“Who do you know there?!”

It’s 1 in the morning and I’m on the phone to my mother halfway down a backstreet in Taksim, on my way to the emergency services with a man I have just met with the car keys of a 52 year old deaf man to get a placard out of his car boot.  My mother is saying “who do you know there?” this question has two answers; no one and everyone.

At 10 a friend of mine and I arrived at Taksim square to join the standing protests, I am far to hyper to stand still for hours on end, Sibel is a lot more patient so she stood and I minced around taking pictures of the indignation in peoples faces, standing for liberty, standing for freedom, standing for choice, standing for life.

Everyone in Turkey is exhausted, if we are not out on the streets, we are glued to screens, between refreshing twitter, facebook and watching the live stream of the unrest, we haven’t slept, eaten or lived properly for 22 days.  It has changed the discourse of the nation, its all anyone ever speaks of, it’s like we have become paralyzed, frozen in a time, in a context and we have no idea how to break free.  We sat down to watch those standing, to look at the most peaceful, non-violent direct action I have ever seen.

Standing is symbolic, and social change has been won through people standing in the way of brutality, corruption; quite literally putting their bodies in the way of harm to stop oppression.  These people had been standing since yesterday about 3 in the morning the day before, they were so tired and they were swaying.  exhausted, dehyrdated, hungry, people had put water bottles infront of them, they stood there untouched.  I walked up to one of the men and asked him if I could give him some water, he nodded, and thats how it started for me.  The next 6 hours I spent running around Taksim, feeding them water, and simit (a Turkish seeded bread), getting placards from cars, meeting strangers wives, picking up their medicine from them, finding friends in the most unlikely places.

The oldest of the ‘Standers’ was 52, the youngest 15.  Two of them were soldiers, one a photographer, the other a blues musician, and one a little babe, so young, so tired and indignant.  I put him to sleep for 15 minutes, they all took turns holding a sign saying ‘Don’t bow down/Boyun egme’, they put candles on the floor saying ‘Diren Dilan/hang in there Dilan’ the name of a young protestor who is in a coma due to police brutality. we shared stories, we laughed, we took care of each other.  I made friends with people who I would have never met before, and what beautiful friends they were.  We shared numbers, food, tea, and opened up our hearts to each other.

I discussed politics with 4 beautiful young women, I met a German man who had come just to photograph the protests, a young woman gave massages to get the Standers to get their blood flowing.  we became a community.   I gave my scarf to a woman who was cold, an ex army general and his dog made sugar water for the standers so that we could regulate their blood sugar, he called me his ‘little sister’, an affiliation I never thought that I could have to anyone in the army.  We became a family of those who stood, and those who looked after those that stood, and once again I saw how easy it is to connect as long as we set aside our differences and understood that we have one common goal, to live the way we want to live, to be who we want to be, and to respect that person that we have every right to be.

So when my mother asked me “Who do you know there?” as I stood on a side street with a man that I had only just met 15 minutes before on my way to the car of a man that I wasn’t even fully sure of the name of, I answered “Everyone.” and i smiled, from ear to ear beaming, proud of humanity, proud our ability to open up our hearts, and proud of our resistance.

Gezi Is A Symbol

I grew up in Istanbul and left when I was 18, convinced that I would never return apart from on holidays to see my mother.  I had never been to Gezi Park till Tuesday 11th June.  I went to meet with friends, and as I walked through Taksim, a place we used to go to drink as kids, it looked so different to the place that I had visited so many times growing up.  They have been working the area for the last year and a half for public transport and the last time I was back the whole place was covered in road works.  That Tuesday, the pre-fab walls built around the road works had been taken down to form barricades to keep police water cannons out, the roads were half cobbled, half destroyed.  If you looked to your left you could see a full on war zone, cobblestones smashed, gas canisters on the floor, blood and if it had been visible; the tears of an entire nation, on your right the developing city that was Istanbul, with Burger King, Mcdonalds, large ads for Coca-Cola etc. (I didn’t get the memo, but apparently this is what progress looks like.)

Turkish people aren’t renowned for their environmental attitude; we only made recycling available two years ago, Gezi isn’t fully about a park, it’s about a lot of other things.  We are running out of public spaces (as are other parts of the world) to convene without purchasing things.  When you meet people to talk together, to laugh together, to cry togther you have to pay.  If you go to a bar you have to pay, if you go for coffee you have to pay, if you go for dinner you have to pay.  So what becomes of ‘public space’? It no longer becomes public, but private, and the building of a shopping mall is the perfect example.  

By building a shopping mall in one of the last green spaces in Istanbul the government is selling out our future, our future to be in a space where we can enjoy each others company without having to pay.  A future where we value environment instead of profit.  For both parties Gezi is a symbol of unity.  That is why we want to protect it and the government wants to destroy it.  We have seen through out history the incredible things that humans can accomplish through unity, through solidarity, and all social change comes about with people forming connections.  That is why it is so dangerous for the government, because we can accomplish through unity, and that is terrifying for them.  

When you see the images flying in from all over the world over the last 3 years, with Occupy, Sarajevo, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and many many more we can see that we are on the cusp of something huge; but we can only achieve that by putting aside our differences and concentrating on our similarities.  Turkey has been a perfect example of that, I don’t think that there is a cohesive political point that all the protesters have apart from; this is not what we want from our government.  The people we put in power who are meant to represent us, the police that we pay who are meant to protect us, are trying to crush us.  This is not democracy.  Democracy is not voting once every 4 years and then shutting up and dealing with backward, back street deals.  Democracy is being able to hold your governments accountable for the hurt they cause, for the loss they cause.  Democracy is being heard even if you are not the majority.  Democracy is us standing up for each other, and as long as we have hope that people are inherently good and that they will pull through for one another we have the strongest weapon in our hands.  Much more powerful than pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and guns.  

Change is coming, it is not going to happen overnight, but it is coming, and we will resist, we will occupy, we will sit in-front of water cannons, and take the blows of the police until the opposition drops its weapons, listens and acts.  The world is fed up, and it is in the interest of the status quo that we don’t hear each others stories of bravery, camaraderie and sorority.  We beat as one heart, the whole public of the world, we beat as one heart who wants a better world, who wants to leave the world a better place than the one we came into, we don’t want extremism, we just want to exist, to be together, to sit in a park, to enjoy the sunset.  That is why Gezi is so important, its a symbol of a beautiful future that could be…