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After Katrina
By Mackie Blanton
Chapter 2
Earthquakes and
Baklava
Well, now I've had it all. A few
days ago, I experienced my first earthquake while
sitting here at my office desk! And on a morning when I
had forgotten both my wallet and passport back in my
apartment! Who would have been able to identify the
corpse?!
I have been here in Izmir, Turkey,
for about six weeks now, and will be here for a year, as
a Fulbright Lecturer in the Faculty of Letters of Ege
Universitesi. On a recent Monday afternoon, shortly
after my class in Contemporary British Fiction ended at
noon, I was sitting at my desk when suddenly I felt the
slightest tremor invade my space and move upwards
through my office and through me as if I were virtually
a part of my office itself. The invasive presence
strengthened in my corner of the building, and I assume
throughout the building itself, and began to rattle, it
seemed, the very campus itself. Who knows how fast the
mind really hypothesizes at a moment like this one; but
at first I thought a heavy loader was rumbling too fast
past the building and therefore shaking its very
foundation. But as the rattling intensified, I had the
horrible thought that No, this can’t be happening to
me! I held on to my desk, as I imagined I might have
seen done in movies, and in a few eternal seconds the
rattling stopped just as suddenly as it had started.
This was to be my very first
earthquake, all the way across the world, in the land of
the daughters and sons of Ottoman conquerors! Out in the
hall, I saw my colleagues standing as stiff as
mannequins but beginning to relax.
“Mackie Bey, are you all right? Are
you okay?” Aysun Hanim, my Chair, asked.
“Is that what I think it was?” I
inquired, faking American Southern-style nonchalance.
“An earthquake, you mean?” she
suggested knowingly.
“Yes.”
“Have you never experienced an
earthquake before?”
After a concerned pause: “No.”
“Oh, Mackie Bey, I am so sorry! I do
apologize! I suppose that this is the sort of thing we
should have spoken about through emails a year ago, but
I never wanted to discourage you! You know what I
mean?” she pled inquiringly, staring up at me from
downcast eyes.
“Yes, Aysun, I do understand, believe
me. In New Orleans, our universities also never brought
up the subject of hurricane season to visiting parents
during orientation weeks? Why worry them unnecessarily,
we also figured?”
“Yes, all right then, I see you
understand.”
An hour later, the intrusive visitor
rattled and shook the building of the Faculty of Letters
once again. This time, I was standing in the computer
room discussing and comparing earthquakes and hurricanes
with Lirik Konak, a colleague. Frightened, she embraced
the wall; well, braced herself against it, but the
initial involuntary action looked more like an embrace
to me. I couldn’t help noticing this sensuous aspect in
the female form at such a moment of fear and panic. I
obviously missed my wife. I clutched at a table, a few
feet behind her so that she couldn’t see that all
emotion had drained from my face. I felt that I needed
to hide this fact from her. But I was simply lost; I
did not know how to be in and with this moment, or with
another person at this moment. Then the trembling of
the building ceased.
Telephones began to ring in various
offices up and down the hall. Calls were coming in from
deans and vice rectors that classes needed to be
canceled immediately and that the campus should be
evacuated. We wished each other to be safe (“Gecmis
Olsun!”) and began to go our own individual way.
Several were concerned about me, the American and new
colleague and friend, and I had to console and assure
them that this was nothing new to me, that it really
seemed no different from getting the hell out of the way
of an oncoming hurricane. Of course, they did not take
the time to point out to me that one never knew from
where and at where an earthquake – in an instant – would
rattle or shake the land or split or erupt it.
So the campus suddenly closed on this
Monday, as did all schools. On my way back to my
apartment by foot, I saw that the streets were filled
with parents rushing to school yards to rescue their
kids. Teenage boys, presumably old enough to look after
themselves, joked and teased one another, some
pretending that the ground was swaying and opening up
beneath their feet. The girls vogued and twirled and
squealed and giggled. Younger kids were crying as they
fidgeted and waited at the school fence for a parent.
Panicky motorists leaned on their horns from every
direction, and out of the window to argue one another to
speed up and get out of the way. Someone had to pull two
men apart who had jumped from their cars and begun to
fight. Nerves were on edge everywhere.
I made it to my apartment, where I
unburdened myself of my satchel and laptop and took the
elevator back down to the ground floor and out once
again onto the street. I took an academic journal from
my study to read because I had decided to stroll over to
Cinar (The Oak Tree), my new favorite coffeehouse.
Among people milling about aimlessly or rushing past one
another with purposeful, determined, pinched faces, I
sauntered my way through Grand Park just opposite my
apartment building, toward its main entrance opening on
to where Cinar was. This was going to be my way of
dealing with earthquakes, I thought. I won’t panic
against the worrying newness of all of this, I told
myself. I would just quietly find a table near a window
where sunlight would be streaming through dusky
off-white curtains and I would read, and concentrate
intently on what I was reading, an essay on the center
of Western Marxism of the 1930s, the Frankfurt School of
Critical Theory.
