BEARING WITNESS: life will consist of one long night...
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One afternoon in that selfsame cafe, I fell into a conversation with a pleasant, brown-haired woman, a writer, recently returned from Brazil. I had been a practitioner of a Brazilian martial art, and so we wound up chatting at length about matters Brazilian, the spirits of Candomblé, and so on. I'm not sure we agreed on what all those spirits signified, but future conversations were left to the times when we were both in the cafe—a nod, a hello, not much more. Eventually, I got my hands on an advanced copy of her translated book, The City in Crimson Cloak, a wonderfully layered collection of linked pieces set in Rio.
Finally I left Istanbul for good, save a few brief visits. Looking back as I now read Stone Building, however, I calculate that Aslı must have been working, prophetically, on that book and its theme of "confinement" soon after I met her. I say "prophetically" because in 2016, Aslı was among the many writers and journalists swept up and put in prison after the failed coup of that year. When I began reading the English version of Stone Building (Tas Bina,) I neglected to note the original publication date: 2009, seven years before the failed coup and Aslı's imprisonment. I had thought I was reading something based upon her own experience of incarceration. It was, indeed, uncanny how she wrote so obliquely about the neglect, the contempt and the trauma brought on by incarceration even before she experienced it directly, especially as her work by no means uses the writer's equivalent of cinema verité. Turkey has more writers and journalists incarcerated than any other country in the world. Even when I lived there, it had a dicey reputation for freedom of the press. The high profile Pamuk case, in fact, erupted when I was still teaching in Istanbul, and we knew similar things happened to the less famous as well. Hardly confined to Turkey, true, we hear of these things every day; and we can become righteously concerned, shocked, angry that such injustices persist in so many places. Though it shouldn't have made a difference, putting a face to the news of Aslı's imprisonment made it even worse. I knew her! When I heard, I contacted a friend at PEN International in the UK, another friend in Istanbul, wanting to know what could be done. And what does one do? One keeps the light on that person, so that they are not forgotten. Donate, keep bugging the incarcerator to let them loose. That is what one does. Witness The Stone Building is a series of linked pieces; and it begins with "The Morning Visitor," an introduction of sorts. "Visitor" takes place under "the tentative sun of the North," and in a boarding house for immigrants. Like many of the deliberate ambiguities in this book, we are not sure, when the actual visitor speaks, if he is referring to the state of exile in the wan sunlight of this place or what it is like in prison: "And that's when your life will consist of one single night." True to her style, the author does not spell out precisely what "one single night" looks like. One can imagine both the long night of imprisonment and the long night of exile. References to endlessness—endless darkness is clearly implied, but not spelled out—are coupled with references to a profound claustrophobia. Indeed, I am reminded of accounts of shell-shocked WWI soldiers suffering both after prolonged confinement in the trenches that characterized that war. In this beginning piece, trauma has left scars only devoid of sensation when very lightly touched; painful, like a phantom limb, when touch is more forceful. Amnesia, the follow-up to trauma, has not yet set in; but its protective force looms over narrator and guest. Thus things are too difficult to express head on. In a world fraught with cruelty and injustice, grabbing the reader by the collar and subjecting him or her to graphic news of yet another round of the horrid, casual cruelty of our species' inhumanity, "ain't it awful" no longer works. We are numbed by its frequency. Much worse for the person so traumatized. I once knew someone who survived a horrible accident as a child: her mother reported looking in on her right afterwards only to see that she was asleep with her eyes wide open as if fixed on the moment of impact. Awake, the child remembered nothing. However, just as that child's moment of trauma was frozen in her wide open, but unseeing eyes, a person suffering pain or injustice bears implicit witness and so do those who know, who witness consciously, even unconsciously (the villagers near Auschwitz—didn’t they know?) Stone Building's author knew, in her gut and before her own incarceration, what that experience was like. Here is where imagination both psychically places one in the midst of what goes on, and at the same time gives the vulnerable some respite. In the case of the latter, several studies have been done of children raised by wildly dysfunctional, schizophrenic parents—the children who survived relatively intact did so because they could retreat into some form of creative, imaginative activity. In the former, the case of the imagination's testament to human catastrophe, as evinced by writers and other artists and as we can see with Stone Building, imagination bears witness even before or without one going through the trauma oneself. In one sense, it is an