In the document I am translating at the moment I have just read a sentence that still (dares?) speak of the alphabet revolution as if it were the best thing that could have happened to Turkey, as if it were a Notwendigkeit.
And to think that only a couple of weeks ago I was in the heart of Europe, ridiculing this very act and my co-Europeans finding it appaling that a nation had been turned illiterate overnight.
letters are stores of memory,
you can feel this best in Turkey where there is collective amnesia concerning who we were and what we wanted to be,
for we no longer see the letters that we used to see and with which we expressed our notions of who we are.
Europeans- that would've started with the letter "alif", which looks like an "I", and which is the first letter of Allah as well
letters have memories, and initials more so, initials are intertextual, initials make you think about other words, make you trace other words in the word
initials bind, or make the rift more apparent, so now our task is to consider the implications of "alif"
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