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 Nostalgia in the Periphery

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Only 40 copies for sale!

Only 40 copies for sale!

Nostalgia in the Periphery is a limited edition bundle of serigraphy and digital prints from a diverse range of writers and artists who investigate the golden age of global popular culture. The personal essays and short stories in the project ask discomforting questions about who gets to remember and who gets to be forgotten.

The print version of Nostalgia in the periphery will launch in Istanbul and will be available from our online store for 75$. Ten copies will be reserved to be sold domestically in Turkey for a reduced price. We would love to see you at our launch event at Arthere on May 6th 2022.

 

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Introduction

 

This bouquet of printed matter you are holding in your hand started out as a series of blog articles on the eve of 2020, right before the world as we knew it started to gradually crumble. As members of a generation born into a moment of global cultural uniformity, we were wondering how much our perceptions of the past translated into each other. The further we got from analysing our experiences with universalised academic terminology and the closer we got to the inimitable idiosyncrasies of our emotional states, the easier it became to relate to each other. Our adoration of Hollywood, pop music and junk food did not entirely cease to become embarrassing, of course. But it gave us an opportunity to reveal our vulnerabilities to each other in unprecedented ways. 

The next thing we knew, we found ourselves pulling out bittersweet memories from old tupperware boxes and spreading them out on a picnic table. Being from the periphery means that every revelation you make about yourself is inevitably wrapped in embarrassment. Are we worthy of talking about our feelings in public? Are we worthy of being recognised, let alone be appreciated? These questions became even more acute as the cataclysm clenched its steel jaws around us and amplified the injustices that separate us from the centre of the world. 

At moments, it seemed indulgent to go down memory lane when the world around us was on fire. Shouldn’t we be busy with survival? But then, we knew that we deserved so much more than that.

This lovingly crafted bundle of paper in your hands is testimony to our irrepressible desire to thrive. 

Contents

Nostalgia all over Baščaršija- Adnan Mahmutović & Esmir Prlja

Fourteen-page serigraphy comic book written by Adnan Mahmutović and illustrated by Esmir Prlja.

Folding- Zeynep Beler

A single sheet of A3 with high-quality serigraphy print on one side and a short story on the other, both by Zeynep Beler.

Tipitip- Efe Levent & Cincinius 

A single sheet of A3 with high-quality serigraphy print by Cincinius on one side and a short story by Efe Levent on the other.

Morphing Flashbacks- Sharanya Deepak & Damla Özdemir

Three A5 sheets of digitally printed collages by Damla Özdemir and a personal essay by Sharanya Deepak on three sheets of A4.

Cut-off marks on the Château- Ayşegül Dinççağ

Single A4 sheet with an architectural drawing of Haydarpaşa train station on one side and a personal essay by Ayşegül Diççağ on the other.


 

 Nostalgia All over Baščaršija

Adnan Mahmutović & Esmir Prlja

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 Folding

Zeynep Beler

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Folding

Re: Tidings


Hi B. Sorry for my long overdue reply - you know how it is with moving. I’m glad you managed to get out of the city this summer. As it is, I’m still exactly where you left me - still unpacking and settling in, while racked by paroxysms of guilt and self-loathing for not getting any work done in the meantime.

How’d I know you would be more intrigued by the courtyard below than anything I’ve written you about the building or even my own flat? I am too, in a way. It feels like such a classic Istanbul mystery. To answer your question: no, I don’t know who owns that flat. ​​​​Either she got too old to keep coming or she’s dead, but either way, none of us transplants have actually seen her. She used to come here with her mother every summer, as the earliest proprietor of the building, a tennis-y gentleman who cracked an unfunny joke about their swooping in on brooms come 1st of May, told us during an apartment meeting. Get it? Two single women gonna be witches, amirite? Hilarious. Anyway, he’s tried to get ahold of her for a while, in vain. It is a bit infuriating - I don’t care what you do with your flat, but send someone to clean up your shit, maybe? And I could swear there is some new junk down there every single day.

Part of the reason I’ve been so busy is that a few weeks back I took it upon myself to also sort out the courtyard. I told E. I needed to do it because all the muck is generating moisture and mosquitoes and making it harder for me to sort out our own veranda, but the truth is I’m kind of drawn to the place. It seemed to conceal something familiar during a time when everything was unfamiliar that was going to help get me out of this rut.

But you know me - it’s probably more the usual instinct to evade reality. Either way, I don’t like staring at this dump all day. It looks like the personification of my garbage mind. So I went for it.

I cleared out the plastic chairs and stuff first, the stuff I told you about - real old, mid century-looking plastic chairs. Then I started clearing out the smaller stuff which, I’m telling you, is super random and I still haven’t gotten to the last of it. So far, I’ve found all sorts of trinkets, coins, soda caps, IDs, some super old - like ID’s of people from the 50’s and that. I know you think I’m a hoarder as it is, but some of this stuff could be valuable. Or like I said, inspiration. (I can hear you say that’s how people end up hoarders - shut up.) 

I found one of those Akbil smart tickets - turquoise, same as the one I had when I first moved to Istanbul. They were already phasing it out and all they had left was turquoise. I used it a bunch anyway and kept it on my keychain for years after that, but it got lost eventually. Istanbul legend, am I right? 

Anyway, enough gushing about the gross courtyard above which I have incidentally started living and my wonderful life in general. How is the road trip going? Maybe on the way back you’ll stop by? LMK. Kisses, Z.


