Nur seemed to live a normal day, except that she went to her friend in the container like herself and gave her favorite toy. Today, Nur, who came to the world as a refugee and is now 7 years old, was the turning point of her twin brother Nuri and their mothers Bahar.
Yes, some people are born refugees; Like Nur and Nuri. Their birth, assets and identities were officially reshaped by a document with photographs taken a few days after the birth by the United Nations Refugee Agency Van office, prepared for them.
Like every refugee who took refuge in Turkey, they were able to go to another country and establish a new life there. Did not thousands of people have lost their lives in the Aegean and the Mediterranean to build this life? Had not the beautiful coastals embraced the many inanimate body? Were not Nur and Nuri with their mothers going to the land in the care of the UN where Canadian refugees dreamed and that the child’s body, Alan Kurdi, was also want to reach there and dieing in the sea, today?
Then, why did Nur and Nuri live the excitement and confusion that their mothers experienced? Did they not realize the importance of this journey, or did the refugee life they struggled with their mothers no longer make all the extraordinary odds? It is easy to say; they struggled together against all the difficulties that were common to the day, from the day when they was born into the mother’s 15 year refugee life.
Nur, like her mother, was not born in Iraq, she had to escape from the pressure of the men who had a say in the family because she was a woman and did not take refuge in Turkey alone. She had come to the world 7 years after her mother was in Turkey. Maybe she should not have the difficulty of being a woman because she is a child. Didn’t her mother escape from Iraq and shelter Turkey? In that case, it had to be something else being in Turkey. If they faced the same difficulties in Iraq and Turkey, would it make sense for their mother to take shelter in Turkey?
But to shelter somewhere does not bring a good life with it. Nur began to recognize life in a difficult struggle in the first years of his life, reflecting the difficulties of his mother, a lonely woman. Nur first met her father, who had left her mother before she was born, collected money by doing hairdressing, confiscated the money of her livelihood mother, and deceived her with another family and children.
She had witnessed unknown accusations about her mother, who was sometimes strange to be alone, the grinding of the container that they had been staying. Maybe being a woman has the same things everywhere; Sometimes desiring, sometimes being ignored, sometimes being evil. The intense “humanitarian” struggle of the homeowners who burned the houses of their neighbors who were not convinced of their mother’s hairdresser’s coming and going to work as a hairdresser, rented the house to her mother and tried to support her mother in response to her masculine desires, lived before Nur’s birth. Of course, everything was not normalized by the birth of Nur and Nuri.
As Nur and his brother Nuri normalize many lives and deal with them, life has always tested them with greater difficulties. One day, they moved from place to place, so they met earthquake at home during the meal that they had three container center experiences for 4 years. Container experience was sometimes accompanied by watching the insects discovered there, examining them, and sometimes waiting for the release of the pharise hiding between them. The alternative to getting rid of the stifling container, which is full of stuffy stuff due to its tinyness, is often the small tube TV. But on the cold days when they stayed without electricity for 4 months, they could laugh and be happy without that tube TV.
In order to get warmed, they had to go into the bed of their mothers like a mouse to get warm, to go out to the door of the icing container with the first rays of the sun, and to wash them for days without rubbing them like the routine of life.
One day, the hardness that their mothers would notice when they pummeled her chest would come to mean they should meet breast cancer. They had to stay in the state’s residence when their mothers unaccompanied for two surgeries because they had no relatives other than the mother. Nevertheless, in the first occasion, the came to the containers and supported by mothers in their treatment of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, sometimes rubbing cream on the backs of their mothers, sometimes looking at their lack of medication and trying their heads.
This life was their life and they had to fight for their own problems as much as no one else had. Sometimes the mothers get power from her children, sometimes the children spend 15 years of their life expecting to go to another country, but they are getting stronger from their mother who has resurrected from the old. And when the day of their lives had come and gone, Nur seemed to be living an ordinary day except that she gave her friend a toy. Nur, waiting to go out on the road in those days, a popular song in Turkey, “people pray for a happy life, everywhere is peacefull if you are there..,” . Later on, she went to Canada with a couple of suitcases, her mother and twin brother.
In fact, their refugee lives would be abandoned as if they were not living like the life of most refugees without a life documentary called Late Spring.The document Late Spring offer a great opportunity to open our minds to the lives of refugees to see their struggle and to understand the reality of refugees that Turkey’s the most long-awaited female refugee Bahar and Nur and Nuri, born as refugees in Turkey.
Translated by Betül Dürgen