Every Fire You Tend E-Book

Sema Kaygusuz

• Herausgeber: Tilted Axis Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 275

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A poetic reckoning with Turkish history, fuelled by mysticism In 1938, in the remote Dersim region of Eastern Anatolia, the Turkish Republic launched an operation to erase an entire community of Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds. Inspired by those brutal events, and the survival of Kaygusuz's own grandmother, this densely lyrical and allusive novel grapples with the various inheritances of genocide, gendered violence and historical memory as they reverberate across time and place from within the unnamed protagonist's home in contemporary Istanbul. Kaygusuz imagines a narrative anchored by the weight of anguish and silence, fuelled by mysticism, wisdom and beauty. This is a powerful exploration of a still-taboo subject, deeply significant to the fault lines of modern-day Turkey.

Leseprobe

Praise for Every Fire You Tend

‘Kaygusuz extends her greetings to all the hurt of the past, painting a portrait of human suffering in all its clarity and poetic beauty. Every Fire You Tend is a history of pain, of cruelty, of hope, of being unable to give up on a world so beautiful you want to cry out; it is a history of all the feelings that have evolved alongside humans.’

— Halil Türkden, Agos Kitap

‘In a country still ruled by denial and by faith in a homogenous culture, Sema Kaygusuz’s superb novel brings memories of a diverse and mixed Turkey rushing back. It takes pleasure in claiming as part of Turkish cultural heritage all the ancient civilizations that have marched through Anatolia and elsewhere – Hittite or Assyrian, Greek or Phoenician. The result is profoundly beautiful, a way of applying the Alevi theory of the migration of souls in the service of cultural history.’

— Charif Majdalani, L’Orient Littéraire

‘When you finish reading this book, you are overcome with the feeling that you hold in your hands an atlas of all the sufferings of humanity.’ — Esra Küçük, Arka Kapak

‘Sema Kaygusuz’s novel is a literary Guernica, far-reaching in its scope, its bitterness touched with honey. Its staggering cultural profundity, its unique style, and its impressive experimental touch leave a distinct taste on the reader’s palate.’

— Pakize Barışta, Taraf

‘Each of Sema Kaygusuz’s books is a hymn to life and the sensuality of the world, over which hangs the shadow of death and the tragedies that have punctuated Turkish history.’ — Marc Semo, Libération

‘How to speak about this book without making its poetry disappear? This incantatory story is served by its calm decor, planted between quietude and desolation, between certainty and mystery, light and darkness, cruelty and sensuality, indecency and modesty, dream and reality. Despite its aesthetic pleasures, Every Fire You Tend never lets us forget the lamentations of mourning.’

— Anne-Marie Mitchell, La Marseillaise

‘As stylistically thrilling as it is exceptionally calm, Every Fire You Tend represents an assault upon our usual habits of reading. The author approaches legends handed down over the centuries in a new light, daring to put forward interpretations that shock expectations. Undermining countless concepts like heroism, self-sacrifice, and compassion that are usually held in high esteem, Kaygusuz raises a moral perspective deeply rooted in the culture and geography of Anatolia and Mesopotamia.’

— Sevengül Sönmez, Sprache im technischen Zeitalter

Every Fire You Tend

sigh

I know your shame.

I carry it with me, that shame, that most private part of you. Ever since I was entrusted with that cryptic emotion, I haven’t taken my eyes off of you, off of the historic secret inscribed on your face. Before the mother who bore you and the father who dreamed you up had themselves come into this world, you were already a doleful visage conjured by your ancestors, the final entry in a searing elegy imparted from flesh to flesh. You do not know how to read what is written on your face. You do not know the source of your latent shame, do not know how to speak of it, let alone string its sentences together, and so it weighs on you as an affliction, stunting your growth.

Only in the thrall of emotions you recognize does that writing on your forehead disappear. When your lips curl in contempt, for example, or when your eyes well up with longing, not a single word of shame remains etched on your face. Sometimes, though, when your mind begins to wander and you’re torn from this time, unfamiliar emotions envelop you, and you can’t remember a thing. That’s when I find you, aching from head to toe with the obscure memory of an event you never lived through.

