Hunger Strike, 50th day--and year anniversary of Mamoste's Arrest

We spent the Bayram holiday on the Mediterranean in the village of Kaş—swimming, kayaking, canyoning, and eating seafood. We always enjoy food on vacations (and every other day for that matter, we’re plumping up like Thanksgiving Turkeys, or Bayram sheep) and it was with an odd pang of unease that we gorged ourselves silly as the papers across the street seemed to accuse us with headlines about the hunger strikers.

65 prisoners began their hunger strike on September 12th, the anniversary of the military coup that began decades of purges, disappearances, and assassinations by the Turkish state.  Since the 12th, an estimated 600 people have joined them, with more strikers announced every day (the number varies, sources are notoriously unreliable; the Bayram holiday has made exact numbers difficult to ascertain—at least according to the channel, NTV. Reuters claim 800. Most people say around 700).

Their demands are simple.

1. That solitary confinement (tecrit) be lifted for Abdullah Öcalan on Imrali Island (the island where his prison is located). They’re on good constitutional ground with this one—Öcalan hasn’t been permitted to meet with his lawers for a year and a half. The government has offered some rather silly excuses—‘the weather is not safe for the boatride over’ or ‘the boats are broken’, but no one, of course, is buying. Cengiz Çandar today wrote in the Radikal on Monday that an AKP official told him this:

‘We are aware of the influence of Imrali on the Kurds, but we are the ones who brought about this situation. In other words, the State did it to itself. Since he was captured in 1999 Öcalan has been managing his organization from prison—we recognized the possibility. This is a situation you would see nowhere else on earth. Thanks to us, his managed to increase his influence over his people. Now, for months no one has heard a peep from that island and the world hasn’t ended. That means that the influence he gained (thanks to us) is weakening.’

In other words, the isolation is meant to break any influence Öcalan still holds over the Kurds.

2. That Kurds (and everyone) be allowed to defend themselves in their mother tongue before the court. In their petition to the government, the BDP writes:

‘From today, with over 8000 people in prison for over three years on trial in the KCK investigations, and with our requests for a defense in the mother tongue not only refused but counted for nothing, the judicial process has come to a standstill….The efforts of civil organizations have been ignored and our pleas in the legislature have failed to draw any attention, and so hundreds of prisoners are forced to submit their bodies to hunger and death.

I witnessed the repeated refusals for a defense in Kurdish this July while visiting the trials in Silivri—the court was stubborn, defiant, and seemed bent on hurrying the trial to a predetermined end.

3. As indicated in the above quote from the BDP’s petition, the strikers are also demanding public education in Kurdish.

The first two requests have been met with some positive signs—but so far they have remained only signs. Just today (October 30^th) IMC news reports that the government has once more refused permission for Öcalan to meet his lawyers while at the same time the Ministry of Justice tries to circumvent the whole problem by claiming that there never was any solitary confinement. He could meet anyone he wanted, apparently, but they had to apply through the proper channels like everyone else.  Well they do and they’re refused, guys. That’s the issue.

Today—I am writing on the 30^th, the BDP’s co-chairman Demirtaş called for civil protest throughout the country today. Businesses were not to open their doors, children and teachers were not to go to school, life was to come to a stop—an attempt to have a Kurdish spring like the Arab one.  And life did come to a stop—all over the Southeast thousands went to the street and marched in support of the hunger strikers. We have been anxiously watching reports coming in from the cities of Van, Muş, Mazgirt, Tunceli, Agrı, Doğubeyazit, Şirnak, Antalya, Adana, and of course, Diyarbekir showing marchers filling the streets only to be attacked by police with tear gas, water cannons, and in a clip from Diyarbekir, a line of tanks. A friend in Diyarbekir said that, despite living in a city where protests are the norm, he had never seen anything so comprehensive. The city was paralyzed.

The protests in Van

In Diyarbekir

 

 

In Istanbul as well—where in Okmeydani police attacked protester, even tossing a gas bomb into a tent with several mothers of strikers holding a hunger strike of their own in solidarity.  (Emine Akdoğan, reports Bianet, has one daughter in the mountains and one daughter, Şehnaz, in prison. Şehnaz told her what she was about to do on her last visit to the prison. ‘What could I do but support her decision? We went to Bakırköy for the Bayram holiday and were met there with a Bayram meal of gas bombs.’ The reporter adds that moments later the tent where Emine spoke to her was ‘dispersed’ by tear gas)

The Turkish media channels report things as if the police responded only after being attacked by Molotov cocktails and rocks.  Oh, I am sure this happened, but wonders what exactly one needed a line of tanks for against some kids with rocks? And really, why does anyone believe the police need any provoking when we have seen countless reports of torture and abuse of people from all walks of life at police hands?  (The woman beaten by cops in Izmir, the man in Istanbul kicked by a team of cops as he writhed on the ground, the girl band tortured in Istanbul. Here's a documentary on the topic featuring pictures of political prisoners on hunger strike killed with flame throwers by Turkish guards.)

And as for police attacks being a response—a video on one of the main Turkish channels show protesters standing in front of a building and being warned that if they don’t move in five minutes, police will ‘intervene’.  No one was throwing a damn thing. In the meantime, the Prime Minister calls the BDP who started the hunger strike ‘terrorist barons’ and says that they themselves feast on lamb while their pawns are forced to starve themselves to death. To prove his point, he shows a picture of BDP party members at a banquet in the town of Kızıltepe near Mardin, but the correspondent reporting never mentions that the picture was taken in July, some three months before the hunger strike was even conceived. Reuters leads with Erdogan’s deliberate misinformation as if it were fact.  Just yesterday, Turkey’s Independence Day, Erdoğan forbade celebrators to march in Ankara. When they tried anyway, police responded with billy clubs and tear gas—and the victims were mostly old Kemalists, well dressed women and old men, members of Parliament and local governors. Erdoğan called them terrorists, too.

The  hunger strikers are entering a critical point—four days ago, it was reported that four women on hunger strike in Siirt are moribund—their stomachs no longer accept fluid. Meanwhile, Amnesty reports that guards in Tekirdağ prisoners are ill-treating the hunger strikers while those in Silivri and Şakran are putting them in solitary confinement. There are also reports that they are restricting strikers access to vital liquids, vitamins, and salts. False media reports are popping up everywhere that the hunger strikes are ending—only to be disproven later. 

Things look grim. And this whole situation hangs over our family like a dark cloud. Over thousands of families.

Turkey has a history with hunger strikes. In2000, over 800 prisoners in the F type prisons (like Kandıra where my father in law was first held) began unto death hunger strikes to protest inhumane conditions. The strikes ended when police stormed the cells—30 prisoners died. Many are wondering if this is what Erdoğan plans.

There is a petition you can sign to make your voice heard. However lightly.....

Here...Petition for Hunger Strikers
 

Sacrifice

It’s Friday. My sixth graders and I are going out to the football field. Their eyes are full of colors.

We’re going to write poetry.

‘I hate poetry,’ a girl announces. ‘It’s stupid.’

One of my clever boys smirks and asks, ‘Why are we going outside to do this, I mean, I’m not complaining mind you, but we could have done it in the class room just as easily.’

I gather them together and tell them to look up.

For a second there’s complete silence. You’ll never see such a sky, such Fall blue, not in Istanbul. It’s like we’re on a mountain in Bingöl, in Arizona—far from every house and car and smokestack in the world. A thousand white gulls pass in a swirl of wings.

‘Run,’ I tell the kids. ‘We’re going to run until we can’t run anymore and then we are going to sit down and look around and write about what we see.’

They write magic.

Some never sit. There’s a little blond girl who runs and runs, let’s her maroon jacket fall down to her elbows. She’s exhausted but won’t stop. Sometimes someone chases her, sometimes they don’t. A boy shows me a poem he’s written about her.

‘I see a girl running. Running and running and running.  Now she runs like a tired zombie. Falls. Her yellow hair on green grass.  She gets up. Red leaves on green leaves. We are lying on green grass. Green trashcans, green notebooks, green pines.’

