Merhaba Canım

ALMOST HALF A CENTURY AFTER THE POET ZEKAI ÖZGER

WHO HAD NAMED HIMSELF ARKADAŞ

WAS FOUND DEAD AT AGE 25.

We went to...

We went to Bolu with Zekai.

To Bolu...

Or rather, I took the bus on a summer's day in the '70s.

Zekai said, "There is a tent theatre there."

"Come and see what a tent theatre is!"

So I went.

The tent theatre had a huge effect on me.

There was go-go dancing, like the ones in military service.

In the tent theatre, a woman was stripping.

Her breasts were revealed.

But she had panties on.

Lots of macho men were shouting "Go! Go!".

She took her panties off.

But there were more panties underneath.

I really liked it.

I said to Zekai "What is this?"

"We are people, look for a sense of the truth,

but the truth is like these 'Go-go's."

I mean, you unfold one layer of the truth, only to find another.

We had quite a laugh.

I remember Zekai alongside the "Go-go's".

Because I think his world was similar.

I mean something that can be uncovered again and again...

to reveal something that is erotic.

BY WAY OF A DELAYED INTRODUCTION

HELLO MY DEAR

I'M ONE WHO SPEAKS LITTLE AND TIRES EASILY

I LOVE DRINKING WINE WITH HALVA I HAVE NEVER PRACTISED MY DAILY PRAYERS

ALSO ADORE MY MOTHER AND ALLAH MY MOTHER ALSO ADORES ALLAH

AS A FAMILY YOU COULD SAY WE ADORE ALLAH AND CATS QUITE A BIT

I'll never forget, it was a day of festivities.

Everybody was out selling something and making money.

Zekai and I saw some chocolate in shiny and yellow wrapping.

We bought some to sell.

But we realized that we'd already eaten half of them instead of selling.

Naturally, we couldn't sell any.

I was in touch mostly with Zekai.

We used to have a lot of fun together.

It was him who took me to a library for the first time.

There was a children's library in Bursa.

We would go on Saturdays,

wait around for hours to find a place so that we could read our books.

We had a pretty good childhood...

..until the infection in his foot appeared.

He had surgeries one after another.

My mom was always with him.

That's why there was a strong bond between them.

It's hard to live tied perched atop a chair...

at a hospital for months to be with your child.

When he came home, my mom did everything she could...

to make him better getting supplements like fish oil, fruit, etc.

First the mother gave birth to the child into suffering

Then the child mixed mother and death into pain

Then everything and everybody came to being from the child

But the day comes to square up with the mother, also

The child lives only for the mother, as a child

The mother lives not for the child alone, as a mother

She shares motherhood at the crotch of the father

Contradiction is what grows in the gaze of the child

Crying becomes a question with the half share of love

As siblings, it was Şükriye, Zekai, Türkan and I who were at home.

The house was small, with two rooms side by side.

There was a long hallway, not really a sitting room.

From there you could go down some stairs to the backyard.

It was a tiny-weeny house.

But since we spent our childhood there, it has a special place in our hearts.

My mother was a housewife.

My father was a worker at the Merinos factory.

Now I realize that it's really hard to raise seven children.

Especially with a worker's salary.

My dad had an anvil and a hammer.

On weekends, he used to repair the soles of our shoes.

Then, he would repair shoes for others in our neighborhood.

This would contribute a little to our income.

Back then, there were some spoiled and nasty kids in our neighborhood.

They used to call him "cripple".

Because of this, he was always quite sad but kept quiet about it.

Across from your own house

Away from your peers tucked in a corner

Just as you're wondering why you never join in their games

Mostly then it arrives with a chill

You enter the room of the clay house facing the street

Lie down on the divan on the bristle rug

Scrunch up your knees to your chin

The chin has a mechanical way of working

Your teeth, the gear of a terrible machine

tick tock

clackety clack

rattle crunch

Mother comes in you must have caught a cold again she says

Your father's aged coat a survivor of many winters past...

along with your mother's cloak perhaps covers you

The tent of shivers and fever is so set up

In the heat of the fire you settle into sleep

There was only one thing he cared for; reading, writing poems and literature.

