RHNK #4
ON EYES
RHNK Berlin | Ä°stanbul | Barcelona
CREW
WRITERS
ARTWORK
Editor
Nazlı Koca
Designed by
Ayşe Zeynep Özbay
Printed by
Paper Street Co.
ZIPPORA’S OLDEST DAUGHTER
DAYNA GROSS
LORIE
CRISTINA BURDUJA
ALEXANDER NORTON
IOANA CRISTINA CASAPU
LINEA
CLAUDIA GILLIES
CIHAN KÜÇÜK
AYŞE ZEYNEP ÖZBAY
HELLO!
In Turkish, we add suffixes to words for the time and person they are about. One kind of past tense is called mişli geçmis zaman // past tense with miş but it is also common to call it the learned past tense, the rumor past tense, the heard past tense. Turkish fairy tales start with the words “bir varmış, bir yokmuş” meaning something like “once it was, then it wasn’t” When I was a kid I thought of it as “there was one, there wasn’t one”. mişli geçmiş zaman felt like a special fairy tale language for kids but I was also hearing a lot from adults as I grew older, like at the weekly meetings of my mothers and wives of my father’s friends. “Suzan’s daughter failed 10th grade againmiş.” Or sometimes they used it to talk to us kids with -miş making sentences like “My son is going to be a genius doctor-muş.”
The suffixes which change according to the time they refer to, then change again according to the person they are about. Then, if one wants to use -miş but emphasize that they were there when the incident happened they could say “görmüştüm // I had seen it”. But it also gives an unreliable edge, a doubtful meaning to the action like in “yapmıştım // I had done it” or “yapmış mıydım? // Had I done it?” The list goes on and on, but it feels quite impossible for me to explain the individual flexible trigger power of each possible version of the mişli geçmiş zaman suffix in one’s mind to anyone who doesn’t speak the language. But Kreuzberg can. If you go to Oranienstrasse 18, cross the street and look up maybe you will feel it without having to understand it. 1949 born, Turkish woman artist Ayşe Ermen made this art installation titled Am Haus, which literally means On the House, as part of a bigger exhibition in 1994. Whenever I pass by this building instinctively look up, identify the suffixes, the artist, myself with the artist, feel proud, miss Turkey and feel glad I am away from Turkey all
at the same time so very intensely. And I pass by this building every day. Then, I look at the endless possibilities of fairytale endings and realize where I am. I am in Europe, Germany, Berlin, Kreuzberg, Oranienstrasse where right under this building is located a cafe and bar named after Rimbaud’s most famous poem, Bateau Ivre. It means The Drunken Boat. Sarhoş Gemi. This place opened in 1997, but time is not so relevant here in this neighborhood or in Rimbaud’s poems. He is a timeless poet, an endless stream of emotions, love, lust, and darkness. I learned about Rimbaud’s life by reading Kathy Acker’s collage of his life and work in In Memoriam to Identity. I had read the poem that gave this cafe its name before, I think because the column of a poet in a big Turkish literary magazine where he published selected submission had the name The Travel Journal of Rimbaud, or something like that. I remember dreaming of being published there once. Now, I can’t imagine writing fiction or poetry in Turkish, my mother tongue for reasons so complex that they could only truly be expressed in my mother tongue.
Whenever my mind makes the connection between this building and the cafe, and the cafe with Rimbaud a bittersweet feeling takes over me. I know I will never know Rimbaud’s soul with the details hidden in his French passion. I miss a friend I never had. I know Patti Smith loves him too. She took a trip to the town he was born when she was young and wrote about it in “Just Kids”. Do you ever feel like everything you know is based on other people’s opinions? Where do their opinions come from? There is no surveillance camera that can shoot every single side and corner of an U-Bahn wagon. That is why there are more graffitis than warning signs. It’s certainly not because they don’t give a fuck. They live for the fuck.