Their heads are full of Carl Sandburg and Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. (They all agree Williams has a stupid name.) On the play ground, one girl writes while hanging from a rope swing. ‘The sky is blue, I hang in the air and I just don’t care! I just don’t care! I just don’t care!’ One little boy says, ‘I think I’ve written something strange.’ I read what he’s scribbled diagonally across the page, ‘My white sneakers run on green grass, like the white birds on blue sky. White shoes running on heaven.’

 Another boy, the smallest of all, writes eleven poems in a row. About the red maple, about the yellow sycamore, about the sky, about the Fall, about the service busses, about us running around and around and laughing and falling and writing, about how boring school is. He’s on fire.

‘I know why we’re out here!’ the girl who hates poetry says. ‘When you’re outside like this you’re feelings just bubble out! You can’t stop writing!’

Or running. The blond girl still can’t stop.

Whatever they do this coming week, we’ve had a burst of joy today. The 23 of them and me.

The school is getting ready for the October 29th holiday. The administration has selected a theme, ‘The eyes of Atatürk.’ In various places around the school hang pictures of the eyes of the Republic’s founder. Only the eyes, big and blue and staring at you wherever you go.  We will have a ceremony celebrating those staring eyes and none of the students will come (but not because they’re not learning to worship this man—simply because they’d still rather play). We teachers will come because we have to. Songs will be sung in his honor, dances danced, purple prose speeches made.

October 29th marks more than the anniversary of the Republic’s founding. It’s the day that Delal and I took a ferry to the Emniyet (the national security office) to find out if we could see her father. The police. The paranoia. The undercover agents. A black day. He’d just been arrested. We had no idea what would happen. The red Turkish flag was everywhere. No one questioned. The right wing papers were screaming ‘TERRORIST!’ It was the first time I really understood,  gut understood, why my in-laws found it so threatening.

The hunger strike that started weeks ago is on its 40th day—63 people have been striking since the beginning, 420 more have joined—political prisoners all, and not just in Istanbul, but all over the country.  The 63 are growing weak. Some are starting to vomit and show signs of disease.  An article in the Radikal say it’s no longer a hunger strike but a death watch.  And strangely, the government is taking notice. They are allowing stories about it in the papers (the Hürriyet says, ‘President Gül is unsettled by the direction things are moving’). People debate it in talk shows on TV. President Gül says talks with the strikers are possible. Even talks with the PKK are possible.  They may consider the strikers demands which include an end to solitary confinement for Abdullah Öcalan, being able to defend themselves in Kurdish, and general education in the mother tongue. (We don’t know the details because the prisoners are boycotting visits—strangely, the journalists are too. Not one paper, it seems, has sent anyone to find out first hand what is happening inside. Rumors are flying about Kurdish being allowed in the courtroom.)  There are signs for hope.

And yet at the same time, the random repression continues. A journalist, Hatice Duman, is sentenced to life in prison. Never mind that Necati Abay, tried in the very same case, was released. And the prime minister promises no compromise during a speech in Elazığ. He says, ‘We will not negotiate with terrorists! We will even talk to Yezidis (a Kurdish sect) as long as they are not terrorists.’  ‘Even’ with Yezidis.  Notice the wording. And the very same Radikal newspaper devotes three pages to a historian named ‘Ismail Küçükkaya’ who says that Turkey has never been multicultural, and then goes on to insult Kurds in particular.

‘Turkey is not a mosaic,’ he writes, ‘Because those other elements have never developed themselves. When I say this, you might counter with ‘The fascist Turkey never opened schools!’ But actually the problem is not with schools but with the elite. Kurdish leaders are not real leaders. They are not Iraqi Kurd. Put one of those guys across from them and let them see what real governing is!’

Never mind the extrajudicial killings, jailings and legal executions of hundreds of Kurdish intellectuals. How can you develop anything from a grave?

But at the same time, things are being discussed that have never been discussed before. For the first time since I’ve been here. On TV the other night, a commentator said the words ‘Armenian Genocide’ without the hitherto obligatory ‘so-called’.

At night, the smell of livestock and manure wafts through our apartment. The feast of the sacrifice is fast approaching when Muslims celebrate the sparing of Isaac by God. Instead of his son, Abraham kills a lamb.

The papers are full of people arguing one way or the other for the holiday. Editorials, articles. ‘How can we explain this to our children?’ City folk find it cruel and barbaric, this sacrificing of animals. I don’t see it—maybe I’m not used to the blood flowing right in front of my eyes, but it’s done behind the scenes every day. We like our meat already cut and packaged—no reminders of where it comes from. But so what? What, really, is the big deal?  But nothing is without political import here. The old guard does not like the reminder of religion or blood. The new boys in power want everyone to know that this is a MUSLIM country with MUSLIM holidays. The faithful will perform the sacrifice and give away the meat—ideally. The non-believers will go somewhere and have a drink just to show they can. We non-Muslims might hit the streets just to see what’s going on—or head to the beach while the warm weather lasts to take advantage of the days off.

I helped sacrifice a goat last year. It was in Dede’s dream—with his grandchildren he would sacrifice and animal at a holy place and give away the meat. They painted blood on our foreheads to mark as belonging to his house—Mala Memli.

All I know is that the goat meat kavurma we ate on Mt. Silbus tasted good.

That day the sky was blue too. Like the spirit of the mountain named for an Armenian saint of light had cleaned it just for us. We danced the halay with strangers and lit candles to the gods.

The better question to ask at this Kurban Bayram is this:

Many of Turkey’s own sons and daughters lie on the altar now—are they going to strike or spare them?

Hunger Strike at Silivri and Beatings (Türkçeşi en aşağıda)

 

Anxiety.

That’s the prevailing mood for the past year. Sometimes the anxiety is aimless and sometimes it is a divination.

On Monday, my sister-in-law received a call from her father. Monday are the days prisoners at Silivri get a phone call. She said his voice sounded strange—subdued, morose. We found out that a hunger strike was planned among the prisoners in the KCK case. We had no idea if my father-in-law would be among the strikers. His name was missing from the official lists, but it was clear from his voice that something was wrong. The trial is resuming next week. The visitation this week was canceled—the prisoners themselves were boycotting visits as a means of protest. We would have no news for a while.

Tuesday, my wife, determined to see her father and find out if he was okay, arranged a car and a lawyer to go with her to Silivri—while family could not get in, most likely a lawyer would be let through. The only trouble was finding a driver—we called friends, friends of friends, and friends of those, but there was no one who knew how to drive (imagine having that problem in the States!) She was talking about driving out there on her own—a thought which terrified me, given her lack of experience. It looked like we might have to give up the trip, but something was nagging at her and she had to get out there somehow. I was about to call in to work to make the drive myself when a friend came through at the last minute.

The rest I heard from my wife herself.

The prison was eerily empty—the crowds of visitors for the KCK inmates missing, home because of the protest. The lawyer was let in and met with my father-in-law, Kemal Seven, who was extremely pleased to see him. Something had happened, and in their isolation, he had feared no one would ever find out.

My wife’s instincts had been correct.

Tuesday, September 25th, 10 of the 99 detainees remaining from this particular round-up began a hunger strike. They wrote a petition to the prison announcing the strike so that later the officials could not claim ignorance should something happen later on. The remaining 89 prisoners wrote a petition of their own declaring their support. Sometime the same day, roughly between  40 to 50 guards and riot police in full gear (this means shields, gas masks, billy clubs and pepper gas) gathered at the door of the prisoners wards. Among them were the assistant warden and the chief of the prison guards. They entered the cells to take away the hunger strikers. Apparently, they were taking them to one-person cells isolated from the others. Their comrades did not want to give them up—they feared that in a few days the strikers would no longer be able to take care of themselves, and expected little help or understanding from the prison officials. Thus, they tried to prevent the guards from taking them awa. The guards attacked. Everyone was beaten (Remember, please, that resistance or no, many of these men are around 60 years old with a host of ailments ranging from heart disease to diabetes). The ten hunger strikers and 2 other prisoners were taken away. None of their belongings were removed from the cells and they’ve had no word of where they’ve been taken. The others worry because, on hunger strike, of course, they need to drink water and sugar water quite regularly and there has been no sign of anyone making provisions for that.

The remaining 89 have refused food since Tuesday in solidarity. I’m posting this on a Saturday, so this might have changed. The trial will resume Monday. Most likely with the reading of the 2,500 page indictment-I think after 10 days in July we left off on page three hundred and something.


