03/03/2018
In Turkish, we add suffixes to words for the time and person they are about. One kind of past tense is called mişli geçmis zaman // past tense with miş but it is also common to call it the learned past tense, the rumor past tense, the heard past tense.
Turkish fairy tales start with the words "bir varmış, bir yokmuş" meaning something like "once it was, then it wasn't" When I was a kid I thought of it as "there was one, there wasn't one". mişli geçmiş zaman felt like a special fairy tale language for kids but I was also hearing a lot from adults as I grew older, like at the weekly meetings of my mothers and wives of my father’s friends. “Suzan's daughter failed 10th grade again-miş.” Or sometimes they used it to talk to us kids with -miş making sentences like “My son is going to be a genius doctor-muş.”
The suffixes which change according to the time they refer to, then change again according to the person they are about. Then, if one wants to use -miş but emphasize that they were there when the incident happened they could say “görmüştüm // I had seen it”. But it also gives an unreliable edge, a doubtful meaning to the action like in “yapmıştım // I had done it” or “yapmış mıydım? // Had I done it?”
The list goes on and on, but it feels quite impossible for me to explain the individual flexible trigger power of each possible version of the mişli geçmiş zaman suffix in one’s mind to anyone who doesn’t speak the language.
But Kreuzberg can. If you go to Oranienstrasse 18, cross the street and look up maybe you will feel it without having to understand it.
1949 born, Turkish woman artist Ayşe Ermen made this art installation titled Am Haus, which literally means On the House, as part of a bigger exhibition in 1994. Whenever I pass by this building instinctively look up, identify the suffixes, the artist, myself with the artist, feel proud, miss Turkey and feel glad I am away from Turkey all at the same time so very intensely. And I pass by this building every day. Then, I look at the endless possibilities of fairytale endings and realize where I am. I am in Europe, Germany, Berlin, Kreuzberg, Oranienstrasse where right under this building is located a cafe and bar named after Arthur Rimbaud’s most famous poem, Bateau Ivre. It means The Drunken Boat. Sarhoş Gemi. This place opened in 1997, but time is not so relevant here in this neighborhood or in Rimbaud’s poems. He is a timeless poet, an endless stream of emotions, love, lust, and darkness.
I learned about Rimbaud’s life by reading Kathy Acker’s collage of his life and work in "In Memoriam to Identity". I had read the poem that gave this cafe its name before, I think because the column of a poet in a big Turkish literary magazine where he published selected submission had the name The Travel Journal of Rimbaud, or something like that. I remember dreaming of being published there once. Now, I can’t imagine writing fiction or poetry in Turkish, my mother tongue for reasons so complex that they could only truly be expressed in my mother tongue.
Whenever my mind makes the connection between this building and the cafe, and the cafe with Rimbaud a bittersweet feeling takes over me. I know I will never know Rimbaud's soul with the details hidden in his French passion. I miss a friend I never had. I know Patti Smith loves him too. She took a trip to the town he was born when she was young and wrote about it in “Just Kids”.
Do you ever feel like everything you know is based on other people's opinions?
Where do their opinions come from?
There is no surveillance camera that can shoot every single side and corner of an U-Bahn wagon. That is why there are more graffitis than warning signs. It's certainly not because they don’t give a f**k. They live for the f**k.
Nobody was surprised when I announced the 4th theme was going to be surveillance. The word itself has a cold, technical, 1984 feeling attached to it, but the concept is very close to all of us. Who hasn't been told they were watched as they were growing up? Be it god, your mother, your babysitter, teacher or guardian angel, all humans were given the same narrative. We are not alone here. First, when we are younger we are told that we are watched and thus protected, when we get older, well, the excuse is the same. If you choose to believe in religion you agree to be “under his eye” all your life. It will determine whether you will swim in a sea of your favorite beverage or burn without ever being able to turn to ash.
Is it all because surveillance is the only way to confirm our existence? Like a pinch? Is it something we need like air, like water?
Rimbaud's mother was obsessed with the way society would see her kids. She forced them to get a posh classical education and watched them closely to make sure it would happen. Rimbaud called her “mouth of darkness”.
He did everything in his 16-year-old power to free from the surveillance of her mother and ended up on a train to Paris to become a poet and expose himself to the whole world.
Many people think he died at the age of 21, but he only stopped writing and traveled the world as a merchant, which is pretty much the same thing for those of us who are still trying to fight the pressure of unwanted surveillance by putting what we want the world to see out there.
RHNK #4 is about us. People who come to Berlin to take control of their stories by telling them through fiction, poems, and photographs. When I started RHNK I wanted to create a platform for voices that say things like “Am Haus” in English and eyes that would like to read them anyway.
We hope you'll enjoy reading our new issue and share your thoughts.
From Kreuzberg with love,
Nazlı
