Basil King
Murat Nemet Nejet and a Life of Coexistence
Murat’s book Io’s Song is deceiving. The book is printed front to back and upside down. The front cover with the title and the author's name is printed as the back cover and it’s printed upside down. Open to the title page and I wondered was this book to be read as if it was written in Hebrew? Turn the book over and the back cover is really the front cover and like the front, it too is printed upside down. Open the book and the first page is about the publisher Chax and the next page contains a statement by the author, Murat Nemet Nejat. Is the author playing a game? Is he preparing himself and the reader for a multitude of contradictions? Is he throwing caution to the wind?
Pause
Oh, Israel you didn’t loose a son when he became a poet he brought Judaism and Turkey with him.
Pause
Everyone has one secret and some have more. One person who had more than one secret was Oliver Sacks. He spoke to himself and because he spoke to himself all the time people began to believe that he was talking to them. Oliver Sacks would have understood why Murat’s book cover for Io’s Song was printed front to back and upside down. He would have understood what Murat had to say in “The problem Poem: Crisis of Reading.” He too had a trance, when the soul talks the bead of contentment is shattered. Murat’s accumulated facts identify male and female parts in his poems almost as in Arshille Gorky’s painting The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb. Agony is in a house of conviction eclipsing language. Language, language, language, as a painter I cannot help but see painting as having language when the soul talks.
Pause
When the soul talks it exercises the right to address what so many people have been seduced by: Purity's spell. Purity is the curse of the twentieth century and it remains a mark on our contemporary wellbeing in the twenty-first century Conjugate what suffering it has caused and you experience the agony of a loss that beauty cannot replace.
Pause
In The Problem Poem: Io’s Song, a Crisis of Reading--Murat describes his awakening. The mysterious things that took place in his reading in 1995 gave him permission to take advantage of unknown sounds, voices and images. Insight turns the light on and in so doing Murat continues to gain facts that he will store and never forget. For Murat who speaks four languages and every one of them with a foreign accent, I can’t imagine what it takes for him to speak and write in English. Jack Kerouac wrote his first thoughts in French. I know other writers of English whose first language is something else. Andrei Codrescu, Rumanian; Vyt Bakitis, Lithuanian; Pierre Jorris, born in Luxemburg he has no first language; Yuko Otomo, Japanese. Like Murat these poets are translating every word that they write from their first language into English.
Pause
Immigrants when they come to this country are obliged to become a person that they have never met and who they have never lived with. This unfamiliarity can be vexing when it comes to speaking to strangers, counting change.
Pause
Martha and I were driving to Celo, North Carolina and we got lost. Martha asked a man walking on the road for directions. He gave them and she thanked him. I didn’t understand a word he said. Martha having lived in the South did. He spoke in English with an accent that was foreign to me. Martha translated what he told her and we were able to continue and find our way.
Pause
My namesake Sir Basil Henriques, founded the Oxford and St George’s Club, which developed into Bernhard Baron St. George’s Jewish Settlement, and acted as warden of the Settlement until 1947. He told my father that when he first came down to the East End of London where Cockney was spoken he didn’t understand a word anyone was saying to him. He came from a very rich Jewish family and had been educated at Harrow and Oxford. I’ve spoken English all my life I know no other language. And when I came to this country I was asked to “just speak.” I put my head on my pillow and promised myself I would drop my public school accent.
Pause
In Murat’s book of translations, Turkish Voices enter into a garden, birds, flowers, a lover and a loved one, male and female conflicts exercise accessibility, displaying Murat’s attention to detail. There is no redemption there is prayer. Is there a mean? There is fruit day and night the tongues of the bewitched cross their legs. The truth is, sex is, like water it isn’t always clean it isn’t always given its due. Rape and incest, the trauma of perfume, odor, a Persian miniature, describe the imagination, magic, the soul in release, describe what Murat celebrates, the myth made modern. It makes me say:
Without the tongue
There can be no language
Turn the page in not knowing
What is on the opposite page
The tongue tolerates
Many spoken languages
The tongue tolerates many accents
The tongue resides in a dark place
The tongue is silent and still
Until it is directed to wet the lips
And then on a good day
You might find the humor
In what is difficult and smile
Pause
Murat might advise begin with Chaucer, Shakespeare horned in and the English language benefited from being taxed by the spoken word.
Pause
And from Murat, a delicious poem:
Peeping Tom
The Woman
Passing the soap
Along the
Curves of her body
One leg up:
The soap appears
And disappears
What likes ice cream, sex and lives in a dark place? Tongue
Pause
Murat lives in a house is married, a father, a grand father. He has lived in more than one country and speaks four languages. For example Murat was recently at our house and got a phone call from a business acquaintance and he spoke to him in a language that was not European. He writes in English and he writes as a man who has known how to be alone, a foreigner.
