Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

When he heard Jiyan express her feelings in these elaborate words that seemed to have been derived from an epic poem he had found it strange. He had found it unnatural. This woman speaks as though she is holding forth in Manukyan’s theatre. In trying to impress she has the opposite effect. It seems to alienate. But then he got used to her mode of expression and became almost addicted.

When he told this to Jiyan and asked why she spoke in such pompous language she said, ‘We either clam up or speak like this. perhaps it is the vestige of a tradition. Our mothers and grandmothers speak like this, too, as though they are reading an epic poem. But they speak in Kurdish. Then it sounds better, more natural. When I translate the thoughts that are in my head and my heart in Kurdish into Turkish, my ideas and my feelings become a little confused. This is why it seems odd, unnatural and pretentious to you. Do you know what dengbejlik is? Let us say it is our minstrel tradition, our oral literature. Perhaps I have been inspired by the dengbej. I don’t do this intentionally or with premeditation. It comes out spontaneously. That’s how it comes to my lips. In fact, the truth is as I tell it. I’m not embellishing it, believe me. I understand that it seems strange to you because you haven’t learnt the language of our region with its emotional range. The style you use when writing I use when I’m speaking. In your last novel which you gave me you form the same sort of sentences as mine. The man says to the girl, ‘Your eyes are not eyes. It’s as though they are the whole world, a whole life.’

He had been embarrassed: because he could not produce a special word for Jiyan, because he had won the admiration of readers with trite phrases such as these; because he had become famous not for the enquiring, deep, challenging ideas of former days but for the novels he had written full of florid sentences and feelings lacking in originality — and most importantly because Jiyan had perceived the inadequacies he had tried to hide even from himself.

Ömer Eren is thinking about all this as he crosses the market and slowly ascends the slope that leads to the military garrison at the end of the road. He mulls it over, but his mind is confused, his thoughts disconnected. There is a fog in his head that he doesn’t want to disperse, and he is in a state of drunkenness from which he is afraid of sobering up.

On his left lies a wide earthen area where in the past youths played football, funfairs were held at festival time and where, infrequently, third-rate folk singers gave concerts and where tent theatres and visiting acrobats performed. The place is now surrounded with barbed wire, and makeshift lookout posts have been erected on either side. He thinks that although the town has no sound it does have colour: yellow-grey, the colour of dust and smog; a colour, bereft of the joy, laughter and excitement of being completely open to the horizon, a mixture of grey earth, smoky-grey cliffs, milk-blue snow. Further along, on the right, are the grey concrete blocks that cover the town, the army quarters and garrison buildings that merge with the gloomy colour of the town. And at the end of the uphill road, steep rocky mountains suddenly rise up like an impenetrable fortress, a frontier without a crossing. Jiyan had said, ‘This town is an open prison, but for women it is a closed prison.’

‘Where are you in this prison, Jiyan?’

‘I’m the officer on the gate. The collaborator, who, although sentenced for life, has been promoted to being a warden for good conduct. The officer with whom prisoners and the prison administration have to get on because they both need her help.’

Her statements embellished with metaphors and similes astonished Ömer. He had noticed that not only Jiyan but also the ordinary people that he had been able to talk to expressed their views articulately in their distinct eastern dialect with its harsh accent; some of them poetically, in an epic manner like Jiyan; some of them in speech that was frank, clear and to the point. But all said what had to be said as it should be said, reaching the heart of the matter … Perhaps because in the solitude of the mountains they thought a lot and said little.

He shows his identity card to the heavily armed soldiers on duty at the door of the garrison and tells them that the Commander is expecting him. He waits while they make a phone call.

A few minutes later a junior officer comes running and cordially shakes his hand. ‘Ömer Bey, welcome. The Commander awaits you. Please come this way.’

As Jiyan had guessed, the Commander’s invitation had not been long in coming. If not the following day, a few days after he had arrived in the town, an officer — perhaps it was the adjutant — coming to the hotel at night had informed him in a courteous manner that the Commander would be honoured to meet him and expected him in his office the following evening at 19.00 hours. He said that a car would be sent to the hotel to pick him up, but Ömer had politely refused the lift saying that he preferred to walk. For a while he had wanted to stroll towards the military zone and take a look around, but he had abandoned the idea so as not to draw attention to himself and create a problem. The Commander’s invitation was a good opportunity to take a look round the military zone. He now had a response to the question ‘Where do you think you’re going, buddy?’

He had made trips with Jiyan or with the people to whom she had introduced him, entrusted him or, it would be truer to say, delivered him. They knew the area well. They could navigate this menacing land that kept its secrets from strangers. On these journeys that were officially ‘surveys’, for which they had to notify their route and get permission from command headquarters and the Governor, Ömer felt as though he had discovered a completely new continent. Yet I knew every inch of this land, or I thought I did. In our youth, in the years of our revolutionary ideas, we had argued not a little, were frequently divided as to whether we should lay siege to the cities from the countryside or whether we should go from the cities to the countryside and save the peasants, with the working class taking the lead. Were not the cotton pickers of Söke and Çukurova, the landless villagers of the east, the labourers, the tenant farmers groaning under the exploitation of aghas and masters waiting for us to come and save them? Is it we who have changed? Is it I, is it the people, the times, this place? Is it I who have changed, I who have become alienated from these parts, or is it they who have lost touch and gone, become estranged? I don’t know these lands any more. I, too, am a stranger here.

On the main roads where the mine-sweeping teams — with their young men, beloved sons, their hearts beating at every step with the fear of death — sweep in single rows; at the crossroads where armoured vehicles wait; at the checkpoints that rule one’s fate; while waiting for hours for no comprehensible reason at interminable roadworks; in the deserted countryside from which they had to turn back because of signs declaring ‘Dangerous from this point’ or ‘No entry! Access forbidden’; in the deserted villages, the solitude of remote hamlets, his loneliness, foreignness and helplessness increased a little more.

Where am I? Which country is this? Years ago when I was going around Bosnia, then Afghanistan and a short time ago Iraq, writing features on the theme of war, I used to know where I was and didn’t have to ask. There I was a proper foreigner. Perhaps that was why I wasn’t overwhelmed by a feeling of foreignness. I wasn’t embarrassed about being foreign. I wasn’t responsible for what I saw. I wasn’t an actor in the play. I was just an observer witnessing the suffering caused by calamity, the tragedy of man. However, here … where is this place? This lost country on the bottom and last leaf of a foldable Turkish road map. Where is this land crushed under its secrets, its suffering and the rebellion of its mountains?