The Eagle and The Tortoise VO Draft
Chapter 1: Kebi Keç
Kebi Keç is a mythological creature that protects old books from worms. If I was a god,
that’s the kind of god I’d like to be. One that gets to spend long stretches of time in
libraries looking over the forgotten books, chasing the worms from their spines.
Kebi Keç was the name of the bookshop on the bottom floor of a building in
Diyarbakir. When we gathered in that same building in 2019 for a summer school, the
bookshop had become a factory for making false teeth. We were two stories up, in a
gallery that was to be the site of a ten day workshop on architecture and
urban planning. The participants were mostly graduate students, T urkish and
Kurdish, who were studying the city of Diyarbakir - known in Kurdish as Amed -
and the Kurdish towns and villages surrounding it. I try to memorize names: Zelen is
building a website showing satellite images of Sur, the old town, before and after the
war, documenting the neighborhoods that had been bulldozed
to stamp out the resistance that had grown in the narrow streets. Cemil is a
poet. Eray is working on ecology and the ways that the war has ruptured
relations to the landscape. Omer is the one with the big mustache.
Efrin, one of the organizers, is always drawing in a little notebook:
sketches of the landscape, the architecture, a pen serving as a record in places where
the cameras are forbidden. Aylin, whose father had been a soldier in the Turkish
military, is studying instances where the army bases bisected Kurdish villages,
cutting the community - some times even individual houses - in half. Rojda and
Ramazan are documenting the dams that have changed the landscape
here, that have flooded whole villages, blocking the routes of the guerrilla fighters
moving between mountains, under the guise of progress. I’m here to teach a
workshop, and with plans to make a film: to document the documenters.
Chapter 2: Aeschylus and the Tortoise
Do you know how the ancient Greek playwright, Aeschylus, died? He was out walking
one day when a tortoise fell on him. An eagle was carrying the tortoise in its talons,
looking for somewhere to drop it, to smash the shell and break open the meal inside. I
imagine that Aeschylus was bald. From above the sun reflecting on his shiny scalp
made it appear as a large smooth stone. Eagle sees the sun-reflecting rock- shaped thing
below, drops the tortoise, and: Bam! Just like that, the death of the father of tragedy.
A student, wearing a red scarf and a purple knitted hat, smiling and making a peace
sign.
The body of a woman face-down on a road, blank eyes of bombed out buildings either
side.
There’s something I like about this Aeschylus story: the different points of view it sets
up. The bird’s eye view, way up above, seeing everything spread out horizontally. And
then you’ve got tortoise eye view, right down there, in amongst everything. It’s google
maps satellite, versus street view. Artists like to see themselves up there with the birds,
getting the big picture in order to make sense of it all. They like to imagine they’re
separate and apart, that they have an elevated status. But, as the Aeschylus story shows
us, from that point of view you might mistake a bald head for a stone.
What about the tortoise? Well, the tortoise can’t see the big picture, she’s in the middle
of it all. The bird sees it, the tortoise lives it. But the tortoise will live for a long time,
maybe 100 years. Imagine 100 years of seeing the details in things. The bird has the
advantage of space, all laid out underneath. The tortoise has time.
Zelen tells us that the old city of Diyarbakir, called Sur, is a Unesco heritage
site. But the Unesco statutes only protect the walls: not what they hold
within them. Now, 40% of those neighborhoods have been destroyed. The old narrow
streets, navigable only by those who knew them were ideal for guerrilla warfare.
When we walk around on foot, the ruins of these
neighborhoods are hidden behind tall hoardings, the destruction masked by giant
advertisements for the ‘traditional Diyarbakir living’ condominiums that will be
built. The new houses don’t look anything like the traditional ones. Where the
old houses used to be crowded close together, shading the streets between
them and keeping them cool, now there are wide avenues between one
building and the next, each house a little island in a grid pattern, regular and
symmetrical. An organized architecture designed for surveillance.
At one location, because we are under the aegis of the Diyarbakir Chamber of
Architects, we are allowed to cross behind the hoardings and climb the stairs to an
old Armenian church. The caretaker greets us in three languages: first Kurdish,
then Armenian, then T urkish. Crossing the line is
crossing into another world.
