Sevgi Soysal (1936-1976) was a Turkish and German writer. She was one of many people imprisoned for political reasons by the military junta following the coup of March 19th 1971. She spent eight months at the Yıldırım Bölge Women’s Ward in Ankara and over two months in forced exile in Adana. She wrote about her imprisonment inYıldırım Bölge Kadınlar Koğuşu which was published in 1976. She died of cancer the same year.
Two letters from writer Sevgi Soysal to husband Mümtaz Soysal, 1972
Yıldırım Bölge Women’s Ward, Ankara
25.06.1972
My dear Mümtaz,
Last night, I think it was before the head-count, the lights of the ward went out for a little while, I lifted my head and looked above – towards the barred window, with the belief that there was something bright, hopeful somewhere in the distance. The moon really was very round and shiny, laughing just like the moon of my childhood; I rested my head on the bar of my bed and stared at it for a long time. As a child, I would spend a lot of time wondering why the moon looked exactly like the face of a laughing person, I even asked why the moon laughed several time. I was told that the moon didn’t laugh, that there was nothing to laugh about, that the moon only looked like it was laughing. Yet, last night, when the lights of the ward went out, I felt I understood why the moon was laughing, or at least why it looked like it was laughing. The moon was laughing because it could see all of the world and the humans as a whole, at once, as well as their nice evolutions. It was laughing because it could watch the formations, slightly at a distance yet amplified. And I acquired some new, short-lived, strength by looking at the joyful reflection of this evolution, this formation on the beautiful face of the moon. Then, the lights of the ward came back on, the image of the moon drifted away, we lined up and waited to be counted.
Yıldırım Bölge Women’s Ward, Ankara,
3.08.1972
My dear Mümtaz,
I stood up and listened to the verdict given about me; I thought to myself, they gifted me with two months, thank god, and walked quickly without making the gendarmes wait. There you were standing, on the left, with your sun-burnt face and your eyes laughing behind sun-glasses. I had to walk past you, I did so laughingly. I’d really missed touching you, talking closely with you. But I had conditioned myself to make nothing of all the restrictions affecting me, us, to accept all these “no”s as endurable, bearable. I regretted it later, if only I had stayed next to you, thinking come what may, and held your hand, showing you my love – which I’m tired of transmitting from a distance – through the rushing flow of my blood.
But my being, which has turned into a sieve letting all this unbearable, accumulated pain through as if it was an insignificant liquid, kept on with this attitude. I went down the stairs, as if they weren’t the stairs which have been keeping me from you this whole time. What is there to care about if not this? But what “matters is the rose!” I only hope we’ve not made a mistake in our choice of the rose-
Then I waited in the custodial prison for a while, until the car came. After a short while, I returned to my handcuffs, bars, iron gate and all the things which I have grown familiar with over time. I laid in my bed and laughed for a long time about the fact that I was going to Adana instead of New York. Anyway, as my lawyer jokingly said, I got off lightly since the radio exists in Diyarbakır and Kars too.
They brought me to the courthouse this morning. As a witness for a case concerning the TRT1. Isn’t it funny that I’m taken in as a witness when I couldn’t even attend my own book’s trial2 ? Luckily, nothing surprises me anymore –
Sevgi
İSTASYON editions 