By Nural Sümbültepe
I am on Jericho Beach littered with driftwood; the sand is vast today with the tide out. I dip into the water with little hesitation, and I plunge downwards through the yucky seaweed, refusing to surface for a while. This is not the curious polar bear swim ritual. I am the only one here in the frigidity of February, scourging my body with hypothermia.
I am several time zones away from my mother, who is broken and abandoned in Türkiye in a coastal city unscathed by the earthquake, where the sea water is warmer.
As an icy wave sweeps over me, I look at the endless expanse of the Pacific and the North Shore mountains drenched in charcoal mist. I feel confined in this vast land of Canada. I can’t help my mother from here.
A torrent of tragedies pummeled my existence within the course of two years. The earthquake that happened on February 6, 2023, took away eight members of my family, and displaced the rest. It wiped out my birthplace, once the ancient capital of the Roman Empire. Along with my neighbourhood and family homes, it erased the most concrete evidence of who made me what I am: the public library with its cool stone walls, where I sought relief from scorching hot summers throughout my youth.
From above, the state of my family is just a drop in the ocean. One drop with a still-travelling ripple to Europe, where the rest of my siblings live, and to Canada, where I live.
My mother survived the massive earthquake. Now powerless and dispossessed, she is in an old-age home with no loved ones in proximity, despite the fact that she gave birth to many children, equivalent to a soccer team.
I try to make sense of the linearity of the past year. Time flew in cycles of pain, through tunnels of grief, big and small, in different shades. How to grasp the language of suffering? With its stubborn stony existence, grief has crept in, coiled and settled into my core and it is hard to shake it off. It has many faces, mostly masked. I put on a shiny front, and I go to work. I don’t struggle at work. I am happy to be in the service of other people. I am a teacher. I see tragedy in the eyes of some children, and I can make them feel loved. That’s my syllabus.
I brave my days on autopilot. I clean, cook, and even iron my clothes. As I do housework, I often think of my beloved sister-in-law, the impeccable housekeeper among many things. Had she survived the earthquake, she would have hated the dust and the debris. She couldn’t tolerate a morsel of dirt.
Anger, fear, and guilt are still the presiding feelings in me waiting to be cleared away like the rubble in my hometown. I mistake heartbreak for heart attacks, says my GP, when I reported to her about shallow breaths and my chest heaving, waiting to explode.
What is a mother tongue?
Growing up, Mum and I didn’t speak so much, not because of the typical mother-daughter strife, which we also had, but we simply didn’t have a proper common language. The words “Mother Tongue” are ironical. Was I the only one without a mother tongue? She was my mother, she raised me. I didn’t have my mother’s tongue, Arabic. And she didn’t learn mine, Turkish. With so many children around and me being down the totem pole, she didn’t need to speak with me, not until it was too late.
We exasperated each other growing up. She would give me instructions in Arabic, and I wouldn’t understand. I tried to speak to her in Turkish. She didn’t understand.
One night when I was quite young, I woke up with panic, went to my mother’s bed, and tried to force open her eyes as she was sleeping. I had to assure myself she was alive. My child brain mistook her incessant physical fatigue for fatal ailments. I had to make sure my mommy was there for me, not dead. Irritated and exhausted from intense labour and deprived of sleep, she shooed me away. Glad to see that she was alive, I curled next to her. I tucked my face into her neck, held her calloused hands, and smelled her body drenched in sweat. I fell asleep to the soothing hum of her heaving. I smelled her when she was awake too, especially her hair when she washed it with olive oil soap that she herself had made. Occasionally, when she had time for handing out affection to her children, she would say, “Come, my little lamb, let me inhale your scent.” Smell was our common language.
Unable to follow the news, illiterate in social media and just plain illiterate, denying the death of her children was an easy one for mum. Eight odd months in the aftermath of the disaster, she was still resisting the acceptance of this colossal loss in forms of hallucinations and dementia. She stopped walking entirely. The fighting spirit vanished.
When I call her at the old-age home, I imagine how my voice travels across Canada and across the Atlantic and across Europe all the way to Türkiye to Antalya. We utter the same routine sayings over and over. She always remembers me despite what the doctors are saying about her onset dementia. Our conversations are always the same with the one exception early this morning when she tried to tell me in two broken languages “how her pride had been trampled on by horses”. Total strangers who don’t speak her language are changing her diaper and not doing a good job cleaning her.
