#11 / from Istanbul

Welcome to issue eleven of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator, an artist and a curator of cultural programmes based in Amsterdam.

Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature. Each issue has a short essay or some thoughts, a nerdy look at translation, a page from one of my notebooks, a list of things to read, watch or listen to, and a highlight from my archives.

If you prefer an audio experience, you can listen to me reading the newsletter to you (I will record this issue next week when I return to Amsterdam). I also invite you to support my work via Patreon.

Thank you for your presence and attention!

THE ESSAY: FROM ISTANBUL

A year ago, my grandmother died in the city where I was born.

I have lost all sense of belonging since she passed, questioning the meaning of roots in relation to land, country, geography… Nation isn’t in my understanding of such emotion, even if our realities do exist in relation to the passports we carry.

I am a child of the in-between. Just like Istanbul, the city where my parents fell in love and brought me to life before they migrated to Brussels. But not in-between in the cliché way that attracts people to have a taste of orientalism, but in the deeper sense, the kind that makes your body ache at the sound of a song, a piece of news, a phone call at midnight from a number with your area code of origin or the smell of a dish you cannot make because the ingredients don’t grow where you chose to live.

The moment I entered my grandmother’s home, I started crying. Not only because I lost this woman I loved since my earliest memory, but also because this home is the only place in the world that I can recognise as such. It had been my only rooted place for more than four decades. Apartment after apartment, we never had one fixed home when I grew up in Brussels. Familial and financial challenges made it that we had not one place to return to, our stuff always in boxes, always in movement. My grandmother’s home was frozen in time and love, welcoming us unconditionally.

A year since my grandmother has passed, we have kept this home alive as a family. All of us still not accepting the loss, grieving in our many ways, and holding on to this appartement as if our lives depend on it. And maybe it does. After all, in my family, we are all children of the in-between.

I came to Istanbul with two cameras, a tripod, a microphone, all the gear I need to document, to create, to archive. My grandmother’s death has reconciled me with a camera I had left on the side for a while - too big, too intimidating. But the urgency to capture this home was stronger.

I have obsessively been filming and photographing a flower my grandmother loved. Then the rooms she lived in, where I also have memories. All still present in my imagination. Yet, I feel the need to capture it all on camera, in video and as photographs. I shoot and shoot and shoot, as if my life depends on it.

I think in order to grieve I need to know I will never forget.

Many factors can influence the possibility to keep memories alive: from our health and brain to earthquakes. Everything can be lost in a matter of seconds. Would any camera footage soothe such pain and loss?

This is where I turn to writing and making art. Documenting everything is only part of the process, what will require the work and transformation of reality into still and moving images, from memory into imagination, is the in-between: the editing phase, the writing, the struggle and joy to bring images that may only mean something to me into a story that will speak to many.

So I keep shooting as much footage as I can while I am here. I will edit and write the story when I am back in Amsterdam. For a moment in that process, I will forget that maybe I have no more roots because it won’t matter. Where I was born and where I live, the rivers and seas I cross, the God I pray to from a church or a mosque, or seeing faith in the eyes of a bird feeder. I know that in the act of creation I will find some solace from the pain loss creates.

As long as I will have language to express the urgency and the emotions, in every bird coming to my window, the flowers I grow where I choose to call home, the peach I will cut to eat looking at the canal instead of the Marmara sea, that dish I will learn to make with a missing ingredient, I will always see my grandmother, visiting me from wherever the dead go. I will never let go of the in-between.

ON TRANSLATION

I didn’t wear my headphones as I left home to go to Schiphol airport. I left them in my backpack when I took the bus, the train, and until I arrived in the plane. All the way, I have been engaging with strangers.

It started with the bus driver, all smiling and greeting every single passenger. We all said goodbye leaving the bus.

Then in the train, an old woman sat next to me the time of one stop, and we talked about her kids and a house with a swimming pool. She wished me a safe journey. Then an old man on his way to Zeeland to see his sister sat next to me for one more stop until Schiphol. We spoke about family, losing and remembering loved ones. I told him about my grandmother, he about his elders, whom he lost long ago.

I am sharing these here because, to me, such encounters are part of the act of translation: you listen, you engage with the world around you, remaining curious and leaving a door open for a dialogue. Don’t misunderstand me, I do love putting on my headphones and remain in my bubble from time to time. But I also embrace the many moments when I just want that connection. This is a materialisation of how I see, live, experience translation.

LISTENING, WATCHING, READING

Listen: Feeling in Turkish: (un)translatable. A playlist I made years ago with songs in Turkish which are so difficult to translate that the (im)possibility makes my heart ache.

Read: James Baldwin in Turkey. How Istanbul changed his career—and his life, a beautiful portrait of Baldwin in the context of his many years in Turkey, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in The Yale Review.

Watch: The Club/Kulüp on Netflix. I had watched the first season of the series when it came out in 2021. Walking in the neighbourhoods around Beyoğlu today brought me back to the story which takes place in that area and shows you the cosmopolitan and multilingual history of Istanbul in the 1950s.

A PAGE FROM ONE OF MY NOTEBOOKS

FROM THE ARCHIVES

PODCAST

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ABOUT

Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a multilingual writer, artist, literary translator, performer, editor, podcaster and cultural programmes curator based in Amsterdam. She established The Attention Span website and its newsletter to publish their work independently: making the time to reflect, analyse and imagine.

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