Re: re: re: re: Tidings

Thank you for being as excited about this as I am. Yes, I am still digging around and finding more stuff, even though E. thinks I’m disgusting and obsessed. He thinks I’m going to “bring fleas into the house” - I think he means scabies? XD At any rate, the courtyard has been yielding some interesting things.

You ask if people could be tossing crap into it from the apartments above. Fair question, but we’re the only ones directly above them. The apartment above us is a duplex, they only come a few times a year and their place has been shuttered all summer. Trust me, I would know if anyone came. 

Anyway, I keep thinking I’ve gotten rid of most of the stuff and swept the place so it looked halfway decent. Then I don’t know, over the night I guess the wind blows more stuff around, so I’ll go down there to sweep it again. And the next day, repeat. Metaphor for artistic process much (or reminder I should be doing my job instead)? It was funny at first, but now it’s starting to give me the heebie jeebies. And on top of that I’ve been unearthing all these toys out of what’s starting to feel like the post-apocalyptic rubble of some creepy toy museum. Not even cool ones but like, a lot of dollar store figurines from the ‘90’s and Kinder Chocolate Surprises. Do they still have those? And the weirdest of all: this toy soldier that looks super archaic, more WWI soldier than GI Joe, with a helmet and straight up what looks like a bayonet. Super sturdy, I’m guessing Bakelite or whatever they used back then. And it doesn’t have that flat part around the feet that this type of toy soldier would have. 

Maybe that’s a weird thing to notice but it reminded me of this story my dad told me when I was little. He had this big white scar in the fleshy part under his left thumb and one day I asked him about it. He said that when he was a kid, he had a fixation with cutting off those flat puddles that toy soldiers have around their feet to keep them upright. He would just take a knife and cut that part off and free the feet. He just thought it looked janky, I guess.

So one day he’s cutting off the flat part - he was maybe what, nine, around the same age I was when he told me that story - and the knife slipped and he straight up stabbed himself in the other hand. He said that the knife went right in.

I remember him telling me he was fascinated because there was no pain and no blood, even when he removed the knife. He said he could see white stuff - fat - and sinews and stuff. He excitedly runs off to show one of his aunts. The aunt flipped out. She grabbed him and ran the tap and shoved his hand under it, and he said that’s when the blood came like a faucet, along with pain, and he started screaming.

Yeah anyway! There are other trinkets with similar evocations but I just wanted to give you a preview. Too morbid? Anyway, the pics are adorable. Hope you guys are still having a good time. Let me know when your plan materializes further xx



Re:re: re: re: re: Tidings


Great tidings indeed! Incidentally, you’ll be coming at the best time to enjoy it here - the crashing wave of September deadlines has ended, the weather is bearable. Hygiene in, around and below our flat has been achieved and as I’d predicted, there is a considerable decrease in mosquitoes at our level, too. As for the latter, I haven’t found any objects lately, but for sure we can check it out - still not a peep from the purported owners. 

One of the last things I found there - and I would have missed this one because it was practically buried in some, like, half-disintegrated garbage bag in a corner that was full of damp soil, leaves, worms and mosquitos all coagulated together into a single lump... 

You remember Rubik’s cubes, right? Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when we were kids, there was this whole puzzle craze? That brand had a whole line of similar puzzles, I don’t know if you remember. I kept an eye out for this particular one for years but I think it was discontinued. Thanks to Google I’ve just found out that it was called Rubik’s Magic. 

It was one of my first toys. Obviously it was no toy intended for a toddler. It was my dad’s and then became mine. I remember being obsessed with it and I can either also remember, or was told, that I used to gnaw on it when I was teething. Makes sense, because it kind of resembles a bendy biscuit or a chocolate bar, one that’s made out of something like clear resin. It has eight tiles with five multicolored hoops against a black background - super ‘80s - and your objective is to interlink them by folding and unfolding the puzzle into all these configurations. 

It always seemed kind of mysteriously esoteric to me, like a live Mobius strip or a demonstration of space-time folding in on itself, discontinuous but never separate, connected by wormholes or whatever. I feel like this thing informed my outlook on life somehow, or my drive for finding out how the world works. Unless, of course, that’s more likely just my dad’s geekiness that permeated every aspect of our lives, including his choice of baby teether.

It’s so weird that I can so clearly remember on a visceral level the exact same almost-subaudible sound the wires make when you fold and unfold the puzzle. I’m surprised the thing is still in good working condition - aside from a very fine patina of micro-scratches. I just noticed that there are these, I’m loath to call them tooth marks, but that’s what they look like. Maybe a dog has been at it. Or a teething baby, lol!?

But - as usual - I digress. Text me once you cross the border, yeah? xx, z.


 

 

 TipiTip

Efe Levent & Cincinius

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TipiTip

Tipitip gets up early every morning to make sure he gets his implausibly large nose into as much trouble as possible. By the time you unwrap the brightly-coloured chewing gum wrappers, he is dressed up in his full attire. His thick-rimmed glasses sit precariously on the aforementioned nose. He wears a yellow cardigan that buttons halfway up to his chest, a polka-dotted green bowtie, a pair of dayglo orange trousers and occasionally a peculiar round hat that defies description. He occasionally gets stuck in traffic jams, presumably as he is rushing to work. His blond hair and formal outfit strike a remarkable contrast with fellow motorists who are drawn with pot-bellies, hairy-shoulders, and bushy moustaches. Among these men whose appearance is supposed to be typical for his part of the world, poor Tipitip looks like a novice cold war spy trying to conceal a hidden camera with his awkwardly sized fashion accessories. 


