We Take Refuge From Bombs In Poems

'We take refuge from bombs in poems.'

                                                          -Gokcenur Celebioglu

As it's World Poetry Day, I thought it moot to turn away from the litanies of violence convulsing Turkey and look at something else instead - its poetry.

Poems pervade the very air in Turkey. You can't get very far without encountering some expression in verse, whether it's written on a wall or a sudden uttered phrase. It's a living, breathing thing, unencumbered by the baggage tag of 'Literature' that so often weighs down the reputation of verse in the UK. All too often, over here, people are vaguely embarrassed when they talk of poetry - it's all seen as something a bit affected. Over there, it is embraced, seen as life-affirming and life-enhancing. And also a way for feelings to be vented against the political classes - it is no coincidence that the number of graffiti poems increased substantially after the Gezi Park debacle.
The #SiirSokakta ('Poems on the Street')  are literally everywhere:

Often an outpouring of love, of frustration, of anger, of joy, these verses are very much of the people, by the people. 

Yet Turkish poetry is woefully unknown in the English speaking world. Why is this? After all, it is a huge rich seam, running through the centuries, intermingled with the cultures around it. Turkish, Arabic, Farsi. Pashto, Urdu - they all commune with and inform each other, much as the poetic tradition in the west did, between French, Italian, Spanish, German and English, to name a few. But it is as if there is a block, a wall, between these groups, in particular when it comes to English poetry. There's little or no sense of communion, of borrowing ideas and forms between neighbours. 

Largely, it's because Turkish poetry just doesn't get translated into English in the first place. The partial reason for this, I think, is the lack of connection, either through proximity, as in European works, or through relationship, as in poetry written in countries that were formerly parts of the British Empire. It's a very great shame, and our loss - poetry is the very rhythm of other lives, and to not know it is to not know the secret heart of other cultures. Right now, we could do with more translating, more understanding.

I've known my good friend Neil Docherty since we used to wander the bars of Istanbul over twenty years ago. He still lives in the city, teaching at Bilgi University and making translations from an array of Turkish poets, from Asik Veysel and Nazim Hikmet. to Orhan Veli and Oktay Rifat, right up to contemporary writers. Once written, he puts them up on his Facebook page, The Open Boat, with beautifully evocative images. What I would hope to see is all his hard work put into an anthology one day, so that more people can appreciate this largely overlooked (in English-speaking countries, at least) literary tradition.

I'll leave you with three poems, translated by Neil.

Ece Ayhan

Phaeton

for Erol Gülercan

What’s playing on his master's voice gramophone
is it seems the delicate melancholy of her loneliness
my sister boarded a phaeton of suicidal black
as it passed through the streets of pera’s deathly love

rapturously perhaps she who had garden fulls of flowers
stops in front of a flowerless florist’s
with a montenegrin revolver enshrouded in tulle
in the window algerian violets and photographs of oleanders

I who have not tried suicide these past three nights do not know
if the ascension to heaven of a suicidal black phaeton and its horses
was down to my sister chosing to buy the Algerian violets.

Fayton

Erol Gülercan'a

O sahibinin sesi gramofonlarda çalınan şey
incecik melankolisiymiş yalnızlığının
intihar karası bir faytona binmiş geçerken ablam
caddelerinden ölümler aşkı pera'nın

Esrikmiş herhal bahçe bahçe çiçekleri olan ablam
çiçeksiz bir çiçekçi dükkanının önünde durmuş
tüllere sarılmış mor bir karadağ tabancasıyla
zakkum fotoğrafları varmış cezayir menekşeleri camekânda

Ben ki son üç gecedir intihar etmedim hiç, bilemem
intihar karası bir faytonun ağışı göğe atlarıyla birlikte
cezayir menekşelerini seçip satın alışından olabilir mi ablamın.

Ahmet Ada

Day

I have been listening to music twenty four hours of the day. The
teapot bubbling away in the kitchen. The moon falls like strings
into my night. A poem waits to be written on the table.
A poem in tatters waiting to be gathered up.

Day breaks over the fisherman’s cafe. The sun
casts its fishing line into the sea.

Gün

Gün yirmi dört saat müzik dinliyorum. Çaydanlık
mutfakta fokurduyor. Ay düşüyor incesaz
geceme. Şiir, yazılmayı bekliyor masada.
Şiir paramparça toplanmayı bekliyor.

