Hollow-tel
Maria do Céu Costa, Portugal
Nazım Balcı is a Ph.D. candidate in English Language and Literature and is currently working at Bahcesehir University as an English Language Instructor.
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Background
The poem
Museums have always been my point of interest. They prevent forgetting, refresh our memory, teach us –however subjective it may be- history, culture and arts of our ancestors. Yet, they are institutions and this implies authority and manipulation, which, therefore, present people what authorities desire them to see/learn/remember.
This hotel that I employ as the “protagonist” of my poem is neither a museum nor an intentional site of tribute or the like. Bombarded during 1974 Cyprus Turkish Peace Operation (another ironic name like America’s War on Terror), the hotel is located in Maraş (Varosia) which is now nominated as a “ghost city” and is UN’s buffer zone. It used to be a remarkable holiday place with its golden beaches. The Maraş part of the beach is fenced and separated from the one that people still enjoy today.
That word in italics is, in fact, the reason why I felt the need to write such a poem. It is extremely ironic. Each and every pixel of the scenery is nothing but the traces of violence, of wars, of humanity! The hotel, quite uncannily, watches you enjoy yourself. And you do enjoy yourself in that beautiful sea during the day. Retrospectively, however, you do realize that the hotel makes you remember, talk about it, tell the (hi)story to children- again, however subjective it may be. In other words, the hotel itself is a natural museum, free from its manipulative aspect, but not free to realize itself.
This hotel and its function... Nothing but art.
Hollow-tel
That historical hollow
From far made me follow
When closer its the war
A hotel on the shore
Like a dead god’s eyes
Those black holes
They still see
To make me see to see
A hotel on the shore
And I am sea.
Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s 1862 poem “Dying” (I heard a fly buzz).
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