Alevis: Part 1

When I think of the Alevis I have met, the word "luftmensch" comes to mind. I imagine traveling bards, dervishes, street performers, fire-breathers, circus people. I think of a culture that emphasizes art as an expression of life and playing an instrument or singing or dancing as a matter of course.

Ali and Hakan, for example, play the saz and sing traditional folk music in a conservatory in Europe. When in Istanbul, they go out every night until three and four in the morning. Their evening begins with chai and backgammon in Taksim Square and ends spontaneously as they migrate through Taksim from chai shop to nargile restaurant to music hall. Sometimes they bring the party back to the apartment, which means, I wake up with strange bodies to step over and every couch and bed occupied.

Can keeps a photo of Kerouac above his bed. He claims he's trying to live "on the road," just like Kerouac. He has few possessions -- an old automatic camera, some plaid shirts, two pairs of jeans. His saving grace is that he can cook. Most days he prepares breakfast for everyone in the apartment, but not unti he's asked enough of us for money to come up with the ten lira for the ingredients. He's a handsome man, Can, and has at least three girlfriends that I know of (although one recently went back to France, leaving him a gift, a very nice graphic novel, so I'm not sure whether to count her or not). Not bad for someone who works in a movie theater, although he does speaks Zazaci, as they all do, everyone in the apartment, apart from Anton.

Anton studied opera at Istanbul University and is, apparently, working for the state opera a couple days a week. Not only is he the only one in the apartment who doesn't speak Zazaci, but he's also the only one not from Tunceli and not Alevi. He's married to Gizem, whom I've never met, but who lives here during the academic year, when she teaches psychology classes somewhere in the city. Frankly, I don't know how she can take being married to Anton. I've never once seen him clean up or cook a meal and yet many times I've heard him complain about the food or talk about how dirty the apartment is or how backward the neighbors are. He doesn't pay rent, apparently, because he's just crashing at the apartment temporarily for this state opera job; in any case, in my view, his guest tenant status gives him license to stay quiet and smile more.

I never realized how much Anton considers himself superior to the others until once after lunch the conversation came to language, specifically, Zazaci. "There's no point in learning to speak it. You're better off learning French or English, some Western language. I mean what are you going to use it for. No one outside of Turkey speaks it." Ahmet, Can, Can's girlfriend Turkhan, and Kemal and I were all sitting around the table and no one said anthing for about a half a minute or so. Then, Can very calmly said that he hadn't had much choice because his mother had spoken it to him since birth. Later I found out Turkhan and Can had actually met at a rally in Ankara to promote the Kurdish languages being taught in the schools, so clearly this was a subject about which they felt pretty passionately.

From what I have observed, these people in our apartment have pretty loose romantic arrangements. Turkhan, for example, works as a psychologist for the schools in Tunceli, but she comes to Istanbul during holidays to see Can. When she's in Istanbul, they do everything together -- make meals together, clean up together, smoke cigarettes together, go shopping together. To me they seem an ideal couple, yet there are two other girlfriends who do the same thing with Can and who also have short, dyed hair, flat chests, nose rings, and wear the same kind of waifish sandles and yoga pants. They all seem very attractive to me, but I wonder how it all plays out, finally. The French girlfriend's card said simply, "You were different from the others." She must have had a start when she saw me opening the door with my three-month-old daughter in my arms. Probably thought Can had forgotten to tell her about more than just the old girlfriend in Tunceli.

On Living by Nazim Hikmet

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...

Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)

Piro needs slippers

Most of Mustafa's friends just ignore me, but there are a few who try to make conversation. One of those is Piro, an ex-guerilla, with a strange, high-pitched voice, a graying mass of curls, and a penchant for old-fashioned clothes, grandfatherly cardigans, button-down shirts, khakis or unstylish pleated jeans. This morning he throws up in the bathroom next door. The sound of his retching vomit and his high-pitched mutterings wake me.

Mustafa tells me that Piro has not worked for the last ten years. Before that, he lived in Germany, doing what, no one knows, but his German is still broken. When I ask him about his time there, he responds vaguely, as if he doesn't want to talk about it. He has just been to Tunceli, he tells me, a mountainous region in Turkey where the majority practice the minority Alevi religion. He's an only child, in his early forties, who has never married, and is among those who lost his farm when the Turkish government burned the villages of those they thought were supplying the Tunceli guerillas with weapons or bread or food.

