aziz nesin, a famous turkish novelist, was born in 1915 and took a pseudonym to escape from political consequences. he was imprisoned several times and died in 1995.
nesin has a short story of great significance that applied at the time to turkey’s situation and is still applicable to ankara and to many countries that are knee-deep in foreign debts.
the story goes like this a family was living in a large house, and one day they decided to rent out one of the empty rooms to a tenant. the income encouraged them to rent a second room, then a third, so the money flowed and they began spending it on unnecessary things, forgetting about spending on the maintenance of the house.
the tenants complained about the frequent interruption of services, as a result of the family’s squandering of its money, and their anger prompted the owners of the house to borrow from them against the rent guarantee to fix the faults, then they borrowed from them to repair the sewage network, and a third loan to repair the garden and the water tank, and at some point, the total debts became more than the value of the rents they collect.
the tenants stopped paying, and the house owners suffered from accumulated debts after the tenants stopped paying rent.
this situation prompted the family to allow more tenants to live in the house and turned the garden into a wood store, then the family left the space they occupy in the house and moved to live on the roof, and finally, bankruptcy pushed them to work in the service of the stranger tenants, and they became their servants.
one day, the eldest son had enough and cried about the bad situation they had reached, that the house was no longer theirs and that they had become strangers in their own house. the father got angry at his son’s grumbling, opened the treasury and took out the deed of ownership of the house, and said to his son, waving it at him: it is our house, which my father inherited for me from my grandfather. the son replied angrily, yes we have the title deed, but the house is no longer ours.
this applies to several countries and people, just as our situation is similar, to some extent, to that of owners of the house, but not because of our financial inability and the accumulation of debts on us, but because of the preponderance of the various extremists whom we allowed to invade us and expel us, destroy our hopes, and sabotage our dreams. we have turned our beautiful city, with our deeds, into a large prison and made it the capital of the forbidden in the world.
it is forbidden for us to eat or drink what they do not want us to eat. it is forbidden for us to wear what we like, it is forbidden to play the piano in the lobbies, it is forbidden to hold celebrations, it is forbidden to harmonize with tunes, it is forbidden to display what we want from paintings, it is forbidden to publish books and novels, to issue statements, and to write articles, and it is forbidden to sell gold crafts that represent the symbols of other religions and even a kuwaiti husband and wife are forbidden to live in the hotel, it is forbidden without a marriage contract and data, and it is forbidden to display clothes on mannequins, it is forbidden to do this and that and that and that …
we opened the doors to them and entertained them in our homes, and with time they became the ones who had the upper hand in legislating laws with rules and regulations promoting their ideologies and customs, and they succeeded in that to a great extent. it will not be too long before they overwhelm us with the backwardness of their thoughts and dark, evil intentions.
when will we realize their danger and rise up?