Behind us we can see the backs of the buildings that appear, from the front, to be a
bustling commercial street. From this side they are a sieve of gun- shot scars, pock
marked masonry, barbed wire. ' No photos', says the caretaker. We wander
across the site, splitting into groups. In the old destroyed church is a room with
light filtering through broken glass. On the ground, sandbags. The sunlight, the
sandbags, the dust motes catching in the afternoon slant of light. It seems the
fighters have abandoned their posts for just a minute and
will return. It seems to be a film set, waiting for its actors.
When the caretaker catches up with us again he says: “In the 1960’s there were 48
cinemas in the city. After the 1980’s coup they were turned into mosques. But don’t
jump to conclusions. Before the genocide those cinemas were Armenian churches.”
During the 2013 siege, the Turkish government cut all water and electricity to this
3neighborhood, to try and drive the inhabitants out. Then, bulldozed their homes to
the ground. City planning as an act of war.
Chapter 3, The Ambassador and the Artist
Melchior Lorck was an artist and sometime-spy who travelled to the Ottoman Empire in
1555 to gather information for Ferdinand I, heir to the holy Roman Empire. Lorck was a
cartographer, and his mission was a proto-photographic one. Unlike later
artists, Melchior was not under the sway of what would become Orientalism: in 1555,
the uneasy alliance and equal power between the two empires was such that Lorck
approached his task with fear and respect. Most notably, he pioneered drawings from
an aerial perspective, laying out the land in meticulous, cartographic detail. Istanbul, a
city built on seven hills, affords a good selection of vantage points for those who would
be birds. Lorck’s eye is accurate, dispassionate, a kind of google earth. And, like google
earth, sometimes his gaze catches scenes that didn’t count on an aerial viewer. Two
lovers, spied between the rooftops. In those earth-bound days only the birds should
have seen them.
In 2016, the USA sold Turkey $7 million worth of bombs called ‘Bunker Busters’. The
only place Turkey would have need for these bombs is in the Qandil Mountains, to
target the underground bunkers of the PKK, The Kurdish Workers Party. Bombs are a
kind of metal bird, targeting from an aerial view, where, of course, they often mistake a
wedding for a riot, a journalists’ camera for a soldiers gun.
Her name was Deniz, which means Sea. At 18, having just finished school, she wore a
red scarf to the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey. When she was arrested, the court used the
color of her scarf as evidence of her anti-government politics: the red, they said, stood
for socialism. Deniz became a symbol for the Left of the injustice of the government.
The Girl With The Red Scarf.
In 2014, the year following Deniz’s arrest, I was sitting in a bar in Istanbul. The
country we were in was in the midst of a brutal war.
But in the city, the bars were open and the galleries and the
nightclubs. One night the art space we were running was graffitied with
anti-Kurdish slurs. The next day we painted over them. We shared that space with Syrian
artists and poets who had arrived in Istanbul. But we met less with the war within the
country we were in. Those affected were crossing other borders, tracing other routes
upon the map. For all these reasons we existed in a separate space to it, the war. Our
city was another country. ]
Later that same year I travelled to meet with Deniz’s lawyer. A friend became
worried that I’d fall foul of the authorities for meeting with associates of the
PKK.
So he made me load an app onto my phone, which would
trace my route and share it with him in real time.
I thought he was being over protective. But on the way
down there, between leaving my home and arriving in Antalya, the lawyer
stopped answering his phone. An afternoon of missed calls later, I gave up on our
meeting, and went to see Deniz’s mother, planning to try again with the lawyer.
Not realizing that in the course of my journey he had been arrested. And
the police now had his phone. That night when I arrived back in the tourist town I’d
made my base I crept around the edges of my hotel, looking for red and blue lights,
and feeling foolish.
Chapter 4 : The Ecology of Freedom
Zoom out and hover. Turn the globe. Zoom back in again. The 1960’s, on Bowery and
52nd. This was the loft of the New York Federation of Anarchists. One of the people
living there was a man by the name of Murray Bookchin. He was a Bronx born
anarchist, who had started out a communist - a marxist-leninist - but had grown
disillusioned with both the power grabbing and brutality of the communist state
experiments. (Later in his career Bookchin butts heads in Vermont politics with a
youngster named Bernie Sanders, whom he considers overly conservative.) Bookchin
decided that it wasn’t the distribution of power that was the problem - it was power in
and of itself, and so he began to reformulate his old communist views into something
new, a non-hierarchical form of self-governance.
