COMANDANTE CHE GUEVARA Bedros Dağlıyan
Türkçe
COMANDANTE CHE GUEVARA Bedros Dağlıyan
We were young. But we were not in a rush. I can say that we had gathered all the fast, wild aspects of youth. When we added the traditional bully attitude of the people of Diyarbakır to this, we considered ourselves as fearless of almost nothing… Years later, when we bent and broke like young willow branches, we would understand how much we had been hit and defeated…
We all read a lot. We read and discuss constantly. We gather at home, on the street, at school and talk about books, philosophers and philosophy. Of course, there is entertainment in our lives; we have somehow included those entertainments in our struggle… So much so that sometimes we get beaten; we laugh and laugh even at that. We live life to the fullest, hard but with the utmost pleasure.
We talk about the revolution, the revolutionaries. Socialism, communism, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao are among our main topics. We read the long march of the Soviets and the Chinese people many times.
Of course, the unforgettable revolutionaries of March 12th never leave our minds. Mahir, Deniz, Hüseyin, Ulaş, Yusuf and my countryman Ömer Ayna are among those we always talk about and draw inspiration from…
We recognize them all from the wanted photos hung on the wall. We cannot help but remember Garbis Altunoğlu, the older brother of my middle school classmate Rafael. One day, I recognize the Cuban revolution and the two brave revolutionaries who helped that revolution succeed. We recognize Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara.
“No matter where and how death comes from... If our war slogans will spread by word of mouth and our weapons will pass from hand to hand and others will lament our funerals with machine gun sounds, war and victory cries, death is welcome, it is pure...”
This long sentence becomes our slogan; when the time comes, we say this to the person in front of us like a parrot... The photo of Che in a shop window draws me in, as if... Comandante Che Guevara looks at me with his cigar in his hand and his big smiling face. I took the black and white photo with this slogan on it. I pasted it on a piece of hardboard and hung it on the wall of my room.
When I enter my room, a smiling Che greets me with my bookshelf... Later, the Şemsi Yastıman saz my uncle bought would also be on that wall with its tassel on its neck... There was a photo of a smiling nazim with the poem “The Answer” on the saz.
That wall
That wall of yours,
We don’t give a damn!
The speed in our power,
It is not from the smoky promise of a clergyman,
Or from the heartbreak of a dream.
It is only
It is from the unstoppable flow of history.
We gather with friends and either talk about books or sing folk songs in unison. How much we love listening to Karacaoğlan, Dadaloğlu from Ruhi Su. Oh, if only you knew where Rahmi
Saltuk Ahmet Arif's poem ""İçinde" was carrying us, me.
"Do you know that the stone wall/Demi door, blind window/My pillow, my bunk, my chain/For the sake of which I went and came to deaths/The sad picture in my stash/Do you know?" When he said it all in unison:
My interviewer sent green onions/ My cigarette smells of carnations/ Spring has come to the mountains of my country” We say it in such a way that our voices blend into the darkness of Diyarbakır’s rose-scented evenings and go far away…
When the time came for us to leave Diyarbakır, I distributed most of my books to my friends there.
I left that smiling photo of Che to Saba, who loved him as much as I did. She had said, laughing, “They will call me ‘Goshist’ now”…
Now I don’t have a photo of Che on my wall. I don’t have that kind of madness anymore. My hair has fallen out and turned white. Despite this, my heart still beats so hard when I think of Che and the revolution together that the words of that brave revolutionary come to my mind immediately: “I didn’t laugh at the poor, I didn’t envy the rich, I didn’t love the fascists, I didn’t beat the oppressed, I was born a revolutionary, I will die a revolutionary.”
