Trouble sleeping last night. I got up and translated into English one of Asli Erdogan’s texts – one called Égalité – Inégalités. If I get the OK, I’ll put it online, so those who don’t read French can have some idea of what the Turkish government calls “terrorist writing”. Just think: a woman writing out loud about the distance between the concept of womanhood and the reality of being one…

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This morning, after reading more dark brown drivel from the presidential hopefuls in this country, drivel about borders, “strangers”, and  control over women’s bodies too,  I asked myself if I had dreamt or read the tale about the canaries making fun of or berating the dummy of their species who had gone down in the mine (as if he’d chosen to) and died a martyr so humans would know trouble was sneaking up to them in its poisonous sleep-inducing vapors ? Whether I dreamt it or read it doesn’t make  a huge difference.

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Later in the morning (after buying the bottled kind, since the tap is still releasing  unhealthy-looking turbid water in my apartment), I talked with someone who is illustrating legends based on transformations – women “reverting to their animal nature” or seducing men in the guise of their human form. Ah yes, those dangerous Japanese fox-women and their cohorts of fish-women, bear-women… the list goes on.

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Full circle, in other words, back to the ones by Asli Erdogan I was translating last night:

“Attendu que je suis le corps qui accouche du temps, que je suis la mémoire de tous les secrets…que je suis la poitrine remplie de lait, que je suis la terre  sortant de son sommeil…pourquoi jusqu’à ce jour n’ai pas pu trouver dans les légendes, les concepts, les images, ne fut-ce qu’un mot auquel m’identifier? De vieilles phrases…”*

Men. Women. Equality, whatever the word could mean for all of us, other than the constant flow of the trite and the trivial.New meanings to old legends, perhaps.

*Asli Erdogan, Egalité, Inégalités dans Le silence même n’est plus à toi, chroniques traduites du turc par Julien Lapeyre de Cabanes, Actes Sud 2017