The gum around which Tipitip is wrapped was a chunky rectangle, coarsely textured with two narrow arches. It would balance on your tongue perfectly while you pulled it gently toward your molars.  The tiny piece of joyfully coloured wax paper, with a simple story barely over two frames, was the real reason you spent your pocket change on Tipitip. You used to love flattening the creases on the marbled paper with your chubby fingers and smell its sweet fragrance before reading the comic. You would stuff your pockets with his little stories for family road trips under the scorching summer sun. You would pull them out carefully so they don't fly off from the fully rolled-down windows of the family car. Unlike your real friends, Tipitip could be whatever you wanted him to be, a portable blank canvas on which you can project all the qualities you wished real people had.  

Tipitip pours himself a cup of coffee and wonders what loopy shenanigans he will get up to today...


By your late teens, you had a falling out with Tipitip. His clean humour and his subtle-bourgeois morals, felt as trite as the synthetic flavour of the bubblegum he is wrapped around. His outdated sense of fashion started to make him look like your grandparents’ friends, those who would perpetually tell you how much you have grown up. When you were barely fifteen, puberty descended on your head like an ACME anvil, leaving you flat on the pavement. By the time you scraped yourself off with a spatula, Tipitip and his saccharine sense of humour had started to seem too tame, too ineffective at challenging the norms that you were so eager to defy. 

So you got into more in-your-face, fuck-the-system type shit. A clumsy little fella with a chunky bowtie was not cool anymore. T-shirts with the pope smoking a massive joint was cool, stickers in which well known corporate logos were redesigned to say: "FUCK OFF" was cool, stencil graffitis showing Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders boxing bare-knuckled was cool. You spat the candied taste of gum from your mouth and wrapped new words around your tongue: "Down with globalism! down with neoliberalism!" you said, sometimes to no one, sometimes to a full room. In spite of all the promises the entertainment industry made to you, you would never be a ghostbuster or a ninja turtle. You were never gonna defend your house from robbers by strategically placing your toys around. Your brief appearance on the world stage was never intended to have a speaking part. You started to feel like the centre of the world was trying to sedate you with junk food and blockbusters. You were suspicious of everything. 

For starters, you couldn't shake off the idea that Tipitip might be an undercover CIA operative who is sent to destabilise your country. No one around you looked, lived or acted as he did. You had never been to a house like the one where Tipitip and his wife Tipitoş lived. But when you saw him staring at a pile of dishes by the kitchen door vowing to similarly bespectacled Tipitoş that he would soon buy her a dishwasher; or when you saw him clumsily fail to repair his car on the lawn of his freshly mowed garden; or when you saw him in the bathroom informing a visibly vexed fireman that the fire engine is his only hope for a shower during a water outage, you felt like you knew your way around their cosy suburban home. 

It is the exact same house gringos have lived in for an immense period of human history. One that stretches from The Flintstones to The Jetsons. 

You really couldn't shake off the idea that Tipitip might be an undercover CIA operative who is sent to destabilise your country. But that seems unfair. Because despite your young age you already knew what a CIA agent looks like. You saw Paul Henze on TV denying allegations of US involvement in the 1980 military coup. He then praised the same coup for liquidating the terrorists who had infiltrated the country's largest trade union. Henze, the *real* spy; with his ill-kept beard, his tobacco-stained yellow teeth, his permanent frown and his crocodile-green polyester suit looks nothing like dear old Tipitip. The man who called president Carter on September 12 1980 to announce: "our boys did it", is more like what Dr No and Fu Manchu would look like if they had been Caucasian. 

Tipitip is painting a football pattern over a cannonball, so unsuspecting passersby will be tempted to give it a hard kick. 

There is no turning back now. Tipitip has unravelled into your memories for good. His blond hair, his suburban home and his outlandish sense of fashion have entwined around your spine like poison ivy. As you start to get older you will start to look like all the *other* men in Tipitip’s world. Hair will start sprouting all over you like a dark forest. You will sweat profusely, no matter how much deodorant you spray into the ozone. Even your mother will half-jokingly threaten to wax your shoulders while you are asleep. You will hate going to the beach for about three years. Then all of a sudden, you will stop caring.

Tipitip is walking on all fours next to a sign that reads: "do not step on the grass."

Tipitip is appearing as a guest on a late-night talk show. The presenter is a jug-eared comedian whose career took a downhill turn after a series of ill-calculated political statements. You used to be a big fan of his cynicism in your early twenties when the angry phase of your adolescence was at its peak. He had a boiling rage against the mediocrity of society. His raw anger made you feel alive. Over a decade later his sense of righteous indignation makes you shiver with discomfort. You have long stopped hanging out with friends who force you to watch his youtube clips: "This is the last one, valla I promise you gonna love this one..." The comedian’s all-black suit and red paisley neckerchief reflect the persisting ambition to be remembered as more than just a "funny guy". 

"We have a surprise guest with us tonight at the studio, who is sure to revive some cherished childhood memories. Let's see if you will remember him!" he says, obsessively fixing the collar of his shirt...


Tipitip appears from behind a heavy corduroy curtain as the studio band kicks in with a drumroll and a brass-heavy upbeat jingle, which may or may not be the theme tune for the show. The crowd cheers in recognition. Tipitip points to his nose and winks at the crowd as if to say: "I know how you recognised me." As he makes his way to the couch he steps on a banana peel and falls on his ass, sending the room into roaring laughter. The presenter claps mockingly with an enormous phoney smile plastered on his face. 

