“Wardens of the World”—an excerpt from Pure Beast

Translator’s Note: To visit Northern Kurdistan today is to countenance a landscape scarred by state violence. You drive along the Turkish state’s highways and see the ruins of Kurdish villages razed less than a generation ago; you climb hills and mountains, once the refuge of Kurdish guerrillas, and learn that the sparsely-treed slopes were once lush forests burned down by the Turkish military; you visit ancient wonders, thousands of years old, only to find them fenced off by the Turkish gendarmerie for use as shooting ranges and military training grounds. Meanwhile, the state builds dams that submerge Kurdish villages and towns while the mountains are sold off for oil prospecting. Still, something survives.

Sema Kaygusuz’s work has long been concerned with that which was not meant to survive, and Pure Beast offers a speculative account of survival against erasure. Published in Turkish as Saf Canavar earlier this year by Metis Yayınları, it is Kaygusuz’s first novel in a decade and has not yet appeared in English. Set in a near future in which the state and its technocrats have obliterated the means to life, the novel imagines the natural world rebuilding the means for human survival. Over its pages, Kaygusuz sketches an ethic of living that refuses the scientific rationalization of the human body; that gives itself over to a feverish will to be in and know the world; that finds, even in the most destitute and hopeless conditions, a scornful, fugitive kind of beauty. Before counterinsurgency there was insurgency. After counterinsurgency there will be insurgency. It is insurgency that will always have survived.

— Nicholas Glastonbury

We wardens are all orphans, all motherless and all fatherless. It is this grief without end, these two great losses, that bears us into being. None of us has a surname. None of us has roots, none limbs; we’re nothing more than tubers dislodged from the earth. You know, it’s interesting: except for Basque and Mongolian, the distinction in Turkish between öksüz and yetim, that is, between motherless children and fatherless children, doesn’t exist in any other language. In the library that lay hidden in the mine, I found old dictionaries for all kinds of languages; when I looked at their mouldering pages, before they disintegrated into thin air, I couldn’t find a single word corresponding to öksüz, the motherless child. It doesn’t exist in the Sami languages or in Latin, in the languages of East Asia or in Hindi, in any Scandinavian languages, or in any of the Indigenous languages of Africa or the Americas. In some languages they add a feminine ending to the word for fatherless children to indicate the loss of the mother, but that’s all. Languages tend to hide their motherless children. It’s true, in fact, that motherlessness is a kind of mortal silence. We wardens, each a motherless child, each lacking in that most essential feeling of trust, only realized much later that the orphanages that raised us were a kind of stepfather, a stepfather called the state, that overthrew our own fathers. We knew nothing, when we took up our appointed positions, of our motherlessness nor our fatherlessness. As for me, though, I learned about the distinction between öksüz and yetim by reading, hidden away from prying eyes, the Little Nobody novels by the remarkable writer Yaşar Kemal. If anyone found me reading those books, or any books, they’d terminate me without hesitation.

What I mean to say is that I became a nobody by reading insubordinately. I came to grasp, by way of those books, that they meant for us to lose our mental faculties among the ruins, among the fossils and the bones. Because for us, the written word is all but forbidden. We are only allowed to use language that is purely informative, like the well-governed sentences in the few books the state does allow us to read. The use of descriptors, images, and metaphors is considered a misdemeanour under the law. For simple creatures like us, whose minds are confined to a shallow language of concrete nouns, pronouns, and fifty basic verbs, the interpretation of dreams, the communication of emotions, and the telling of stories constitute serious crimes. As a result, we must be as careful when we speak as we are when we listen. I hope, in other words, I’ve managed to communicate the kinds of risks I’m taking here. 

That we could be, or become, lovers was precisely what the state had failed to account for. Orphans, abandoned, who don’t want to find what they’ve found, in fervent alliance with their beloveds.

