Aaron Kilercioglu Crab Farts
I
have two memories of you. In the first, you are driving an old taxi. ’89 Skoda Rapid, pride and joy. Like a refraction of its original, we are being driven free of charge. You keep the yellow light-up Taxi sign in the glove compartment. Sometimes you use it for the thrill of being a korsan, a pirate. Sometimes you use it to supplement your pension. You are driving us to the airport, even though we’ve hardly seen you this summer. Your brother - my dad - is sat in the front, my brother and I are in the back. I remember trying to fasten my seatbelt and I remember my dad telling me off for being rude: Ayıp! And I remember your wink, yellowed smile through thick bristled moustache. You don’t speak English. So how do you build a home, not despite, but through distance? I remember driving past a lot of construction. Tall beige blocks of flats, divided by wide concrete squares, scattered, seemingly at random, along the motorway. Baby teeth sprouting in the economic miracle that is Turkey in the early 2000s. I remember you liked to talk of your plans. “Your uncle lives in the future,” my dad would say. I remember how my dad, despite being seven years your junior, gives you advice, reprimanding, instructing. I remember it having something to do with our living abroad. ‘Abroad’ means dignity, wealth. It means proximity to something I later understand to call ‘whiteness’. You couldn’t have known that my dad longed for nothing more than
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aaron kilercioglu
