Review: Every Fire You Tend,Sema Kaygusuz

By Şule Akdoğan

How can a novel be written in the language of figs? Sema Kaygusuz’s Yüzünde Bir Yer, recently translated into English as Every Fire You Tend by Nicholas Glastonbury, offers an enchanting insight to this question. Every Fire You Tend is a multi-layered text in which myth, history, religion, guilt, pain, memory and sexuality, among many others, intermingle with each other in such skilful ways that an impressive polyphony becomes the core of the narrative. With its multiple appearances, the fig becomes a captivating narrative device in weaving and flowing the polyphonic spirit of the novel.

We first come across the fig in the second page of the novel, in which the narrator addresses an unnamed woman whose pensive mode is also infused with pain, shame, guilt, isolation, alienation and melancholy: “The middle door of your introspection opened upon a fig tree. There on the threshold, you breathed in the scent of its bitter leaves, observed its white branches twisting outward, heavy with purple fruit…Your “I” had shrunk in that ancient agony, all the time you’d lived through condensed into a fig seed.” While the woman is unable to articulate the source of her pain, the narrator, in an assertive manner, says that it is because of “the obscure memory of an event” that she “never lived through.”

After that, the narrator turns to Dersim, an eastern region of Turkey mostly populated by an ethno-linguistic group called the Zaza, who generally Alevis. The area witnessed much death and displacement in 1937 and 1938 as a result of a military operation conducted in the name nationalism. Flashbacking to a day in 1938, the narrator focalizes 40 people from Dersim, including the unnamed woman’s grandmother Bese, as they are sent into exile; they are suffering not only from the harsh conditions of their exilic state but also “the deep guilt of having survived” a massacre. The narrator indicates that their agony and fear have transformed them forever:

Afraid of stepping back into the nightmarish, bloody landscape that they had left behind, they refused to sleep. Water, fire, and bread had taken on entirely new meanings: water smelled of blood, fire screamed, and bread turned into a sacred pittance they hoped would fall from the heavens. These people gathered around the fire had lost their fear of death. Moreover, they were so lifeless at this poiny, that it would be impossible to kill them further.

While the group have gathered around a fire and started an ecstatic “reproachful entreaty” to Hızır— a Quranic figure and major religious figure for the Alevis of Dersim, believed to appear in different guises, Bese departs from the group and disappears for three days. On her return, she says, she has seen Hızır; but her being half naked, along with the bruises and blood on her body, indicates that she has been raped. While this scene raises a critique the sexual abuse and violence experienced during the forced displacement, it also intensifies Bese’s further mental transformation through the wounds she has and Hızır’s role in this. Hızır, says Kaygusuz in the afterword, is “a symbol of poetic justice” for people like Bese.

Later, it is revealed that Bese is pregnant and it is at this point that her “pact” between the fig tree comes to be tested. As fig branch is also used to abort foetuses, a midwife tries to insert one into Bese’s cervix. Bese rejects it saying, “Don’t! Don’t ruin the fig for me.” She does not let anyone “violate the pact between her and the tree.” This fig tree, the narrator says, comes from the seeds of a fig seedling that belonged to a woman named Eliha who lived centuries ago.

Displaced from her hometown at a young age as a result of an unsettlingly unfortunate encounter between his father and a bandit, Elia turns into a Hermit-like figure whose life is pervaded by loneliness, guilt and silence. An object of disgust, fear, curiosity and also desire, Eliha, as well as her fig tree, eventually attracts the attention of Melchisedek, King of Salem who soon ruins everything she has and cuts down the tree to make Eliha his wife. As she left her hometown with the enemy years ago, this time she leaves with Melchisedek; taking a seedling from the tree, she nevertheless does not look back. During her continuous state of homelessness, the fig seedling becomes her home.

After Bese, Eliha’s fig seeds also cross the unnamed woman’s path. In her obsession with finding a flat with a fig tree, she eventually finds it and names the tree Zevraki. Quite critical of her fixation on the tree, the narrator notes how she is isolated from society, people and even nature. Although she stares at the tree for long hours, she neither acknowledges the fig’s mythic and religious geography nor is she captivated by its erotic spell and mouth-watering taste. The narrator correlates the woman’s detachment from the historic and impressive power of the fig with several things such as her infertility, loneliness and existential suffering; but perhaps more importantly, it is “the shame of being human” that devours her “sensitive spirit:”

Because children like you, born into the silence that remains in the wake of catastrophe, are born unable to cry out. Even if misery comes undone in language, even if wistfulness gives you pleasure, even if grief makes you feel that you matter, still, shame will always settle like a stone in your gut. The sheer horror in the scene of a massacre, in the killing of one person by another, can never be contained in a photograph.

