CHAPTER TWO
I was born in May 1972 in Izmir, the largest city on Turkey’s western coast and the third largest in the country. The city is built around a bay on the Aegean Sea. I spent my childhood in Karsiyaka, a district right on the water also known as the Gulf of Izmir.
For many of us Karsiyaka was a special place, a living representation of the founder of the Turkish Republic Kemal Ataturk’s values of human decency; hospitality; love for children; respect for the elderly; and belief in science, medicine, arts, sports, aviation, and the rights of all people, especially women. Given the chaos and political violence that had dominated the country’s politics for decades, this made Karsiyaka an oasis of civilization within a turbulent country that had been through a lot.
Of course, I was just a child and knew little of these things. To me, Karsiyaka was a place of happiness, understanding, acceptance, and good morals and values, but most of all, it was my home.
My parents didn’t have much money, but my childhood for the most part was a happy one. My friends and I ran the streets, playing and exploring, and were passionate about our local soccer, basketball, sailing, and volleyball teams. I played soccer, basketball, and marbles, rode my blue Bisan DeLuxe bicycle, went fishing, climbed trees, flew kites, and hung out with the other kids from the neighborhood.
My parents divorced when I was two years old, and until I was thirteen, I lived with my mom and my maternal grandmother. Mom stood five feet six and had long, light brown hair and brown eyes. She grew up in a small town called Tire, around fifty miles southeast of Izmir, and spent much of her childhood in difficulty and hardship. Her father, whom I never got to meet, was a bus driver, and while she told me that he loved his children very much, he could have been a better husband and father. She told me many times that he enjoyed his alcohol quite often and spent much of his time in local taverns, drinking away his salary.
My mom has a fair amount of knowledge about farming. I remember when we would drive by farms, she could tell most of the time what type of farming was taking place on that particular field. She also would mention how hard it was to farm, extending her sympathy to the farmers in the fields. She knew because she had spent many years working on farms during her youth. She told me stories of picking olives from trees during October and November when she was only seven years old. She worked alongside my aunt, who was only two years older than her, feeling her little hands freezing as she made her way down the rows. Her first-ever job was picking cottons with her friend Ayla at the age of thirteen. She recalled the family’s Jewish neighbors across the street, who babysat her many times and gave her a lot of love when my grandmother needed support.
As a teenager, my mother dreamt of being an actress and had some roles in plays in high school, but her career was cut short by my grandmother’s fierce opposition. My mom said that the Turkish theater icon Yildiz Kenter, with the work of over a hundred foreign playwrights under her belt, told my grandmother to take advantage of my mom’s natural acting talent and not let it go to waste. She had even extended her support by offering to sponsor her. A good amount of Turkish society imposed heavy pressures on women in those days, though, and despite its many good qualities, Karsiyaka had its imperfections.
My home country Turkiye, as we all called it back home, had been a role model for so many countries, especially for those whose main religion was Islam. Out of all the Muslim countries, Turkey had been the most progressive, balancing Islam with secularism fairly well because of Ataturk’s reforms, although not without some problems arising. While people in many parts of the country enjoyed westernized lifestyles, the threats to freedom of speech, journalism, and human and women’s rights were always present. So many researchers, brilliant authors, and innocents lost their lives to violent attacks from religious fanatics, hardcore nationalists, or the government itself.
My dad, who was in his early thirties when I was born, was not an ideal husband or father during my early years, according to my mom. He could often be found socializing and drinking with friends, rarely spending time taking care of his wife and child. My mom said my father’s irresponsible ways were the main cause of their marital problems, while my dad said my mom could be very difficult to deal with.
After the divorce, in about 1974, Mom took a job in a bank as a loan officer. To my father’s credit, his family helped her get the position. Not long ago, my mom shared with me just how difficult life had gotten at times when I was a kid, when she had found herself without a job or a husband, with a child to raise. And once she did go to work, she was caught in the middle: as a modern and attractive woman, she was targeted by some of her coworkers who at times were jealous of her, but she also had to deal with ignorance from some religious folks who didn’t view modern women like her in a warm or accepting way.
One of my favorite things to do as a young boy was to walk to the ferry station, which was five minutes from our apartment on 1699 sokak, and wait for the 6:05 PM ferry to arrive from Konak to Karsiyaka. When my mom disembarked, we would walk to our apartment while talking about our day.
While my mom was at work, my grandmother did most of the job of raising me. My grandmother was a good-hearted, hardworking, faithful, tough, and caring woman from Tire, who had spent a good amount of her youth on farms. A devout Muslim, she prayed five times a day and, although we didn’t have a lot of money, she fed the hungry when she could. She loved all people and taught me to do the same. She wasn’t educated but she could cook, make pastry, and sew. I loved all of her food but her green bean dish with cacik (yogurt with diced cucumber and dry mint) was my favorite.
My grandmother stood just over five feet, but she carried herself with her chin up, even though her socks were patched inside her shoes. I remember her standing up to drunks who sometimes knocked on our door, with only a shoe to defend our small apartment. Even after she had a stroke, which caused her right foot to drag on the ground while she walked, she didn’t slow down. My grandmother was an extremely hardworking and selfless woman.
Her husband, my maternal grandfather, died young in 1966 from intestinal volvulus, leaving her with four kids. To this day, I can’t imagine how she managed to raise my mom and her siblings, support her family, and then raise her first grandson, who was a handful.
I was a cute little kid with hazel eyes and curly blond hair. My mom said strangers on the street would stop and want to hug me when I was a toddler. I was almost completely fearless, too, hitting the back of my head so hard at three, while doing wheelies on my tricycle, that I needed stitches. I got sewn up again after both of my uncles dared me to jump from the top of a stove and I hit my forehead on a metal bar on the floor. I jumped from a tree and broke my foot in the second grade and cut my shin badly climbing a rock wall.
I developed many cavities thanks to my love of candy and chocolate and not brushing my teeth frequently. My classmate and friend Taner broke my front tooth in third grade by hitting a glass soda bottle from underneath as I was drinking from it. There was hardly a day when I wasn’t missing a button on my black school uniform. Kids today would require medical attention for many of the injuries I sustained in those days.
When I was about fifteen, I was in my mom’s bedroom, which had a window that opened next to a balcony that led into the living room. We had guests, so I climbed out of the bedroom window and scrambled across to the balcony, surprising them with a dramatic entrance through the door. Our apartment was on the fifth floor, around fifty feet from the ground, but I wasn’t worried about falling — and fortunately I didn’t. If somebody told me I couldn’t do something, that immediately made me want to push the limits and do what they believed couldn’t be done. I grew up believing anything was possible and continually tested the laws of physics and nature.
Comments