Bieke's Stories
Wednesday 30 July 2014
Bieke's Stories: A last look from my window
Bieke's Stories: A last look from my window: Now that I am no longer there, I spend my time gently prying lose the tentacles that hold my emotions engaged to the time spent in Istanbul...
A last look from my window
Now that I am no longer there, I spend my
time gently prying lose the tentacles that hold my emotions engaged to the time
spent in Istanbul. I had the good fortune to have a window looking out on where
the Bosporus meets the Golden Horn, and where the Golden Horn runs down the Sea
of Marmara, past the Sultan’s Palace, past the Hagia Sofia, and past the Blue
Mosque. Names that invoke mystery, and I got to look at them on a daily basis.
In the distance, the Asian
side where the harbor of Haydarpasa and
Kadakoy shine in the sun. Closer by, the shores of Uskudar,
in front the Kiz Kelesi Tower. All day long, ships of all sizes would come and go, birds
would fly over and, a few times, dolphins sped by on their way to the next
feeding grounds.
My window painted a never still picture of
light playing on water beneath ever changing skies. This constant presence inspired
me to try my hand at a, for me, new form of poetry.
ON THE BOSPORUS: a collection of Haiku’s
Gelatinous rings below
The Bosporus calms
Floating cities
From the mists of Marmara
Tourists up above
Ships crossing pulsing
Birds skimming for tasty treats
Small boat keeps balanced
Skies sweet rose on blue
Golden light descending
Evening painter
From Marmara they have come
Rising from the mist
Ships like city blocks
You never need to leave home
The future of tourism
Curtains of rain
Dark clouds tumble on darkening waters
Seagulls with silver bellies
Stringing water to dark sky
Birds soar like angels
And then it starts
Between dark sky and restless water
Streaks of lightning
Weather worn facade
Torn curtain black with soot
Abandoned home
Blackened curtain whips
Blackened curtain whips
From broken window
Shattered glass in worn down wood
Clouds rumble in
Water churns decisively
Boats keep rushing by
They keep rolling in
Clouds keep flashing like silver
Monday 21 July 2014
Bieke's Stories: Getting involved
Bieke's Stories: Getting involved: A Facebook friend of a Facebook friend called and we arranged to meet at the Gezi patisserie near Taksim Square. I had taken the funi...
Getting involved
But today I had not come to take a stroll down this
street. Today I came to meet a new friend, and to take in Taksim Square, the
place of so much recent history.
The park, which authorities wanted removed so big
business could have space to expand, takes up about half square.
It isn’t much of a park, as far as city parks go, but it is the only green
space that this part of town has. It is a quiet space amidst one of the busiest
parts of a busy city. People love to come here.
As I walked, I contemplated how a little over a year ago,
this place saw bloodshed. Not the kind of bloodshed it had seen in the past,
notably the late sixties and seventies, but there is still enough nervousness
on behalf of the authorities that police keep a vigilant presence at all times.
Taksim is the place where demonstrations take place, and Gezi Park has become a
symbol of ordinary people’s rights.
When G and I met we only had two hours, but we talked like
old friends will. The kind of talking with no beginning and no end and that
goes on over a life time. We were sitting in front of a latte and a sinfully
delicious portion of chocolate creation. G gave me her take on Gezi Park and
the clashes with the police, words and sharing flowing as smoothly as the
chocolate concoction sliding down our throats.
In the beginning of my stay, I truly was amazed how
freely people shared their views about the political situation but by now I
realized that this was pretty common. Outside Turkey, when you get reports
of people clashing with police you get a distorted picture of how safe this
place is to those who speak their minds. Certainly, in the past you would get
punished if you professed what the authorities didn’t want to hear but for now
things have eased up. Not everywhere. Some buildings are still closed to the public and guarded.
G said her views about the current situation were not always those shared by her peers. “I just want to say, I
think people forget how much progress we have made.” She leaned into me before
she continued. “I clash with my father because he strongly believes in the
secularization process Atatürk introduced to this country. He also served in
the diplomatic services of subsequent governments. And then, here I am, his
daughter, defending some of what Erdogan has implemented. The Kurds. We didn’t even have a name for them before he came to power.
And that just wasn’t right. My mother is afraid I’ll show up wearing a veil one
of these days.”
