flying
by Douglas Messerli
Ece Ayhan A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon
Press, 1997 / Reprinted by Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2015)
The manuscript Murat had given me seemed to me to have many similarities
to the American poet John Wieners, who, like Ayhan, was a gay writer who had
begun his early life at the edges of academic and socially responsible
behavior—Wieners began his education at Boston College, later enrolling in
Black Mountain College to study with Charles Olson and Robert Duncan before
working as an actor and stage manager at the Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge; Ayhan
graduated from the school of Political Sciences in Ankara before serving as a
civil servant—while later gradually moving out into the underground and sexual
fringes of society.
According to Nemet-Nejat, by the time of Ayhan’s third major collection
of poetry, Orthodoxies (1968), he had
moved to the streets of Istanbul’s Galata section: “historically both its red
light district—of transvestites, girl and boy prostitutes, tattooed roughs,
heroin merchants, that is, the unnamed or ‘euphemized’ outcasts of Turkish
culture—and the district where minorities—Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Russians,
etc—lived.”
The two works that made up the Sun &
Moon book, ultimately published in 1997, A
Blind Cat Black (which I inexplicably published as The Blind
Cat Black) and Orthodoxies,
reveal Ayhan’s spiral out of the social center.
Nemet-Nejat describes the first work as a story of exile “masquerading
as an adventure sea romance.” “One has a fairy tale with pirates, treasures, á
la Peter Pan, whose child hero does
not fly home at the end, but joins the secret and street society of
homosexuals: a fairy tale, a misadventure of trauma, shame, torture
and rape in deep sea.” Nearly all these elements, for example, are represented
in the title poem:
An absent-minded tightrope
walker comes. From the sea
of late hours. Blows out a
lamp. Lies down next to my weeping
side, for the sake of the
prophet. A blind woman downstairs.
Family. She raves in a
language I don’t know. On her chest a
heavy butterfly, broken
drawers in it. My Aunt Sadness drinks
alcohol in the attic,
embroiders. Expelled from many schools.
A blind cat passes in the
black street. In its sack a child just
dead. His wings don’t fit,
too big. The Old Hawker cries. A
pirate ship. Has entered
the port.
Already in this section “the wings
don’t fit,” and by the end of the poem the author-hero’s inability to fly away
ends in no longer caring, the narrator of the poem hiding “himself in dust with
apoplectic kicks.” In a sense, Ayhan seems to be suggesting that it is
impossible to be gay, to be a fairy,
without the magic possibility of flight:
You don’t understand. Being
without wings. And it gets
dark, weeping in the sea of
a sea. A child waiting. The sail
boat.
By the time of Orthodoxies,
the translator argues, Ayhan no longer was interested in presenting a center
against which his figures were judged, but turned to a focusing upon on the
word, particularly puns and slang, that made clear that language itself could
be the destroyed of things outside its boundaries, that “part of history, is a
trap/tomb, a cribdeath, where the
peripheral is buried,” something that needed itself to be rejuvenated before
the misfit might escape.
In the strange night world of Orthodoxies,
even the perpetual sufferer Jonah has escaped the whale only to himself become
a dolphin. While he may symbolize, however, a joyful aspect of the community
(joy and community both connected with the image of the dolphin), this Jonah
is, as Ayhan jests, “A sight. Cruising. Bedecked with holsters, stirrup,
harness.” This horsey leather queen combs “his hair in cum water. Then is
treated to flowers. A garland of braids. From time to time blinking, with vast
hanging earrings.” In this work devoted to questioning notions of “orthodoxy,”
(the translator points out that in Turkish the word means not only the holy,
pious or virtuous, but also in Turkish slang suggests “whore, homosexual, pederast,
betrayer, etc.”) Ayhan asks:
What is an Orthodox lad
doing at Maidos? Banged about by
agitation which is after
the knowledge of knives.
Along with Gallipoli, Maidos a
nearby city to the South, was heavily damaged in the World War I battle of
Gallipoli, the Allied assault on the Ottoman Empire—the last great battle of
that Empire before being transformed into the Turkish Republic under Atatürk,
himself a commander at Gallipoli—which resulted in the deaths of more than
300,000 people. The horse imagery associated with this new Jonah is appropriate
given that one of the major attacks on the Turks occurred at the Battle of the
Nek when The Third Australian Light Horse Brigade futilely attacked, a battle
depicted in Peter Wier’s film Gallipoli.
In short, the poet seems to take pleasure in the paradox that, out of
the Ottoman battle to save the Dardenelles from invasion, another being,
capable of creating a new world, had been spewn own, like Jonah out of the
whale: a preposterous “dolphin,” a sea mammal associated for centuries by
sailors with Christ. Accordingly, in Orthodoxies,
Ayhan’s figures at least regain, through language, their wings, even if they
are only artificial, sad and silver:
She cannot cover the
sadness of her silver wings, the Greek
Hag….
Drunk, her world reversed (“Boots in
hand and parasol on her feet”), Ayhan’s outcast has, at least, the potential to
fly away, to be forgiven or, if nothing else, to pray to be forgiven: “But she
does know how to cross herself efficiently with index and third fingers.”
It was with great sadness that I learned
of Ece Ayhan Çağlar’s death on July 13th, and I soon after determined to
reprint these moving books in my Green Integer series.
Los Angeles, August 15, 2002
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (November 2008).
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