“Every night, when I approach my mother, I find shelter from the cold and from loneliness.”
There is a persistent, private chill that threads through the bones as one reads The Cold Nights of Childhood (Crocetti, translation by Massimiliano Calvia). It is the cold of a youth matured in restlessness, of a life burned quickly in the search for meaning, of a fragmented soul that has never been fully rebuilt and told through objects, scents, desires, repression, and bursts of proudly defiant rebellion. Tezer Özlü narrates a life marked by mental illness, but that is not all: within her tale there is an unconventional and courageous fresco of an existence, constructed through an act of accumulation, a gathering of images, a reordering of moments, seen through a steadfast gaze in which past and present never proceed in a linear fashion.
The connections of memory overlap
From the countryside to Berlin, to Paris, to Istanbul, the connections of memory overlap, fitting together: the despotic father with the whistle in his mouth, the grandmother and the mother at his service, the narrow rooms of a childhood marked by severity, by discipline, by the suffocating rules of frugality: a house without love, then a religious and rigid school, another cage in which to shrink. In the background, a myopic province and a repressive society, shaped by the discipline of the Turkish State.
There is no warmth in the author’s life, except in a few rare moments of closeness with her sister and mother: temporary refuges from the surrounding cold that, little by little, begins to invade from within.
For the protagonist, hungry for life and unabashed, there is no voice of self-pity; instead, there is a gaze cast outward toward others, toward the elsewhere as promised land. Amid days marked by responsibilities and duties, by nuns and rules, watching buses depart becomes the dream of a possibility, fueling an envy of life, movement, and escape.
Leaving is the word of this book, painful and moving.
“I want to go out into the streets, to look at the roads, of which I never tire, to discover new corners, to observe strangers, to assimilate the ravenous existence, from eyes to heart“.
Raccontare cosa significa essere vive
The words of Tezer Özlü gouge the ice of existence with bare hands, in the attempt to understand and to tell what it means to be alive, gouge and describe how one can remain spellbound by the beauty of a field, by the blush of the sun, only to find oneself in immobilized time, long in duration, whether on a hospital bed or along the streets of a foreign city, in the arms of a man or in complete solitude. There are images to dream for the child protagonist, pink images like Grace Kelly’s dresses, belonging to an unreal world, there are thoughts of death in the cold, damp reality of days marked by darkness that falls early, there are hospitalizations that become flashes of white, ice-cold, in an objectively realist world from which one cannot escape. These are moments that mingle with memories, with rebellions against conventions, with the body used as a field for liberation and emancipation.
Indeed, the elsewhere is, par excellence, travel, the discovery of places and cities; the protagonist seeks it and ends up finding it even in sexuality, a space of freedom and experience, of rejection of conventions, rules, and modesty: the body and its desire to experiment are told in the most complete and pure honesty as a form of resistance.
The Cold Nights of Childhood is the story of a restless yet free, unconventional, and courageous spirit. It is a tale of unease and self-assertion, of curiosity toward the world, of attraction to others; it is a shiver, the whispered message of those who suffer but do not accept either the constraints of institutions or the humiliations of hospitalizations. Tezer Özlü herself, just like Sylvia Plath, is inhabited by a scream.
“We grow within the bosom of anger. We grow by feeling anger toward the shantytowns where we live, the streets, the rooms, the beds—cotton, old—that we warm with difficulty in the winter months. Life is found only in the streets. There is, as if, a vitality for the streets.”
A collage of narrow spaces and broad fields, between wonder and pain
Traveling through the places of her life, between wonder and pain, childhood and adulthood, The Cold Nights of Childhood builds a collage of narrow spaces and broad fields, in a narrative disorder carried by energy, in a vulnerable and honest nostalgia that, while loving life, ends up habituating itself to death. Politics stays in the background, like a reminder of a weight: the weight of institutions and society, which leaves traces in homes, in families, in daily life, and marks the protagonist in her desire to move freely to think and act, beyond the limits of petty bourgeoisie.
It is through this fragmentary writing that the author tells of her Turkey, of her Europe, of her short and brave life, moving back and forth in time, reassembling a memory without imposing our ordering on it. It is a writing that leaps through time, aware that a moment is full of events that outrun the times, fed by the obsessions that drag the author downward, and linking them in a circularity of desire, pleasure and torment.
And in the book’s relentless movement, the same echo returns to us readers, again and again, as an impulse, a necessity, perhaps a form of salvation: to go away, to go away, to go away.
“One day, I, too, will know distant worlds,” I think within myself.
