Having sought and received authorization from Asli Erdogan’s literary agent in France, I am putting online my English translation of one of her texts originally published in the now-banned pro-Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem, and since published in French in Le silence même n’est plus à toi.* I do so for the sole purpose of giving my English readers the opportunity to get a sense of the writings that have led to criminal charges against her of “support to a terrorist organization” and of “defamation against the State of Turkey”. After more than four months in jail and with the State Prosecutor demanding a sentence of life imprisonment, she now awaits resumption of her trial on March 14th.

I put this translation online with the understanding that the author may request its removal from my website at any time, and that my translation is  not for commercial use  by me or anyone else.

Although a coincidence, putting this text online today seems particularly appropriate, as we learn that the United States of America’s President has reinstated a ban on foreign aid to groups defending full reproductive rights for women. Equality, Inequalities…

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Equality, Inequalities – Asli Erdogan

When I align three dots in a row, they mark a pause, an emptiness, an incompleteness, and that makes it the most significant of all punctuation marks for me. Ten years ago, I wrote « being a woman » then, as in an interior liberation more than as a breathing space, I added three small dots after which, at the end of a long night, I moved on to the second sentence. (All in the course of the same long night, as dark as coffee grounds…Always in the full of night, in this frozen country…) Total Silence was the title of this tortuous text the old pain of which still burns my hands…But where, how (and even why) did this silence take form, this emptiness splitting sentences in half, placing them in parentheses and absorbing them? Transforming the words into an empty mold, an empty mold into which pours and takes shape all that I have lost and will still lose…Is it possible to find, to impose an origin on this alway imperfect and always stuttering residue ? To my own destiny, a story like so many others, to my own destiny always stumbling up against silence ? Our true story is born from the chasm that exists between the concept of woman and the reality of being one.

Human = human. I concluded my last text with this familiar « formulation », debatable also, and that may sound strange… with an equation, by « equality » expressed by two small parallel lines…Attempting to indicate that this was only a beginning, a way out, as much as a final objective…Days have gone by since, gone are the anniversaries of the massacres in Maras, of the Return to Life, of Roboski*, on which I wrote so much – or not – gone Berkin’s** anniversary I could not attend. (Happy anniversary…It was a huge life they stole from you, your life…But you, with that endless smile, from the summit of your fourteen-year old smile, you tell the assassins: I am here. I exist !) In the midst of the flurry of news briefs and the forced enthusiasm of the passage into a new year, as the newspapers reminded us, 2014 beat all records in terms of labor crimes…(In my previous text I aligned the official figures for the first eleven months of the year, the labor crimes, the assassination of women relegated to the third page, the men shot down by police, the prison dead, those who gave up their soul under torture, gas, bullets…

On a New Year morning, the news of a death in a faraway prison made us feel the cold burn of figures, the burn that the contact of a freezing metal leaves on a man’s hand…) Ten years ago, we attempted to speak about and draw attention to the burns sustained through explosives in dormitories, to injections of acid on the wounded beaten to death, to human arms thrown in the garbage. Years later, the misty mirror our words hold up to us are only peopled by ghosts. Did we really hear ? Or is man a species incapable of hearing when his own life is not directly at stake ? Truly, what is justice in your opinion, when every day assassinations occur, again, again and again…The silence of three small dots begins exactly there, at that point where concept bounces against the rock of reality, slides on it, falls back to earth…It must be repeated again : justice, equality of all human beings is only possible once we manage to internalize that we are equal in principle and in actions, and that the quest for equality is the basic principle, the inalienable moral component of all political struggles.

« When a man is attacked because he is jewish, he must defend himself as a Jew, not as an intellectual or a defender of the universal rights of man. » And when one is humiliated, abused or « attacked » because she is a woman…In this world built on masculine fantasies, that speaks men’s language, no one calls this an « aggression » but rather this one speaks of « procreation », that one of « lies », another speaks of honor, of love, of sacred motherhood… The most ancient, most tenacious form of tyranny, the most profound and insidious, is linked to the one men exercise over women, and where it seems we must still quote imposing phrases written fifty or one hundred years ago…Or must we, at the cost of tearing out our eyes, and with the patience so becoming to my gender, murmur that « we too are human beings »…And who can be against it? Who, really, to speak constantly in « my » name, to rain down judgments, orders, sentences, who to rob my words, my wounds, even my blood, who to condemn me to hell when I say « I »…There was enough to send me to hell already…But what was it that always destined me to lose ?

Since I am the body giving birth to time, the memory of all secrets, those of the waters and of the first light’s coupling with shadow, the womb, the melody initiating all things, the breast filled with milk, the earth emerging from its slumber, why should I not see the day ? Given I am all that, why can not even my sorrow belong to me ? Even should I not take shape for another thousand years, why to this day have I not found in the legends the concepts, the images, or even one word to which I can relate ? Old phrases… »

*Kurdish village bombed by the Turkish aviation.

**Berkin Elvan, a fourteen year old boy dead in 2015 from head injuries sustained from the point blank firing of a tear gas grenade by Turkish policemen

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