2023-07-29 15:19:12
A little party
But the beach also recalls the light murmur of the Tiger crossing the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir (“Amed” in Kurmanji) where Suzan Samanci was born. She is a recognized author in her language and culture but has lived in Geneva since the July 2016 coup, banned from returning. His country, Turkey, is ruled by a man who does not recognize the existence of Kurdistan, does not like writers, and locks up the innocent. Or rather, since any oppressive system is the work of a people and to focus on a single one is to forget to look at the masses (it is therefore to look badly), Suzan Samanci is in exile because a part of the people Turkish refuses to recognize the existence of his own, and because the rest of humanity faces other battles elsewhere. And among the thousands of books left in the now closed office of Suzan Samanci, there are The Waves de Virginia Woolf.
Read once more: The waves of Virginia
I met Suzan a year ago, within the framework of the “Ecrire, encore – Suisse” project developed in Bern on the experience of her German brother, keep writing, which puts authors in exile in contact with Swiss authors. It has become a stretch of land before an ocean of questions. An isthmus between two shores. And she says, “swim.” She says, “swim,” in response to the word “beach,” and laughs to imagine herself splashing across the surface of the lake. And when Suzan laughs it’s a little party. It reverses his sadness, pushes it away.
The burst eardrum
His father, seated at his side, calm, attentive, watches and listens. His name is Sahabettin and his voice has the flavor of a prayer, also its sweetness. He came to visit Suzan. Black tea is served, baklava has been sliced. In the largesse of the meal, the living room table has become a trunk of memories. He says, “I only like river beaches, the shores of flowing waters.” Then he adds: “But I don’t bathe”. The eardrum in his right ear burst one day at school when the teacher slapped him violently for speaking Kurdish. “Turkish! You will speak Turkish!” Since then, Sahabettin fears water. In his deaf ear survives the refusal to hear the threats. In the other, resistance and lucidity.
We don’t look at the beach and the sea, we are the beach and the sea. We don’t bring them together, we are brought together by them.
When Suzan translates her father’s words, when he answers her, they both look at each other with the sincere attention of someone who does not speak lightly; of who wants to understand and say as accurately as possible. Of who knows that we are human because we speak and that in this gesture a possibility of reparation interferes, claims it. This “talking together” claimed by Aristotle conditions everything and between their words slip regular Bêlé, bêlé (“Okay, okay”), light melody. Sahabettin is now there, at the lips of the Tiger. He walks. He walks on the arena composed of gravel, silt, sediment, thick waves that are slowly dying of so many evils, and, as on any beach (the beach in Kurmanji), he finds fragments of memory under his feet.
The first wave
We don’t look at the beach and the sea, we are the beach and the sea. We don’t bring them together, we are brought together by them. If sea and beach get along so well, it is because they coexist, without rejecting our presence which nevertheless denies them. We are this fish that has become a pedestrian and has forgotten that it carries its own sea within it. The first of all grains of sand cannot be found, but this unfindable survives within us and asks us the question: what was the first water? What was the first wave? What was the first current? And we don’t know how to answer. Some scientists say: it is this, it is that. Their research questions, digs. But we don’t know how to remember so far back.
Read also: Karelle Ménine, urban poetry
When from the banks we lean over the surface of the water, when we see its reflection and the underwater depth at the same time, a trinity is reformed which usually escapes us. The original time of the abyss, the universal time of light, and the present time of bare feet come together. We still see the beach, and still the water, but we are in the middle of something else. We are in the middle of the universe.
The sand, this guardian
And perhaps what is contained in the tiny matter of a grain of sand, a grain, just a grain, living fossil by its capacity to lead us back to the most buried, to set our memory in motion, to revive forms nameless but familiar, perhaps – if we detail its faces, its radiance, if we know how to feel its pulse, listen to its story – it will take us into a dizzy spell, suddenly seeming ridiculously small to us , consumed, soon gone altogether, but able to remind us of this mystery: it all came from there.
Once the cigarette butt, the bottle, the plastic bag have been picked up, taking the time to look at a beach is to see what it really is: the first of the encyclopedias. The most fantastic personal archive. The most mysterious of lands. Waves are messengers, wrote biologist Rachel Carson. In their scrolls are secrets. The sand is also its guardian. Holding it in your hands, letting it flow, is not watching time pass, it is observing what can revive this unconscious memory of having been a mollusk, seaweed, sponge, and from which everything is possible . From which humanity no longer has borders, where Suzan Samanci is no longer in exile, where Sahabettin no longer carries his loneliness to the banks of the great river.
Passing through our fingers, the sand transmits to us a language that contains what we need to continue the strange road that is ours, and continue to look at the sea, and continue to feel the wind. And never stop listening, days and nights so terribly alive, to the sound of the waves.
Journalist, urban artist who inscribes the words of writers on city walls like those of Isabelle Eberhardt in Geneva, Karelle Ménine published in 2022 Black Nimbus (Work and Faith) and Blur the immensity (MétisPresses).
1690644681
#beach #Karelle #Ménine #continue #sea
