I do not understand your wild Oriental fantasies,
I hardly get your worshipping uds and ney flutes
or your hankering after the noxious desert dust from Misir and the dry wadis of your Scheherazade fantasies:
I come from Istanbul, where winters are bitter and water is abundant.
I do not feel for your imposed languor and your homosocial spaces
and all that warped sublimation of sex fuelled by lamb meat and mint and what not:
I come from Istanbul, which is the City
and the City is its public spaces and its streets and the exposed mingling plus the privacy of homes.
I do not understand your vain Western aspirations
I hardly follow all that aping of Germanic misery
and of French warped hygiene
and of Italianate slyness:
I come from Istanbul, where life can be good, where more senses than just vision exist,
where aspiring to joy and aspiring to knowledge are hardly contradictory.
I do not feel for your existential anxiety and for your enquiries on identity,
your repetitive questioning on how to carry oneself through this world:
I come from Istanbul, which is older than most of us;
this is identity enough, and a multitude of them, too.
I don’t live in Istanbul, I have hardly seen Istanbul — but coming from Istanbul is more than enough.
Sraosha 