E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
Kaygusuz Every Fire You Tend
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-911284-28-4
Verlag: Tilted Axis Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-911284-28-4
Verlag: Tilted Axis Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Sema Kaygusuz (born 1972) is one of Turkey's leading female writers and the author of Every Fire You Tend. She has published five collections of short stories, three novels, a collection of nonfiction essays, and a play, which have won a number of awards in Turkey and Europe and have been translated into English, French, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. Her short story collection The Well of Trapped Words was published in an English translation by Maureen Freely (Comma Press, 2015).
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How do you think fig trees were born? Did they fashion themselves according to the angle of the sunlight, or to the appetites of the birds and bugs in their surroundings? How did they come into being, and in which time zone? Your Zevraki, for example… When I think about the endless cycle that culminated with Zevraki, I imagine a tendril secreting a milky poison, sprouting from beneath a lapis stone on a silvery Syrian cliffside overlooking the Mediterranean. Long before Adam and Eve covered their private parts with its leaves, it was a bastard that grew of its own accord.
It’s almost as if we exist because figs do, think of it that way. The fig is a scion that spread by imagining humans before it had ever encountered them. It conceived of the fire that would fall into the womb of the first woman to eat its fruit, of the moment she splits it with her two hands; it conceived of the thumping that fire would start in her chest, of the sweet ache in her groin; and it conceived of the honey that would flow from her lips upon her first bite, of the carnal prowess of that honey. It wished for men as it grew, men who gathered together to play their frame drums and sing ghazals as they drank raki distilled from figs; it wished that the songs they breathed into the air would help them reach lovers waiting in the world beyond. It designed roots to spread like vortexes along the surface of the earth, building nests for snakes slithering silently among them. This was how the dual bond between figs and snakes began. Over time, the shadow of the fig tree became the gathering place for punishment and praise, for poison and antidote, for arousal and calm. Eventually, its roots meandered underground. It emerged among humans in strange places, splitting the walls and cracking the foundations of derelict homes across the four corners of Mesopotamia. In time, of course, the fig became something of a demigod. In an age when innumerable gods and goddesses and human-animal hybrids began to converge in the fabric of a singular creator, the fig held its place in the world with a terrifying depravity, a symbol of the singularity in the plural and the plurality in the singular. And so, as the fig became a mysterious creature that consorts with snakes, a creature that sees, that knows, that speaks in whispers to the night, humankind began to treat it like a being from another world.
The Arameans gave the fig its first name, calling it Idra, or spirit, and thus setting it apart. Ever since this naming, all great adventures have transpired before it. In fact, the fig tree was the symbol of knowledge in Hebrew, and from Idra, it grew into a weightier, more sublime concept of wisdom. These letters, portals that open onto all places in the universe, hold the fig’s ingenuity. Because of the spell contained in the word Idra, to speak the fig into the world is not only to give voice to the greatness condensed in everything, in water and leaf and stone, from the peach fuzz of human skin to the fur of a leopard; it is also to declare, “There is a beginning.” Reverberating in Hebrew, the fig became a sonorous sentence that nobody could grasp in its entirety.
As luck would have it, though, the fig began to fall from favor once it gained its Persian name, ancir, which corresponds to piercing and penetration. The fruits grow slowly, swelling from concavities at the root of the tree’s broad leaves; as they swell, they begin to resemble breasts or testes, stirring seductive passions. As a consequence, the Pharisees gave it a name they chose for no other fruit they ate. This was because they peeled figs with an assiduous tugging, the same way they might have undressed a lover. Over time, it became shameful to be seen eating a fig in public, and even now from Iran to Anatolia, you can’t simply go up to a grocer and brazenly ask for figs. They’ll give you a dirty look and pretend not to have heard your request. The thing to do is to ask vaguely for “fruit,” owning up to the fig in all its vulgarity, and eat it at home with your curtains closed. In any case, it’s not as if you eat a fig slice by slice; you make out with it. You have to plunge your mouth into it, suck it out. Its red flesh is effervescent, animate, quivering. You can’t do anything else until you finish eating the fig because it makes your fingertips so sticky. Perhaps this is why virgin girls and pregnant women weren’t allowed near fig trees: so they would abstain from sex.