antidote, however oblique, to amnesia. Is it then, our most mammalian animal self that, without words, knows what another suffers? Is it our most human privilege to be able, then, to recapitulate that experience in words? in a work of art? If the reader is not primally engaged then the work so read or viewed, in my opinion, is just facile entertainment. Now I confess, I am what Coleridge used to refer to as a "tea strainer reader"; that is, I read fast, and don't always remember the details when I am done. Not this time: under a mere 200 pages, I read this book very slowly. The writing is dense, not at a semantic level per se; but because of the imagistic quality of the work. For example, switch very quickly to a lush jungle—or is it just a forest? In "Wooden Birds," the geography is vague; and thus, we insert ourselves into the narrative by choosing a woods or jungle or rain forest familiar to our memory. We join a group of women, one of whom, Felicita, or Filiz in her mother tongue, is identified as a political refugee and with her books and ideas, regarded as a bit of an intellectual snob by the ordinary women around her. Like we all do, Filiz tells herself stories that situate (or protect) her in (or from) the narrative going on around her. The tales that Felicita/Filiz tells herself are 1) that of the female terminally ill tuberculosis patients on Heybeliada (one of the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara) all sneaking out in the night for assignations with the male tuberculosis patients and 2) the Chekovian Nadyezdha in The Duel who dreams of "soaring to the sky by spreading her arms out in flight." In the "real" story, the narrator and the other women are confined to a sanatorium--seriously asthmatic, tubercular, one heroin addict whose habit has invited other illnesses—but not, we infer, on Heybeliada. Deemed sufficiently "better," these women are taken on the "Amazon Express" for an outing which culminates in a precipitous descent towards a rushing river. Filiz experiences a farcical, burlesque release, a failed imitation of Nadyezdha spreading her wings, isolated from the others who express their vitality, their life force, as a chorus, together, but also as a farcical imitation of those night-wandering TB patients on Heybeliada. There is a sense of the circular here. However, we must ask, is the narrator's confinement simply as a patient, or an introvert, or someone who cannot speak? No answer is given... In "The Prisoner," ostensibly narrated by a pregnant woman, we are not directly thrust into the experience of confinement but into the narrator's "deep, dark loneliness" which, yes, is also part of the feeling of incarceration. However, that experience is seen very much at a distance. Suffice it to say that as the narrator leaves a café, having sat, supped, and refused more in a rather disconnected state, she sees the stone building: |
Massive, gloomy, solemn, it stood there waiting. It hadn't dissolved into the night or oozed into the darkness like tar. Unshakeable, untouchable, unassailable. Still, like anyone who takes upon himself to be God's messenger, it couldn't hide its worldliness. Which made its commands all the more unbearable. To read a death verdict from a drawn straw...
Personified, it knows the way of the world and has seen it all. Is it then, an instrument of justice as one perceives the Almighty, or is it a lazaretto, into which a plague squad confines those contaminated by the world and prevents them, in turn, from contaminating us? Unable to escape the invasions of the subconscious even as she moves through the streets, the narrator daydreams of the Goddess of the Marsh: myth, fractured reality, abrupt changes of scene. It fits. Stirred from her reveries, however, she sees a prisoner being taken from the stone building, his head accidentally (?) banged against the doorsill of the prison van. What the author stresses is that this is a real moment—"she saw it all." She has witnessed something which, like Brueghel's paintings of Icarus falling into the sea, takes place on the periphery of routine, of daily life. Yet it is critical. And we readers, outside the story, we are also involved. While most of us have seen clips of alleged criminals being taken away in police vehicles, with the signal gesture of the cop putting a hand to one side of the captured person's head to prevent them hitting their head, in this case the head-banging is ambiguous—is it accidental or not? We are without a clip, a photo, no pre-supplied image: we must imagine that image merely from reading the writer's words. And there is the power of imagistic writing and a litmus test of good writing: we must become personally involved. We, too, are witnesses.
Imagination
Writers, painters, musicians, etc. may create at the individual level, to address the individual in the audience; but I suspect that what gets committed to paper, canvas, or instrument must ultimately provoke others who read, see, listen. In other words, after the imaginative experience a conversation ensues, as one might have with a stranger in a café, at at bus stop, as one writes a "letter to the editor…." When trauma is en masse, related to a collective experience—war, political repression, genocide—at the hands of one's fellows, what do those who witness do then? collectively, if possible? What stories does that collectivity tell itself to get through the night?
