No Hay Banda
I have
not put up an entry on this blog in months and most likely whatever readership
I had garnered is now gone. But there’s not been much to discuss—everything I’ve
been writing about just seems to continue on as is, in all its oppressive monotony.
How many times can I talk about the comically unjust trials or the increasingly
oppressive government? The details of my wife’s father’s trial seem obscene
after a while. When I first wrote about them, there was an urgency to
communicate just how bizarre they were, as if exposing this absurdity to the
light would somehow make it go away. Now I’ve done that and it only gets more bizarre
and nothing changes. We are beating our hands against some gigantic rock and
expecting it crumble, but it doesn’t of course. And these days of course,
Turkey is embroiled in a greater power struggle and the plight of our people
languishing in its prisons seems to take a back seat.
This
morning was a beautiful morning. Outside it was overcast. From our balcony we
could see the ever increasing skyscrapers in Ataşehir. Someone was operating a
jackhammer in the street and so Delal brought out her bağlama and began to
sing. She has an incredibly gorgeous voice and there is kind of a twisting in
the gut whenever I hear her sing türkü—half
the time I would like nothing more than to lay face down in the floor, cover my
face and listen to her—the feelings her singing arouses are that strong and
that visceral. I expect most would find that a strange reaction. She taught me
a song ‘Bitlis’te Beş Minare’ and we sang it together and though I desperately
wanted to write, there seemed no better way to spend a morning than
singing with her.
It made
me think of riding in the car with my mother, niece, and her daughter (my
grandniece) Linleigh. This was back during my winter break in Alabama. Linleigh
was fussy and my mother started humming something out of her own head. She has a terrible
singing voice in the conventional sense—at least when hushing a baby in a car, but there was something deeply about it then. All of us hushed and
listened, and Linleigh herself quited down and fell asleep. I think my mother’s
voice carries so much time and memory that the things that make it unmusical—the
gravelly quavering tones caused by the accumulation of age and years—are somehow
scars that we know most intimately. She sang to me forty years ago and then to
my niece 20 years ago and now to Linleigh and there is somehow the memory of
all of us as babies, and all of us having passed into adulthood now and all that
has passed inbetween. We are three generations all together and no longer
children but growing older and older in the presence of this child to whom all
his new and unknown and fresh.
While I
was in Alabama, Delal’s Dad’s trial—the Istanbul KCK trial—was supposed to
start, but the defendants boycotted it. They were dissolving the special
authority courts, went the argument, to this trial no longer had any
legitimacy. So proceedings were postponed till April. This didn’t stop them
from announcing a decision anyway, on the day the trial would have ended. 7 people were released. No trial but a
decision. No defense presented but a release. It was made clear, yet again,
that the legal process was a mere formality. There was a script to follow.
Decisions had already been made and these 7 were going to be released no matter
what happened in the courtroom. And whose decision was it? The followers of the
Gülen cult who are everywhere planted in the judicial system? Or those loyal to
the increasingly dictatorial Prime Minister? Or was this a relic of their
cooperation back in the old days that no one was going to take care of because
one thing that they can all agree on is fuck the Kurds.
We had
a teacher’s meeting the other day. They are called ŞÖK meetings—where all the
teachers of one class get together and discuss the students one by one. There’s
one boy in my eighth grade class who is rather mouthy, bright but lazy, and
generally a pain in the ass to manage. I’m fond of him, though. I like him
because he’s witty, because he doesn’t just swallow whatever he’s told, and
because he can be quite original. One teacher offers this as an explanation for
his behavior problems-- ‘Well, his mother is from the Southeast. Perhaps that
blood is the source of things.’ ‘From the Southeast’ is shorthand for ‘Kurd’
when you don’t believe that any race exists except Turks. I couldn’t believe I’d
heard what I’d heard—it seemed so ridiculous, especially coming from a teacher,
an adult, a person whose job it was to care for these kids. But this kind of
racism is so common that no one even thinks to comment on it. And that is an
oppressive thing to deal with.
There are constant little indignities that we swallow that
seem such a waste of breath to explain somehow. Like how Delal’s dad is brought
in handcuffs to the hospital for his check up. A sixty one year old man
handcuffed as if he were a dangerous criminal—which of course they are trying
to pretend he is with this kangaroo court. Handcuffed to get treatment for
diabetes and kidney problems.
So I haven’t felt like writing much because it’s only the
same old same old over and over again and you begin to feel sick that nothing
changes, that there is something hopelessly toxic about society, that
explaining it to anyone is not only useless but somehow obscene. And while a
lot of what happened in the protests last year gave me cause to hope for
something better—the turn out from all sections of society for the Gay Pride
Parade for instance and the the emergence of all sorts of neighborhood
organizations trying to build a way of life quite different for themselves—the grander
sweep of national and world events makes me think that only ignorance and
perfidy and skulduggery prevails, and it prevails indefinitely.
And the next time I write and post a blog—I think it will
either be news of my father-in-law’s release or else some short comic sketch.
Something that will break with all I have written before and make it
irrelevant.
