Sara Deniz Akant | Once There Was and Once There Wasn’t : The Story of P
Name as Archive, Witness, Fantasy
(or, even – The Empty Kingdom)
Carefully I have avoided like a camera
putting false events before your eyes.
the hard rage from this slow war
it is gentle
to get a basic ice cube stuffed with sugar.
-
I lived in room.
I loved him.
the hotel window faced.
the Director was in.
the Director was not in. (the Director was in.)
I loved her.
the huge surround and then the domes
but I was one of the lucky ones – one shutter –
one window – one floor-maid – one
fearless – and yet still the impossible –
to approach her
comes in
It’s July 15th 2016, and I’m retracing my steps in Istanbul. Two friends have just landed from London, and we meet them at a small gathering of expat journalists, who turn out to be a group of twenty-somethings making their post-Oxbridge careers in a majestic building next to the Galata Tower. The news of the hour is that there has been a military coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is being overthrown, and the girl who works for Bloomberg is having a panic attack. To give her space, we take our beers and climb the long spiral staircase to the roof of the building. We watch fighter jets fly overhead; snap some Instagram pics in the dark silhouette of the tower. Even though my father, Adnan, is Turkish, and I’ve been coming to the city to visit family for years, I will always be a tourist here. In the whirlwind of event, my relation to this place is one of constant flicker.
A few minutes later, the Bloomberg girl privately asks her boyfriend to get off the roof. Her whisper is an audible whine: it’s much too dangerous.
A few hours later, we are in a hotel room across the street, drinking the gin we stole from the journalists when they told us we had to take cover elsewhere. We’re downloading VPNs and watching half-streamed videos on illegal Twitter. In one, we see a plain-clothed man being shot down by a helicopter, his hands raised in surrender on the Boğaziçi bridge. When a tear rolls down my cheek I flick it off: fuck this gin mixed with childish confusion.
A few hours later, we are crouching in the narrow hotel hallway between the empty hotel rooms, scanning each other’s eyes with each loud crack in the sky. Get away from the windows, Chris says, sternly. When the sky stops breaking, we lie together in the bed furthest from glass, fully dressed in our clothes and our shoes. We pretend to sleep. In the slow soak of dawn, we realize our room has a tiny TV, and turn on the news. Hordes of men run around desperately on screen. To the Western eye, which is also my own, the city looks like any other distant, dusty, war-torn place. A female reporter keeps clipping herself into the BBC – a frantic, low-fi interruption. She says not to trust the media, and there are bodies in the street. Flicker, flick. I wonder if they ever use stock-footage.
My father calls and says to stay inside. Through the window, we watch the ex-pat journalists hauling their messenger bags up hill, to the heated protests in Taksim. I think of them trying to synthesize all these thunderous fragments of information, piecing stories together in a language that I know they still can’t parse. Erdogan calls on civilians to take arms in the streets; his voice booms through the microphone across the city’s minarets. If you didn’t know any better, you would mistake it for the melodic call-to-prayer. I did.
A few months later, in New York, my father proudly shoves his finger on the thin newspaper column. He asks me to read it out loud. When I mouth the words, I realize I’m offering evidence of their validity. I’m supporting the myth of fact and objectivity, the sense of some collective conviction.
When I ask my American mother, she begins another sentence with: what the scholars say. What the scholars say, is that Turkey has always been organized under an authoritarian, tribal rule. From Attila the Hun to Genghis Khan, from Fatih Sultan Mehmet Han to Muhteşem Süleyman, from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to President Reycep Erdoğan.
I list their names in succession on the page. Hun, khan, han, man, an.
I’ve always been told that the perfect rhyme of our given names
is pure coincidence: İlhan, Rezzan, Reyhan, Canan, Doğan, Meldan, Ceylan,
Destan, Sinan. An, an, an, an.
Nevertheless, I wonder if there might be a sort of kinship
formed in echo.
As an archive for both the historical and the imaginary.
As a linguistic document that imagines some subjective future.
As a narrator for the broken trace of language – I am inevitably
fickle and faulty. So quickly do I hide and reveal, it is difficult
to distinguish the real from the fabricated, the fixed
from the unfixed.
The child takes the father’s surname,
and the nominal iteration is repeatedly remixed.
