#16 / LOOKING BACKWARDS, LOOKING FORWARDS

Welcome to issue sixteen of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator and an artist 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.

If you prefer an audio experience, you can listen to me reading the newsletter to you (please note that I’ve been delayed in recording since issue 14). You can also support my work via Patreon.

Thank you for your presence and attention!

Those of us in the Netherlands have witnessed worrying election results two weeks ago. Part of me is shocked, another part of me is not surprised at all. We have seen populist discourses being normalized in many countries we thought were safely guarded behind democratic doors. Instead of penning an essay about my disappointment in the current politics, I have decided to share diary entries written and published in French in 2019 when I was in residency in the Bassin Minier, the former mining area in Northern France. The city where I was based has been governed by the far right since 2014. I felt the necessity to go back there, where I managed to find space for culture, literature, and translation among a group of resilient people. This is an edited version from the notebook entries from 2018-2019 which I have translated myself from French.

1. Ayran & Ricoré

I had started writing in my travel notebook – purple, made of Italian paper with white flowers painted on its cover – when I had first arrived in Lille in 2017, and for some reason I only filled in one page with: “Pourquoi je traduis?” Why do I translate? Here I am one year later, on the train from Amsterdam to Lille, turning an unanswered page.  

Justine came to pick me up at the station, and we made our way to Hénin-Beaumont by car. We talked about the Yellow Vests Protests, the wealth of this post-industrial region, the groups of vegans attacking halal butchers in Lille. I can’t get this image out of my mind: vegans attacking a butcher's shop. A halal butcher shop. Why? Above all: why does it make me laugh? Although we didn’t really eat halal at home, my parents taught me to avoid pork my whole life – and then I became a vegetarian, it lasted four years. I only managed veganism for one month. This process taught me food is politics. I understand vegan activists and their intentions. I try to picture the scene in my mind as we cross the highway in rush hour, trying to imagine it without an ounce of violence. But, the act of attacking a place, as well as the act of slaughtering meat and then selling it, are all violent. This disturbs me. Different values and priorities merge in my mind as we approach the mining landscapes with its slag heaps silhouettes emerging in the dusk.

For my first evening in Hénin-Beaumont, I join the various members of local grassroots associations. Among them, Jean-Bruno, a man in his sixties who, welcoming me with a big smile, tells me: “I knew a Canan,” pronouncing my first name perfectly. I wonder what French name sounds like “Janan” as he goes on to tell me about a friend of his from Istanbul. I have lived and travelled in French-speaking lands since I was born and this is the first time that my first name has been welcomed so warmly, without any questioning. Neither in Paris nor in Brussels, especially not in circles of culture, art, universities… But here: in the Bassin Minier, a man with Polish and German roots pronounces my first name with the greatest generosity. I have loved Hénin-Beaumont even before I arrived.

My residency begins in a kebab shop that serves as an Irish bar: the O’Shannon. I'm told that this place was heavily frequented by neo-Nazi groups in the 80s. Our presence here is proof that it is no longer the case, and I doubt that they would serve deliciously prepared köfte and kebabs prepared by a Kurdish cook from Turkey if it was. This place intrigues me. Portraits hang on the walls: Charlie Chaplin, Che Guevara, unknown people suspended in time, and a few poses of dubious exoticism. I feel good in this place with confused identities. Probably because I recognize myself in it. In this multiplicity. This: chaos. The confusion and paradoxes that make up the complexity of our societies seem to be found in this very place in the heart of Hénin-Beaumont, facing a cathedral with Byzantine architecture, which transports me to my city of birth: Istanbul. I think about it while eating my köfte accompanied by bulgur, and drinking my ayran served in a Perrier glass. No one knew what this yogurt-based drink was, and yet an entire floor of the O’Shannon’s fridge is dedicated to it.

In Hénin-Beaumont, the ayran is my madeleine.

At this table, rich in the stories of those who welcome me, we talk about languages, particularly the languages of Nord Pas de Calais, such as Picard. Is it a patois, a dialect, a language? “It’s a language” retorts Aurore*, passionate about culture and social justice, who will guide me throughout my residency in her native region. I feel ignorant, but I'm happy to learn. The more I listen to people in the region, the more I see the similarities between France and Turkey, especially in their oppressive nationalism. This constant desire to erase differences in the name of a constructed “unity”, which ultimately only leaves room for the most powerful. I feel that there are many languages in this geography. Around our table already, we hear Italian, German, Polish, ... I bring in Turkish, Dutch too. These languages may not always be visible in public space – not at first glance – but they exist. I already feel them. They vibrate in their inhabitants and their stories.

*Aurore has since our first meeting transitioned, so to respect her identity I am translating all my notebook entries to the feminine form as I publish them here.