He is not the only one in the room who has undergone a makeover. Tipitip now looks like an IT technician in his early 30's with a short-sleeve-starch-white shirt and a reassuringly oversized necktie with magenta stripes. He rubs his behind while making his way to the leather couch. The presenter cuts over the fading laughter to declare: "you have done it again Tipitip!"

Tipitip bashfully scratches the back of his head. "I have, haven't I?" His self-awareness sends a ripple of chuckles across the auditorium. 


"So! Tipitip! While everyone in the entertainment sector is starting to turn into dinosaurs you almost seem to be getting younger every day. To what do you owe your eternal youth?"


"Why to being a cartoon character of course!"


The room claps and applauds. Amused and bewildered in equal measure.


"That must help of course. But you have also changed your style haven't you?"


"Well yes. My agent believes that I have a great nostalgic appeal for millennials who have grown up with my face. But I need to adapt to the times to stay relevant. The world is not what it was back in the ‘80s and ‘90s."


"You can say that again!” He turns meaningfully to the camera, fixing his collar for the umpteenth time. “So, what kind of changes have you made exactly?" 


"Well, the packaging has changed for starters. I am now sold in resealable cardboard multi-packs. They sort of look like an envelope and the cartoons are printed inside the flap as opposed to individual wrappers."


"Cutting costs?" He directs the question to his guest but ends the sentence by turning to the audience for approval. Murmurs emerge from among the seats. Is this where the gloves come off? 


"I think of it more as modernising." 


"Sure... I hope we can count on the humour being the same?"


"Absolutely! I get into the same loopy shenanigans and invent clumsy solutions for everyday problems. I think people in Turkey need a good clean laugh today more than they ever did before." 


"Is that because..."


You turn off the TV. You know where the rest of the interview is going to go. The pretentious presenter will bring up the allegations about Tipitip's involvement with the CIA and he will detract by making a silly little gag. Then there will be some back and forth about whether the mission of comedy is to enlighten or entertain the masses. You are too old for either of them. 

Tipitip has returned backstage after the show. He looks like a squirrel, mouth filled with his own chewing gum. He keeps popping a new one as soon as the fruity taste starts to fade. Back in the day, it used to linger for much longer.





 

 Morphing Flashbacks

Sharanya Deepak & Damla Özdemir

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Morphing Flashbacks

It is sometime in 2002, my sister and I are in the car with my parents, a white Maruti Suzuki my dad proudly cleans every morning. He jerks the gears and brakes suddenly as we hit our heads on the soft cushions in front of us as my mother turns to check on us from the front. My sister is sitting with her knees hugged to her stomach, and her feet on the seat, she peers at my mother from in-between her knees. I am more prim, even though I am scared of my father’s driving, I sit stoically at the back with a contorted, sideways smile. “Scaredy cat,”  my mother says to me and everyone laughs, except my father and I. We hate car banter, we always will. As we drive through the city, we cross a large shop with an M sign outside. I realise it is a restaurant, and there is a statue of a smiling clown under the sign, which is coloured in red and yellow. I have never seen these plastic colours before.“Mac-Dees!” my sister shouts from her window, calling McDonalds by the name she uses even today. She is right, it is a McDonalds, one of the first and only in our city. Even though the first Delhi branch of the chain opened many years ago, we live too far away from the city centre to have seen one. 

But we have heard stories, mythical tales of birthday parties where the clown comes to shake hands with children. Tales of bright, slushy drinks filled with crushed ice.  As we cross the restaurant, we see kids like us standing outside holding yellow and red balloons, eating pink ice-cream cones. My sister begins to sob dramatically and my mother turns back again, this time with a stern look on her face. “Your hair will fall off if you eat there!” she says to her. “Is that what you want?” We drive past, leaving the McDonalds behind, my sister whispers stories into my ear. She tells me about salty French Fries and little boxes of meals - one for each person, so no one needed to share. “Like in Amrika”, she says, this time loudly, wanting my parents to hear. I was quieter about my desire, even though deep inside, I wanted the same thing as her. To go to this strange place with its uncanny colours and unlimited American snacks. We had eaten French fries before, in another restaurant close to our house. But ice-cream cones, never! And milk-shakes! My sister would scream at my mother later when we were home. Milkshakes, Ma! Please, I need a milk-shakes!” she would say as if she knew what it meant.

My sister becomes obsessed with the idea of pink ice cream, which someone tells us are called Softies. “Softies, you dumbs,” they say to us, in the way that kids around us always used English adjectives in plurals as insults. My sister flips her hair over her shoulder. “I knew that,” she says and I memorise the word so I never make a mistake again.  “Do you think they’re made of clouds?” she asks me one day from the bottom bunk of our bunk-bed as I read my book above her. “Don’t be ridiculous”, I reply. But who knows, maybe they are made of clouds, I think to myself.  Despite my sister’s theatrics, and my solemn requests, my mother remains unfazed. She knows better, she says. Fallen hair, wasted money, no one would be let into this American utopia that had suddenly come to take over our lives. By the middle of the 2000s, the chain had cultivated an audience in the subcontinent. The menu was bait; burgers like McAloo Tikki, named after a popular Indian street food dish and the playfully named Maharaja Mac, which sucked in even critical, concerned parents to succumb to this alien thing that had come to fill their children’s hearts and souls. It was cheap. There is a twenty-rupee burger, my father insisted one day. “Papa loves Mac-Dees” my sister informed me, this time climbing up on the top bunk, as she overheard my parents arguing in the room next to ours. Soon, more branches opened. One was near our house, in the suburbs outside where we lived. It is huge, we hear. And there is a pit with red and yellow plastic balls where kids jump around… 