—

This morning when I arrived, you were lost in thought, caught in the cross breeze, on a threshold opening into the depths of your melancholy. Wearied by sleeplessness, your spirit snagged itself upon objects around you: the swaying tulle curtains, the photographs on the wall, the little spider dangling from the web it prudently let loose; it tumbled its way to your body, the home of your introspections, carrying with it all those intimations of the world, while you lay there in bed, passive in body but agonizing in mind, trying to fend off these unwanted intrusions. You spirit had departed to another plane altogether, and you were left suddenly alone, among strangers who wouldn’t say a single word to help you. All those strangers standing on the other side of the threshold, wandering the labyrinth of your melancholy, calling you on a journey without return, into the boundless universe of your introspections. One of them, an old woman, her hair so white it seemed ice blue; another, a holy man, his face pallid, sprung from the sanguine legends of the spring festivals. You recognized them both but didn’t know from where. The middle door of your introspections opened upon a fig tree. There on that threshold, you breathed in the scent of its bitter leaves, observed its white branches twisting outward, heavy with purple fruit.

You weren’t there with me. All I could see in your place was the ache in your bones, the sweat on your hands, and the pain in the hollow of your groin. You were in a wretched state. Your “I” had shrunk in that ancient agony, all the time you’d lived through condensed into a fig seed. Doubled over in bed, you listened to the throbbing of your flesh, afraid to open your eyes, your arms covering your face. You wanted to close the door that opened onto your melancholy. Or perhaps you were desperate to escape, to leap into another time in which you’d never been born and would therefore never die, a realm beyond the world’s many insinuations. A centennial distance loomed between us. We stood on the same piece of earth, sundered into different times. I watched you splintering apart. You were the protagonist of an anguished story, borrowing the consciousness of a woman from another time, a victim’s consciousness, one that continues to loom large in the present. You mutilated yourself with your self. What’s more, you were afraid of a phantom whose fresh sweat you could still smell on your sheets, undeniably tangible and passing through your time. You and your phantom had emerged anew from the Hıdrellez flames.  

Let me tell you about the first Hıdrellez flames you ever saw, a story from a time before you existed, when your conscience was just being woven together, some seventy years ago. You were elemental as a new spark, a mad-hot stone in the heart of a fire, a dry branch that crackled with the first lick of flame. Your eyes that watched everything were the silver-dappled stones. You were a place on that mountainside, and you were the otherworldly aura that permeated the place. That day, you were both the burning fire and the person who warmed herself beside it.

Forty people with packs on their backs, weary from walking for days on end, weak from living off only wild spinach, gathered around a fire, taking solace in each other. The children smelled of urine, and everyone, with their shorn clothes and jackets, looked utterly ruined. They hadn’t yet realized that they were exiles. The deep guilt of having survived had plunged them into silence. Afraid of stepping back into the nightmarish, bloody landscape that they had left behind, they refused to sleep. Water, fire, and bread had taken on entirely new meanings: water smelled of blood, fire screamed, and bread turned into a sacred pittance they hoped would fall from the heavens. These people gathered around the fire had lost their fear of dying. Besides, they were so lifeless now that it would be impossible to kill them further. Ever since they’d gotten off the train from Elazığ, their spirits had been utterly numb. As they continued onward, burying those who couldn’t withstand the fever and the hunger, the world itself became another affliction. They were like Job, who beseeched God that his spirit had grown weary of his body: all realms known and unknown, all seven tiers of heaven and seven tiers of earth, had become for them no more than a body writhing in pain.

There was a man named Cafer among them. His right eye was wrapped tight with a bloody rag while the other was bright red. As if he had left this eye uncovered not to see but to weep. Swaying back and forth, he began muttering as if speaking to the fire, as if the fire was the only thing that could understand him. Words rolled around in his mouth. “O Hızır,” he moaned, “O Hızır, my unseen brother, where are you? At the throne of God, or here on earth? Do you stand before Moses, do you sit beside Gabriel?”

