gray areas of identity

I’m not sure if this guy is worth anything to say about, even from a mortal student like me, but I couldn’t let this quote go:

Reacting to the comment by Firat (Dengir Mir Mehmet) of the AKP that “Kemalist revolutions have caused a trauma”, CHP leader Deniz Baykal said, “Does Turkey want to be a modern society, or a defiled version of the Khomeini regime, an Islamic Middle Eastern society? This is what she should decide.”

My initial reaction is a blank face. Seriously, Deniz Baykal? Really? Come on…

On the one hand, we’ve been over this. Everyone has; the media, students, academics, writers, politicians. On the other hand, that is precisely the reason why the thickness of this guy’s skull baffles me.

“Are you kidding me, or are you kidding yourself?” is the appropriate chicken translation I believe. It’s not just him, obviously. Actually it’s not him at all. When exactly did our modernization project go sour? When did it become this black and white dichotomy (By the way, thank you, Sam, for making this word forever funny) of us and them, the modern and the backwards. Trouble is we are not modern, nor will we ever be, the way we want to be. Nor is it the greatest thing to be modern, to put it crudely. This so-called identity crisis, this self-hate and inferiority complex of one turned contempt for the other is eating us alive. It’s contagious, malicious, so seemingly normal, so humane and ordinary – to be caught in this perceived hierarchy of the best and the worse. To conquer Vienna all over again every time we beat a European team, and for me to speak in “we” still…

I wasn’t even born there. And I prefer Syria to Bulgaria. But it wasn’t always like this, and this preference is largely the product of my own contempt – of the stupidity, of the blindness and the stubbornness of these people. Not because they are the only ones with these qualities, but they are the ones with the resources; with the money, the education, the ability to get a peak at the world. Instead you sip your wine and indulge in newly found capitalist pleasures, and talk of modernity. Modernity is so yesterday, to borrow a phrase from Eric Cartman. But this self-torturous frenzy about our place in the hierarchy of civilizations, of nations is making everyone sick. And I think more and more people are getting fed up with it. Because even when we were “at the gates of Vienna”, we were there as an Eastern empire; the Muslim, the oriental, the mysterious and the feared. We were Islamic, and Middle Eastern. It’s actually a good thing, if only you loosen up a little bit. Even this ex-Soviet of yours is pretending to be a part of it.

Poor Deniz Baykal. I suddenly feel bad for him (wait for it…

Ok, it has passed).

I'm still going nuts and making Ottoman slap-on-the-EU jokes if we beat Germany tomorrow. I AM from Turkey.

A salute to Jacques Berque

I imagine a poet
in Beirut, sister to Anatolia, friend of Athens,
a poet who stands with his friend Jacques Berque at the gate of the sea
leaning on his cane
imagining that his voice is a tambourine,
that the tambourine is broken in his throat,
that his throat is a fire named God.

I imagine a poet
into whose innards history rains,
into his words and between his feet,
and who rains blood that some carry as if a banner made of sky.

Goddess of doubt, you who were born in the lap of our mother the sea,
why do you not announce this poet and his friend?

Say what you do not see,
what turns time on its back,
what holds the wind standing on tiptoe,
what pours the ashes of silence on the flames of speech
improvised by the world's prose.

Announce also the inflamed eyelashes
the severed hands
the withered days
and whether the lantern is a throat or a head
and how we can distinguish today between an insect and a flower?

And say is there a means now
to colonize the clouds
and say
how this Mediterranean still needs
to re-emerge from the childhood of the alphabet.

Alphabet, how brave they are these cicadas that inhabit your
harvest,
how ferocious these angels that lie in the beds of your forgetfulness!

René Char
where is the storm then,
and why is poetry still an ally of the waves
and why has the sky left nothing of our history
except statues whose genitals have been lopped?

The poet leaning on his stick
standing at the gate of the sea, with his friend

Jacques Breque
whispers to his friend, or perhaps to the waves:
‘If there is a sky, it is migration'
and his friend replies, also whispering,
‘No
the miracle is not above
it is soil sleeping among the underclothes of the grass.'

What time is it now? I don't know.

Except that the spidery arms of the clock spin. Two flies circle
and buzz above, or three.

Poet, write a poem, and describe the scene
adding the wall upon which you were hung and the curtain
half torn under the lamp and the black window.

Do not forget to allude to Modernism so that you may be counted
among the pioneers, but before that, don't forget to describe the
scene
the old shoe resting alone under the clock as if
waiting for his owner's return, and beware of the big issues:

Poetry
must capture - not the things - but their crumbs.

And let you words rise to their covenant.

Owah!

The moon has fallen sad asleep
on his chair covered with clouds.
And the poet leaning on his stick accompanied
by his friend Jacques Berque
counted the moths that drowned in the clamour of flames
on that night,
the flames of candles lit
by children by the sea
who spend the night with foam
hunting the waves.

And evening in Beirut
was pining like a beggar soliciting in space
brought down to his knees
resting on his cheek on Ulysses' cheek.

Do we think we are still alive by the shore of the Mediterranean,
have we become herders of the stars?

A rose carries the whole of night in her sleeves
leans on Beirut's chest
and gives her waist to the air's forearm
while life embraces her hatchlings
placing her feet on the staircase of the future.

Is this really the world?

Shall I grieve? Shall I hope?

I prefer to sing.

-Adonis