It is thus the shame of being human that fails the ordinary language, which is the reason suskunluk, silence in Turkish, writes Kaygusuz at the beginning of the book, pervades the characters of this novel who are also haunted by the memories of the Dersim massacre. Kaygusuz’s grandmother was one of the survivors of the massacre, and yet she never talked about Dersim, which inspired Kaygusuz to write this novel. Fear, shame, guilt, resistance to “making meaning out of cruelty” and “the sheer futility of speaking in the name of the dead” are some of the reasons for this silence. Nevertheless, the writer takes silence as a disorienting narrative device in chronicling the suffering of Dersim and its unsettling memories, which also can be taken as a transnational metaphor in its resemblance to the agonies of exiled and massacred groups such as Jews, Armenians and Bosnians. Accordingly, she says: “Silence marks not the absence of emotion but is acute abundance, and here, this abundance-the story-combusts in the loudest silence of writing.”

The allure the silence creates is intensified through the stories of Hızır, Zulqarnayn—the warrior king who also appears in Quran, the mass suicide of the inhabitants of Xanthos, miraculous metamorphosis of a shepherd named Munzur into a river and many other ancient agonies. Besides, across the novel there are numerous eco-feminist imageries; in one instance, for example, the narrator relates the unnamed woman’s suffering from nothingness and alienation, from herself and society, with nature’s physical and spiritual oppression at the hands of an increasingly mechanical and capitalist society:

The stairs down to your garden are covered in bird shot, flies buzzing overhead. It’s not really a garden, you’re right, only a small space between apartment buildings. This narrow patch of grass only exists because they were never able to construct here […] Zevraki doesn’t dream of bearing fruit here…There in your garden, overshadowed by buildings looming over us, laundry drying on back patios, old belongings wrapped in plastic, rolled-up carpets […], overshadowed by so many other odds and ends, we’ll recognize how desperately we struggle to impart our spirits into our possessions.

The language of figs, with its transhistorical essence in weaving the myriad of emotions and memories across cultures becomes apt for the polyphonic structure and spirit of the novel.

As translator Nicholas Glastonbury explains in his foreword to the book, Kaygusuz’s unique use of language is vital to convey the deep repertoire of the novel. For instance, she deliberately uses Ottoman vocabulary, not only to create “an antiquated tone,” particularly concerning the cross-genealogical conversation of the narrative, but also to underline how the Turkish language still has traces of Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish, the languages that the nationalist project has tried to suppress and eliminate. At this point, Glastonbury’s careful translation should be given due praise, since he has meticulously and adeptly translated this mesmerizing piece of storytelling with all its thematic, historical and linguistic plurality. Especially considering that the language of figs is also the language of an archaic silence, Glastonbury translates not only various unsettling historical chapters but also the impressive array of emotions embedded in them. Considering the Tilted Axis Press’s inspiring mission to publish books with “artistic originality, radical vision, the sense that here is something new,” to “tilt the axis of world literature from the centre to the margins,” and to foreground the power of “multiple traditions,” “new forms” and translation, Yüzünde Bir Yerseems to have found a caring home in English publishing industry.

In her keynote speech at the “Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, İzmir” in 2013, Kaygusuz underlined her concerns related to being “confined to a ‘national literature.’”[i]While such confinement can enforce a writer to be representative of certain ideologies within national borders and at some points can generate hatred toward minorities, she argues, it can also reinforce a Turkishness that is also infused with Eurocentric bias. She said, “the minute that I leave Turkey, I am labelled absolutely and exclusively as a female writer who is Turkish and Muslim, and I am only accepted by some literary circles if I bear these tags.” I think translation, a careful one indeed, has utmost significance for a writer like Kaygusuz whose texts create a contrast to a rigid understanding of Turkishness as well as other identity markers. Like Every Fire You Tend,The Well of Trapped Words, a collection of Kaygusuz’s short stories translated into English by Maureen Freely in 2015, is full of stories highlighting a multi-layered, polyphonic context where diverse issues such as sexual abuse and suicides in the army, massacres, traumas of violence, İstanbul with its shopping centres and impoverished people, and human’s relationship with nature and animals, which are often infused with gruesome, grotesque and supernatural touches. In the same speech, Kaygusuz also said: “As stories get translated again and again on their journey around the world it is our shared spirit that keeps them alive.” “Therefore,” she says, “all the warm democracies the author encounters, such as publishing houses, cultural and artistic ideologists, editors and academicians do in fact have life-sustaining meaning.” The Well of Trapped Words and Every Fire You Tend conscientiously translate the polyphonic spirit of Kaygusuz’s stories. In this regard, Freely and Glastonbury should be acknowledged for their adept translations while Comma Press and Tilted Axis Press deserve praise for providing a platform for these meticulous works and keeping their spirit alive as well as making them travel across the world.

[i]The speech is translated by Caroline Stockford and avialable at, http://www.edinburghworldwritersconference.org/national-literature/kaygusuz-in-turkey-keynote-on-a-national-literature/.

Şule Akdoğan earned her PhD from Middle East Technical University with a dissertation titled “Local Feminisms: A Comparative Analysis of Feminist Literary Theory and Practice in the 1970s in Britain, America and Turkey.” She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her research interests include transnational feminism, feminist literary theory, women’s writing, Turkish literature and comparative literature.