A Blind Cat Black, Ece Ayhan

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language: Turkish (English tr. Murat Nemet-Nejat)
country: Turkey
year: 1965
form: poetry
dates read: 31.12.22

Ece Ayhan’s A Blind Cat Black (translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat) is a short collection of prose poems offering fragmentary images of a sailor’s life, but also poking around among (and as part of) communities who have been excluded from mainstream Turkish culture and society: Jews (it’s mildly haunted, in particular, by Salonica), Black people, Arabs, lgbtq people, and others.

everything about it is fragmentary: sentence fragments, repetitions, and unfinished thoughts abound. the back cover blurb says a reviewer of the translation in 1997 described this and the other collection it was published with, Orthodoxies, as “a virtuosic study of what you can do with lyricism denied, besides choke on it” — but I think what’s interesting here is that it seems like he is choking on it. these are glimpses of something silenced.

I think I liked it, but I also think I’m going to have to reread it — there’s a lot going on and I know I didn’t process it all.

moods: dark, horny, mysterious


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