“Victory is for those, who can say…”

I choreographed and performed in my first music video. It got extensively featured in Turkish mainstream media. They describe my dance with one word: Unique.

I am open to debates about whether uniqueness exists, what uniqueness is, whether my dance is unique, etc.

I am open to rational criticisms (If you want to translate that as ad hominem attack in any form, you can talk to my lawyer).

Yet this is a victory for me. A young woman who was a domestic violence survivor at 25. The last two years of my student life was tainted with a perpetrator’s envy and oppression.

My uniqueness was attempted to be taken away from me. To be erased brutally.

I was proud of my uniqueness. I took immense pleasure in using my creative intelligence in everything I do. His target was my uniqueness. Why ? Because he was stripped off his dignity. His unique pride in being himself. Once he told me a story about the president of his high school. He was extremely harsh and punishing with students, for holding hands, or simply appearing together, girls and boys… Also, he was harsh and unforgiving about any personal and unique style students had. But his daughter had a “crazy” style with piercings and chains all around, and he worshipped her…

He sought to demolish my uniqueness. I didn’t realize, he was THIS envious of me. He must have felt like a pathetic worm next to my womanly glory. He was weak. Looking back from today, I think the strong-weak division is an artificial one. Yet as a student, I cared about this subject a lot and I was extremely strong. There is a culture of strength in my family, due to Circassian culture. Circassians are natives of North Caucasus, being strong and survival in the cold plays a central role in the upbringing of children. Let me give you this gory detail: Circassians dip their babies in ice cold river, to test whether the baby will survive in the cold or not. The ones who survive live on, the ones who don’t survive, pass away.

I had grown up in Beyoğlu, the lifestyle and cultural center of not just Istanbul, but whole of Turkey. He had grown up in a city of Western Anatolia. There were a lot of students from that region in our university. I respected him and his intelligence a lot. He was beautiful, tanned with such a rich colour and with long eyelashes. I did not bring up nor care about the fact that his parents were working class, if anything, I respected him for it. I was familiar with the narrative of academic achievement despite harsh setbacks in my family, this was the pillar and the norm of the Turkish Republic: democratic education, education by merit.

Yet he brought it up often, talking about Stalinism and his wish to see a worker’s dictatorship. As a 19 year old apolitical youngster, this did not feel like a red flag to me. So what? I was open to even the craziest political fantasy. Yet, I did not catch the pathological anger and envy under his political smart talk. He did not really wish to see a revolution. That “worker’s dicta” he was talking about, he wanted to implement that in his daily life. To hurt people who seemed to have cherished the priviledges which were denied to him. To strip them off the symbols which reflect that priviledge.

I don’t know why he supported me when applying abroad to pursue my dreams. If he had a healthy inch in his psyche, that must have responded to my respect and love. He told me he loved me, I wasn’t like the other Istanbulians from the private & foreign schools. He told me “You were different, first of all.” as the reason he loved me. Yet then why did he seek to destroy what he claimed to have loved?

Either way, he failed. He could not strip me off my uniqueness, because he was wrong. I am not unique because of my priviledges. My uniqueness in everything I do is a result of my creative intelligence and it was not given to me on a silver platter. Just like his intelligence was not given to him on a silver platter. My creative intelligence was not a product of the social inequality. It is me. The woman you loved, but hated more.

Yet all the papers in your mother tounge, talk about me, a person with a creative intelligence who embodies it through an art form. They summarize it in one word: unique.

“… victory is mine.”