I immediately ordered baklava with
tea and bottled water. In Turkey, when you order
baklava, you don’t just get one piece as a single
serving; you get five wonderfully syrupy squares. I
soon learned, weeks before earthquake time, to savor and
to devour them all, slowly, especially while pouring
over tracts of intellectual history and literary
theory. There I sat, until dinner time. Later, I went
off to a restaurant for an evening meal and returned
afterwards for more of Cinar’s baklava, even though I
had promised myself weeks before that I would have the
pleasure of this great dessert only once a week, on
Sundays. But here I was, on the Monday of my first
earthquake ever, having a single serving of five
perfectly inviting pieces twice, as my way of contending
with earthquakes and consoling myself!
Throughout that afternoon and
evening, I marveled at the fact that I didn’t run
upstairs, pack my bags, and book the next flight out, to
Budapest or Praha, or to Paris – or New York, and then
home to New Orleans. One should never stick around
faced with impending disaster. But I now know that we
learn from childhood never to imagine that the hurricane
or the earthquake will insinuate itself in our path.
This is our parents’ carefully crafted imprint.
As a very young man, I often wondered
why more enslaved Africans never attempted to escape
slavery or why so many native Indian tribes simply
seemed to have surrendered their fates to European
settlers or why seemingly the majority of European Jews
did not think to abandon their shtetls at the least
inkling of emerging, centuries-old, murderous
anti-Semitism. But here I now sat over baklava several
years later, in Izmir, Turkey, among persistent
earthquakes, even as I remained a fresh refugee of sorts
from Katrina’s Louisiana hits. Why didn’t I just leave,
abandon this new experience? Escape back to the US,
just in time for the next new hurricane? I don’t
understand these things yet. Perhaps such introspective
questioning suggests an element of the solipsist in me.
On the other hand, such questions may be the only way to
normalize the incomprehensible. Perhaps there are no
authentic responses to such questions. I just don’t
know. I must work them out one day – over baklava, but
not during earthquakes and hurricanes.
I think it must have something to do
with the way we human beings narrativize peril into
legends over time. For instance, they now tell me here
that Izmir undergoes underground tremors constantly.
Some 150 tremors were reported for that Monday morning;
500 by nightfall. Whatever the exact number, four were
felt across the Izmir and its townships on Monday and
two were bigger than had been felt in years: 5.7 and
6.9, though the US registered this last one as a 9.0.
In my office on this Monday of the first earthquake of
my life, I could feel the quake move through me and take
over my body as if I were just another extension of the
room I was in, as if I were a column or a chair or
bookcase. I still have dizzying phantom imaginings that
I can feel one starting up again, especially when I am
in a tall building. Or perhaps what I was feeling was
one of the actual many tremors of the Anatolian Fault.
That Monday, the areas near the Izmir township of Cesme
received the harder tremors and on Tuesday I heard that
some Greek islands were damaged in part. I am wondering
whether these were Lesbos and Xios, which are just
across from Cesme. I was in Cesme two weekends before
and could see these islands from there across the
Aegean.
I now understand from Onder Bey, my
department Chair’s husband, who told me, the newcomer,
with gleeful mischief in his voice, that Izmir has minor
tremors in the hundreds almost daily, year round. I
could see the devilishness in his face, even though he
was citing facts to the newcomer. He was initiating me
into becoming comfortable with a new panic in life.
Onder Uluyisci, the impish anarchist and benevolent
iconoclast of the department (perhaps of the Faculty
even), continued to explain that the people and experts
of Izmir believe that these daily tremors are good for
Izmir and its townships because daily and frequent minor
horizontal grinding of tectonic plates along the fault
line somehow reduced the risk of major vertical
upheavals. So Izmiris, as all Turks must, live with the
narrative of real or phantom sensations of rumblings
going on below us daily. I, too, now believe that I can
sense them from one moment to the next. And so we stay
put. Becoming an amateur expert on earthquakes just as
Gulf Coast Southerners become an expert on hurricanes, I
recently read online that only a week ago California had
300 tremors in one day and no one sensed them.
I am learning the quake dance as I
call it – embrace the nearest wall or column or piece of
furniture at the first rumblings but head for the
nearest exit as quickly as you can. We had two more
days of reports of The Big One about to rip its away
across Greece and Turkey. Asleep at 1:00AM on one of
those days, I was shaken awake by one of those quakes.
I lay there in the dark, not quite knowing what to do
just yet at every moment that I was still alive,
imagining fissures creasing streets, alleys, and the
lawns of Grand Park. When my building ceased rattling,
I dressed and went to Grand Park and sat among all the
young and old couples there who had packed their
valuables in 30-inch rolling suitcases, just in case
they, alive, would have no home to return to.
It all seems to be over now, for this
year. So perhaps earthquakes have a season of sorts
after all. I will re-reform myself regarding sweets and
go back to having baklava only on Sundays.
I learned from my greengrocer later
that some people had died from fright that Monday of our
first discernible quakes this year and on the following
days that we had more noticeable quakes; or they had
perished from accidents while rushing out of imagined
harm's way; or even from jumping from a fifth floor
window, hoping to save oneself. Most people slept out in
their cars for three to four nights straight, fearing to
be indoors where the ceiling of their apartment might
cave in on them. They say it's better to live in a
two-story apartment building, on the second floor. That
way, you won't have far to fall and you are not on the
bottom. In my new apartment building, said to be
constructed to be earthquake proof (I hope), I live on
the 7th floor. posted 16 March 2006 |