The world described by Bookchin’s ideas is a clearly defined non-hierarchical society in
which the actions of every person are determined by the potential impact on the
environment and one another, all meant to maintain an ecological balance. Bookchin’s
ideas travelled in the form of a book, ‘The Ecology of Freedom’ translated into Turkish,
to the sole inhabitant of an island-prison in the Marmara sea - Abdullah Ocalan.
Ocalan’s political philosophy was evolving from standard 1970’s marxist-leninist
thought along the lines of IRA, FARQ, PLA, to something more novel: a radical,
feminist, ecological system of self- government. The theories developed by the bronx-
born immigrant joined the feminist theories of the Kurdish activist Sakine Cansiz, and
these and many others were woven together by the man in the island prison, into a new
political philosophy, known as Democratic Confederalism.
When you reach this page, stop reading, look up from the book and point your light at
the screen.
There is water everywhere, in Diyarbakir. On one field trip from our space at
Kebi Kec, we visit the series of concrete pools that catch water for the children to
play in. We visit the dams that have created artificial lakes where there used to be
rushing rivers. A whole economy has sprung up around them: tourist trips for
honeymooning couples on glass bottom boats that have been carried here across the
mountains. Bawer, one of the students, tells us his childhood village is under there,
6beneath the boats. The trick of the lakes is to look as if they’ve been there for ever.
More real than the memories of villages submerged.
Another day we leave the city and walk down into the valley of the Tigris, outside of
Diyarbakir, This valley is known as the gardens
of Hewsel, home to a species of tortoise called the Tigris Tortoise. It is here that the
agriculture that fed the city was grown, fruit trees, vast watermelons: Diyarbakir too,
was famous for its watermelons. Now the valley is for industrial forests, trees that
would be cut for timber, for the construction boom that drives Erdogan’s money and
power. These new trees draw too much water from the river, sucking it dry and
taking up land that used to provide fresh food for the city. The change took place
when Erdogan’s government downgraded this stretch of the Tigris from a river to a
stream, so that the ‘river-bank laws' no longer applied.
Performative language. Downgrade a river, the mighty Tigris re-worded into a
stream.
We’re sitting in amongst the trees, the rush of water behind our backs. The head of
ecology for the HDP - the Kurdish party - is speaking.
She says: "When we first came to power the priority was helping those whose
houses were destroyed, and the children in the old part of Diyarbakir that had been
the center of the fighting: who ran around the streets with their fingers in their ears
because they had become so accustomed to the shooting. Now, she said, I can
begin to turn my attention to what I was elected for: ecology."
Chapter 5: Longzoom
The long zoom is a spatial collapse, and leads to a kind of vertigo experienced when
using google earth: traveling from a virtual perspective in space to a single street in a
matter of seconds, the eagle swooping down to catch the tortoise in its claws. The
opening page of Google Earth is similar to the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photograph, taken
from the moon during the Apollo 8 mission. From Apollo 8, at the height of the Cold
7War, that photo represented an earth without boundaries. On Google Earth, we have an
entirely illuminated planet, on which night never falls. A planet seen from the
perspective not of one individual holding a camera, but by multiple satellites,
simultaneous perspectives from every angle, an earth perceived by orbiting machine
eyes.
Deniz was facing 90 years in prison for what the state was claiming as a performative
gesture: the wearing of a red scarf. The first place she was incarcerated was near her
home town of Antalya. But the state decided she was having ‘too much fun’ with all the
media attention, so they moved her to a high security prison in an isolated region. Here
she was placed in a cell with a group of women, high level commanders of the PKK, the
armed guerrillas Deniz was accused of being a part of. Deniz’s grandmother told me: In
our country, you can be in prison and then be the president of the country. Released
temporarily, pending a new trial, Deniz met with a smuggler who had been organized
for her by her cell mates. The smuggler took her to Diyarbakir, capital of the Kurdish
region, and from there, across the border into Rojava, in Syria and then to Iraq. Her
destination: the Qandil mountains.
Stop reading here. Point your light at the tracing paper that you took from your book
when you first arrived. See if you can make it into mountains.