We were at the same high school; in fact, we were classmates.

We were interested in literature, poetry and other genres of literature.

Our high school years were interesting and a lot of fun.

We developed a friendship, a love for animals, and a love for reading.

Zekai was into poetry.

He used to adore pure Turkish.

For this reason, he used to search the pure Turkish equivalents of words...

from the dictionaries of Turkish Language Association...

to use them in his poems and writings.

He cared about it a lot.

There was a theater in Bursa back then.

My sister worked at ticket office of the theater.

Zekai frequently used to go there with her.

I met Arkadaş there.

He was a student at Atatürk High School.

Our first connection was through publishing magazines...

we worked on separate magazines though.

I used to publish a magazine called "Toward Illumination"...

when I was a senior student, it wasn't exactly a literary magazine.

Arkadaş and his friends used to publish "City 16"...

which was a magazine like a newspaper.

Our relationship developed in those years in that environment.

Then, we graduated from high school the same year...

and went to Ankara for university.

I started to study at the Ankara Law Faculty.

Arkadaş was at the Vocational School of Press in the Political Sciences Faculty.

He used to sit at back of the class.

He wouldn't socialize much with anybody.

I can't say that he was a student with a perfect attendance.

He would come and go in a subdued manner.

He would always answer if you asked a question.

I think that he somehow didn't make an effort...

to establish any kind of intimacy.

What somehow "forced me" to be friends with Zekai...

was his calm and attentive manner.

He used to come, sit in a corner and just listen.

It took me a few months to realise that he had a limp.

He was ashamed of his crippled leg...

and had an inferiority complex because of this.

Although I tried to help him about it...

he was rather obsessive.

He seemed timid but also, he was quite inflexible.

I'd written "How can anyone be so thin?" under this photograph.

It's in the book this picture is in.

You can see how skinny he was.

Like a stickman.

The theater club of the Political Sciences Faculty was staging Peace by Aristophanes.

Zekai was acting several parts and also working for the play.

The play later won the first prize in the METU Theatre Festival.

There were other guys from Bursa who came from the Bursa High School...

in the theatre club, beside Zekai.

However, they weren't good friends with Zekai.

We could feel that there was tension and animosity between them.

So, Zekai preferred to choose his friends...

from the poetry and literary community.

He wanted to read poets and poetry books of all kinds.

He aspired to fill his library...

with poetry books completely.

He used to follow up on emerging poets.

In those years, I used to write...

for magazines which were average.

Arkadaş's poetry on the other hand...

was published in Papirüs published by Cemal Süreya...

Soyut by Halil İbrahim Bahar...

and Forum by Hasan Hüseyin Kormazgil.

And there was a newspaper called Ulus ...

which had a weekly cultural section.

His poems used to be published there as well.

Another journal that meant a lot for us was Yordam .

Hüseyin Cöntürk was the director, editor and owner of Yordam .

There were Ahmet İnam, Hüseyin Peker, Tuncer Gönen...

I and also Arkadaş Zekai Özger as writers.

Once during our meetings in İzmir...

when our conversation came to mystical analysis, I asked him...

"So, your pen name is Arkadaş. Where does it come from?"

"Yes, but" he said, "I use it as my own name."

He said "Because one night..."

"I saw God in my dream. I was with him."

"As a result of this togetherness I became a friend of god."

"That's why I use Arkadaş as my name." he said.

The novel Mikhail by Panait Istrati, translated as "Arkadaş" into Turkish...

speaks of a love like this.

I think it was an important book for him.

I think, the name was based on a novel by James Baldwin.

There are two gay characters in the novel.

They call each other "friend".

I would say it was probably a reference to that.

Don't you get swept up in it It will change one day

the course of the wind that worships the sun and the phallus

Because I read about it or something

that somewhere women were hustled to the gods

There was a rough political environment in Turkey starting from 1965.

This tension had begun after that social movements became...

more political and left-wingers took part in active political life.

It was 1968.

Student movements had just started.

The political scene was beginning to gradually take shape.

The organization Revolutionary Youth hadn't yet been founded...

but the Federation of Debate Clubs was.

We all cared deeply about revolutionism.

We thought...