Afinidades

This could be Henri Rousseau’s painting titled “The Dream” (1910) or it could actually be a true representation of me wandering in Guatemala for the next couple of weeks. My first language is Spanish and not Turkish. I entered the world and grew up hearing both languages of course, but the intimate world built between me as a baby and my mother had sounds, scents, forms, words that came from my mother’s country. As my first land was my mother, the first language of love I learned was Spanish. 

I often see dreams that involve languages I cannot read or seem to understand. I receive cards that are written in another language, or read from screens that involve symbols that mean basically nothing. Going back to Guatemala, the “roots”, my grandmother’s house, the lakes, volcanoes, all the flora I have no vocabulary for, makes me feel like I’ll go back to that initial phase where there were no words but feelings. Raw feelings, non-verbal memories and gestures of love, that first stage of infancy we’ll never remember fully (and don’t need to) but can intuitively feel close to in some moments. Guatemala is that kind of dreamworld to me.