Of those who come to the house regularly, Piro's one of the ones that I like. He allows me to make mistakes when I speak Turkish and he doesn't give up making conversation if I trip over the words or I can't quite express what I mean to say. Maybe he's more forgiving because he knows what it's like to speak a foreign language and to live in a foreign country. He's also an Alevi, as they all are, everyone who comes to the house.

Piro makes his way from the bathroom, smiles as if embarrassed, and passes into the living room. I can see that he's wearing socks but no shoes and the apartment is cold. Piro needs slippers, I realize. There are the slippers I bought at the Tarlabasi market last year. They're crummy and worn-out, yet they keep disappearing on me. Mustafa offers them to all the guests, the ageing former guerrilla fighters, the out-of-work opera singers, the visiting girlfriends, even the electrician who never fixes the faulty wiring. I too offer the slippers now. I put them in front of Piro's feet and ask him if he wants some tea.

Hansel and Gretel, Starvation, and the Kurdish Village

In the film Bananas, Fielding Mellish accidentally joins the San Marcos revolutionaries to impress a sexy political activist back in New York. After the revolutionaries save him from a run-in with a local militia, he decides to thank them by walking into a Central American bakery and ordering 5,000 ham sandwiches to take back up to all those hungry rebels still fighting in the mountains.

Mustafa's friends view me as a sort of female Fielding Mellish, as if my job is to feed and protect them. Like guerillas, they use the element of surprise to catch me off guard. Can, Mina, and Selcuk, for example, come every weekend, ask for Mustafa, and when I answer that he isn't here, they walk straight in, sit down in the living room, help themselves to the food in the kitchen and generally monopolize the TV set and DVD player. They have been known to stay for days at a time and often become more brazen when Mustafa finally arrives. Usually, something goes missing -- if it's not the lighter for the stove, it's Mustafa's books, or the honey, or the oranges.

In Mustafa's childhood, the guerillas regularly came down from the mountains to secure food and supplies from his village. All of the villagers opened up their home to these men, he claims, giving them whatever bread and vegetables they had. Why would these villagers, who had so little to begin with, be willing to sacrifice their own sustenance for those of the guerillas? Under what cultural and psychological conditions were these villagers living?

In families of eight, nine, or ten children, at least one child might join the guerillas. If not a child, then maybe an uncle or a cousin. The psychological effect of this outsourcing of the family males is worth exploring. In this re-envisioned Hansel and Gretel fantasy, the beleaguered and impoverished parents risk their own future to guarantee the survival of the ethnic family at the expense of the biological family.

In the original Brothers Grimm story, Hansel and Gretel's father and stepmother twice lead Hansel and Gretel out into the forest for the purpose of abandoning them there. Hansel and Gretel's biological father objects to the plan but concedes because of his new wife's persistence that they can no longer afford to feed Hansel and Gretel. According to Bruno Bettelheim, the cast out children must use their own ingenuity to survive on their own, to outwit the witch who tries to trick them, and to find their way home again, while at the same time securing the necessary resources so that when they return they will be able to provide the family unit with the tools it needs to survive and prosper.

Yet in this case, the villagers must be psychologically re-conditioned to redefine the family unit as synonymous with the party and to perceive the party as symbolically the provider, protector and benevolent father. To do this requires an emotional rhetoric that symbolically fuses party and family and depicts the economic survival of the family as highly dependent on the party. To present the party as essential to the survival of the family, the party not only has to create an outside threat more dangerous than its autocratic rule but also must fashion an atmosphere in which the contributions of the individual are essential to the survival of the party. This description rings true to the recollections of former PKK terrorists on their methods. Akif Hasan, a former spokesman for the PKK, describes the organizations attempts to raise money for the PKK in this way:

"You have to convince people, it can be difficult. Once, we made a play about a guerilla who was wounded, he goes to a tent hoping to get help from a doctor, but it's too late, he dies. Before he dies, he says, "tell my children I am sorry I can't see them before I die." The message was that he died because the guerillas did not have enough bullets [for lack of money]. People would cry watching it." (Marcus 231).

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: Accidental Elegance

The above photo is courtesy of Fashion Mommy.


Igor Stravinsky holding a negative of W.A. Mozart, courtesy of Opera Chic:

Dreams, Part II

#1 The Communist Island Dream

All the trees and vegetation on the island have been sold. The horses are listless and starving; the people, untrustworthy and anemic. From the edge of the island, I can see a green, beautiful island. I want to swim to that island, but I am afraid of drowning or freezing along the way. On the island it rains constantly and is always cold. Wherever I look, there's concrete and dirt – grass does not grow here.