But she and her parents love one another dearly and,
recently, she has been able to find a way to help her father understand where
she is coming from. And her mother no longer wonders if she will show up with a
veil.
Although! She tried one on. The other day.
“I thought I would feel suffocated,” she said. Her
mischievous laugh underscored her words.
“But it was actually kind of nice. I could see everything. No one could
see me.”
Playing hide and go seek. It suits her impish
temperament. “Actually,” she said, “my sense of humour is simply childish. You
remember when pipi and kaka jokes would make us laugh. They still do.”
When she smiled at me, I got a glimpse of the cheeky
child within. The smart provocateur who smiles at you charmingly while giving
you a clear message that something needs to be said.
Then she got serious again. “What happened here last
year, and earlier,” she said, “is not a good thing. Police spraying water and
gas at people for just speaking their minds. But if you compare it with what we
used to have, then you have to admit there is progress. People used to get shot
dead, now they get sprayed with water, or pushed back by gas. A few still get
hurt, a few died last year, but it is not as it was.”
“I see,” I say.
She has a point. Progress in small quantities is still
progress. I told her of the documentaries I saw at the Modern that show the
time when freely speaking out, or being the kind of person that was not wanted, could get you into all kinds of trouble.
Staying here, in this country, the questions come at me with urgency. Turkey is a multi-faceted and multi-cultured
society that is bubbling with possibilities. When you sit with a woman who
defines herself as a secular atheist, who lives on the Asian side, and who has
friends who wear the veil without giving up their capacity for tolerance, then
there is hope.
We met hope again on our last
Sunday here: Pride Day. Our friends were going in support of a friend so we decided
we couldn’t sit back. Th and I set off for Taksim Square early, and with a
sense of caution. We checked in at the Taksim Square Burger King where we had
agreed to meet. No rainbows yet, apart from the decorative string of colourful
shopping bags high up, and that run the length or Istiklal. We retreated and found
a coffee shop. There a girl in a white organdie dress entertained us playing a
repetitive tune on a small accordion. We called her over just as she was shoed
away by the proprietor. She told him she had a coin to collect.
It takes guts taking to the street.
Pretty soon, groups of young people carrying
multicoloured flags started drifting by. Our cue for going to Burger King to
see if our friends had arrived. On our way we saw a group of men hanging out by
an official looking building. Plainclothes policemen? We thought so. At Burger
King I spotted my first rainbow coloured piece of clothing, a fingerless glove
on a tough looking dude. Further down, some merchants were selling whistles in
all colours, and LTGBQ banners. A couple arrived on a motorbike. He was wearing
a multi coloured helmet, she carried a striped flag, the colours of the
rainbow. People started to move in on one another, hugging, old friends meeting.
“They’re just people, standing up for their rights,” I
still said. And, just then, rainbow flags were thrown in our midst, like gauntlets. Some of us picked them up and looked over the row of helmets to the flags
that were now jumping up and down. Before we had time to decide, police shoved
us gently, but firmly, into the circle. “You go that way,” they said. And we
were committed. In the midst of it. Our fate sealed to this growing crowd that
came out to show the world what speaking out means.
It soon became clear that the police only had one wish:
no one was to go to near Gezi Park. It was also clear that this group of
protesters was not here to tackle that problem. They had their own statement to
make. Before long, the helmet clad police wearing gas masks retreated. So did
the armoured cars that came with them. Only a few rows of plainclothes
police were left and they eventually also took a few large steps back and then disappeared behind a wave of colour.
No Gezi Park. We were all clear on that. But what was
also clear was that the police would have used whatever means necessary to make
sure we didn’t make a move on the park. You seldom see police, here in
Istanbul, and when you do, you don't sense threat. Until a group decides to
speak out. Then they appear in formation. Each individual a fortified unit.
Each formation impenetrable like the fortresses of old, except that those
fortresses used to offer protection to the subjects of the lords. Not so today.
The people who come out to protest are clearly the enemy. But who needs protection from
them? Gezi Park? Or the plans on the desks of the corporations that want to
move in?
I, a person who never raised a flag, not counting that
one time in my youth when I was coerced, gladly held aloft the rainbow flag. I
gladly joined my voice with those that were chanting and shouting and showing
the world that personal freedom is sacred.
That the freedom to be who you are, cannot be touched.