surveillance /səˈveɪl(ə)ns,səˈveɪəns/ noun close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal. “he found himself put under surveillance by British military intelligence” synonyms: observation, scrutiny, watch, view, inspection, monitoring, supervision, superintendence; spying, espionage, intelligence, undercover work, infiltration, reconnaissance; informal bugging, wiretapping, phone tapping, recon
Nobody was surprised when I announced the 4th theme was going to be surveillance. The word itself has a cold, technical, 1984 feeling attached to it, but the concept is very close to all of us. Who hasn’t been told they were watched as they were growing up? Be it god, your mother, your babysitter, teacher or guardian angel, all humans were given the same narrative. We are not alone here. First, when we are younger we are told that we are watched and thus protected, when we get older, well, the excuse is the same. If you choose to believe in religion you agree to be “under his eye” all your life. It will determine whether you will swim in a sea of your favorite beverage or burn without ever being able to turn to ash.
He did everything in his 16-yearold power to free from the surveillance of her mother and ended up on a train to Paris to become a poet and expose himself to the whole world. Many people think he died at the age of 21, but he only stopped writing and traveled the world as a merchant, which is pretty much the same thing for those of us who are still trying to fight the pressure of unwanted surveillance by putting what we want the world to see out there.
RHNK #4 is about us. People who come to Berlin to take control of their stories by telling them through fiction, poems, and photographs. When I started RHNK I wanted to create a platform for voices that say things like “Am Haus” in English and eyes that would like to read them anyway.
Is it all because surveillance is the only way to confirm our existence? Like a pinch? Is it something we need like air, like water? Rimbaud’s mother was obsessed with the way society would see her kids. She forced them to get a posh classical education and watched them closely to make sure it would happen. Rimbaud called her “mouth of darkness.”
Now, it is time to change mediums and make our stories heard by more people. Find us on Facebook to find out about what’s next for us. From Kreuzberg with love, Nazlı
by Ayşe Zeynep Özbay
by Ayşe Zeynep Özbay
Just because you are paranoid, don’t mean they are not after you. Kurt Cobain
#True Eye by Zippora’s oldest daughter
Nuru’s wandering eye could see through walls skin, flesh and bones, neuron ends she deciphered synapses I lay on the cold tiles dripping wet In my sparkly pink, bathing suit young chest flat, one with the cement weight deep pressing me still Nuru’s eye ran but stopped, let him close the bathroom door, naked skin wet pressing against a still wet coldbody,
at night Nuru came to me pinched my flesh, “I know what you did, you bad little girl this is all your fault,” chest pressing tears out my eye tub, “It’s okay, you bad mannered shameful girl CONFESS! CONFESS! It’s all your fault, not his I know what I saw,”
Her power to see things lay in the chemicals she possessed, to develop reality, She was also older her eyes more truthful than some small girl’s swimming memory.
by Ayşe Zeynep Özbay
by Ayşe Zeynep Özbay
Letters from Long Island by Dayna Gross
1. I am hiding in my room because my step sister is cooing to her baby downstairs, or the baby is cooing to her? I’m overwhelmed, but when am I not? Or should I say underwhelmed by the American lifestyle? I am judging everyone, which is nothing new, but I cannot close, cover, or stab my cynical eye. I tried to take my first yoga course and in the middle of the course the instructor told us to “lie in corpse pose and chillax.” I’ve decided to force myself through these experiences but I’m not sure why yet. The clash continues to confirm my life choices, my existence, my mind or something less meaningful. I wonder how long I can blame my cynicism and distance on jet lag. My mom wants me to go to the gynecologist to make sure I can have a baby in the future, my dad wants to know when I’m going to finally settle down and my sister wants to know why I’m surprised a non-kosher cheese store would finally close in such a religious neighborhood. I accuse her of keeping a blind eye to anyone who doesn’t belong to her religious reality. I realize I am being too aggressive and if I intend to persuade her in