Meanwhile, night was overtaking the land. A deceptive stillness enshrouded everything, the light playing tricks as it reflected off the jagged cliffs. The outlines of the trees on the mountainside slowly became indistinct, and all the pathways and passes disappeared in the twilight. Gathered around the fire, the abject figures melted away, replaced by their black, hunched silhouettes. Cafer’s reproachful entreaty to Hızır suddenly coalesced in a rhythmic prayer the forty of them sang together, forging a clandestine bond between serenity and sorrow. They were submitting themselves to their faith in God. There in that leaden stillness, as Cafer’s voice filled the air with tension, a girl stood up and calmly brushed off her skirt.

That girl was your father’s mother, Bese. Bese had a small beauty mark below her lower lip where her mother would always kiss her, a small gesture of her love. Bese, now the sole survivor of all her extended family. Ever since she had seen her brother’s body drifting along the Munzur River, she had taken a vow of silence, to be broken only when absolutely necessary.

Bese began to walk, slowly at first. Nobody gave her a second glance as she wandered into the nearby copse, assuming perhaps that she was going to urinate. If they had only paid heed to the tautness of her back, to her jutting shoulder blades, to the speed with which she was now walking, to the fact that she was no longer limping, they might have realized that hers was a strange departure.

Bese didn’t return that night. The others scattered in all directions, setting out to search for the girl. They didn’t have the fortitude to lose another, nor could they live with themselves if she had died, if she had fallen somewhere and gotten stuck, and they had left her behind. Wearily, they searched for Bese. When they lost their voices from shouting, they clashed stones together. They shuddered at the calls of birds of prey and started at every rolling stone or rustling branch, and soon, legends about Bese began to circulate among them. One would say that Bese was with them still, only now invisible; another, that she had died long before, but her spirit had only just departed; another still, that she must have gotten mixed up with djinns.

“I don’t know anything about djinns,” clamored one old woman, “but if we give up on Bese we give up on her entire lineage. I’m not leaving until we find that girl!”

On the morning of the third day, Bese appeared out of nowhere. Half naked, her hair disheveled, her arms and knees bleeding and bruised. Her ribs were pressing into her lungs, so she was barely able to speak. She seemed to have undergone a profound transformation, her timidness abandoned for an air of defiance, a readiness to pick a fight. She shunned everyone with her intransigence, placing an insurmountable distance between herself and her tribe. The knowledge that all beings had been leavened by the same stardust brought her only empty consolation now. To survive, she needed to approach life differently. Resurrected with a new grief and a new set of ethics, Bese had been born again, this time through another wound.

“Where were you?” they asked her.

“I saw Hızır,” she replied without hesitation, as if explaining something entirely ordinary. “He was on his grey horse, staring at me. He gestured for me to come, so I went.’”

As she spoke, a profound sorrow spread over her face, almost identical to the expression latent on yours. How exactly you’re going to step free from this sorrow, etched as it is into the fabric of your soul, is something I’m still wondering myself. 

Now you’ve entered the age of figs. You’re ready to show and tell all, on the brink of offering your honeyed core to life. You even have a fig tree, there, blocking your living room window. You’ve learned how to get by on the feeble light filtering through its broad leaves. The tree’s shadow casts another dimension into your daily life. At first, anyone who visited you at home would have to listen to you talk at length about it, let you translate for the fig without its permission. In fact, you often got carried away, telling visitors that the fig leaf resembles a giant hand, the hand of the goddess Demeter. You bestowed meanings on the leaves that leaves can’t bear. After all, every life is defined by such meanings. And you were defined by figs.

Before you rented your current apartment, when you were wandering from realtor to realtor in Beşiktaş, you insisted that you wanted a small, ground-floor apartment, and moreover, one that came with a fig tree, telling those who looked at you with bewilderment that the time had come to live with a fig tree. As if that sentence made the slightest sense… They gave up looking for a flat altogether, thinking a fig tree was all you were after. Muammer, with his Coke-bottle glasses, was the only realtor who took your request seriously. “I love walnut trees,” he told you in his nasal voice, smoothing his hair from its part down the middle. His shoulders were covered in dandruff. You tried not to stare at his yellow teeth as he prattled on about how sleeping under a walnut tree always left him in a gentle daze, waiting patiently for this dull banter to end. The only thing you and Muammer had in common was trees. But your eyes, they couldn’t see past figs.