Türçesi (Özet)

Silivri L Tipi Cezaevinde, KCK davasından tutuklu bulunan 99 tutukludan 10 kişi süresiz dönüşümsüz açlık görevine başladılar.  Bir dilekçe yazıp, hapishaneye bildirmişler.  Kalan 89 kişiden bu arkadaşları destek verdiği diye bir dilekçe yazmışlar.  Sonra robokop şeklinde 20-25 hapishanenin gardiyanı ikinci müdür ve başgardiyan koğuş kapılarını açmışlar bu on kişi alıp bir tek kişilik hücre götürmek istemişler.  (Bu arada koğuşlar 18 kişilik. 99 kişi kalıyor, bu koğuşlarda, her koğuşa gardiyanlar dağıtılmış).   Dün Salı günü yaklaşık 40-50 kişi yarısı gardiyan yarısı robokop şeklinde, koğuşlara girmişler. Koğuşlardakiler tabii ki arkadaşlarını bırakmak istemdiler (Çünkü bu 10 kişi 10 gün sonra kendi ihtiyaçlarına bakamayacaklardı). Direnmişler. Gardiyanlar onlara darp etmişler.  10 grevlileri götürmüşler bir de direnen kişi den iki kişi daha. Bu 12 kişinin nereye götürüldüğünden koğuş arkadaşlarının haberi yok. Henüz gardiyanlar gelip onların eşyalarını götürmemişler. Açlık grevinde olan bu kişilerin su ve şekerli su almaları gerekiyor, bu yazı yazıldığında kendilerinden bir haber alınamamıştı. Tüm tutuklular Salı gününden beri arkadaşları destelemek amacıyla yemek ve ekmek almıyorlar.

A Portrait of the City

(I am doing little scetches around the city at the moment, word sketches--taking a break from the heavy political stuff)

 

Here, every day, the giant sits outside his cafe puffing on his nargile with his right hand and mashing buttons on his cell phone with his left. He has a shaved head and a black goatee and wears heavy metal concert shirts that hug his bulky body. Tattoos peek out from under both sleeves, and it so tight that every fold and mound of flesh is clearly outlined under the T’s. One would not call him movie-star muscular—he has bulk that is more bar-bouncer frightening than inspiring, and though not quite fat, aggressive lumps and masses of flesh push the limits of that tortured shirt until at the shoulders, pectorals, belly, and sides it seemed ready to burst. Over his head hangs a banner that proudly advertises—ALCOHOL FREE EFES BEER SERVED HERE--though he himself does not look particularly alcohol free.  He is friends with the couple who run the pink painted yoga studio on the other side of the alleyway. They lean out the window from time to time to shout down at him—requests for linden tea or a simple greeting. She is a frail girl with pale river-nymph skin and a bird-song voice.  Her boyfriend is a lean serious faced twenty-something with curly hair that pours out of his scalp like a jungle vine.

The giant’s brother—nearly alike in hair style, body shape and fashion choices, manages the ALCOHOL FULL bar next door. The two brothers rarely speak. The brother’s bar is set into the four floors of a narrow Pre-Republic home (most likely Greek), with the usual cluster of tables out front in the street. Portraits of famous leftists cover every inch of the walls—reverent photos of Che Guevara, Deniz Geçmiş, Nazım Hikmet, Hrant Dink, and Lech Walesa. The shelves of the bar itself are lined with bottles he has collected from the eskici over the years—a Moldavian Brandy from the Soviet Years, an empty rakı bottle from the 40s, a jug of cheap wine from the U.S., unopened bottles of British Champagne.  He has asked, but the eskici never tells him the secret of his finds. Where in the world does a collector of street junk come up with these extinct varieties of alcohol in a country rapidly clamping down on imbibing of all sorts?

Maside Bar in Kadıköy

The skinny eskici can often be found leaning against the wall of the bar as customers from all four floors swarm down to pick through his stuff. He wears the blue vest that all Kadıköy eskicis wear and a white baseball cap with faded lettering.  Smoking under the grapevines, he simply smiles with pride at the frenzy his finds produce and answer every excited inquiry into prices with an outpuff of smoke and a soft-spoken, ‘Well, that all depends…’. He could simply wait here for an hour and make over a hundred lira. When other eskicis pass—with carts full of metal wire and a tire, or a single box of old magazines and a broken electric kettle—they gaze at him with defeated envy. His cart is a mountain of useful junk, every day, a traveling bazaar, an ambulatory version of the best garage sales in the US. He has vintage clothes that would go for a bundle back in the thrift shops of Boston—old furs, seventies bell bottoms, tacky blouses, big hats with feathers, scarlet shoes with gold roses on the toes, tube tops. He has costume jewelry, old disco records, gaudily painted dishes, rhinestone purses, road atlases in Russian and Turkish of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and various other countries that don’t quite exist anymore.

Buckhannon, West Virginia and Conag, Turkey--Sister Cities?

We sat on the porch swing—Delal, Demet and I. My cousin Roy was on the steps.

‘You’ve lead such an amazing life,’ Roy told me. ‘Going to Japan and now living in Istanbul. Man, I’ve barely ever left this place.’

He waved his hand dismissively at the stunning mountain scenery that enfolded us there in that little hollow.

‘For us, West Virginia is pretty amazing,’ I told him. ‘Wherever you live is going to eventually seem a little ordinary and you get blinded to what’s amazing about it. Istanbul was driving me crazy when I left—but you would probably love it.  And here you’re saying it’s boring here, but it’s incredible to us.’

And what was so incredible for us? The mountains for one. Driving in and out of town took you through landscapes that cut to the quick, deep valleys with winding rivers and a sunset sky turning electric purple above. Quiet hollows full of fireflies.  Mist sending tendrils slithering over the rivers. We were staying in a cabin on the Middlefork River. Across the water was a huge meadow--a picturesque farm pastoral, the kind of thing you see in paintings in public buildings worldwide that seem so cheesy because they can’t be real. Such scenes are run-of-the-mill here. Our meadow—an empty green field, a dirt road winding through two poplars, a barn to the right, rolling green mountain backs behind, two horses grazing lazily.

The Middle Fork where we stayed

 

And then there was the animals. Everywhere we went, and I mean everywhere, we saw mother deer and their fawns. There were two fawns at the cemetery, a herd of six behind the car rental place, three out in the field next to the corn at my Uncle Jack’s house, three more at the empty lot next to the Wal-Mart.  A flock of wild turkeys in my Uncle Butch’s pasture, bears, rabbits, skunks, hummingbirds, groundhogs and a flock of wild red-headed ducks that made its way to Uncle Jack’s porch at 7:00 PM every day for bread.

The fawns wandering the Union Cemetery where my grandmother and her parents are buried

 

One thing about leaving a place for a long time, you’ll have a different vision when you come back. It had been nearly six years since I had last visited West Virginia, and I had a new set of eyes this time thanks to my wife and her sister. With our trip out to Bingöl and her village last year, I found myself in West Virginia looking for all the similarities to her Kurdistan. And there were quite a few—some more direct than others.

My Uncle Keith took us on a tour one day. We followed his pick-up down the four lane highway toward Elkins until he suddenly turned right onto a broken dirt road that wound round hillsides and dove deeper and deeper into the woods. At a spot just past a long stretch of nothing but maple shadows, the road winds between a farm and the ruins of an old one-room school house. This once was the community of Gormley, and this the Gormley School where my grandmother’s brothers and sisters learned to read and write a century ago. It was a one roomer, wooden, and now was a shell of gray planks and broken window panes. My sister-in-law tramped our way through the tall milkweed and peeked through the windows—a raggedy couch and bed sat pushed against the wall.

‘There was a family living here for a while,’ Uncle Keith explained.

My grandmother’s older brother Dick attended this school until the third grade. Her older sister for only two years. She herself finished the eighth grade—though I’m not sure where.

