Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
For the years to come, she walked up and down İstiklal and began to remember. She was first able to recall the taste of bread and of hunger. Then she remembered many revolutions, one in this very country. She recalled the scent of greed and coal, the sound of iron rails, of a gun cocking, and the clunk of death. But she also remembered liberty, thought of it often at night, sitting alone in that park nearby.
In May 2013, Spirit woke to the sound of heavy equipment. Her eyes widened in fear as she rushed to the source of the noise and saw that her trees, all of Gezi Park with its walls broken in, stood ready to be plucked. There, between the trees and the bulldozers, the cats had gathered, staring at her. Her head filled with whirring noise and the sound of rubble. Her sight flooded with knowing feline eyes. And then she cried out.
The sound of the scream echoed throughout İstanbul as the city joined in it. The screech of seagulls, the violent waves of the Bosphorus, and the dull bellows of ferries roused the people. Some ran toward the cry. Others were slower. But that day, everyone was called to Gezi.
People who were gathering knew that this was the first day. They came, setting camp on the streets, pinning their protest to the square. So came those dressed in black, arms borne on the shoulders of their uniforms. They came with batons and with pepper spray. They came with shields and gas masks. There, two masses met, one with an official decree, and the other with an unspoken order.
Spirit became visible here, only briefly, in snapshots of early Gezi scenes when she stepped for a few moments into the hearts of its agents. There is a photo going around, for instance, where Spirit stands tall. A woman protester steps forward, meeting an officer’s pepper spray. She carries a white tote close to her red dress as she looks oddly similar to the flag printed on the officer’s uniform. Ceyda Sungur. Now they call her the Woman in Red. All who have seen the picture know how the entire Square was possessed. They know that Gezi is no longer a park.
As the protests went on and got bigger, a mother came home one night and, with an excited grin, turned on the TV. That was when an eight-year-old suddenly felt something within him bound by something happening there in Taksim. Not knowing what to do with himself, when night fell and the protest rested, he grabbed pots and pans and made his way onto the streets. Under the cover of childhood, he too was feeling a long history of discontent. He walked for hours, pan in hand, and chanting: “Everywhere is Taksim. Everywhere is resistance.”
And there, on a lonely street, Spirit met him. Restless all night, she had been walking the streets and whispering into windows her call so all would wake to find her invading bedrooms and their nighttime sleep. She had heard him as he marched. He was one of the many whom she met that night. Yes, also very young. Perhaps around her age. Sending him off with a grin, Spirit moved on with her whispering and haunting of İstanbul, while the boy was never to forget what was in the air as he marched that night. He wouldn’t understand it, but still wouldn’t forget.
Distance and Remembrance
It’s been a few years since I moved abroad, and I’ve spent most of that time remembering. From here, I’ve walked up and down every street of my past, and revisited every room in every house that I’ve stepped into. Any time I sit in the city parks of the northeast, it all comes back to me. I sit at a bench and count the trees of Gezi and make sure it’s all still there. I sit at a bench and make sure that the tram line past the bend of the road across is still running without mistake. There is much work to be done from here.
It is not so difficult to rebuild a city within a city. I can remember so vividly, so much so that when wandering this foreign space, I see double. I see the 1361 trees of Gezi. I see the alleys, buildings, tram lines, and subway maps from my past. I can pull the slightest sound or scent to one I would have sensed back home, and tell myself that it is here, İstanbul.
But this city is abandoned by many features I’ve come to expect. There are no cats to cut off your path. Though I often try to reconstruct the presence of İstanbul, the sense that at any point you might meet feline eyes, some things cannot find dwelling even in memory.
I sit at a bench here and think of what home must be like right now. There is someone crossing the street. He is wearing the clothes from three years ago. The building next to him has not aged one bit, down to every chip on its walls. The weather is just as I left it, or as I saw it sometime before. This distance between me and the city now is a temporal one; my city exists in remembrance alone. All the spirit I had come to feel within İstanbul, I see in memory, in snapshots of scenes. It remains there, spectral and unembodied. Speak. I tell it to speak. It will not make a sound. I cannot be part of it.