The first thing you did after you signed the lease was name the fig tree in your garden. You called it Zevraki, claiming the name meant both “boat” and “wood.” The nickname of an Alevi bard who died long ago. You’ve always loved the letter Z. Every word that Z passes through seems to you caught in paradox, half dead and half alive. Everything Z touches: azure, zephyr, zero, zenith… Z blazes like fire, freezes like ice. Zevraki, that seemingly musical name, circumscribed the tree, enclosed it in a place oscillating between dream and reality. Ignorant as to the sex of your tree, you attempted to graft it with the name of a poet. It’s not natural, what you did. All it does is reinforce the recursive cycle by which civilizations build the logic of their own undoing into their very foundations. Naming something forces it to adapt to you; it is the first step toward domesticating all of earth’s creatures, the rageless and meek, the plain and serene. Regardless of the name you gave it, the only thing you will ever see in the tree is a semblance of yourself. I have to admit, though, that the names you come up with do always suit the thing being named. I don’t know how you do it, but it seems to me that your naming recreates it anew. Ever since you named the fig tree in your garden Zevraki, I’ve been drifting upon an ocean, the same poem restless in my mind:

if the waves rose high, higher than the north star, if they swelled past the limits of the vaulted sky, and if they swept into even the ninth heaven, surged beyond the throne of god, still zevraki would remain above the surface of that vast sea. 

How do you think fig trees were born? Did they fashion themselves according to the angle of the sunlight, or to the appetites of the birds and bugs in their surroundings? How did they come into being, and in which time zone? Your Zevraki, for example… When I think about the endless cycle that culminated with Zevraki, I imagine a tendril secreting a milky poison, sprouting from beneath a lapis stone on a silvery Syrian cliffside overlooking the Mediterranean. Long before Adam and Eve covered their private parts with its leaves, it was a bastard that grew of its own accord.

It’s almost as if we exist because figs do, think of it that way. The fig is a scion that spread by imagining humans before it had ever encountered them. It conceived of the fire that would fall into the womb of the first woman to eat its fruit, of the moment she splits it with her two hands; it conceived of the thumping that fire would start in her chest, of the sweet ache in her groin; and it conceived of the honey that would flow from her lips upon her first bite, of the carnal prowess of that honey. It wished for men as it grew, men who gathered together to play their frame drums and sing ghazals as they drank rakı distilled from figs; it wished that the songs they breathed into the air would help them reach lovers waiting in the world beyond. It designed roots to spread like vortexes along the surface of the earth, building nests for snakes slithering silently among them. This was how the dual bond between figs and snakes began. Over time, the shadow of the fig tree became the gathering place for punishment and praise, for poison and antidote, for arousal and calm. Eventually, its roots meandered underground. It emerged among humans in strange places, splitting the walls and cracking the foundations of derelict homes across the four corners of Mesopotamia. In time, of course, the fig became something of a demigod. In an age when innumerable gods and goddesses and human-animal hybrids began to converge in the fabric of a singular creator, the fig held its place in the world with a terrifying depravity, a symbol of the singularity in the plural and the plurality in the singular. And so, as the fig became a mysterious creature that consorts with snakes, a creature that sees, that knows, that speaks in whispers to the night, humankind began to treat it like a being from another world.

The Arameans gave the fig its first name, calling it İdra, or spirit, and thus setting it apart. Ever since this naming, all great adventures have transpired before it. In fact, the fig tree was the symbol of knowledge in Hebrew, and from İdra, it grew into a weightier, more sublime concept of wisdom. These letters, portals that open onto all places in the universe, hold the fig’s ingenuity. Because of the spell contained in the word İdra, to speak the fig into the world is not only to give voice to the greatness condensed in everything, in water and leaf and stone, from the peach fuzz of human skin to the fur of a leopard; it is also to declare, “There is a beginning.” Reverberating in Hebrew, the fig became a sonorous sentence that nobody could grasp in its entirety.