#2 The Father Dream

My father speaks fluent Turkish. I try to get him to speak in English but he can no longer understand English, much less speak it. I realize if I want to communicate with my father I will have to improve my Turkish.

#3 The Shoe Dream

The authorities have filled the lake with boots, some relatively new, some full of mud, others un-wearable. It takes me some time but I locate one of my boots on the shore. My boots are made of good soft leather and are worn in just how I like them. I search the entire beach but find nothing in the way of the right pair for my shoe. I realize then that I must drain the lake or scuba dive in search of my boot’s perfect match. I also understand that draining the lake will be expensive and that scuba diving in search of my boot’s opposite will be time-consuming, but I don’t care.

You say you want a revolution

Thirty Years of Hope: Martyrs of the Party and the Revolution begins with photos of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, followed by photos of the movement's Turkish founders, Kemal Ruzgar, Halil Ibrahim, Reza Berivan. The text is in Turkish, but much can be conveyed through the photos, mostly bearded youths, serious blazing women, some as young as 17. Most hold their weapons in their photos and, if for some reason, no one has provided a photo, a graphic of a man thrusting an automatic weapon in the air appears in its place.

Mustafa tells me that his uncle is in the album – that he was killed in the eighties in a shoot out. The uncle’s name is Ugur Tulkan and he was his mother’s brother. Mustafa was only three years old when the shoot-out took place, but apparently he remembers his mother and his uncle’s wife leaving to identify the body. The wife apparently intended to fight with the guerillas until she became pregnant and then instead opted to stay with her mother in the village. Her fatherless son now lives a quiet life as a civil servant.

There are quite a number of women fighters, all of whom appear to be young, between the ages of 18 and 22, all not smiling, all with sad, penetrating gazes, and all, of course, now dead.

1980: I see an image of the big house on the hill, the rushing Chattahoochee River, the jumps I have set up outside for my imaginary horses, the autographed photos of Olivia Newton John and Ronald Reagan taped to my wall. The neatly folded Izod Lacrosse polo shirts, the Mad Magazines, the bad play I am writing about our Episcopalian principal reimagined as a cross-dresser and a hoarder of Playboy magazine, the talented Mr. Bernstein enduring my tone deaf guitar playing.

By the fifth grade, in Ms. Field’s geography glass, we learn of the histories of China and Russia. We read Betty Bao Lord’s Eighth Moon. I involve my stuffed animals in very involved rescue missions. We must defect by repelling from the second story loft space down to the couch. If we do not land on the couch, we will be eaten in the shark- infested waters of beige carpeting, or even worse we will be banished – sent back to the loft. In my mind the loft represents Cuba or Russia or China, places where they eat nothing but gruel and porridge, and endure an endless ritual of singing revolutionary party songs, marching and hoarding rations.

Nothing about that world appealed to my eight-year-old mind, so how could it have held such promise for Mustafa? What about Chairman Mao would attract a small child from a village in the middle of Turkey? In answer to this question, I seek out any websites about the party I can find. The basic information I can find about the party coincides with the dates of the Thirty Years of Hope album. Yes, the man in the album is the same as the founder of the party, a strikingly handsome man, with very sharp cheekbones and a cruel mouth, by the name of Halil Ibrahim.

Their explicit goal is to fight for a classless society and to overthrow the state by force. On their website they boldly proclaim that they will continue their revolution until they reach their goal of world communism. They want no national borders. They want the proletariats from each land to act as a platoon of the world proletariats. They are a part of the Peasants Freedom Army of Turkey, an outgrowth of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.

On the website is a tribute to Chairman Mao but also a tribute to the party and violence and power and militancy. Everything that the passages from Romans 12, the ones the Anglican Minister called us (we fifteen battered members attending that battered church) to reflect upon, oppose.

“His (Mao’s) development of other principles is also a great treasure: people are the main factor in revolutionary war; the starting point is relying on the masses; the Party; leadership is the principal aspect; the principle of self-reliance, the decisive importance of a correct political and ideological life (?), and especially the question of the new political power; and the revolutionary violence as a law without exception, as indispensable to seizing political power, which is the main law of every revolution.”

At times they have even cribbed Thoreau – throwing around terms like self-reliance and attributing them to Mao.