The sound you are hearing is an improvisation by Ozan on the saz, around a folk
song that has version in Kurdish, Armenian and T urkish. It is called “Turnam
Gidersen Mardine, T urnam yare Selam Söyle”. “Turna” means crane. We chose this as
Deniz’s theme. The Crane, soaring above the mountains, crossing with ease. A
birds eye view. But in Greek myth, the Crane was the inspiration for the alphabet.
Ciphers in the sky: the beginning of being able to put things down, in words.
My Crane, if you go to Mardin
My Crane, say hello to my love
Behind the snowy mountains
8My Crane, say hello to my love
My Crane, if you go to Aktaş
Passing over the snowy mountains
Along with my people and my brothers
My crane, say hello to my love.”
This incarnation of Deniz in the Qandil Mountains became a symbol for both political sides.
The right said it proved their point, that the youth of Gezi were allied with terrorists.
The left media went to the mountains with their cameras, and filmed her with her
battalion.
Thinking about Deniz, I’d often idly follow links around the internet, letting Ocalan
lead me to Bookchin, to Krotopkin to ecology to the latest shipment of
arms from the US to Turkey, to the Russian anti-aircraft dispute. One time, through
this lackadaisical kind of travel, I arrived at a youtube channel that showed YPG
women performing theater on the side of a mountain.
The audience clap and laugh as they perform a slapstick satire of a Turkish court.
Red Rose, White Rose, it is called, and through the shaky recording
and the rise and fall of laughter, I strained to hear the lines. It seemed to be some
official proclaiming a rose to be an insurgent because of its color. Red Scarf, I
thought. I thought of the Chaplin poster on Deniz’s wall, and her mother telling me
that The Great Dictator was her favorite film. I also thought of Brecht, and how this
was the closest I had ever seen to his learning plays, in action. The videos continued
to scroll, one following another as they do in their own algorithmic chronology,
and this time it was men acting out the plays. It was a
competition. One man acting out a death is so involved, that he 8 remains prostrate,
immobile on the floor of the stage, as the audience whoop and holler and his
comrades bow. Eventually, when they try to rouse him, and pick him up by the
armpits, he is limp and weeping. I watch this one again and again, the fall, the
resurection. I hadn't thought about it: what the guerillas do for fun.
Chapter 6: The Politics of Resolution
‘Each era gets the map that they deserve’. The Qandil Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan,
where Deniz and her comrades were based, when you zoom in on Google Maps, looks
like crumpled paper, and then goes totally blank. Qandil is unreadable on Google Maps
for reasons of security (it’s a war zone), and for lack of profit (Google Maps is, after all,
the map our era deserves).
A new world map is guided by the politics of resolution. Sometimes, to be seen is
power. And so, there is the phenomena of ‘third world low-res’: North America exists in
higher res than Kurdistan. In other cases, withholding is power. Military bases, conflict
zones, where high res images could provide advantage to those other than the state. I’m
sure the Turkish military has satellite images of Qandil, to the highest resolution.
At a technology conference in Berlin I was helping a friend teach the same workshop
I would later lead in Diyarbakir. I got approached by a recruiter for the British
Intelligence, who offered me a job ‘nation building’ in Kurdistan. He knew that I had
been living in T urkey. I asked if I
could go to the interview, just to see, even if I wouldn’t do it. ‘You don’t fuck around
with these people’ he said. I asked for time to think. For six months I didn’t tell a
soul, turning it in my head. Could I do it, just to see, to try and understand how
power like that works? To spy on the spies, to get an inside view? But as I turned it, I
realized: I’d never know more than what was right in front of my nose. I’d not be the
one with the aerial view. I’d be the tortoise, but working for the eagle. A great cover
though: Artist. No one really knows what you are up to.
Deniz's mother gave me a pair of socks that belonged to her.
What a strange gift, I thought at the time, what a strange souvenir of an absent
person. What does it mean to stand in these socks? I know nothing more about
this person though we’ve both worn these woolen socks next to our skin. To back up
again, to the bird’s eye view, the bird might say these are the socks of a terrorist,
or a freedom fighter, depending on where you stand. Or where she stands in
relationship to where you stand.
