CNF: Hüzün

by Sybil Baker

 

I’m in a body of water far from home. My brother, who lives here in Turkey, has found a spot of beach with white sand and trees for shade and a shallow entrance to the ocean that only the locals know about. The rocks underneath my feet are worn smooth, the water is clear and calm. Turkish families set up picnics, with couples and young people lounging on towels. I play with my seven-year-old nephew, the child of two empires, in the calm water of the Aegean Sea.

Somewhere, it is 1630 and my ancestor seven-year-old Jeffrey Baker is on the Mary and John headed to the British colonies, never to see his homeland again.

 

Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk writes of Istanbul, “Here amid the old stones and wooden houses, history made peace with its ruins; ruins nourished life and gave new life to history.” Pamuk calls this melancholy about Turkey’s lost greatness, “hüzün.” Surrounded by the crumbling ruins of its former empires, the Turks are surrounded by visual reminders of a past that will not return, even if their leaders want it to. It is, Pamuk says, a uniquely Turkish feeling.

Americans seem to be stuck in a restorative nostalgia Svetlana Boym writes of in The Future of Nostalgia that “manifests itself in the total reconstructions of monuments of the past,” while Pamuk’s hüzün as a reflective nostalgia that comfortably “lingers on the ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.” With this reflective nostalgia, Americans could live in peace among the ruins instead of trying to re-construct them, allowing us to envision a future we cannot yet dream of.

 

My dad’s dream for us was not necessarily the American Dream of the next generation doing better financially than the last. That none of his three children followed the traditional corporate path that he himself had become disillusioned with pleased him. It pleased him that all three of us and our spouses earned advanced degrees. It pleased him that I lived in Korea and my youngest brother had moved to Turkey, even if he wished we were closer. It probably would have pleased him that our own marriages—to a Jew, Muslim, and White man from South Africa—and their progeny have diluted the Bakers’ White supremacist legacy.

It was my dad’s dream to pass on the desire to pursue knowledge and to always be curious of what life is about. As my dad said, “If there were no longer questions then there would be no hope, no dreams, no unknowns, no visions, no tomorrow, no future.”

We are living in my ancestors’ future; one they could never have imagined.

 

Soon I will be on a plane back to the States, leaving Turkey’s hüzün behind. Like Odysseus, I will return to my ancestral home. But unlike him, when I return I will not slay the suitors or hang the women servants for their acts of resistance. When I return, I will gather the threads of Penelope’s funeral shroud she weaves and unpicks every night. With my loom, I will weave the threads of stories into a shroud that will be large enough to bury and honor the dead so that we can begin life anew.

And like Odysseus, like my ancestors, I will dream of the sea, of leaving my homeland once again.

 

Sybil is the author of five works of fiction, which have won Eric Hoffer, Foreword, and IPPY awards. Her nonfiction work, Immigration Essays, was the 2018-2019 Read2Achieve selection for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and required reading for all first-year students. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Guernica, Electric Literature, Glimmer Train, and Critical Flame. She was awarded two MakeWork Artist Grants and a 2017 Individual Artist’s Fellowship in nonfiction from the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee and Chattanooga, Director of the Meacham Writer’s Workshop, and on faculty for the Yale Summer Writer’s Workshop.

 

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What We Learn From Their Bones

by Sybil Baker

Who will I be like when the air runs out? Perhaps I’ll be a garden fugitive from Pompeii, flash baked before the fumes can kill me. (more…)

Agamemnon’s Wife Speaks From Hades

by Sybil Baker

With you, Agamemnon, sex was no great shakes. You fell on top of me when I was half asleep, my body as still as a vase trying not to shatter. You were dry and heaving, smelling like sour milk, grinding into me until I was dust. Why would I save myself for ten years for that? Ten years in Ancient Greek age is like fifty years in the future. I always figured Odysseus was a great lover, why else would Penelope wait so long, so patiently? He probably made sure she came first, early and often.

And then Aegisthus appeared. We took our time, spent hours in bed, feeding each other apricots and olives, licking each other clean like cats. He brought cup after cup of wine to my lips, kissing the drops as they slid down my neck. He asked me questions like who do I remember, what is the color of my last dream, what happened to dawn, what were my dead daughter’s first words, where did she kiss me last? I pointed to my cheek. Here. He kissed it. And here and here and here. Throat, ear, breasts. Slowly, tenderly, he worshipped my body, rubbed oil on it, kissed all those places you didn’t know. Each night it was my body, my pain, my skin he peeled away. He never once said that I was old, never plucked my gray hairs or followed the tracks of skin stretched across me. Again, again, again. That’s what he said.

And you, arriving in your carriage with your latest prize, Cassandra, a stolen lover I was to embrace, a woman younger than Iphegenia would have been had you not killed her. Poor girl, how could I let her waste her years with you and your parsimonious ministrations? How to share you when there was nothing left to share? But even that, all of that, my happiness with my lover, your own mistress kidnapped (because how else would a woman sleep with you) that was not enough for me to take the knife and gut you like a pig. No, that was for our daughter, the one you whose hands you tied and mouth you stuffed with a rag to keep her from crying out. At least I let you cry out, at least the Gods heard you. But what about our dead daughter, silenced, sacrificed to Gods who have already decided everything, have foretold the way the world will end. If only I could have held her one last time, brushed the curls off her forehead, pulled the lobes of her ears before I whispered to her to never trust them. And yes, I admit, I wanted power, wanted to rule the land. You men, you understand that at least, the lust for power, but what you will not understand is this: that is not the half of it.

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Sybil Baker is the author of Talismans and The Life Plan. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, upstreet, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. After living in South Korea for twelve years, she now lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she is an Assistant Professor of English.

Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

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