What's Happening in Turkey Right Now

There's a chance you haven't heard about it yet, which is astounding considering that a city with a population of 18 million is more or less in chaos. My friends have been keeping me updated on what's happening, so let me give a run-down for those who are new to this situation:

This is how I understand it. The Turkish government plans to take down a park (Gezi Park) near Taksim Square, more or less the center of Istanbul, and transform it into a mall with an Ottoman-style architecture. To offer some form of comparison, imagine if New York City were going to tear down Union Square to build high rises. But this particular park in Istanbul has some historical significance, especially regarding the act of protesting. So now imagine a park as centrally located as New York's Union Square with the historical meaning of People's Park in Berkeley, California. Naturally, there were protests.

The protests were nonviolent. There is no indication that the protestors provoked the police officers, even in the information given by the government. But the police reaction to this first small demonstration was over the top. They raided the park, beat people, and sprayed tear gas.

So the protests grew the next day, taking on a new feeling of speaking out against the police brutality, which continued as the police flew in helicopters (yes, helicopters) into Taksim to spray tear gas, which could be felt across the Golden Horn (that would be like gassing Union Square from helicopters and people in Brooklyn feeling their eyes sting).

Thing is, the police didn't legally have this power a 5 years ago. In the past few years the ruling Turkish party has expanded the powers of the police significantly while edging away power from the other branches of government. For example, when I was teaching in Istanbul there was a special vote that amended the country's constitution to drastically cut back the power of the military - the main secularizing force in modern Turkish history - and the courts (later that year the immensely popular Prime Minister Erdoğan became just the third Turkish prime minister ever to receive an absolute majority of the vote). So all these police actions are completely legal, no matter how despicable.

So now the protests have spread throughout the country and beyond (I've seen photos of people protesting in Canada) taking on the form of a broad outrage against the practices of Erdoğan's government over the past decade, ranging from his power grabs to his arresting of journalists who speak against him to his pushing the Turkish legal code closer to an Islamic code with moral laws, such as the regulations against alcohol and the prohibition of street seating at cafés.

Here are some articles about it in the American press, which is a little reserved about the whole thing: NPR, NYTimes, CNN. Erdoğan is an important ally, after all: a secular Muslim! (although barely) And this is only the first time he has been publicly humiliated on the word front like this. And here's a Turkish blog about the protests that's quite a bit more sensationalist. 

Here's a quote from the NYTimes article that reveals the attitudes of Prime Minister Erdoğan and his aims for control over culture as well as government:

In his remarks, Mr. Erdogan criticized Twitter, which became an important conduit of news — and unfounded rumors — about the demonstrations, which were not covered aggressively in the Turkish news media.

“Now we have a menace that is called Twitter,” he said. “The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.” 

 And here's a poem I threw together ion solidarity for the cause:

"Fear Not! (Korkma)"

Fear not!

O!

Drag me from Gezi Park

I dare you!

Pull me by my feet

While my fingernails scratch rows into the soil

And watch as sunflowers spring forth

So tall and thick that your machetes dull felling them

See my friends and I sitting cross-legged in the field that results

Laughing together and eating sunflower seeds.

Spray chemicals into my watery eyes

Burn the sight from them

And watch as anguished tears spill from my face

Onto your deserted concrete streets

Boring into the ground like acid

And watch the magnificent junipers

Jump eagerly from the holes

Their roots tearing up your barricades

Their branches smashing through your malls.

Pummel me with your rods

And watch your weapons sprout a thousand hands

That reach down to help me to my feet once more.

Declare me a liar, a spreader of false rumors

And watch all the skeptical heads turn your way instead.

Afix a blindfold to my eyes

A gag to my mouth

And watch as the world hears me speak

In a language you cannot comprehend

With the volume of a cannon.

Fear not!

O!

Drag me from Gezi Park

I dare you!

Poem: Crater Lake

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Crater Lake,

You purest expression of water

Your most vivid blue statement

Your clarity less obstructed than the water in my own eyes

You frighten me.

You rip the meaning from my life

And dangle me over the checker square farms

Higher

High enough that Mount Everest looks like a pimple

Storm clouds look like plum blossoms floating to earth

The Pacific Ocean looks like a waveless bowl.

I shuffle down your volcanic slopes

Lusted after by gravity

Choking on the dust

My resisting stomps kick up.

I see the wake of a boat

Ghastly white

Slice through your windless, still surface

Carving grooves that roll outwards, softly.

I remove my sweat-moistened clothes

And then I contaminate you

By jumping in.

I peer at your depths

With goggles strapped across my forehead.

