Wandering through the city like a spreading stain

Mehmet Mahsum Oral’s latest book, Gecenin Örtüsünde Güneş Lekesi, has been published in recent months. We spoke with Oral about the state of walking that forms the narrative backbone of his books, and the notion of being “stained”

Interview: Hüseyin Gökçe

Mehmet Mahsum Oral

In Barbarlarla Beklerken, Mehmet Mahsum Oral appears in motion, walking alongside barbarians who have already arrived and perhaps have always been here. He writes from an awareness that waiting with them carries a weight that seeps into life, unsettles it, yet neither truly transforms nor changes it. There is something corroding about this form of waiting. Irony, meanwhile, emerges as a way of exceeding that condition. Barbarlarla Beklerken speaks from within such a world. The often invoked, restorative and thought activating dimension of walking is reversed. What unfolds instead is a sense of walking and yet being unable to move forward, almost as if inside The Castle. In every encounter, one is confronted with the fact that the barbarian is already waiting somewhere, that they have long been there. If there is nowhere else to go but toward the barbarian, could waiting be a more appropriate choice? Yet because they will come and find you even while you wait, this supposedly democratic choice is immediately rendered void. The text is shaped by an insistence on narrative that risks everything, infused with abundant laughter and with a language willing to shed itself, to strip down to letters if necessary.

In Gecenin Örtüsünde Güneş Lekesi, his self described “novel that did not wish to become a novel,” Mehmet Mahsum Oral is once again in motion, this time in a large city. As a drifting narrator, he moves through the city like a stain that disperses because it is being erased with resentment. He blends into the crowds. Here and now. Without forgetting the lands he comes from. The city’s rhythms, layers, emotions and sensations, love glimpsed at the very last moment, its voices and its noise appear and vanish in fragments through untimely encounters, shaping the language, texture and rhythm of the text. He knows well how to remain close to walking in order to breathe all of this in. Walking ceases to be an activity that simply makes him feel better. Instead, by bending, refracting and relentlessly reworking the city with all its realities and ironies, he turns it into a literary condition.

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Demet Yalçınkaya, Untitled, Oil on canvas, 80x110 cm, 2023

I would like to begin our conversation with a painting that I know has influenced both of us for a long time, and that I also believe resonates with certain aspects of your writing. When we visited Demet Yalçınkaya’s studio at Tokatlıyan Han, we spoke about many of her works. Yet there was one in particular that stood out in such a way that we felt compelled to talk about it more. At first glance, the work presented itself as a landscape painting. Yes, Demet depicts a fragment of nature, but rather than showing us what we assume to be the mountain itself, she frames the slopes stretching out before it, the tracks formed across them, a stone on the verge of falling, and many other elements belonging to that place. Perhaps she wanted everything here to carry equal weight. What gives the painting its strength is not only the way these elements coexist, but also the fact that it withholds the mountain itself, tearing it away from the image. Yet your way of approaching the work shifted it to a different register. You spoke of a landscape painting that had not quite become a landscape. Following your lead, I would like to call it a painting that did not wish to become a landscape. Even though there is a subtle difference between these two approaches, I think the channel you opened is crucial for how we look at this work. When you return to the painting now, what do you find yourself reconsidering?

In butcher shops in Kızıltepe, I have seen countless landscape paintings, the familiar, well known kind: a stream flowing from between mountains into an open plain, a small house nestled in a pine forest, birds in the sky, and the feeling of clean air. I think of those images as signs of life inside shops where nothing else seems to be alive anymore. In Demet’s drawing, I encountered a nature that speaks by syllables, something that felt as though it belonged to the very moment when sounds were first being formed. A landscape, for me, always feels like something that comes long after an “already happened” and a “fully formed” state. In that painting, there was no knowledge of “being.” It was closer to the way children who have not yet learned to walk lack any knowledge of “distance” while trying to reach one another by rolling toward each other. I no longer see that stone as something that has “fallen.” In art, it is not the law of gravity that decides this. I think this perception comes from having seen stones for a very long time, in the places I come from, not so much on the ground as “thrown,” suspended in the air.

You also think and write about contemporary art. In fact, together with Mehmet Ali Boran, you co run Mişar Art in Mardin. The stance, gestures, language, and modes of resistance of contemporary art are highly multi layered. At times, its relationship with what is urgent can produce strong results. Is that why everything seems to turn into an artwork? Yet there is also a side to addressing urgency that cannot go much further than simply pointing at it. How do you evaluate contemporary art practices in the face of this urgency? I am also curious about how contemporary artworks seep into your narrative and your novels.