Returning to Türkiye
Mum somehow fell through the cracks of Turkish education and was trapped in a marriage at a young age, burdened with caring for an endless number of children. I am a language teacher who never taught my mother to read and write and didn’t try to bridge the gap in our communication. Now I help Ukrainian, Syrian, Chinese children and many others about language learning and advise their parents about the importance of keeping the mother tongue.
I visited my mother several times after the earthquake. Last March, I saw lemon and orange trees neglected, fruits left rotting in her backyard, in everyone’s backyard next to piles of wreckage. Cattle and sheep and dogs let loose. Typical signs of an apocalypse.
Later in the summer, when I went home again, I was astonished to see an uninterrupted life of lush blooms, wisteria, jasmine, and bougainvillea with strong roots creeping from under and around the rubble. This image of despite-all-odds should have sparked a renewed desire to go on living for Mum, who, unlike the plants, was totally unrooted. She was taken to the old-age home against her wish and instead of wisteria, jasmine, and bougainvillea, she is now facing four walls with other aged women.
Is it easier for plants to recover and move on. They need soil, sun, and water, but nourishment for human soul must be more complicated.
Following the tragedy, I ruefully discovered how I wasn’t the type who mourned in solitude. I couldn’t be left on my own. I needed an abundance of attention and affection from friends. In the midst of this wreckage, two of my closest friendships in Vancouver expired on me. My sorrow was too prickly for their sensibilities. They were unable to console me, unable to hold my hand. The farther they distanced themselves from me, the more I chased them. Their disregard spiraled me deeper into depression. I had many languages in common with them so there was no excuse for miscommunication. Instead of forging bonds with friends who were sympathetic and present, I pursued rejection. I put my self-worth on the line and chased the ones who abandoned me, demanding loyalty and accountability that, in my opinion, came with the job description of friendship.
Coping with rejection
The word sahib in Arabic means owner and friend at the same time. You own responsibility to your friends, people! You can’t just discard them, I thought. The word ‘arkadas’ (friend) in my other language, Turkish, literally translates as “the one who has your back”. Oddly enough, I was diagnosed with a severe case of herniated disc right after those two friends left me, after they promised to help me with a fundraiser for the earthquake victims that required heavy lifting and sorting. The prefix that means back, ‘-arka’ in the word ‘arkadas’, was definitely injured. The support was gone, and my body was telling me so loudly and clearly.
Throughout this unexpected betrayal, I deliberated for explanations. I didn’t find out why I was deserted, but I unearthed what I thought was a small event when I was five years old. It explained why I went after rejection.
“I will come back for you next week,” my mother had told me after she left me with my grandparents one summer in our village at the age of 5. The village children worked alongside their families, but I was supposedly a delicate city child who couldn’t work, and I was left to my own devices with almost nothing: no toys, no friends waiting for my grandparents to come home from the fields. Mum didn’t keep her promise. She didn’t come to get me. She had nine other children to take care of. I do understand this now, but the lonely heart of that five-year-old has followed me to my 50-odd age. I waited with anticipation and anguish for those two friends the way I expected my mum to come for me. Mum didn’t keep her promise. The trauma of my five-year-old self resurfaced 50 odd years later. This incident must have stayed encoded in my cells. The helplessness and dependence of a five-year-old came back.
After months of hoping, I finally gave up and rearranged my speed dial.
Sometimes I think of the Turkish breakfasts with the departed, with tea brewing endlessly in our homes by the sea, with people—neighbours—trickling in from the beach with their bathing suits and towels and their “good-mornings” and how-are -yous, and those lazy afternoons when everybody retired for naps. And the joy of the evening around never-ending dinners with the jasmine in the background and singing in all the languages we had. I didn’t realize until now, the family members who were killed by the pillars of faulty constructions were the supporting pillars holding the family together. One of these people was my sister-in-law.
In my dreams, I speak to her. She is standing on top of a sandy hill by our beach house. I tell her to run to the sea with me. She tells me not to wait. “I am on a different time zone now. Go without me.” Even in my dreams she is taking care of me in her own ghostly ways, telling me to move on.
I will go back to that coastal town unscathed by the earthquake where my mother is hallucinating the happy old days, and I will tell her in form of scent and kisses that I forgive her for not coming back to get me that dreadful summer of 1975.
Pocked by goosebumps and with my teeth chattering, I come out of the ocean. I wrap myself in a gigantic fleece blanket and sit on a wooden bench dedicated to someone who has just passed. Looks like from a daughter to her mother.
Nural Sümbültepe is a B.C. teacher. Learn more about the communities that make up Canada on the Toronto Spark website. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