Given all my adversity, I have found that I can only really sate my hunger for poetry, quite surprisingly, by being among the other wardens. Because above all else, we wardens are collectors of things. In the dig sites where we’ve discovered there once was life, the objects we find–a wooden top, for instance, freshly exhumed from the earth–are not simply ordinary objects with names we haven’t yet learned. The top’s round body, we might learn, was shaped by a lathe to carry itself on a single conical point. Once we ascertain the purpose of that point, the top suddenly takes on a kind of personhood, a life of its own, all without a single living interlocutor in the world. Or a saz, the drum of its broken body full of earth, instantly finds itself borrowing life from some other time. When we chance upon the bones of domestic cats or caged birds, it’s our job to connect them up at the joints before we send them to the center to be brought back to life. To fix things like this lets us feel like we’ve managed to stave off disaster. Before we mend the holes in a torn Shiraz carpet, we first let ourselves imagine the hands that knotted it. Then we must once again bury all that we’ve imagined. A hand-poured glass ashtray has a clear, distinct fingerprint left on its edge, thanks to which voices from the past begin to slip inside of us. A broken walnut table made whole again turns, in the hut of the warden who fixes it, into a reservoir of vital energy. Each of our huts is, as a result, an atlas of evocations, a map of the past. We unwittingly engage in all this abstraction, which intensifies by the day; ours is a spiritualism that the state has not noticed and which we are afraid to name. All of these things give us selves, and we often find one another in resulting states of reverie.

Recently, Sable Warden, Frog Warden, and I, three women, went to the Mercan Valley; we set up camp in the parched riverbed of the Harami Creek which once babbled across the land. Scouring for fishbones, vertebrae, claws, hooves, shells, and furs that might be buried beneath the sedimentary rock formations under the loose stone ground, I happened to see Frog Warden with her hand on the desiccated trunk of a dead oak, eyes closed as if in prayer. In this place whose name she didn’t know, Frog was involuntarily touching, feeling, something in the tree. Without any real purpose. But when our eyes met she flinched like she’d been caught, and I looked the other way. That night, huddled round the fire, undaunted by the bitter frost at our backs, we talked on and on about the animals we were searching for. The more we spoke the more our reservations seemed to melt away. Poor Frog, though, her vocabulary was so narrow she couldn’t help but repeat the same few sentences; she grew frustrated with herself the more she tried to speak. Aside from the few thornbushes around us, which were soon to die anyway, there was no forest, no river, that might rouse us to language. 

In the morning we found the gift the night had conferred upon us. Tearing up the dry and withered brambles to open up a new dig site, Sable Warden found, just beneath the surface of the earth, two pronged antlers that we figured once belonged to an adult deer. She held up the antlers to her forehead, giggling as she asked how she looked. We were getting on so well we felt safe enough to joke around. We pondered together what the deer must have looked like. Frog Warden found the roe deer in the tablet containing the state’s Living Catalogue, on its page for missing animals. The creature’s appearance was bewitching. With thin legs, enormous ears, giant eyes, thick eyelashes, and long, delicate hooves, it looked to be instinctively demure, a creature that knew not to trample upon flowers, that seemed to hover in the air without touching the ground. Still more striking, the antlers we found hadn’t fully dried out; the bony knobs at their base swarmed with yellow fleas. We read in the tablet that male deer, called bucks, shed their antlers in the winter and grow new ones in the spring. It filled us with joy; we laughed and laughed over our new discovery. Maybe these belonged to a deer that was still alive. It would be a buck, coming out at night and hiding itself away during the day. 

Of course, as we talked about our deer, we couldn’t help but think of Deer Warden, recollecting with disgust his fat jowls and the whiskeylike scent of grain alcohol that followed him around day and night. We didn’t want to give our deer to Deer, so with our silent assent, Sable Warden stoked the embers back to flame and tossed the antlers into the fire. As they burned, we covered up the tiny hoofprints we found on the path. Then we packed up camp and returned to the center as if nothing had happened. The deer became our shared secret. We wanted to hide it from the world.

Thinking about it now I wonder how many snake spines, how many fish bones and hooves and jaws, how many fossilized plants and slumbering seeds vanished in this way, without being delivered to their proper stewards. We wardens were in competition with one another, but the mysterious protectiveness with which we hid our findings could not simply be explained away by our petty rivalries. It was rather that we turned into something like lovers, passionately devoting ourselves to the lofty idea of these creatures erased from nature. That we could be, or become, lovers was precisely what the state had failed to account for. Orphans, abandoned, who don’t want to find what they’ve found, in fervent alliance with their beloveds.

*

When I look back on that foolhardy, reckless day when Sable, Frog, and I conspired to disappear the deer antlers, I could never have imagined the woe of the scientists, fading away day after day in their windowless laboratories, suffocating in their latex gloves, their leaden jumpsuits, their surgical masks, as they awaited the arrival of the tiniest bit of biological material. There’s a line I remember in a book from the Middle Ages; maybe I’m making it up, I’m not sure: “In this life I have devoted to the Lord, there will always be a share of myself devoted to play and idleness.” Those scientists don’t have a single ounce of life to waste on play or idleness. They’ve devoted their entire lives to replicating the region’s biological diversity in the newly-inaugurated National Park.