As you were sending this new question, I was looking at the news. I was watching a video of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspecting a hospital. Not only in this story, but in almost every piece of news about him, we see a group of aides standing beside him, furiously taking notes in the small notebooks they carry in their hands. We also notice that these older aides, standing next to a dictator who often appears cheerful and smiling, look extremely serious, most likely out of fear. I sometimes wonder whether, when they are writing in such deep anxiety, they also note down the moments when he smiles: “(laughs!)”. In The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis, published in 1881, there is a line about “writing with the ink of sorrow and the pen of joy.” What would it mean to write joy with the ink of fear? Contemporary art has an ironic, joyful pen, and this often feels inspiring and mind opening to me. Its ability to engage with any material is a tremendous possibility. It sits at the table with an overwhelming abundance: poetry, philosophy, history, politics, the body, music, sculpture, video, sound, paint, steel, silk, and so many other things. With so much nourishment, there is also the risk that its digestive system might be thrown off. It has the privilege of being bold enough to say, “I’ve done it.” It has as many viewers as there are people who know how to play bridge. Those who “do not understand” it carry an anger toward it, though not to its face. It has to be sold, and it operates under precarious conditions. Its buyer is dominant. Naturally, it carries many fears. It is dependent on contact, yet it does not take off its glove. I care about all of these contradictions seeping into my writing, because they reveal to me the attraction of what is early, even untimely.

Gecenin Örtüsünde Güneş Lekesi is a novel in which you write the stains you encounter while wandering through a city like a “loafer,” carrying with you the sunspot that comes from the lands you come from, the lands where the sun rises. Because this novel has no central character, no event, no fixed place or time, and therefore no beginning or end, it bears the mark of being “stained” within its own genre. We are faced with a literature that has “not become” or perhaps “did not wish to become” a novel. I am curious about the conditions that make such a position possible. Could this be related to the way the “untimely” appears in Giorgio Agamben’s thinking on contemporaneity, in the sense that one never knows when or how the untimely will arrive? It seems to me that it arrives, somehow, through a stain.

In Ben Ruhi Bey Nasılım by Edip Cansever*, there is a line that reads, “it is as if I have drunk a strange water and now my inside is visible.” How are being born into the world, coming into language, looking, hearing, imagining, and feeling, being among so many living beings and so many natural phenomena, connected to that strange water that reveals what is inside? And what does that thing we call “inside” look like when it is thought together with all of this? This text is, in a way, concerned with these very questions. After a while, the characters and narrative structures of contemporary literature began to feel to me as if they had “not drunk water.” What passes through someone’s mind felt stranger to me than what happens to them. This mysterious universe that Immanuel Kant described as “a dream of a dream” has never offered us knowledge of a beginning or an end, and I find it difficult to understand when and how we became so tightly bound to beginnings and endings. A text trapped within rules and technique can, at best, attain the status of a “formally valid petition.” There is a narrator who walks through the text, wandering like a stain that disperses because it is being erased with resentment. The book did not wish to become a novel, because it was written by someone who could not become whatever that “it” was meant to be. They were always “called” in another way. In this sense, the text itself comes to share a part of this historical fate.

I think that “wandering through the city like a stain that disperses” is what allows the text to move forward through fragments. Before asking about the relationship that someone who never became whatever that “it” was establishes with things and objects, or the relationship that objects establish with the narrator, I am curious about something else. A text without a beginning or an end can be entered from any point. The narrator’s question, “why did I begin everything in the middle?”, followed by the answer, “but there is no starting point to eating a bunch of grapes, is there?”, says a great deal about the text itself. Blending into the crowds of a large city is, in a way, like eating grapes. After Barbarlarla Beklerken and Ev Düşkünü Bazı Rüzgarlar, I am curious about your desire to merge into the crowds of the big city.

After walking through a vineyard that a friend of mine had planted across a wide field, when it came time to eat grapes I stopped beside a single vine and, with what I would call an “urban ignorance,” began eating only the grapes growing on that vine. Noticing this, my friend pointed to the hundreds of vines spread across the field and said, “you think they are all the same, but they are not, they received different water and different sunlight.” Writing in fragments may be a little like walking among those different vines that appear the same, without ever leaving the vineyard. Because this mode of narration is also trying to create its own form, it asks the reader for a generosity of attention. And yet readers also enjoy “gossiping” with the writer. “Pour the story over me. Who did what, what happened to whom?” In other words, in a sense, they expect from literature what a film would give them. I do not think the two are the same. For this reason, many writers shape their “literary” texts in ways that might attract filmmakers’ attention. But even if One Hundred Years of Solitude were to be adapted into a long television series, it would still need a narrator through a voice over. Because you cannot convey the rain described in that book with a hose.

Even tourists who are thought to be idling in a big city have a kind of work schedule they impose on themselves. Because they have to be voracious, they rarely have the time to chew. Those who live in a large city such as Istanbul, on the other hand, are forced to be on a diet. In a city made out of voracity and strict dieting, how does one practice “idleness”? I wanted to understand this, at least a little. And so I walked.

The way someone who never became whatever that “it” was relates to things and objects, or the way those objects enter into a dialogue with the narrator, seems to unfold through their own fatigue with remaining the same and their desire not to become anything in particular. This appears possible only when one insists on narrating by splitting every hair. The irony of your writing seems to arise precisely from this way of approaching everything. What presents itself as reality has to be bent and refracted somewhere. But could we say that you are among those who bend things not in order to reshape reality, but so that no such thing as reality remains at all?

