Mousafir,
Attempting to visit the seasons,
once a circle of season is complete
my home may feel hospitable.
Mousafir in history we all are,
in our timeline we exist.
Mousafir in our own flesh.
Mousafir in our own thoughts.
We sleep inside the breathless blue walls.
Mousafir in our own narrative, in pain.
Is a Mousafir a foreigner or a stranger, a ξενος?
The knots of our flavours made us suspicious, and we talked about the commons of Histories.
I am Mousafir again, I walk with the winter river in Ayvali,
I was able to listen to their memories, to speak with my grandmother like we were there together.
She was a girl and I was a woman. She was a woman and I was a granddaughter.
It was strange for us both, I remember us looking at each other, but we both went along like it was real.
“I will go up the mountain in Ayvali,” she said as she was sleeping for the last time.
My mum asked, “Shall I come too?”
In a game of love, care and comfort she would often go along with my grandmother’s visions,
even when perceived as an illusion.
“No, it is not your time yet, you have a family.”
My mother told me the story after I said I visited Ayvali.
I heard the voice of the village.
It was almost sunset.
I was walking with nothing else but the present.
I return to the river because they can’t be owned nor divided; the river is eternal.
River, may I take a bit of you or even drink you?
You watched them play,
they drank of you once and the taste of mourning will be eased.
Will our particles be joined?
Childish illusion but all I wanted was to meet her.
If I drink from you, will I become part of you?
I lost the stories of their memories, now mine are present.
Forgetting is in replacing.
River, are you related to the river in my neighborhood, in Nea Ionia in Greece?
Am I related to you? Oh! I wish we were.
The concept of neighborhood illustrates the communal,
due to human intervention and presence in the place.
Machala, so many words used today in the Greek language but to our surprise they could mean different things today in Turkish and Greek.
Chocolate – Çikolata – Σοκολάτα
Small tavern – Kütük – Κουτούκι
Alley- Sokak – Σοκάκι
Çavuş (ανδρικός τίτλος στα τουρκικά) – Τσαούσα (θηλυκός τύπος στα ελληνικά, διαλεκτικός)
Guest – Misafir – Mουσαφίρης
Coffee – Kahve – Kαφές
Money – Para – Pαράς
Sorrow – Dert – Nτέρτι
Enjoyment – Keyif – Kέφι
Aman – Αμάν
Slowly – Yava – Σιγά σιγά
Difficulty – Zor – Zόρι
Generous – Helal – Χαλάλι
Chicken – Tavuk – Κότα, η μόνη λέξη που θυμάμαι.the only word that I remember.
Notes on pictures, notes of napkins, in notebooks and small papers, a collection turning into a selection. Making up a temporary dialect.
Snow did not arrive as expected. It is now snowing in January, but it snowed sufficiently the day before our arrival. I wanted to see her snow stories, to walk in the snow paths, two meters tall. Illusion of presence when we look through memory. But I feel her when I am there.
Cats welcome us. The nature of cats is our tension; travelling together for the first time, the irritation is enough to become a disturbance, like in the memories of others in stories we did not embody but became part of since birth. We share fragility, and it can masquerade as a defense.
I am always lost here, in a state of fear. I become defensive for no obvious reason. I lose my ability to negotiate, breathing through fear. It is so fragile for memories to travel together; our bodies are present, but more complex, unheard feelings and presences accompany us.
I have no questions; silence is my care.
How do you say cat in Turkish?
We laugh, we add suffixes to invent words and our game exposes our commonalities and differences.
Huzurlu, first one in the airport in an advertisement for vacations.
I take pictures of the words.
I recognize and invite my friends into the game of finding the words. I want to make a list.
Lists make words into things and then it is easier to see and juggle with them.
The village
“The houses on the top of the village did not exist,” he explains.
“It must be one of those houses,” he says, showing me his hotel.
“They have Greek architecture,” he explains.
I never know how to react to this, what to say.
How do they feel when they say it was yours but now it is mine?
I try to say something nice, but is there anything?
The blue is here again, hiding below the white.
Silently, I am in two time lines. I remember her story. Yes, the village was in the valley, protected.
They live in caves.
“It is good that someone is living in it and it hasn’t fallen,” I say.
I feel sad but also responsible to reassure him I am not here to take it.
I just want to listen to the stories, there is a comfort in listening.
In Stella’s village, a gravestone is part of a building,
spolia—a practice so common in Greece as well:
to build with whatever remnants of earlier eras one finds.
Now, why does it feel to me like an uprooting of history?
Pause.
We are here and we try to walk.
In which line of history?
Ayvalı was here, beside the stream, in the ravine of the mountains.
Are they called mountains here?
Or rock formations?
Or a valley?
We are in a valley.
It seems to me more like a shallow gorge.
the river
the roads
the houses,
the stores,
to kafeneio
the merchants coming and going all metamorphosing in cohabitation
Garden – Bakse (παρτέρι)
Bazaar – Pazar – παζάρι
Same organisation as in Nea Ionia, in their differences, maps start making sense. The same needs of neighbourhood companionship.
Why do I come back?
As a memory myself, I am afraid I will lose their stories.
I walk the same streets,
I visit the same people, I make up memories or erase them.
To meet the people, the same houses, walk the streets, hear the same river.
When will I not remember anymore and connect with the now?
My mind is constantly trying to tie knots of habits, unconsciously I try to join, not sure why having peppers in the garden is essential.
Making tursi, or drying vegetables for the winter, making mandi. Is it really?
“I am waiting for spring,” she said.
Food in jars,
Dried fruits,
Peppers,
Homemade pickles.
She didn’t make sense in Nea Ionia, but she knew she was not from there.
I feel guilty that I wish to find similarities. In the lack of language, suspicion is raised.
Why does she return?
The knots of the differences reveal the commons, even today.
Does searching for what is one’s own, for the idiom, mean erasing otherness?
Does it mean claiming ownership?
Could we, more than a hundred years ago, share habits and food and belonging with one another?
I can’t accept such a clear deviation. The sun is the same, the river is the same. Maybe you say I am a romantic, even naive – war is war is war is war – but I am not. I am looking for something.
Why do these knots exist if we were not bound?
Related does not mean in agreement.
Why do we still eat the same foods if their taste was unbearable?
It is not about a personal question, but it needs to start from one.
It started because I wish to heal, becoming without memory is impossible.
To reach the point of the full stop: nothing after that, not even white.
The absence of memories gave birth to sorrow and illness.
As mousafir, I am learning to breathe again.
As mousafir, I am learning to remember.
To go
To walk
To hear
To see
To listen, eat, sleep: my dreams are always nightmares in my visits and before.
What am I dreaming of? Which complications and stress suffocate me every time I am there?
All active verbs in a steel, Historical body of non-belonging.
Of a History dilutional and divisional written on narratives of superiority.
“You are of the old people,” they told me once.
When encountering other histories, I keep a distance, careful not to disturb what is felt or spoken.
Support from afar but is not accepted as enough.
Silence is my care.
Time allows time to become a place.
I have no questions.
I am flooded by seawater; it has engraved my face.
Care is salty.
Why is it relevant to travel back to the ancestral lands today, which are lived by present histories?
Love grounded in care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Reading bell hooks as we travel, before and after, I try to think through love and the woman’s body moving across centuries of deprivation and isolation.
We enter the hammam, a place of freedom: perhaps one of the few historically private women’s spaces, where we are not required to be anything other than our bodies.
Our journey ends in ambiguity, in a field of expectations. Why does this matter today? Where do we encounter history?
I pause midway along a long route of thoughts, places, encounters, readings, and questions that, like water, continuously shape my body and my perception. A mousafir in time.