Wednesday 16 July 2014
Bieke's Stories: Walking with Pamuk
Bieke's Stories: Walking with Pamuk: On the last day that belonged to me—alone from early morning till late night—I set out to search for the soul of Istanbul, through the eyes...
Walking with Pamuk
From my apartment to the museum is at most a ten minute
walk. We share a neighbourhood. Whenever I walk this neighbourhood, I wonder
how Pamuk would view what I see around me.
The museum opens at ten. By the time I got there it was
still early and I was ready for tea. A tiny coffee shop two houses from the museum,
in the narrow street with it’s closed-in feeling of the tall narrow houses that
line it, was all I found. The museum is housed in a mainly residential
neighbourhood that has a run-down look and feel to it. In one side street, I
spotted walls of corrugated steel and runaway weeds. The museum is painted in
what my colour illiterate eyes would call a burgundy. Everything feels small,
unglamorous.
Deserted. Almost.
Please, let it not be closed down.
Then it was ten. Still nothing looked as if anything had changed at the museum. The couple across from me hadn’t moved and the front door with
the poster remained closed.
A family walked by the museum. An outsider look to them.
Cultural tourists, I told myself. They looked at the door and poster. Then they
disappeared around the corner. They never came back. Then a lone woman.
Oriental from appearance. Camera hanging from her shoulder.
Same thing.
After I paid for my tea, I gingerly
walked the small distance to the burgundy house. I peeped around the corner and
sure enough, at the side of the house, a window with bars. And it was open.
I felt as if I had stepped back into my childhood. In
Belgium, back then, wickets of institutions that served the public where often
intimidating with their bars as security measure. But the nice looking young
man behind the wicket was sweet as can be, unlike the sour-faced bureaucrats of
my childhood. When I told him—I had done that much homework ahead—I wanted to
buy the book and use the ticket in the book for my entrance, a door appeared
out of the burgundy wall and a security guard let me in. This man seemed oddly
out of place in this museum that didn’t look like a museum because it looked like the ordinary house it still is, in many ways.
He pointed to the basement. First thing I saw in the two
paces it took me to get from the desk to the stairs was a display case
as large as the wall. It was filled with cigarette stubs that had
little pieces of paper stuck next to them.
But down the stairs I went to a crowded basement full of
books. I was glad to have done that part of my homework because for the price
of the book, which is the same as the price of the entrance ticket, I got
both.
25 TL or $12.50. This city is generous with its displays
of culture.
The first thing I did after I had the ticket in my book
stamped was to spend some time in front of the cigarette stubs caught like butterflies against cork board. Each cigarette stub a
memory of Füsun, the girl so loved by the protagonist. On the second floor, a
parade of small glass cases. Each small case displaying objects of a
chapter of the novel that holds the life of a man obsessed by objects that are connected
to the woman who dominated his every thought.
Walking through the museum is like walking through the writer’s mind as he is writing his novel. The narrow three-storied house is the house
where the protagonist of the novel spent his last days and
where Pamuk supposedly sat with him as he recorded this story. As you walk by
the display cases, you get an overwhelming sense of the importance of objects
that create our world as different from the world of others. There a cup of
petrified coffee, a decapitated doll, a purse, a satin pump, photographs, movie
reels, a glass of tea never finished.
The book is an account of an unremarkable life of a man
born rich in a poor country, who fell in love with a shopgirl, a poor distant
relative, and how his life from then on is shaped by this troubled love. Yet
the book is so much more. It talks of an era when the bourgeois class of
Istanbul embraced ennui in the second half of last century, while outside their
circle people where fighting in the streets to change the country. The museum
doesn’t show this explicitly, nor does the book take you there but as you
embark on this adventure you get a sense of a life in a chaotic world,
cushioned by privilege but forever changed.
Out on the street again, I walked by a shopkeeper and saw
the loves that evaporated from his life. I also saw how the shoeshine
man’s brush might be the only thing that never let him down. I saw the graffiti
on the walls and understood some of the longing of the person who held the
spray can. I saw an abandoned shoe on the street and a cigarette stub near it
and I stopped in my tracks when I understood there was a story to be told. When
I walked on, the faces of the people I passed prompted me with an overwhelming
urge to write.
I had to simply stop again, to collect myself. I
contemplated Pamuk’s words when he said that instead of the epic story, we need
novels; that instead of monuments, we need homes; that instead of large and
expensive, we need small and cheap. That instead of large museums that glorify
the acts of the powerful, we need small museums that celebrate ordinary daily
life.
