52 MEN 52 WEEKS/ 49 DERYA BENGİ
Pata Pata!
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A well-known scene from the popular cinema of the 80s:
A soap opera is being shot in a hospital. The hospital administrator Emily Kimberly visits the room of a woman beaten by her husband. While the woman in bed, whose face is filled with bruises and swelling, is complaining, "I can't move out, Miss Kimberly. I have nowhere to go. I don't know what to do", Ms. Kimberly goes off the script and asks in astonishment, "Why should you move out? It is your house too". She then continues, still off the script: "You know what I'd do, if somebody did that to me (...) I'd pick up the biggest thing I could find, and bash their brains in".
Everyone in the set of the soap opera is surprised by this interference. When the injured woman follows the script and answers, "But, I can't afford therapy", Ms. Kimberly gets angry and says: "Who said anything about therapy? (...) to tell somebody with two children, a broken arm, a punched-in face and no money to move out of her own house and into a welfare shelter in order to get therapy is a lot of horseshit!"
The script written with a man's mind falls to pieces and the scene is shot and broadcast on TV in this exact way. Ms. Kimberly, who has, all of a sudden, acquired the identity of a women's rights defender, starts receiving fan letters from around the US every day. Actress Dorothy Michaels, who plays Ms. Kimberly, becomes a country-wide idol of women.
As you know, the name of the movie is Tootsie and the person who played the characters of Emily Kimberly (and Dorothy Michaels) is Dustin Hoffman. The main character of the movie, an unemployed actor, poses as a woman and successfully auditions for the role of a woman hospital administrator, and the moment he gets the part, he lets "the woman inside him" come out. Dress, appearance, make-up, gestures and mimics do not suffice, "sensitivity" too is worthless; what makes him a woman is, in a sense, the "ideology" of womanhood.
Even though the accusations recently made in the film community have shown that Hoffman did not get his share from this ideology in real life, the main thesis that the movie treats in jest has always been valid.
The men who stand on the side of women and attempt to have a say on the issue of male violence against women in a social life disabled with inequalities have to internalize this way of thinking and set their inner "Tootsie" in motion; and just like in the movie, they should start by getting rid of this "tootsie" literature (honey, my dear, flower, bug).
If being a "tootsie" is a crude dream and an impossible fantasy, is it also as impossible to rein in the monster of force and violence springing up from manhood?
***
In previous weeks, the movie Müslüm, albeit perfunctorily, managed to adapt certain parts of the musician Müslüm Gürses' life into cinema. It also, very slightly, touched upon the crime of beating, which most of us have forgotten, pretended ignorance of or did not know about.
It must be the weakness of not the movie, but our damned life that the love of Müslüm Gürses and Muhterem Nur is still seen as an exemplary love in spite of this violence and the subsequent spiral of regret which are presented as further evidence attesting to the strength of love.
There is a reality which the movie Müslüm has reminded us all: Muhterem Nur represents the mass of meanings called arabesque, which is mostly created with a male language, more so and much better and much earlier than Müslüm Gürses himself.
It would indeed be a valuable endeavor if someone interested in researching, writing or making a movie on the history of sorrow, pain and grief in the 20th century Turkey, first follows the life story of Muhterem Nur step by step, focuses on the way she existed and survived in Yeşilçam (the traditional cinema of Turkey), and then connects this to her relationship with Müslüm and to the arabesque of Müslüm Gürses.
Muhterem Nur was a woman "who cried all her life". In 1967, at a time when she was about to pull the plug on her cinema career and was performing as a belly dancer and singer in second-rate nightclubs, she recorded the song "Ömrümce Ağladım" (I Have Cried All My Life) on extended-play. (The biography of Muhterem Nur written by Gülsen İşeri was also published under the same title in 2017.)
Poet Ümit Yaşar Oğuzcan who had written the lyrics of the song made the following note on the back cover of her album:
"Following her sorrowful life story from a distance, I have always admired the struggle of Muhterem Nur to stand tall. Therefore, when she asked me for the lyrics of the first record she would make, I fulfilled her wish with pleasure. With the voice of Muhterem Nur, these verses, which have become all the more valuable thanks to the art of esteemed composer Şekip Ayhan Özışık, will be the song of all those who love and suffer ."
It was something stressed by everyone that there was an overlap between the life of Muhterem Nur and the roles she played in films. What had been written about her since the 1950s, what she did and did not tell about herself were the stations of this "sorrowful" story, as Ümit Yaşar put it. Migrating from the Balkans, being left an orphan, being driven to poverty, being raped on the street, being harassed by her uncle-in-law, working in a factory, getting married to a young neighbor, becoming a mother at a young age, getting walk-on roles in films, then, becoming the leading actress...
Muhterem Nur was one of the first stars who made Yeşilçam what it was. While playing the part of the good (or acceptable) woman in cinema as written by the novelists Kemalettin Tuğcu, Kerime Nadir and Muazzez Tahsin Berkand, she obeyed the orders assigned to her role to the letter.
According to writer Agah Özgüç, she was "the prototype of a constantly suffering, crying and unhappy woman character". Journalist and filmmaker Burçak Evren was of the opinion that Nur was "the meek, innocent maiden of the neighborhood free from any femininity".
