Diyarbekir Diaries – Rojnivîska Amedê Day Two

Diyarbekir Diaries – Rojnivîska Amedê

We awoke early this morning--around nine or so, to full on summer level sunlight. It poured in from all directions and was warm enough for me to walk around in a T-shirt. All three of us, still in pijamas, immediately dove into the news. Last night, after I finished this blog, just a few kilometers away, someone had apparently attempted to assassinate Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-chairman of the opposition HDP party. A bullet hole was found in the rear window of his car. If they had succeeded, the whole country could have been plunged into a civil war. The governor of Diyarbekir province (an AKP appointee) denied that it was a bullet hole, of course. 

After news and politics, we had our breakfast on the balcony overlooking the park. As we ate, two F16s passed overhead--on their way to God-knows-where from the Diyarbakir military airport, to bomb Kurds in Iraq (most likely) or perhaps somebody else in Syria. Hilal made a kind of herbed French toast, and as we ate, I watched the goings on in the park below. One jogger, a kid spinning an trashcan and startling a cat, two old men chatting on a bench, a pair of speed walking girls, a group of student boys in uniform walking and chatting, one of them in front of the others, walking backward to face his friends and gesturing excitedly.

Delal and I decided to stroll around the new city, not the touristy part, just to see what we ran into in terms of ordinary life. We took a road behind the apartment complex and passed onto a wide sidewalk lined with Acacia trees. The fall weather was pitch-perfect--sunny, slightly cool, crisp air. Pairs of students strolled to school arm in arm.

We passed by a high school in the neighborhood of Bağlar. Back in 2012, at a protest during the height of the Kurdish hunger strikes, I had met a boy from here who told me that this was the poorest neighborhood in the city. He said that the police loved to target Bağlar and once, during a protest when he was twelve, he'd watched them chase down and kill one of his friends. I wondered if this was the school? The graffiti on the walls around here, I think, explains a lot about the place somehow. The usual names of lovers separated by hearts, lists of school friends names, and political slogans praising Rojava, the HPG, the PKK, and Demirtaş (nicknamed Selo). On one wall a name has been painted over and the rest of the sentence, "is a novel that has not yet reached its end," now lies subjectless and seems to apply to everyone here. Just down the road is an advertisement for Salsa classes with the slogan "And our souls remained free..." 

We stopped in the chic neighborhood known as Ofis (Office) for a cup of menengiç coffee. Menengiç is something you find all over Eastern Turkey. It is a creamy kind of coffee made from the roasted terebinth berry, a bitter relative of the pistachio. The cafe was called "Ares", the god of war. Out front along a stone wall, someone had lined up three nargile pipes--red, green, and yellow. When I took a picture, the waiter told me to hold up.

"It's not in the right order," he said. "Let me fix it."

He rearranged the pipes so that they went in the proper Kurdish order according to the slogan, kesk sor û zer (green, red and yellow)--the colors of the Kurdish flag. When he'd finished, he put his hand on his hips and smiled. "Now you can take a picture." 

kesk sor û zer

Menengiç--with a side of chocolate pebbles and Turkish delight at the Ares Cafe

A few months ago, I got in an argument on Twitter with a well known journalist who had written an article where she'd insisted that Diyarbekir had become like a foreign country--with everything having become so Kurdish and so other that when you ran across a Turkish restaurant you found yourself as surprised as when you saw a kebab shop in Paris. Given the Turks paranoia about the Kurds always trying to divide their country, I thought this was an exaggerated and irresponsible thing to write, knowing how it could easily provoke and mislead a people already quite confused and deluded about what was really going on here. She countered by asking if I had reported on this place for over ten years, if I had been there in the 90s, if I was as experienced and as big an expert as her. Well, as I said then, no, but with a few pictures from our wanderings on the street, I think you can see there isn't much all that foreign for a Turkish street (sadly). One need not be an expert to look around and see what's right in front of your face--the same Ceylan Kuafors, Mehmet Avukats and Tarihi Cafes as in Istanbul.

