work completed: 01-04-2024,
7:00 AM
When they went home; sleepwalking from Ağrı to Ankara
In some circles, sleepwalking is referred to as ‘a type of sleep disorder’.
Some mornings, when I was young, my family would tell me that I had been sleepwalking — wandering around the house, pacing from one side of the living room to the other without getting tired or bored — and that sometimes I would go into the kitchen and move the plates and pans while asleep. These moments would strike me as funny, or I would smile because they were told in a light manner. The structure of these recollections may have different details in my mind, just like the way I sleepwalk through the kitchen and move things around, the structure of these moments I return to are designed differently each time I remember them. Maybe I design those moments differently in time within each return.
“So why do people remember things? Is it to get at the truth? For the sake of justice? To let go and forget? Because they realize they were part of some monumental event? Or are they taking refuge in the past? And then there’s the fact that memory is fragile, fleeting, it isn’t precise facts, it’s your conjecture about your own self. It’s just emotions, not proper knowledge.” (Alexievich, 1997/2016, p35)
The origin of these sleepwalk-states of mine is the city of Ağri where I was born and grew up until my teenage years. My father was working as a guest worker in the Netherlands in those years. He got his permanent residence permit, the opportunity to take his family with him, in early 2001. And then he took us with him. Of course this journey was a turning point for me. We first set off from the east to the west of Turkey; you had to go to the west of the country before you could go to the ‘west’. It was during this journey, that I sleepwalked.
The ride from Ağrı to Ankara, is about a day’s bus ride, and, at night, while asleep, my fragile, fifteen-year-old body walked from one side to the other in the narrow corridor of the bus. Relentlessly, without getting tired, my mother would say to me later, and a restlessness overtook the people who could not sleep. When I woke up and they told me about it, I didn’t smile like I used to; this memory is embroidered on my mind as a heavy, unsettling event. I had started practicing our journey west years before this bus ride; from time to time, while everyone else was asleep, while I was asleep, I would stand up and start walking.
When I look back now, to that day on that bus, I think that I was still not ready for Europe, for the west. My uneasiness was due to the fact that I was not ready. I think that an easterner never can be ready for the west, always in a state of not being complete, and that the best preparation we can do is to walk, as my fragile body unknowingly prepared itself for, even in sleep. That we need a body that can mobilize itself to far away places, to beyond, always beyond, even in sleep, as if it is about to set off at any moment. Because migration is an endless movement; it is a necessity to be able to walk without stopping in order to be prepared for the day ‘when’.
Six months after we moved to the Netherlands, the attack on the twin towers occurred in the United States. And I, with my family, watched George Bush’s infamous speech, “you are either with us, or against us,” through the window of our TV, in our small living room, like watching any soap opera. He was addressing the muslim communities living in the west.
I remember my mother sitting with her prayer beads, her back facing the elevision screen (maybe I am making her sit like that while revisiting this memory); this image I have in my head makes me think of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina now. The first sentence of the novel. “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Tolstoy, 1875- 1877/2001, p1) I imagine many families like ours gathered in the living room of their homes; I want to sob and lament for them.
My last sleep-walks lasted about a year; in a year, at the age of sixteen, Europe synchronized me; my body and my consciousness. In all those years, since my childhood, I can say that I reached myself by walking in my sleep.
I was a peculiar kid.
I’m sitting on my bed, looking at the big wooden doors and windows, eyes wide, as if I am waiting for something. I am five or six years old. It is not day yet. In the dark room, I can’t make out the furniture, the colors, or anything beyond the glass. The pitch black mentioned in novels has come and sat right in front of my eyes.
Suddenly a brightness touches the room, the furniture, me. It does not just flow through the windows, through the doorway, but crashes into my pupils so intensely, as if imitating the moment when the water touches the water in the most violent waterfalls. It’s as if the sun has come to my doorstep. With a gentle, euphoric feeling, I realize perhaps for the first time that I am alive.
From that day on, in the twilight of many mornings, I sat up in my bed and tried to relive that sublime moment. Perhaps it was the desire to wake up and see that sea of light again that drove me to sleepwalk. I was chasing that moment again, the memory of how beautiful it was to feel alive. I still am (I feel it in the house I build in pieces).
Most of the times, I failed to wake up before the light. My body wanted to wake up before the sunrise so much that I almost believe that these desires triggered my sleepwalking. Maybe when I got up and
walked while I was asleep, that wonderful sunrise found me again. I want to believe that too.