Lives collide in ‘Banana Sounds’
Print Edition
IN stories that take place in sane parts of the world, a man approaches a woman before kissing her, a city creaks before it collapses, and a gun is seen before it fires. But this isn’t that kind of city, or story, or love. If only it were...,” said Ece Temelkuran, Turkish journalist and author of the book “The Sound of Bananas.”
Set in the summer of 2006 in Beirut, “The Sound of Bananas” revolves around the lives of two women: Filipina and Deniz. Chapters alternate between telling the stories of these women who seem, at first, to have nothing to do with one another.
Filipina is from the Philippines. With a stack of letters left by her late father, who wrote in Arabic from the Shatila Refugee Camp, she comes to Beirut to trace her roots, as well as find truth behind the death of her parents.
Deniz is from Turkey. She’s been studying law at Oxford. Under her thesis advisor Miss Trablousi’s suggestion, she too embarked on a trip to the Beirut — to seek new identities in the changing time.
“Beirut was said to be the Paris of the Occident for quite a time. But then, with the enormous humanitarian crises of our time, it became more like a place overloaded with tragedy. You cannot like Beirut. You love and hate Beirut,” said Temelkuran at the interview with Shanghai Daily.
Temelkuran was sent to Beirut as a journalist in 2006 to report from Lebanon after the Israel attack. She was planning to write a non-fiction book on Hezbollah but turned to literature instead. She started writing “The Sound of Bananas,” a story combined with the unmentioned love of war, by the seaside one afternoon.
In 2010, she went to Beirut a second time and stayed there for almost a year to finish the novel, which has now been translated into several languages, including Chinese.
“The title of the book might sound a little bit ridiculous, but actually bananas do have sounds,” said Temelkuran. “In August during the night when there is no other sound, when you go to a banana plantation, you hear the sounds. Because bananas grow in bunches. When they separate from each other, they make the sounds chook chook chook…
“Those noises that turn everybody into nobody can be heard all around the plantation. The idea, as one of the main metaphors of the book, is that if there was no other sound in Middle East, what if we could hear the sounds of bananas?” she said.
Q: How is Beirut years after the 2006 Lebanon War?
A: Beirut is a strange place for being constantly changing... but never really changing. During the centuries, the city developed an extremely resilient way of being. That is actually why I find it fascinating. It represents to me the only possible way to be in today’s world: Flowing with the shocks and turmoil and in spite of them. And this is the reason I made the city one of the novel’s heroines.
Q: Is it still a taboo to talk about the Shatila Refugee Camp massacre these days in Beirut?
A: Shatila is the black hole of history. Every nation owns its own black holes. It is there, a huge one, but you don't see it until someone shouts “Look! There is a black hole here.” Nobody realizes that they have been seeing it. Even after one shouts out the truth, it can still be invisible. Human beings are a tricky thing. Memory is even more so. Don't we all know that seeing is not about the eyes after all.
Q: How do you look at the regional differences between the Christians, Muslims and Syrians?
A: I wish we didn’t have to talk about the identities, sectarian differences. When humanity lost its faith in solidarity and equality we ended up talking about identity politics. And now, as if we are in the Middle Ages we are talking about religious identities, ethnic identities. This is a deep disintegration that our world is going through.
Q: Part of the stories of Deniz and Filipina were told through letters. Why did you use the letter format?
A: The letter is the most genuine form in literature, at least for me. And if you ask me, a novel is a letter that a writer puts in a bottle from an obscure island in the middle of the ocean, waiting to be read.
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