As luck would have it, though, the fig began to fall from favor once it gained its Persian name, ancīr, which corresponds to piercing and penetration. The fruits grow slowly, swelling from concavities at the root of the tree’s broad leaves; as they swell, they begin to resemble breasts or testes, stirring seductive passions. As a consequence, the Pharisees gave it a name they chose for no other fruit they ate. This was because they peeled figs with an assiduous tugging, the same way they might have undressed a lover. Over time, it became shameful to be seen eating a fig in public, and even now from Iran to Anatolia, you can’t simply go up to a grocer and brazenly ask for figs. They’ll give you a dirty look and pretend not to have heard your request. The thing to do is to ask vaguely for “fruit,” owning up to the fig in all its vulgarity, and eat it at home with your curtains closed. In any case, it’s not as if you eat a fig slice by slice; you make out with it. You have to plunge your mouth into it, suck it out. Its red flesh is effervescent, animate, quivering. You can’t do anything else until you finish eating the fig because it makes your fingertips so sticky. Perhaps this is why virgin girls and pregnant women weren’t allowed near fig trees: so they would abstain from sex.

It also fell to the fig to remove fetuses from the wombs of women impregnated outside of marriage. This secret remedy was known only to midwives. They would stick a freshly cut shoot from a fig tree into the womb and poke around, causing a miscarriage. In those days, it was considered sorcery to pierce through the cervix and slough off the uterine membrane without killing the woman. As a consequence, the fig tree’s creative and destructive power began to spread by word of mouth. They say that a woman who miscarries in this way must never again eat a fig, so she won’t be poisoned by the dizzying taste of what she gave up.

Over those many millenia, I don’t know whether the fig became more human, or whether we humans bent to the fig’s temperament. Regardless, it began to speak every language in which its roots spread, to practice every religion that deemed it the tree of paradise. In due time, djinns settled at the foot of the fig tree, made it vengeful: it began contorting the faces and mouths of drunkards who peed on its roots at night, crippling children who tried to climb it, and spiriting away the memories of those who fell asleep in its shade. People revered and condemned the fig in equal parts, believing that this double-hearted androgyne had descended upon the world to dole out bite-size shares of the divine to all. The fig was a holy spirit that tamed humans even as it led them astray. It cultivated free will, inciting the ego; at the same time, it encouraged people to resemble one another, to become indiscernible, invisible. Strange that, in those times, the fig had two sexes. It seeded itself, spawned itself of itself, but it also acted as a devil hell-bent on driving humans out of paradise.

And so, while you were in the midst of the age of figs, you should have looked at Zevraki not with an eye toward history but with the eye of a barbarian who knows, deep down, that every civilization is impermanent, and with the hunger of a savage woman who, inspired by the cycle of the tree’s life, has cultivated its spirit in her body.

In fact, I’ve never had the sense that you’ve fallen under the fig tree’s spell, even once. You’re just moved by the myths of the fig, that’s all. Of course, the intimate bond you feel with Zevraki is important. But such bonds, such damnable attachments, all they’ve ever done is seclude the unique character of your spirit from the ineffable world. To tell you the truth, I still haven’t figured out why you love figs the way you do. Have you ever even wandered through a street market to buy a kilo of figs? Have you popped a fig into your mouth in the middle of the crowd, licking the nectar that dribbles onto your lips? Tell me this first before you worship at the foot of the tree.

—

You’re perched in your chair in the living room now, staring at Zevraki through empty eyes. Looking out upon its involuted branches, its sizable leaves, you’re light as a ghost in search of a body. See the crystalline sky? You’ve never seen it from this angle, at this hour. The shadows that the leaves cast upon the earth seem to form new shapes altogether. Halcyon shadows, shifting with the light… You barely even realize the great lengths the fig branches have stretched in order to reach toward the sun. You’re so lethargic compared to the tree. The history of your life has been extinguished by the faces in the photographs hanging on your walls. You’re only now beginning to realize how vainly you’ve spent this life of yours, looking solely at people’s faces.

Take that picture of the old man just across from you. He’s sitting on the steps of a wooden house with a bay window, watching the passersby from behind a small counter displaying his homemade Muscat wines. You took this photograph in the village of Şirince, where you wandered the streets on an assignment for a magazine advertising vacation destinations. You were so thrilled when they published it as a full-page spread.

