{"id":33960,"date":"2024-07-26T08:24:55","date_gmt":"2024-07-26T06:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=33960"},"modified":"2024-07-26T08:24:55","modified_gmt":"2024-07-26T06:24:55","slug":"excerpt-from-the-anthropologists-by-aysegul-savas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/excerpt-from-the-anthropologists-by-aysegul-savas\/","title":{"rendered":"Excerpt from The Anthropologists<\/em> by Ay\u015feg\u00fcl Sava\u015f"},"content":{"rendered":"
An excerpt from Ay\u015feg\u00fcl Sava\u015f’s new novel, The Anthropologists<\/em><\/a>, published in July by Bloomsbury<\/a>.<\/h5>\n

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Ay\u015feg\u00fcl Sava\u015f<\/h4>\n

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Beginnings and Endings<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a moment of panic, we decided to look for a home. We\u2019d been in the city for several years by then, and from time to time we worried that we weren\u2019t living by the correct set of rules, that we should be making our lives sturdy. I worried more than Manu did, but he often acquiesced to my apprehensions.<\/span><\/p>\n


\nCosmology<\/strong><\/p>\n

For many years, it had been just the two of us. When we met, the world expanded and it also contracted: it stretched large enough for the two of us\u2014a whole universe\u2014and it left everything else behind a curtain.<\/span><\/p>\n

We were so young then, barely out of childhood. On weekends, we\u2019d walk off the university campus to spend the day in town, among older people whose lives seemed at once real and unreal. Real, because that was how we imagined actual life in the abstract; unreal, because it did not seem we would ever be like them.<\/span><\/p>\n

We went to the town bookshop, to the coffee shop, to the record store, even if neither of us knew anything about the type of music sold there: cool and stylish and, to us, exotic.<\/span><\/p>\n

We were scholarship students in a foreign country, which is to say that we recognized something in each other. We\u2019d been raised by similar types of people\u2014 their worries, their discipline, their affection, their means\u2014even though we had grown up on opposite ends of the world. We accepted, children that we were, that we would remain foreigners for the rest of our lives, wherever we lived, and we were delighted by the pros- pect. Back then, it didn\u2019t seem to us that we\u2019d ever need anyone else, in our small world that was also a universe.<\/span><\/p>\n


\nRough Drafts<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019d arrived in the city on a whim. We had lived in small towns after university, and the city seemed alluring; the start of something else. We had an idea that we would live in other places afterward. For a while, we wouldn\u2019t worry about making things sturdy.<\/span><\/p>\n

We found an apartment for rent on an unremarkable street, in an unremarkable part of town, and we decided on it without much thought. Back then, we were only playing out our adulthoods rather than committing to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our apartment was small and a little dark, the kitchen not much more than a sink and stove. But we loved it all the same, and for a reason we didn\u2019t clearly articulate, we stayed in the city. Instead of the framed posters we\u2019d had since university, we hung paintings we\u2019d bought at the flea market: a plate of fruits, a port scene at sunset. We liked the paintings, yes, but we also liked what they might mean about us\u2014people with real paintings on their walls. We had a routine; we grew fond of it. Perhaps we were tired of that first rush of excitement in a new <\/span>setting, and the gradual draining away of color.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now it was time to expand. <\/span>To make a life<\/span><\/i>, as some people called it. We wouldn\u2019t have called it that, but we agreed that we had to make things a bit more solid.<\/span><\/p>\n


\nDaily Life<\/strong><\/p>\n

Manu left home early to go to work at the nonprofit organization on the other side of the city. While he made breakfast, I made a pot of coffee and sat with him at the table in pajamas. It was a ritual of sorts, sitting across from each other, face-to-face. There were few rituals to our lives, certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faiths. So these small things mattered. I would make sure to sit with him at the table.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before he left, we kissed in the hallway. Okay, Manu said, back in my shoes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Afterward, I lay on the couch and read. I made tea once the coffee pot was empty.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had just received a grant to make a documentary, though the funding was flexible enough that I could use it for many other things. We wouldn\u2019t need to worry about paying rent for the coming year. The money we saved would help toward a down payment for a small apartment. We had a little more, a wedding present from our parents, though their earnings were modest and the currencies of our native countries were constantly losing value. Still, they considered it their duty; and they were sad, they said, that they couldn\u2019t afford to give us more.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whenever I introduced myself as a documentary maker, people assumed that I was a sort of journalist, that I was drawn to investigation. This hadn\u2019t been my impulse when I started filming years ago, when I recorded my parents and grandparents, walks around our neighborhood, late-night conversations. Back then it was just an itch, something I did without thinking very hard about. I didn\u2019t worry about the outcome, what to do with the hours of footage I accumulated, about giving shape to anything. I put together bits and pieces to show Manu, stitching together scenes in our particular humor, our shared logic. There was a film about my mother, or rather, about my mother\u2019s wardrobe. Another about the grocer in the neighborhood where I\u2019d grown up, from <\/span>the vantage point of the owner\u2019s father, who sat all day at the shop. Now that these seemed to me like the work of another person, I could say that they were good films: joyful and na\u00efve. For later projects I traveled to countries I knew little about. I filmed a school for refugee children; a group of migrant women running a soup kitchen from a bus. Sometimes, I believed that making a documentary was a process of empathy, an education. Other times, I thought bitterly that this was simply what documentarians wanted to believe, leaving their subjects as soon as they accumulated the necessary footage. Still, these films taken together gave a sense of social critique, and it was for this reason that I had received the grant, allowing me freedom for the first time in my career.<\/span><\/p>\n

For now, I knew little beyond the fact that I wanted to film daily life, and to praise its unremarkable grace. I didn\u2019t want to travel anywhere, to investigate the ways of other places, but to remain in the city, and establish some rules.<\/span><\/p>\n

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