Berji Kristin E-Book

Latife Tekin

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The cast-offs of modern urban society are driven out onto the edges of the city and left to make a life there for themselves. They are not, however, in any natural wilderness, but in a world of refuse and useless junk - a place which denies any form of sustainable life. Here, the unemployed, the homeless, the old and the bereft struggle to build shelters out of old tin cans, scavenge for food and fight against insuperable odds. And yet somehow they survive: it seems that society thrives on the garbage hills because it has always been built on one. In this dark fairy tale full of scenes taken from what has increasingly become a way of life for many inhabitants on this planet, Latife Tekin has written a grim parable of human destiny.

Leseprobe

Berji Kristin

Tales from the Garbage Hills

a novel by

Latife Tekin

Preface by John Berger Introduction by Saliha Paker Translated from the Turkish by Ruth Christie and Saliha Paker

To Ertuǧrul

Contents

Title PageDedicationRumour Preface by John BergerIntroduction by Saliha PakerTales from the Garbage HillsAcknowledgementsCopyright

RumourPreface by John Berger

I have never read another book like this one. And perhaps you haven’t either. True originality is unusually difficult to define because it gives the impression of existing for the first time and this — fortunately — precludes generalizations. Within an original work you lose your way. If you stay with it, you are captured, you are forced to reside there, and the experience becomes unforgettable. If you don’t like losing your way, you shut the book, you mutter Nonsense! and it remains closed to you, probably for ever.

It was several years ago I first lost my way in Latife Tekin’s book. I had already lost my way many times in Istanbul, the city she writes about. I was visiting people in the shanty-towns. I was often on the Bosphorus ferry plying between Asia and Europe. My feet got dusty with exactly the dust of the earth she describes. And suddenly what I was watching, what I was brushing shoulders with, what I was turning my back on, what I would never see, what I was deaf to, was given a voice in her book. A book in which I again lost myself, but this time in the labyrinth of her understanding.

Several years later, through mutual Turkish friends, we met, Latife and I. And during an entire evening we kept on laughing. Laughing, I think, at the inexplicable. For example, we’d have laughed a lot — if we’d known about it then — at the idea of my writing a preface to her book!

We were laughing partly because, without a proper common language between us, laughter was the best alternative to silence. (For different reasons, this is often the case in this book.) But also we were laughing at everything that can never be said anywhere. Two writers at the end of their tether, laughing about it. Such laughter is very Mediterranean. It begins where lucidity and sunlight say the same thing.

Of course Latife Tekin didn’t set out to be original. If the thought ever crossed her mind, it would have been before she was thirteen. Artists who retain such an ambition are ones who never grow up. The originality of Tekin’s mature book is the direct consequence of its story. Before her, no shanty-town had entered literature — had entered written narrative — as an entity in itself. If shanty-towns were there, they were there as décor or as social problems. In Tekin’s TalesFromTheGarbageHills a shanty-town community becomes the centre of the world, holding the stage and addressing the sky.

She has written down what before had never been written down. Other books by other writers will follow — perhaps have already followed — but their and our debt to her is enormous. It isn’t that she showed the way. We all lose our way and there are a hundred ways. But she showed that it was possible, possible for any reader anywhere in the world, to at last imagine the centre of the world as a shanty-town! If you want to do that, read this book.

It’s about language. Not because Latife is a post-modernist or a structuralist, but because she is familiar with the lives lived on the garbage hills. She knows deeply how nick-names, stories, rumours, jingles, gossip, jokes, repartees constitute a kind of home, even the most solid home, when everything else is temporary, makeshift, illegal, shifting and without a single guarantee. Wind, dust, wind. Yet the Tales save from oblivion more effectively than the roofs give shelter. Everything is polluted on the hills except the legendary names people earn with their lives, and the laughter provoked by those names. On the garbage hills laughter takes the arm of heartbreak. And death is venomous and everywhere.

The story-teller of the Tales is rumour. As a means of expression rumour is not much approved of in places where certitudes rule. Law courts. Ministries. The offices of managing directors. Colleges. Rumour is worse than myth for it is uncontrollable. The only big institution where rumour is rife is the Stock Exchange. The stock brokers deal with (and create) events in a nexus which is volatile, unpredictable, often inexplicable, risky and packed (over-populated with money). Rumour is a mass reaction to trying to follow, anticipate and hold together events which are always on the brink of chaos. This is why — astonishingly — Wall Street and the garbage hills have one thing in common. The noise of rumour.

