Praise for every fire you Tend ‘Kaygusuz extends her greetings to all the hurt of the past, painting a portrait of human suffering in all its clarity and poetic beauty. Every Fire You Tend is a history of pain, of cruelty, of hope, of being unable to give up on a world so beautiful you want to cry out; it is a history of all the feel- ings that have evolved alongside humans.’ — Halil Türkden, Agos Kitap ‘In a country still ruled by denial and by faith in a homog- enous culture, Sema Kaygusuz’s superb novel brings memories of a diverse and mixed Turkey rushing back. It takes pleasure in claiming as part of Turkish cultural herit- age all the ancient civilizations that have marched through Anatolia and elsewhere – Hittite or Assyrian, Greek or Phoenician. The result is profoundly beautiful, a way of applying the Alevi theory of the migration of souls in the service of cultural history.’ — Charif Majdalani, L’Orient Littéraire ‘When you finish reading this book, you are overcome with the feeling that you hold in your hands an atlas of all the sufferings of humanity.’ — Esra Küçük, Arka Kapak ‘Sema Kaygusuz’s novel is a literary Guernica, far-reaching in its scope, its bitterness touched with honey. Its staggering cultural profundity, its unique style, and its impressive exper- imental touch leave a distinct taste on the reader’s palate.’ — Pakize Barışta, Taraf ‘Each of Sema Kaygusuz’s books is a hymn to life and the sensuality of the world, over which hangs the shadow of death and the tragedies that have punctuated Turkish his- tory.’ — Marc Semo, Libération ‘How to speak about this book without making its poetry disappear? This incantatory story is served by its calm decor, planted between quietude and desolation, between certainty and mystery, light and darkness, cruelty and sen- suality, indecency and modesty, dream and reality. Despite its aesthetic pleasures, Every Fire You Tend never lets us for- get the lamentations of mourning.’ — Anne-Marie Mitchell, La Marseillaise ‘As stylistically thrilling as it is exceptionally calm, Every Fire You Tend represents an assault upon our usual habits of reading. The author approaches legends handed down over the centuries in a new light, daring to put forward inter- pretations that shock expectations. Undermining countless concepts like heroism, self-sacrifice, and compassion that are usually held in high esteem, Kaygusuz raises a moral perspective deeply rooted in the culture and geography of Anatolia and Mesopotamia.’ — Sevengül Sönmez, Sprache im technischen Zeitalter EVERY FIRE YOU TEND TRANSLATED BY EVERY FIRE YOU TEND SEMA KAYGUSUZ NICHOLAS GLASTONBURY TILTED AXIS PRESS suskunluk The state of being silent, taciturn, tongue-tied. There is very little speech in this novel; its two sections, “Sigh” and “Wail,” are sounds we make when language fails. Mired in the ongoing afterlives of the Dersim massacres, the characters in this novel are overcome with suskunluk, imposing upon themselves vows of silence in their grief. In grief, it feels impossible to speak, to impose the order of language on the chaos of loss. Silence marks not the absence of emotion but its acute abundance, and here, this abundance—this story—combusts in the loudest silence of writing. Think of the flame on a candle, which burns it away from the inside. This motif plays a significant role in the twelfth-century Alevi-Bektaşi and Sufi poetic traditions from which this novel draws liberally. As the wick burns down and the wax evaporates, the candle burns in on itself, leaving behind a hollow pillar of wax. The candle’s flame may have offered solace and refuge, may have lit a path, shown the way; it may have started a great conflagration, may have burned everything to the ground. And though the tunneled candle may have tended so many feelings, sentiments, thoughts, and stories, they are not harbored in the candle’s ever-dwindling remains but in the flame itself; indeed, they are the flame itself. Suskunluk, too, is a flame. SIGH I know your shame. I carry it with me, that shame, that most private part of you. Ever since I was entrusted with that cryp- tic emotion, I haven’t taken my eyes off of you, off of the historic secret inscribed on your face. Before the mother who bore you and the father who dreamed you up had themselves come into this world, you were already a doleful visage conjured by your ances- tors, the final entry in a searing elegy imparted from flesh to flesh. You do not know how to read what is written on your face. You do not know the source of your latent shame, do not know how to speak of it, let alone string its sentences together, and so it weighs on you as an affliction, stunting your growth. Only in the thrall of emotions you recognize does that writing on your forehead disappear. When your lips curl in contempt, for example, or when your eyes well up with longing, not a single word of shame remains etched on your face. Sometimes, though, when your mind begins to wander and you’re torn from this time, unfamiliar emotions envelop you, and you can’t remember a thing. That’s when I find you, aching from head to toe with the obscure memory of an event you never lived through. 