We live within a daily life organized around certain “truths.” Parting the sea with a staff, ascending into the sky, raising the dead from the grave, restoring sight to the blind, being thrown into a great fire and not burning, saving all living beings from the flood with a single ship, walking on water, remaining for days inside the belly of a whale... When we think through these narratives, we realize that, in our journey through this universe, what already exists is not enough for us. Reality, in a sense, has been bent and passed from hand to hand. When Jorge Luis Borges says, “I do not write fiction, I invent realities,” he may be pointing to precisely this condition. I consider the mechanical clock to be an invented reality. I come from being something that is “defined,” rather than “recognized,” within the sequence of labels “eastern,” “southeastern,” “regional,” “of Kurdish origin.” My effort to come to know the object may stem from here. What does it mean to see or think the object outside of its already “defined” form? I could say that my narratives generally dwell on such questions. And in this situation, philosophy becomes a companion to irony.

As you move through the crowds of the city, it seems to me that you also make room for what one might call, in a Walter Benjaminian sense, “love at last sight,” something many people experience as well. A love that settles into that final glance, precisely because you know you will probably never see the person you encountered again. Almost like sealing that moment. It carries a strongly melancholic tone. Can we speak of traces of such a love in the book?

Thank you for the Benjamin reference. We might also add Marcel Proust to this reading: “Love is the heart’s gaining sensitivity to time and space.” The times the narrator passes through and the places he moves across become, in a way, fragments of this sensitivity. And sensitivity, naturally, brings with it words that are partly melancholic and partly ecstatic. At times, the narrator owes it to this sensitivity that he walks not as if stepping on a pavement, but as if playing a foot operated instrument. A text should have a heart as much as it has an eye. In a crowded city, the air of the city can change several times within a single day. The narrator sees an excess of faces, shop windows, lights, and objects. His ears, too, are shaped by this density: the sounds of card terminals, turnstile beeps, public announcements, car horns, phone alerts. This creates in him both a sense of estrangement and a feeling of anxiety. He longs to hear a single sound, a sound like the one produced when a sword, sharpened by being hurled, meets water.

There is a feeling that accompanies your narratives and novels: anger. But it is not an anger voiced at full volume. You allow its presence to be sensed, yet it does not move beyond that. Does this way of suggesting anger in your texts stem from a sense that anger, in both literature and in life, does not really possess the power to change things?

We tend to understand personal anger as an instantaneous outburst, a loss of composure, an uncontrollable emotion. Yet when it becomes part of an identity, and when that identity is met with denial, violence, and injustice, a collective condition emerges. Because this condition does not unfold and end within a period of three months, or ten years, or even thirty years, the response one can give to it can no longer be described simply as “anger.” For instance, I now need an explanation very different from anger when it comes to the banning of Kurdish, one of the thousands of languages that humanity has developed over a vast span of time and carried into the present, and to the recent “intention” to lift this ban by presenting it as a benevolent gesture. My reserve for feeling anger at this “cruel joke” has been exhausted. And the absurdity of having to explain this in Turkish is another issue altogether. I wish it were possible to ask someone from the tribe who worshipped idols made of halva and ate them when they grew hungry how they would look at this language ban. The writer Charlie Campbell refers to a striking case in his book Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People: “In 1591, in the city of Uglich, after a prince was assassinated, a bell was rung as a sign of rebellion. As punishment for this act, the bell shared the fate of those exiled to Siberia. It was not pardoned, and it was not sent back to Uglich until 1892.” One can only imagine with what great seriousness that decision must have been taken at the time. And how great the anger in response to it must have been. Today, it is an object of astonishment. In my narratives, it is possible to sense the presence of anger, but it is not greater than astonishment. 

In your narratives and in these novels that refuse to be novels, the narrator is always in motion, in a state of walking. This seems to be one of the shared features of your writing. Do you see this condition of walking as something that shapes the rhythm, structure, and language of your texts? Yet in your work, it is often not walking itself but rather the elements that interrupt or obstruct walking that turn it into something other than a life-affirming activity for the narrator. When you compare the different forms of walking across your texts, what would you say about their literary resonance?

Exactly as you suggest, this state of walking creates a rhythm and a form. I have never really had much desire to drive a car. For that reason, I do not drive. Where I live, in Kızıltepe, I mostly move from one place to another on foot. In images that depict human evolution, we usually see a dozen figures in various stages of walking. We first tried to understand this planet by walking. For instance, these days we see how free-range eggs are valued more highly. There is something wild and solitary in walking itself. Not walking like a postal worker, bound by fixed hours and assigned routes, but walking like a carrier pigeon, determining its own path and its own time. One is certain that there are “envelopes” in their bag; the other senses that “words” are tied to their feet. Contemporary literature moves along these two lines. There are texts that knock on the door, ring the bell, and when they cannot find the reader at home, leave the envelope with the neighborhood grocer, with social media influencers. And there are texts that reach you through balconies and windows. I try to be the latter.