Otherwise of course they are the opposite poles of this planet, one occupied by winners, the other by losers: one set of rumours signalling the best way to make money, and the other set of rumours whispering about the latest crazy slender hope of survival. The first on the verge of mental breakdown — as the pharmaceutical record shows. The second on the verge of fairy story – so long as one remembers that fairy stories, when first told, were as cruel as life.

Rumour is born of the irrepressible force of a community’s imagination deprived of shelter or any guarantees. And Latife Tekin has found here the voice of rumour. I don’t know how she found that shanty voice. But it came to her like genius. There are comparable pages by Joyce where he found the male voice of drunken rumour. Tekin’s rumour is feminine and sober. Never maudlin. Never shocked. Never rhetorical. Never flinching. As if rumour were an angel with a sword.

She walks blindfolded through wherever people gather on the hills — the car battery factory, the brickworks, the linen factory, Nato Avenue, the detergent factory, the hen houses, the grocery stores, the trade union meetings, the mosques, the cardboard homes, the brothels. Blindfolded and dry-eyed, she hears and therefore sees all.

Why say angel? She brings a promise that nobody can not believe in and yet nobody thinks true. The promise is that again and again, from the garbage, the scattered feathers, the ashes and the broken bodies, something new and beautiful may be born. Perhaps rumour here is a demon, not an angel — for she cannot stop raising hopes which do not last. But wherever I fell in this world, I would pray for her, angel or demon, to come and I would listen to her and she would revive me as she revives so many …

Introductionby Saliha Paker

When Latife Tekin’s first book, DearCheekyDeath(SevgiliArsızÖlüm) came out in 1983, breaking through the cloud of silence after the military intervention of 1980, it was hailed as ‘magic’. This term implied a degree of astonishment on the part of the critical establishment: some affinity with Marquezian fiction, yes, but also something unique in the way a Turkish writer was exploiting fantasy which was not a means of escapism but of reconstructing an individual experience that was authentic and indigenous. The following introduction, written by Tekin herself for the first edition of her book, gives an insight into her background and way of writing:

‘I was born in 1957 in the village of Karacafenk, near the town of Bünyan in the province of Kayseri. I started school as soon as I learned to walk. The school was the men’s living room in our house. I learned to read and write as I played with the jinn under the divans. Jinn and fairies used to live under the divans in Karacefenk. I spent my childhood among them, secretly joining their community. I went to see their homes, their weddings, and learned their language, their day games and night games. My father used to work in Istanbul. I forget now who told me that my mother was a strange woman with a broken heart. She was literate, sewed, gave injections, and knew Kurdish and Arabic. She used to enquire from the gypsies that came to the village about places and people unknown to me. Her searchings for her past were the first pains that touched my childhood. My father used to come back from Istanbul with sacks full of money and gathered the villagers. Our house was full of strange gadgets, magic metals. I had no idea of their use…

‘In 1966 I came to live in Istanbul. It felt like a sharp pain that split up my childhood. Unfulfilled dreams tore apart the people that I grew up with. My father quickly became working class, then gradually fell into unemployment. Three brothers worked on construction sites. I finished high school, slipping away like a trembling shadow from seven brothers and sisters. I paid the price of moving away from fear and loneliness to go to school: subjected to a thousand denials and pressures, I was incredibly shaken. I fought hard to keep up with the city and was badly bruised. During my struggles I fell apart from those that I grew up with. But I resisted in order not to lose my own values, my language, and the constant and passionate love that those people bore me. This book is my reward from the people I grew up with for my resistance…’

