When I was young, one of the most rewarding activities for me was searching for books that my parents had brought from their past. These books included first editions of popular Turkish literature and translations of works by Dickens or Proust. I wanted to preserve them, similar to how nature preserves extinct creatures in ancient Baltic amber.

During high school, my boyfriend and I immersed ourselves in existentialism. We would keep buying used philosophy books from the sahaf who was selling them by the Teşvikiye mosque. My boyfriend helped me build a great collection of works by Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. We branched out to Kafka and Kierkegaard because Beauvoir and Sartre referenced them. Our classmates were interested in fashion, while we were intrigued by philosophy. We had aspired to be the Turkish Sartre-Beauvoir, but our aspiration didn’t last a year.

During college, I traveled across the Atlantic many times, each time with at least one suitcase filled with books. I brought Turkish books to the US and English books to my mother’s house in Türkiye. When it was time to return home from college, I shipped my books from my dorm library to Türkiye via ground mail. My books traveled across the Atlantic to meet me at home, a journey that lasted three months. Upon their arrival in Istanbul, they were held by Turkish customs officers and sent to a processing center. The large number of books must have raised suspicion, as I was required to open each box. Showing my markings to the customs officers in those books made me feel too exposed.

What were they? Why so many? How long had I stayed in the US to acquire all of them? Were they all used? What was the point of bringing them home if I had already read them? Were there any new books? Did I intend to sell them in Türkiye? After a painstaking interrogation that lasted at least ten minutes, a customs officer guided me from one booth to the next in a Kafkaesque fashion to see what they could do about my books. When my father came to solve my problems by reminding the officers about their legal boundaries, I had already told the clerks enough about my relationship with books to entertain them for a decade. I didn’t mind that, but it hurt to give them a written declaration stating that my college books were of no value. Thanks to my father, they never learned I was ready to pay them any price to get my books out of there.

After rescuing my books from the customs office, I thoroughly cleaned and dusted them. I then visited several thrift stores in my library to find the perfect shelves for each subject. I chose a mahogany shelf with ornate Ottoman-style carvings for my play collection. Initially, I kept Turkish and English books on the same topic on separate shelves but later arranged the shelves bilingually.

When I married, it took some time before I let my husband’s library merge with mine. We needed to ensure that there was no breach of privacy. As we became more comfortable living with each other, our books started mixing. My theater section was especially fond of his movie section. There were occasional tensions about the misplacement of specific books or lending others to friends without telling each other first. Nevertheless, our libraries and we got along quite well for the most part.

After our child joined our family, we realized that our current shelves wouldn’t be safe for our child. We had to part with them and went to the nearest IKEA to buy a set of oak-veneered Billy bookcases. These new bookcases could easily be secured on the walls and had doors that a baby or a toddler couldn’t easily open. Our library no longer felt distinctly ours
*
I once watched a feminist adaptation of King Lear by a German theater company. The play explored the relationship between fathers and daughters in present-day Germany. The actresses invited their fathers to the performance to discuss their relationships. The performance shed light on the socio-economic challenges faced by Germany due to its aging population. The problems between the four father-daughter duos were poignant and bittersweet. One duo stood out. This duo discussed what would happen to the father’s library when he moved to his daughter’s house in the city. The daughter calculated that her father’s library would take over about two-fifths of her tiny apartment. She argued that transferring her father’s library to her apartment was out of the question. I found this to be the most tragic moment in the story. No other Lear adaptation had affected me so strongly. The realization that our books may one day become a hassle to someone hit me hard, granting I would never imagine them becoming a hassle to me.
*
The first request to part with some of my books came from my father. He was a philanthropist and was renovating his derelict elementary school, turning one section into a village library. Since he knew I had more books than I needed, he asked me to donate some of them to this library until he found additional grants to expand the library’s collection. I don’t remember why I got so angry at my father for even suggesting I could give away my books. I started producing all sorts of excuses to prevent it. Most of my books are in English! No one will read them. Plus, my books are discipline-specific. Why would anyone be interested in reading so many books on theater or cinema? My father was disappointed in me. Not because I didn’t want to give away my books, which was quite understandable, he said, but because I had so many presumptions about the profile of a village library reader. I felt slightly embarrassed. I went home and began putting aside the least favorite editions of my double and triple copies.

Fortunately, a close friend of my husband, who worked as a film magazine editor, mentioned that he needed to downsize his book collection as he was relocating from his current office. We offered to donate his books to the village library to help him out. To avoid discomfort, my husband and I packed up the books he wanted to donate and prepared them for delivery to the village library. Even though we told my father that the generous donation was from a friend, it brought him more joy to believe that most of the books came from us. This donation troubled me. It was the first time I had seen someone wanting or needing to get rid of his books. Until then, it had seemed like a first-world problem.
*
It was 11:00 pm, and I was going to my husband’s office with two tote bags filled with books. Earlier today, my lawyers asked me if I owned any books on Kurdish politics and history that could get me into trouble. After the meeting, I went through my library and separated any book with “Kurd” or “Kurdish” in the title. I thought of my mother telling me how my father had to part with all his books on socialism during the 1980 coup in Türkiye.

“What are you doing here?” my husband asked.

“I needed to bring our books on Kurdish history and politics to your office,” I replied. “The lawyer asked me to do so. They will count as evidence if the police come to our house.”

“You could have asked for help,” he said.

“I wanted to take them out of the house immediately.”

“I see,” he said.

“I would have never imagined having to do this. It feels surreal.”

“The government and police will direct their attention elsewhere as soon as they feel that they have intimidated the academics enough, which they have obviously.”

“Don’t tease me.” I lost my will.

“Don’t let the lawyers scare you too much.”
*
We were downsizing, knowing that our days in our home country were limited. My husband spoke with his bookseller friend, who visited to discuss what he could sell in his second-hand bookstore. My husband and his friend shared stories about selling books together in Kadıköy when my husband was studying at the university. During this time, they learned how to pack books in large quantities properly. They mentioned that a banana box was ideal for transporting books, as it could hold as many books as you could fit in that box. That’s how we parted with the Turkish section of the library.

Since the remaining books were in English, we considered donating them to a foreign library. We reached out to our acquaintances and friends in neighboring countries for assistance. As a member of the European Cultural Parliament, my husband had often traveled to Georgia and knew of institutions that could benefit from our collection. The complex logistics of transporting books across borders and the high cost of such an operation, even when the books were donated, were challenges we had to address on our own. These challenges kept us occupied.

So did our legal troubles while leaving the country. As we carefully packed and insulated our library for its long journey, some photos and documents slipped through the crevices of thick books, revealing our secrets. We didn’t necessarily want each other to discover them, yet we were sending those secrets into the world for anyone to see. We would soon discover that exile meant exposure anyhow.
*
My husband left our home early the following day with our library. He began his two-day journey on a bus that frequently carried Caucasian immigrant workers between Türkiye and Georgia. A few weeks later, we left Türkiye with only a few books and magazines from our library, mainly containing our own writing.
*
Our friend, the bookseller, passed away from a heart attack a few years into our exile. With him gone, it felt like we had lost the last person with paper traces of us somewhere. I found one of the few books I had brought from Türkiye, left the house, and sat by the river, reading a collection of Italo Calvino’s stories. After finishing each page, I tore it and let it float in the water. As I watched the ink smudge on the pages and dissolve into the river, I felt the heaviness of ephemerality.

 

Burcu Seyben is an asylee academic, playwright, director, and writer of creative non-fiction from Türkiye. Since 2017 Seyben has been rebuilding her life and writing in the US. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in The RavensPerch and Door is a Jar Literary Magazine.