I can see everything

Every boulder frozen under the weight of your shores

As if I could reach out and take then between my fingers

Like a child holding a coin to the moon

To judge its size.

I crawl along the top of your water

Towards your center.

The boulders shrink below me

Until they can fit in a spice jar

But their grainy multitude is still evident

Because your purity is cleaner than air

There is no haze on your horizon.

One stroke further

Before the giant boulders dissolve into each other

Below my feet

And all that remains under me is a slab

The size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

I am higher than a fighter jet.

Roadways would be too small to see distinctly

But their presence felt

Like wrinkles in an ancient face

Seen from across the street.

The slab grows to mountainous proportions

With another two strokes.

The Great Pyramid is a pimple on this desert

Splayed below my feet

Sinking like a continent

Deeper and deeper.

And then:

Nothing.

I am smaller than a pebble

Examined in the calloused hand

Of a hill giant

Wedged in the fold of his love line.

I hang over the pure blue my eyes cannot pierce

Too light to sink

Too small to be spotted

By gravity.

Nothing!

Crater Lake

You rob me of my substance.

You roll me into myself

Smaller and denser

A ball of dough

Until I am too small to see

A crumb

Unnoticeable

Unimportant

No matter what it thinks of itself.

And what lies beyond?

I am too afraid to swim farther

But I might guess:

More nothing.

All the clarity in the world

Can only illuminate a fraction of what I don’t know.

I need but ten strokes to return to shore.

Poem: Constellations

How can I misplace the meaning of
the existence of other lives,
    other’s doubts and starlit regrets
    other’s triumphant moonlit wisps of cloud
    other’s brisk, dark lusts and howling urges
    other’s daybreak nocturnal loves
with my personal sunlit world
    in its shiniest season?

My world is of my solitary perception.
My father does not conduct my eyes
nor does my mother whisper the sounds I hear daily
into the ears my brother pries open.
My friends do not scrape my palms
across the surfaces I feel
nor do they firmly grasp the door handle
and instruct me on its cool firmness
before opening.
My lover does not deliver the vaporous tendrils
of perfume and stink
to the depths of my nostrils
nor does she place them past my lips and onto the tip of my tongue.
No:
Perception is a lonely affair.
My body absorbs the physical to create my idea of it
and I can only live in, and barely imagine,
a world bound by those ideas.
I could conclude that I make the world,
    even that I own it.

But I do not make my world alone.
I own not its deed
    I rule not its politics.
My night sky, like smoke,
    belongs to no one.

When my eyes show me an orange
I see not a plump citric encased in its soft shell
but only its gently grooved sunset skin.
My ears announce a prickly hissing
but do not grasp the spatula that cusps the half-seared salmon
an inch above the skillet
and flips it to its backside.
My skin sizzles after brushing against a stovetop cast iron pot
but does not leap to retrieve the ice,
shepherd it into a newspaper bag
and hold it to the reddening, wrinkling spot.
My nose delivers the toasty scent of cinnamon
but does not realize the time has come
to extract the cookies from the oven’s mouth.
When my tongue brings me fresh tomatoes
    acid and sunlight sweet
I taste not the method with which they were prepared.

I do not make my world alone.
Rather
I assemble it as the night assembles stars,
as the year assembles days.
My kitchen is not one unseen by mortal eyes before.
It houses the same tools
    spatulas, tablespoons,
recipes books, cutting boards,
a palm-sized dish in the shape of a cat drowned in salt
as my neighbors’.
My night is dark like all nights.
My stars shy away from glowing cities like all stars.
Even the way in which I greet the night
    with loose-fitting clothes and toothpaste,
    perhaps a shower
is far from unique.
Even the way in which I greet my cutting board
    with soaped and toweled hands
    bearing ingredients
is far from unique.

My mother educated me on the majestic friendship of the onion,
the assurance of the measuring cup,
the slender balance of the sharp knife,
and my father instructed me to steam my first
undersalted vegetables.
My brother left me his star chart
    and I studied its constellations before sleep
    each night while it hung over me
    glued to the ceiling.
My friends and I gazed upon the Perseid Meteor Shower
    from Crater Lake,
    what felt like North America’s eardrum,
    lying with my back on a blanket,
    staring above the forest fire haze.
My lover stole me to farmer’s markets
    and found the deepest, juiciest oranges
    dropped them in our canvass totes
    with muscular black kale
    and the bulbous eggplant we planned to devour that evening.
We jump on each other like stanzas
we link arms like words
we breed doubt like commas
we quickly die after short lives like periods
but not until after we have shaped worlds together!
Solar systems, galaxies
gravitating in and out
towards and apart
constellations that change shape
    from Orion to the Little Dipper
with bouts of cosmic inspiration.