Where does writing get you? Or ...

‘2017 will be a good year.’ That is the message you set out to give on the last day of the year in your column that will appear on the first day of the new year. You wake up in the morning to 39 dead and 65 injured.

You are gripped by a sense of deep hopelessness and scary fallibility. Sentences reeking of hopelessness and pessimism like, ‘Suppose I just pack in this damned job?’ followed by, ‘Where does writing get you in this country and in this world? You’ve been scribbling away for years and what’s changed, what’s got sorted out?’ fly around your head.
Then you fixate on a more scary and more devastating question:
- Have we lost?
The toxic question plunges like a knife into your heart and the depths of your brain and you embark on a self-reckoning from your early youth right until today. You would rather dodge it. It shows no pity. It sticks firmly in your consciousness and memory, inside you, like a stubborn hook.
The day you first heard the word socialism flashes into your mind as if it were yesterday. You even recall your excitement and how you muttered, ‘I must learn. I will learn.’
Then you recall the evenings in a mountain village in a high, snow-filled valley north of Erzincan when you read Jean Baby’s Fundamental Principles of Political Economy in the light of a number seven gas lamp, first not really understanding, then grasping a little, then getting it and finally mastering it.
You are young, very young. No sooner have done your military service than you go and sign up with the Turkish Workers Party.
Even today you consider your teachers to be a source of pride. Behice Boran, Cemal Hakkı Selek, Sadun Aren, the tailor Garo from Bomonti ... 
Still ringing most clearly in your ears now is Behice Boran’s deep, hoarse voice that was instructive even when, first having pursed his lips, he reprimanded, ‘Socialism is not pity felt for the poor. Do not get up and wander around saying, “I am a socialist” without having learnt about Marxism, historical materialism and dialectical thinking.’
Recollections dredged up from the depths of your memory since your early youth until today jump out and line up before you.
Then, you begin to question your life journey right up to the point where you ask, ‘Have we lost?’
Have we lost to religious jiggery-pokery, blind and blinded faith, to a capitalism that has found and succeeded in finding remedies that will prolong its existence and hegemony?
Hollow utterances make an entry, eager to console you and ease the heartache and ward off the barbed questions. Never despair! You try to come to terms with yourself and what you have believed to be correct from your early youth until now.
You begin to ponder over the failure of each attempt to establish socialism since the Paris Commune and how they all disappeared from the face of the earth without attaining their goal. You ponder over the attempt to establish socialism in the Soviet Union, to which you pledged firm allegiance in the unswerving belief that it would attain its goal, over the current state of the Yugoslavian soil on which Tito sowed the seeds of his ‘self-government model’, over China, where capitalism has reared up under Communist Party leadership, over Vietnam, forced to sit in the lap of the IMF, financial capital’s world policeman, over militarist North Korea that appears to have embarked on nonsense worthy of the name ‘dynastic socialism’, or over Cuba, which has been deprived of the support of the disintegrating socialist system and is under a merciless siege by capitalism.
You face the question ‘Is this a chain of defeat?’ full square and unswervingly seek answers even if you are hurting inside.
Then ...


***
 
Then, on the morning of a desolate day shrouded in ash-coloured clouds, on the first day of the new year, that consciousness-illuminating sentence of the great teacher comes and holds your hand:
- The river of humanity flows slowly. But it keeps on flowing. It keeps flowing forward.
You remember the day when you first heard that sentence from Cemal Hakkı Selek.
- Will we witness the revolution, Cemal?
The reply came with a sorrowful smile at the corner of his lips:
- Marx says, son, ... Marx says, ‘The river of humanity flows slowly. But it keeps on flowing.’ Would it not be wrong to compare the slowly flowing river with your own brief life?
You shake yourself. Those in the sky are beyond your power, but you dispel the black clouds from your brain, consciousness and heart. You sit at your desk and write, deriving pleasure from your anger.
You repeat with obstinacy and belief:
- 2017 will be a good year. A freer and more just year. If not, then 2018. If not, then 2019. We are rowers and sailors in that slowly-flowing river. We are children who do not perceive the river’s meanders to be retreats or the slowness of its flow to be defeat.
Once more, I wish everybody a good new year.