In Homer's Birthplace...

We were city kids, from a city of three million. (For some reason, many people do not imagine a country that is in -or near?- the Middle East as having such big cities. I guess I was supposed to live in a yurt with mud walls, and ride camels.) Alas, there were no apple orchards for us, no tall grass in which to dream, play, or discover sexuality hidden from our parents, hidden from the world. We did not run around and play cowboys and Indians in the woods, pleasantly ignorant of political correctness. We played lastik. We went to tuhafiyeci and got meters of rubber band women used to reline the belt of loose cotton panties that no longer sat tightly around their waists. We tied a knot and there it was, hours of jumping lastik. Two girls stood about two meters from each other, with the lastik around their ankles, then we moved up to the knees, then our waists… Pull up your skirt and jump as high as you can. There was silent competition between the best friends, relieved only when the lastik broke from the strain. Our imagination was limited by tall concrete buildings. We never saw beyond our rooms, beyond imagining we were Sabrina from Charlie’s Angels, or the singer with the beads in her hair on the Eurovision Song Contest.

I wished for a big enough earthquake that would flatten the entire city without injuring anyone. Maybe city planners would do a better job the second time around, and my city would not look like crooked adolescent teeth that desperately need braces.

We were city kids; we created our own beauty. My best friend Ayse and I discovered the genre of Urban Magic Realism through experience, not literature. We sat on the steps and leaned against a door of an old house in Alsancak; it opened for us. We went in, as if it was our own house; we took pictures maybe, or just told stories about it, or just referenced it as a part of another story. Urban Magic Realism. We stayed up all night when Izmir got hit with a 5.8 earthquake, and felt estranged from the American exchange student Mike, who pointed out this was like Christmas in New York. Mike's simile had no part in what we experienced standing right next to him that night. What we saw was Izmir Magic Realism, and New York had no part in our Magic. We got over Mike pretty soon after that.

Then I learned to recognize the "haiku moments," which unfortunately got much easier to perceive after I left Turkey. On one summer visit, I went to the Turkish equivalent of DMV to get my license renewed, except DMV would never have two men chatting about their army days and the people they knew in common while doing their duty, with çay in hand and a plateful of watermelons behind the desk that looked as red as I am sure they tasted. That was a haiku moment. At night, I realized I was the only one in the water as the sun was setting beyond the sea-sky. I dove in, looked up to the surface of the Aegean Sea from underneath it, orange and green-gray, and I knew I had come home. That was a haiku moment.

So in a way, you could say things did not happen in Turkey if you were from there, but I would disagree. We made things happen; we actualized stories by paying attention to what could be possible. As soon as we got sophisticated enough to understand and recognize irony, we had a lot of stories to tell, all set in Izmir.