Gün ağarıyor balıkçı kahvesinden. Güneş
oltasını uzatıyor denize.

Ülkü Tamer

Its name was Death

When I first saw it its name was death
And afterwards it did not change a bit;
From the fortress of a city they displayed it
I saw it and the forest far away,
No matter what I did its name would not change.

They gave me a sword for some wars
And behind it they built me a house;
They gave me a spade for some wars
And behind it I built them a house;
In the evenings I toiled over the flowers a bit,
Some of my neighbours grew old and became flowers,
In the evenings with the others I would have dinner,
As we gathered together death grew, its name was death
As the city grew it became restless and headed out into the markets.

Its name was death because when we created it
The bird on its lips bled every evening
Its name was death when I moved to it every night
From the gallows tree I had grown used to
Laughing at the the dark emptiness of the throat
It was death, that would wander the streets of the city
That brought the clock tower right into my sleep.

Death was so much death and so diligent too
That no one could save me save death itself.

Ölümdü Adı

Ölümdü adı onu ilk gördüğümde
Sonraları da hiç değişmedi;
Kalesinden gösterdiler bir şehrin onu,
Onu gördüm ve ormanı gördüm uzakta,
Ne yapsam değişmiyecekti adı.

Bir kılıç verdiler bazı savaşlar için,
Arkasından bir ev kurdular bana;
Bir kazma verdiler bazı savaşlar için,
Arkasından bir ev kurdum onlara;
Akşamları çiçeklerle uğraştım biraz,
Yaşlanır, çiçek olurdu bazı komşularım,
Akşamları yemek yerdim bazılarıyla;
Biz toplandıkça büyürdü ölüm, adı ölümdü,
Şehir büyüdükçe azar, çıkardı çarşılara.

Adı ölümdü çünkü onu yarattığımız zaman,
Her akşam kanardı dudaklarındaki kuş
Ölümdü adı, ona her gece taşındığımda
Alışkın olduğum bir darağacından,
Gülerken boğazının karanlık boşluğuna
Ölümdü, sokaklarında dolaşırdı şehrin,
Saat kulesini getirmişti uykularıma.

O kadar ölümdü ki, o kadar da çalışkan,
Kimseler kurtaramazdı beni ölümden başka.

A word.

I simply do not know how to talk of this. 

How is it possible that yet another bomb has gone off in Ankara? How is it possible that the ruling party cares more for its image than it does for the lives of those lost and affected? How is it possible that some consider it more important to issue a blanket ban on coverage of the event than to actually do anything concrete and viable?

Kizilay in Ankara

source: Getty Images via the BBC

I said in my previous post on the last bombing that people who have no connection with Turkey probably find it hard to empathise, simply because of the objective and subjective distance from the event. We shouldn't blame or curse for that - it's what people do, otherwise they wouldn't be able to get up in the mornings for the sheer terror, pain and misery that happens around the world all the time. So, in order to contextualise, let's try a bit of what-if to create an analogy.

What if the British Government had refused to recognise Welsh as a language at all, and regarded the Welsh as a kind of inferior English?

What if, in the mid-twentieth century, the British government had cracked down a bit harder on Welsh nationalists and banned Welsh outright?

What if they had locked up, without trial or representation, anyone using Welsh?

What if they had pursued a policy of razing Welsh villages to the ground, and enforced a school curriculum that severely punished any child using Welsh?

What if the Meibion Glyndwr (The Sons of Glendower, a militant Welsh Group) had begun carrying out more than just firebombing attacks?

What if Plaid Cymru were represented as being the political wing of the MG, and demonised as such?

What if the MG, in 1966, had been successful in carrying out a terror attack at Prince Charles' investiture in Caernarfon?

What if the British government had moved an occupying force into Wales, and so didn't deploy to the extent it did in Northern Ireland?

What if a cash-strapped IRA had sold all its weaponry to the MG in 1968?

What if the MG went on to sustain a decades-long conflict with the British Government in which more than 30,000 died?

Let's put these what-ifs away just for a moment. I'm presenting a version of history that came within a gnat's whisker of what actually happened here in the UK - The IRA really were on the verge of selling their arms cache to the MG when the Troubles began.