The Gormley School

 

I found myself thinking back to the one-room school house in Conag—also in ruins, also the place Delal’s grandparents had learned to read and write, also in the middle of a poor mountainous region in the center of the country where many people had to quit school early because there was work to do (and not enough teachers anyway) then later, being a people of tremendous pride, feeling embarrassed for it, yet having no reason to be embarrassed at all, for through hard work, strong character, and yes, intelligence, they carved for themselves respectable livings that we of the younger generation stand in awe of. These are no superficial comparisons—these kinds of things leave their mark on a family—the way you think and carry yourself in the world--and because of them I think that Delal and I have more in common with each other than we do with many of our own countrymen.

Up past the school we drove, leaping and hopping over boulders in the road until we came to a spring bubbling out of the woods on our left, flowing under the road and into a meadow on our right.

‘This is the spring that fed the Nesbitt farm,’ Uncle Keith explained.

Down in the meadow was the ruins of the Nesbitt Farm, a rickety shed that once served as home to my great grandfather Francis Alfred Nesbitt, his wife, her parents, and their eleven children—one of whom was my grandmother Lela.

Delal got out and hopped over the rocks to get a drink. I followed suit. The water gathered in a shadowed pool lined with fallen sycamore and oak leaves. It tasted of the forest—earth, green, cold. It looked like the pool of Xidirilîyês (Hıdrellez) in Conag where we’d picnicked one afternoon. The pool was also off a dirt road winding away from the village, also pouring from a spring to gather among the rocks, also lucid and lined with leaves. In Conag, the Pool of Xidirilîyês is a holy place for all the surrounding villages, where people come to drink water and pay respects to the spirit of the two saints Xidir and Ilîyês, patrons of those in trouble on land and sea respectively. Xidir was rumored to have drunk from the Water of Life and springs and water seem to hold a special place for the Alevis in Conag—springs, fountains, and rivers are sacred places. This little spring of ours, while no pilgrimage spot, felt sacred to me as it was by this water that my great grandparents and their children survived the wilderness. Uncle Keith seemed to feel at least an echo of this—it was him that took us here, to the middle of the forest, to show us this modest little spring.

The spring flows down into the Middle Fork River. The old Nesbitt homestead of my great grandfather sat on its shores in 1900. This place is remote now—fifteen miles from the nearest town of Buckhannon (itself only a small town of 5700 people) down a back road off a back road.  Back in the beginning of the twentieth century it was a bit livelier—there were communities all along the river built by the railroad for its workers in the coal mines and lumber mills. My mother took us on a tour of the river one day. She pointed out the ruins of all the wooden houses that sat high on the rocks or rotting up among the trees. ‘That was a railroad company house, and that one, too.’

A train of the Moore Keppel Lumber Company--along the Middle Fork. My great grand father worked for them

 

There are lots of trailers in the woods, cars junked in the yards.

‘The mountain people used to live out here,’ my mother tells the Delal and her sister. ‘We would come out to the camp meetings all piled into the truck and you could just see, lining the hills, these people watching us. They didn’t smile or wave, just stared. You could tell how poor they were from their worn-out clothes. No shoes on the kids. They had the spookiest looks in their faces.’

She had frightened them a bit with tales of mountain people a few days before—families that lived on the remote peaks and almost never came down. She said she had a dentist friend down in the south of the state. Sometimes her friend would hear a knock on the back of the office door and find two kids standing there, unspeaking, without shoes or sometimes without a shirt. She’d tend to them for free, but they’d never speak.

A lot of the tales of the old family feuds—the Hatfields and McCoys that come out of West Virginia have their origin in the clans of the Scotch Irish who settled here. In Dersim, the province that Conag culturally used to belong to, a similar clan system was in place, leading to similar kinds of feuds—whole families holed up in the mountains managing their own affairs independent of the central government.

On our river tour, we pass an enormous white house, all boarded up. Next to it was a little white-washed building.

‘That was my Uncle Elam’s house—my grandmother’s brother,’ my mother explained. ‘And that little building was Uncle Elam’s store. We used to have our camp meetings out on the grass. People would gather here for a few days or so in the summer and have baptisms and preachers would give sermons. I always sat in the back with my girlfriends and spied on the boys. One day we were just a giggling and carrying on and I saw my grandmother way up in the front, suddenly stand and scan the crowd for me. Her eyes locked on me and she motioned with her finger for me to come up front. And there I went, walking all the way down that aisle in front of the preacher, God and everybody.’

‘Or another time I remember me and my cousin Bobbin went out on the river swimming. There was no one around so we figured we’d take off our bathing suits. We were about 11 or 12 at the time. We took them off and lay out on the rock to sun and just as soon as we did, two men came down to water their horses. We jumped up to put our bathing suits on only to see them go floating down the river.’

I’m going to veer into a bit of drier history here—you can skip this paragraph if you wish.  The camp meetings my mother spoke of are a unique feature of Appalachian religion. They used to come when everyone wasn’t busy with farming and focused more on the ‘plain folk’, ecstatic variety of religion—lots of singing, baptizing and evangelizing. The central churches didn’t like it much—because by that time they had established a church hierarchy complete with leaders that conflicted with the individualistic faith of the mountains. And so they sent missionaries (particularly starting in the 1880s with the ‘home missions’) to ‘correct’ the Christianity of this ‘backward’ region. Delal’s region of Bingöl has a similar dynamic going on with Alevism—the Alevis were pretty self-sufficient religious group living in the mountains, and the surrounding Sunni communities saw them (and see them) as deviants from the true Islam.

We pass a ruin of a blue house set up against the hillside. ‘That’s my Aunt Sarai’s I think.’ She pronounces it Say-ree. ‘She was my grandma’s sister. My great grandmother used to stay with her. I remember she would sit out on the porch smoking a pipe and swearing at us all in German.’

Dede’s Dad used to wander through Conag, drinking coffee and wearing American clothes, swearing at kids in another language (English). My grandmother’s grandmother used to smoke pipes and fuss in German.

My mom and her cousins filled a book about our family with stories of their parents—the eleven children who grew up in that shack on that Nesbitt farm by the river. My mother tells this one:

‘Being the meek and mild child that I was, I got blamed for a lot of things for some reason. I would be put on restriction and had to stay in my room, which was on the second floor. I could look out the window and see all the kids playing and having a great old time. One day I decided I would climb out on the roof, climb down the drain pipe and no one would know the difference. Wrong! My mom was coming home from somewhere-I didn’t see her-and saw me coming down the drain pipe. She met me at the bottom with a switch!’

Or this from her cousin Jack about his dad—my grandmother’s older brother, Dick. ‘One day, my dad decided to get another pony and we loaded that pony into a two-door 1934 Ford. Dad turned the back seat up and we three boys got in, the pony sitting in front of us. Mom got in the front seat with the dog ‘Rex’ on the floor. We had about forty miles to drive like that and I remember all the folks in the small towns we passed through just stopping and staring. And whenever we’d hit a stop light, that pony would just raise cane!’

My aunt Joanie writes about my grandmother’s younger sister, ‘She and one of her siblings upset the outhouse once while Uncle Dick was still inside. And once she and her sister Lela (my grandmother) hotwired their dad’s Model T Ford with a fingernail file and took off on a joyride. Her old job used to be to pick the beetles off the beans and the bugs off the potatoes. When her youngest brother Bob was born, they had no money to pay the doctors and so they paid him with a ham.’

These stories of my mom and her cousins remind me of Dede’s stories back in Conag—funny, pastoral, and opening a window to a past that I am always surprised I am so closely connected to—poverty, camp revivals in the woods, German immigrants, coal company towns.

There’s a picture from the days of the camp meetings—an old blurry black and white. My grandmother is a little girl—about 6 years of age. She stands with a group of her siblings and cousins. Behind her is her mother with all her brothers and sisters, and her grandmother with all of hers—about 40 people in all, over a hundred years ago. They all made their lives down here on the river where we were staying. They bathed and swam in the swimming holes where we were bathing and swimming. I sometimes went down at dusk and followed the river to a swimming hole at a point where it forks—there were no houses here, no sign of people at all, just a dense wall of oaks and poplars and ash. The sky would be pink or else already fading into a dark purple-blue, fireflies would have ignited along the shores. I would hear nothing but the flow of water over the rocks, the crickets, the cicadas, and the frogs. It might be 2012 or it might be 1890 when my Great Great Uncle Elam swam here with his brothers or friends or father.

This blood continuity, this connection with the land is another thing that we have in common. Delal and Conag, me and here.

