Melissa Bilal

Standing next to you, I was talking about being sent away from homeland. I was talking about the feeling of loss which is scraped to our bodies… How could I know… How could I imagine that the biggest pain will come with your loss… How could I imagine that I will be homeless after you actually… how, that we all will be…

I haven’t written since you, haven’t spoken… I required everyone to stop talking, everyone to stop talking for a while… Stop talking! Can you manage to shut up? Could you manage to stay silent and wait while your hands are locked ? Manage to blink back your tears, cry gritting and silently while the pain penetrates inside? Or would you go mad? You have a lot to say, then say… So you haven’t come to the point that sayings had finished. Then, talk… aren’t you a bit late?

Yes, I haven’t spoken since you, haven’t written, haven’t thought of… Actually… I could not breathe… I have lived for months all alone with the pain that is thrust into my heart with every breath I take… I stopped talking to hear you, to hear all the pigeons which had died with you for one thousand nine hundred and fifteen times… I talked with you in my loneliness… In a country where nobody knows the meaning of my tears, I bottled up my anger and mutiny… I talked with you… You, who transform pain into clemency , pain into virtue, pain into life… I grow up… There I had a piece of you inside me anymore; inside any of us. There was piece of you on the hands being firmly clasped together around the hearse… inside the hearts…. inside all the fearful pigeons.

In every day passing without you, the feeling of homelessness deepen more and more. I still have hope remaining from the old days but it’s getting weaker… On one hand I persistently say “That place is my home, noone can take me apart from there” to the ones who tends to displace me, on the other hand I sink under that thought. Am I that strong? I get annoyed at my parents calling me and saying persistently ‘Do not go back to Turkey’ everytime and I reply back as ‘I am going to’. Then I hang up and cry for hours… It’s hard to understand them, it splits my body into two to give a right to them… Just like that new year night which, I tumbledown in the darkness of Kızıltepe leaving my brother whom I could not get to know with a commando uniform on him at military post. Just like that new year night which I got embarressed of my impotence thinking of mothers with one son is soldier, the other is guerilla.

Sequel…(?) I am surrounded by the fear of leaving the city I was born without saying good bye. ‘Three months İstanbul’ was written on my prescription, however İstanbul was making skin over to my wound before healing the infection. I was taking the crust up and make my wound bleed again, I(we) must keep this wound open before the infection surrounds and explodes my(our) whole body.

If I(we) could have wailed for my(our) past, I(we) would not be wailing today publicly. If ever somebody do not have to die and the others not have to kill, we would have a country not to die but to live… and funerals would not stand instead of a country.

They asked for me to write about citizenship… My citizenship is standing on a cobble cobblestone of the country…

19 January 2007, turn off the lights, it’s the end of the game; ‘Citizenship’…

From Amargi- Issue 7