The pieces described above lead up to the book's centerpiece, "The Stone Building," which should be read, and reread, not dissected. The cumulative result of these tales is a pervasive sense of bearing witness. We learn of the watcher, "A.," who appears to be a vagrant keeping his eyes on the stone building, then of the layers of witness—the author, the narrators, ourselves, the reader… Always the witness as outsider/insider—all are struggling against the entanglement of varying forms of confinement. But, again, Stone Building is not reportage, neither a post-soviet soviet realism, nor the claustrophobic "write about what you know," navel-gazing of far too many of our contemporaries. The reader is not shut out nor positioned, just so, to suit a Pygmalionesque author. Aslı's work is about as far from ideological as humanly possible, approaching the nightmare of imprisonment through the same kind of logic as our dreams, with all the lacunae of forgetfulness and the need for amnesia's warm blanket—even more, with the need for the work of imagination. The imaginative process is, in greater or lesser degree, that which allows us to put preconceived notions on pause and visit others with some compassion and understanding. That process of necessity employs skilled storytellers although storytelling is clearly not always a bed of roses: we have plenty of artists who waste our time soothing us to sleep with anodynes or bedtime tales of things that go bump in the night, but which our buyuk baba ("big daddy") leaders will save us from. Aslı Erdoğan has more integrity and more skill than that; and we would do well to read, to walk with, her.
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Post Script: While a full discussion of this may be for another time, please note that I did not read The Stone Building and Other Places in the original, but in an English translation. In itself, that may raise questions of how one transfers the understanding of culture from one culture's means of expression (language) to another's. What Sevinç Türkkan, the translator of this book, accomplishes is not only to make two very different languages work together; she also avoids the beartrap of becoming, as Michael Kandel described in our inaugural issue, an "accountant of the word." That is, she is not a linguistic fundamentalist—that word equals that, no matter how jarring it sounds in the target language. I liken it to physical comedy: we see pratfalls and assume that the comedienne is a klutz because that's who she is portraying, but little do we know what grace and skill allows that person to produce the illusion. Most importantly, the translation does not impede the reader. It succeeds because you would not know it is there.
Imagination
Writers, painters, musicians, etc. may create at the individual level, to address the individual in the audience; but I suspect that what gets committed to paper, canvas, or instrument must ultimately provoke others who read, see, listen. In other words, after the imaginative experience a conversation ensues, as one might have with a stranger in a café, at at bus stop, as one writes a "letter to the editor…." When trauma is en masse, related to a collective experience—war, political repression, genocide—at the hands of one's fellows, what do those who witness do then? collectively, if possible? What stories does that collectivity tell itself to get through the night?
The pieces described above lead up to the book's centerpiece, "The Stone Building," which should be read, and reread, not dissected. The cumulative result of these tales is a pervasive sense of bearing witness. We learn of the watcher, "A.," who appears to be a vagrant keeping his eyes on the stone building, then of the layers of witness—the author, the narrators, ourselves, the reader… Always the witness as outsider/insider—all are struggling against the entanglement of varying forms of confinement. But, again, Stone Building is not reportage, neither a post-soviet soviet realism, nor the claustrophobic "write about what you know," navel-gazing of far too many of our contemporaries. The reader is not shut out nor positioned, just so, to suit a Pygmalionesque author. Aslı's work is about as far from ideological as humanly possible, approaching the nightmare of imprisonment through the same kind of logic as our dreams, with all the lacunae of forgetfulness and the need for amnesia's warm blanket—even more, with the need for the work of imagination. The imaginative process is, in greater or lesser degree, that which allows us to put preconceived notions on pause and visit others with some compassion and understanding. That process of necessity employs skilled storytellers although storytelling is clearly not always a bed of roses: we have plenty of artists who waste our time soothing us to sleep with anodynes or bedtime tales of things that go bump in the night, but which our buyuk baba ("big daddy") leaders will save us from. Aslı Erdoğan has more integrity and more skill than that; and we would do well to read, to walk with, her.
_________________________________
Post Script: While a full discussion of this may be for another time, please note that I did not read The Stone Building and Other Places in the original, but in an English translation. In itself, that may raise questions of how one transfers the understanding of culture from one culture's means of expression (language) to another's. What Sevinç Türkkan, the translator of this book, accomplishes is not only to make two very different languages work together; she also avoids the beartrap of becoming, as Michael Kandel described in our inaugural issue, an "accountant of the word." That is, she is not a linguistic fundamentalist—that word equals that, no matter how jarring it sounds in the target language. I liken it to physical comedy: we see pratfalls and assume that the comedienne is a klutz because that's who she is portraying, but little do we know what grace and skill allows that person to produce the illusion. Most importantly, the translation does not impede the reader. It succeeds because you would not know it is there.