ISSUE THIRTEEN | FALL 2019
1.
Güz: both fall and the first syllable of beauty
in my mother tongue. Socialism like honey
from the music of the tongue of a stranger—a Kurd
to be precise, whom I met online, a boy who survived
the rubble of a Turkish military operation, while still
inside the womb of his mother, who fled like a saint
holding her husband’s hand, who lied into her ear:
this is the last, evîna min, I paid the truck driver
for the journey all the way. Still the shoes to trade,
winter coat, winter boots, and grandpa’s inexplicable
ruby ring. Istanbul ne hostile, ne güzel—just mean,
rude, and poorer in its way: you build your own house
with your bare hands on a brown lot from the price
of fresh fruit and meat. Ferit speaks a Turkish like knife-
edge—loud, sibilant—because knives kill lovers like him
who speak their mother tongue. Sedat (21) just last week
bled to death, because six men at a bus stop heard him
speak Kurdish on his phone: Think whether those last
words were without issue, or a slip, or absolute necessity,
or daring to prove his father wrong, who had counseled
him not to: do what the quantal voice-box is meant:
lean into the only sounds that can beg, trip, forgive.
Ferit, too, counseled by his mother to be silent, leads the way
to a truck in a once-Greek neighborhood—abandoned
when fake news claimed the birth home of the deceased
first president of Turkey, his hometown in Greece, bombed,
causing a government-armed pogrom that killed dozens,
and displaced tens of thousands of Greeks. Oh, my hysterical
people. A neighborhood since squatted by Romani, Kurdish,
Iraqi, Syrian, and African immigrants now on the verge of eviction
for luxury apartments whose life-size digital illustrations bespeak
a futuristic nostalgia for empire, with some neo-classical molding
to hint that we’ve been following in the steps of our ex-colonizers
all along. For now, Leyla still sells her hand-sewn underwear
at the local bazaar, and watches her kids play soccer in the street,
and at night Ferit leads me through the endangered alleys to a food truck
that boasts an unused grill, because what’s really on sale inside
are the pills that come in blue and pink: ecstasy stamped
with Superman’s cheeky ‘S,’ and never—like poor Uncle Sam’s,
always cutting corners—a bad batch. Here he speaks
the language that finally ensures our trust, and our adrenaline
pumps as we walk past undercover cops, through that shining
hill of my city: the ghetto, where the same cops await, silently
a class war that has happened elsewhere, because here
we’re too close to capital. Then the club on the 5th floor
of a building off a street bustling with taverns and tourists,
my heart begins its birdsong—the lush curtains move to reveal
homosexuals, queens, trans sisters, queers of all stripes,
goths, sex workers, lovers, friends, fuck friends, writers,
activists, goddamn exchange students, and each day more
and more immigrants out of God’s good eye, who’ve made it
from Tehran, Damascus, Cairo, Sana'a, shaking off the
wolf, shedding skin, kissing, holding hands, sweating,
dancing, sitting in the plush velvet sofas in the back,
lips twisting, curling, caressing, jumping, confidently,
ecstatically, defensively, coyly—desiring, drifting,
declaring, affecting, giving, forgiving, scheming. A kind
of dream, I think, when Ferit presses his mouth
to mine, and I forget, for several minutes, that tomorrow
he will be in the east, the source of our visions, and I
the west, the source of our nightmares, as we hold
onto each other for dear life.
2.
Sonbahar: fall, or ‘last spring,’ in Turkish: 1 movie
following another survivor: rootless, impotent, alone
on the raging shore of the Black Sea where he was born,
after a military raid on the political prison where he lost
lost . . . 200 miles away skin melting off
the cheekbone of a hunger striker at Bayrampaşa
Closed Prison, December 19, 2000, where it was
easier to burn the 6o victims protesting solitary
confinement huddled in a space of 150 m2, autopsies
revealing toluene, xylene, and methanol in skin, hair,
and clothing fragments, as well as tear and nerve gas.
All poured down the ceiling as in a conscious reenactment
of Birkenau. Look at this still of her stoic cheekbones
that spell “No, sister,” or “Yes, kardeş, here I stand,”
in the real voice of muteness. Press ‘play’ and you’ll hear
her speak: “they burned us alive,” in a voice whose calm
will haunt you like a lethal mystery—strange fruit
of the still-living throat. She will appear on TV
to describe every detail, but what is etched forever
in the memory of those who watched: weapons of
war against a single soul, a single skull. Prayer
plucked out of total and abject disbelief.
A cousin moves to the US, for no good reason.
After all his poor uncle made it in and out of junta
prison in Istanbul after the Pentagon informed then-CIA
chief of Ankara that “the boys did it,” meaning Turkish generals,
soldiers, and paramilitaries who took over the country in 1980
to charge, imprison, or kill anyone aiming to change “the character
of the Republic,” “disappearing” over a thousand—517 officially,
299 unrecorded, the rest extrajudicial. ‘Yankee Go Home,’
ama beni de al, pero llévame contigo: but, gringo, take me
with you. Yellow highway lines of a DUI—the absurd (there,
in America) is given several names: oil, gun, and Blue Velvet.
“I, mother, am,” the boy writes, “worried about my other.