DearCheekyDeath was based on Tekin’s childhood and adolescent experiences of the village and of the outskirts of the metropolis, and it was unlike anything that had previously been written in the genre of rural or urban fiction. The ‘Village Novel’ had been established as a major genre in Turkish fiction since the 1950s in the predominant mode of social/ist realism, focusing on the problems and dynamics of rural society from the ‘enlightened’ point of view of the educated writer of peasant origin with a mission. The rural fiction of Yaşar Kemal transcended this genre in its use of myth and in epic scope and style. The urban novel, on the other hand, bore the stamp of the ‘intellectual’ left-wing author, chiefly concerned with the tensions brought about by social change, political conflict, and by a republican ideology based on westernization. The novel itself was an adopted genre, introduced from Western literature in the second half of the 19th century when the Ottoman Empire came under political and economic pressures, and social and cultural influences from Europe. It was used initially as a vehicle for a critical attitude towards family and society, differences between Eastern and Western values and ways of life, and represented a reaction to the fantasy and escapism of the Eastern romance. An acute sense of realism, however, did not emerge till the early years of the new, proud but poverty stricken republic founded (1923) on the remains of the Empire that fell at the end of the first World War. By the 1950s, social realism had become the formative mode determining the conventions of the modern Turkish novel, regardless of the urban/rural distinction. Society was the sacred area of concern in the novel while the inner world of the individual found its best expression in the short story. Since the 1960s, however, both the novel and the short story have gained a rich diversity in subject matter, scope and style while still holding on to the realistic tradition. This is largely due to the proliferation in fiction by women who have proved to be less fearful of exploring new ground. While some boldly imaginative women writers in the 1960s came under critical pressure, either stopped writing for a long time or changed their course and fell more in line with mainstream fiction, others more confident in the 1970s went their own way. Barriers against introspection, fantasy and sexuality were broken down.

Even in this broader context, however, Latife Tekin stood as a challenge to the mainstream fiction of the 1980s by rejecting ‘realism’ in favour of a highly metaphorical perception of reality in which fantasy is an essential element. In conjunction with fresh narrative forms, Tekin developed a figurative style which is vigorous and innovative. She has often expressed the desire to forge ‘a language of the deprived’, one that gives expression not only to their way of life but also to their outlook on life, perception of reality, sense of humour and dreams. In this respect BerjiKristin, her second book (1984), can be considered a breakthrough in modern Turkish fiction.

In BerjiKristin:TalesfromtheGarbageHills, the squatter settlements built on rubbish tips may appear bizarre or unreal to some readers, but in fact refer to a ‘real’ phenomenon in the Istanbul of the 1960s. In the experience of millions who, since the 1960s, have been flowing into the big cities to make a living, squatterland was an extension of the village. But as seen in BerjiKristin life there, unlike in the village, had different dynamics and was subject to sharply dramatic as well as gradual changes. Makeshift dwellings could be set up overnight (‘gecekondu’, the Turkish word for squatter hut, means ‘set up/perched overnight’) but razed to the ground the next day. Even in the 1990s it is not uncommon to have police raids on squatter huts built on land unlawfully possessed. Such news, accompanied by photographs conveying the drama especially of women and children torn away from their homes, still make the headlines. While struggles continue, especially in pockets or frontiers, the primitive dwellings of thirty years ago have been transformed into two or three storey buildings, roads have been built, public transport has been provided by local authorities. But ‘Rubbish Road’ has remained the name of a bus stop on the main road from the Bosphorus to the city, the mosque with the tin minaret was still standing in 1988, and those who witnessed the survival of the baby whose cradle landed on a treetop, have themselves survived to pass on their ‘tales’ to their sons and daughters. Tekin’s narrative, akin to the oral tradition of the ‘masal’ (fairy/folk tale) is based on the testimony of the older generation of squatters who witnessed the genesis of a subculture of enormous social significance despite its marginal situation. Assuming the position of a detached but devoted narrator rather than a patronizing intellectual onlooker, Tekin has reconstructed the dreams and realities of squatterland in specific detail and with a uniquely metaphoric use of the language, without overlooking the humorous attitudes, ironic perception and emotional vitality of the community amid the filth and poverty of its living conditions. The squatter settlement, which had so far existed in Turkish fiction as the periphery whose inhabitants were taken into account in terms of the social class they represented, became in BerjiKristin a world of its own.

This is essentially a man’s world, but women appear in it as strangely powerful figures, despite their subordination. Their world in Tekin’s fiction maintains a distinctive interaction with its male counterpart and womanhood is conceived as a secret society resisting and, at times, subverting oppressive forces. However, like the majority of Turkish women writers, Tekin makes no claim to feminism in the Western sense, which is regarded as a separating and restricting factor for a fiction writer. What lies behind this stance are the specific conditions created by a secularist ideology of a republican state (which tends to shun any form of separation or segregation), the desire for total social involvement, and the need to address a wide readership. It is interesting, for instance, that in BerjiKristin the rise and decline of the community on the garbage hills is symbolized by the female attributions in the title: ‘Berji’ for innocence, and ‘Kristin’ for prostitution.

