1. The parricide of pain
Orange and I never came to terms.
Pain penetrates me in unspeakable ways when I am there.
I wish it wouldn’t.
I often act through pain and memory.
You do insist on being carefree, neutral, open, flexible,
But how noble is the intention of acceptance?
Is there any space to accept the metamorphosis of change in bones and in the soul?
This writing is a commitment, a spell that I can carry with me.
To whom am I writing?
Is this a letter to myself or am I writing to Niels?
Is it a script?
Or a letter to her: the amalgam of memories and desires for freedom of pain.
2. THERE
This there has specific coordinates, a name and citizens. It speaks a language and has History, but it’s also as abstract as a feeling or a sense.
I know I feel.
I know I feel it.
I know I smell the sounds,
and hear the smells.
But it is unsensed by you because it emerges from the personal,
affecting my substance and my environment as well, all perception, all measurable and non-things.
So does yours, but I can’t feel that yours is private too.
Is this where we could meet? Do you want to meet?
It is a condition to want to meet, a commitment that requires care, communication, acceptance.
It needs to continue to the far east and back.
3. Red Wine
I woke up with a hangover – headache,
taste to see
people move around me,
dancing.
It’s been more than three weeks since I hurt my leg.
Neglected to rest. Now I can’t dance.
Healing is a collective process; dance is too.
Dance was sinful, growing up.
Dance is grief, joy, remorse, celebration, release, eros, death, pathos, empowerment, division, and collective choreography with no restrictions.
I will walk through a shared history, this in companionship.
There.
I will visit the land where my grandparents were born, but I won’t be hosted, and I don’t wish to host anyone. Yes, my tone carries irritation. Can you feel it?
I have carried the responsibility of being a guest, misafir, and a host for so long.
And I was raised to be a host.
And I am grateful and annoyed.
To whom do I feel with or for my selves, guests, hosts?
Maybe plurality is inevitable. We are many selves,
Many women, many selves and many identities change during our lives: for one to host and to be hosted by the other.
I can choose myself in between my embedded roles. And I will.
This time, I stand in the middle without resolution, free of thoughts and questions, paused in my own mind. Like I reached a place where the roads seem like a root system coming together forming a space that opens to multiple directions.
I am trembling with fear, I am trembling knowing I am no longer guided.
This trip will entail my view. How will I see? Will I see?
I feel fragile, as if I’m about to break in shame. All I feel is shame.
I end up being the host.
I imagine a golden thread in a packing needle penetrating white cotton paper like a pen
and memory freezes over.
I write about the headache from a trivial hangover because pain, it sharpens and amplifies the body.
Like a mauve reddish stone resembling a flesh from the thief’s cave beach.
3a.
I wish for time of reflection, but what does that look like?
I am from the south.
By learning to be lazy again, I claim rest as an act of healing; modernity demanded productivity and we delivered.
Traditionally it was siesta, the accusation of laziness was justified through reason, so now we unlearn to be ourselves again.
The east is lazy, like the south.
Do I wish to know what this accusation means?
I choose to hear it as a compliment.
I’m just hungover from the consequences of time.
I try to count first, second, third maybe even fourth visit in Cappadocia but fifth in Turkey in general or maybe even seventh. Does historying and daydreaming count as travel?
My travels are limited to the area of Urgup today, Prokopi then and Ayvali.
Why do you return to the same space, same place, same people?
They ask, no answer than a need, is time time I have to answer no questions.
Can I not know? Not answering your curiosity is regarded as a lack of care and knowledge.
Which representation of processes shall I use to not be accused of laziness?
I worry I won’t be able to be with you if I host you, if I’m being hosted by you.
How do my limbs feel, when the pain grows quiet again?
What are the extensions of my bones?
4. The Oak Tree
Do my bones attach in the graves where the old oak tree is rooted?
The elder oak tree now rises from the center of the schoolyard.
Educational institutions were often intentionally built on Turkish graveyards, after the new state was created following the enforced exchange of populations.
A won war, but still: war is a war is war.
I am not torn as much by the demolition and desecration of the dead, but I am in grief by the symbols used as the foundation of learning; schools shit on graveyards.
Symbolism narrates the unspoken, the divine, but I prefer the fluidity of the abstract as it seems to cultivate the complexity of the non-binary, non-dialectical, non-oppositional, but it seems to merge, to become and uproot, to blur. I can get lost in it.