Even my mother’s resolution has no strength against this development. One day, we are sent to our first McDonalds party hosted by one of the younger kids, my sister’s age. At almost thirteen years old, I will be one of the oldest there my mother tells me. On the day of the party, my sister wears a skirt printed with orange flowers, her hair is in two ponytails on the sides of her face with a manic smile of triumph to match. I wear a pair of blue jeans and an orange Harry Potter T-shirt my uncle sent me from the United States. My hair is short and cropped. “Are you a boy?” my sister says to me as we sit in the car, and I slap her arm. “Shut up!” I say and she chuckles. I laugh too. This is the best day of our lives, I think. At the birthday party, my sister goes on little plastic slides and jumps around in the plastic-ball pit with other athletic kids, while I sit in a corner drinking milkshakes and eating fries that come with a tissue paper embossed with the birthday girl’s name. In the end, the big clown comes to shake hands with us and some kids sit on his shoulder. “Rohan Uncle!” they scream in chorus, an affectionate Indian name for Ronald McDonald, the funny foreign clown, who does a dance. When we get back home, our grandparents ask about the party.“It was okay,” my sister says as she flops on the floor. I can’t believe her, she is already unimpressed, already bored. My mother looks at me knowingly, aware that it was I who had been enraptured by this place she loathed. 

By the time I am fifteen, I begin to sneak inside the same McDonalds that had disquieted me only two years earlier. I am attending an after-school Science class near it, after which some other kids and I walk to it brazenly, sitting outside smoking cheap cigarettes and eating their newest invention– the Pizza McPuff. When we get there, we count the change in our pockets together, the anxiety of having one or two rupees short is always too much.  Sometimes, I go alone to another new branch, a Drive-Through. I become besotted with the Chicken McGrill, a burger with an orange patty made with Indian spices and topped with mint sauce. I eat quickly before my mother comes to pick me up, wiping each trace off my face and hiding my paper tissues. Sometimes I push my luck when I ask her to buy me more. Whenever she finds out, my mother is enraged.  “It’s just Food, Ma,” I tell her every time she takes it up. “That it is not, food it is not,” she says to me in Tamil, always repeating herself. 

As the McDonalds become a regularity in our lives, I see my body change, as I do everybody else’s. We are bound to become different looking, teachers at school tell us, as dumpy teenagers did everywhere in the world. But I am aghast at the way I morph, extending in places I didn’t expect. I become heavier, and the other girls don’t. My hair does begin to fall, which I think would have happened anyway, but my mother blames McDonalds. I become helpless and I begin to eat without control. I buy synthetic cheese from the market, another new entrance into our lives and eat it out of the box. Other things, like fudgy squares called “brownies”, begin to pop up in some of the shops in our neighborhood. I steal money from my mother’s bag and run to the market to eat those. This continues till I am sixteen when I am diagnosed with a combination of Dengue Fever and Malaria. I blackout in the kitchen. I am rushed to the hospital, fixed onto drips and put into a room with another teenager. 

While I have little comprehension of what exactly is happening, I know I am sickly.  That it would take a long time for me to recover. My mother sits near me as I sleep or text my friends, my father worries about bills. My sister comes into the room and bursts into tears now and then. Because of all the tubes attached to me, she is sure I am going to die. After ten days, I am let go, and I change out of my hospital clothes to what I wore before. I look in the bathroom mirror as my mother helps me. I notice my cheeks are sucked in, my stomach flat, my shoulders suddenly smaller. I look like some of the other girls at school. “Ma look! I’m thin!” I say to her, ecstatic about this development. She raises her arm to slap me. I have never seen her look so angry before. I duck her and run out to another mirror. It’s true, I am flattened, bean-pole-like from each side. My body has changed drastically, in a way I didn’t expect. And then the dysmorphia began.

Fallen hair, wasted money, no one would be let into this American utopia that had suddenly come to take over our lives

**

When my body began to return to its real shape after my illness subsided, I wept for hours instead of celebrating any sign of health. By my late teens, I realised that what my mothers’ friends called my “fluctuating weight” was among the things that had caused me to live outside my body as a teenager. I hated it, the way I appeared on glass surfaces as I passed. Every sight of myself made me squirm. So I treated it badly, always disassociating from it, never joining myself within my own body. I shouted at my parents when they tried to get me to eat better. I was angry when my sister asked me if I wanted to go shopping for a new shirt for an interview with a university in London. I threw up on some days, stayed hungry on others... Because of how much I resented my body, I decided to treat it with solid detachment, as if it belonged to somebody else. And so it did, belong to other people. I never stood up for it, resisted any imposition or abuse that came its way. 

***

It is sometime in late 2010, the song “Teenage Dream” plays around us. My sister and I are in Delhi’s first Zara store, a brightly lit room with creamy shirts and tall mannequins modelled on straight-backed white women. I walk quietly among the shirts as my sister grimaces at some of the clothes. She looks at me and makes a vomiting face, to which I laugh. “Shut up!” I say to her, and she sticks her tongue out at me, puts her hands on her hips and moves from side to side, dancing to Katy Perry.  “Stop it!” I say to her again, without realizing I am lip-syncing my words. The white tube lights, the sounds of the cashier typing on his machine and the quietness of the shop – filled with otherwise loud Delhi people, now in a quiet trance – fills me with a mixture of fortune and complete terror.  “Hey you!” my sister says to me from behind one of the racks which hold jeans, completely unaware of the store’s etiquette, oblivious to the mannequins, who are all around us like a silent monarchy. “Why are you whis-per-ing? This is not sk-oo-l!” she enunciates the words in all their syllables, as she continues dancing and twirling around the shop. I have only recently outgrown being a teenager, but my sister is still one, strong-willed and popular. Even this flush of White-Western capitalism in the country doesn’t faze her.  