The point of this is to try and create an analogy of the situation in Turkey vis a vis the Kurds: They want language and education rights and autonomy, just as people in Wales do. The difference is that the Turkish state has never been that keen on accommodating this. During the 90s, it seemed that the conflict would never end - yet the news and the way the situation was represented was muted, repressed and entirely biased.

Rather like, in fact, the way the British media at the same time robustly denied that there was anything remotely like peace talks with the IRA going on.

Turkey has its reasons as to why it will never want to cede sovereign territory, albeit ones that you may think aren't that good. It essentially comes down to the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement, which effectively carved up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the first world war. Turkey was effectively a vassal state, until Mustafa Kemal rallied his forces and pushed out the occupying countries during the War of Liberation in 22/23. Part of the new constitution mentions that the Turkish State is a single, united and inviolable entity.

Quite simply, the Turkish state regards itself as a monolithic, unchanging thing, rather than the pluralistic, cosmopolitan, multilingual vast entrepot that it really is.

Going back to my what-if analogy now: Imagine that you are in the town centre, near the bus terminal or the train station - it's a sunny afternoon, people are going to and fro, some kids have left school and are hanging around. There are queues of people waiting for buses, and they're doing what people do - chatting, looking at Facebook, texting family, friends. A few people are having something to eat and drink, sat at tables outside a cafe. There is music wafting across the street and the aromas from various restaurants and shops. A bus slowly drives past.

And suddenly the image flares, first bright white, then red, then black. The noise is so tremendous that it is silent, a heavy hard huge fist pushing at your chest, slapping you to the ground. Moments later, there is only blackness and silence and a hole where the bus used to be. There are holes everywhere, absences in space and time where there should be people. Lives brushed away, ended brutally, or lives twisted and changed.

And imagine this in your town, your life.

Later it turns out that it was yet another attack by the MG. The Queen, who has worn black since the murder of her son in 1966, expresses her sorrow and horror. The Prime Minster vows to 'bring terrorism to its knees'.

Of course, this is an analogy, but it's the very closest I can create to describe the scenario in Turkey to a UK audience.

Now let's zoom back to the real - and what I describe above is what happened in Ankara yesterday - Ankara, a very real, very lively city that is no different from where you or I live, with the same kind of people walking the same kind of streets.

And it all goes back to a want of conversation, an unwillingness to talk. And yet all wars, in the end, must needs be rounded with dialogue.

We do not need to live in a world of what-ifs, of missed opportunities: We can make a brighter, better, happier place - but we should start with talk, and continue with talk, and end with talk.

Neither Respect Nor Obey

Turkey's president is married to power, but his relationship to the rule of law is on the rocks.

I would prefer to write nice things about Turkey. Stuff about the unbelievably delicious food. Articles on the amazing places. Long delighted paeans to its history and its cultures. Instead, I have to write once again about Mr Erdogan.

The title of this piece refers to his latest little tantrum. The president has never liked journalists much. OK, so that's probably true of most politicians. However, he really doesn't like them. Really. Turkey has an unenviable record for arresting and imprisoning journos, and incidents of firebombing media outlets and murder are not exactly rare. It seems that Mr Erdogan has an animus towards anyone who even mildly criticizes him, his family, his party or his business interests. As for actually revealing the truth, heaven forbid.

That's what two journalists, Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, did. They exposed the fact that the Turkish Secret Service, MIT, has been smuggling weapons to Syrian rebel groups (primarily, it is suspected, ISIS) via trucks. People in power, it has to be said, were not best pleased. The duo were imprisoned on a charge of espionage, and face a life sentence.

However, in a rare example of judicial independence, they were released from pre-trial custody by the High Court, who ruled that their rights had been violated. This prompted Mr Erdogan's screaming hissy fit, when he said 'I don't obey or respect the decision'.

When the president of a country holds its own laws in contempt, what hope is there? Erdogan, for such a high-profile figure, has a remarkably thin skin - since August 2014, some 1845 court cases have been opened against individuals for insulting the president. Those accused have included journalists, doctors, lawyers, academics - and 13-year-old schoolboys. In one case, a man presented as evidence a video of his wife, in which she repeatedly insults the president despite his increasingly heated injunctions to desist.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, she is now apparently seeking a divorce.

Like that soon to be ex-wife, it seems that Mr Erdogan wants to get rid of his relationship to law and justice - or at least that which applies to him.