Living is no laughing matter:
You must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel.

My mother taught me to live sincap gibi (“like a squirrel”), to take life lightly but to live seriously, amorously, sımsıkı tutunarak (“holding on tightly”). I remembered, from the echo of the original, Hikmet’s words that were with me at a distance. They multiply. I multiply. Questions multiply. The students around me ask, “Who is Atatürk?” They don’t know the face that hangs next to the clock in every classroom of my childhood. Every Monday morning, every Friday before class is dismissed, the face projected upon the Turkish flag as we sing the national anthem. Atatürk, and with him, fake nostalgia. I am afraid to speak of him now, of this man or god, but I know the minds of the students around me are untouched, that Atatürk is just a name. So I speak despite the fear. I tell them of how poisonously my people cling to him, transformed him into a euphemism for fascism. I try to explain how thoughtlessly we praise the past and think that it can resurrect in the present. What a narcissistic view of history, textbooks full of instruction without vitality.

What I don’t say to my class is that it was against this void that I began searching. Like a survival instinct, a defense: What I believed my language obscured, or didn’t allow me to know, I tried to find in English. And English was trying to find something in me. Already in the twentieth century as the modern Turkish alphabet left behind an Arabic script, English was being taught as a second language in schools. It had already invaded who I was going to be, before I was born. A problem of unwritten genealogy. (“Genealogy.” A word Nietzsche taught me in a class during my freshman year. It was in Beyond Good and Evil that I encountered it first, a way to describe the relationship of things to one another. A string of points in history, points in time, their distance from one another connected by a motive. Uzaklık. Distance.)

In my Istanbul classrooms, yesterday and today were always forgotten. History would not be found in poetry, in individuals, in honest words. So the history of my birthplace became what I could glean from my mother’s childhood. She grew up in the seventies, and she’d play on the streets for hours with her brother and his friends. I look at a black-and-white photograph of my mother and my uncle, neither older than ten and with the same boyish haircut. They’re running in a field with a ball. I never played on the streets of my neighborhood, or threw a ball to kids there.

Someone in the class asks me about the present. The nostalgia is blinding, vicious; the fields are gone, and there are no children. I suddenly remember the little boy who died when I was in high school, in between the sadness of forgetting him. Only five, he goes out to get bread for his family. A tear gas canister takes his life. Only two years ago. I tell the students sitting around me about the Gezi Park protests, which started when the government decided to demolish Gezi Park, one of the few remaining green spaces in Istanbul; the Prime Minister’s plans included the construction of a shopping mall, a mosque, and Ottoman Empire replicas in its place. A community started to gather in the park, made up of people from all over Istanbul; some even stayed in tents overnight. They wrote, and they sang, and they shared with each other. But words are dangerous. The demonstrations were broken up when the police arrived; they used water cannons and tear gas, beat the protestors and burned their tents. Many lost their lives. Vatan hainleri (“Traitors of the nation”). Journalists and poets, kids, college students, people passing by, a boy buying bread. I learned what was going on through friends and family. All social media was blocked. All communication forbidden. News channels went black. A terrifying darkness. A darkness that was already everywhere, but one I hadn’t seen, one I was distanced from. The point from A to B. An intention. Hikmet’s exile had entered into those dying on the streets. An afterlife. Yet how can it be so dangerous to write? I wanted to tell the students sitting around me and watching, puzzled, how with Hikmet’s poetry began a yearning for the language that thought me. The language of my first signs. A drive to uncover fragments, doubles, associations and so, to recover the skin that was peeled off:

i am a kid
and the skin of a peach
fuzzy and foreign
is too strange on my tongue.
impatient
i skin the peach

“But you don’t sound Turkish,” say countless voices.

What is a skinless peach? What is it to sound Turkish, or to look Turkish, or to feel Turkish? Is it the r that rolls too strongly, the t that is a touch sharper, the o that is not round enough? Hatirlamak, “to remember,” its t carves itself on the tongue and then immediately pours into that rolling r — they hiss together as they’re lost into the l and solidified with that final k. Mor, “purple,” its o like a ring of smoke, slightly imperfect, how it sounds like an impatient “more.” I miss my voice, so I get lost thinking of it. The violets in my garden are riddled with circles where caterpillars have bitten through; an image of these violets comes to mind. What is it inside of me upon which English intrudes? And how. In the garden, next to the violets, my father is sitting in his green chair. Legs crossed. Yaz kokuyor: “it smells like summer.” His beloved season, my father, a boy in the sun. He plays “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” for me, and sings along with Eartha Kitt. We dance on the grass, my hand the size of his thumb. Innocence, like honey melting in warm milk. Which is how English seeped into my thoughts. I am drinking warm milk with honey, enveloped in my mother’s bed as she reads Where the Wild Things Are in English. My uncle lived in Los Angeles at the time, and he would bring us suitcases filled with books. Shel Silverstein’s Falling Up and The Giving Tree, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, James and the Giant Peach, and The Little Prince. I would insist that my mother read to me about the Wild Things, and how Max would tame them with the words “Be still,” and how their hearts were as soft as their fur, and the look in their eyes. One night I sat up straight in bed while still asleep, turned, and pointed toward my mother, saying: “Be still!” Do I dream in and with language, then? Was I even dreaming? I don’t remember. In all of us I think there is this urge to say certain things, to speak certain words. And we carry them with us, like ants swarming in and around our body, little particles waiting to escape. Maybe when our guards are down, they speak with us.