The ubiquitous restaurant in Turkish that is supposedly so surprising to see--I love that the meat is cooked on a wood fire. The man feeds logs into the flame.

Bank Street in Ofis--with tons of Döner, Lahmacun, and Çiğ Köfte restaurants that you find all over the country.

But there is definitely a different vibe in Diyarbakır--something more relaxed, friendlier than Istanbul or any city in the west of Turkey. Paying always seems to an option--if you have the money, and the sums are negotionable. 25 lira--oh you only have two twenties? Give me one then. Behind the wall of buildings on Bank Street was a maze of tea gardens in the shade of acacia trees. We bought different kinds of pistachio filled baklava from a street vendor and took them to a little table under a tree in the back. No one was bothered that we'd brought in food from the outside. We ordered teas and watched a couple of cats bathe themselves under a grafitti or what apparently looked like a vomiting fish.

Just down the street was the Monday Bazaar--full of all the usual suspects of the Istanbul bazaar with a few surprises. A pumpkin yellow on the inside, purple carrots, pink pomengranates and deep red persimmons.

We passed through a park--the sycamore trees bright yellow, the leaves raining down, fluttering and fluttering. A couple of old ladies chatted on a bench near a sign advertising food in Kurdish. We run into these signs from time to time--they fill the park across the street from our apartment, but we hadn't seen many in Ofis until this moment.

Women's Labor Food Place--simple and direct I guess

Hilal had been working in the old city, called Sur İçi (Inside the Walls), named because it is located in the medieval black basalt walls that surround the historic quarters. It is here that young people--male and female--have blocked off streets with sandbags and trenches and declared their streets independent of the Turkish state. It is here that clashes between the police, the army, and these youth have resulted in the deaths of citizens and soldiers. And yet, walking past the famous Hasan Paşa Han or the shoe shine market you would never know anything was afoot.

We met Hilal at an old Caravansaray called "Sülüklü Han"--the Leech Caravansaray. According to the sign, there used to be a well from which doctors would extract leeches to bleed their patients. A plaque on the gate explains the history in all the languages of the people of Diyarbekir--Assyrian, Armenian, Kurmanci, Zazaki, Arabic, and Armenian. This is anathema anywhere else in Turkey where the mentality is ONE LANGUAGE, ONE PEOPLE, ONE RELIGION. Anything else menas the country will be divided by whatever mysterious powers you blame for everything.

Sülüklü Han is located in the middle of the blacksmiths market--sparks fly across the gate next door from where a smithy is forging spiked dog collars. Hilal has brought a long a friend who explains an interview he had with the women's football team who believed that their rivals from Iğdir at a recent match might actually have been men, or at least on hormones. They were too aggressive, the women had insisted, too violent.

The tea seller in the blacksmiths quarter

The door of 6 languages

We ended our night on the city with a dinner of shish kebabed liver--for which the city is famous. Absolutely delicious! 

Diyarbekir Diaries – Rojnivîska Amedê, Day One

Diyarbekir Diaries – Rojnivîska Amedê

Fall break has begun, and we have come to Diyarbekir to visit my sister-in-law who is working in the city as a translator. Inspired by her ”Boston Diaries”, I have decided to keep a daily record of our stay in the unofficial capital of Kurdistan. Maybe I can shed some casual light on a city on the edge of several Middle Easter conflagrations.

Day 1

We get off the plane at 2:00 PM. The airport is brand spanking new—having only just opened two weeks ago. Parts of it are still under construction. F-15s sit on the runway along with commercial jets. There’s some sort of garden-like thing under way in the arrival lounge. It looked like a cross between a Zen rock garden and a putt-putt golf course. There were swathes of raked sand winding through astroturf, all shut off by panes of glass like a green house.

Hilal was doing an interview with Diyarbekir's women’s soccer team and we were to meet her at the sports center. We hopped in a taxi and asked him to stop by an Akbank ATM on the way.

“I’m not sure I know where there is one,” he said. “Not the way we’re going. I’m terribly sorry, ma’am.”