8 Every Fire You Tend — This morning when I arrived, you were lost in thought, caught in the cross breeze, on a threshold opening into the depths of your melancholy. Wearied by sleeplessness, your spirit snagged itself upon objects around you: the swaying tulle curtains, the photo- graphs on the wall, the little spider dangling from the web it prudently let loose; it tumbled its way to your body, the home of your introspections, carry- ing with it all those intimations of the world, while you lay there in bed, passive in body but agonizing in mind, trying to fend off these unwanted intrusions. You spirit had departed to another plane altogether, and you were left suddenly alone, among strangers who wouldn’t say a single word to help you. All those strangers standing on the other side of the threshold, wandering the labyrinth of your melancholy, calling you on a journey without return, into the boundless universe of your introspections. One of them, an old woman, her hair so white it seemed ice blue; another, a holy man, his face pallid, sprung from the sanguine legends of the spring festivals. You recognized them both but didn’t know from where. The middle door of your introspections opened upon a fig tree. There on that threshold, you breathed in the scent of its bitter leaves, observed its white branches twisting outward, Kaygusuz 9 heavy with purple fruit. You weren’t there with me. All I could see in your place was the ache in your bones, the sweat on your hands, and the pain in the hollow of your groin. You were in a wretched state. Your “I” had shrunk in that ancient agony, all the time you’d lived through condensed into a fig seed. Doubled over in bed, you listened to the throbbing of your flesh, afraid to open your eyes, your arms covering your face. You wanted to close the door that opened onto your melancholy. Or perhaps you were desperate to escape, to leap into another time in which you’d never been born and would therefore never die, a realm beyond the world’s many insinuations. A centennial distance loomed between us. We stood on the same piece of earth, sundered into different times. I watched you splinter- ing apart. You were the protagonist of an anguished story, borrowing the consciousness of a woman from another time, a victim’s consciousness, one that continues to loom large in the present. You muti- lated yourself with your self. What’s more, you were afraid of a phantom whose fresh sweat you could still smell on your sheets, undeniably tangible and pass- ing through your time. You and your phantom had emerged anew from the Hıdrellez flames. Let me tell you about the first Hıdrellez flames you ever saw, a story from a time before you existed, when your conscience was just being woven together, some seventy years ago. You were elemental as a new spark, a mad-hot stone in the heart of a fire, a dry branch that crackled with the first lick of flame. Your eyes that watched everything were the silver-dappled stones. You were a place on that mountainside, and you were the otherworldly aura that permeated the place. That day, you were both the burning fire and the person who warmed herself beside it. Forty people with packs on their backs, weary from walking for days on end, weak from living off only wild spinach, gathered around a fire, taking sol- ace in each other. The children smelled of urine, and everyone, with their shorn clothes and jackets, looked utterly ruined. They hadn’t yet realized that they were exiles. The deep guilt of having survived had plunged them into silence. Afraid of stepping back into the nightmarish, bloody landscape that they had left behind, they refused to sleep. Water, fire, and bread had taken on entirely new meanings: water smelled of blood, fire screamed, and bread turned into a sacred pittance they hoped would fall from the heavens. Kaygusuz 11 These people gathered around the fire had lost their fear of dying. Besides, they were so lifeless now that it would be impossible to kill them further.