The stars coming after her found themselves a place in cinema depending on what they added to the typecast of Muhterem Nur. Actress Belgin Doruk added a pinch of caprice while Türkan Şoray added a little lust to it.
It would be enough to take a quick look at the promotional texts published in the newspapers for Muhterem Nur movies: "An unprecedented family tragedy based on a real story" (Son Şarkı, Last Song). "A film to make all women sob, drive men to the greatest thrill and teach an exemplary lesson to the young" (Annemin Gözyaşları, Teardrops of My Mother). "A masterpiece to be watched by every sinful woman, every negligent man and every art-lover with admiration" (Ben Kahpe Değilim, I am Not a Whore). "The film of women who believe in the bliss of family life, mothers who struggle for the future of their children, and young girls who have just come to know what love is" (Kadın Asla Unutmaz, Woman Never Forgets).
Talking about the filmography of Muhterem Nur, we must underline two exceptional roles that she played in the 1970s, a time when she was rarely doing movies: A female director, Bilge Olgaç, imagined her as a hard-bitten sex worker in Karagün (Dark Day) and as a brothel madam who is caring and protective of her girls in Bacım (My Sister).
In an interview she gave to Hayat magazine in 1961, when she was no longer in the prime of her career, she was bewailing her bad fate and the hardships she had been through and telling her first 10 years in the film industry modestly and with a matured humor:
"Directors raced against each other to write my destiny in the films as bad as they could. They made me blind twice, tubercular several times, killed me 50 times, and then to make it up to me they made me bride many times."
***
From Tracy Chapman's "Behind the Wall" to Suzanne Vega's "Luka", from Billy Bragg's "Levi Stubbs' Tears" to Eminem's "Stan", we have long listened, loved and cherished many songs which talk about various aspects of violence and abuse. But to date no one has told of violence to the audiophile kids in such a stinging, hurting way as Berrand Cantat did. Moreover, not with a song, but in real life.
Of course, artworks, movies, songs have a nature, life and individuality independent from their creators, but, after Cantat beat his girlfriend Marie Trintignant to death, and it was revealed through various testimonies that this fatal tragedy was not the only manifestation of his tendency to violence, is there anyone who can listen a Noir Desir song without a pang of sorrow?
In an interview, Kurt Cobain quite naively expressed his discomfort of his massive fame along the following lines: I don't know the crowd who buys our albums. I don't know who they are, whom they vote for, what they look like. Some of them perhaps beat their wives, or throw their dogs on the street when they move. Do we have a single thing in common with these people?
Who would have thought that, one day, Cantat would also fit Cobain's description? Actually, there is no need to go as far as Cantat. Life has taught us good and proper that no one can vouch for anyone on this subject. Those who fit this description (they know themselves), aren't they perhaps right next to us, and sometimes our closest ones?
The most impressive, (literally and figuratively speaking) most stunning song about domestic violence was probably written in Turkey. Justifying violence, brute force and maltreatment, even making them sound cute, in such an explicit way that it doesn't leave any room for the possibility of black humor or figure of speech is the song with the dual title "Pata-Pata (Dayak Cennetten Çıkma)" (Pata-Pata, Beating Comes from Heaven). It is the Turkish cover of South African Miriam Makeba's famous song "Pata Pata". To cap it all, it doubles the blind violence by exploiting the original song with a vengeance.
As of the 1960s, Miriam Makeba, nicknamed Mama Afrika, was one of the symbols of the South African blacks' antiapartheid cry for freedom and the African women's meeting with feminism.
Her life was full of struggle. In her first marriage to a policeman, when she wasn't of full age, she was subjected to beating and humiliation. After migrating to America in the 1960s, she first married trumpeter Hugh Masekala, one of the pioneers of the antiapartheid movement in arts just like herself, then taking the risk of deportation from America she married Stokely Carmichael, one of the leaders of the Black Panther movement.
The song "Pata Pata" became a worldwide hit in 1967. It was a wonderful dance song that catches the listener with its fresh melodies and lyrics written in the native Xhosa language. The recitative parts in English were about how people from Johannesburg have fun with this dance at weekends.
The political implications of the song lay in both equating dance with resistance against the white racist regime, and the very figures used in the dance. The basic figures of the "Pata Pata" dance were the movements of the police body-frisking the blacks, which was a constant and tiresome practice on the streets of Johannesburg at the time. The meaning of "Pata Pata" was "touch touch".
"Pata pata" must have evoked "pata küte" or "pataklamak", an onomatopoeia for beating in Turkish, and driven by some inexplicable appetence, the songwriter Ülkü Aker and singer Rana Alagöz, in the record released in 1968, thought that this beautiful song deserved the following words:
"Don't ever make him angry
He will beat you pata pata
Don't say I didn't tell you so
He is so bad tempered pata pata
Look, beating comes from heaven
He will beat you pata pata
Don't you ever cry
Don't hit pata pata
There is no one in the world who didn't get beaten
We all know that
First our mothers, then our teachers
Then who beats whom?
Guess who
Don't piss him off
He will beat you pata pata
Does your lover beat you too?
Don't worry, these things happen
When was the last time he slapped you?
Come on, tell it
Everybody gets beaten." (DB/ŞA/APA/VK/SD/IG)