Back to the tortoise, it doesn’t matter what side of the map you are on. The tortoise,
and the fighters, move as if those boundaries did
10not exist. The fighters, fighting to dissolve those borders, are already moving in total
disregard of them. The fighters move in the future tense.
Chapter 7: The Aerial and the Subterranean
When did the artist begin to think of themselves as a bird? In the mid-1880’s a
frenchman named Nadar was the first person to take a photograph from a hot air
balloon, and he imagined the commercialization of his new technique in two ways:
Warfare recognizance, and the settling of property disputes. Space and the subterranean
are deeply linked in the visual imagination. After Nadar made his photographs from a
balloon, and created a dirigible (which would inspire the Zeppelin), he invented a
means of artificial lighting that allowed him to photograph the Paris catacombs. To see
from above, to see from below. The earth’s surface was no longer an obstacle to the
probing of human eyes. Imagine if the long zoom of google earth penetrated the soil
and went under. Virtual excavation. From the stars to the buried bones.
Stop here. Point your light down at the ground.
The needle hasn’t changed design in 12,000 years, Nor the fishhook.
In Diyarbakir, behind the archeology museum, there is an area that is taped off.
We duck under it, and our guide, a local archeologist tells us:
"This is where the excavation stopped. They found bones: mass graves from the Armenian
genocide. And so they stopped the excavation, although there are centuries of
information down there." On the way back, we make a detour to the site of
a Roman catacomb, the remains of a massacre. The floor is clear plexiglass, raised
above the skulls and curled skeletal remains.
What an earth of buried bones we live on.
The workshop ends, and say we goodbye to the students, but I linger in the south
east.
I want to visit to Nusaybin, a city half in Turkey, half in Rojava.
In Nusaybin the economy is based on dollars. ‘Why?’, I ask the taxi driver. His reply:
‘Do you remember why they invaded Iraq?’ At the checkpoint they ask him: Is she
Turkish or a foreigner. British, we say. They laugh and wave us through,.
The taxi driver used to bring soldiers, special forces, back and forth across this border
his taxi, in 2015 at the height of the war. Before being a taxi driver he was a people-
smuggler, and in the war those boundaries blurred again. Were people here
sympathetic to the PKK during the war? I ask. Everyone, he replies.
On Lonely Planet there are discussion boards checking how hard it is to cross this
border. Why would you go, it’s a war zone, someone asks. Dude, that’s the point,
replies another. The taxi driver takes us there: To our right, it just keeps going.
Watchtowers, wire. The stretch of land between the road and the wire he tells us, is
mined. On the other side, YPG, PKK. The troops Deniz was fighting with.
What is this? Amateur ethnography, anthropology, cartography?
maps for a war tourist.
Chapter 8: Hermes and The Tortoise:
There is a Greek myth, in which Hermes, son of Zeus, finds a tortoise. Looking at it, he
has an idea. ‘Tortoise’, he says, ‘I would like to do you a great honor. I would like to
transform you into music, and you will profit from it.’ Without waiting for her to
answer he picks her up, scoops out the flesh of her, and strings the empty shell with gut.
He begins to play beautiful music. He uses the beauty of the lyre as a lure, a distraction,
in order to steal. Trying this trick on Apollo he is caught, red-handed, with stolen sheep.
He offers Apollo the lyre as payment, and the instrument is instrumentalized: the
corpse becomes currency.
This sound you’re hearing? It’s a hymn being played on a tortoiseshell lyre.
Sound continues.
If you find this story interesting, you are not alone, Jake Gyllenhaal does too.
It's one of the reasons that I didn't make that film about Deniz in Diyarbakir.
Because Jake Gyllenhaal was already making it.
His film was supposed to be about an American guy from Portland who went to
Rojava to fight with the YPG. For the last few years, Western leftists, hearing about
this attempt to carve a non-hierarchical anarchist utopia out of the war, started going
to Syria to join the YPG and fight the Islamic State, and that got lots of news articles
written about it in Rolling Stone, and now, Jake Gyllenhaal is going to star in a
movie about a white guy from Portland who somehow survived every battle
unscathed while his Kurdish comrades fell around him.
There is no Hollywood end to the story. The US and Europe had labelled the
group Deniz was fighting with a terror organization for decades, but facing the
Islamic State, those fighters became the Americans’ most trusted ally, and in
exchange, America promised support for their aims once the battle against ISIS had
been won.