Numb they are. Nobody from the faculty or the students are surprised when strangers visit the tree. Standing in its shadow, they look up at the canopy while touching its trunk. They all continue doing their thing.
We all share its shade on warm summer days.
I went to ask permission and they nodded from distance, “Yes, yes,” with a smile.
I was not the first Greek to arrive in the schoolyard.
I was in so much shock.
Only now I remember I never asked how they felt when they saw me visit the tree. I am not me. I am a symbol, a descendant of a trauma. They are as well.
I heard in Cretan Turkish that they came to see their grandfather’s home.
I felt anger crossing me,
, do you feel it too?
From my toes to my forehead. It is not the same, as my friend from Turkey explained, why were they there in the first case? Her question puts the narrative in perspective and we feel small no more.
I was taking an interview at that moment. I held my breath, acted normal, I lied.
Yes, they were occupying my country, my home and now they come to see their home in my home?
I find myself justifying their behaviour to my friends. Her question opens a new terrain or reflecting, they were the fourth or even fifth generation, they also felt at home.
When will we put an end to this? And how? Shall we continue to ask questions and which ones?
Figurative mimicry of any scene insists on describing it with symbols of resemblances and insists on making copies of copies of copies of copies of copies.
Perceptions of deviation, of specific ideologies, of specific representational and symbolic codes preserving what is seen. Transforming realism in preservation rather than representation mode. A successful embalming method which recreates itself through a vicious repetition that is claimed as realism inside a purely capitalist and patriarchal perception.
But now, after two years of distance, I wonder:
What if their house is in my house? What if Escher’s staircase is our pathway? How can I read your poetry? What if the stories of Turkish ancestors after 400 years of occupation are real? What if they are as real as my post-memories? Details evaporate and get replaced by my memories as I travel back to Cappadocia?
On the 25th of March, we remember the liberation from the Ottoman Empire. On the 29th of October, they remember the foundation of the Turkish state. We have no memorial of loss. I saw an image this year. I knew it but never saw it. All Greek flags are blue and Turkish flags are red. I remember how upset my friend Sanem was on the 25th of March and realize I never asked her why. Is she also sad on the 29th? How can we make memorials of loss?
This research always penetrates my essence, my perception and projection of what it is, what I am, what I feel, and I feel small. I am grateful that it puts me in the state of becoming an amagalma.
I feel like a broken leg touching the ground after having been inside a cast for over a month. I feel so small, I only see my hands touching the leg. Sometimes I see this transformation and others. I insist that it is my knowledge, my perception, my history, my trauma, myself.
But NO.
It is not all about me.
I try to resign from the self-centered, independent myth of emancipation of the self, the kind I was after for more than forty years. I am responsible, but I am not alone.
Division is forced with violence in our perception of identity. Our perception is brutally divisional as a western medicalized body. Don’t misunderstand me please. I do believe we are communicating vessels of histories and beyond. I do believe we have an outline and I for sure need one. But at the same time, this outline is a line in the ecosystem of histories and lands.
Can this text be a ritual of trying to get there?
In writing I see the letters coming in after a letter after a letter, and there is a calmness in their coming together, like putting my rocks out, one by one, just to remember where I was. Munching my socks. Like boiling water. Or rain after a gray sky. I like tidying up my home. I can’t tie up memories.
This text is the beginning of a spell.
A matsuni (1). Traditionally midwives would offer a herb, a ritual for healing often associated with the land, myths and even religion.
I was advised to look at the sun first thing in the morning so I could heal from depression.
5. Snow
I am intimidated by the cold, yet here I am, postponing the transition to experience the snow that was the text of her stories. I hope the respect to the seasonal approach and the wish to follow the stories of my ancestors won’t trigger my trauma, that I’ll be able to visit them and the snow.
6. Desire to Dream
Trembling
Four days before we go
My limbs are trembling
I am cold
How do we think of belonging, coming together, ownership and co-creation?
So numb are my fingers I can barely type
Trying to prepare to cleanse my self for fifteen days now
The effects are here.
Bitter dry mouth, sleepless nights, loss of focus, itching, trembling, feeling cold, migraines, nightmares, but still no sorrow so I am grateful.