And like in Conag, in West Virginia the family protects. One night, as we drove back to the camp Delal asked me if we had enough gas. I looked down at the needle—an eighth of a tank. ‘Sure,’ I said. When we pulled into the drive the needle dropped and the empty light flipped out.

‘Shit.’

We were fifteen miles from town.  From any town or major highway. Figuring I should take care of this now (we had a long day trip the next day) I called my Aunt Bobbin, owner of the camp, and asked her where the nearest gas station would be. ‘We’re a little close to empty and close is best.’ And then I took off, with my mother driving behind me just in case. Of course, the needle went back up to an eighth of a tank as soon as we started and I was fine.  When I got back to the camp, my sister told me I needed to call my Uncle Butch and Keith right away.

‘Why?’

‘Well Aunt Bobbin told Keith and he told Butch, I guess, and now they’ve filled a gas can and are going to come looking for you!’

I laughed. You always feel taken care of out here—for a kid who grew up with an absent father, it’s a tremendous feeling. This kind of thing and others is what made my wife tell me that West Virginia was the only place in all our travels that didn’t feel foreign, that felt like home.

I think on what Roy said to me on his Dad’s front porch.  Why do I travel? Why have I always been drawn to foreign places? That feeling of discovery? Of roaming new worlds? I remember last year when I first stepped into Delal’s village. Everything was so different, so rich in a history that I’d only come across in storybooks. There was a culture so colorful and strong.  Sometimes I lose track of the same thing back home, or maybe looking for it here in Turkey makes me see it more clearly when I came back home.

There’s a picture of my mother and all her cousins, standing at the camp along the Middle Fork River for an impromptu barbecue-slash-reunion. These are the children of the eleven kids who grew up along this same river—all of them long lost to old age and disease and death. There’s something special about this group of people. When they are gone, a precious thing will have passed out of this world. I have a picture of their parents, too.  Eleven children born to a poor farmer in the backwoods of a backwoods state. How they grew up, how they took care of each other, how they were intricately wound into each other’s lives bespeaks a culture that will be lost and is almost as foreign to me as Delal’s own.

The Nesbitt Children around 1918--my grandmother is Lela

The children of those 1918 kids in 2012

Their children and grand children and great grandchildren (and one great great on the way)
 

 

The West Virginian Halay---

The other night, Delal and I strolled down İstiklal Avenue for the first time in months—unprecedentedly relaxed among the ever-present crowds and hullaballoo that usually sends us both into the fetal position, shivering in a ball right there in the middle of the promenade. We were feeling so good that we popped into a türkü bar and after a few melancholy songs from the East, the singer broke into something much jauntier and we leapt up and let loose with a spirited halay.

                It reminded me of West Virginia.

                That’s right.  Of our Kurdish square dance in Helvetia.    

Helvetia, West Virginia is a small village up in the mountains, an hour’s drive from my mother’s hometown of Buckhannon, which is already up in the mountains by virtue of being in West Virginia. The tiny two lane road winds and curves up through forest and farmland—past barns, deer, wild turkeys, lazy cows and a small tavern in the woods that should be located anywhere but this twisty road lined with dangers. We were heading to Helvetia for a festival celebrating Swiss National Day.

The Creek--leads into the Buckhannon River eventually

                Some random facts about Helvetia. First of all, it’s smaller than most villages in Turkey—a fact I like to flaunt because it always silences people here who see all of America as an urban Frankenstein consisting of CSI teams in Miami and New York. ‘In Turkey, we have rural places…’  Oh yeah? Try this-- according to the US Census of 2010, Helvetia sports a population of 59 people. A flip through the year book revealed a graduating class of 2—the whole high school had a total of nine kids and that’s only if you count from the ninth grade. The village was settled after the Civil War by intrepid Swiss immigrants including the ancestors of my Uncle Keith (not really my uncle, but the husband of my mother’s first cousin which in Turkish or Kurdish I’m sure has a specific word, but we just say Uncle.) Uncle Keith has a book published for one of his family reunions that describe the journey across the mountains. Harrowing is the word. They walked up through the forests without roads or signposts—dragging all their worldly goods along with them.  And, yes, maybe to people who frolic among the Alps, the old, worn-down Alleghenies didn’t seem like much more than pleasant hills--but moving a home on foot in this country would not be the easiest task in the world for anyone. It would involve scaling large boulders and small cliffs, forging straight up hill for years through blackberry briar and poison ivy, and no doubt fighting bears.

                In the dance hall there are yellowed pictures of these early days--of men with enormous two-person saws cutting lumber in the forest, and of a rather robust woman in a Sunday dress holding up an enormous tom turkey whose plumage looked like the hoop of a giant skirt (In fact, at first I assumed she was holding up a young woman by her braids—turned out to be the Turkey’s neck). The community has kept alive a lot of Swiss traditions which is what today’s festival is all about.

                I say festival—this word undoubtedly conjured up images of game stalls, dunking booths and perhaps even midway rides in my American family’s minds. For my Kurdish family, I suppose that there were teeming crowds of people milling about several music pavilions. But when we pulled into the village we found that ‘festival’ in the Helvetian dialect meant a line of 4 tables, a grill, and about fifteen people in a meadow—20 if you count the folks manning said tables and grill. To be fair, that’s over a third of the population. Not that more weren’t on their way—a guy pulled up in a truck shortly after we did and the taciturn guy cooking the Bratwurst said that he was sure their yodeler was coming, though no one had heard from him in months.

                We got a plate of Swiss National Day food—which included a bratwurst, sauerkraut, and spinach dip with corn chips. Delal loved the sauerkraut. She had already fallen in love with hot dogs, so the idea of pairing them with this wonderful new pickled cabbage was magical. We ate our dinner in the meadow—the village’s answer to Taksim Square.  Now Helvetia is a very green place in summer. The color is electric—it sparks off the trees and grass. The forests surrounding the village are so thick with foliage it looks like an emerald fog hangs over the hills. There’s a brook that winds through the village sporting one pensive duck who peers fiercely into the water as if seeking enlightenment (Note to visitors: the duck really hates to be disturbed, even with bits of bread, and will use violence) They even have a log cabin library, which amazed our Kurdish visitors who come from a city of over 15 million people where I can think of not one genuine public library that anyone uses.

                The woman at the cash register promised that the music and dance program start at six, so we took our places on some benches lain out in front of a little stage set up in the middle of the meadow, ate and waited. Soon a troupe of men and women in red Swiss National Day shirts separated from the ‘crowd’ and climbed the steps together with a guitarist (and in doing so, halved the potential audience). The emcee was a thin woman named Sandy with hair down to the back of her legs that she kept wound on the back of her head like a failed attempt at a cinnamon bun.  ‘Unfortunately,’ Sandy the emcee announced, ‘The yodeler doesn’t seem to be coming this year so we will have to make do with this modest little chorus.’ She asked where we were all from. Someone shouted ‘Clarksburg!’, another ‘Pittsburg!’. I shouted Turkey, and helpfully pointed to Delal and her sister.  Sandy threw up her hands and gave a cheer for Turkey.

What followed was an hour of Swiss folk music in German with a lot of wisecracks bandied about between songs. One of the songs was a melancholy melody about a Swiss immigrant longing for the mountains of home. I think this one moved my wife quite a bit. The performers apologized for not being in traditional costumes, but it was just ‘too dang hot!’ At the end of the concert, two men brought out a pair of alphorns the length of a mammoth’s trunk and created what passed rather well for a melody by spit-blowing into something the size of a rocket ship. Next came the folk dancers—I think the entire high school participated—but needing more people to make the various reels work, they rounded out the group with some of the older folk and a man forced into labor as soon as he climbed out of his pick-up (summoned there, no doubt, five minutes before by an emergency phone call). Before his arrival, Sandy had shouted in an ominous voice, ‘Let’s make the Turk dance!’ Meaning me.

Now since coming back to Istanbul—among the 21 mosques surrounding our house screaming the ezan into our windows at 120 decibels five time a day, the car horns that never ever stop, the tens of thousands of buildings that spread out in all direction—the dancing and singing on the quiet Helvetian meadow is a pleasant memory that wafts like green smoke drifting in from another world—the sunlight, the people, the smell of grilled wurst and mountains.

