“I always wanted to write a dirty novel. I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been thinking about it, but it’s been a while. Writing a novel about something disgusting is like a tool to get the filth out of me.
There is filth in all of us. Disgusting, stinking… In one of the notes I took, there were texts about writing a thriller and adventure novel about a psychopath licking a pile of shit left right in the middle of the place where urine and fecal waste splattered on the sides of the toilet stone, and becoming a superhero after eating the shit. But it wasn’t going to be the kind of dirty novel I wanted. I gave up.
Or a hospital director in the morgue cutting the fingernails of the dead and collecting them… Actually, that was a great idea. I’ve never come across such a character in any story or novel. I stopped writing when I became worried that if the novel became a bestseller, I might never get health care again after the fame I would gain…
Maybe I should stop writing a dirty and disgusting novel. I know I can’t stop writing these dirty and disgusting thoughts inside me as a novel. I wonder if I have a severe psychological problem. Can you help me?”
Sümeyye was trying very hard to be a good writer. She was scribbling day and night and had a hard time stopping the urge to write. Why did she want to write? Since she was a child, she had been writing in notebooks left and right, taking notes, making up stories. She dreamed that one day it would write a great, unattainable novel. In recent days she had begun to consider the possibility that this was a psychological problem. Why write a novel and why write a dirty novel? To find the answers to all these questions, he thought she should seek help from a psychiatrist.
“I always think there is a deep relationship between literature and paranoia. There is a schizophrenia inherent in art. Without it, how could we believe that life is something so different and variable, as if it were so ordinary? What billions of people actually experience is always the same, except for small nuances and changes in time and space in the course of events. Freud’s psychoanalytic approach comes to mind. He analyzes the novel through the author’s creativity; he tries to relate the events and heroes created by the author to his unconscious, his personality and his neuroses. According to him, the unconscious manifests itself best in works of art. He comments that there is a connection between art and dreams and proposes the method of dream interpretation for the analysis of works of art.”
While writing these lines, was Sümeyye coming to the conclusion that the relationship between literature and psychiatry could perhaps be better described with the concept of “dream”? Or was she forcing herself to find a new path? Perhaps he would think about these things again in the future…
“Yes, literature and the novel is actually a dream and I write my dreams. My dreams always lead me to do bad things. In the back of my mind I have bad dreams day and night, but I don’t realize it. I need to get rid of these dreams, I need to wake up!”
She had to pause his writing amidst the voices of her children gathered to watch The Power of the Dog on TV. Maybe she should have given up writing novels and become a movie and screenplay critic. That way she could get rid of these complex feelings her mind had set up for him. Why did she always want to write something? “Why!” She wanted to shout. “How can I get rid of this urge to write? Why do I always want to tell someone something?”
In the novel she was trying to write, it was usually Tuesday when the events of the week began. For him, Tuesday was the day when important events began, which were always realized later. It was only when the events were moved to Friday or Monday that their significance was understood and recognized. That’s why Tuesday was in the middle, and the things in the middle were always the most important.
-Is there a problem, sister?
-Why?
-I don’t know, you keep writing Tuesday from bottom to top on the paper you’re holding in your hand.
-From bottom to top?
-Yes.
-Hmm… From bottom to top…
She was taking notes with a red pen. The fact that she wrote long notes on A4 sheets of paper with a red pen gave the impression that there was a pornographic aspect to what she was writing. She was always attracting attention, always putting herself on display. She liked to expose even her notes. She imagined that everyone wanted to read her notes in red pen and that they acted on that impulse. Maybe no one read them because writing in red pen is disgusting. He thought about that too. No matter, it was her style and she liked it. He wished he could use a purple or blue pen at the same time. She still used paper to take her notes. Whereas everyone around her was recording even the simplest notes on their smartphones.
Do I really want to write this novel? I didn’t like starting it like this. How many times I tried, how many times I wrote, but the same things happened to me. How appropriate is Sümeyye, a very conservative name, as the protagonist of the novel I want to write? What should I call her and should she die here?
Let her die…
Rüveyda! Come here, let’s try you…
The Death of Somayyah and the Birth of Rüveyda
Remember in the previous episode when we killed Sümeyye and replaced her with Rüveyda? Rüveyda is an Istanbul-born girl studying English Language and Literature at Hacettepe. Escaping from her family and the crowds of the city, she comes to Ankara to study and live there, thinking that it should be a big city but livable. She is a cute girl with her blonde hair cut short and green eyes behind her astigmatism glasses. Although she thinks she is very beautiful, the truth is that she is not. She may attract the attention of men, but she thinks she’s a model, and that’s the worst thing…
Tuesday…
There was a knock at the door and she got up from the breakfast table she had prepared before going to school. She looked at the clock as she went to open the door; it was 10:30. The cargo officer waiting at the door was about to knock again when the voice “Who is it?” came from inside. “Cargo!” he answered. Rüveyda opened the door. She took the envelope in her hand and thanked him. Only her address was written on the envelope. The sender’s name or anything else was not written. “Who the hell is this asshole!” she thought to herself. She was also a little frightened…
Rüveyda opened the envelope with some hesitation. Inside was a letter addressed to her and a contract.
“Rüveyda hello… I am Sümeyye. The heroine of the novel before you. First of all, I apologize for sending the letter anonymously. But I had to do that because if he found out that I sent this letter to you, he would definitely stop me and probably kill the courier like me. He’s a ruthless killer, remember! Along with the letter, I’m sending you the contract he signed for me to be in the novel. If you find it useful one day, you can use it. If there’s an investigation into me in the future, give it to the police. That way you can protect yourself by revealing the relationship between me and him, and avenge me.
