the wedding was at the campground where was the goat roast. the ceremony happened under a new geodesic dome that ruchan helped build, covered in new white vinyl so taut that you could flick it with your finger and have it ring like a drum.
turkish food made in huge steel pots; rice and couscous stirred with rough wood spoons like spades.
musicians, live musicians, good at what they did: when the dancing crowd started clapping hands and singing along (traditional songs) the bass drum player would drop right out of the way to let people hear themselves together, just playing with his thin and trebley pine switch on the one side of the drum. the voices lifted and fell with the brass clarinet and people turned up their faces to reach for the top of the phrase. then as the verse ended the drummer moved right back in with the hardwood mallet he used to hammer out the heavy rhythms on the drum's other side, and hands went up and feet lifted and people moved clockwise and stepped back, clockwise and back.
got a belly dance lesson and made lovely smalltalk.
and how out of the whole secular ceremony i understood just one word, "evet" -- "yes."
Saturday, May 10, 2008
one hundred words and eight about a turkish wedding
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
i am a unique and beautiful snowflake.
the road leading to the cemetery was backed up with donkeys and cars. we had to park way far away.
going into the cemetery there was a woman in robes pouring out warm clumpy milk from a plastic bottle onto tea glasses on a silver tray and children milling without their parents. there was the blaring of party horns carried by running boys, and the sound of laughter. two girls longjumped down the sidewalk.
then as we went through the stone walls i could see plots of earth claimed by picnic blankets, and hear the rushing sound of propane burners. down the haphazard rows there were people tending the flowers on the white marble tombs. nearby a man arranged red and pink roses in a glass bowl that he placed next to a headstone. children pushed past us from behind, and through.
"i didn't want to spoil the fun," said mo.
the whole village seemed to be there. people walked back and forth along the main road with plastic trays of food, fruits, vegetables, sweets. other people sat and tended kettles and pots on burners. one or two people would sit on huge ground sheets as if to invite others to sit down with them, which we did with an old woman who crouched on her haunches while she boiled us turkish coffee, which we drank and moved along.
women had us take pistachios from their held-up aprons. girls moved in the smaller pathways between the grave sites and worked in pairs to pour fizzy pop into plastic cups. the earth was greybrown and the tombs were white. the stones and bricks that terraced out the cemetery along the hillside were bright white like they had just been given a fresh coat of paint or whitewash. the marble tombs looked like they had all been wiped clean. some of them had tulips carved and painted in with red.
"trippy," i said to mo.
it was. everywhere there were people sitting on the concrete slabs that made the base of the tombs, or leaning against trees, or sitting on blankets. a woman brought us another coffee. another woman brought us tea. a woman poured us coke, which we said no to at first, but she insisted, saying when it comes to you, you have to take it, you can't pick and choose. it seemed to be the women bringing things around. i don't know if that was actually the case: i don't know if there is some part of the tradition that says it is the women that do the giving. fresh from a night of half-hearted lusting after the firespinner and the violinist it seemed to be the women only who were doing the offering. but i did not know for sure.
sometimes instead of a tomb there would just be a pile of dry earth with a ring of white painted stones around. there would be stone at the one end, sometimes a bundle of white roses, or sometimes a wooden stick with a scarf tied round. there were rose petals on the ground, and very small cedar trees. many of the graves had wine jugs half buried.
and always the tooting of those party horns which i learned later were made from torn off pine branches, green branches such that you could pull the wood out from the bark, leaving the bark to be a tube, then you could blare through the tube.
people kept bringing me things and i knew i had baklava to share too. i'd made sure it got in with the picnic supplies. but it took me a long long time to go get it. it was only baklava from the kipa, store-bought, and that was because i feel safe shopping at the kipa where everything has its prices clearly labeled and everything is pretty much where you expect it to be. and so i almost did not dare to share. i waffled. and waffled and waffled. but i knew.
i am a unique and beautiful snowflake.
when i went to paw through the plastic bags, looking for the baklava in its barcoded plastic tray, i was informed that it had already been shared out. it had been taken out with the vegetables and the raw garlic and the nuts and sliced into pieces.
and maybe people liked it. maybe the honey even dripped out of it, baklava which never hurt anyone and never showed anyone anything but love.
then when it was time to go there was pressed down grass under where the groundcloths were, and we walked out over the rose petals and past the smoldering firepits.
an early morning goat roast
the next morning mo woke me so early i thought i was dreaming, and we packed our thinkgs and went back up to the village to start in on the ram. i did not know that the roast began so early, but it did, almost at dawn, and by the time we arrived at mehmetalan the roasting fire was already burning low in its white ash. there were tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and cheese on the little varnished coffee table that stayed outside with the plastic chairs, and some juicy meat on a wooden cutting board with legs to serve as a low cutting table. there was a knife on the cutting board. water dripped from the outdoor faucet. altogether the fire looked too low to do any serious cooking, mo placed the quivering cuts on a wire rack and suspended it over the ash on bricks, and shortly the smell of roasted meat poked through, and we ate with knives.
