Mümtaz'er Türköne wrote: Remains of Nihat Genç's fight

Not sadness, more distress. A weight that weighs you down, locks you in, like a memory you value and care about falling into the void and disappearing. Death is a ridiculous thing; you should look at what you have experienced, not the absence that takes your loved ones away. You should also keep Nihat Genç in your mind like a photograph of Turkey with the passionate fights he left behind , the absurdly energetic struggle.

69 years is enough time to live and do justice to life. Before being sad about his death, we must respect the memory he left behind.

Sometimes the experiences of youth are not left behind; they shape your entire life like a teenage acne that leaves a mark; they become your identity, they squeeze your soul and brain in an iron grip and take over you. You live life like a habit you acquired at that age, a detail you obsessed with.

Nihat Genç lived his entire life as a young man who stopped time at the age of 21 and lived true to his surname. He was also a young man when he made his last will and testament on his deathbed to “continue the struggle”. For some of us, there are sublime and sacred excuses for which we would sacrifice our entire lives. If there weren’t, who knows how dull and ordinary Nihat’s life would have been? How would he have added excitement and color to ordinary lives? The question of “what did he struggle for?” is absurd for Nihat, what was important was that he struggled at all times and on every occasion.

I was not present at the last stage of his story, but I am the beginning. If I do not write, his memory will be incomplete, as will the answers to the questions of those who are curious, especially the young.

It was a cold winter day. The end of 1977. The Genç Arkadaş magazines were to be picked up from the printing house in Rüzgârlı, packaged and mailed. Despite the long announcements from Site Yurdu, I could only find one person to sit in the driver's seat of the truck. When I made the announcement that "we are going to a fight", a hundred people would get off in a minute or two, when I said "we are going to carry magazines", everyone would disappear.

After a sleepless night due to the magazine, in the evening hours of a tired day, the young man next to me was talking constantly with the Black Sea accent, asking curious and tedious questions. When he said he was a “typist champion”, we immediately switched to another mode. The magazine needed a typesetter; I asked if he could use an IBM Selectric. A machine that we call “topbaş” in short, a donkey-like machine. It requires additional skills beyond typing. Like matching the column ends, making corrections. Nihat started work the next day, and our typesetter problem was completely solved. He was really typing very fast without looking at the keyboard, with his long fingers that could be bent 90 degrees backwards. Nihat brought a new color to the magazine. He was fast, he never missed a detail of the conversation while typesetting, and he never missed his tea or cigarettes. Don’t mind me saying “work”, nobody had a penny in their pockets, we all played the miserables separately. We would boil a maximum of a kilo of canned green beans in a pot, add tomato paste and plenty of water, and fill our stomachs with bread. Our greatest luxury was French fries. I can still remember Nihat carefully frying the fries in a tiny pan on a small electric stove.

First, on the sixth floor of the building where the famous Mon Amour nightclub is located at the foot of the Demirtepe Bridge, then in a small apartment just below on Necatibey Street, and finally on top of the Yapıcıoğlu apartment building in Dörtyol, Nihat became an indispensable member of the magazine team that worked 24 hours a day. We would sleep on L-shaped couches, and Nihat waking up from the upper storage area of ​​the fixed wardrobe in the middle of a serious meeting and jumping down without losing his composure is like an exaggerated movie scene in my mind.

Lütfi Şehsuvaroğlu, Burhan Kavuncu, Naci Bostancı, Nuri Gedik, Tahir Özakkaş and Nihat Genç. When Nihat, who talked a lot, joined the team (we would imitate his saying “I am Na'at” and address him as “Na'at”), a silence fell upon him, he only listened to our conversations. We would discuss the most absurd topics with great seriousness, accompanied by thick cigarette smoke and blackened tea until the break of dawn. I witnessed Nihat describing those conversations by naming someone as follows. “Someone enters the hall and says, ‘It was as beautiful as a war of extermination’, Nihal Atsız says, to tell us how beautiful a girl is,” he begins his speech by taking out a gun from his waist and putting it among the newspapers. The other one said, "What does a pickaxe like you, whom you call an idealist, know about beauty?" and then he took out a passage from Muhiddin Arabi's Lübbü'l Lüb from his pocket, while the other one objected with Plato's definition of beauty." This was the picture Nihat had drawn, was it really like that? I just remember that we talked a lot, especially about issues that were way beyond our capacity. None of it was about politics or ideologies.

Later, Nihat devoted himself to reading in the house right next to the prison in Ulucanlar. He delved into every kind of book imaginable. He would devour philosophy, economics, history, anthropology, mythology, theology books, jumping from one to another. Then, much later, he began to write. His first book, Ofli Hoca's Teravih Sohbetleri, begins with a dedication to our team at the time.

Nihat himself is a story in itself. Driver Sabri from Maçka took his mother on a truck while she was passing through Erzurum Hasankale and brought her to Trabzon-Maçka as his fourth wife. He knew the number of his siblings, but there were some he had never met. They were two siblings from the same mother. His biological brother, who lived in France, was an artist and died at an early age.

