Description of the Project
My aim with this project was to visualize how my mind works and make it understandable for an audience, which does not share my cultural or geographic background. I used scalar particularly to make my own connotations and associations for certain words and terms tactile for the culturally alien audience.
My central obsession was the failure in human communication and the experienced, flesh-cutting cases of disconnect based on the fact that every word or symbol connects to a different network of associations in every person, based on their background and personal experiences. In my case, whenever I feel the need of communicating in Canada (as a person who has started living in the continent of America only a year ago), and spend her life in a relatively more monolithic culture for 25 years (in Turkey, as a Turkish person); I feel that I am facing significant obstacles beyond vocabulary, grammar and accent. Even when I articulate the perfect sentence with precisely the right words the gap between what I’m trying to pass to the other person and the other person’s understanding has a visible difference. The communication gap I am experiencing here is somehow significantly more solid than what I have experienced in my own language, culture and geography.
The center text [Cursed by the Land], is an open letter to a non-existing ideal lover. It is an allegory parallel to well known Middle Eastern and Mid-Asian love stories such as Layla and Majnun, Kerem and Asli, Ferhat and Sirin, Tahir and Zühre, Yusuf and Züleyha or Mem and Zin. Since I have direct access to modern theatre in Turkey I can also add Murathan Mungan’s “Mahmut and Yezida” to the list. The pattern with these love stories is that they all finish with both lovers dying after facing countless obstacles. In Layla and Majnun, at the end Majnun gets so crazy that he cannot notice Layla. In Ferhat and Sirin, Sirin waits for 40 years for Ferhat while Ferhat digs a tunnel in the mountain to bring water to the town. Kerem and Asli burn together to their death. Mem and Zin can’t even reach each other in their death. In Mahmut and Yezida (a love epic taking place in contemporary Mesopotamia, written for theatre in 1980 by Murathan Mungan), Mahmut gets killed by the klan of Yezida, and Yezida starts a hunger strike which lasts for 40 days and dies. There are three main differences about these Anatolian-Mesapotamian love stories from their Western cousins like Romeo and Juliet. First, besides none of them having a happy ending there is no potential of a happy ending in any moment of the story or even if there is it is way too short and way too fragile to hang on to, characters are doomed to their dead ends. Secondly and most significantly, there is never any sexual contact between the lovers - they don't even share a kiss on the lips like Disney movies as a visible metaphor of sexual desire (but there is sexual desire, I think it is delusional to ignore sexual desire in this kind of insistent intensity of emotions). And thirdly, these stories evolve in long periods of time in lovers' lives. Some of these lovers know each other since childhood (like Kerem and Asli, or Layla and Majnun). This stretch of time is very different from the "lust-love-madness-death" pattern of the Western love tragedies which take place in short times (Romeo and Juliet have sex and die for each other before one week ends) which underlines the narrative of the insistence in resistance to tradition. Lovers insist on each other. They craft this tradition of resistance through devoting their time and existential energy to being in love. There is a significant desire in these love stories where the love and pain for the loss of the lover intensifies so much, that it nearly becomes a metaphysical love. Nationalists read these stories as allegories for love of a country (nation-state), or religious people as love for the God since the sexual desire in these epics can be undermined. I find these readings oppressive because they are enforced ideological instrumentalizations of love. I prefer to read these allegorical stories as an enlarged form of love, which is not selfish enough to love only one person, and has the potential to transform the order of things, and shift the reproduction circles of social life. This kind of love essentially has a queer-anarchic potential to attack the neutralized norms of society by making the obstacles of love visible, if not completely exposing the meaninglessness of them.
Lovers are defeated from the beginning in these epics but they never back up from their desire to have “normal” lives like “normal” human beings and possibly end up living together as far as it goes. The pattern is that their love is nearly pure idealism which leads to the irrationality of the lovers running to their death. Sometimes death is the orgasm, the coming together (Kerem and Asli, or Mahmut and Yezida) but in some stories even death cannot bring lovers together (like the metaphorical end of Mem and Zin where the evil character who separated them with his envy reappears as a black thorn in their graveyard where the lovers are lying side by side). The particularity of this pattern is that there is always an uprising, a resistance to tradition, to social codes: generally lovers are from different religions if not only from historically enemy clans.
In this open letter to the anonymous lover, there are references to this historically shaped paradigm of love but also there is the desire to go beyond this dead end, go beyond this fatalism of the addiction of dead ends and have hope even when hope makes things worst. The open letter also makes significant signs of sexual desire and the repression of it which further polarizes the dialectic of love and oppression. I also used a genderless tone in the letter so the audience can play around more freely. There is only contemporary material attached to the central open letter through hyperlinks, all the contemporary material gestures towards themes like communication over traditional or modern borders, resistance, insistence and rebel. Even though there is a fatalist buzz in the text there is the childish insistence on the possibility of defeating the history, defeating the tradition and even destroying the pattern of the reoccurring terrors historically enrolled in my geography.
