She’s been called Cassandra. Because author and journalist Ece Temelkuran , ever since she left her home in Turkey in 2016, with two shirts and a pair of trousers, has been warning the world that what she fled, fascism, is coming for everyone else too. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was blessed with the gift of prophecy, but cursed never to be believed.
In her new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century , for the first time, Ece no longer feels that she’s a step ahead of everyone else. “Dear stranger”, she addresses the reader. And asks, “How about you? Are you home? Do you feel at home?” Everywhere, more people are feeling unhomed, not just physically, not just those whose houses are bombed. But also morally, politically, even digitally. Even if they live in their own country.
Her book makes the claim that the misfits, outcasts, foreigners and the like who are now the majority, are too scattered to claim their own nation, and in urgent need of a common language. It’s a poetic thesis.
Out in the cold with monsters, lost, broken, melancholic, we already know that many more will soon learn to live like us. What we can tell the others is how to stay human when everything is working against us, how to survive homelessness with dignity, and where to go next.
Right now, Ece says, we are mourning not what we have already lost, but what we know we eventually will. We still have a bit of the rule of law here and there. But we know what’s coming. So we doubt why we should even carry the flower seeds, when the soil everywhere is becoming unreliable.
But remember, during WW II, during years of butchery and fascism, with their loved ones gone, and everything turned to dust and ashes, some city planners saved the blueprint of Warsaw. They refused to forget the far future. That’s how the entire old town could be rebuilt anew.
That’s how we will also survive, Ece says. By depending on our inherent urge to create beauty, and doing it together. When Eyad, a Syrian refugee, got onto a boat, heading for Germany, and it struggled against the waves, he first got an old man on his shoulders, then held a woman and her baby, saving them all from drowning, that’s us, the strangers, holding the defence line.
The survival lesson is, don’t look at the waves, look at the people next to you. It’s not really about hope. But about determination, doing what you can to survive. When parts of the self are lost, “the ultimate decision a stranger makes is how and with what to fill that gap.”
At a weekend waltzing with the beasts, aka an exclusive gathering of the world’s techno-feudal overlords in the Alps, amidst speeches about money, space, colonies on Mars, AI, and money again, Ece discovers that people are not part of these billionaires’ story. “They are designing a future by ensuring there is no return to the familiar homes of humanity: good old democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
So, what do we have to work with? There is me, there is you, and all the others like us, Ece says. Take care of each other. Don’t fall into the trap of getting separated by your differences.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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