We were coming from Istanbul where there was an ATM at least every 100 feet. He told us, no problem. If we wanted, we could just pay him the day we went back to the airport.

“How’s that?” Delal asked.

“Well you’re leaving, right? You’ll need to go back to the airport.”

“Not for a week!”

“That's fine. You can pay me then.”

And that is the best introduction I can give to Diyarbakir.

My sister-in-law lives in the apartment once occupied by our good friend and Kurdistan’s top foreign correspondent, Frederike Geerdink. (Anything I write here is done in her shadow, and with much respect and in debtedness) At the beginning of the Fall, she was run out of the country for “supporting terrorism” or some such nonsense—her actual crime being, of course, writing things that the state didn’t like. It was odd going into her house without her. Her office (where I am writing from) is untouched, as if she might come breezing through the door at any minute. Her book still sit stacked on her desk. Her schedule still waits for attention, things to do in a list on a dry erase board. There is a haunted feeling about the place, or perhaps, more accurately, a de-haunted feeling, as if a resident spirit has been ripped out.

From Frederike’s balcony we could see a huge park, full of maple, sycamores and acacias on fire with the last yellows and reds of Autumn. After having a snack, we made our way down to the park and strolled around. What struck me first was that all the signs were in Kurdish, and Kurdish only. In the mornings, a group of women do Pilates on the grass, apparently. Now some kids were playing volleyball and people sipped tea next to duck-filled fountains. We ran into two old men sitting on a bench and playing checkers using different colored rocks they had found on the ground. Their board was a card board box on which one of them had drawn squares. In the center of the park was a huge statue with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights engraved upon it in Turkish. Diyarbekir is a political city.

At the end of the park was the clothing store Heft Reng—"Seven Colors", a store that sells traditional Kurdish cil û berg (clothes) along with modern T-shirts with captions in Kurdish. I love to go here every time I visit because it is the only place I have found where people actually want me to casually speak Kurdish to them and will tolerate my mistakes and slow sentences. I know very little of the language but it is always exciting to be able to shop and pick out something in a new language.

We stopped in Aram Book Store at the end of the park to have a look around and have a tea. My sister-in-law met up with us there and brought along a friend, Hasan. Hasan was apparently a writer and had recently published a book on philosophy. We sat for an hour and talked politics. The walls were decorated with pictures of Kurdish writers and poets. Two in particular captured my attention, one because I like the poem, the other because I could understand her poem.

The first was a poem by Şêrko Bêkeş:

If, from among my poems,

You remove a single rose,

Then one season

Of my four seasons dies.

If you remove a lover

Two of them die.

If you remove bread

Three of them die.

And if you remove my freedom

Then my years die,

And

I, myself, will die as well.

The second from the female poet Evrim Alataş

As long as you

Don’t understand the Kurds’ ambition

You cannot

Understand a thing

About the Kurds.

After the book store we went to the theatre. This was the last day of the city’s theatre festival (Festîvala Şanoyê) and they were performing a modern dance piece about Leyla Bedirxan, a Kurdish woman who lived in Paris. She was the daughter of an exile, raised in Turkey, Egypt and Europe and master of dance. The troupe’s name was Mesopotamia Dance and they were performing a fairly abstract piece about her life. 

We boarded a minibus to the City Hall where the performance was taking place. An odd thing happened on the way. We passed by one of the ubiquitous police "scorpion" tanks and suddenly there was a loud pop. We thought a tire had blown, but suddenly the air filled with tear gas. The streets were dark, no demonstrations were anywhere near, no people, for that matter, and yet it seemed that the scorpion had fired a gas canister into the empty street. The driver commanded everyone to "close the windows" and floored it--speeding us through the gas without even a slight burning sensation to disturb us. Such maneuvers were clearly old hat. 

Upon arrival at the theater, I learned quickly that whatever peculiarities governed life in Istanbul, they were intensified here. We bought out tickets for a dollar only to find a house literally packed to the walls with nowhere to sit. No one seemed to mind and so we chose a place at the back and stood, leaning against the wall.