I walk around the store in a kind of trance, looking at the photographs of lanky white girls that are everywhere and denim jackets that cost more than most people in the country make in a month. My mother walks into the store with a funny look on her face as if she has unwarrantedly entered a foreign country. She stops to look up at one of the mannequins and picks up some of its blonde hair in her fist, which I gesture at her to drop. She joins my sister in dancing and they both decide to gang up on me. Because they know I am trying to behave according to what this situation demands. They have always been less caring of the expectations of the world, whereas I have talked myself into adapting and succumbing to every oppression that has come my way. Their dancing is a joke at my expense, but also their reminder to me that this is not important — these clothes, this store, this is not the end of the world. I take a few clothes to the dressing room and they fall funnily on me. The shirts get stuck on my shoulders, the pants crumple up on my knees. I see other women like me emerge from the locker room, all equally confused. 


One girl, who I know is wealthier than most of us, looks at herself in the mirror and cries, pointing at the white girl in the poster. “I want that jacket!” she says to the shop worker in charge of the changing room in Hindi. “Kahaan hai woh?” she orders her. “Where is that one?” The rest of us roll our eyes as her mother comes to soothe her, looks at the price tag and gasps. Her daughter glares at her and the mother concedes. “Please get her the right jacket,” she says to the shop worker, who nods in resignation. “It’s the same one madam, that’s the jacket the girl is wearing”, she points to the poster. I notice that the white woman in it is on the beach, her hair is flying in the photogenic wind. “It’s the same one, madam, the same one”, the shop worker repeats herself.  The girl throws a fit, the rest of us roll our eyes, but what she said is true, the jacket she wore looked nothing like the woman in the poster. I go back into the changing room and take the clothes off, the silkiness of the shirts falls down my arm, but the pants come off with as much difficulty as I put them on. I pry open metal buttons with some difficulty, I scrutinise myself in the mirror wearing silhouettes that I have never known before. When I come back outside, I notice that my mother and sister have already left. I leave the clothes on the counter and thank the cashier, who doesn’t look away from his computer screen. I run out of the shop, white lights blinding in my head to search for the exit of the mall. 

**

In the 1990s, after economic liberalisation, as writer and anthropologist Meher Varma notes in her piece in Vittles, the Indian woman “arrived on the world stage”. The country saw its women win international beauty pageants., and in the 1990s, “Indian looks”, Varma states, became a commodity, which had to be merged with Westernised standards. Varma writes about how “Heinz ketchup was as easily available as spicy namkeens, and even McDonalds. The unforgiving beast had to indigenize its menu, offering up beloved hybrids like the McAloo Tikki Burger and Maharaja Mac. However, glossed by the new market euphoria was an important contradiction: for the Indian woman to liberalise, she had to occupy a new body while safeguarding imagined Indian traditions.” With this then, came new standards of beauty for Indian women: dark-haired, doe-eyed, but also thin, fair-skinned and tall; a right bridge between tradition and modernity; as Varma notes — “Indian, but not-too Indian”, and also Western, but always one post below the aspirational mode of whiteness that they would never attain.

With the opening of India’s economy to the world in the 90’s, women had access to new modes of clothes, and make-up, which they considered to be channels of liberty and a way to engage with the world. While new standards emerged, already present racial colourism was heightened to new limits. In the time following the coming of foreign brands, all the girls I know began to search out these modules. Malls flooded with anxious young women ready to buy slinky new shirts and skirts in funny fabrics. New shapes to describe ourselves  — pears, hourglasses, flattened bodies — became molds in which we fit ourselves into global, capitalist standards, ready to present ourselves to the world. 

The white tube lights, the sounds of the cashier typing on his machine and the quietness of the shop – filled with otherwise loud Delhi people, now in a quiet trance – fills me with a mixture of fortune and complete terror.


**

I am at a party in Antwerp, and everyone, except my friend Emi and I, is wearing black. We have taken the train from Brussels, where we live. “This is going to be wiiiiiild, man” she had drawled to me as she rolled a cigarette in the train. “Can’t believe I’m finally going to one of these, '' she said. Emi is of the opinion that Antwerp parties, especially “fashion parties” are ridiculous. An opinion that I probably share, but I am curious to find out for myself. I am also going, because of a guy, a man, I have been in love with for some months. He is going to this party too. Emi hates him, she lets me know on the train. “I wish I had remote-controlled your friendships when you got here” she always says when she sees some of the people, especially the white men that I have befriended during my eight months in Europe. I have two groups of friends, one of them is formed around this person that Emi hates. The other is the group I will later come to call my “real friends”. They are the ones who, though often tired of me, give me the benefit of doubt. They grew up here, I didn’t. This continent confuses me. They understand. 

When Emi and I enter the party, we hear someone say that Antwerp is the “fashion capital of Europe'', at which we both laugh. “Imagine just making up facts because you can’t be fucked with the rest of the world,” I say. “And a fact nobody cares about, at that'' Emi responds. 

