I awaken in the middle of the night, dreaming of the far east. There’s a rainstorm just outside tonight and accompanying the patter of rain is the rhythmic tapping of branches against my windowpane. Lightning is striking every few moments now; that brilliant, blinding white illuminating my room for some few lucky seconds. My gaze lifts to that Kazakh rug pinned against the otherwise bare wall facing me, a souvenir of my mother’s recent venture eastwards to Istanbul. Spun with raw shades of scarlet that trickled into rhombic vermilions that then persevered into slithers of the finest golds, it was a complete masterpiece- woven with all the genius intricacies the hands of those great masters possess. My mother told me the rhombic adornments represented female fertility, and that because such carpets were often used for daughters’ dowries, the greater the mother’s love was for her daughter, the more beautiful her carpet ought to be. Such was the kind of knowledge my mother had ascertained throughout her travels. A proud and intensely enigmatic Turkish woman, she was born in the dry Anatolian heart but now declared the languid, sensual western coast to be her only home. Possessed by a spirit hungry for the world and for archaic wisdoms, she had spent her life swathed in long travels and impassioned learning of all the world’s histories. Yet such a wildly erudite heart was, by her forefathers’ decree, loyal above all to the teachings of her native land, a loyalty and discipline she had unconsciously handed down to me. And now, when I trace the currents of my mind back to my childhood on pensive nights like this, I still hear the reverberations of the songs she sung in all the guttural splendour of the Central Anatolian dialects. All those lullabies, all those stories, prancing about like all the padişah’s horses across the plains of my mind, now caress me- linguistically lost to me in all the mystery that now shrouds the osman’s dead tongue. My mother would reach further back than that too; engulfing me with stories of those who long came before us; my great grandmother’s Circassian lineage- filled with beauty and grace, and my grandfather’s far Turkic lineage- filled with strength and sorrow. Further east she would advance still, ever the Orphic bard and I her devoted seven-year-old disciple. From the Caspian Sea to the Lake Baikal, from tundra to taiga, her tongue summoned the spirits of those great primogenitors- now laid to rest in soil a thousand leagues below the walnut trees. With what marvel she spoke of those eastern brothers! The mythic tapestry she wove was as such: the founding loom of Alash Khan, the warp threads of Oghuz Khan, the weft threads of Bilge Khagan, an interchanging weft thread for Abylai Khan, and the final threads for Kenesary Khan. A halcyon of desolation now reigns the lands they once triumphed, adorned only by the exalting cries and sighs of the black larks.
They swarm me now, my vision, caressing my eyes, exchanging my sight for loving, blind delirium totally tainted by the jet of their feathers. I see not my mother by my side in this reverent trance, but the figment of my own body- alone with this splendid history- and with this sovereign desolation. Beneath my left hand I feel the supple wood of that sacred loom…Loom of the Alash nation, of that father, oh how I recall him now! With what presence he once more stands before me- alive in the vivacity of flesh before my cecity! Gracing the plains in all his fire and iron, he gallops upon his steed with all the freedom of these larks that now so violently embrace me. I spin and whirl into my mind’s eye. Did he ever imagine, did he ever once dream, that on this choleric golden peak the nomad would one day stand still? How he marched and how he rode- casting shadows of bronze and horsehair- that great progenitor. How he may rest now in his stone chamber! How we, sons of the Seljuk, now appraise him; eulogising him not as mere passenger of the world since the time of Âdem yet as some Âdem himself; fathering not Kabil, Habil and Sit, but those who breathed life into Uly Zhuz, Orta Zhuz and Kishi Zhuz. Thus did Alash Khan hand his sacred cocoons to those three great shadows, tossing them as they were, bellies filled with what was to be the silken threads forever destined to weave the tapestry of the great Alash nation. I turn my head to where the gale blows. Across the steppe to the Altai before me now, I feel the vision, the thunder, of some thousand wild horses that gallop in his honour- as though they were still lashed by his whip. Thus do another ten thousand colourful threads fly in unison to their fluttering manes. Woven flags of the Alash nation. Still lost in the rapture of jet, my blind eyes see before them those frantic, scarlet rhombic patterns of fertility and maternal promise. Rhombi of the Alash nation. The sanctity of mothers’ promises finds me now, for reaching for my hand through the swarm of larks is my mother’s hand- extracting me from my ecstasy as though I were a whirling dervish, lost in the Sema, fated to fall back to our Earth. We sail, hand in hand, through the clear skies over the land and the mountains and the rivers until we reach that distant heaven of my bedroom.
I open my eyes, vision restored to me in this reality, in this life, as another bolt of lightning strikes. I smile, and then I lie back as though I were laid to sleep beside that great progenitor to the lullaby that is the murmuring of the Karakengir- once the breath of Sarkarya. I close my eyes and listen to the thousand horses, galloping not across that marvellous steppe, but against my little fixed-pane window.
Cover image by Joe Walford.