The Oil Road by James Marriott

Author:James Marriott
Language: eng, eng, tur
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

14 NO-ONE WANTS THIS PIPELINE ON THEIR CV: IT’S AN EMBARRASSMENT

EUPHRATES VALLEY, CENTRAL ANATOLIA

İstanbul House of Detention

I love my country:

I have swung on its plane trees

I have slept in its prisons.

Nothing lifts my spirits like its songs and tobacco.

My country:

so big

It seems endless.

it seems that it is endless to go around.

Edirné, Izmir, Ulukıshla, Marash, Trabzon, Erzurum.

All I know of the Erzurum plateau are its songs

and I’m ashamed to say

I never crossed the Taurus

to visit the cotton pickers

in the south.

Nazım Hikmet, 19391

Our carriage trundles slowly across the plateau from Erzurum. Together with Mehmet Ali, we picked up the train just south of Ardahan, close to the border with Armenia. We are now moving due west, both following the pipeline and in the wake of a mass human migration. Many of the homes and villages we glimpse from the windows appear deserted or barely inhabited. It feels as if the train from the east has swept up those it passes, depositing them eventually in the slums of Ankara and İstanbul. Long stretches of this railway follow the ancient trade route that connected Tehran to İstanbul and Sofia, part of the Silk Road, travelled by mules, horses and camel trains. Today, the E80 highway, thundering with trucks and cars, runs in parallel with the train. The railway track from Ankara to the eastern cities of Erzurum and Kars was opened in 1939 – a symbol of the bold modernity of the Turkish Republic. The coal-driven engines thrust into a land that was then almost entirely without oil-driven vehicles.

Passing through Erzurum and Erzincan provinces, the Doğu Ekspresi (Eastern Express) stops at countless village stations with no platforms. Sometimes the train halts in open fields, where the passengers wait patiently to board. At other times we make five-minute stops, but nobody climbs on or off the train. Once, a young boy walks alongside the carriages selling quinces to passengers. Mehmet Ali reaches down from our window to buy a couple. We are already four hours late – did he see us coming, or was he waiting here the whole time?

As the train moves across the Erzurum plateau, we take turns reading and discussing Nazım Hikmet. Ground-breaking both within Turkish literature and internationally, Hikmet’s poems evoke the romantic beauty of the villages and towns of Anatolia while explicitly confronting political oppression. Hikmet, a lifelong member of the Turkish Communist Party, was imprisoned for over a decade and stripped of his citizenship. Sent into exile, he spent long periods in the Soviet Union, travelling south to Baku and Tbilisi to be closer to his homeland. He believed that harnessing industrialisation to socialism would rescue the toiling poor from poverty. Both his aesthetic and social visions were heavily inspired by Futurism.

I sat at his deathbed

He said to read him a poem

About the sun and the sea

Nuclear reactors and satellites

The greatness of humanity2

Hikmet remained persuaded of the liberating power of technology throughout his life. Fifty years later, many on both the right and the left remain convinced of this kind of modernity as a solution to social, environmental and economic problems.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.