None of us wardens had ever laid eyes upon the National Park, so it would not be an exaggeration to describe it as a mirage. The park had been built in the south, and if any of us wanted to see it we would first have to submit a formal request that would need to move step by step up the bureaucratic ladder until it reached the top of the hierarchy. The towering temple junipers marking the park’s borders looked from the outside like a pyramid. It was impossible to see beyond them. From afar I could sometimes hear the hooting of an owl, the cackling of a striped hyena, the buzzing of the bees, and the peace of mind I found listening to those sounds gave me a share of the most beautifully idle moments of my life.

Just after the eclipse last year, as the weather was warming up, I happened upon a scientist. She sat on a bench on the path that ran along the cliff over the park, spooning at some food. It must have been her lunch break. Her shining hair and healthy teeth were much finer than mine, but she was so pale; the mold-blue veins in her hands caught my eye. I stopped walking as soon as I saw her.  She recognized by my clothes that I was a warden, after which she gestured, with an air of condescension, for me to sit beside her. I didn’t take my eyes off her. These scientists are not to be trusted; they’re the ones who make the state’s most eager informants. To them, we wardens seemed inhuman. Speaking in a polite tone, she offered to share her meal. She was clearly patronizing me. I ate some of the slop she offered while she waited patiently for me to introduce myself. I said nothing. Potato salad with walnuts; it was far too salty, so I stopped eating after two bites. Somehow I was not surprised that she was the kind of person who used too much salt. “Are these walnuts your creation?” I asked, not trying to hide my mockery. She resented the question, quickly swallowing her mouthful of salt and straightening up in her seat.

Her soft, hospitable voice cracked wide open.

“Theoretically, no, I did not create these walnuts, but these walnuts would not exist if it weren’t for me.”

It turned out she was an ecophysiologist; she was tasked, brainiac that she was, with creating the environmental conditions for resurrected creatures. Little globs of potato spurted from her mouth as she spoke. She blathered about all kinds of things that I had no interest in knowing, like the range of the walnut tree’s heat tolerance or the levels of water that subsoil requires. Light, water, air, it was all in her hands, blah, blah, blah. She lectured me at length, gesticulating wildly with her hands to tell me about the debates she was having with the geneticists, how not one of them could do a thing without the ecophysiologists. The woman couldn’t form a single sentence without resorting to jargon, and still she couldn’t find the words for her anger, for the tension these debates created in her workplace. Still, despite her failures of language, she still possessed a self, and she stood up angrily without finishing her salad. Her rear end was impressed with the shape of the chair she’d been sitting in for years. She flung her scarf disdainfully around her neck and made a hasty departure. I watched her leave with a scorn I couldn’t repress. I paid no heed, of course, to her reprimands.

Scientists are dry, dry as dust, lifeless people. I would have expected more dynamic personalities of them, given that they get to live in better conditions than we do. Not to mention the fact that they’re much freer to read. Still, I hear their social lives are awful. They argue with one another so viciously that the state feels no need to conduct any operations to ensure their solitude.

It’s not just me; all the wardens in the region despise the scientists. They see us as mere workers, while we see them as weaklings, nerds. The wardens live in prefabricated huts built upon the lifeless cliffs, only reachable by creaking old cable cars, while the scientists live in heated, well-lit smart apartments built on top of one another, close enough for them to be able to have their squabbles. It was inevitable, given the sharp distinction between our classes, that every warden had had an unpleasant introduction to the scientists. While I’m on the topic, let me tell you about the day I met Poyraz and Nube, when I totally gave up on the scientists altogether.