On the square near the cathedral, on my way home after supper, I see a woman dressed in yellow plush pyjamas, with a teddy bear hood. She was smoking her cigarette in front of the other kebab shop on the square. I tried to capture her with my iPhone camera. I utter “capturer” in French. A false friend, but Suzie, who is driving me home, says: “Capturing is indeed a good choice for a bear”. I realize how English has influenced my French and decide to accept my language as it is. I really like this idea of capturing this moment, so anchored in a reality that I could have hardly imagined. And then, the young woman in yellow pyjamas smiles at me. Her smile rocked me to sleep on that first night in the Bassin Minier.

I like my flat in the heart of Hénin-Beaumont. I have a direct view of the main street where I see the yellow vests marching in protest every Saturday. I start a conversation with the tulle curtains covering the kitchen window. These few meters of fabric hanging from my perspective on a new world, a public space that I do not know, bring me closer to so many things that I recognize. I observe the rays of sunlight piercing the embroidered flowers on the fabric. The beauty of their encounter fascinates me and transports me to my grandmother in Turkey, where all the windows are covered in tulle. It is the culture of the mahrem – the intimate, the private that must not be revealed to the world – to which I am no longer accustomed to since moving to Amsterdam, the very city of transparency where one can easily gaze at a family having supper, an old man reading his newspaper, or a couple so lost in their desire they unknowingly showcase their lust to the outside world. And people walk by. Nobody stops to watch, except me.

I sip my bowl of Ricoré that I bought at the Match supermarket – a sudden gesture ignited by the sound of the commercial I would see and hear throughout my childhood watching French TV “Le soleil vient de se lever... L’ami Ricoré !” At home, I only drink coffee made from freshly ground beans, and here I am having chicory. It’s strange how certain tastes enter our imagination without ever having touched our palates. It was in Hénin-Beaumont, for the first time, that I drank Ricoré. Like my ayran: here, the Ricoré will have the effect of a madeleine on me, only elsewhere.

II: The Snail Shell

Systems of oppression know no borders. Even when the political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts can be so different, as in Turkey and France, I cannot help but make connections. I feel both contexts in a very personal and subjective way. But my subjectivity is expressed to transform itself into a discourse that can matter.

I think of what the Turkish philosopher and sociologist Nurdan Gürbilek writes in her work Living in a Shopwindow (1992), which I had translated into French based on my very need to understand her better (a collection of her work has been published in English in 2011 as The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window in Victoria Holbrook’s translation). Gürbilek analyses the arrival of neoliberalism in Turkey in the 1980s, following the coup d'état and the installation of a military regime in Turkey until 1983. The arrival of shopping malls has transformed cities and its inhabitants, whom, visiting these places of consumption, become tourists and spectators of their own city. While strolling through the gigantic Auchan supermarkets on a grey Sunday (and a beautiful one, the Belgian in me loves grey so much), I think of this passage from Gürbilek:

Shop windows always signal plenitude. But what makes this plenitude possible, what brings it into being, what is expended and exhausted to create it, that is not shown in the shop window. Shop windows conceal from those who gaze into them the fact that the wares displayed are products of labour. Just as the market equalizes forms of labour and reduces products to an exchange value, all the experience, lost opportunity and labour expended to make them becomes a mere image when society becomes a shop window.

There are nineteenth-century glass ewers displayed in the window of an antique store in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Rumeli Hisar. They were not sold in their day because they were considered defective. Their defect lies in the drops of blood consumptive workers blew into the glass. Now they are priced as antiques. Yet one should not forget: it may not always be others who put pain on display in a shop window. Those who suffer can themselves finally make a spectacle of their experience.

And here I am, face to face with a chocolate galibot – the name given to the children sent to work in the mines. I observe it through a window of pastries in the cafeteria of the Louvre Lens Museum. Four euros and fifty cents per galibot. The whole story of collective suffering reduced to a pile of cocoa. From Turkey to France, through every possible country that comes to mind, I wonder: why are we all in such a hurry to shred our collective memories, to forget. The more we forget, the more we fall into populist pits. It scares me, pushes me to make connections. Yes: that’s why I listen to people living in places I don’t know, and that’s also why: I translate.

When I observe the landscapes of the Bassin Minier: the slag heaps, the gigantic shopping malls, the towns without any bookshops or small independent stores, ... I can't help but feel sad. However, it is by speaking with its residents that I realize to what extent I am pre-conditioned to judge a place and its political and social context based on my perspective. I can see many things, and yet never enough. I am fostered by the people I meet, by their stories, their vision of their own geography, their country, the government for which they voted – or did not –, their universe, their imagination. I have seen so much beauty in the slag heaps. These landscapes are poetry. The sky went from dark grey to light blue then back to mixed tones of grey and green, it transported me to Belgium with its rich grey chromatic fields which rocked my childhood and youth, making me forgive it for not being like the winter sun of my native country.

