For future beauty queens: a visual aid for the Q&A session
August 30, 2007 at 9:45 am (Uncategorized)
Fake chicken noodle soup
August 28, 2007 at 2:55 pm (Uncategorized)
It rained fiercely last night. I slept with my balcony open to the sound of rain and thunder, to air out the flat after months of heat, and to keep my bedroom cool enough to finally sleep beneath my duvet. It was so cozy that I slept until almost 9am– something I haven’t done in months. Lovely.
Celibate good times, come on!
August 27, 2007 at 1:15 pm (Uncategorized)
The skies have turned from the unchanging hot bright blue of the past few months to a refreshingly cooler and dimmer grey-white, bursting with promise and gusts of wind. I really do miss rain. I am craving autumn and changing leaves and cool days and cozy weekends wrapped up in a soft shawl, reading cheap and tawdries and sipping tea and being generally quite hermitty. My lovely new flat lends itself totally to being a self contained hermitage. I have at least a year’s worth of internal rebuilding to do. Had a lot of walls knocked down last year, somewhere between the slow Azzam deconstruction and the overworking and the incompatible living situation (and XYZ other things). I’ve already (unrealising…ly) started the spackling and gyprocking, going into voluntary hiding on weekday evenings and selfishly hoarding my weekend mornings and sometimes whole days.
I spent Saturday late-afternoon quietly with Rachel and Janine, with a long and chilled tuna-salady lunch at Pia, then many strong tulip glasses of tea on a rooftop teras near the Lise with a view of the Bosporus. Sunday was out on the glowingly bright Ortaköy lojman roof teras, reading cheap and tawdries and having a gorgeous cold beer with Rachel, then joined by Jonathan who braai’d for us at sundown as the huge almost full moon rose up over the Bosporus bridge. I was home by 9 last night and so tired that I slept soon after, and slept well past my usual 6am wake up time.
Update: it is now raining fiercely, sideways. I can see the heavy greyness through the big windows behind Steph. Even the glass is being pocked with drops in a very satisfying way. All the dust is being washed off and all the built up air pressure is reaching a bursting point— surely thunder and lightning must follow.
Maybe I can sleep with a blanket over me soon.
Clinkin’ like a MoFo
August 24, 2007 at 2:09 pm (Uncategorized)
I can’t seem to write now that I’ve started this new job. Everything is just too calm. Aside from yesterday’s Vodafone driver fiasco (which was more of an irritant than anything lethal or exciting), I’ve been coasting through my weeks, sipping peachy ice tea, reading the newspaper, looking out the window (window!!!!!), having tea breaks with people I like, teaching a few classes here and there, and sleeping well at night. Oh, and cooking when I get home. And having a lovely balcony beer at night, with kitten and book and trees and calm. No great traumas, no insanely stressful long days, nowt.
All I need now is a washing machine, non-cartoony sofa, and I’ll be dreadfully dull and never write again.
To note: it is purple plum and crunchy pear season right now and both are wonderful. Am very pleased to have a great manav just up the street, on my way home. And a bakery that does many multi grained village breads. Yay.
Notable on so many levels…
August 23, 2007 at 11:28 am (Uncategorized)
(for a truly surrealistic moment, please read all the way to the end) Families in Turkey accused of forcing young women to take their own lives Guardian Instead, on June 14 the Kurdish woman succumbed to the phenomenon that is claiming lives in this Kurdish area of south-east Anatolia: she hanged herself in the bathroom of her home. “She was just 25 but it was especially tragic because both were teachers, educated people,” said Remziye Tural at Kam-er, the women’s organisation that has become a lifeline in Turkey’s poor south-east for those who face death because of a perception of dishonour. “She was modern and wore tight clothes – which is why his family rejected her. She was banned by her parents from seeing or speaking to him, and then they stopped her leaving the house. In the end the pressure was too much.” Despite the searing heat, Ms Tural is dressed for work in a pink T-shirt, combat trousers and boots. On the streets of Batman, a city with a population of 250,000, an alarming number are harbouring suicidal thoughts, and acting on them. Across Turkey, men are twice as likely as women to take their own lives, but, defying that trend, more than 300 women in Batman have attempted suicide since 2001. Seven women died in almost identical copy-cat deaths in one month alone. The rising number of suicides has brought schoolgirls marching in protest to Batman’s cemetery crying “stop the violence”, a courageous act given the conservative mores in Batman. “The numbers are increasing,” said Ms Tural. “By June this year, 19 had tried to take their lives and most were successful. That’s just in Batman. All over, in villages and towns, young girls are committing suicide.” There were those who had jumped into the River Tigris, others who had fallen off rooftops or cut their wrists, and some, like Nuran Uca, who had opted to end their lives abruptly as they were doing chores around the house. Invariably, survivors said it was their kader, or destiny, to meet such an end. But women’s groups and human rights advocates believe the suicides are tantamount to murder. Stories have emerged of girls as young as 12 being locked in rooms for days with rope, poison or a pistol. “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that these are, in fact, ‘honour killings’ passed off as suicides – that these girls are being forced to take their own lives,” said Aytekin Sir, a psychiatrist who has studied the practice. There is no evidence that Nuran Uca’s family forced their daughter to kill herself. Last year, Yakin Erturk, a special UN envoy, arrived at the same conclusion, saying “honour suicides” had clearly begun to replace “honour killings”, with the deaths increasingly being disguised as accidents. Death sentences For a long time the potent forces of fear and shame in the communities stopped young women visiting the Kam-er centre on Aydin Arlsan Street. But recently at least four girls a day have gone there, often in fear of death sentences issued by their fathers