The rich variations in Latife Tekin’s language, which give expression to a powerfully creative inner voice, will inevitably be recognized as having sparked off the imagination of a whole new generation of writers, regardless of gender. Following the trends in the West, the impressive works of Orhan Pamuk, for instance, appear as a subtle challenge to the conventional novel from within the mainstream, but the making of the modern Turkish novel has also to account for the consistently unpredictable originality of such writers as Latife Tekin.

Tales from the Garbage Hills

One winter night, on a hill where the huge refuse bins came daily and dumped the city’s waste, eight shelters were set up by lantern-light near the garbage heaps. In the morning the first snow of the year fell, and the earliest scavengers saw these eight huts pieced together from materials bought on credit — sheets of pitchpaper, wood from building sites, and breezeblocks brought from the brickyards by horse and cart. Not even stopping to drop the sacks and baskets from their backs, they all ran to the huts and began a lively exchange with the squatters who were keeping watch. A harsh and powerful wind kept cutting short their words and at one point almost swept the huts away. The scavengers pointed out that the ramshackle walls and makeshift roofs would never stand up to the wind, so the squatters decided to rope down the roofs and nail supports to the walls.

When the garbage trucks had come and gone, the simit-sellers on the way to the garbage heard that eight huts had been built on the slopes and spread the news through the neighbouring warehouses, workshops and coffee houses. By noon people had begun to descend on the hillside like snow. Janitors, pedlars and simit-sellers all arrived with pickaxes, closely followed by people who had left their villages to move in with their families in the city, and by others roaming the hills behind the city in the hope of building a hut. Men and women, young and old, spread in all directions. Kneeling and rising they measured with feet and outstretched arms. Then with their spades they scratched crooked plans in the earth. By evening Rubbish Road had become a road of bricks and blocks and pitchpaper. That night in snowfall and lantern-light a hundred more huts were erected in the snow.

Next morning, by the garbage heaps — downhill from the factories which manufactured lightbulbs and chemicals, and facing the china factory — a complete neighbourhood was fathered by mud and chemical waste, with roofs of plastic basins, doors from old rugs, oilcloth windows and walls of wet breezeblocks.

Throughout the day bits and pieces arrived to furnish the houses, and the remaining women and children, with sacks on their backs and babies in arms, entered their homes. Mattresses were unrolled and kilim-rugs spread on the earthen floors. The damp walls were hung with faded pictures and brushes with their blue bead good-luck charms, cradles were slung from the roofs and a chimney pipe was knocked through the sidewall of every hut.

The factory workers gathered at the windows to watch, laughing at the belongings arriving in horse-drawn carts and the people chasing up and down. All day long there were whistles, catcalls, jeers. In the evening a weariness settled on the huts and the inhabitants dozed off under the wet walls, and the roofs creaked in the wind. By the time the factory nightshift had left, the founders of the community were fast asleep. The factory machinery had stopped; lights were out. The hill was engulfed in pitch darkness, but in the small hours a wind sneaked up, loosened the rooftops, and carried them away. And the babies too, asleep in the roof-cradles, flew off along with the roofs.

The hut people woke with snow falling on their lashes and faces still warm from deep sleep. They thought at first they were having a wonderful dream; the sky had turned to snow and filled their huts. Then their cries rent the night. Men and women, old and young, rushed out in their underwear; lanterns were lit; everyone turned out to search for roofs and babies. Keening and lamenting, the women tied magic knots in their handkerchiefs and headscarves to arrest the passage of the wind, praying it would carry the babies no further.

One roof was found in the garden of the lightbulb factory, come to rest and stuck between two mulberry trees. The baby from the roof-cradle was hoarse from crying and its eyes were enormous with fear. The other roofs were lined up side by side on the level ground around the china factory and the babies were out of their cradles, crawling about in the snow and playing with broken shards. In the wind the clatter mingled with their shrill little cries.

Fervently the women hugged their ice-cold babies and sheltered in a coal shed a little way off. The men dragged the roofs back, one or two at a time and, lifting them over the walls, tethered them with stout ropes and secured them with battens to prevent them flying off again. They wound the ropes round the legs of the long seats which lined their walls, and whenever the wind blew hard they hung on tight and pulled on the ropes and battens.