Pause
When Murat’s family lived in Iran they had to pretend to be Moslems and Jewish services were practiced in secret. He was a boy and he had to pretend he was something he wasn’t, that is abuse and it is something that he never forgets. Istanbul, London, New York his writing does not contain one ideology his contains ambiguities, folklore, pomegranates and watermelons.
Pause
Is it possible to coexist with one ideology? Is it possible to coexist without ambiguity?
Pause
After a six months stay in Tangiers and Morocco Delacroix on his return to France via Spain and Algiers where he stayed for three days, a merchant in the Algerian port gave him access to his households private harem.
noun Harem
(in former times) the separate part of a Muslim household reserved for wives, concubines, and female servants.
Delacroix made two small sketches of the women in this Algerian harem. He used those two sketches to paint Women of Algiers
Pause
My knowledge of the East consisted of three movies, Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and my favorite, The Thief of Bagdad. But as interesting as these movies are Delacroix’s painting, Women of Algiers, is more important.
Pause
Murat and his family lived in a Moslem world were the norm in the culture was, women were subjugated to the whims of men. The harem is an extreme example. Delacroix’s painting does not tell a story of extreme subjugation, he paints what he witnessed.
In Orthodox Jewish families the wives and daughters never live in a Harem but they are not free to choose they obey they do not sit with the men in Synagogue. They are excluded from “sitting Shiva” a mourning period that lasts for seven days following the burial.
And in Christianity, Fundamentalism defines a strict adherence in a religious context. When a person follows every possible rule of the Bible, both literal and implied, women must obey their husbands. This is another example of the eastern influence in Judaism and Christianity.
Pause
In Women of Algiers Delacroix paints a scene never seen before. Europeans could only imagine and fantasize the happenings inside a harem. Delacroix paints three women on a carpeted floor and a standing Eunuch. The woman sitting on the left side of the room looks at Delacroix she is annoyed wondering who is he what is he doing, what does he want? The other women don’t take the time to look at him. Delacroix being the painter was able to remember all of this new information, the crowded room, the exotic clothes the women and the Eunuch wear, the carpets and the “narghile pipe” with smoking hashish or opium.
It is a beautiful painting a devastating painting and Delacroix’s warmth of color adds to the weight of captivity layered throughout the room.
Pause
Is it possible to coexist with one ideology? Is it possible to coexist without ambiguity?
Pause
Delacroix was an innocent he had no way of knowing if the three women were the merchant’s wives or his bought concubines. He assumed, as was commonly thought by Europeans, this was the merchant’s private brothel and he like other European males fantasized about their existence. He had no idea of the complexities that the Moslems instituted when it came to setting up a separate room for women, a harem.
Pause
This is not to say there were no abuses. Women were subjugated to the whims of their masters be it a harem of three women or hundreds of wives and concubines. Sultan Caliph Abd al-Rahman III executed two concubines for reciting what he saw as inappropriate verses, and he tortured another concubine with a burning candle when she refused sexual intercourse. The concubines of Caliph Abu Marwan al-Tubni were so badly treated that they conspired to murder him, and women of the harem were subjected to rape when rival factions conquered homes and palaces.
Pause
Europeans were appalled with the Moslems’ subjugation of woman and the castration of men making them into dependant Eunuchs. But did the Europeans consider their assault on women and their behavior towards the working class? European Women were expected to never question their fathers or their husbands. Workers in the mines and the mills had to shop at the company store and sometimes live in company housing, work 12 hours a day, often conditions for working families were no better than serfdom.
Pause
Murat spent his childhood in Istanbul with his prosperous family. He left Istanbul when he was fifteen. His memories, his need to communicate with his late city forever pull at him. Murat is a Jew and Jews are not to be trusted. In good times there is a temporary coexistence between the Jew and the gentile but if the wind blows and there is no rain and the crops fail and there is hunger, the Jew is to blame. Every Jew carries the mark of blame.
Pause
There are tears in Murat’s work. His poetry his translations say, hear me, and they succeed. Read one poem and you have to read another there is no Stop and Go around the board, you will collect nothing but you will give what you are given a bond between you and the writer, a spark, a light that tests your strength, your intuition to coexist.
Pause
On September 12, 2021 I finished a mixed medium piece on canvas. As every one who sees it says it’s a Persian Miniature and it is it reminds me of Murat his memories of Turkey.
