Latife Tekin
BERJI KRISTIN: Tales from the Garbage Hills
Marion Boyars, #13.95 (pp 160)
THIS profoundly moving and magical allegorical novel, only comparable,
in my experience, with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of
Solitude (though, inevitably falling short of that towering
masterpiece), tells the story of Flower Hill, a pitiful squatter
settlement cobbled together from the plastic detritus of consumerism on
a garbage dump on the outskirts of an unnamed Turkish city, almost
certainly Istanbul.
Here, in this universe of junk, nature itself has been corrupted, and
the conventions of poetic symbolism are similarly subverted in its songs
and stories. So the snow that falls ceaselessly on Flower Hill is toxic
waste, and the hot blue water that flows there is chemical effluent.
The first place to be named by the original settlers is Wind-Curse
Point, for the savage wind is as much a threat to their ramshackle walls
and flimsy roofs as the garbage owners' wreckers. Even the name, Flower
Hill, is an ironic imposition by a remote bureaucracy, designed to
obliterate all memory of its first baptism as Battle Hill, which
commemorated squatter resistance to the wreckers with their guns,
bulldozers, jeeps, and trucks.
The same bureaucrats attempt to rename Rubbish Road (still,
incidentally, a bus-stop between Istanbul and the Bosphorus) as Nato
Avenue, but the name fails to stick. There is already enough deformity.
Some of those who bathe in the hot blue water find their skin peeling,
while the faces of others turn purple. Bright blue spots come out on the
children's bodies, the hair of two women turns white. The black,
poisonous wind causes sweats and fevers. Bodies distort incurably.
In time, the noxious factories along Rubbish Road are joined by
mosques, coffee houses, gambling dens, a school, a bank, a football
team, even a cinema. There are prostitutes, a blind prophet, a fake
miracle, strikes and elections. Beneath the menacing wings of the
ever-present garbage birds, the voracious, scavenging gulls, Flower Hill
has become a terrible microcosm, encapsulating all the follies and
vanities of the human race, the inequalities and injustices of our
planet.
The writing of Latife Tekin has been admirably championed in recent
years by John Berger, who now contributes a short preface. He makes the
point that Tekin has written down ''what before had never been written
down,'' by which he means that, before her, no shanty town had entered
literature. Now 36, Tekin was born in the village of Karacefenk, near
Bunyan in central Turkey, where her literate mother, who spoke both
Kurdish and Arabic, entertained gypsy visitors carrying travellers'
tales. There are gypsies, too, in the Garbage Hills.
I imagine that her childhood grounding in the fantastic and romantic
literature of the East, with its djinns and fairies, was important to
the novel, Tekin's greatest achievement to date (though there is, one
hopes, still much more to come). But, in creating the mythic history of
Flower Hill, she has also used sharp observation -- and the ears and
recording skills of an anthropologist.
So we experience the rise and fall of the Flower Hill hut people as
seen through their own innocent -- and superstitious -- eyes (Benji
Kristin, I gather, means either ''the innocent prostitute'' or the
''prostitution of innocence'' in Turkish). To do so, she has had to
evolve her own story-telling language, rich in poetry and metaphor,
close to the oral tradition. It has the force and directness of, say,
Bunyan or, perhaps, the medieval mystery play. No knowing
twentieth-century voice ever intrudes.
The novel is also, needless to say, light years away from the jaded
artifice of much contemporary European modernism, and it says much for
this sensitive translation by Ruth Christie and Saliha Paker (who also
contributes and illuminating introduction) that it manages to convey the
sense of the singular and memorable epic that is far removed from our
own exper-
ience.
In Turkey itself, Tekin represents a new direction. The novels of
Yasar Kemal like Memed, My Hawk (now mostly available in translation
here) come from a different genre. They certainly have mythic and epic
elements, but predominate is socialist realism. Tekin on the other hand,
has succeeded in forging a new style that marks her as a truly original
voice from the other Turkey, the part that the glossy holiday brochures
never reach, and she deploys her new ''language of deprivation'' to
deliver a savage parable of capitalism in the Third World that is also a
devastating critique.
For the first time, over the past few years, I have seen teenagers
begging in Scottish stations, and the shaming phrase ''cardboard city''
has now entered our own language. Will single mothers and their families
soon join mental patients (expelled from mental hospitals for ''care in
the community'') on our streets? What has been happening to our own army
of dossers and bag ladies over the past few nights, with Scotland
shrouded in snow and ice? We, too, like it or not, are living on Flower
Hill.
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