The vegetation that flourishes on such black soil reminds me of the resilience of the inhabitants of these territories. The clouds that caress the destitute trees. The shades of grey mixed with yellow tones. Nature does not know unique identities; it subjugates us and shows us the way to the multiple possibilities of existence. While wandering around the slag heap, I come across a snail shell: blue and lilac. A surreal sight. I take it in the palm of my hand and caress it gently, then I put it in my pocket. I invite the shell to follow me in my constant need for movement, to carry the landscapes and emotions of the Bassin Minier and leave her traces in my writing and translation.

III: Arabesk

Here I am perched near my beloved window, chewing a Hollywood gum and sipping Ricoré, I watch the yellow vests march by thinking that this same day is also the anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, twelve years ago, in front of the AGOS newspaper offices in Istanbul. Later, I lead a workshop around a film about the visit of writers to Palestine. I have thought of a workshop-discussion around words. I have chosen a sentence from the film that strongly resonated in my imagination, my experience, my knowledge: “no one has a monopoly on a land, a memory, a history”. It joins a line from the poem History-Geography by Karin Karakaşlı: “No one is the first to set foot on any soil/You're always borne by souls who passed before” (translated by me and Sarah Howe). I proposed to work with this poem in a translation workshop during my residency. 

Each residency is a new look at myself, an infinite questioning, through this movement from one “home” to another “home”, albeit temporary, places that I do inhabit even for a short while. The intensity of the stay is more important than its duration. Encounters, moments of solitude facing streets that I don't yet know, flaneusing endlessly. But not all places offer the same freedom of movement: of mind, of body. I remember asking Aurore, late one evening, after a drink at the Label Anglaise bar if I could walk alone at night in the streets of Hénin. “Oh, you know, there’s no one on the streets here after a certain time.” It made me realize that I am no longer used to wandering around deserted towns at night.

Is this why I chose to do a workshop around Arabesk music, in a punk bar? Arabesk, this musical genre which addresses the stranger in the city, to those who are foreign to the city. As sociologist Nurdan Gürbilek explains:

If the tourist is someone here today and gone tomorrow, the stranger is someone here today who cannot leave tomorrow, someone who cannot go back. This is the stranger in the city to whom arabesk calls. It is the music of those who cannot return to the village, who are no longer villagers but not yet city dwellers. But it is also the music of revolutionaries who spent long years in prison during the 1980s and could not return, when they got out, to the world they had left; the music of men and women still imprisoned though set free. Yet, unlike the gaze of the tourist, theirs comprehended both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, for they were able to line up the segments of their experience, or rather the symbols representing the different time segments of their experience, side by side. Arabic music and Turkish music, the saz lute and the synthesizer, fatalism and revolutionism, religion and protest: the stranger’s gaze took in all as a sequence of images.

Arabesk was first the music of the road, played on long trips, in inter-city bus terminals, roadside restaurants, and minibuses working routes between shanty towns and city centres – places neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’. For arabesk is anyway not the product of a tradition, a cultural totality, or even a synthesis in the true sense of the word, but rather a genre of music open to symbols of different historical times, places and cultures. In a way, it is able to internalize because it has no ‘insides’, because it can transform words and music into a surface woven of symbols. That is why it is the music of nobody. The arabesk listener hears something which is not hers, which is alien to her, but not anyone else’s either; a music neither Turkish classical nor folk nor pop. Here is what makes arabesk so inviting, what makes it call out to the strangers of the city: in it styles and genres belonging to different times and places can be quoted freely.

That evening, at the Label Anglaise bar, I offered to translate songs from the Arabesk repertoire as well as so-called “resistance” songs, from Turkish into French. For each song, I proposed a “literal” translation, word for word and a few references… for the rest, I let the music speak. Each participant created their version of Arabesk and resistance in music: adapting it to the context of the Bassin Minier, to their own history – personal or collective – in French and even in the local language Chti-mi. For me, having grown up with the urgency of always showing an “other” facet of my original culture to those around me through the gesture of translation, seeing this music resonate in this punk bar in the heart of a city such as Hénin-Beaumont created multiple emotions, including joy and a lot of pride. The last music video I showed was the song, “ses etme” (Don't say a word), by Athena, showcasing queer life from Istanbul, and which follows a day in the life of a transgender performance artist. In five minutes, the clip captures the beauty and richness, but also the sad reality of violence against LGBTQ communities. Watching the video clip in this bar, surrounded mostly by men in leather biker jackets, in a city governed by extreme right politics, I thought more than ever about the importance of intersectionality in my work. I couldn't imagine a better place than this bar to share this moment of resilient freedom.

After my numerous workshops, meetings, my discoveries of the Bassin Minier, I return: home, or rather, where I consider being “at home”, for the moment. And yet, I feel as much “at home” on this moving train, crossing borders that keep us in boxes. As if our humanity depended on patriotism, on an idea of the nation. Beyond our geographies, our political, cultural, socio-economic contexts… we all have a thirst for humanity and empathy. For love. So much love. In a far-right governed former mining town of Northern France, I found out that translation was always a possibility for a common space.

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Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a multilingual writer, artist, literary translator 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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