The project can be described as “digital poetic prose” where Umberto Eco’s “Open Work” can be a theoretically key text to frame my work. I want my work to be classified under “digital pre-modern” instead of post-modern. I think the term "digital pre-modern" captures the spirit of my work better than the North American post-modernism with its denial of centers and hierarchies. With the term "pre-modern" I acknowledge that there is a central meaning that I am dealing with and that meaning is bending the form, not the other way around which is the post-modern way. Through the hyperlinks my text becomes an intertextual conversation with contemporary poets from the Balkans, Middle East and Mid-Asia. I translated all the Turkish poets’ works (Didem Madak, Cemal Süreya, Edip Cansever, Arkadas Zekai Özger, Seyyidhan Kömürcü) through last year and this year either to use in a project or to make them accessible for some friends. I copied the English translations of the Serbian poet Arsen Dedic and Persian poet Ahmad Shamloo’s poems from the open internet sources. Lastly, Bahar Orang is an Iranian-Canadian poet (and a friend of mine) and her poem was the only one written in English.
This digital text is created to feel like a dialogue instead of a monologue where intertextual references to other poetry and all the gifs, pictures, videos and music files attached to these layers of texts create a “choose your own adventure type of thing” (as one of my Canadian friends coined it). The more the reader insists on spending time, and googling key words, the more they will understand what I am trying to articulate creatively which makes the project a medium for dialogue, therefore communication.
Below bibliography is a list of the academic collection (and connotations) of the theoretical aspects of my work.
Bibliography
Alexander, Jeffrey C., et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. CA: U of California P, 2004. Print.
Anvar, Iraj. "Peripheral Ta'ziyeh: The Transformation of Ta'ziyeh from Muharram Mourning Ritual to Secular and Comical Theatre." The Drama Review 49.4 (2005): 61-67. Print.
"Asli and Kerem." The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition. N.p.: n.p., 1970-1979. N. pag. Print. This article is accessible through: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Asli+and+Kerem
*Uzeyir Gadzhibekov’s opera Asli and Kerem, staged in 1912, is based on this epic.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Print. The smooth and the striated. 474–500.
Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Trans. A. Cancogni. N.p.: n.p., 1989. Print.
Erayda, Naz. Ne Bileyim Kafam Karisti Istanbul: Boyut Kitaplari, 2002. Print.
Ertaylan, Ismail Hikmet. Yusuf ile Züheyla. Edebiyat Fakütesi: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayinlari, (Volume 860) 1960. Print.
"Ferhat and Shirin (in English)." Alasayvan. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2015.
<http://www.alasayvan.com/masal-ve-hikaye/360040-ferhat-ve-sirin-efsanesi-ingilizce.html>.
Gioroux, Henry A. The Violence of Organized Forgetting - Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine. San Francisco: City Lights, 2014. Print.
Haddawy, Husain, ed. The Arabian Nights (Alf Laylah Wa-laylah). Trans. Muhsin Mahdi. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Print.
Hakim Bey. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. 2nd ed. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003. Print.
Khani, Ahmad. Mem Û Zîn. Trans. M. Emîn Bozarslan. Sweden: Weşanxana Deng, 1995. Print.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Print. "Why are Americans afraid of dragons?", 34-40 / "The Stalin in the Soul", 213 - 224
--The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2015.
<http://www.kareyperkins.com/classes/445/omelas.pdf>.
Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. Trans. Bill Johnston. N.p.: Premier Digital Publishing, 2011. Print.
Li, Xingbo. "Global Subjects of Poetry: Power and Discourse in Poetry." Mosaic 47.2 (2014): 85-102. Print.
Mungan, Murathan. Mahmud ile Yezida [Mahmud and Yezida]. 5th ed. Istanbul: Metis yayinlari, 2003. Print.
Nâzim Hikmet. Ferhad ile Sirin: Oyunlar 2 [Ferhat and Sirin: Plays 2]. Istanbul: YKY, 2002. Print.
Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.
Nizami Ganjavi, Layla and Majnun. Trans. Colin Turner. CA & US only version ed. London: John Blake, 1997. Print.
On, Barak. "Egyptian Times: Temporality, Personhood, and the Technopolitical making of Modern Egypt, 1830-1930." Diss. New York University, 2009. Print.
Pina. Dir. Wim Wenders. Composed by Thomas Hanreich. 2011. Film.
Reiner, Erica. "Fortune-Telling in Mesapotamia." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 19.1 (1960): 23-35. Print.
Satrapi, Marjane. Embroideries. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Print.
Shein, Paichi Pat, Yuh-Yuh Li, and Tai-Chu Huang. "Relationship between scientific knowledge and fortune-telling." Public Understanding of Science 23.7 (2014): 780-96. Print.
Sound of Noise. Dir. Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson. 2010. Film.
Stanley, Thomas A. Osugi Sakae, Anarchist in Taisho Japan: The Creativity of the Ego. Cambridge: Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1982. Print.
Temple, Kathryn. "Gossip and the Public Sphere." The Eighteenth Century 53.4 (2012): 509-12. Print. review of Patricia Meyer Spacks' book "Gossip"
Timucin, Afsar. Tahir ile Zühre. Istanbul: Habora Kitabevi, 1968. Print.
Turkeli, Sureyya Evren. "What is anarchism? A reflection on the canon and the constructive potential of its destruction." Diss. Loughborough University, 2012. Print.
Vaccaro, Jeanne. "Felt matters." Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 20.3 (2010): 253-66. Print.
Waller, John. The Dancing Plague the Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2009. Print.
Ze'evi, Dror. Producing Desire - Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900. N.p.: University of California Press, 2006. Print. Chapter 4: “Dream Interpretation and the Unconcious” and Chapter 5: “Boys in the Hood: Shadow Theater as a Sexual Counter-Script”
This page has paths:
- [Cursed by the Land] Deniz Basar