I came across an interview of Eartha Kitt once, not too long ago. She’s been asked, “Isn’t love a union between two people? Or does Eartha fall in love with herself?” Eartha lets out that divine laugh, long, devilish, and sublime: “Yes. I fall in love with myself, and I want someone to share it with me. I want someone to share me with me.” To want to know someone, or something, completely — not for just one moment in time but for all the moments preceding. To let them be themselves, and to love only that. And how can such a want manifest in translation? I watch Eartha as she sits against a backdrop of pink flowers, the same ones my grandmother loved; her gaze meets mine for an instance as she speaks. I feel in awe as I sense her strength, her sensitivity, her respect for herself. Eartha Kitt, one of many who exist as a fragment of me. Eartha, carved in my memory. She slips back into existence from time to time, somehow knowing when to reappear. I’m sitting on the carpet floor of my apartment in Philadelphia. It’s nighttime and my living room is illuminated by broken string lights. I’m tired and all I want to do is lie on the floor. I put on The Best of Eartha Kitt. “Après Moi” begins to play with a crackle. We’ve been friends for a long long time, we’ve shared again and again; we like the same clothes and we like the same wine. I get up to make coffee, and gather my books to work. The record continues now, and I don’t notice the passing songs. My guard is down. Unfamiliar words with familiar sounds capture me through the recorded songs. “Üşküdar'a gider iken…” She’s singing “On the way to Üsküdar,” but in Turkish, and with the most charming of errors; she utters my beloved ş instead of s. How is it I’ve never noticed, the countless times I’ve played this album? It’s a subtle difference, but you can feel it inside of your cheeks, a puff of warm wind. Ş, pronounced “sh.” I sit and listen to this Turkish ballad we learned in music class when I was eleven years old. Now I’m nineteen and she speaks to me, sings my country’s tale of a nineteenth-century woman in love with her much younger clerk. He is hers, and she, his. “Kâtibimi arar iken yanımda buldum” … “As I was looking for him, I found him beside me.”

I am Max. Sitting on my white carpet in my living room in West Philadelphia. My walls become a forest. I do not know under whose sky I am. But my mother has left soup on the bedside table, the supper that, for my wildness, I was once denied. On the way to Üsküdar. I breathe in the displacement. Even as I write now, I feel I am imitating an intimacy I can’t truly grasp. It’s fragmented. I caught myself divided, thinking in English, and something shifted. I sing, soundless, with the afterlife of Eartha’s voice. I sit with her ghost figure scattered in my mind, accepting the mystery. In between languages, I have come to accept uncertainty, distance, susuzluk (“thirst”). I leap with the words from myself, unfolding with their translated lives. Sıvılaşmış. “Liquefied.” Mine sounds warm, with its doubled ş, whispering, melting matter, muddy with its muted, unembellished, ı. The other, “liquefied,” whose knifelike q is absent in my alphabet: how in the beginning it’s crystallized, and then dissolves. Hiss of water touching ice. Both words belong to the same substance, amalgamated, only different in form. And where they touch, so lightly, they absorb each other. “Su kristalleşir, buz sıvılaşmış” (“Water is crystallized, ice liquefied”). And I live right here in the middle, sometimes far, sometimes close, as now, when I listen to my mother tongue in this beloved other’s voice. Üskü Dara. A split destination, Üsküdar cut in half. My white walls reappear, and with them that capital “I” that is becoming. That grand “I” which I still cannot embrace. The “I” that I don’t want: the excess of the first person — too great and everywhere. A longing: “kendini paylaşan küçük ‘ben’” (“the little ‘i’ that shares itself”). An “I” distanced from its action, scattered almost physically. Some words I have saved: içimde (“inside of me”), dışımda (“outside of me”), papatyalarım (“my daises”), ölüyorum (“I am dying”). In translation, my “I” is separated. Severed. I want to catch it as it runs off.

