill prisoners. Chapters such as “Şerife Sulukan: An Imprisoned Woman with an 89 Percent Disability,” “Halime Gülsu, Condemned to Death” and “I Hold a Pen and a Stethoscope, Not a Gun” reveal how the right to health was disregarded.
Halime Gülsu’s story is among the book’s most harrowing. Gülsu, who suffered from systemic lupus, a serious chronic illness, was unable to obtain her medication or appropriate treatment under prison conditions. Her health deteriorated steadily, and she eventually died. Here, prison ceases to be merely a place where freedom is restricted. When essential medical care is withheld, it becomes a place that directly threatens human life.
The book’s final story, “You Have Thirty Days Left to Live,” takes the violation of the right to life beyond prison walls. Twelve-year-old Furkan is diagnosed with brain cancer and told that the treatment he requires is unavailable in Türkiye. His family finds a treatment option in Cuba, but because their passports have been confiscated, they are prevented from traveling abroad. Even the family’s request that Furkan be allowed to travel alone is denied. As the disease progresses, Furkan suffers facial paralysis and later loses sight in one eye. He dies on February 7, 2017.
Ending the book with this story is profoundly meaningful. Throughout the work, every violation ultimately converges in Furkan’s story as a matter of the right to life. An administrative decision by the state became a fatal barrier standing between a sick child and the treatment he needed.
The Inner World Revealed Through Letters
Letters occupy an important place in the book. “The Final Letter,” “A Letter from Ali Ünal,” “What If I Never Get Another Chance?” and various letters sent from prison offer direct access to the characters’ inner worlds.
Rather than relying on emotional manipulation designed simply to make readers cry, the book trusts the power of testimony itself. Most of the stories are, of course, profoundly dramatic. But this is not because the narrative artificially heightens the drama; it is because the events themselves are dramatic.
It is equally important that the victims are not portrayed solely as helpless and broken. The book also recounts the solidarity among women and families, their efforts to remain productive in prison, acquire new skills, raise their children and preserve hope. In this way, it maintains a careful balance between victimhood and human dignity.
A Work of Counter-Memory
Memory is one of the most important battlegrounds in authoritarian periods. Governments do not seek merely to control the present; they also attempt to determine how the past will be remembered. To achieve this, certain victims are rendered invisible, certain deaths are normalized and certain injustices are legitimized through the language of security.
It is precisely here that My Mother Had Hands acquires its value as a work of counter-memory. It records the voices of those excluded from the official narrative. Even if court files, official documents and political disputes one day lose their significance, a child’s words—“My mother had hands, too”—will continue to live on.
Deniz Kenan’s book is an important resource for anyone seeking to understand the social and human toll of post–July 15 Turkey. It deserves especially careful attention from human rights advocates, journalists, lawyers, educators and historians who will study this period in the future.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book, published by Süreyya Publications.
