This week’s story, both written in and translated from the original Zazaki by Pınar Yıldız, is firmly confined within the walls of its narrator’s house. The photographs decorating the interiors offer an occasion for reflection on familial history for the narrator, who is suffocated by the silence that dominates the “soilless cemetery” of their home. These portraits, a collage of family members and Kurdish folk heroes, are portals into memories of a lush childhood, when the images seemed to manifest a corporeal existence, infusing the household with their vigorous commentary. Once, they held the power to influence the animate world; now, they are simply still lifes. The passage of time, resisted by the frozen shots, is instead measured by the tapering volume of their voices. Through reflections on preservation and vitality, Yıldız ponders what keeps a house, and a family, alive.
The walls of our house, like the walls of many other houses, were like a soilless cemetery. The unfortunate lives got stuck to the walls. It was as if the walls wanted to open their mouths and speak, but they were frozen like soulless frames. A silence spread from the walls into the house. Most of the time, like those frames, we would freeze without saying a single word. Like those photographs hanging on the walls, it was as if we were frozen in a different world.
Only three of the photographs hanging on the walls of our house had not been inside that soilless cemetery; they were struggling to live in a corner. One was Ahmet Kaya’s photo. With his saz (baglama) in his hand and his enthusiastic and hopeful smile, it was as if that photo had made him greater than death while he was still alive. The other photo was of my brother Roni, who had just started school. That photo of Roni in his blue apron was also very precious to my mother, just like Roni himself. Roni, born in the millennium century, looked at the camera with a look as if he was lost in worry and thought. The photograph of my father and Sheikh Necmettin taken by the sea in a distant city has been hanging on the wall in a frame for a long time, and liveliness and life radiated from this photograph. In that photo, Sheikh Necmettin did not look like a sheikh, but like a human being, a gentleman. He was not as old as he is now. I do not know why the sheikh, who I thought never left his big house with a courtyard, had been to that distant country. Maybe Sheikh Necmettin brought those pink hard candies from that distant land by the sea. Maybe he would keep those candies in his pocket as a souvenir from those days and distribute those candies not only to children but to everyone.
Apart from the photographs, calendars and timetables from the month of Ramadan were also lined up on the walls. I remembered the blue walls of my grandparents’ house. Calendars and timetables hung on the walls of their house too. An embroidered towel and a mirror always hung on the edge of the stove. The shape and model of the mirror never changed, but sometimes the surroundings of the mirror were blue and sometimes red. I never saw when the mirror was broken or replaced with a new one.
When my grandfather was still alive, a photograph of him hung on the walls of their house. I would look at that photo of my grandfather with surprised looks. My grandfather looked old again in that old photo. My mother used to say, “He has always been the same for as long as I can remember.” I guess at that time there were not yet so many dead accumulated in our family, or there were no photographs of the dead at that time. That is why there were not many photographs hanging on the walls of my grandparents’ house at that time. Only that photo of my grandfather and a photo of Sheikh Said were hanging side by side, and one of them resisted history and the other resisted the years.
At that time, silence had not yet spread from the walls of my grandparents’ house. My grandfather would talk and talk non-stop, with his usual loud voice, sometimes with excitement, sometimes with anger, sometimes with reproach… I would sit behind the stove, and the warmth and serenity of the stove would spread throughout my body. My grandfather’s loud voice came into the room… The fire in the stove, the photograph of Sheikh Said, and we all listened to my grandfather silently. I would look at the photo of Sheikh Said from behind the stove. It was as if he was just staring me with those eyes. Those looks that sometimes made me afraid of them and sometimes made me feel even smaller with their majesty. But he listened to my grandfather.
I do not know if it was the majesty of his gaze or what, when I was a child we used to call the Sheikh Said of history just “Sheikh” and with this word, he became even bigger and holier in our eyes. When we swore an oath, we would say, “On this shrine, on this sheikh…” Actually, we used to swear by the sheikh whose grave (shrine) was in the cemetery of our village, but every time we said “by this sheikh”, I would remember that photo of Sheikh Said hanging on the wall of my grandfather’s house. It would be very difficult to lie, even for the sake of that hanging photo. His sharp gaze would be a body to that grave and a voice to us, “Don’t lie!” It is like he was there. Not like a dead person, not like a sheikh, just like he was there with his looks. Gazes with a strong and loud voice… “Don’t lie!” Those voices and looks were as if they had been there forever and would remain there forever. Sometimes I would listen to the voice of those eyes rather than my grandfather’s voice behind the stove. Like my grandfather, those looks would talk and talk non-stop too… Sometimes, the sound of the “Sheikh’s” look and my grandfather’s voice would intertwine. At that time, the silence of the silent had not yet dominated us, and voices would rise loudly from the frames.
We no longer swear on the sheikh’s shrine (mausoleum). I do not remember any photos anymore. Neither enthusiastic voices nor reproaches remain…
Silence also radiates from the blue walls of my grandparents’ house. Sheikh Said’s photograph, like us, listens to the silence of the frames on the walls, with the sound of the fire igniting in the stove.
Translated from the Zazaki by Pınar Yıldız
Pınar Yıldız (b. 1988, Diyarbakır, Turkey) graduated from Dicle University’s Turkish Language and Literature department in 2010. At Mardin Artuklu University, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the dialects of Zaza Kurds in the Modan (Mutki) district of Bitlis. In 2019, her first poetry collection, Vena [Rock Pigeon], was published by Avesta. She followed up with the short story collection Hîkayeyê Hewn û Hişyarîye [Sleep and Wakefulness Stories) in 2021. In 2024, she released her second poetry collection Vateyê Zimistanî (Winter Words).
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