Journal Update

June 26, 2008

Trip number 6, number 5 to Istanbul.

I’ve been a bit slack with the journal entries, and will try to be better this time. 30,000 feet over the north Atlantic, a mere 6 hours between Boston and Amsterdam, first leg of a two leg voyage. But how many legs, really?  From the safe mental space of Philadelphia, with all its complications to the more exotic, foreign and unknown space of Istanbul, cross roads of the world as the literature repeatedly states, is it just a mere 14hours? Or is it something more like a year, a lifetime, a world step sideways? And then what of the Iraqi mentality, the slow and methodical telling of stories that are not even worlds away but very simply unbelievable, what of that trip? Can it be done in a simple plane or does it take the full week to make the journey or maybe even the journey keeps being made, with arrival just a little bit closer each time I read the stories I have transcribed, each time I time I re-tell the recounting of a stress position, a “bad night,” a hand-cuffed trip from home to police station to the cold dirt cement floor splashed with icy water and metal bed of a “zinzana.”  Does my mind ever go that far? Or is it a trip I can never make but still somehow I will return home to show pictures of where I tried to go?
 
Susan has told me this time we will meet 4 victims, maybe 8, she’s not sure, Majid is not sure, no one is really sure.  They are arriving Friday, inchala, one day after I arrive in Istanbul.  I will use that day to sleep, acclimatize, maybe do some sight seeing, a boat trip up the Bosporus, maybe dinner in Taxim.  Will that relax me, get me in the mood, open up my ears and heart so that I can be the conduit I hope to be for the stories that will make me forget the glitter of sunlight between Asia and Europe?  The plane bounces a bit and I remember that I am afraid, I am never comfortable in a plane, always thinking that it may fall out of the sky and I with it, down into the black sharp waters below Greenland. I am afraid of the fall, and then afraid of the cold, but really, what have I got to fear? No one will chain me naked to a cell in December, and spray my naked body with water, my knees week with fear of the dog so close, teeth bared, barking, or make me dance for hours at a time, my hands cuffed behind my back, a hood on my head, to music that is loud and makes no sense.  I fear only a fall so fast I won’t feel a thing, a crash so sudden and sure that pain won’t have time to form.  Nothing that I will be sentenced to live with for the next three generations.
 
Istanbul this time: Kathleen, a playwright seeks stories and direction; Jennifer, a yoga instructor and one time actor whose one-woman monolog about Abu Ghraib moves people to tears and anger comes again to reconnect with something deeply human; Bill, a lawyer representing the firm, I haven’t met him yet; Majid, now my Iraqi friend who spent years studying to become a vet and is now on his way to law school,– he is the center of trust for the Iraqis; Mohamed, just a kid really, a young man who somehow found a job working for American lawyers in a crazy damaged city called Baghdad; Mahi and Ibrahim, the two interpreters living in Istanbul who help me understand – is it fair to ask them to translate and not feel the pain of what they hear?  A group of people brought together by fate, by war, by a story once told then many times told again of pain and injustice in a prison in the dessert worlds away....