another direction clenching my jaw and spitting harsh words over her covered hair won’t suit the objective. I try to talk about my boyfriend so they will eventually drop their guards and allow him to exist, instead, my sentences float and fall as if they never made it to and through an ear hole. I’m sorry this isn’t exciting writing, I’ve eaten a peanut butter bar I got on the plane and I’m feeling queasy from the sugar. Self conscious of my voice, I realize if I would read this paragraph I wouldn’t want to meet me. Remind me what your room smells like and maybe I will figure out what I’m doing here. 2. Nothing is happening here besides for food entering my mouth and rude comments that I can’t seem to withdraw. I think I am angry at my family for being who they are, religious Americans. I’m cruel because I have already become like them yet I still mock them for their closed mindedness. I meditated yesterday to release this new anger and found the Hebrew letter shin (too close to sin). It’s supposed to represent the letter of truth. It has a base with three parallel lines. The middle line
is slanted, leaning towards the right. It must be crooked as a reminder that there is no such thing as direct, straightforward truth, something must be crooked in order for it to be true. My mom sent me to the pharmacy to buy her a “sympathy card” because someone died. I love her for her simplicity and predictability. Perhaps my brother and sister are the two straight lines and I am the crooked line in the middle. I tried to exercise on an orange exercise ball in my room. It should have come with a warning label: “For balanced individuals only,” oh well, at least the sky is blue and I can see the sunset over the oversized suburban houses. If I erased cynicism from the undertone (overtone) what would be left?
am I? I look into their innocent eyes and tell them I’m a freak. I can’t think here, the mundane has invaded my mind, my brain feels like plastic, this is what it must feel like to drink cocacola. My body feels like a 70 year old woman’s in silhouette. My shoulders are onto the next errand, to keep me in the in between. How do writers stay focused when they’re cornered into a writer’s block? I bought a small camera so pull me out of the house when there’s sun. Then I will know what is inside and out. I’m ashamed of my artlessness. I’ve recorded a radio show with Danielle. When you hear her poetry written years ago, you remember what poetry is supposed to sound like.
3.
While Berlin is freezing over NYC is stripping to find knees, shoulders, and sunglasses. I forgot how to trust the sun and worn wool pants over my vegan legs. Every country I go to I remind myself how I should speak Spanish. I drove to the cemetery amazed how the emotion continues to erupt from blinking car lights flowing behind a dead body they once loved. Someone is in pain,
We are so far away, it’s dark outside, and I’m awake, and we call this morning. I feel the world I once knew is disappointed with my silence but I can’t help but trace the lines on our faces, we have aged. We have been downgraded. Everyone’s a mother here, so the children call me mommy too, otherwise, what
4.
a pain I know. I found a photo album filled with my Hungarian family. Everyone in that album is dead now, besides for my father. My great-grandfather next to his wife with a Jewish band around his arm. My grandmother smiling with her two younger siblings burned without a goodbye. I watch their life before they know what I vaguely know, that they were all going to be murdered in one moment. It’s so real, as I lay on a carpeted floor drinking my stepfather’s wine trying to study the lines on their faces for hints of a foreshadow. My grandmother had a child at 17 because my grandfather, who she met after the war, was the only family she would have, yet she continues to smile a full dimpled smile in every black and white photograph my pages flip through. We call them holocaust survivors as if the process is over, and they too seem to mask relief, what choice do they really have? This history will be lost, the same way I look at a photo of my great-grandfather void of familiarity. These photos have survived world war two, communism, and escaping to America, and now pray on the bottom shelf in my father’s basement. I’m afraid of death and loss.
5. I walked through the Bronx tonight. The homeless people lay passed out on every step and street corner and I am overwhelmed with sadness. I keep money and apples in my pockets to hand out, but they are too many and I don’t know what to do. I look to them so they know they are seen between the people who pass legs in leggings because NYC is their gym and they are always in the fitness process. How are there so many worlds within one world? I feel so alone that I could easily stay here, in my alienation. I want to be separated from the worlds around me, but I am only temporary in every moment. I cannot come back to the Berlin I left. I will rearrange my flat and insist transformations. I have so much more to say but the wine I have sipped taste like fresh cut wood and I can’t seem to find any pieces to spit out of my mouth. It’s hard for me to understand how Berlin exists while NY is blowing in from my window. Everything has changed.
