#24/ WALK IN MY WORDS

Welcome to issue twenty-four 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.

🎙️ an audio version of the attention span newsletter is available on your favourite podcast app: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast…or to listen on the attention span website.

After my grandmother died in September 2022, one of the objects of hers I took back with me to Amsterdam from Istanbul were her long black boots. I didn’t know it yet then, but I needed them for the first time I was going to leave the house for something else than basic survival acts (such as groceries or getting fresh air). With my grandmother’s boots, I went to visit the Fiona Tan exhibition at EYE. Everything I saw took on a different meaning then. I was walking in her boots, walking in search for meaning through the pain created by grief. An experience of walking I had never felt before.

Those of you who have followed my work for a while now will know that part of my artistic, writing and translation practice is the act of “flâneusing” or “flânerie”. As I wrote in issue 20 of the Attention Span:

I am a practitioner of what is called flânerie which can be described as idle wandering, and was mostly practised by urban men in mid-19th-century metropolises. […] Renowned flâneurs include Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel and Edgar Allan Poe, who all have provided descriptions of flânerie throughout their work. Benjamin’s collection of notes in The Arcades Project catalogues everyday life in 19th-century Paris and provides a rich material on the figure of the flâneur.

To me, this act of walking goes beyond observation of the world - even though it is part of it. It is most essentially about seeking connection. With spaces, history, stories, and also with living beings such as fauna and flora, and of course, with people. Even if I don’t necessarily speak with people during my many walks, I engage with them in different ways, which can be through a smile, sharing a moment watching birds being fed, experiencing street art, enjoying sunlight in a park on an autumn day. Simple gestures that make us feel alive. Photography is, to me, also part of that gesture of connection. Capturing strangers walking in a geography where some of my elders come from, like Novi Sad in Serbia for instance (Türkiye has never been a monolithic culture, and many of us coming from that region will have a rich ancestry spread across continents. I for instance have heritage in Syria, Kyrgyzstan, Albania, Serbia and Crimea through my grandparents and great-grandparents). As I write this, I realise being a child, grand-child, great-grandchild of migrants has deeply fed, whether I was aware of it or not, my ongoing yearning to seek connection and understanding through movement.

I have recently experienced another way of walking, thanks to a poetry event I was invited to by spoken word artist Kevin -Ahn Kwang Soo- Groen, who also curates programmes at the wonderful Labyrinth Poetry & Cocktail Bar in Amsterdam. This brilliant programme, Walk in my Words was based on the popular notion that you should not judge someone before you walk a mile in their shoes. Or if you remember the lyrics in Depeche Mode’s song, Walking in My Shoes:

Try walking in my shoes
Try walking in my shoes

You'll stumble in my footsteps
Keep the same appointments I kept
If you try walking in my shoes
If you try walking in my shoes

And as Kevin also told us when inviting all the artists to be part of his programme, we can never fully understand other people, yet, we can create empathy - which is also part of my flâneusing practice when trying to connect in that way. What is absolutely brilliant though, in Kevin’s curation, is that he has invited artists to build connections through covering each other’s words. Walk in my Words was an invitation to move beyond our artistic egos and be a vessel to someone else’s words for an evening.

It didn’t feel that uncanny to me to go through this process. As a literary translator, it is something I do all the time, walking, dreaming, speaking in someone else’s words, holding space to carry these words and emotions into another world. I have also been trained as an actor when I was younger (I was enrolled at drama school for years and to this day, will still wonder what my life would have been like if I had chosen that path).

Acting and literary translation hold many similarities, I find. You don’t only need to try to understand someone else, another voice, an experience external to you, sometimes totally unknown to what you’ve ever seen, lived or felt, you have to create space in you to build empathy and not judge (writing fiction is also similar in that sense, creating characters beyond judgement). Then, once you hold space for those emotions and experiences, you need to express them through your own body: writing for the translator, voice and physical body for the actor. In both cases, I believe the body is present and active. You cannot feel outside your body. When you write, when you translate, your body is part of the process. You take the stories inside that language and create new versions in another. It is, I believe, one of the most generous gestures of all, carrying someone else’s body from shore to shore, to go back to Teju Cole’s beautiful imagery on literary translation.

I am used to carrying other people’s words, not only as a translator, I also did so as a literary curator for more than a decade, or as an advocate for free expression, everything I do is rooted in this necessity to create spaces for others to exist in their own words. What I am less used to is having someone else carry my words in their body. And that happened thanks to Kevin’s beautiful invitation this past Sunday at Labyrinth.

None of us knew which artist was going to cover our work, and vice versa. Singer, songwriter, pianist and philosophy student Sofija Gkaits is the artist who received my poetry and has performed them in songs. When she started singing my words, my whole body shivered, I started crying, I was moved and humbled. I felt a deep connection through how this artist had understood who I was and what I tried to express, in the time of two short songs, our bodies and imaginations blended. Something close to magic.

The poems I performed were of local poet Andrew Dillon. His work is different from mine and challenged me to step out of my comfort zone. The themes, the language, the rhythm have carried me into his world and experience, his quest to understand his heritage, his family history. We’re both from completely different geographies, and yet, our voices merged at that moment to create something new.

Walking in someone’s else words is an act that goes beyond walking, beyond words, beyond any definition of connection, it is about letting our minds and body be carried by the possibility of living in someone else’s imagination. I wish we would create more spaces to do so in our daily lives, in the most mundane of gestures, because right now, our societies are starved of not just connection, but the simplest act of remembering none of us has more right to exist than anyone else.

WATCH
I have rewatched Angels in America (2003) years after I had first seen it (you know, when HBO was leading the way in groundbreaking storytelling on TV). Tony Kushner’s writing didn’t age, the story spoke to me even more today than it had at the time. The miniseries (6 episodes) is based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1991 play of the same name (also by Kushner). Set in 1985, the story revolves around six New Yorkers whose lives intersect. At its core is Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS who is visited by an angel (played by the wonderful Emma Thompson). Angels in America beautifully explores political and cultural themes, from the Reagan era politics to the AIDS epidemic, touching on social and political issues we are still deep in today. The last episode even sees the main characters having a conversation on occupation and Palestine (and Kushner hasn’t changed his tune).

LISTEN
I am that person who walks through life creating soundtracks for my everyday life, so I love original soundtracks for film and TV shows. Diving back in Angels in America also means going back to the soundtrack, with Thomas Newman’s brilliant score. I love Newman’s music, he also did Shawshank Redemption (yeah, I’m on that team, don’t judge), as well as Revolutionary Road (another favourite soundtracks of mine).

READ
COMPLAINT! by Sara Ahmed is the book I needed to read at this moment in my life. It offered me much solace and acted, not only as a confirmation of how much work we still need to do to fight against heteronormative and white supremacist norms and structures, but also brought me hope because we’re not alone, and we have tools, definitions, and the heart to go beyond labels or experiences that may have been inflicted on us.

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ABOUT

Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. They 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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