I am in the middle of a tavern in Samatya. I am with a group of people I have met not very long ago. I smell the aniseed, I examine the paintings on the wall, I watch the conversation and joy flowing at the other tables. On the one hand, I watch the environment, on the other hand, I watch myself in that environment with an outside eye. With a quick glance, I check “Is anyone looking at me?” I am at a long, white and crowded table on the street. Certain prohibitions that I thought I didn’t need to enjoy this life until today flash before my eyes. I think about the sea, the wind, music, cycling, being out on the streets in the dark. The reflexes I have acquired of covering my mouth when I laugh too much to compensate for my previous “idleness”, of lowering my voice, of covering my facial expressions as much as possible, of controlling my face and my whole body opens up before me like a fan. I hear the music, I hear the laughter, I finally take a deep breath, realize that I’ve been stiff in my chair for hours and lean my aching spine against the chair.
At a long table in Samatya I am with a group of new people whom I have only touched in the fields of struggle where we wore our political masks for the first 30 years of my life, but I have never tried to participate in life together. I see the comfort, flexibility, joy and commonplace of being in a place they are used to and where they belong. Memories are shared, old photos are opened on the phone and conversations about memories are colored, all the photos tell me again what a difficult but beautiful break it was for us to be together at that table that evening in a polarized society like Turkey. Whether this rupture only crosses the fault lines of my world, whether it only turns my world upside down, I have yet to see. Moreover, I am in Samatya, I came to this table by passing by Uncle Agop’s tiny shop selling baptismal supplies and Eleni’s sewing workshop. With the same silence, I passed by the homes of the people I read about what happened to them in books, whose grief I felt in my heart, whose history I felt ashamed and embarrassed for, and whose silent defiance I participated in wherever they gathered and challenged. While I came so close to them in my mind, unaware of them, our living spaces, the schools our children went to, all the thresholds where we would have a real encounter remained just as distant. Just like the “strangers” I am sitting at the same table with right now.
It all started with a municipality changing hands. In essence, a group of people, among whom I did not look like a weed from the outside, lost and a group of “foreigners”, among whom I could easily be chosen, won. Since I define difference and similarity through political ideals, ethics and social imagination, I think that differences or similarities in the way we live this mortal life and habits cannot do anything for “us”. I leaned on such an understanding of “us” when I joined that table. At that table, where I sat with the intention that those who share ideals can also share life, a low-rhythm but continuous restlessness sat right across from me.
The buskers approached us with all their joy, they started beating their darbukas with great enthusiasm and singing songs in unison. A woman at the table, who was not in the best of moods that day, first handed out tips to the buskers, then asked for a song to cure her grief, refilled her raki, closed her eyes and listened to the song being played to her. Then came another request for another song from another woman, there was dancing, the joy of the table spilled out into the street. Meanwhile, I am sitting at the far end of the table with a stiff spine, trying to accompany the joy of the street with a forced smile. The door of one world opens but the other door does not close, the silence, the joylessness, the stiff spines, the sullen faces and the rules of that world do not suddenly turn into a cloud of dust. I see the walls between these two worlds and I stand in the middle of those borders and think about all this.
The earthquake at one end of the table does not shake the other end of the table with the same intensity. Those who are confused, whose acceptance and prejudices are challenged do not ultimately change their places or volunteer to travel between worlds. I, as an exception, touch their lives. I stay somewhere between being a right and good exception and being “one of us.” A small group volunteers to meet in a gray area between these two worlds called “us” and “them”, the most fundamental fault line of the society we live in. This turns into a safe and authentic climate where we can flow life together, both as a space of commons and as a space for negotiation. In this climate, no one’s spine is stiff, our backs are leaning back and relaxed.
In that space, our spines loosened and we leaned back with confidence. Then life flowed for others as they knew it. Because those who could get out of the circle of habits were the ones who sat closest to the boundaries of that circle. Once out of the circle, there was no great challenge to anyone’s life, so much so that we forgot how the story began and there was no longer a “difference” between us. When this friendship, which was “strange” from the outside, began to flow with all its ordinariness and commonplace, my shoulders relaxed at the table I had set up inside myself and sat across from my own story of change. I believed that I could find a way to live this mortal life in such a way that I would not be burdened by my responsibilities to myself and to God.
Towards the end of the evening, I said goodbye, knowing that I would never be at the same table with many of them again, we took souvenir photos with a very fake smile on my face, and eventually we dispersed to our homes. Many of us dispersed into our own worlds and never again attempted to make life, day and moment flow together. This story has hit the wall of habit and rote memorization, and now a real “difference” has opened between us. A new definition of similarity has fallen into the lives of a few. Our change began with a friendship that seems quite “strange” in the course of Turkey’s political history. I smoothed my hair, which was sticking out of my headscarf, and in the middle of a tavern, I thought about the sharing of public life, living together, the commons, the friendships we built as a political ground. I believed in change and the vital thresholds that changed us.