My other is living on classes, mother, not a girl looks at him
who does not see in his features the hot-blooded Arab
of her mother’s nightmares, while I stand looking at her,
and I swear, from that position all Americans are monkeys.
They couldn’t tell their tails apart from that president
if they ended up at a bonfire off this college town in upstate
New York. I am a hanged man here, mother, I fill a hole
with damages. I look forward to being profiled, Tased,
and searched. Did you find anything? Me, me, that’s
all you’ll find in this body. My privileges. What would
my elders think of it all, if I cared for such things?
I’d gladly cut their faces from high school yearbooks
and stage a history of my country’s horrors. Halls
where you must pick your nationality, your ethnicity,
your party—are you a Turk or a bastard? There’s one
good answer. No, my ancestors can go re-bite the big one.
There is a poison inside me—inside my stubbornness—
that tears holes at the roots of my very dreams,
the dreams of my people. A violence that pulls them
down into the dirt, into nightmares a hundred times
darker than any Dante imagined. Now I choose to live
in this country where I’m a foreigner, where most people
hate their emotions, and are as afraid of love as
kindergarteners are afraid of being stuck inside the gate
to either their captivity or their freedom. Here we are,
mother, running from the gravity of our own shadows,
our own misgivings, our own best impulses on a day
to day basis. But at least, Heart, here I am not forced
into military service, and, maybe, killing my other. To hate
the fullness of my own mind. These are luxuries
in New York: ones that don’t get you far,
but luxuries, nevertheless. I enjoy my poverty.”
3.
Your survival: an empty seat on the bus
to Ankara Central railway station, 5:25 am,
October 10, 2015: where hundreds will gather
to ask for peace between the Turkish government
and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK,
when a double explosion will char the halay—
practiced by entwining one’s arms or pinkies
and kicking in a line or circle, performed at wedding
ceremonies and political rallies—into a bloodbath.
No room for survivor’s guilt. Police are tailing you
for going to a protest to protest that. I know this Middle
Eastern Kafkaesque is not lost on you, because it never is,
but that you’re genuinely scared. Scared that they might
show up at your home. They know too much about you.
That you are gay, they would use against you, out you
to your family so you have nowhere to live. This is real.
It happened to a friend of yours. He moved in
with your classmates at the university, where you visit
often. Kurdish blood has never weighed the same
as Turkish blood. The blood of a Turkish soldier who died
a hundred years ago safeguarding the republic
weighs more than the blood of a Kurdish boy
who dies this minute. Now the military carries out
some of its offensives against southeastern
since Ferit’s mother left her home
when she was pregnant with him. Now the city
of Cizre is under lockdown and more are
afraid to leave for water and food
because the streets. Ferit’s mother
remembers this possibility like it was yesterday
so she will never appreciate her son’s daring, the fact
that he wears the colors of his people in a wristband.
“The noose around your arteries,” she tells him, “your
suicide, boy.” She says it for his benefit, though he curses
her lack of political will. He says his father does better:
takes him to the village of his birth and eviction, where
a missile sits—undetonated—in what used to be his school:
a concrete rectangle. Ferit can’t believe it, but his father smiles
like a ghost. “We made it out, I guess,” he says, “most of us
fled, and the rest, well, they had a mind to join the rebels,
or hold on.” And Ferit squeezes his shoulder, who raised
him selling odd items at one of those Turkish bazaars
where you can buy everything, from olives to pajamas.
And he remembers the day his father accompanied him
to the bookstore where he’d fill his bag up to become
the writer he is now, from which he sometimes stole,
and his father asked if there was a discount for students,
when 17-yr-old Ferit—before he could even think—said: this
is not a bazaar, dad. A father’s rejection is insoluble, claustrophobic,
blue with anxiety and guilt, often anger—not this father. How
Ferit realized he could suddenly create a rupture between them,
which he did not understand yet, regretted with every bone. Broken,
he hugged him. Now. Now father and son on the edge of all
things past: the future an overwhelming caress, he said:
“I’m sorry.” “For what, son?” “For not understanding. For all
of it.” “But, none . . . I . . . in fact, it’s sometimes, I . . .”
He felt his son’s hand squeeze his shoulder, again, understood
he could be quiet. And Ferit understood this was one way he could
hold his father. No will necessary in that gesture, that ablution,
not even the old familiar hatred of these destroyed and sunburnt
images, not even hope. The sense simply that all was there:
the shape of history: ginormous, quiet—something to best,
beat, bury. And that there was a time for fists, for banners,
and a time for tears. For watching one’s father cry.
1
1. Erasures are examples of auto-censorship as mandated by various new articles of the Criminal Code of Turkey that contain up to 3-year prison penalties for the sharing of specific kinds of information.
Sébastien Bernard is a Turkish poet and fiction writer based in Istanbul. He was a 2018 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, and his fiction appears in Evergreen Review and DIAGRAM; his poetry in SUSAN/The Journal, DIAGRAM, KGB Bar Lit, Prelude, and Queen Mob's Teahouse. Sébastien completed his BA in Philosophy at Vassar College, and his MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. He edits for Brooklyn Poets’ the Bridge remotely, and has called Istanbul, Poughkeepsie, NYC, and Maputo home.
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