And please take note of what I have written below!
I think the author will put you in a political or religious organization to get you away from the family, or if that doesn’t work, he will make you a member of the mafia. Then he will make a great novelist out of you. He wanted to make me a prostitute in the hands of the mafia, but I refused. When I refused, he made me a clerk in a bank. How many times I told him I wanted to be a psychiatrist, but he didn’t care. How can a clerk in a bank write a novel? And how can a prostitute write a novel? He said, “No, a prostitute would make a great novelist. Why not? It’s something untried in a novel,” he lectured me at length.
And she’ll make you fall in love with a guy called Hüseyin in the novel. Never fall in love with him. He’s a total idiot, a loser. Never mind that he’s the hardest working student in school. We’ll make it in the future, he’ll be unemployed. Because I was married to him in the novel before you, but I could never love him despite all the author’s impositions. I was going to tell him and leave him. I even asked him to write in the novel that it should be a nightmare, but he didn’t. He preferred to kill me. You, fall in love with Hayrullah. Make him fall in love with you. He’s very intelligent, intellectual. He could be a great novelist in the future. Maybe even the Dostoevsky of this century. Okay, I know I exaggerated. Don’t mind that, but trust me. And even if this writer kills you in a novel like me, Hayrullah will write your novel anyway. Take care of yourself and don’t forget what I said. Kisses. Sümeyye…”
It’s interesting, I’m really sorry now. If I had known that Sumayyeh was so upset and hurt by my killing her, I wouldn’t have killed her. If she loved Hayrullah so much, I would have made her his mistress. Maybe she would have liked it more. There are many reasons why I killed Sumayyeh, but Hussein is not among them. He’s just trying to provoke Rüveyda and take revenge on me.
Why did I kill Sümeyye(?) Lately she has been saying, “Let me write a novel, but let it be a dirty novel.” As far as I understood from what she wrote, she seemed to have sexual problems. Imagine, she was always writing such pornographic things; she was talking about things with feces. That could never happen in my novel. Besides, how can I keep a married man being gay in a novel? I was going to write about an urban woman’s inferences about life and the problems she faced, but suddenly she complicated things like she was out of her pants. And in the end, killing him became clear in my mind as the best solution. But will Rüveyda be like that?
No!
Birth of Abdulgaffar Age of Enlightenment
When I woke up in the morning, I saw that my computer had been turned on and there was a letter on the screen for me to read. Who had done this and how? Could it have been someone at home? But no one knows the password to my computer… Who can I ask? No one is home. My wife, already tired from work, fell asleep on the couch last night and I took her to bed. She left early in the morning. The children were at school. I gave up unanswerable questions and went to read the letter.
“Dear writer, I understand the tension you are experiencing with Sümeyye, but as far as I understand from what you have written, you are a person of a very conservative world and I must say this. In an effort to write a new novel, you write as daring sentences as you can, while at the same time you wear a conservative armor in order not to get lost in the sentences you write. I realize that you are an ego that will not accept my criticisms! You talk about a scientist like Freud, who is the founder of modern psychiatry, and you speak through the mouth of Sümeyye; then we read the lines where you talk about Sümeyye’s sexual problems. And we realize that what you call a problem is homosexuality. Is homosexuality really a problem according to Freud or did your conservative identity come to the fore here and you took it to a completely different place. Because as far as I know, Freud in 1903 stated quite clearly that homosexual people are not sick and that homosexuality cannot be classified as a disorder. I am really confused about you.
I thought you were going to have a discussion about sexuality and modern women through Sümeyye’s identity, but suddenly you killed her(?) I was completely shocked. I couldn’t believe it! How could you commit such a murder? She was actually revealing her sexual psychological problems by making very pornographic sentences. I think it was a behavior that hurt your identity. It got out of your control and you chose to kill her. As every conservative, bigoted man does, “Kill the woman you can’t control!” You accuse her of immorality. Do you realize, you are a murderer!
You also wrote that the name Sümeyye might be a very conservative name for what you wanted to write, you! Do you remember those sentences. How will you be able to handle all these sentences? Considering all this, am I really a character who should be in your novel? I’m not sure. Maybe I shouldn’t be. I hope you will take what I’ve written into consideration. Rüveyda…”
Wow! Look at this girl. The character I created hacks into my computer without my knowledge and criticizes me. She’s criticizing me. I can’t believe it. They’re crazy! I have to stop these women’s subversive ideas from running through my mind. I can’t keep killing them. I need to find a new character, like a man. But what kind of man?
When creating the character…
Abdulgaffar is born to a family of teacher parents from Denizli. He is the only son of Şükran, the daughter of a CHP family, and Kemal, the son of a National Visionist family, who met and loved each other at university during the secular and anti-secular tensions of the 1990s. Abdulgaffar is a smart, successful young man who got into the top ten thousand in Hacettepe Computer Engineering program. His school life is full of success. But he has deep ontological problems that are not visible. He is neither a child of the republic from the tradition his mother comes from, nor is he someone who has been influenced by intense religious indoctrination like his father. That is why he has a problem with his name. His father had named him after Abdulgaffar, a National Visionist who had been a big brother to him, a material and spiritual mentor. As a sign of his loyalty to him…
Abdulgaffar told the first people he met that his name was Hussein. To him, his own name was too off-putting, too reminiscent of an intense religious character. Yes, Abdulgaffar will be one of the great protagonists of my novel. With him I can deal with such incredible topics as religion, secularism, conservatism, the modern world, class division, the future. I have found my hero!
“Hhh! wah wah…” thought Rüveyda.
-to be continued-
