Ayşe Doğu
Time intersecting and diverging, me meeting and separating…
More than one time flows. Time is not one. Like parallel universes – ours and the others‘ – ourtime flows. It is not static, it is alive. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, in some events it freezes, becomes numb, enters a vegetative state. We live in the present, the past and thefuture at the same time. Sometimes we meet people, sometimes we get separated. Sometimesit is necessary to save the day, this choice in parallel with our determination is beneficial, it is a right step. If we do not have a purpose, a reason, we lose. Both ourselves, our future andbeyond.
The elite think the day is theirs and spend it extravagantly, but the peoples, the oppressed, those waiting for justice, stubbornly wait for their own day to come. If their lives are not enough to settle the score, they leave their righteousness, their claims and their dreams as a legacy to their children.
Having hope for the future is faith in the good, the beautiful, the eternal.
Every human being opens his/her eyes to life ‘alone‘ but finds someone around him/her whoembraces him/her. As he grows up, he establishes a spiritual bond with more and more peopleand with all humanity since Adam, integrating his uniqueness into the great human family. Indeed, there is a difference between a blood family and a non-blood family.
True human beings do not turn a deprivation that offers an opportunity for humanization –integration – into a means of wholesale revenge against humankind. It does not function as a means of settling scores with the past, as a means of discord, as a means of divisiveness. Ifanything, it becomes a struggle that is an opportunity to empty the poison inside and get rid of its burden. In this way, we will be freed from our shackles, our soul and body, our past andfuture will be lightened, purified and we will be free like a bird. Then we can look ahead. Ouroptions, like the forms of the universe, become infinite and free from being finite, limited andcompulsory. We become free too.
Those who look at change, at protecting human dignity, at resistance with suspicion mixedwith fear: When the causes of the people they exclude and look at with suspicion begin togain credibility in the eyes of the public, they come softly and pretend to be in the face of thetruth. But in the first ordeal, they move away little by little, they are the first ones to abandonthe ship.
So much so that they join the fastest chorus of slanderers, saying ‘we told you so, we warnedyou‘, and then they start to condemn them in the cruelest and most brutal way. Those whoworship power; when they say Allah, when they say law, when they say democracy, whenthey say law, they only hide their insatiable appetite. They practice taqiyya. Their mostdistinguishing feature is their superficiality and their existence that is hollow on the inside andglittering on the outside. Their fight and their faith are both soulless and lies. They love shortpasses in a narrow field.
If we were to put them in a laboratory and peel off their masks, we would get the image of an insect, single and plain, cold and creepy, patiently waiting for its prey. Either they are onlywomen or men, or oppressed or disenfranchised losers, or merchants, or mere disciples. That’swhy they so quickly turn into their enemies, why they become best friends with those theycursed yesterday. They are poor moths in the orbit of their enemies whom they fear – morethan Allah. They fall into the fire.
No identity alone is enough for a human being, it cannot summarize a human being.
Black skinned or Kurdish, Turkish, modern or primitive. These are all illusions. They define the poor, helpless and incomplete human being. Only those who fail to be human define themselves with a single identity. This limitation turns people into either oppressed or ruthlesssavages who hold power in their hands and think they have every right to control others.
A human being, for example, cannot only be a woman. As a woman, she is a daughter, a mother, a neighbor, a friend, a citizen and ultimately, above all, a human being. This is whyfeminism has not been of any significant benefit to women. A man cannot be just a husband. Each individual is made up of many roles, many faces and many possibilities. It reminds us of God. Man himself is creation. It contains within itself an infinite range of options.
Anyone who reduces himself to a single thing is a poor victim of fate, who is not the masterof his life. Every human being who cannot bring me together with us is in fact a humanoid. He is constantly threatened, hungry, cruel and cowardly, and therefore alien to all creaturesother than himself. Since he cannot identify, the suffering, needs and fate of the other do not concern his ego. This is the ‘that’s your problem’ ego that entered our language throughforeign movie translations.
Underneath that maverickism, which at first glance seems to promise infinite freedom andindependence, lies an insurmountable oppression. It is such an oppression that it neither pitiesitself nor the other. Underneath lies a deep disbelief and indifference, unreliability, unprincipledness. There is a betrayal of humanitarian approaches, a blindness.
A human being may be a loser in some areas, sometimes in one, sometimes in all, but he doesnot use this to limit himself. He does not use it as an excuse to get rid of his responsibilities. He is not either white or black. He avoids totalitarianism. He hates coastalism. It is preciselybecause of this that human beings define themselves by what they are not – cannot be.
As human beings, we may be incomplete and faulty, but as long as we do not deny ourfeelings, as long as we do not lose faith in humanity, we remain in the human line. Isn’t lovingalready loving the potential of that person? In a person we find all of humanity and at thesame time ourselves. When we love him, we love ourselves. When we get angry with him, weget angry with ourselves. Judging him, we judge our own faults. When we doubt, we doubtour own beliefs. The other becomes a mirror for us. As we get to know ourselves, we get toknow the other, we understand and love, withhold and forgive, protect and care, hide andavoid.
Human beings have many emotions and they change every moment. Just as the day is in a cycle, so are emotions. Even the change of weather affects our emotions. We hear somethingsad and our eyes fill up, we encounter something inhuman and our feelings of rebellion swell. When we hear a beautiful song or see an impressive landscape, our emotions run wild.
Emotions are a sign of vitality. It is proof that we are human; that we have not lost touch withthe divine. If there is no pain, no regret, no sadness, no joy, no hopeful look at the future, nohopeful expectation, no faith in the future, then we don’t exist, we are dead. That’s whyhopeless arabesque songs always talk about death.
We always feel more than we are. We always feel plus one more than we are now.
This place is not enough, we wonder about the beyond and other places, times and realms.
The greatest crime committed against humanity is human enmity. It is not believing andtrusting in oneself and humanity. The human family is both alive and always in a state of becoming.
If there is breath, there is hope.