I named the rocks and offered them to the female keepers of knowledge: the snow that was the text of her stories other than mine by the coast, the substance of nightmares leaving my body. Some rest in the deep forests, others in farseas and others maybe in themselves or even in the pockets of coats.
I carried them in my pockets, samples of a beach,
Gray and round, irregular, colorful.
I was surprised again and again when I accidentally found them where I left them.
In my red coat’s pocket, I am in a red coat.
Stones, pebbles, rocks, earth, mountain, beach, who are you?
You are my companions; with whom will I travel this week? Who will I meet?
I am writing to meet people and looking forward to meeting them. I worry, will they?
In Capaddokia, I never traveled in silence. Actually I never traveled to Cappadocia. I am in between other villages, my grandparents’ village where they were born and left as unwilling children.
Worrying I will become the guide, instead I became the organiser.
I wonder how it will sound if I travel in silence, alone.
Can silence be purple, as I wish my voice to be?
Lavender purple, I feel my tone, my language
The ritual started, I painted my nails red, women of Cappadokia paint their hands with red henna for different healing moments.
My custom of red is red manikour. How it will be preserved there. Women doubt women
Copper heals as well, imam bayıldı (ιμάμ μπαϊλντί), köfte (κεφτές), dolma (ντολμάς), sarma (σαρμάς), pilav (πιλάφι), börek (μπουρέκι), mantı (μαντί), yoğurt (γιαούρτι), kaymak (καϊμάκι), baklava (μπακλαβάς), helva (χαλβάς), lokum (λουκούμι), cacık (τζατζίκι), kavurma (καβουρμάς), sucuk (σουτζούκι), pastırma (παστουρμάς), şerbet (σερμπέτι), kahve (καφές) and çikolata (σοκολάτα) food words realign as spells.
Flavor as a witness of war = in both languages stands.
How many make up our shared vocabulary today?
He, my uncle Labros, whom I have never met. He was the first young man who died after their settlement in Nea Ionia. Before him only an old man had. The screams of the women from the house were heard four streets further, Mania explained. We heard them in my home. It was almost dawn when we heard the screams. Everyone mourned, not only my family, death had arrived in our settlement. A death is another communion. If trauma was not enough, death arrived in the young, as if the troubles were not enough. I now know why they all remember him until today and for my family it was so difficult to move on, because his death was the community’s first death of a young man.
I placed the carpets in the new home and it became my home. All I need is a carpet to feel I have arrived, I once wrote. I wish I could take them back, sit down, sleep in the fields where flowers made their colours, and the wool made their threads. Not how to count knots, where to start and where to pause. They seem like a rhythmical song of no sound other than all the sounds of the thoughts of the lands and of the women who made them.
I got a notebook. How to share when you need silence?
I am orange and purple.
Is it important because of the essence of the intimate?
How does trust transform our borders, and if so, is fluidity always meaningful?
There are times my body becomes elastic and invisible, and others are present in moments, in these moments I soften, and I feel me.
I hear the sound of the river every time I go back at night in Nea Filadelfeia. I wonder which river I will meet when I go to Ayvali.
I pause on the small bridge.
November is the month that I didn’t have to turn off the engine to hear the water.
The silk factory next year only yesterday, Britannia British landmark in a freshly inhabited area by the ανταλξιμους (2), the production happens in British soil and is moved in Britain as a British good. Next to the river; no they did not allow the slaughter, they just withdrew their boats and watched. They were mutual, let everyone burn alive, being raped, killed but now they offer work here in land but first they take that too and all I make is already theirs.
I always wanted to live by a river. I imagined it like the ones in the European cities where you can rest by its banks. I never imagined the outline of its shore would be filled with textile factories.
Δictation of memories is growing like a flora in the human mind to make the unbearable bearable.
*****
(1) Matsuni (Greek) or matsun (Turkish): a mild fermented milk, considered in Greece, the Caucasus, and Armenia as more than food, a traditional folk remedy for digestion, immunity, and well-being. Matsun is customarily used in other home remedies.
(2) “The exchanged” is a term used for people who were forcibly moved between Greece and Turkey following the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). It differs from migrants or refugees, as these populations were relocated through a state-mandated exchange, not by personal choice or flight, but as part of a compulsory political agreement between the two nations.