Thank you Murat.
September 2021
Murat’s book Io’s Song is deceiving. The book is printed front to back and upside down. The front cover with the title and the author's name is printed as the back cover and it’s printed upside down. Open to the title page and I wondered was this book to be read as if it was written in Hebrew? Turn the book over and the back cover is really the front cover and like the front, it too is printed upside down. Open the book and the first page is about the publisher Chax and the next page contains a statement by the author, Murat Nemet Nejat. Is the author playing a game? Is he preparing himself and the reader for a multitude of contradictions? Is he throwing caution to the wind?
Pause
Oh, Israel you didn’t loose a son when he became a poet he brought Judaism and Turkey with him.
Pause
Everyone has one secret and some have more. One person who had more than one secret was Oliver Sacks. He spoke to himself and because he spoke to himself all the time people began to believe that he was talking to them. Oliver Sacks would have understood why Murat’s book cover for Io’s Song was printed front to back and upside down. He would have understood what Murat had to say in “The problem Poem: Crisis of Reading.” He too had a trance, when the soul talks the bead of contentment is shattered. Murat’s accumulated facts identify male and female parts in his poems almost as in Arshille Gorky’s painting The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb. Agony is in a house of conviction eclipsing language. Language, language, language, as a painter I cannot help but see painting as having language when the soul talks.
Pause
When the soul talks it exercises the right to address what so many people have been seduced by: Purity's spell. Purity is the curse of the twentieth century and it remains a mark on our contemporary wellbeing in the twenty-first century Conjugate what suffering it has caused and you experience the agony of a loss that beauty cannot replace.
Pause
In The Problem Poem: Io’s Song, a Crisis of Reading--Murat describes his awakening. The mysterious things that took place in his reading in 1995 gave him permission to take advantage of unknown sounds, voices and images. Insight turns the light on and in so doing Murat continues to gain facts that he will store and never forget. For Murat who speaks four languages and every one of them with a foreign accent, I can’t imagine what it takes for him to speak and write in English. Jack Kerouac wrote his first thoughts in French. I know other writers of English whose first language is something else. Andrei Codrescu, Rumanian; Vyt Bakitis, Lithuanian; Pierre Jorris, born in Luxemburg he has no first language; Yuko Otomo, Japanese. Like Murat these poets are translating every word that they write from their first language into English.
Pause
Immigrants when they come to this country are obliged to become a person that they have never met and who they have never lived with. This unfamiliarity can be vexing when it comes to speaking to strangers, counting change.
Pause
Martha and I were driving to Celo, North Carolina and we got lost. Martha asked a man walking on the road for directions. He gave them and she thanked him. I didn’t understand a word he said. Martha having lived in the South did. He spoke in English with an accent that was foreign to me. Martha translated what he told her and we were able to continue and find our way.
Pause
My namesake Sir Basil Henriques, founded the Oxford and St George’s Club, which developed into Bernhard Baron St. George’s Jewish Settlement, and acted as warden of the Settlement until 1947. He told my father that when he first came down to the East End of London where Cockney was spoken he didn’t understand a word anyone was saying to him. He came from a very rich Jewish family and had been educated at Harrow and Oxford. I’ve spoken English all my life I know no other language. And when I came to this country I was asked to “just speak.” I put my head on my pillow and promised myself I would drop my public school accent.
Pause
In Murat’s book of translations, Turkish Voices enter into a garden, birds, flowers, a lover and a loved one, male and female conflicts exercise accessibility, displaying Murat’s attention to detail. There is no redemption there is prayer. Is there a mean? There is fruit day and night the tongues of the bewitched cross their legs. The truth is, sex is, like water it isn’t always clean it isn’t always given its due. Rape and incest, the trauma of perfume, odor, a Persian miniature, describe the imagination, magic, the soul in release, describe what Murat celebrates, the myth made modern. It makes me say:
Without the tongue
There can be no language
Turn the page in not knowing
What is on the opposite page
The tongue tolerates
Many spoken languages
The tongue tolerates many accents
The tongue resides in a dark place
The tongue is silent and still
Until it is directed to wet the lips
And then on a good day
You might find the humor
In what is difficult and smile
Pause
Murat might advise begin with Chaucer, Shakespeare horned in and the English language benefited from being taxed by the spoken word.
Pause
And from Murat, a delicious poem:
Peeping Tom
The Woman
Passing the soap
Along the
Curves of her body
One leg up:
The soap appears
And disappears
What likes ice cream, sex and lives in a dark place? Tongue
Pause
Murat lives in a house is married, a father, a grand father. He has lived in more than one country and speaks four languages. For example Murat was recently at our house and got a phone call from a business acquaintance and he spoke to him in a language that was not European. He writes in English and he writes as a man who has known how to be alone, a foreigner.
