Perhaps he's all I'll ever be—alone, shutting out the world, stubborn. With a packet of cigarettes that my child shares in silence. Perhaps it's all I can be.
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I lost my mother when she was finally turning a new page for both of us. I can't describe the feeling of disappointment, of chagrin that she left me with. Cancer stole that opportunity from me.
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Maybe my immense dislike of cooking and food has everything to do with the gendered aspect of it, the way I have seen my mother spend days and nights in the kitchen. Maybe I did not want to confine myself to it like her, which affected my ways with the food everyone else loves.
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Perhaps it was through my mother’s meals that we were able to enter their community with our Kurdish language and identity. Perhaps this was how we managed to feel as safe as any other family in the neighbourhood.
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I and most of the women close to me lived there and I didn’t recall us ceding the city to the men. Here in Ethos, as if to vindicate me, is the unmitigated identification of Istanbul with its women.
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The personal integration my parents wished for me was a process that ignored my Georgian heritage. I never claimed it and I never learned to claim it either, because I feared the social downfall my parents warned me about.
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My mother threw away all the toys I had once held dear. She told me it was because they had gone dark, blackened, covered in soot from a fire in the apartment, a fire she said that had been the work of a warlock who wanted to destroy her.
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The seekh kebab roll exists somewhat synchronously to the way I do. What did somebody call a food they ate so often that it almost didn’t taste like anything anymore, except memory and instinct?
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The fact that the burden of proof is on us who oppose the whitewashing of Moses speaks volumes about the conditions of our seeing today. That is, whiteness is seen as neutral. I sense this in the very need to dig into these sources and linguistics to prove that Moses was not white when such a notion should be obvious. And the shady discourse of racism makes us ask: Just how Black was he? Is “ādam” Black enough?
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The 7th-century Najdi Bedouin poet Qays ibn al-Mullawah or more popularly known as Majnun (مجنون) crossed the Arabian desert, travelled through Persian literature, Hindi cinema and ended up on the door of my childhood home.
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Ilker Hepkaner and Sezgin Inceel are co-hosts of Yine Yeni Yeniden 90’lar, a podcast which analyzes 90s Turkish pop music from feminist and queer lenses. They wrote about the first pop songs they remember, and how it relates to issues of nostalgia and belonging.
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When I watched the movies I watched and listened to the music I listened to, I felt like Rapunzel, looking through a window at people living their lives and desperately trying to emulate it up in my own little tower. I didn’t like looking at the white world through a window and not being able to experience that life in my peripheral country, but I couldn’t help it.
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