It opened with darkness and the sounds of thunder and of a house creaking and straining under the brunt of a storm. A spotlight fell on a woman lying on the stage and the snap of boards breaking and glass shattering filled the air. She moved her body to every noise, to every rumble and crack. She seemed to possess absolute control over every muscle in her body. We were impressed. 

Videos here and here.

The rest of the performance was gorgeous, one woman and three young men, sometimes dancing in synch and sometimes in a kind of round of body movements, one cascading off the other. At the end, the crowd leapt to their feet and the city’s co-mayor, Gülten Kışanak appeared on stage with red roses. This woman is one of my favourite politicians in Turkey. I will never forget the elegance of her speech in Parliament during the Hunger Strike and how, without breaking stride, she silenced the rightwing nationalist men trying to shout her down with a simple but effective, “Shut your mouths! Shut your mouths! Shut your mouths!” Childish words maybe, but spoken with such command and dignity that they did shut up, as they never had before.

The dancers on stage with Gülten Kışanak

The Kurd and the Cracker in Thailand--Part 1

Title makes it sound like breakfast somehow, curds and crackers.

Anyway...

To be honest, I find myself often questioning the worth of travel blogs these days. It’s eye catching, people might ping a picture or two, but it's somewhat boring and two-dimensional if you ask me—even when people do interesting things. Now I like to hear about a good adventure in another country as much as anyone, but the work of writing is such an intensive and special process to me, an aspiration to sublimity. That’s right. (And I mean it, too) If I write a travel blog, I'd like it to get at something I care about at least.

So here is my attempt.

During my fall break in November, Delal and I took a trip to Thailand. I’d had dreams for several nights about what our trip would be like—there was a kind of anthropological curiosity in the back of my mind about what a Kurdish woman from Istanbul, born and raised in the Kurdistani mountains, would make of tropical Bangkok. And a lover's curiosity about how Delal herself would react to something that had been, however much in the background now, an important part of my life--Asia, where I had lived and traveled for five years as a youth. I had heard the perspectives of my own countryfolk until I could recite them by heart, but what would she think? What would make an impression on her?

We were coming at a strange time, at least for people who’d lived through the last few years in Istanbul. Thailand is currently in the hands of a military coup, run by a man, who, like our own Dear Leader, controls the country with a fatherly iron fist. Like our own Dear Leader, he is taxing alcohol and other vices because he thinks it’s bad for you, and like our own Dear Leader, he is throwing protesters in jail willy nilly and making like it's for their own good. The day before our arrival five students had held up the three fingered salute from the Hunger Games to the reigning Prime Minister Prayuth Chan Ocha. They were promptly arrested and taken to a military camp for “attitude adjustment.”  Prayuth said something patronizing to explain their detainment--I'm glad their brave but they must learn to use their bravery properly--and military police were stationed outside some theaters in Bangkok to catch people doing the same thing.

Prayuth and Dear Leader have a lot in common on the whole, but these sorts are a tribe. They make up the secret cabal controlling the world that they're always ranting about. Power, I think, hones away certain parts of a human being until finally it cuts away enough flesh and blood that it reveals the same monster underneath—whether you’re in 21^st century Thailand or Turkey, 20^th century Russia or the Germany of China, 19^th Century India or a 2014 Citibanker and his Congressional stooge in the United States—or anywhere and anywhen else for that matter. Anyway, PM Prayuth does not like the Hunger Games or booze or anything that harms the morality of the noble Thai people .

Of course, we saw none of this political topsy turviness. Nor would anyone touring Turkey ever really notice the creeping government authoritarianism. Even expats living here might never notice if they didn’t go looking. We did see one group of college students next to a Bangkok metro station in Makkason—they were in a weed-strewn vacant lot dressed in gas masks performing some sort of outdoor theater. Some did stunts on BMX bikes. The way they were dressed reminded me of the characters in the murals of PixelPancho in Kadıköy—faceless, highly symbolic, slightly menacing. There was also a strong police presence in the subway stations--cops rummaging through everyone’s bags, but that might not have been out of the ordinary. Who knew? We were new.