Pause
When Murat’s family lived in Iran they had to pretend to be Moslems and Jewish services were practiced in secret. He was a boy and he had to pretend he was something he wasn’t, that is abuse and it is something that he never forgets. Istanbul, London, New York his writing does not contain one ideology his contains ambiguities, folklore, pomegranates and watermelons.
Pause
Is it possible to coexist with one ideology? Is it possible to coexist without ambiguity?
Pause
After a six months stay in Tangiers and Morocco Delacroix on his return to France via Spain and Algiers where he stayed for three days, a merchant in the Algerian port gave him access to his households private harem.
noun Harem
(in former times) the separate part of a Muslim household reserved for wives, concubines, and female servants.
Delacroix made two small sketches of the women in this Algerian harem. He used those two sketches to paint Women of Algiers
Pause
My knowledge of the East consisted of three movies, Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and my favorite, The Thief of Bagdad. But as interesting as these movies are Delacroix’s painting, Women of Algiers, is more important.
Pause
Murat and his family lived in a Moslem world were the norm in the culture was, women were subjugated to the whims of men. The harem is an extreme example. Delacroix’s painting does not tell a story of extreme subjugation, he paints what he witnessed.
In Orthodox Jewish families the wives and daughters never live in a Harem but they are not free to choose they obey they do not sit with the men in Synagogue. They are excluded from “sitting Shiva” a mourning period that lasts for seven days following the burial.
And in Christianity, Fundamentalism defines a strict adherence in a religious context. When a person follows every possible rule of the Bible, both literal and implied, women must obey their husbands. This is another example of the eastern influence in Judaism and Christianity.
Pause
In Women of Algiers Delacroix paints a scene never seen before. Europeans could only imagine and fantasize the happenings inside a harem. Delacroix paints three women on a carpeted floor and a standing Eunuch. The woman sitting on the left side of the room looks at Delacroix she is annoyed wondering who is he what is he doing, what does he want? The other women don’t take the time to look at him. Delacroix being the painter was able to remember all of this new information, the crowded room, the exotic clothes the women and the Eunuch wear, the carpets and the “narghile pipe” with smoking hashish or opium.
It is a beautiful painting a devastating painting and Delacroix’s warmth of color adds to the weight of captivity layered throughout the room.
Pause
Is it possible to coexist with one ideology? Is it possible to coexist without ambiguity?
Pause
Delacroix was an innocent he had no way of knowing if the three women were the merchant’s wives or his bought concubines. He assumed, as was commonly thought by Europeans, this was the merchant’s private brothel and he like other European males fantasized about their existence. He had no idea of the complexities that the Moslems instituted when it came to setting up a separate room for women, a harem.
Pause
This is not to say there were no abuses. Women were subjugated to the whims of their masters be it a harem of three women or hundreds of wives and concubines. Sultan Caliph Abd al-Rahman III executed two concubines for reciting what he saw as inappropriate verses, and he tortured another concubine with a burning candle when she refused sexual intercourse. The concubines of Caliph Abu Marwan al-Tubni were so badly treated that they conspired to murder him, and women of the harem were subjected to rape when rival factions conquered homes and palaces.
Pause
Europeans were appalled with the Moslems’ subjugation of woman and the castration of men making them into dependant Eunuchs. But did the Europeans consider their assault on women and their behavior towards the working class? European Women were expected to never question their fathers or their husbands. Workers in the mines and the mills had to shop at the company store and sometimes live in company housing, work 12 hours a day, often conditions for working families were no better than serfdom.
Pause
Murat spent his childhood in Istanbul with his prosperous family. He left Istanbul when he was fifteen. His memories, his need to communicate with his late city forever pull at him. Murat is a Jew and Jews are not to be trusted. In good times there is a temporary coexistence between the Jew and the gentile but if the wind blows and there is no rain and the crops fail and there is hunger, the Jew is to blame. Every Jew carries the mark of blame.
Pause
There are tears in Murat’s work. His poetry his translations say, hear me, and they succeed. Read one poem and you have to read another there is no Stop and Go around the board, you will collect nothing but you will give what you are given a bond between you and the writer, a spark, a light that tests your strength, your intuition to coexist.
Pause
On September 12, 2021 I finished a mixed medium piece on canvas. As every one who sees it says it’s a Persian Miniature and it is it reminds me of Murat his memories of Turkey.
Thank you Murat.
September 2021