And so I study the ruptures and fissures between these nominal constructions.
At times I call it a dissertation, a chapter, a title, a poem, or simply a name
for the intertwined self.
As the seamless fusion of disparate origins.
As a coming together of discouraging parts.
What is the function of a messenger? The purpose of a map?
As a remedy which can neither make nor fill a hole.
As a lens through which to see the gaps that are left gaping.
My name was designed to be legible, but in a worldly way.
Biblical, the wife of a dog, and a princess.
What is the fundamental difference between an “s” and a “p” – a terrorist,
and a tourist – the letter “g” and the letter “d”? Upon further inquiry,
this conversation is over.
Please stop asking these questions.
Here is a ship and here are her passengers. Here is the ocean
we are destined to sail. This automobile holds our feminine rage.
We name her Christine, and she’s a powerful machine.
Ban-ban, Ca-Caliban. Found a new master, get a new man.
Chatty abstractions – how the nebulous abyss of a poem will chew
up all the ideas. In people, in things.
Or: what if this novella were to look like an engraving?
What if it were to fasten the page back together, what if it sings?
Here’s a song:
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. And yet –
Boredom is an ugly feeling. It is constructed from the language
that we encounter in the biography of a king. He founded, he seems to, he develops,
he is important. This is how our boredom might sound.
But it is worse to be visible than invisible.
Blended in and blotted out, we imagine the white
imagination, re-surfacing. A construct is produced and then it lives on –
how supreme. Of the absent, of the spectral, of the other, I ask –
Who is there? Who is he?
Enmeshing the ocean, the tentative lines, the broken descent, the erasure
of safety, what horror can we seek, what impossible fantasy, the door
to another door to another form of that universal we.
And so I ask you again – Who is he?
A song repeats. I’m incomplete. I begin to combine “p” with “p.”
But listen: I have it easy. I tie recuperation
to creativity, the past to endless
ownership, dictation to poetry, and then to gain-seeking scholarship (O mores!
What trash).
I have the time, and I waste it. (In turn, this allows me to consider the dialectics
of my waste). I have a small collection of materials that throb with power
within space, they are: a thin book of poems, a mistranslated novella,
an envelope stamped by the King of Morocco. One man, one death, etc, etc.
And I have something else to admit.
The scarcity and the boredom of this project interests me.
The repetition and the indulgence and the spiraling husk of a self
that begins to occur all around it –
interests me.
The cut the wake the eye the fold
The wake the eye the cut the fold
The fold the eye the wake the cut
The eye the wake the fold the cut
The cut the fold the wake the eye
I try all the variations. If poetry is theory
and theory is poetry, I think to document my own impulse
to document, to repeat
and to slyly transform. Like a woman, I fall on my knees.
I look for objects, for food, for people
(and for rooms). I use artifacts like water, and insects, and
eyes – the language of reflection
and infection, the language of apology
gone wrong (as you can see).
I think about my family, about theft of all kinds. I think about the third
who walks beside me, the (alien) transmission, the (evil) eye that
circulates but is never seen. I ricochet from monster to monster:
from Frankenstein to Dracula, from Cheburashka to “p.” From my animated self –
and then to Deleuze – and then to a self-proclaimed
becoming-baboon.
Like a vampire, I ask you once again –
Who is there? Who is she?
.
.
.
On Sources Consulted or Quoted, in order of appearance:
The opening poem is written after “Ostia Will Receive You,” by Friederike Mayröcke (as read by Wayne Koestenbaum in 2020), and it uses some language/influence from Ilhan Akant’s novella, Moscow Hotel National Room 333 (1989). “The gaps that are left gaping” is a phrase under the influence of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2006) and “Venus in Two Acts” (2008). Ban-ban, Ca-Caliban is Caliban, from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623). “Chatty abstractions” is a term used by Mary Anne Caws, or by Maggie Nelson, or originally by Frank O’Hara, or perhaps all of the above. A novel that… look(s) like an engraving is from the epigraph to Gertrude Stein’s Lucy Church, Amiably (1930). A rose is a rose – also from Stein. “Ugly feeling(s)” is a term coined by Sianne Ngai in Ugly Feelings (2005).