Deniz fled her home to fight against the Turkish government, for an
organization with an explicitly anti-American, anti-capitalist,
ideology, and then she was deployed to the assault on the Islamic State, backed by
American war planes. War planes dropping the same bombs that are sold to Turkey,
who are dropping them on the bases that the fighters are coming from.
Then Deniz was killed by an ISIS bullet, and then the US, and Europe, reneged on
the promise that had led her into battle in their stead.
Deniz’s story, even after her death, is changing. In Turkey, when her friends, and leftists
and activists were honoring her life and celebrating her bravery, nationalists and fascists
were using her death to taunt other activists, threatening them with the same fate. Like
Hermes used the tortoise to make music, the violence of her death was being exploited
by others for their own ends. What good do the images do? I have film of her mother,
telling me the stories of her, film of the mountains, film of the fighters, film of the
protests: her own image, that was weaponized and sent around and around and around.
So no more images. This is story that longs for quiet, some words can be spoken only
by your own voice, inside your own head.
Chapter 9: Reading Aloud
Deniz’s martyr name is Destan Temmuz, which means July. She was named for the
young high school activists from Turkey who were traveling to rebuild Kurdish towns
one July. Posing for a photo together before they started work, a suicide bomber blew
them up. Destan Temmuz - I take that name to mean that she, like those young activists,
was fighting for a cause that was not her own.
Reading silently to oneself is a fairly modern invention. Used to be, to read, was to
sound out. Even to oneself. When did both the reader and the listener move beneath the
surface? And what does it change? Bertolt Brecht, while in exile in Hollywood, was
writing a Fritz Lang film about the Nazis. Researching for the film, he discovered a
Czech flyer with a roughly drawn tortoise on it, and a message saying ‘Slow Down’.
These flyers had been distributed around munitions factories in Nazi-occupied
Czechoslovakia. They calculated that if every worker slowed down by just 10 minutes,
they would have the same affect as taking out an entire battalion of the Nazi army.
Brecht wrote a poem based on this image, called In ‘The Sign Of The Tortoise’. Could I
ask you to read it aloud? You can read it as loud or as soft as you like. As slow as you
like. Read it aloud for yourself, or aloud for the others:
Audience read aloud, at different volumes and different speeds
“Soon the tortoise image appeared as if drawn by children,
On the walls of the factories,
On the asphalt floors of the bomber shipyards,
In the tool boxes of the workers.
And where the little one showed herself, awkward and slow,
The tanks crawled weakly from the halls,
The bombers rose up sickly,
The submarines multiplied listlessly,
The procreation of the barren and deadly ones stagnated.
14The heraldic animal of the lower classes fought
With the heraldic animal of the upper ones.
The tawny eagle of the empire unwillingly leaves the nest alone:
And the turtle eats the eggs that were full with disaster.”
Stay on this page until everyone has finished reading aloud. When the room is quiet
again, turn the page together and keep reading, silently.
Chapter 10: Final Perspective.
There was a cult of the tortoise, long ago, in the region around Diyarbakir. Fragments of
pots, bones, the shells of tortoises under glass in the archeology museum. Arranged as if
for ritual, but what?
The labels say ‘use unknown’. Time doesn’t always bring perspective.
The bullet that killed Deniz was an American one. I mean, one intended for an
American. In her final battle she was fighting as a proxy for American troops against
ISIS in Raqqa, Syria. What an unholy alliance, the radical feminist ecological revolution,
in service of the world’s greatest empire. But war makes strange bedfellows, and the US
promised the Kurdish troops support in their own aims, if they fought this battle for the
USA. And so she stepped out and took the bullet, intended for an American. And now
the promise that led her to that bullet, that led that bullet to her, has been broken.
Melchior Lorck, the ambassador and spy who made those drawings and maps of
Istanbul, created, at the end of his life, a strange sketch. It depicts a giant tortoise
floating above an urban scene, eyeing the world below in confusion and suspicion.
Neither the quiet proximity and longevity of the tortoise, nor the soaring perspective
through space of the eagle.
Here am I, are we, in the worst of both viewpoints: The lumbering giant in the sky,
impossibly airborne.