This sets our mood for this party, we pick up drinks and go to the side where we observe – me curiously, her disdainfully - everyone that passes us. People look at us with intrigue and come to talk to us, a consequence of the fact that neither of us is white. People ask Emi where she is from and she replies in French that she is from Brussels. More times than not, people laugh. We make a drinking game out of it. Sometimes, when she trusts them, she tells them that her mother is Japanese. The people in concern, if they are men, ask her questions about sex kinks, tell her about Asian porn stars they like. She suggests we make a drinking game out of this as well. “No way, it’s too sad,” I say. A group of tall white women pass me by and touch my arm, asking me how I was so dark in winter. “That’s much, much sadder”, Emi says when they are out of ear-shot. I disagree with her, and both of us, already tired within an hour of this party, decide to walk around. Because we are both young -I am twenty-three, Emi is even younger- our guards soon drop. Three drinks in, we start making party-friends, engaging in pointless banter. It is cold, and chatting keeps us warm. Emi stops glaring at people who ask her to confirm her origins, I explain my dark skin and dark-hair. “It’s not dye” I keep saying to gangs of beautiful girls, again and again and they are thrilled with this revelation every time. They tell me with wide-open eyes, that I am beautiful. I smile and nod. They keep saying it. It starts to make me sweat on the forehead. “Please stop,” I think to myself, and look for Emi over my shoulder but she has been captured by another throng.  


My body feels different in Europe. Sometimes people gawk at it and ask me the same questions, other times I am invisible, mistaken for someone else. At the bar where I work, I am routinely spoken to by people who think I am the French-Sri Lankan woman who is the manager. She is at least fifteen years older and a foot shorter than me. When I tell her this, “Can you believe them?” I say, she tuts at me in French. “Ca va, no? C'est normal, no?” she responds, always posing questions, probably to herself. Eventually, she asks me to wear cologne to mask my natural smell at work. “I did it too”, she says to me, nodding sagely. I refuse, and she fires me from my job at the bar. 


As I talk to these women at the party, the man I am in love with texts me about where I am. “Centre-left” I write to him. “Next to the speakers?” he says, with the instructional, know-it-all air that I would soon come to resent. “You’re going to turn deaf in no time.” 


When I find him, he is on the balcony with his friends, many of whom I know. Some people hug me, others wave to me because they are mid-conversation. I take a cigarette from someone I like. He puts an arm around me and pulls me into a circle that he is talking to. Like him, they are all older than me. I listen to as much Dutch I can follow, and soon everyone switches to English. “You don’t have to,” I say, like I always do. Because it’s true, I’d rather not know what they are talking about. “Having fun?” he asks me now, eyebrows raised. “Yeah, actually, I am,” I say, and he keeps his eyebrows raised in a sign he doesn’t believe me. “For the most of it” I laugh, to entertain him. and he relaxes. This is my function to him, I think: I am a bit of irony in this setting. This is all I am. “Look around us, so many beautiful people,” he says emptily when we go to the railings of the balcony and I balance my arms on the cold metal, in an attempt to feel anything that brings my body back to myself, which by now is floating outside me within my grasp.  “It’ll be good for you,” he says, now looking at the gang of thin beautiful girls that I was speaking to earlier, who touched my skin and hair at whim. He leaves me to go to talk to them and pats my head like I am a prize puppy. “Maybe you’ll learn something,” he says, as if he’s known me my whole life. “It’s about time.”

**

Later, when I moved back home, I was asked by a therapist to learn to look at my body for a long time. To touch the tips of my fingers, look at my feet, look at a photograph of myself for ten minutes without looking away.  I was thankful for the small scale of these actions she asked of me. Otherwise, women friends would try to tell me in large gestural ways to like myself, or the cursed “love myself” too often, and I would fail even before I began. They would tell me about men who asked about me, and throw gifts, clothes, jewellery my way which I refused to accept. How do you overcome a habit you have cultivated with such dedication over time? Slowly, it would get better: swimming helped, as did being around people I trust. As I got older, I would learn, at least for fleeting periods to join myself up in my body, feel grateful for the way it moved. I would close my eyes when my calves tightened pleasurably when I walked to the metro station. Every time I got into a new body of water, I felt thankful for the way I felt there, snug and strong. 


When I was twenty-six years old, my mother decided to take me to her darzi, or seamster to make my clothes. This was Liaquat Saab, a quiet man with intelligent eyes and a steady gaze, he would stitch my shirts, alter my pants for me so we never had to go to the mall. He used my mother’s saris to cut up and make things for me. Wearing a part of her made me feel better. I know she enjoyed her beauty immensely, it felt like I could borrow that for a while. As Liaqat Saab measured my shoulders, he told me that I didn’t need to fit into a preempted size, I wasn’t a medium going on large, a large going on a size the shop didn’t have. I was only my own size, he would say to me when I asked if a design would fit me if he could make me a jacket for the winters with black wool. “Of course I can” he would say gently, holding up a piece of garment. “This needs to fit you, not the other way”.  “Theek hai aap” he told me, as he measured me and I shivered under the long pink tape. “Just relax, you’re all right.”

My body feels different in Europe. Sometimes people gawk at it and ask me the same questions, other times I am invisible, mistaken for someone else.







 

 

 Cut-off marks on the Château

Ayşegül Dinççağ

HAYDARPASA_A3-1.jpg
 
 

Cut-off Marks on the Château 

I don't recall the first time I saw Haydarpaşa train station over the sea. nor do I recall the first time I took the ferry on my own. It must have been during high school, I pretty much hinged on my parents' commute before that. What I do remember is the strange feeling of ‘heimlichkeit’ -- a  sense of inert familiarity towards a building. Despite its magnificence, I was not deeply moved -- as one might rightfully be upon seeing a train station on the sea -- nor surprised. Instead, I calmly reckoned the ornate facade, as if I was the architect who planned it. Seizing the tectonic hierarchical order leveling up with my gaze, my mind traveled within the style-references of the eclectic building. The rustic masonry foundation followed up by two levels separated with a line of  balustrades. Arched windows of the first floor were decorated with neo-classical pointed open pediments. And the three entrances were articulated by a Palladian gesture of three balconies. They were followed by under ranked, simple rectangular windows on the mezzanine floor. Whereas the third floor windows were separated elegantly from the rest of the facade, and were illustrated as a part of the roof, which made all prominent figures such as the big clock look more integrated as a part of the vertical facade. And finally the two round towers framed the facade of the building as two watchguards standing still and firm in front of the castle door.

