Emre Soncan, a journalist who was detained in Silivri Prison for 1260 days, shared his feelings with a letter he wrote.
Prison notes from Emre Soncan: I am lack of love here
In Emre Soncans letter titled “Give birth to dreams for me, I’ll grow them up” that journalist Ahmet Dönmez shares via his personal web page ahmetdönmez.net Soncan expresses the days of captivity in Silivri and his experiences in his own unique style.
Journalist Emre Soncan’s letter is as follows:
“Give birth to dreams for me..”
The table watch on the ward which has a silver pendulum, I don’t know why silver why not another metal, its each swing of the pendulum I feel an illusion of Although I call it illusion, because I believe it is an illusion, I doubt that as I sleep and wake up in the bosom of a simple reality. I’m confused. It’s not like I’m in a prison, it is like I am in a dream of someone who dreams about being in prison that I have never met. I walk my way with his head tilted on the route he chose for me in his dream ground. I am tangled.
I become prey again at every corner that he imagines with various games. Sometimes, I believe that I live in the eyeballs of a bird watching me from the sky… I feel freedom and captivity at the same time. Sometimes I see a woman standing in the courtyard; standing with the sun pouring over it, with the hair pouring into the night, so the sun is the sun, the night is night. The sunshine and the night secret in her eyes beat my dreams. “No, I am a dream” she says. I say “then give birth to daydreams to me, I’ll grow them up.”
I have become a dwelling man who dwells at the point where the boundaries of imagination and reality have become indistinct. Clouds, trees, buildings… As if I take one step further, the clouds will rub against each other and roll into an avalanche and fall on me; the trees will remove their roots from the ground and whip my body with their branches that will walk waddling; the buildings will fall over the road; the sun will shine and separate me into my atoms; motor grunts of cars will make my ears deaf; a magical and evil hand asphalt will pull under my feet; I would go into it if the extract was to be split.
Each element of the life that flowed with all its ordinaryness was irritated and frightened me separately. Here, I am deprived of freedom, I am deprived of love, I am deprived of a thousand kinds of life. Prison of a kind of absence… Is deprivation a barrier to pure happiness? Couldn’t a person be happy when captured, deprived of pleasure? Perhaps the things that we have to exist in order to be happy and that we believe are just an illusion. While Socrates stood in front of a loom full of goods at the market place, he finally could not stand up and shouted: “There is so much here that I don’t need!” His student Platon had commanded “The important thing is not to have so much in life, but to need the least.” While Diogenes was sunbathing in front of the barrel, which he used as a shelter, Alexander the Great came to visit the wise philosopher. If he had a request, he said he would fulfill it immediately. Diogenes asked: “Take a step, don’t cut my sun!”… Deprivations of absence should not prevent happiness. .. After three and a half years of imprisonment, the person learns to feel happy with a glimmer of hope for the future, a mother’s smile and even a plate of eggplant moussaka. Because before all of this, there was nothing.
Emre Soncan
Silivri Prison, Winter 2020