It was the last days of summer when I left the orphanage. I was sixteen. It was the conjunction of Venus and the Sun, and I was trying, despite the fog in my mind, to make sense of the world around me. Those were my simplest days. I was taken to the Natural History building, where minerals, fossils, and skeletons were archived, where the climate control systems worked overtime to suppress the earthy scent of death that filled the place; I was led from one elevator to another, across a skyway, down a spiral staircase, through a long hallway lined on either side by premature babies and mutant bodies in bell jars; and I was left at the door to a room. Inside, Poyraz and Nube awaited me. Each of them in their white aprons was a stain against the moss-green wall. They were going to provide me an education into the catfish I was tasked with finding. Regrettably, they hated one another to such a degree that it hampered my education. Instead of telling me what the fossils looked like, or how to tell apart the bones of different fish species, or how a catfish’s skeleton is configured, they continually interrupted one another, each correcting the other, each dragging the conversation into other matters. Nube looked, by all appearances, to be a calm woman, but she was easy to rile up because she was sensitive to aggression. Poyraz, on the other hand, was a master at taking up space, not just because of his booming voice but because he paced the narrow room as he spoke, which overwhelmed Nube. I find myself laughing bitterly whenever I think of them. Because the conflict between Poyraz and Nube was really based on the opposing theories to which they held. They simply couldn’t agree on the origin of life: that was their whole problem. Nube believed life came into being in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, while Poyraz’s creed–for that’s really what it was–was that life emerged elsewhere in the universe and arrived to earth on a meteor. Here we were, on a piece of desertified land that had been bombed every year for centuries, a piece of land whose villages had been emptied out and leveled, a piece of land whose water had been stolen, whose forests had been burned down, whose caves had been gassed, whose peoples had been murdered en masse, a piece of land where the means for life itself had been totally erased, and these idiots spent their time debating the origin of life.

But then, why is that so surprising? It was ignorance, the absolute fact of it. In truth I’d say there’s a range of different kinds of ignorance, each built almost in layers atop the others. I’d call one kind Noble Ignorance, another Destitute Ignorance. We might call the other kinds Pure Ignorance, Presumed Ignorance, Chosen Ignorance, Narcotic Ignorance, Fearful Ignorance, and Courage Ignorance.

Wardens live by Noble Ignorance. Since the wardens are so idle in their constant pursuit of the biological remains they’ve been tasked with finding, they take note of every breath they take. They feel their way through the world with blithe indifference, imputing their vital energy into the desolate geographies they wander. Advancing over hills and into dells, through canyons and down valleys, they are attuned to the terrible magnitude of all that they approach. All the more so at night, beneath the stars. So alert as to distinguish the smell of a fire from its crackling, the wardens come into possession of an inner strength, a means of sensing into the yearning void of all the language that has been withheld from them. You could write all the books in the world from a warden’s heart, if only you could find your way in. 

The ignorance of scientists, on the other hand, falls under the category of Destitute Ignorance. All their knowledge operates by mere functional mechanism. It is a knowledge that, in its decomposition from thought, is purged of all fever and worry and doubt, of all stubbornness and hesitation and endurance, of all poetry and nonsense, of all magic and wonder and awe. Living in their artificial silence, the scientists attain knowledge only by the winnowing away of life itself. They know of Hippocrates, for instance, not for his moral ideas, but only for his medical observations. They may have read Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, but they’re entirely unaware of the philosophical and metaphysical texts he wrote on existence and the soul. Omar Khayyam is no poet to them, but an ordinary astronomer who developed a new kind of calendar. What they know of Bacon are his writings on optics and chemistry, totally indifferent to the impassioned philosophies where he debates the existence of god. Imagine, they even lack awareness of Leonardo’s The Last Supper; the painter’s anatomies and hydraulic schematics are enough for them. They recognize Descartes, perhaps, for his mathematical theories, but completely severed from his statement Cogito ergo sum. Faraday is only worth their time as an experimentalist, while they consider his writings on the spiritual aspects of knowledge to be entirely unnecessary. Marie Curie, they’d say, had no other pursuits beyond radioactive elements; what she wrote about the meaning of life, what she thought about human nature, all of it should remain in the dark. And Pasteur! When they sieve away his work on ethics, they’re left with a man whose sole obsession is exerting his mastery over pathogens. And what to say of Newton! The only legacy of that last of the alchemists are his laws of gravity and motion. Galileo is merely his telescope. Tesla is only his alternating currents; Darwin is only On the Origin of Species, Euclid is only geometry, Gauss is only integers. Thales’ belief in the essential role of water for existence has been prohibited, as has everything that Pythagoras and Fibonacci had to say about the universal harmonies of numbers. I could go on but I’m working myself into a frenzy. 

My heart sinks when I look at the crack they’ve opened up in the world and consider which side we’ve ended up on. It’s all thanks to the destitute ignorance of those so-called scientists, who haven’t even managed to develop a single new theory of anything. 

I fear them. The very idea of looking at myself through their eyes offends me. It fills me with rage, to be seen as a biological creature severed from all spiritual connection, to be seen as nothing more than a device made of flesh. I wish I could appear before them like a ghost, shattering their illusory peace of mind by speaking in an eerie voice from another world and telling them one of the most beautiful tales I know. But instead I look at those marauders with the sharp eyes of an animal, ready to attack. The ruinous scorn of humankind howling in me.