People Watching In Sultanahmet

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

‘If you know your history, then you know where you coming from. Then you wouldn’t have to ask me who the ‘eck do I think I am’. Bob Marley, Buffalo Soldiers.

image

People watching in Sultanahmet on a wet Saturday afternoon in Spring.

It’s very like people watching in Newtown, Sydney.

The history of Istanbul, of Turkey, of the Turkish people, is written in the faces of the passersby. There is no pure Turk, just as there is no pure Arab, Jew, Slav, Celt, or Caucasian. Indeed, you see them all passing by. And it has been raining these past two days. The umbrella sellers are making a killing with their see-through parapluies. Everyone, tourists and locals alike are sporting them.

The weekend is promenade time. Families parade up and down, past the pastry and kebab shops, the hawkers and the hustlers. Young men sidle by with their girls, girls walk out with their honeys. Groups of girlfriends, and boy-groups gather and gaggle and gossip. Western folk and eastern folk. This is where east and west meet, literally, figuratively, ethnically, and yes, geographically. And it is written on the faces and in the garb of the perambulating populace.

Sunday in the park

Muhajibabes in beautiful scarves (the Great Bazaar is chocka with wonderful day cashmeres and pashminas – there is no excuse for drabness). “Mandy, Mother of Brian” in vast and bulbous black. Ladies in full cover, some dark and exotic, and mysteriously alluring, and others that make me think that they are doing us all a favour (non-PC, but there you go). I just saw a clown with green hair and a red nose. Fashionistas and paysans. And the many, many ordinary folk, old, young, and babes in arms, enjoying the weekend. All oblivious to the feral dogs and cats that roam through these parts.

There are no pubs on every corner. There are no rows of wine bars. There are no ice-cream and yoghurt shops (though we did find a good bar just across from the square in front of Hagia Sophia).

Oh, it makes you wonder.

For other posts about Turkey in In That Howling Infinite, see: 

 

Sailing to Byzantium, Ottoman Redux – an alternative history, Cha-cha-cha-changes and The Watchers of the Water  

Bombs and Babies

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments
The Atlantic, Sept 9th 2016

Syrian children have been subjected to “unspeakable” suffering in nearly five years of civil war, with the Government and its allies responsible for countless killings, maiming and torture, and the opposition for recruiting youngsters for combat and using terror tactics in civilian areas, according to the first United Nations report on the issue.   See:  http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=47077#.UvKrOWKSzE0

Reports and pictures out of Damascus and Aleppo of the use of barrel bombs, and sarin and chlorine gas on civilian neighbourhoods, I am reminded of Chaim Nachman Bialik’s poem, Al haShehita (On the Slaughter), about the Kishinev Pogrom in the spring of 1903:

And cursèd be he that saith: avenge this! Such vengeance for blood of babe and maiden Hath yet to be wrought by Satan.

1653277_613808708691589_1237424660_n

In A Short History of The Rise and Fall Of The West, I wrote of how, in Pity The Nation, his tombstone of a book about Lebanon’s civil war, and Israel’s intervention therein, the redoubtable journalist Robert Fisk writes of a Lebanese doctor, Amal Shamaa: “I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames. When I took them out half an hour after, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours”. “Next morning”, Fisk continues, “Amal Shamaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames”. Such is the effect of phosphorous shells on mortals. Made in America, used on Arabs, by Jews. But it happens anywhere and everywhere, inflicted by anyone on everyone.

What’s Bob Got To Do With It?

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

 

Or, ‘How I  came to  write songs and play guitar’

I was in love with Dusty Springfield. In the drear tea-time of my adolescent soul, I worshiped her truly, madly, deeply. Tiny girl, big hair, panda eyes, hands moving like a beckoning siren. I just had to hear “da da da da da da” and then “I don’t know what it is that makes me love you so…” and I was hers for the next two and a half minutes. Until…

It was one of those beautiful late-spring evenings that you would get in the England of youthful memory. The evening sun poured through the gothic stained glass windows of the school library – it was one of those schools. A group of lower sixth lads, budding intellectuals all, as lower sixth tended to be, gathered for a ‘desert island disks” show-and tell of their favourite records.

Mine was Wishin’ and Hopin” by you know who. Then it was on to the next. Clunk, hiss, electric guitar intro, and: “My love she speaks like silence, without ideas or violence, she doesn’t have to say she’s faithful, but she’s true like ice, like fire…” I was gone, far gone. So was Dusty.

I bought a guitar. A clunky, eastern European thing. I tried Blowin’in the Wind, but what came out was unrecognisable. My dad said he’d break it over my head. One day, that tipping point was reached. It sounded indeed like Blowin’ in the Wind, or something similar. I was away, and the rest, as they say, was hearsay.