After the dancers had finished, it was dusk. Fire flies had started blinking along the creek, the duck broke his silence and let loose some frantic quacking, and the sky had turned a bright flamingo pink. We were invited to the square dance at 8 o’clock up at the dance hall, and when that didn’t seem to capture our interest sufficiently, the locals added that there would be some polka and waltz as well. ‘And maybe,’ said the Emcee who had suggested they make the Turk dance, ‘You all could teach us some of your dances!’

The dance hall was an old wooden building just up the road—it had the look of a barn or church. A huge ornate spider web covered the entire south section of the small picnic area. The little arachnid clearly had some free time and my wife and her sister spent a long while snapping pictures of its handiwork. The band had already assembled inside—a piano player, a fiddler, and a guitarist.

 

The night started with ‘round dancing’—a term used for single couple dancing, I guess as a counterpoint to square. Our round dance was the polka. Now that word, to my mind, always conjured images of a busty girl with a beer stein doing kicks as a boy in lederhosen went to town on an accordion—but all the old folks of Helvetia--and my mother--could cut quite a rug with the polka. (‘Oh yes,’ she would say, tossing aside the cane which she used to accentuate her pained cries of I just can’t walk anymore at all! as she struggled to cross the ten feet from , for example, the car door to the Walmart entrance.) ‘We used to dance the polka all the time in high school!’  Who knew? The German influence round these parts is thick and sneaky—it pops up in the random memories of family members all the time but no one outright says or even seems to know that this comes straight out of Deutchland. My mother polkaed me up and down the hall for song after song. (This polka trick of my mom’s was rather curious. All day she had been hobbling around on her cane worrying frantically about how in the world she was going to, say, make it from the car door to the picnic table which was a frightening twenty feet away, and now she was swirling round and round the dance hall clearly having forgotten the cane existed)

After the polka came the square dance.

Now you Americans out there have to push the image of elementary school PE classes out of your minds—where teachers who had run out of ideas made kids dosey do till they dropped to a caller from a cassette tape.  Folk culture is far more alive in Turkey. At my wedding, hundreds of people spent literally hours dancing the halay, and I am constantly being asked if there were any folk dances in the United States (with everyone secretly and smugly confident that I’ll be forced to say no). Heck, sometimes they answer ‘No’ for me. I even catch other Americans saying the same thing. And yet, I would dare say that by high school, a higher percentage of American kids have square danced than kids in Turkey have done the halay. I had to teach my middle school students the halay for God’s sake, so I was excited for Delal to take part in a square dance and finally see that yes, Virginia, there is an American folk dance. And by the way, according to an article I unearthed, the square dance is uniquely American if only because it combines a European style of dancing with modifications by African Americans (supposedly the caller might have popped out of African call and response music traditions.) So there’s another thing we owe to black folk.

Now apparently there is an ‘Appalachian’ style of square dance, which we were doing that night. One distinguishing characteristic was live music. Another was that we danced in a giant circle of couples as opposed to small sets of couples. This involved a lot of confusing ‘going round the ring’ where you had to make your way through every last person in the room all while doing some fancy step or another—and since many of us had either no idea what we were doing or else had been outside with the man at the house next door sampling the moonshine, this proved no easy task. One result of this sort of thing is that you almost never spent time with your original partner. Another distinguishing characteristic probably contributed to the chaos of the second—namely, the dance is very informal and ‘lessons’ are often given on the spot. There are some unique figures as well like ‘dive for the oyster’ where one couple raised their arms and the rest of us dove through in an effort to tangle up in a hopeless mass. (Actually once—after several disastrous attempts--we were able to completely reverse our positions and then dive for the oyster a second time to set them right again.)

At the end of the dance set, the woman from earlier asked Delal is she would teach the crowd a dance from Turkey.  ‘Our musicians are pretty good,’ she said. ‘They’ll pick up a tune.’ So up went my wife to teach the trio the music to ‘Oy naze naze’ by Siwan Perwer. What ensued was perhaps the most improbable melting pot of cultures I have ever seen—here were these Swiss descendants in a circle, holding hands as my Kurdish wife took stage next to the Appalachian fiddle player. She launched into song, and did it in an improvised call and response style—like the old Africans—so that we dancers sang the chorus (Oy Naze Naze!) after every line. Meanwhile, some of the men in the group stumbled a bit due to their imbibing of moonshine. One of the participants turned out to be a Japanese woman—either married to a local or else teaching at the college, I can’t remember which, who I bet never thought she would be buzzed on moonshine while dancing to a fiddle and singing in Kurdish the lyrics of a man exiled from Turkey.

Afterwards, they taught us one of their Swiss folk dances—the Weggis, which I thought perfectly captured the spirit of the US. The Weggis was created not in Switzerland, but in the States, by nostalgiac immigrants who put together in one dance all their favorite moves from the ones they remembered from back home.  The nostalgia of immigrants creating something new out of culture brought from the homeland—quintessential USA. Our teachers were very patient and kind and by the end we could do all 5 figures competently enough, perhaps, to perform next year.

West Virginia felt like home to our Kurdish visitors—the tightness of community there, the sense of family and tradition, and the way the best news agency is a nosy neighbor. A few days after our night in Helvetia, we were at a birthday party and a man I had never met before came up to me and said, ‘You must be the folks from Turkey who taught that naze naze dance up in Helvetia’

‘How in the world do you know?’ I ask. ‘We’re you there?’

‘Naw, I got a friend who lives up there and his wife told him about some people from Turkey who taught them all a folk dance.’

‘News travels fast.’

‘Round these parts it does.’

Now if all of this seems unrelated to what I've been writing about--it's not entirely.  Nevermind those little human similarities that kept making us smile over and over--the way news travels by gossip so quickly, the dancing in a circle, the warmth of the Helvetians.  Imagine, also, two Kurdish women from Turkey coming to a country and watching a group of people have a national festival that celebrates a different nation than the one they live in.  They wave the flag of that nation, feel proud of their heritage in relation to that other country, and sing songs in another language other than the main language of the State (I would write 'official' but there is no officially mandated language--not yet).  And yet no one arrests them. No one calls them splittists. In fact, people just come to watch out of curiosity.

All in a region of the country traditionally isolated by its mountains and historically often at odds with the government because of it. 

               

The KCK Trials--the Last Days (continued from previous post)

The lawyers talking to the press in front of the courthouse

.

I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe
this?' And I answered - 'I can.'

Anna Akhmatova
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

I kept coming back to this poem during the writing of these entries—and I thought, what would I answer to the woman’s question? What if one of the Kurdish mothers in the courtroom asked me, ‘Who can describe this?’ I’d think, someone can, but not me. My heart’s in it, but my blood is not, and that seems to make a difference in who can get at what this is like.

But then this is not the Stalinist years in Russia, and we are not suffering all that much on a day to day basis. Every afternoon in Silivri, we have been going from the courthouse to the beach or to the coast where there is a nice nargile café. There, we sit on bean bags and smoke grape-mint water pipe and drink tea. This is a summer resort for wealthy Turks. They had a parade on Wednesday, all international, in celebration of the ‘Yogurt Festival’. Texan square dancers marched behind some old Korean men doing a harvest dance, followed up quickly by some Serbian folk dancers. Turkish Pop Stars closed the night.

While we are doing all of these things, whole families sleep in the BDP tents on the ground among the flies and heat and dust (We stay in a comfy apartment with one of Delal’s college buds). The campers have no money for food so they have to eat what the party can provide—usually a pretty decent meal of fresh tomatoes (this area is famous for them) rice, bread, cucumbers, and water melons.

We cook for each other every night in the apartment—I made black bean burritos on Tuesday. Our host made meftune on Wednesday.  Curry another night.

Many of these people have blown all their savings to come across the country from tiny villages in Siirt and Şırnak. And they are the lucky ones who had the cash to blow—others were left behind. Some have relatives in our group of political prisoners with severe heart problems or serious cases of diabetes. No, we are lucky--the petty bourgeoise of the political prisoner relative set.)

On Wednesday, after the Yogurt parade, we repair to the nargile joint.

‘What do you think they think we do after the trial every day?’ my wife’s sister says as she lets out a draught of minty smoke. ‘This almost feels wrong!’