It also fell to the fig to remove fetuses from the wombs of women impregnated outside of marriage. This secret remedy was known only to midwives. They would stick a freshly cut shoot from a fig tree into the womb and poke around, causing a miscarriage. In those days, it was considered sorcery to pierce through the cervix and slough off the uterine membrane without killing the woman. As a consequence, the fig tree’s creative and destructive power began to spread by word of mouth. They say that a woman who miscarries in this way must never again eat a fig, so she won’t be poisoned by the dizzying taste of what she gave up.
Over those many millenia, I don’t know whether the fig became more human, or whether we humans bent to the fig’s temperament. Regardless, it began to speak every language in which its roots spread, to practice every religion that deemed it the tree of paradise. In due time, djinns settled at the foot of the fig tree, made it vengeful: it began contorting the faces and mouths of drunkards who peed on its roots at night, crippling children who tried to climb it, and spiriting away the memories of those who fell asleep in its shade. People revered and condemned the fig in equal parts, believing that this double-hearted androgyne had descended upon the world to dole out bite-size shares of the divine to all. The fig was a holy spirit that tamed humans even as it led them astray. It cultivated free will, inciting the ego; at the same time, it encouraged people to resemble one another, to become indiscernible, invisible. Strange that, in those times, the fig had two sexes. It seeded itself, spawned itself of itself, but it also acted as a devil hell-bent on driving humans out of paradise.
And so, while you were in the midst of the age of figs, you should have looked at Zevraki not with an eye toward history but with the eye of a barbarian who knows, deep down, that every civilization is impermanent, and with the hunger of a savage woman who, inspired by the cycle of the tree’s life, has cultivated its spirit in her body.
In fact, I’ve never had the sense that you’ve fallen under the fig tree’s spell, even once. You’re just moved by the myths of the fig, that’s all. Of course, the intimate bond you feel with Zevraki is important. But such bonds, such damnable attachments, all they’ve ever done is seclude the unique character of your spirit from the ineffable world. To tell you the truth, I still haven’t figured out why you love figs the way you do. Have you ever even wandered through a street market to buy a kilo of figs? Have you popped a fig into your mouth in the middle of the crowd, licking the nectar that dribbles onto your lips? Tell me this first before you worship at the foot of the tree.
—
You’re perched in your chair in the living room now, staring at Zevraki through empty eyes. Looking out upon its involuted branches, its sizable leaves, you’re light as a ghost in search of a body. See the crystalline sky? You’ve never seen it from this angle, at this hour. The shadows that the leaves cast upon the earth seem to form new shapes altogether. Halcyon shadows, shifting with the light… You barely even realize the great lengths the fig branches have stretched in order to reach toward the sun. You’re so lethargic compared to the tree. The history of your life has been extinguished by the faces in the photographs hanging on your walls. You’re only now beginning to realize how vainly you’ve spent this life of yours, looking solely at people’s faces.
Take that picture of the old man just across from you. He’s sitting on the steps of a wooden house with a bay window, watching the passersby from behind a small counter displaying his homemade Muscat wines. You took this photograph in the village of Sirince, where you wandered the streets on an assignment for a magazine advertising vacation destinations. You were so thrilled when they published it as a full-page spread.
Do you think he’s still alive? When you took the photograph, did you contemplate his mortality, his vulnerability? Weren’t you implicated, the moment you pushed the shutter-release button, in the death of this man who made a living from his Muscat wine, in his subsumption into the relentless flow of time? Or rather, do you realize the extent of your implication? As I look at the photograph now, it’s unclear to me that you took it yourself. You don’t seem to have noticed the way he slumps to his left, or the large gem-set brooch pinned to the brim of his hat. If you had, you might have chosen a different angle, focusing your camera on something other than the labels of the wine bottles. Though you may not have noticed all the subtle details that illuminated his unique character at that moment, you nonetheless managed to capture them without realizing it. As such, you might be able to learn something by looking at your photographs, to recognize that it is the visceral that enchants the eye.
There are, moreover, some images that simply can’t be captured. Bese’s march toward Hizir, for example, her aloof demeanor when she returned, the dry grass stuck in her hair, the dubiousness of her affected solemnity: such moments are recorded only in an album of memory. Bese herself, and every moment concerning her,...
