— Mustafa GünayIn the year 1980, the Blonde Revolutionary said she would go to university in Ankara. Far from understanding this, our street, our neighborhood, and the surroundings stood directly against it. I was 8 years old. Since my mother was the elder of the street, the neighbors gathered at our house often and I would listen. My father and the family stood right behind my sister. Although worries about what she would eat or drink and where she would live silenced everyone, their “sarıkız” (blonde girl) would take care of herself.
Just three or four months prior, our house had been attacked at night with stones the size of quinces because she and my sister Kezban had wiped away an ultra-nationalist slogan written on our wall. I had woken up thinking it was an earthquake and I was terrified. Those stones passing over our heads had coincidentally left us with only fear and hatred. My father was away on a long haul trip. My uncle Ramazan was at home. Back then, my uncle lived with us. My elders decided to keep this from my father, but with my child’s mind, I think I told him everything two days later. My father and the family stood behind my sister without backing down even a single inch. In fact, my father, who never had anything to do with weapons, bought a gun from a relative in a way I witnessed and wanted to kill those who threw the stones. The heavy hitters of the neighborhood intervened and ensured the men apologized to my father, so the incident did not go any further.
Until the age of 17, I remember my sister from the gifts she brought me from Ankara during summer holidays and the books I didn’t read. She tried so hard to get me to read, but her efforts were in vain as I hung out with truck drivers more than her. But I never neglected to be proud of her and to boast about her. I used to show off a lot by saying that my sister’s glasses became size 8 from reading so much and that she must have read at least five thousand books.
On a summer day around 1982 or 1983, my sister Havva came and said to my mother and father that she was going to get married. She introduced the groom candidate as this and that. I still remember the shock especially my father and I experienced. Perhaps because of my father, I also always thought my sisters would never get married. What was the need anyway? 😊 A week later, we went on a trip with my father. He was squirming but couldn’t quite put it into words. Then we reached the following agreement: we would find a job in a distant city like Erzurum and disappear for 10 days right at the time of the wedding, then come back and continue with life after the wedding was over. Later, that process did not reach completion, but it was certainly not because of us.
August 14, 1986… My mother suffered the most, then my sisters. My sister Kezban left school and came to take care of us and started working in Denizli. My mother couldn’t sleep at night, and my sisters were trying to console her. There was no help from anyone else. No one knew anything or had any experience. The children of İbrahim and Şerife had only learned to work honestly and survive in their lives. Everyone around us, including relatives, was semi-ignorant and very poor. I think our sisters who had seen Ankara despite their conditions began to change this.
In those years, I could have erased everyone except my nuclear family and broken their hearts. Why would such a good, helpful, angel like person die? It was actually his last trip with the truck; he was going to work in the warehouse or the office because of his knees. For years I lived with this reality that I could not accept, taking nothing seriously and believing that happiness did not exist. Later I began to accept it, but I always said this: we gave our sacrifice, we paid our price, from now on deaths will occur in order. It doesn’t work that way… The deaths of your loved ones who shine light upon you and teach you so much while alive also teach you a great deal. They will always remain as lights in all of our journeys. ❤️❤️🙏
The Ankara years, the years when my sister shared her tiny morsel of food with us until the end. Unforgettable for everyone was her taking her 4 year old son to the theater in the city standing for 1 hour on the bus with him in her arms and never complaining about it. Her arranging concert tickets for us at every opportunity, her not getting angry when we didn’t go and sold them, her just laughing it off. Sister Havva was the first to teach us that one could have good friends and companions. Instead of getting scared and distancing herself from her friend who was tortured, she took care of him even more in the same house. I always saw my sister as the most grounded master of the socialist thought, whose training I only partially went through. Much later, I made many jokes about the meditation and metaphysical concepts she leaned towards when perhaps dead ends appeared before her. In this, both the place I put her in and the superficial pop culture I was stuck in over time certainly had an effect. One day she spoke very clearly and said that if I have any place in your heart, you will go to the famous Indian guru coming to the transcendental meditation center in Mecidiyeköy. I went and did whatever they said, but when the finale ended with the guru’s family busy with home textiles and what we could do together, my sister did not insist again. 😊 But she always made sure her healing reached me. 🙏
We will always remember with beauty everyone who touched people other than themselves and left this world. Blonde Revolutionary or Sarı Hoca, I hope I will be a good person with the hope of coming to be with you and my father. Even if I love you from my gut, I loved you very much. ❤️❤️
