Sema Kaygusuz on language, water and renewal. Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury.
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Whenever I think about language and literature, which constitute the basic fabric of being, and whenever I succumb to my curiosity and cobble together a piece of writing, I feel always like I’m on the open seas. As you read this essay that I have titled ‘Shouldering the Boat,’ I would ask that you hear my voice as though you are on land and I am out at sea. I find myself resorting to this image now because of a spiritual experience I had while trying to write something about poetics and creativity. I discovered, in the course of consulting sources during my research, that the creative mind can become all the more creative by departing from land. By submerging itself in water. This is true not just for writers, but also for composers, musicians, painters, sculptors: each must have a sea of their own that allows them to break free of the language they inhabit. A sea apiece, to upend the gravity of culture on land. Because when we imagine that moment when we float along like a piece of wood on the surface of the water, when the weight of our bodies becomes suddenly lighter, our minds loosen up, our senses go numb, we are unmoored in fantasy. In order to be just so properly unmoored, though, we must first, of course, build a boat.
I was thinking about the notion of yenilenme, renewal, a common desire among us modern people. The word renewal strikes me as somewhat insipid, but it nonetheless conjures in my mind’s eye an image of a departing boat. This is a boat that belongs to neither person nor heritance; rather, it is a boat that the seafarer built on their own and for themselves alone. To be renewed, I realised, one must first be unmoored in one’s own metaphorical sea, wherein one can find one’s own myths. Let me do my best to explain this. I’ll show what I mean by shouldering the boat at the end.
If we think, by contrast, of the concept of yenileşme, innovation, we recognise that it lexically encompasses other people. Like invitation, or inclusion, or involvement. In this sense, innovation necessitates others to achieve the new. It might precipitate a new form of interaction with others, or innovative organising and innovative encounters might be how the new is devised. But the concept of renewal is, at least in my opinion, a more singular – even solitary – act. A person giving up on something within themselves, opting to replace it with another approach, another state, another dream or spirituality or attitude. Progressively adopting the new as a means of losing – even mourning – the old. Seeking creativity, this form of solitude surely requires something feminine: the courage to return to the waters upon whose surface the moonlight shines.
In the monotheistic religions of the world, each and every human is understood to be born from dust and returned to dust, born from earth and returned to earth. By contrast, the watery life left to us by polytheistic cultures has been consigned to the psychomythologies of our darkest subconscious. Yet every person who emerges from the amniotic waters of their mother’s womb finds themselves seeking out and returning to those waters with every daydream and reverie, with every act of fantasy and imagination.
Virtually all creation myths posit that water originates the universe – that life comes from water. In fact the very notion of individual descent depends on water. According to Thales, water is what ‘gives birth to all beings.’ In the Vedas, water is called mâtritamâh, mother of mothers. Water’s feminine quality, its description through the fundaments of the maternal, symbolises the creative potential of humankind. And yet the tempestuous waves that one surmounts in pursuit of creativity, chasing after that which is unique and incomparable, are not always so compassionate. At night, for instance, sea monsters emerge. Just as it gives life, water takes life too. It’s trustworthy when still, murderous when stormy. Though it pledges immortality, as in the water of life, it nonetheless churns round us like a deadly whirlpool. Water has the capacity to terrify – with the giant squids and monstrous fish it conjures in our nightmares – even as it beckons – in the form of water nymphs, mermaids and sirens – each of us on a quest for renewal.
In his book Images and Symbols, Mircea Eliade examines how water represents spiritual energy. When water flows peacefully and as planned through its intended channel, it can symbolise a life well-lived. Whereas waters that overflow or gush forth, as floods or tsunamis, threaten the stability of land. To dip oneself into water – presuming that one can re-emerge from it – renders the mind and the ego productive; it increases one’s life force, because contact with water brings one into relation with the source of life itself. Likewise, water is shapeless on its own, even as it wears away at what has already taken shape, and gives shape to new forms:
[The Waters] dissolve or abolish the forms of things, they ‘wash away sins,’ and as such are at once purifying and renewing. It is their lot both to precede the Creation and to reabsorb it, incapable as they are of surpassing their own modality – that is, of manifesting themselves in forms. The Waters cannot get beyond the state of the virtual, of seeds and of what is latent. Everything that has form manifests itself above the Waters, by detaching itself from them. On the other hand, as soon as it is separated from the waters and has ceased to be potential (virtual), every form comes under the laws of Time and of Life; every form therefore acquires limitations, participates in the universal becoming, is subject to history, decays away and is finally emptied of substance unless it be renewed by periodic immersions in the Waters, repetitions of the ‘deluge’ with its cosmogenic corollary.