The quiet one draws me in by Lorie
The deep set laugh lines contrast to a melancholy smile of a face that tells stories upon stories We look at each other with longing to be loved and understood. Like everyone on the street who we pass unrecognized. Reaching for each other’s hands as we sleep Virtual strangers in need of something familiar. The signs of loneliness seep into the conversation We try to laugh it off, hoping the reality isn’t too noticeable. Sinking into each other We let go.
by Linea
by Linea
I’m watching me by Cristina Burduja
I’m watching you As you watch me We stare at each other as if we’re frozen in a statue cemented for those with bruised knees We have fallen As we fall the trees that watched us play games And then we rise Our eyes Have holes in them Holes that show the way through which all goes and comes Forms and reshapes As images sent to the higher bigger I creature who holds us in palms And watches us taking baths and pulls us out Of our bodies To see from above How much love, so much love.
Two Poems by Alexander Norton
1. You know there are more loves than god’s love Lovers are plenty but few see me behind you in the stairwell Is god in you? - Should I start writing god poetry? Hold on Just because I’m in love But I love god and that’s it How can you love anyone else? You can’t Because if you are god Then god is you And everyone is god Then we are all gods - No Surely I don’t believe you
What if god loves me and I love god Do I love you? Or do I love god? And you happen to be the vessel he is taking Hold on If god is a man And I love god Does that make me gay? You know I heard the Bible doesn’t sanction same sex relations Is this really true? Does god have a gender? Maybe if god is white and a man He would be labeled as white, male privilege - I think so
So I’ve thought about it I love her But my love is not for her But the love that she has for you God Because she loves you And I love you We are not in a relationship with each other But the spirit of you Are you a metaphor for love, god? Did you just make it up Why do I feel it in my heart
She loves god I love god I love her love for god She loves my love for god I thought I loved her But together we’re just loving you But who are you? Do you sleep with us at night? In our bed? How about now? Do you ever leave me? Just nod once I can’t see you...
Do I love anyone or is it just you? You can answer me if you want I can’t feel your answer yet Can you actually speak? Because I’ve heard I’m meant to feel you But I can’t Maybe the reverent will tell me tomorrow all the answers I heard you guys talk
2. You were someone exotic to lie to Extension on a house that will never be built Swaying in the winds of siestas and lost hopes Property developers with more money Than sensible decisions to make houses for Spanish citizenship Citizens not as important as the golf swingers Clasping at insurance fingers When they get robbed from kids with credit cards and lost Stolen wallets Lost moments of nine-year-olds weeping at lost photographs of plants Hopes of success Through foreign depiction
Spell a depression Dee Press Si On Lion Exotic Lie to me And I’ll wear the coat first Whilst the tourists wear vests and sandals Scandals Scoundrels of cultural Vulturing luring history And lost preserved memory
Cling on Old things These old buildings Last month’s paper Still swaying in the wind Oh I love Spanish women - they’re so exotic
Imitate a child in the pool They are older than you And speak with a different variation of tongue You’ll spell it eventually Just put the work in Keep practicing Keh? Se vasa Und replicato Of the memories your parents saw when you were children Sat in the plastic furniture Wearing a Spanish dress That your brother will try to wear years later
by Claudia Gillies
Modern Loss by Ioana Cristina Casapu
I couldn’t deal with the breakup, so I started talking to a stranger on my Instagram. I turned my attention away from the ugly emotions I was feeling by putting all my attention to flirt online. It’s growing intense and I slowly become more aware of the purpose I projected onto it. I do it to avoid feeling the emptiness of my bed with two pillows and just one inhabitant, or the lack of direction in life that envelops me at such blurry times. Borderless - is what I find my boundaries to be like in this situation, in a sense that I push
