April 2022
Let me start with a dad joke,
“A father in Iraq gave his daughter a new bag and she said, thanks for the Baghdad.”
I didn’t make this up, saw it on a site called laffgaff,
guess it’s written by someone who thinks salt & pepper are the only spices,
pronounces İran as I-ran and lives in a fool’s paradise with doomsday devices.
Enough rhymes for this random stranger,
I wanna talk about something else, about the act of talking itself, to be precise.
Words don’t come easy to me; I choose them from the language of colonizers,
in which you have to capitalize the letter you use to mention yourself;
I; you are a vertical line connecting two dots, standing on your ground, still,
like an individual branch with a wide personal space and missing roots.
I am the daughter of two reporters, heard the medium is the message and the message is horizontal,
afraid of heights, I choose my words wisely to climb your high horses.
I wanna tilt this I and make it lay on the surface __
to give it a little rest and a view for a while, let it watch the clouds taking shapes in the scarlet sky,
see how fast the seasons change, why frail soil can’t hump the rage;
so that it understands that most droughts are manmade, contracts are blood-paid, comfort is band-aid.
Header image
Untitled, February 2024 by /da (@idaweltt).
About the author
Ekin Tümer is a writer and translator based in Istanbul. Her work focuses on the opposing dynamics between individuality and collectivity, offering insights into everyday relationships. Tümer’s first novel, Dört Ayak Üstünde (On All Fours) was published in 2022. Currently, she is working on a collection of short stories, as well as writing poetry and translating.
Cite as
Ekin Tümer. “I __,” JVC Magazine, 20 February 2024, http://journalofvisualculture.org/i-__/