‘Maybe they think we ululate in grief and slap our faces.’

We ululate for effect and laugh.

‘Or beat ourselves with whips and wear hair shirts,’ I add.

The moon rises over the town and makes a splash of milk-white on the water. It’s utterly beautiful. We stay up till late doing imitations of one another.

The thing is—there is an anxiety that underlies everything. It’s like—while watching that moon rise over the glittering town, there’s someone raking their fingernails down the chalkboard. And it has been that way for a year. This is the thing I cannot describe—it’s like that thought on the tip of your tongue that never materializes. It’s why everything you do comes with a slight stomach ache, a last minute hesitation, why your nights are filled with dreams of concentration camps and round ups and jails.

I think this anxiety is all very run of the mill for my in-laws. This kind of anxiety is just part and parcel of life those Kurds who won’t say they’re Turks.

And then there are those that do. We have a young visitor with us this Wednesday night, a family friend still in high school and only 16 years old, come to pay his respects to Mamoste in prison. As we walk the boardwalk around midnight, a concert is blasting the entire town with noise from the portside.

‘I guess we Turks will always love noise,’ he says, or something like it. I don’t quite catch the beginning of this.

‘Well, maybe,’ my wife answers. ‘But just remember, we aren’t the same as all these people. We’re Kurds, not Turks.’

‘Not me,’ he says. ‘I’m a Turk.’

‘How so?’

‘I reject my Kurdishness.  I don’t want it.’

This is not exactly the most socially aware thing to have said to a group of people going to a political show trial every day for a family member imprisoned for fighting for Kurdish rights.

‘But you are Kurdish,’ we protest. ‘You can do what you want with it, but you can’t get rid of it any more than you can get rid of the fact that you were born a male.’

‘No, it’s a choice,’ he insists. ‘I don’t want to be Kurdish. I’m Turkish. That’s how I feel!’

I’d like to tell him that any true hater of Kurds won’t care what he chooses.  They’ll arrest him if they feel like it, or beat him up, or kill him like the guy in the bar in Ankara did when he heard a man singing a Kurdish song.  I remember the eleven year old girl who told me, upon learning my wife was Kurdish, that the only good Kurd is a dead Kurd. The 7^th grader who, again, when she found out my wife was Kurdish, told me ‘you should be careful.’ The friend who told me the best thing I could do for Turkey was kill Kurds. ‘It’s just like killing chickens.’ The 8^th grader who got angry at me because I said my wife came from the village of Conag. ‘Conag is not a Turkish word,’ he growled. The teacher at school—half American at that—who stopped talking to me because I said that Kurdish and Turkish weren’t the same thing.

‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ We tell our denying teen.  Of course, it’s true. He has had 12 years of nationalist schooling feeding him this mentality. He’s had classes in Ataturk’s thought and National Security where’s he learned about internal enemies (his own people) and the imperative of the unity of the nation. He’s recited every day of his school life the school-kid oath that ends ‘Happy is he who calls himself a Turk.’ Everywhere he turns, on the news, in the music he listens to, the magazines he reads, is the same message. 

‘No, it’s you who’ve been brainwashed,’ he retorts. ‘You don’t have to be Kurds either, but you buy into it. I don’t have to.’

There’s the rub.  I imagine that, at 16, the idea of ‘being Kurdish’ would give anyone pause in Turkey. I imagine that as you are coming out of high school, you stand at a fork in the road.  To the right, are fairly normal, fun filled days of going to concerts with friends, drinking beer by the water, trying to feel up girls, getting sentimental over rock songs, playing video games, reckless road trips, part time jobs and midnight swims in the Bosphorous.  On the left is what he’s seen today—a people always feeling victimized, camping out in shabby tents in front of a courthouse that’s arrested hundreds of their family members, political battles that go nowhere, people shouting at demonstrations and then getting tear gassed, guerilla war, anchormen calling you a splittist and a terrorist, exile from poor villages to ghettos in the city.  What teen looking for a normal life would deliberately walk down the left fork? I remember a quote from an interview somewhere.  ‘What do you do for a living?,’ was the question. ‘I’m a Kurd for a living,’ came the answer. ’If I hadn’t been a Kurd, maybe I would have been an engineer instead.’ In some cases, identity subsumes everything.

I listen to his arguments and make the silent promise never to send my children to school here. I think of a Kurdish girl I met in Nashville.  She was about 17 and running the register at her father’s store.  I asked her where her family was from.

‘Sırnak,’ she answered.

‘Oh we have an aunt there,’ I told her.

‘You live in Turkey?’

‘Yep.’

‘I went to Istanbul once. Fun city. There was some girl there, though. I remember telling her my dad was from there and that I was Kurdish. She said, ‘but Kurds are just a myth,’ and I was like, yeah okay, whatever. Who needs you…’

I want to produce a kid who can say breezily, ‘I was like, whatever. Who needs you?’

It reminds me of a story—a friend of a friend. Her grandmother was Lakota and grew up on the Lakota Reservation when it was definitely not cool to be native—brought up in white schools, assimilated. To this day, in her seventies or eighties she will not admit to being Indian. Her granddaughter—the friend of a friend—turned down a scholarship because she knew it would hurt her grandmother to hear the word ‘Sioux’ spoken out loud, even if it did mean money for college.

THURSDAY

For the first half of the day, there is more droning through the indictment. At the lunch break, I see that little nine year old girl again. She’s wearing a red tank top and white shorts. She’s very chubby and manages to push past up security and stand at the railing of the lawyers section where she starts to blow kisses to the two women I assume are her grandmother and mother—one is much older than the other and wears a headscarf patterned with red and purple flowers. Both look alike. The little girl’s  fat ankles squeeze out of the white straps of her shoes.

We lunch in the BDP’s tent—it’s hot and full of flies. They buzz around the red slices of water melon. Our meal is had communally on the floor—a sandwich of peppers and kaşar cheese, chicken and rice, fresh tomatoes. It is very dusty today—clouds of dust roll in from parking lot on hard gusts of wind. The sound of power drills and hammers fills the air. There’s construction going on at the prison.  On TV the night before, an academic discussed the Assistant Prime Minister’s announcement that 196 new prisons would be built by 2017. 

‘This is way more than necessary to relieve overcrowding,’ he’d said. ‘It seems the government is clearly anticipating thousands of new prisoners, but who?’

After lunch, Judge Ali announces that he will now hear statements from the suspects and lawyers—‘talep’ he calls them, which means requestbut in the legal sense , is better translated as ‘plea’. ‘But only for those willing to give their pleas in Turkish,’ he adds. This is the day before the announcement of who will be released.

A husky woman with short hair stands. The mike is passed.  She explains in Turkish that she never really joined all the meetings that she was accused of joining in the indictment—and that the ones she did join were half-hearted and few and far between. There’s a collective intake of breath. They’re giving in. They’re breaking ranks. 

A man named Erdoğan Baysan rises and the mike passes to him. ‘I joined the BDP at a friend’s recommendation,’ he says. ‘But I never really attended many of the meetings.’ A frizzy haired student named İdil Aydınoğlu says that she was part of the women’s auxillary of the BDP but didn’t really attend the meetings.’ A young college girl named Büşra Önder says that she joined the BDP, yes, but couldn’t really keep up with the meetings with all her school work and her aunt getting cancer. She was Tunisian by heritage anyway. Kemal Karagöz says he was not so much a member of the BDP as he was the leader of the Alevi Association. He is Alevi first and foremost. (This is significant because it is a classic escape of many Zaza Alevis—we are not Kurds, we are Alevis) Another man, barely able to speak Turkish at all, says in a heavily Kurdish accent, ‘I would like to ask for release. Thank you.’ One by one, like dominoes. One or two, like Pervin Tunbul, feel the need to stand and make a kind of protest. ‘I don’t wish to defend myself like this,’ Tunbul says, but their voices are drowned in the pleas for release. And the odd thing is, they defend themselves by distancing themselves not from the KCK but from BDP—a legal political party in Parliament.  They have, subconsciously perhaps, accepted the court’s judgment that being part of the opposition is a crime. I can’t judge (goes the classic phrase before a withering judgement)—I have never spent 9 months in prison, what do I know? But I feel embarrassed for these people and sad—that they have been brought to this, begging for the freedom after doing nothing to deserve losing it. 