towards the fantasy more than I push to go back to my real life. I use sexting as my weapon of choice and rush into innuendos because at a certain level I feel this is much easier than giving a stranger access to my personality. I started smoking again. One addiction replaces the other and life suddenly becomes that comforting place again where you burn yourself down with callousness to avoid the underlying pain. Most of my relationships have started online. I’ve met my high school sweetheart via IRC when I was 15, and my fiancé on Facebook. Everything in between mostly happened online, and I believe not because I chose to, but because I played along in this battlefield of mistrust and fantasy and hiding emotion the same way I played vampire video games when I was a teen. It felt exciting, a connection from elsewhere. Like my friend, Tanya said once, “We are all so fortunate to have all these soul mates everywhere around the planet”. My soul mates were sometimes in the same city, otherwise, we were separated by geography. After seven days of speaking and
getting a taste of each other, he suggested to book a flight and meet me earlier than planned. I sensed he was reluctant and wanted to joke about it. “Don’t worry, that’s how I’ve also met my ex.” It was the 5th of October 2015 when my ex and I first started talking, I was happy enough to have found a cafe with Wi-Fi in Berlin. It was still sunny, unlike the early winter we experience presently, so I bought more coffee than I could drink and sat on the terrace and got to work. It was just the night before that I’d been blocked by Facebook for 30 days for posting an artwork displaying nudity on one of the pages I was handling. The night before I’d watched Jean Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, of which they say it has the most heartbreaking trailer in the history of new wave cinema. The same night before I shared a link to that trailer on my page, and then there he was, the only comment in one hundred and forty-two likes, his own interpretation of new wave
cinema compressed in a short Soundcloud music track. I wanted to respond and couldn’t, as the ban only allowed me to send direct messages. I don’t remember what I said. It could’ve been anything. That’s how I met my ex, eighty-five days after that conversation, in a Russian, dark fur, with bright red lips and an equestrian hat, on terminal A, at Tegel airport. I’ve always thought about modern loss as a foreword to modern love. Uneasy, always forcing an exit through the gift shop; underestimated, always longing to belong, asking a deep, sultry “Would you like to consume me?” I wonder why we give ourselves such a hard time experiencing love. My ex and I broke up two days before I first contacted the man from Instagram. I like to believe that if I had pushed the right buttons in the Universe, the Universe will haul back with something for my heart instead. But that’s not what I thought back then. Back then, my heart flinched at the possibility to start a connection that I wouldn’t be ever able to sustain.
I was coming back from Paris with rain on my hair that I hadn’t washed since Amsterdam to avoid brittleness. The couple sitting next to me in the aircraft read Catholic prayers in between random chats about their holiday. Their first Parisian holiday. I remember mine. I was twentyfour, red haired and dressed in a butter colored windbreaker when I first arrived at Charles De Gaulle in the spring of 2011. I was wearing a similar wind breaker now, that I bought in a vintage shop close to Le Pompidou, minutes before my bag filled with cosmetics was stolen. My first theft in Paris. I never felt more like a tourist.
of Brigitte Bardot in “Le Mepris” sat under glass on top of the main drawer, gazing at me once every day, reminding me how easily love turns into hate. It took the poster eighty-five days to reach me. It first traveled from Paris to Berlin, went back to Paris because the postman never rang twice, and then flew to Bucharest to my ex. It’s been thirty-one days since my breakup and twelve since my Instagram contact started writing me over Facebook.
When we gradually broke up over the next month, I saw all my dreams align and fade. Splitting goods and placing them in boxes. The table will stay with you, I keep all the pictures, this China belongs to your mother. Do you want to have the Mid Century Modern lamp? No, you can take it, it will always make me think I was nonexistent in this house.
When he sends me a photo of him holding his friend’s child I cringe, completely aware that my disgust comes from my impossibility to call my own father “Dad”, and thus my failure to acknowledge men as potential fathers. My dad was there but then he actually wasn’t and our first real conversation happened when I was twentythree, in his car, in a blizzard, and then, in between meaningless conversations about weather and school, I burst into my long distance engagement and life, and taking my American visa and being a soon to be wife.
