or a guide to sprinkling water on our hearts
These are hard days. Days when waking, producing and thinking grow difficult, when anxiety takes a person captive. And not only in our own country: everywhere in the world, days when the stones have shifted, when the order we knew has changed, when the pressure has increased and resources have dwindled, when oppression has grown truly cruel and the oppressed have lost altogether.
Yesterday I woke with a distress I could not drive out of myself, and while I listened wearily to music, something in me lightened for a moment without my noticing. The instant I shook off the daze of this optimism, which had appeared in me for no reason, I searched inside myself. We all know that these lands, like the rooster that crows too early, have little love for a hope without a cause.
I realised my optimism had come from a familiar voice catching my ear, out of the Grundig handheld radio that my mother, in my childhood, never failed to keep playing while she cooked in the kitchen. That music took me to a stove-heated house set inside its garden; to the sweet voice of my mother, a young and happy woman who did her work cheerfully in the cold kitchen, always in a thick dressing gown, singing along with the songs; to the smell of mücver, the courgette fritters, just fried; to the swing in the garden; to play; to an absence of worry; to the drowsiness of waking from an afternoon nap on sunny days; to the scent of the magnolia tree.
All of this really did run through me like water, inside a single second. I could not catch the words at first, but it felt as if sun were dripping into me from the music. I realised that Sezen Aksu was singing "Uzaklarda bir Yerde", which she herself had composed, and for which Nilüfer had written the lyrics. This song, which tells of a passionate summer love I could not possibly have understood at the time, reminded me of my lucky, happy childhood. I called those childhood days to mind, in dramatic contrast with the state I was in, and thought sadly to myself what beautiful days they had been.
Then, in a moment, I came to. Those very beautiful, happy days, the early 1980s, were years when the country was again buried in its own fate, inside a wretched shoving match, closed in on itself: years that dropped live embers into many a hearth, that brought the loss of so many young people and their maiming in spirit and in body, years that were pitch dark for a great many. I was lucky. I had not been battered. Very little of what was happening reached me.
And before me, how did my father's childhood and his youth pass? Was everything so very different? Years of so much scarcity, of poverty, of Marshall aid. Full of conflict again: schools closing every other day, teachers with no safety of life, students hostile to one another, the generation of 68, hearts broken, anxious about the future...
One generation further back, after the War of Independence, was life any easier in the days when my grandfather, an orphan without a father, who had migrated to Istanbul with his mother, fought a real "hunger", a struggle of being and of not being that makes the problems we have today look almost cosmetic? The story of those days, when they boiled the leather soles of shoes and added them to the meal, still sounds in my ears. In my childhood it had seemed to me like a fairy-tale melodrama.
Of course, in those days too there was a minority whom these stories never touched, living in ease. But they were always fewer in number, and the order was a rotating one. With the ever-changing dynamics of society, giving their turn to one another, they handed their prosperous lives on to the next as members of different groups, and then they were gone.
Many of my friends have children now. Through a thousand and one efforts of their families, an attempt is made to raise them without their being battered. And unfortunately, in many parts of the country, the fire is again burning things down to ash, wearing people out, frightening them. But children go on being born, people go on loving, marrying, parting, and the sun goes on rising. It is plain that the turn to wrestle inside life, and to face what is happening, now belongs to me as an adult, and so the one whose inside darkens today is me. Even so, I think we have no right, just now, to pour this mood over the children and the young around us. It is plain that in this geography the cycle will put a few more generations through the circle of fate. As in wretched, endless Turkish television series, the backdrop will change and the theme will not. What will always fall to us is to live: somehow, as far as our hands can reach, to heal and to help others heal.
Neither was yesterday so beautiful, nor is today so dark. Life flows in the way it knows, and we try, somehow, to keep our heads above the water. I do not know whether this consoles you. The thought calms me a good deal. There is no fleeing from life, after all, and as one lives, a person manages somehow to make hope grow, be it a little or a lot. Perhaps it is this strange but magical quality of ours that makes us the masters of the planet.