and brothers for infractions perceived to have brought shame on their families. Nearly one-fifth of those who walked through the doors of the organisation since it started up in 1997 complained of threats from their families. Some had received text messages on their mobile phones saying typically: “You have blackened our name. Kill yourself or we will kill you.” According to Vildan Aycicek, at the organisation’s headquarters in the city of Diyarbakir, west of Batman: “Women apply to us when they think they cannot survive the violence any longer. Most are illiterate and don’t know their legal rights. If they do, they have no idea how to use them.” There had, she said, been cases of Kurdish and Turkish women calling Kam-er’s hotline from Britain and other countries saying they also feared for their lives. Worldwide, the numbers of “honour killings” are notoriously difficult to estimate. But in Turkey the vengeful practice is cited by academics as the cause of death for hundreds of women each year – far above the official annual figure of 70. Sometimes adultery, or a woman’s desire for divorce, prompts an all-male “family council” to order a killing. But the list of “offences” is long: rape, incest, pregnancy brought on by both, a girl ringing into a radio chat show, exchanging eye contact with a boy or wearing a skimpy shirt. Sometimes accusations are no more than rumours. One villager near Diyarbakir explained the attitude of his home area. “Without rules you have chaos,” said Seyikan Arslan. “If my sister or my mother made a mistake we [men] would have to make it right. They would have to pay to cleanse our honour.” Few places demonstrate the clash in Turkey between east and west, between tradition and modernity, better than the towns of Anatolia. Both Diyarbakir and Batman, the site of Turkey’s first oil refinery, have seen a surge in migration from desperately poor rural areas. The culture clash has played a large part in exacerbating tensions within families and particularly between patriarchal fathers and their female offspring. “Migration is behind the big rise in honour and suicide killings,” said Dr Sir, whose research found that support for the deaths far outstripped other popular penalties such as a woman having her nose sliced off or head shaved. European hopes Ironically, the suicides have also been blamed on Turkey’s efforts to stop “honour crimes”. With Ankara’s reforming Islamic-rooted government determined to enter the EU, it has toughened laws against the killings. Lenient sentences for those who cite provocation as a mitigating factor are no longer possible. So, to save men from a life in prison, experts believe families are instead forcing women to kill themselves. “Often there is about two months between a killing being ordered and it taking place. That gives us time to save a woman,” said Ms Aycicek, mentioning the “intervention” teams of activists, police, imams and government officials set up to tackle the practice. Yet, despite these measures, some deny the prevalence of this revenge. “A lot of this talk about honour killings is aimed at showing Kurds as primitive and savage,” said Bawer Ucaman, at Diyarbakir’s chamber of commerce. Absent from the campaign in Batman has been the mayor, Huseyin Kalkan, who was awarded damages by DC Comics after a lawsuit over the use of his town’s name for the superhero Batman. That money, activists point out, could be used to save women like Nuran Uca.
When wrong boyfriends or clothes lead daughters to kill themselves
Thursday August 23, 2007
A memory note about a day that was really good
August 20, 2007 at 10:53 am (Uncategorized)
Went for a very long walk with Ta Mére (no accent grave here) yesterday. We had originally planned to have a short stroll around Maçka Park near Nianta, just to enjoy the sunlight and to have a good yack in daylight rather than at 2 am as per usual. We did have our stroll through Maçka Park, then continued down to the bottom where another park starts, then down to the bottom of that one, where we found ourselves at the Beikta stadium and Dolmabahçe palas, whereupon we decided to stroll the lovely leafy road to Beikta. In Beikta we decided to hike onwards to Yldz park, which was just a little further on up the road to Ortaköy. In Yldz, rather than taking the main roads up into the forests, we took some side trails leading up into the hills– reminding me a lot of Sunday hikes in East Sooke or Metchosin or Beaver Lake.
Somehow I was able to cover several kilometers of steep and crumbly dirt trails in my sandals before we stumbled upon one of the manzaral tea gardens overlooking foresty framed glimpses of the Bosporus. and drank sparkly cold gazoz for several hours until hunger pangs surprised me with their vigour. We had been so busy quietly analysing a wedding party sitting next to our table (one of the girls lept up to puke as soon as we sat down, but no one actually looked drunk and all were drinking tea) and plotting out possible overland routes to Beijing via Mongolia and Siberia and discussing the gentrification of Harlem and Galata that I totally forgot that I’d only had a small bowl of cheesy leftover pasta for brunch with my mugs of tea and it was now after 7 and we were nowhere near anything more filling than Mado ice cream and tulip glasses of tea.
We hiked out of the park and caught a taxi to Tünel and found ourselves in that lovely rooftop café that I’d gone to with Miles and Berkay, the one with walls of open windws laden witf a veggie patch of window boxes, five flors above the ground. We had a seat overlooking a few rooves and a tomato plant and some potato plants and some mixed herbs. Ac Taba and yourtlu kark kzartma and those lovely sarmsakl patates kzartma and a 20cl of rak and an ikram fruit plate dusted with soot from the chimney belching out cinders just outside our open window and several hours of fantastic bizarre unpredictable conversation, followed up by gelato at Milano on stiklal and a hike up to the metro and beers on my midnight balcony, comparing hand flexibility and the silence of the trees and the joy of balcony cats.
Let me state for the record that Ta Mére is slowly becoming one of my favourite people to hang out with. We seem to be having longer and longer marathon sessions. This is good. I need this. Especially with Kevin being out at Vodafone still and me only seeing him twice a week now.