meanwhile the girls arrived one by one or two at a time and ducked through the bead curtain into the house. then they would emerge in ornate turkish costumes with jangley decorations sewn around the borders.
we lingered for only a few short minutes before sabile was wiping the table down and moving things inside. mo emptied out the pickup truck, moving four bags at a time two per arm, and the others carried out plastic bags of picnic food including the baklava i'd bought from the kipa. the girls all climbed into the back of the truck where there was a blanket down. one of them had bright red lip balm in flat metal tin. another watched her put it on, then took the tin and put spots of the red on her own cheek and smoothed out the colour. the rest of them did the same. then mo and emir and ruchan got into the cabin of the truck, and i did too, and asked mo where we were going, and he said plainly that we were going to for a picnic perhaps down by the cemetary. and so we drove off slow down the bumpy road, heading for a picnic perhaps down by the cemetary.
a boy, five girls and a would-be goat
astrid kerr arrives in five days and i am still learning how to be myself around women, of which there were five, and carnivorous, at the goat roast.
the roast was wednesday. tuesday night we rolled into mehmetalan, four of us, ruchan, ugur, mo and me, and our bags, and cassius (dog) in the back of the pickup.
"but unfortunately," said mo, "it is not going to be a goat roast, we are going to roast a ram."
"isn't a ram a goat?" i asked, having much to learn about a great many things.
"no, a ram is a sheep," said mo.
it's true. a ram is a male sheep. and it _was a little unfortunate: i was hoping for a nice tender baby girl goat so i could at last take in some of that divine feminine energy i tend to go on about. but no: a big smelly male sheep. by the end of the event, when most of the ram was gone, mo would say: "we certainly smell like a sheep."
mehmetalan is a turkman village without a mosque and therefore without a prayer call. there are two sharp turns you need to negotiate going down the mountain road leading to. as you go into the town, you pass the antique olive oil factory, then you pass the house of a man named emir and his wife sabile, where we'd stopped once or twice before to say hello. later we would take one more sharp turn and head down to the campground where we would be staying that night. for now, the party was at emir's and we arrived with a square four litre tin of mo's wine.
emir doesn't speak english but he told me through an intermediary that when i learn turkish we are going to drink raki together. then he said "ah!" and remembered something, and drew me by the arm through the bead curtain leading to their kitchen and kind of tossed me in, where three girls sat at the table eating first-course salad and rolling cigarettes, and a fourth was shuffling pizzas in and out of the wood stove, and a fifth sat behind.
"ingilize," he said -- the girls spoke english.
"hello," i said and they said hello back.
this is where my mind starts to spin, always starts to spin. "where are you from?" i said and two of them said, "turkey?" and the other three nodded.
shortly i was to discover that the house bookshelf was all in turkish. luckily mo arrived with a bag full of prawns that needed cleaning and called me over. we stood side to side in the cramped kitchen with a full dish rack to the right and to the left a wall unit with little bowls of spices and a bottle of aromatic bitters, bundles of herbs, and also little bottle of apple rum seemed to have been forgotten. mo tore the shells off the prawns and had me slice down the convex side to remove the nerve-and-gut tubule. from there into a pan of hot olive oil where they cooked from grey to white to pink.
outside we had hot the prawns on hot bread and there was a fire and wine and lots of smoking and the air was cold. the girls were inside and every now and then one of them would come out often with a full wineglass and pick up the camera and take a few shots, or sit and say a few words while smoking. everyone seemed to know each other from sundance -- they could tell that mo's dog was a sundance dog, with a half-length tail, and also they knew the temper of the dog that bit me. to one girl (mo prodding me with his foot and whispering "she spins fire") i got to show off my scar. but that was all. i was prodded a slight bit more and i wanted to be more outgoing but also i did not. and so i was not feeling myself the whole night. i liked the wine, though. and when i walked out having forgot my backpack, i made to go back and get it and mo called after me, "ah yes, go, get her number."
(like this: "hi. would one of you five girls like to leave with me tonight?")
so i picked up my bag and left again and down we went to the campsite which was past the cemetary and over the running water. there we had a fire and tea and i put a new string on the campground guitar and played for a bit. cassius kept bounding around and aggravating the campground dog, who was greying and fat but snarled and bared her teeth. cassius is a puppy but he is a huge puppy and at six months as already the same size as this other dog, and they wrestled as mo went to his cabin to get a jacket.
they continued to grapple. the puppy was not letting up.
"cassius!"
"look at him," said mo when he came back. "he is a _warrior!"
then without further thoughts of his puppy having problems defending himself or for that matter causing trouble, he went in to sit by the fire, leaving the dogs to be.
then everyone went to bed except for me who stayed up a little longer to think and drink two glasses of water (too few) from the pitcher on the table. and knowing that i couldn't have hit on those girls but still somehow thinking i should have, and wondering what it means to be a warrior or to try and teach people to be one, i went to bed myself, and slept and slept.