My critical gaze towards built environment has been well trained since childhood. Growing up in the early 90s in Istanbul meant belonging to a pre-internet generation, who spent most days outdoors fighting the “other” kids in the neighbourhood. The street everyday provided the needed equipment for territorial defense for weak juvenile battles. This kind of gaming also meant, getting crafty and hands-on with whatever tool we utilised as low-tech inventions of our imaginations. Cannonballs made out of yesterday’s newspapers, HE-MAN swords out of wooden sticks, imaginary cooking ingredients out of collected tree leaves, make-up and beauty mixtures out of flowers plucked from the foreyards of  apartment buildings and pieces of rusty wire as remnants from the numerous worksites in the neighbourhood were the must-be props of our weekly activities. Our daily trips were taken to the little street shop for sweets, chips, bubble-gum and all sorts of essentials of our existence. One thing we could never agree on was who would get the supplementary gifts from the children magazines that we had all collectively paid for. These disputes  were resolved by absurd challenges like breath holding contests.

Like most of my friends, I was a busy kid. We met off school mostly during the week. Because weekends belonged to me -- at least the early mornings. While my parents slept off  the exhaustion of the work week, I had a strict schedule. Planned by me. Waking up at 06:00 a.m may seem ambitious for an eight year old, but I had studied the TV schedule and it was worth it. I used to settle into the living-room couch in front of the TV, in order to watch Looney Tunes, Garfield and Friends, The Peanuts, The Muppet Show - a legendary line-up of classical American cartoons. It was a childhood duty. 


Just about 09:00 a.m. when morning shows followed the cartoons, I would lose interest with TV. Next big act of the day was unlocking the house door by myself -- which was a huge grown-up responsibility at the age of eight -- to receive the weekend newspaper. Among many other reasons, this was a particular one to look forward to on the weekends. Our newspaper back then gifted offset-print templates of buildings to be modeled as supplementary to weekend’s paper. My Dad stopped buying this newspaper in the following years, arguing that it was no different to any other newspaper, or to watching the news on TV. He argued that all news on Turkish media were from a hegemonial source that manipulated  reality. He eventually stopped buying any newspapers altogether... However, the model buildings lasted for some time. An entire summer If I recall correctly. I had built a series of buildings which were exhibited in my room in autumn when school started.

On these templates the buildings would be sectioned into facades to be reassembled. On each piece there were cut-off marks to be firstly scissored out, later to be pasted together into a hole cube. The buildings themselves were random collections. In retrospect, I assume that the newspaper aimed to teach children about the national cultural heritage; thus the first templates were scaled models of the very first building that housed the Turkish Parliament, a classical Turkish mansion (köşk). Then the magnificent Dolmabahçe Mosque, with another mosque and a madrasa to be glued adjacently. However later on they seemed to have run out of ideas or they might have grown tired of producing samples of Turkish heritage. The following were a series of random buildings;  an American barnhouse, a nondescript rural stone house, a military aircraft, a naval battleship, etc. These looked like they were lifted from foreign illustrations. The whole project itself could have been as such. Speculations aside, I collected them all eagerly and built them. Sometimes with my dad’s help, sometimes in competition with my cousin. But always to show off to the neighbour’s kids. I remember one time when the newspaper had gifted readers a big model book to keep us busy for the next two weeks during the school break. A model book with majestic medieval castles and a baroque château with round watchtowers, just like Walt Disney’s. It was a childhood dream come true. 


Pages full of cut-off pieces to be rounded into towers -- 14 of them to be exact -- Little flags on each of them. Walls of masonry, the sides, the back, the frontal facade… all cut out and glued with extensive use of UHU, which might be the first childhood step towards narcotics, fronting nail polish and acetone.  I do not regret the hours I spent handcrafting.  By the end of the semester, I had my own little medieval château that I guarded on top of my wardrobe, away from all my monstrous friends, especially the neighbour’s kids. They would have destroyed my many hours spent in one swift envious strike given half the chance. To be honest, I myself did not have the heart to trash it by playing myself. 


For some time, a strange line-up of buildings stood on the wardrobe as if they were a dissonant group of postmodernist architectural samples.  Eventually, like all non-traumatic childhood memories, the recollection of my châteaus' outcome vanished without a trace. 


Years later, on a ferry crossing from the European to the Asian side of Istanbul, I found myself thinking of those châteaus and imagining the cut-off marks of Haydarpasa. In my case, an expected reasonable human reaction to this encounter would have been a tremendous joy for the re-discovery of my cut-off château. However, this was not the case. For me, it was not a rediscovery of a lost time, nor a boxed-up feeling belonging to childhood. It was an incredible overlap of time within a split of a second, which took me to that engineering mindset of crafting. 


‘Building is a noun, as well as a verb’ the voice of an old professor rang in my ears. 


As the ferry sailed away, I soaked up the gentle afternoon sun reflecting from the south facade of the magnificent train station of Haydarpasa.