How

2011
One day they banned the words
That day everybody flooded the streets
The crowd was fluid
Shaped on a long long street
And flowed for not leaving their words.

In time
One by one, they began to cover with plain concrete all beautiful buildings
All colourful intricacy of cultures
That come from old of time, that have shades of history in each curve
That astonish, puzzle, duzzle
And started building numb structures that dare to challenge skies
To every place they find.

One night, songs were banned on the street where I lived
They tried to frogmarch a boy playing guitar on my street
I told the men in blue to ‘stop’
Yet it went from bad to worse
My legs, my back, my wrists got bruised.

And I wondered if every girl has friends like mine
Who dare say “don’t treat her that way”
And risk being taken into custody
While men in blue crushed car door on her legs.
And I wondered if every girl has a lawyer father
That she can call from the station at 5am.
And I wondered if every single girl needed a man
To survive.

But that didn't make sense.

Humanity was a wound which bled over and over again
And which was stuck so deep inside.

I wondered
In which dark hole was their conscience hidden
Of the doctor who wrote “no bruise”
When my body was purple all over
Or of the man in blue who kicked me
And watched  my body at doctor control
By opening the curtain
With a disgusting smile on this face.

They rapidly pressed charges
To the boy who was playing guitar,
To me who was trying to protect him
And to my friends who were trying to protect me,
By resisting the men in blue and destroying the peace of the public.

Just another unimportant, never ending file to grow the fear from his majesty.

And I never saw the men in blue from that night in court again
Different boys in blue were standing before me, young, their souls empty.


2012
When I went out to streets
When I was watching the sky at a park or at a seaside
Men in blue always showed up next to me
Or when there were friends with me, next to us.
They checked our ID’s and history,
They checked if the boys are draft-dodgers
They checked us,
They looked and looked and looked at me
They never touched me again
But they always looked.

One night my doorbell rang
Men in blue showed up with diffenrent news this time
My home, my jungle with my lovely cats
Was a house of sins where green smokes and shameless laughters came;
A whore house with drugs.
Not because of fear but out of disgust
I smiled and released them on their own track
Along with all their threats.

Then I packed my life into my bags
And moved to the shrubs and turquise waters of south.


2013
Most of country's youth was registering into mental hospitals
And the rest was to the morgues
With the help of chemically sprayed weeds.

Not too much time passed; it was already spring
This time men in blue decided to destroy the only green area downtown,
The only park in the middle of İstanbul
People started pouring into the park after hearing that
Who has ben living, working, passing, existing in that area;
With the idea of saving the park, the green.

But men in blue had diffenrent orders in their minds
They started to sprinkle mad waters, spray chemical gases and fire plastic bullets
To all those people.
And one of that bullets just hit a girl
A friend of us
Right on her head.
And after that much more people started flowing to the park
And much more violence started flowing around the park.

And that beautiful, lovely girl could never be the same girl again
Neither could she ever use her body, her hands as back in old days again.

All of us
At whichever city we were in, started claiming the parks
When I arrived to the park which she got shot by her head
And met with my brother
Our first gas hugged us with excitement before we hugged each other.
After that, many cities, many parks under gas cloud for days, nights, months
Old people at the parks in the day time
At night sheltering street cats and dogs in their apartments from the gas
And after that playing pots and pans on their windows.
Bad kids of the cities at their jobs in the day time
At night on streets with gas masks, swimming goggles, stomach medicine and lemons in their bags
For protection

All diffenrent races, different ideas, different beliefs of that country
Crazy-uncountable number of different cultures
Was together, arm in arm, next to each other
For the first time.
They sang out the most beautiful songs and ran away from the bullets
Together.
And hugged and helped and remembered that they are  brothers and sisters for the first time.

But at that moment, by that time
Kids, young kids,
Kids who was just going to buy bread
Who still had innocence in their smiles
Kids, whose dreams of tomorrow just started growing
Were sent to intensive care units of hospitals first
And then to the stars
By bullets shot by men in blue.

And a big, deep scar was carved in every last one of us after that.


2014
Before that year started we learned that
Rich, but oh-so-very-rich people were putting their oh-so-very-much money into shoe boxes
To smuggle.
And when there is an election in the country
If the results were not as desired by certain you-know-who
A cat could enter transformers of the country, cut power off and change the results.
And thanks to some voice tapes
We all knew which countries they are planning to go into war with,
Which country they smuggled guns to and which one petroleum
And the money collected as tax, all were spent on these.
We knew
But we could do nothing.