I sit at the bench in the park and remember Gezi. I, a child-witness to it, remember through the photos, and the videos, the songs, the placards, the news headlines. I read, over and over again, accounts of the protest, day by day. I, a non-presence in İstanbul, must do the next best thing by remembering and preserving. I mark the palpable spirit of the streets as I go back to Gezi. I count all 1361 trees; I take it to be my responsibility.
Gezi, continued
The cry for action was louder every second. Spirit was moved, and despite the intensifying violence, she became larger and larger. Protesters dancing to tango music on the streets with no heed to the battle of the police. They built new borders, makeshift hospitals, and even libraries overnight with books and loose bricks. Spirit kept running through the streets, yes, shouting at times, but also giggling. She came to know how resistance could be sweet and tender.
The people on the streets were all called çapulcu. It meant, roughly, marauder. Yet the melodic and agreeable sound of the word pleased the protest. People came together, wrote songs about becoming çapullers and kept filling the square. They sang of wearing masks and facing tear gas, yet they all grinned as countless others joined as they sang. Çapulling became a rebellion tinted with joy. Spirit was fond of the word and would remember it in her many lives to come. For there did come a day when she knew that this too would not be the end of her history.
Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, 19. The first death of Gezi. She ran to the scene and saw the body run over by a car. She stared at the blood and took in the metal scent. He was the first of many. Spirit sat and wept.
On June 16th, Spirit saw Berkin Elvan, 15, buying bread. Seeing that a gas canister was headed toward him, she ran, yet her desperate hands could not hold the projectile, and passing through her, it hit him in the head. He would die the following year due to his injuries. He was the last to die. She sat. Her cry was no battle cry. She sat, and she whimpered.
Gezi slowly came to an end. The park was saved. Gezi was lost. So with the memory of a tender revolution, and broken by the loss of it, Spirit passed without a sound. Meanwhile, a mother took an eight-year-old to Taksim so he could bear witness. He sat amidst the trees of Gezi and suddenly felt a palpable absence. The sun was setting as the cats went to their curbside sleep while the trees stood in waiting for Spirit’s birth. So waited the city for another bald cry in its streets.
Distance and Change
Gezi had become synonymous with İstanbul in my years of remembrance. After the protests the first thing I could not forget was the fear I had as an eight year old counting the dead and injured through news headlines at home. All else I’d left in the periphery. But every year I return to the date and memory and try to add something to it. Through taking in picture records, essays, and videos, Gezi cracks open and sweetens the way a chestnut does with time above a flame.
I wasn’t there during the protests to witness it happening, for me it always happened after the fact, in the nighttime news or morning papers. But as long as I choose to understand my remembrance as witnessing as opposed to experiencing, it has no end. There is no end to the ways in which my memory of Gezi can grow, adding detail by detail with all minutiae in perfect focus. All that I began to see in records or witness in the anniversaries of Gezi incorporated the spirit and joy of çapulling back to memory, as vibrant as all tragedy. Such a memory can have no periphery.
Over the past 12 years the memory became too large to fit into the experiences of an eight year old. So to attach emotion to image and to understanding, to recover the growing spirit of Gezi, all I witnessed in the city—good deeds and paint, fear and hope—cleaved onto the image I had of Gezi. Even the memory of me talking with a kind vendor on the street selling chestnuts, turned its gaze back toward the park. I know none of this has anything to do with the protests. So now sitting at a bench in the northeast I find myself counting the trees to return to my city. I ask with a tinge of pain why I am doing all this.
The thought of these spirited moments, the instances of care and love, and the names of those who were lost waning and fading out is enough to demand outcry. Yet in the world of my mental recreations, Ceyda Sungur remains photographic and does not go by her given name. All of the dead and injured there have the smell of print paper attached to them. All of this history exists mutilated by attention. It exists misused in order to recover what I briefly witnessed one day and could not recapture, and then to recover what it felt to live with all of this, to live in İstanbul. I do not know what to do with all this.
Starting with the 19th of March this past year, I sat staring at my phone screen for weeks on end, once again watching something large unfold before me. The İstanbul mayor had been put in custody, and many protests had begun. I watched and memorized while all this was lived by others, knowing that I will one day sit on a bench and remember these months too. I remember feeling an odd type of paralysis when first hearing such a bald cry call out from home this year. I remember listening to it day and night, knowing I would not be returning the sentiment. I will keep asking myself what one does with such a sound. I do not know what to do with such a sound.
2026