But Bangkok charmed. 

We stayed in Chinatown, Hua Lamphong. The walk from here to the old city was an adventure in itself—nearly a mile of sidewalk food stalls each seeming to serve a completely different dish. The variety was dazzling and was all Delal could talk about—how could there be so many different kinds of food???? And this was just the Chinese section of the city. Dozens of varieties of mushrooms, fresh and dried, baskets upon baskets of local herbs and greens--kaffir limes, lemon grass, Pandan leaves, Thai sweet basil--and many others I had no idea what was. It was like an exhibition of Asian cuisine—and all so cheap! We had a lunch of two bowls of duck noodles, a seafood salad, and two fresh coconuts macheted open for the juice inside all for about eight dollars, and this was one of our more expensive meals.

The beginning of our parade of food--lunch with coconut--YUM!

Delal noticed one major difference between Bangkok and Istanbul right way. In Istanbul all of these vendors would have been harassing us—buy this buy this buy this!! And they would also all have been men, men who would have been helloing us to death, trying to drag us into their shops or simply staring and staring. Women, Delal said, would be investigating through surreptitious glances, her clothes and hair and demeanour, giving knowing glances to their friends or tsking or maybe even approving—but no matter what, constantly judging. Here, no one seemed to notice us. And when we ordered, they spoke English if they could, didn’t fret if they couldn’t, and didn’t make a big deal out of our foreignness. They didn't even seem to notice.

We made our way through heat and choking air pollution to Wat Pho—one of the city’s oldest and grandest Buddhist temples and it was here that memory kind of flooded the world. As I stepped through the gate, there was this tingling in my gut and the past suddenly boiled up and superimposed itself on the present. It was such an odd sensation. I had been here alone fifteen years ago, first earning to practice meditation. I remembered the younger me—overwhelmed with the smells of the incense, the hot tropical air and the ornate walls covered in multi-colored mirrored tiles, the golden flame shapes on the sharp sloped roofs. I remember walking the quiet mazes filled with statues of the Buddha and the feeling of looking into a kind of wisdom for the first time, one that I had always speculated was there and had not yet dared to delve into due to childish fears from the Puritan Evangelism I had grown up with.

Architectural details from Wat Pho

How vivid this younger me becomes--it's like a take over from that moment in 1998.

I walk into the hall housing the main image of the Buddha and remembered vividly walking into the same hall fifteen years ago. I am barefoot and in shorts, drunk from the sensual warmth after having frozen in Tokyo’s winter. There is a light scent of incense, the sound of a bell that seems to clear the air of other sounds and thoughts and restless things. Under a towering ceiling is a gigantic golden statue of the Buddha meditating in the lotus position. He sits on a pedestal of gold, surrounded by other gold statues of Ananda and other disciples.  The walls are tesselated with murals of classic Thai scenes of temples and gardens in a labyrinth pattern. 

I feel then and felt now a sense of “This is it!” Not that I wanted to become a Buddhist but that I had found something, spiritually or intellectually, that I had been looking for all my life. My mind quieted a bit here, maybe for the first time ever.

We continued walking this temple, me in this disorienting confluence of then and now. I seemed to be seeing everything in double. It was deepened with every new thing we saw--I spent 6 months wandering Asia, doing a kind of unofficial impromptu spiritual quest that changed my life though not as much as it could have if I had really let go and given myself to the place. Every object here reminded me of that me, of life's potential as I was so vividly aware of it then. The monk in saffron robes, the hall of the reclining Buddha, the line of prayer bowls and the sound of chanting flowing over a quiet city dusk.

Afterwards, we repaired through a maze of deserted riverfront alleys (Why were they deserted, the Istanbullus ask!) to a high-priced café on Chao Phraya River and sipped fruit shakes—Delal’s pineapple and mine mangosteen. Party barges glided by. The lights of the city broke and reformed on the waves. Bouncy traditional Thai music swelled and receded. Across the water was the ancient Hindu-like towers of Wat Arun. Through a haze of jet lag, Delal told me she loved Thailand.

I had to agree.