There was nowhere to apply and demand justice
Army was theirs, police was theirs,
Even hospitals, too.
Lawyers were being dragged on courthouse floors
And imams would be fired if they don’t obey what they were told.

As a society we were changing into desperate kids day by day
And this desperation was poisining us by turning into fear.

Again, through the end of spring
Four-letter name of a town that I didn't know existed before
Got stuck in our heads
By an accident which happened at a mine.
That last breathes of those men whom they poured cement on in that hole
Carved a deep scar in me.
That day something got stuck inside me, hardened
That day a piece of human in me
Lost hope in humanity.

I was living next to an ancient city, a village upon a hill
My view was silvery waving of olive leaves
And the crazy dark blue waves of the sea.

At that place, in that heaven,
For the first time in my life,
Just to stop these disgraceful, terrifying, disgusting games
With all the orders, rules of all religions of the world
Seriously, slowly
I imagined to kill someone
By my bare hands
With all those horrible details.
But neither my hands were going that far
Nor there was someone to reach.


2015
Through the end of last year his highness sent news all around
Everyone who is old enough was free to not perform mandatory military service
Provided they paid 5000 dollars to beautiful future dreams of the government.
And who was old enough collected that money by debts, credits, loans.
A new year started with uneasiness inside people
Who would not touch guns
But knew all that money would be spent on war anyway.

It was february
A february, dedicated to lovers.
At a time when the insanity of extremities blowing all around by violence
A girl
A young girl got kidnapped
From a public bus she got on in the afternoon.
And all the men
Penetrated in and out of her.
And left her body lying, burnt to ashes.

The next night, at the bar that I was working
All the girls, including myself
Grabbed by one drunk man with disgusting words in his mouth.
But none of the girls, I mean us, or none of the boys or the owner of the bar
Did anything.
They watched the man while they were putting the cash of his whiskeys to the safe.
I said a few words to the owner of the bar at the end of the night
And never went back there again.
But I heard the sound of one of the waiters got slapped when I was going away on the street
After what I said.

On that same february
It snowed over İstanbul, covered it all in white.
There was the silence of snow all over the city
Except the laughters of the people playing snowball.
And one of those snowballs hit a man’s window.
And that man got out, knifed an old boy who threw the snowball
And beauty of snow wasn’t enough cover the pain of this death

A society managed to go full crazy in a white february, just like that.


2016
It was just another spring which was nearly hopeful
But everything was in abundance around, except hope
Academicians, like artists of the country did,
Signed a paper all together which says “Against Terror! For peace!”
To at least stop murdering of different colored people of the same country in the east
Professors quickly were taken into custody or jailed
Academicians were suspended
Each and every one of them also gifted a trial
Accused of being terrorists.

It was the middle of summer.
To make the most horrible decisions faster and easier
One night they organised a teatral show of  military coup.
The bridge that connects the two sides of İstanbul was barred
A few men got shot
Everyone stored provisions
The next day and following days everything was normal.

But now there was a sneaky, extraordinary state of emergency in our lives.

The day that I was flying to a far continent
My brother had a flight to another country for a conference
I took my flight on the wings of the eagle
But they seized my brothers passport before he got close to the plane
Because he had his signuture with those other people
Who only asked for peace.


2017
When I woke up on the first day of the year
The poshest bar of the country was strafed.
A few days passed
In Izmir, the city of democracy admirers
An assasin was caught at courthouse
With hardware enough to kill thousands.

They conducted a referendum with under this state of emergency
With the cats inside country’s transformer for sure
Primary structure of the republic’s constitution changed.
The place where I come from, where I left
Is a dictatorship or a sultanate now
Either on paper or in practical life.

Before I left,
Streets were dead, greetings were dead
Glances were uneasy, staring at the ground
Steps silent, nights uncanny  and daylight hopeless.
The sick, fearful kids grew bigger inside all.

There are people there
Who just wants to live in peace
Who just wants to live
And who still ask for peace persistently
And who would give anything
Only to stop this.

Now,
Some scanning countries on maps, checking about visas
And trying to degrade their whole lives to the weight limits allowed on aeroplanes.
Some of them keep slowly decaying at their jobs
And all keep trying to survive..

An entire society is leaving a country.
An entire society is dying while they are trying to live in a country.

Now,
Is a ‘this kind of now’ with all these wounds
And there’s a future we have to save or establish now.



Editor: Uğraş Turan Öner