The house was a nightmare and I always tried to make it feel like home. I moved the furniture once every six weeks. A man size poster
When I ask “Have you ever been married?” he says yes, and never asks about my past. He doesn’t want to know, I ponder, as I pour
myself a cocktail surrogate using my landlady’s Cachaca and Fraises Liquor. I felt inadequate all my life, underneath all the Creme de La Mer anti-wrinkle serum and false eyelashes. Nowadays I wonder if I am the sum of my inadequacies or someone completely different than I ever had the chance to discover. Back in spring, I read my future in Tarot cards and there it said that 2017 will be the year of Death and should I be more stressed than ever or feel life running from underneath my feet, I should suppose it’s all for the best, it’s all part of a process. I trust magical thinking and yet I cannot wrap my head around the word process. I like progress more, or better yet, just pretending to progress. When he speaks to me I feel as if my days are running short. As a writer, I can only defend myself with my words. I can only make the best or the least out of the conversation.
When he confessed he adores me I was in a crowded bar with three friends and we were drinking standing. I remember feeling light into my eyes straight up to my heart and not being able to smile but instead shaking the thought and telling my friends, he’s fucking around with my head. When I think of my ex, of our beginning, there is nothing but the same winter light of the small room where I carefully arranged all my goods to create the impression of more space. When I went back to see that house in 2016 I burst into tears. It wasn’t mine any longer, and the new tenants had painted the ceiling in a deep hue of red, like blood oranges, that I never could bear. I watch my phone’s screen every other four minutes, waiting for you to reach back. I feel vulnerable. I feel seventeen again and eager to understand what you’re about. I like your hands and your broken English. I feel like the woman in me needs a place to unravel. I believed I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I only wanted to be a poem. I think of you every second of every day. I’m obsessed and worried
how my life will turn out. When my ex writes me I digress and make a push to leave that place of abandon and fear once again. When he says I will wait, in letters coming from 1800 kilometers away with broken flowers, I remind myself how I want to wait too and live through all the probabilities and maybe share a life together again sometime, but all I want now is this, you. Five days ago I told my Internet crush I started working on a short story. It’s because you’ve met me, he joked, and I joked back with a bit of condescendence and said: “That is true, but not in the way you imagine.” In writing, I can make sense of my life and there is no place to hide. I risk it all because if all else fails and you become frightened of me, or my confession pushes you away, then I will know, at least, I have made sense of something for a while. This is not a love letter, although I am fairly good at writing them, and when I hit the bottom I could probably advertise love letter writing as a paid service.
This is not a falling out of love letter either, although I could have written about the insensitive ways I had broken my ex’s heart in two and the way he broke mine in four. If I look for exemption, it’s only so that I can have a life after this. I just wish you asked more questions. I’m just looking for a stage, you know, where it becomes easier to talk about my life than in front of the person I love or in a psychiatric unit. When love stories don’t write themselves, I push a little bit under the surface to call the blood back in. I wanted to tell people a story where I was obsessed with my career and my individuality, but in all seriousness, I have been trying to back off from being obsessed with love. I arrived here all alone, as I did the first time, looking for myself. When he says I will meet you in Berlin my heart takes a bow and makes small pirouettes on Yann Tiersen’s piano songs and then hides away behind my computer screen because I had always thought I should be alone and focused on my life until I forget completely about love. I make drawings of our first meeting in my mind. Yesterday I pushed my nose against the window as I
used to do in childhood and drew circles in the haze my breath left. I did it unconsciously as if my body was repeating a lesson learned long before my mind could tell right from wrong. “You can sleep in two sweaters and still be wet”, he says over the phone, touching himself, and I can’t remember the last time someone touched my heart.
by Cihan Küçük
Berlin | Ä°stanbul | Barcelona facebook.com/rhnkmag rhnkmag@gmail.com
