Efe Murad’s The Pleasures of Empty Lots: Scenes of Istanbul 2015–2016 (BWolves, 2021), from which “Throw the Stone” is excerpted, is the ambulatory story of a day that’s the story of a year that’s the story, among other embedded stories, of the smothering atmosphere foreshadowing societal disintegration in Turkey during the months preceding the attempted coup of July 2016.
For Efe personally, this was a stretch when the Cambridge, MA–based poet, historian, and translator (of Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, et al.), back in his native city to conduct manuscript research, found himself cooped up in his parents’ apartment, subject to random police pat-downs on the street, and desperate to inhale some intellectual oxygen.
Setting off on a quest for an empty bench and the headspace to edit his poems in peace, Efe leads the reader on a soulfully arrhythmic, grid-slipping excursion (mapped by Begüm Tanrıverdi Bölükbaş, with GIS overlays emphasizing the crush of concrete), evading the maw of a regime intent on jackhammering every last undeveloped patch conducive to solitude and subcultural camaraderie.
Many thanks to Seval for recording this extract while on the road. For those who’d like to read along:
Throw the Stone
Yenikapı Çıkmazı is a blind alley a couple of blocks east from Lycée Saint-Joseph, on the other side of Şifa Sokak. The steep staircase leading down to the coastline at the end of the alley is, in my opinion, the very best spot in Kadıköy to admire the sunset on serene summer nights while smoking a spliff with the Sea of Marmara sparkling at your feet. It must surely be one of the most scenic dead-ends in the world.
Here is where I would freely roll my spliffs, edit my poems, and hang out with friends for hours on end. These stairs are also where, in 1969, the legendary Turkish hard psychedelic rock band Bunalım was formed. “Throw the stone if you have the guts,” they chanted, in their famous leftist punk mantra “Taş Var Köpek Yok,” which adapted a millennia-old Vedic Sanskrit poem about facing down the king’s guard dog.
And so I did, in my way—pen in fist, notebook in hand—at the end of the day, at the end of Yenikapı Çıkmazı, in Istanbul, in the early summer of 2016.