Do you think he’s still alive? When you took the photograph, did you contemplate his mortality, his vulnerability? Weren’t you implicated, the moment you pushed the shutter-release button, in the death of this man who made a living from his Muscat wine, in his subsumption into the relentless flow of time? Or rather, do you realize the extent of your implication? As I look at the photograph now, it’s unclear to me that you took it yourself. You don’t seem to have noticed the way he slumps to his left, or the large gem-set brooch pinned to the brim of his hat. If you had, you might have chosen a different angle, focusing your camera on something other than the labels of the wine bottles. Though you may not have noticed all the subtle details that illuminated his unique character at that moment, you nonetheless managed to capture them without realizing it. As such, you might be able to learn something by looking at your photographs, to recognize that it is the visceral that enchants the eye.

There are, moreover, some images that simply can’t be captured. Bese’s march toward Hızır, for example, her aloof demeanor when she returned, the dry grass stuck in her hair, the dubiousness of her affected solemnity: such moments are recorded only in an album of memory. Bese herself, and every moment concerning her, fades away with each passing day. As long as you continue to submit yourself to the world as it appears in your photographs, the world as it reveals itself to your eyes, any pursuit of Bese will fail. The brooch on the man’s hat may have intimated absence, the absence of a woman, but that absence will never be able to conjure forth Bese’s presence.

What you do is the art of twilight. The snapshots you take do not simply reveal the nostalgic time of photography itself: they foreground the tender absence that bleeds into each and every frame. At the very least, give me that absence from now on, that embryonic emptiness that finds its way into each and every shot you take. Because what rouses your being into presence is not your emotions but your emptiness.

—

Up till now, you’ve lived only by feeling, by remembering how you felt the day before, waiting patiently, alert to the feeling of something similar, something familiar, becoming your own carbon copy, a copy of the memory of your earlier feelings. The darkest aspect of your distorted memory must be your inability to understand why you wake up dead every single day. Even now, as I look at you, I can tell you can’t bring yourself to weep. You refuse to shed tears whose source you don’t recognize. Living is feeling… It’s a beguiling notion, of course; it’s concise, light, lets you fit in with others. But when feelings don’t trigger rational thought, you can’t do anything except feel them. So even if you don’t wake up dead tomorrow, you’ll become lifeless again the day after, acclimating yourself to the destructive banality of the way you feel now. With such a possibility on the table, my pretty-eyed girl, I beg you: weep. It’s only a few days before you become your own corpse. Don’t let go of this moment of reflection as you ache. Let it rouse your conscience.

Let us go into the garden, then, you and me, along with all the people we’ve pushed deep down inside ourselves, with our matriarchs who discovered wheat, our grandfathers who fell into traps, our midwives who were the finest of sorcerers, and with our murdered relatives. The shade has receded by now. Let’s shiver to our bones in the spring’s morning chill. The doves alight on the fig tree’s branches, hunting among its leaves for spiders weaving webs. The stairs down to your garden are covered in bird shit, flies buzzing overhead. It’s not really a garden, you’re right, only a small space between apartment buildings. This narrow patch of grass only exists because they were never able to construct here, owing to the difference in elevation between the foundation of your apartment building and the ground. Zevraki doesn’t dream of bearing fruit here. It lives on a plane of its own, this innocent creature isolated from humanity. Let’s go sit beside it. There in your garden, overshadowed by buildings looming over us, laundry drying on back patios, old belongings wrapped in plastic, rolled-up carpets, skeins of yarn airing on balconies and tennis shoes on windowsills, piles of newspapers, empty flowerpots, overshadowed by so many other odds and ends, we’ll recognize how desperately we struggle to impart our spirits into our possessions. Let’s weep, together, let’s cry out, remembering that we can’t endure the invisible unless we look straight at it. Let’s confess to the tree that these homes of ours, homes that ought to be torn down and demolished, and these bodies of ours, anchored to our homes, these domesticated, banal bodies of ours, are the only means we have to make ourselves visible. Let’s leap out of this desolate time in which people aspire to perfection outside themselves, and into a time in which they attained perfection within. Let it be a time outside of time, before prophets cropped up and spoke plainly for everyone to understand, before any of God’s commandments had been written down, before anyone except Gilgamesh had yet aspired to immortality. It doesn’t seem we can sit still, so let’s move together, as two letters side by side, a vowel and a consonant; let’s become the syllable of an anguished cry.