Instead of nations, he says, we need persons.
As I walked on, though, I found I could no longer look at
each person that passed by me without becoming overwhelmed. It occurred to me
then that maybe we build monuments to hide from ourselves. To be constantly
present in each personal life as I walked up to Istiklal and down again at the
Tünel, was shutting me down. There was too much to hold. So, I was glad when I
reached the Galata Tower. As I rested in its robust strength, I thought of the
heroes we revere and I knew then that we hide in their stories of bravado to
hide from our own lives.
In the afternoon I finally made it to the Istanbul
Modern. I was still caught inside Orhan Pamuk’s vision and I was curious to test
his statement against this government run institution. Would I be able to hide
there in the greatness of others, or would simple lives tear me open even
further?
For starters, I was feeling rather sheepish when I
finally figured out, on one of these last days of my time here, how to find the
entrance. The Modern is housed in an old building at the end of a parking lot
belonging to the harbour, where the huge cruise ships dock and behind the
unremarkable entrance to the American Bazar that is tucked behind the Nusretuye
mosque.
A bargain, I
thought.
A true bargain, I knew three hours later.
As I started to walk from one display to the next, I soon
wondered if people at the Modern might have been listening to their revered
novelist. Where the older paintings still talk of a time when we built it big,
the newer displays, most notably the audio-visual displays, talk of the
ordinary and not so ordinary lives of regular and not always such regular
people. But still, they talk of the lives of the “little people,” the “man and
woman in the street.”
Take Dermet Demir. A transvestite become transgender she/he
was active in the nineteen eighties, the time when the protagonist of The Museum of Innocence could only think
of his love and attempted to live as if times were not changing. I gingerly
entered the long room with benches on one side and four screens on the opposite
wall. I had no idea how I could absorb all that came at me because each screen
showed a documentary consisting of an interview with a person who had, at one
time or other, worn a wig. The first one a woman who did so to hide from the
police, the second a woman who had cancer. The third screen was black but had
audio. The fourth screen showed Dermet Demir.
Mesmerized, I sank down in front of this interview and
listened how Dermet had been brutalized and raped over and over again by the
police because, he/she lived openly. Out in the street, out about his/her
orientation. And still both male and female at that time. Now she is woman and
still speaks freely. Now she is part of the face Turkey shows to the world at
the Istanbul Modern.
As I was listening to Dermet, I was also listening to the
woman in the blackened screen. This woman wore a wig to hide her hair so that
she would be allowed to go to school. Wearing the scarf in Turkey, at that
time, got you banned from many things. School one of them. While Dermet donned
a wig to look like a woman after her hair was shaven off in prison, this woman
donned a wig to look like a Western woman so she could get a degree. Sometimes
she would even keep her scarf on underneath the wig but that proved not easy.
The only time she would feel herself again was when she was home and could take
off the wig and put on her veil.
In another audio-visual display, Undressing, by Nilbar Gures I watched a silent yet dramatic display
of a woman draped in veils and taking them off one by one. Each time she took
off a veil, she named a woman she loves. Her mother, her grandmother, an aunt.
A friend. In the end, she only had one cloth draped over her face. It was wet
with perspiration. I felt profoundly moved when she pulled of the last veil. It
revealed the laughing face of a beautiful young woman. As I was leaving the
viewing room, two pretty young girls with headscarfs took my place. I wondered
how they would experience this video. When I got home, I googled Nilbar Gures
and found the video on You Tube and I watched it again.
A third video that captured my imagination was a cartoon
depicting the life of a woman from childhood to old age, through the
secularization phase of Turkey. When she is a young woman her mother tells her
to take off the veil and conform so that she will be successful in life. In
another scene men have their pants pulled down and their clothes shredded
because they are traditional garb, while their women look on and giggle behind
their hands. A small moment for women that is soon deflated because their men
are not only shamed by soldiers, they also don’t have the means to buy Western
clothing.
Eventually, this young woman gets married. She has a son, who is then molested
by the father.
As I walked home I was profoundly moved. When I first
came to this country I had expected people to be guarded in their opinions, but
the more I got to know the place, the more I started to realize this wasn’t the
case. The Istanbul I got to know, over the weeks, is a place where people of all walks of life
might very well figure out how to live together without tearing one another
apart.
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