What I mean to say with all of this is that one must set out to sea, no matter how stormy it may be, in order to be renewed. By boat or by caique, setting out to sea so that one can return, in other words, to the cosmic mother. By interesting coincidence, the word caique comes from the word kayġuk, an Old Turkic word derived from the word for ‘return.’ One must navigate uncharted waters, must risk the dissolution, abolition, or purging of all forms, so that one can return from dreams and from reverie, bringing ashore new forms. Whatever new thing we bring back to shore, even if it is simply ourselves renewed, is altogether new until it is defined through other objects and beings.
But first, we must build a boat. We must be the crafters of a simple boat, whether by hollowing out a tree or by tying together reeds as they did in ages past. Our books, our histories, our lives are the specifications for this abstract boat we mean to build. But building the boat: that is the responsibility of us, the seafarers. In ancient Greek they used the words tekhnao – to craft with skill, to produce – tekhnikos – skilled in art or craft – and tekhnites – artist, craftsperson. These words are at the heart of tekne, the Turkish word for boat. To build a boat with technical craftsmanship is not easy. As we build, our hands may bleed, our backs may ache, our skin may burn under the searing sun. And then it is our task to shoulder the boat and carry it to the shore, to float it in the sea. Before the creative mind can carry the seafarer, the seafarer must carry the creative mind: with patience, care and discipline, free of delusions, abiding by the laws of physics.
To tear oneself from land and from language and set out to sea in a boat is no less than to risk dying and being born again in the artistic struggle; it is, moreover, an act of existential defiance against the world.
The waters can assist us in this defiance. There are, as you know, five rivers in the underworld of Hades: Acheron, river of woe; Cocytus, river of wails; Styx; river of dread; Pyriphlegethon, river of flames; and Lethe, river of forgetfulness. But there is one additional river: Mnemosyne, which restores to memory what the Lethe forgets. Artists, astronomers, musicians, poets, tragedists, historians, dancers, scientists: these are the people who, by drinking from the waters of the Mnemosyne, are brought back to life. It is these people who shoulder their boats: poets reciting their poetry standing up, writers ached and hunching over their desks, the many named and nameless who carry the suffering of the world on their shoulders to the shores of the sea.
Sema Kaygusuz is one of Turkey’s leading female writers. Her debut novel, Yere Düsen Dualar (Wine and Gold) won international recognition upon publication in 2006. In 2007, she wrote the screenplay for Yesim Ustaoglu’s film Pandora’nin Kutusu (Pandora’s Box), which won the Golden Shell at the 2008 International Film Festival in San Sebastian. She is the author of the short story collections Ortadan Yarisindan (In the Middle of the Half), Sandik Lekesi (Box Stain) and Doyma Noktasi (Saturation Point), which established Sema Kaygusuz as a distinctive voice in the canon of young Turkish literature in the new millennium. Her novels The Well of Trapped Words (translated by Maureen Freely and published by Comma Press) and Yüzünde Bir Yer (translated by Nicholas Glastonbury and published in English by Tilted Axis as Every Fire You Tend) were also awarded PEN Translates grants. The latter was inspired by her own grandmother, and deals with the feelings of shame and guilt experienced by someone who survives a massacre. Kaygusuz is a recipient of both the Cevdet-Kudret-Literature Award and the France-Turquie Literary Award. In 2016 she was named laureate of the prestigious German Friedrich Rückert Prize.
Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator and anthropologist living in New York. His translations of Turkish and Kurdish fiction and poetry have appeared with or are forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press, Comma Press, Soho Press, Sandorf Passage, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and currently serves as a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University.
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