He has a right and effort that will never be forgotten on me and my friends. When we all became fugitives after the September 12th Coup, he carried all our burdens. He would get up at five in the morning to pick up my pregnant wife’s appointments from Hacettepe Hospital. That’s why he was attacked by dogs one morning. He was working as a clerk at Ankara Hospital right next to his house. Erdoğan, known as Cabbar (he has an autobiographical novel about the 70s called “Gündüz Bey’s Derviş Militanlari”), had escaped abroad with Nihat’s help after living in Nihat’s house as a fugitive for a long time. In the meantime, he had opened a bread shop in the Ulucanlar neighborhood and was running it with Nihat’s help. Our conversation topic was often Cabbar’s revelry. Cabbar had bought himself a revelry, and we would hear from Nihat that he would water the adobe shop frequently on hot summer days just so the revelry wouldn’t get damaged. Then we all wondered what happened to Cabbar's revelry after he escaped to France.

He did everything fast. I have never seen another person pray as fast as him. Sometimes he would join the congregation at the Cenabi Ahmet Pasha Mosque. He had a conscience in action. One evening when the house was packed with fugitives, he followed an old man. After the prayer at the mosque, the man asked the congregation for help. The old man from Yozgat was hosted for days, Nihat had the man operated on and treated at the Ankara hospital, put money in his pocket and sent him back to his hometown. We would go back and tell each other a story the old man told us when we got past the subject of women.

Once upon a time, there were two close friends. One lived in the city and the other in the village. One day, the city saint came to visit his friend. The village saint had a wicked wife. The village saint was not at home, he opened the door. He snapped at the guest, said whatever came to his mind and sent him away. The city saint ran into his friend on the way back, grumbling. The other persuaded him with persuasion and gratitude and took his friend who had come to visit home. This time, the woman roared at both of them, leaving no insult unsaid. The city saint could not stand it, finally cursed him, saying, “Be stoned, woman,” and the woman turned into stone that moment. When the friend of the host cried out, “What have you done?” and the guest replied, “Never mind, you are saved,” our village saint said the following wise words. “I reached this level of sainthood by tolerating this woman, I can no longer go further because of you. You prevented me from reaching perfection.”

Nihat is a man who created himself. For such a person, it is said, “The God of creation.” He made his observations on people by establishing empathy. He communicated easily and informally. I thought that his knowledge was based on his observations of people rather than books.

He always lived in financial difficulty. He worked as a street vendor in Kızılay Square for a long time. He was professional in escaping the police while selling Chinese-made pens with small digital clocks on them. At one point, he earned his living by copying doctoral theses in a typesetting office he opened in the building at the beginning of the road to Necatibay, under the Maltepe Mosque. I remember from that time. He would extend his pinky nail to use when opening a Camel pack. Some smoked cigarettes like Hampri Bogart, thinking they were their own, and Nihat's unpacking would turn into a show.

He would gather the plot by entering into the event and the spiritual world of the characters and giving himself completely. He would get caught up in details that no one else noticed. He was careless in his writing. His mistakes in Turkish were like making fun of his own writing; he would not allow corrections. His quick thinking and speaking were impressive; he managed to reflect an extraordinary flow of emotions in his novels and stories with terrible Turkish. I still cannot understand his wisdom.

We were divided into separate worlds because of the stress of life and the difference in lanes. We all changed, including Nihat. Our ideas, values, priorities, and where we stood changed. He was also thrown around; only how he stood there, like the scar of a teenage acne, never changed. No matter what Nihat defended, he always remained the same with his attitude and stance as a young man.

He developed a style and communication style that was unique to him. Before his memory, I owe a debt to the truth: an extremely theatrical, intelligently constructed style of anger and violence, provocative and overwhelming, and of course, full of profanities. Even creative people become slaves to their own fame over time. Nihat later became a slave to the style that he developed and exaggerated in order to find lively responses. I can swear to you: The real Nihat was not like this. After our paths diverged and we were thrown to different poles, Nihat kept his distance from me as required by the role he assumed. I understood, I was not offended, I was not offended.

We did not disagree, we did not clash on any issue; what I understand is this: He declared his independence against me, he dismissed his old friends from his side and region one by one to walk his own path alone.

Nihat has rights over me. When I heard about his illness, I called him to ask for forgiveness. He didn’t talk to me. My heart is at peace: I never betrayed our mutual memories or friendship. Even when he was ranting about me, I never let anyone say anything against him. There were rumors about Nihat while the Ergenekon case was being held. I called him, I talked to him; he was worried. I did what was necessary everywhere, saying “he is my friend”. If he has any rights, then let him be forgiven.

Nihat and I were the same age. Exactly 48 years have passed since we first met and became friends at the age of 21. Death, just as it happened to Nihat, seems very close to my generation now. Nihat spent his life fighting. He fought with everyone and everything, sometimes with himself. What will we fight about after we die? There is a magnificent poem by the 17th century Spanish poet Quevedo called “Love that continues after death.” The fight that Nihat bequeathed on his deathbed seems to continue even in the grave. “Keep the Republic alive,” he told his loved ones. If I were with him, two sentences cross my mind. The first is “Your death is enough, nothing will happen to the Republic,” and the second is “What happened to the Republic, Nihat, is someone advocating a return to the monarchy?”

After Aynur, the wise and patient Nuriye was a great chance to balance his wild nature. No one else could keep Nihat on his feet. I never saw his son Laçin; but I remember that he was named after the city of Laçin because he was born in the year Karabakh was occupied. How wonderful, he will live with the memory of a father he will be proud of.

My advice to young people who will continue Nihat's fight from where he left off:

"Wait, that was Nihat's fight. Create your own fight."

Would he like to rest in peace? I'm not sure. I still wish for him to rest in peace.

Farewell Na'at.