Driving to the western coast from Istanbul, I’m in the backseat, six years old, maybe seven, maybe nine, watching asphalt turn into sunflowers and then asphalt again. A memory outside of my Istanbul, where most memories had to belong. A memory from point A to point B. White storks wander in the fields. A few small stone houses, trembling, the smoke from their chimneys are different from the clouds. I watch a donkey waiting in the shade, his neck tied to the tree. “O gözleri mahzun eşek.” “That donkey with tragic eyes.” I remember him and sorrow overtakes me. And as we drive, I cry from time to time at what I see on that ten-hour road. We travel through everlasting moonflower fields. Ayçiçekleri (“Ay: Moon. Sunflowers”). My dad plays music throughout the entire drive, and I listen. “Le Vent Nous Portera” by the French band Noir Desir is playing: “Je n’ai pas peur de la route. Un instantané de velours. Et mon tapis volant dis? Le vent l’emportera.” (“I’m not afraid of the road. An instant of velvet. And my flying carpet says? The wind will carry us”). I don’t listen to that song much anymore. Now when we drive I put my headphones on, and listen to my own songs. But then, when I was six or seven or nine, among the moonflowers and all the distance between A and B, my parents shared with me all that was shared with them: The Beatles, Billie Holiday, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Serge Gainsbourg, Hendrix, Zeppelin, Tom Waits. Faceless voices that meant so much to me. Some I lost and they never found their way back, some I met throughout the years. I do not belong to them, perhaps, but parts of them now belong to me. Billie sings:

Yesterdays, yesterdays
Days I knew as happy sweet
Sad am I, glad am I
For today I’m dreamin’ of yesterdays

She shares herself with me. I share myself with her afterlife. A translated afterlife. Doubled. And so now I think about memory, the language of memories. I think of the many ways of representing the same thing. Noticing I am in between two wholly distanced ways of thinking, I undergo a change. A sort of alchemy. I see how a world outside of my own has seeped in, sweet like honey; it felt so natural that I missed the transition, and the loss. Whatever matter formed me before has amalgamated with another, and I am forgotten. In parting. “Not how one soul comes close to another but how it moves away shows me their kinship and how much they belong together” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality).

I look behind words. I look at their history, the points where they entered my history. Ayçiçekleri. “Moonflowers.” I will never say “this is this and this” because on the way from one to nineteen, I realize that no one meaning seals one word. So I laugh with the forgetfulness of rigid, indestructible definitions, and I let them multiply. My kingdom is of this world, says Nietzsche: “He collects from everything he sees, hears, lives through, his sum. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting. He knows how to forget.” This figure who I want to be. Noticing how written words travel, and speak, in the strangest form. We are like pickpockets, stealing letters from Eartha and Nietzsche and countless others. Stealing philosophies, and placing them somewhere in between ourselves and those from whom they came. I translate for myself, and in a way, like Eartha, I share me with me. Birleşiyorum (“I’m fusing”).

Every word a point of memory. I leap again, from myself, out the window and soar above the yellow. I’m in a train, by the window. Nineteen, my headphones on, from New York to Philadelphia. I watch red, rusty steel turn into concrete, into ghost towns with broken windows, into a mixture of grey and green, undiscovered fields. I’m listening to Tom Waits as I travel from home to home, in the train, to Philadelphia: “Come closer, don’t be shy, stand beneath the rainy sky, the moon is over the rise, think of me as a train goes by. Lay down in the green grass. Remember when you loved me.” The yellow fields slowly fade into the industrial landscape. I look at the factories, those factories I despised back home: here now they look like magic. Now at night, their clouds turn into fire. I watch these burning steel stars illuminate everything. A new memory sits next to the old; they look at each other and smile. “Üskü dara gider iken… Üsküdar’a gider iken…” The same but split. The distance from üskü to dara. That is where I lie now in my apartment, on my white carpet, in West Philadelphia, knowing that somehow somewhere point A and B meet. I listen to the song my father cried to as we drove:

Yuksek Yuksek Tepelere:
Babamın Bir Atı Olsa Binse De Gelse,
Annemin Yelkeni Olsa Açsa Da Gelse,
Kardeşlerim Yolları Bilse De Gelse.
 
To the tall tall hills:
I wish my father had a horse so he could ride it and come to me
I wish my mother had a sail so she could open it and come to me
I wish my siblings knew the way so they could come to me

I am not satisfied with the word “nostalgia.” What I feel is not just longing, or missing my home. It is a rush of wind, stained with the violets in my garden, and the soup on the table, and the gloves Holden lost, and how his mother got mad at him, and the wild things that were told to be still, and became still, and the donkey with the almond eyes, and Eartha’s purr. I breathe in a violet wind. And as I breathe out, the wind takes something into the distance. Some sort of matter. It’s as if the wind takes the tangible away. As if my scarf has fluttered off, but the warmth it gave me remains. So whenever I am cold, I wait for another wind to blow it back to me. And it does, from time to time.

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim: I loved your card.’ Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.” — Maurice Sendak

I ate the peach, swallowed the violet wind. I lost the gloves but not the warmth. “Sımsıkı tutunarak uzakligin kendisine” (“Holding on tightly to distance itself”). I let the distance keep itself. And I let myself flutter from point A to point B… “yeryüzünü dönülmez bir yolculuğa çıkmışım gibi seyrederek,” as Hikmet says at the end of his poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”: watching as if I’m on a journey with no return to earth.

photo by Naomi Bernstein