Then Büşra Ersanlı stands up. 

Her voice is quivering with emotion—rage, sorrow, despair?  It’s hard to tell. She speaks about her academic record, her years of fighting for peace and equality—her absolute insistence on discussion and dialogue and non-violence.

‘I became a member of the BDP because of a desire to make a contribution to an opposition movement that offered a solution. I don’t regret that now. I feel ashamed of the word ‘request’. I don’t ‘request’, I demand my acquittal!’

I want to stand up and applaud (but that will get us kicked out of course). The silence that follows is ominous. A lawyer stands up and says, ‘The ones who can speak Turkish have a voice. What about the more than one hundred people who cannot? I again make the request that the other defendants be allowed to make their statements in Kurdish.’

‘Request denied,’ says Judge Ali.

And so over 100 people are silenced.

FRIDAY

The last day of the trial before the summer recess. The day they make the announcements about who is released and who is not. We expect a huge crowd—over ten people are coming from our family alone, and there are 205 prisoners—so we set out at 8:00. The bus turns from the coastal road into the Silivri sunflower fields and I notice that absolutely every plant is in full bloom, a rolling sea of gold all the way down to the real sea. It is unbelievably gorgeous, and so strange that these plants have followed the progress of the trial so precisely—almost no blooms the first day, hitting full flower only on the last. 

The tanks are back, and the 21 troop transports.

We arrive over an hour early at the courthouse gate and find it already swarming with people.  At the gate itself are three lines of gendarmes in full riot gear and regular prison guards with Kalishnikovs.  More soldiers line the fence. They have blocked the doors to the building before, but never the gate.

‘There are no more visitor passes,’ the officer in charge tells us.

‘Liar!’ screams an old woman. ‘You’re lying!’

‘There’s no one in the building!’ says a portly mom.  ‘We can see that it’s empty from here!’

‘I’m sorry,’ says the commander again. ‘But each of the people inside has taken between ten and fifteen passes for members of their families, and there’s none left.’

‘Then make them give them back!’ a woman in a headscarf protests. ‘There should be a limit to how many each family can bring in! We all want a chance. We came all the way from Hakkari! Over 24 hours on the bus and we used all our money to come here. Are you telling us we should just go home!?’

The soldiers look tense. They tighten up their wall and raise their riot shields. They are fully armed with Turkey’s favorite weapons against its citizens—pepper gas and billy clubs. More people come pouring down from the BDP tents.

‘What’s going on here?’ they shout.

‘They’re lying to us! They say there are no more visitors’ passes!’

An aside here—my wife’s family often talks about random strip searches when they visit the prison, of harsh interrogations and harassment when there was nothing of the sort the previous time.  They say this is all the State’s efforts at psychological intimidation. I thought that maybe they were being a little paranoid, that maybe it was true that these random searches were, as the soldiers explained, part of the prison routine. I believed the commander when he said there were no more visitor badges because the few people we saw inside had commandeered them all.

I was naïve. For in the next second, the soldiers parted and we rushed the security desk to find over one hundred visitor passes unclaimed.

‘There are only a few,’ the officer distributing them shouted. ‘So each family can only have one! No more taking a dozen!’

So they were still sticking by that story. And this produced a mad rush of people pushing and shoving and trampling each other—who knew when they would run out or when the soldiers would decide to stop handing them out. After the madness and everyone had gotten their badge, there were still plenty left and any stragglers could pick up as many as they liked.

What the hell was all of this about? Why did they deliberately lie about something that didn’t really matter at all? And then change their minds? The ubiquitous Turkish disorder or something else?

Inside there were frisks and strip searches. I was checked more thoroughly than I ever had been—in fact, until today most of the security had been calling me ‘Enişte’ (meaning ‘Man married into the family’) and waving me through with nothing more than a ‘Good Morning.’

With about fourteen family members there that day and only four visitor passes, we were on rotations.  Four in to wave at the breaks and then four out so that a new group could come in and wave at the next break. I was with the first team in.

The previous day, the trial had ended with the lawyers making their pleas for the clients. Only three had been able to speak. The last one asked the judge for an hour’s extension.

‘Your honor, we request to continue until six o’clock today. There are two hundred and five suspects and we think at least five minutes for each one would be fair.’

In the Ergenekon trial going on just down the road, the judge had extended proceedings to 7:00 for the same reason just the other day.

Judge Ali, despite the precedent, despite the fact that he had been over half an hour late that morning, refused. And so now, this morning, we witnessed the absurd sight of over one hundred lawyers trying to speed-read their pleas before the noon deadline. I could understand nothing they said. They sounded like auctioneers. They are out of breath when they finished. I would have laughed if the consequences had not been so dire, but then, the end of this play had long been written—of that I was becoming more and more convinced. It’s not paranoia anymore, but a common sense observation.

After thirty minutes, my turn is through and I file out and hand my pass to an aunt. The rest of the day is spent waiting outside the gate in the sun. It’s over 90 degrees outside and windy. More than a hundred people squat in the dirt or in the middle of the road. The BDP’s tents are already full—there’s no shelter there.

Around 11:30, the commander abruptly announces that all women can go inside, visitor pass or no, and so they flood the courtroom—no seats, no place to stand even. The crowd pours out the doors and down the steps. The cafeteria, entrance hall, and restaurant are teeming with people waiting. We men hang outside the gate.  So the women are there at noon when the judge announces a break (again refusing extra time to finish the legal pleas).

‘The court will convene again at 3:30 or 4:00,’ he says, ‘Without any observers.’

Apparently (the girls tell me) when court adjourned and the suspects started to file out, the audience had once again burst into applause. This was their slap on the hand.

The heat was unbearable. I went with an uncle to a van parked outside the tents where we could at least sit in the shade. A pretty young woman jumped in with us, holding a cell phone.

‘Can I use your van to make a call?’ she asked after sitting down.

‘Sure.’

‘I’m from the IMC news team. I just need to call in an update on the story.’

It turns out that the IMC news channel has a few journalists among the suspects as well.

‘The government doesn’t like us very much,’ the woman explains. No wonder—they’re the best news channel in the country.

Eventually, Delal sends for me with a visitor’s pass (It’s my turn again) and I go to the courthouse and find her in a cafeteria packed with people. There’s nowhere to sit and barely anywhere to stand. People have been taking off their visitor cards, passing them through the fence to those without them, and then repeating the process until the whole place was crammed fuller than before.

3:30 came and went without any sign from Judge Ali. Delal and I decided to go out for some fresh air. We were crossing through the hall when suddenly the doors to the courtroom burst open and reporters leapt through the crowd and ran through the security check (knocking over tables) to get to their news vans. The crowd thronged toward the doors to see what was going on.

‘They’ve been released!’ Someone shouts.

The whole room erupts into an excited panic. Who’s been released?  I catch sight of that little chubby girl from the day before. She’s sobbing and holding onto a woman’s waist as if she might sink. Other  people are collapsing into their chairs, overcome with tears. Some are hugging each other.

16 people have been released on bond including Büşra Ersanlı, Zekiye Ayık (the old woman I spoke about in an earlier blog) and several of the people who had broken ranks yesterday and made pleas in Turkish. And though Mamoste was on trial for the same crime as Büşra Ersanlı, he was not among those let go.  We had not expected him to be. But still many of the family were crushed.  Clearly, some of us had hoped.

The trial will continue on October 1^st. At first they told us that all the prisoners would be moved back to their original prisons—in our case, Kandıra—but now it looks like they’re staying in Silivri till the trial resumes. New security measures have been put into place that we’ve never had to deal with before—more harassment--the prisoners are being searched before every visit, and so far they’ve boycotted these visits in protest.  This week the trial of the KCK lawyers began in Istanbul--the lawyers of many of the people at Mamoste’s trial—in fact, many of the defense team went straight to their own case from the Silivri courthouse. They’re defending themselves. Meanwhile Erdoğan’s government continues to arrest people in the KCK case.  An academic on TV the other night estimated that over 11,000 people were now in jail and more on the way.

As for us, we are taking a break from all this. My next entry will hopefully have nothing to do with politics and will be something about music and travel in the Appalachians.