DEEP HEAT

by Robin Soans

Selections from Deep Heat were first performed at a National Theatre Platform in London on 9 May 2011.

Deep Heat, subtitled ‘Encounters with the Famous, the Infamous and the Unknown’, contains verbatim monologues collected and edited by Robin Soans. The following excerpt is the written voice of ALI BOYRAZ, a former member of the PKK (the Kurdish resistance movement) who now lives in East London. He was born in a Kurdish mountain village in South-East Turkey but his family were forced to move to the city when the Government removed subsidies to their community. He was drawn into the PKK in his teens and was eventually hunted down and imprisoned by the Turkish government. ALI was 43 years old when his experiences were recorded. This particular monologue is entitled ‘The Free Man’. In it he talks about his injuries from prison, coping with life on his release and a chance encounter with one of his torturers.

ALI

My whole body is covered with scars…let me show you… look where they tied my ankles…it’s worn away a whole ring of flesh, and look at these scars in my hair…this is where they opened up the flesh with their batons and then shaved away the loose flesh. And my feet are a strange shape…they used to beat the soles of my feet with metal pipes…one particular night they smashed my feet three times for not singing the national anthem…I couldn’t walk for two months.

But I believe I am strong mentally. If I wasn’t I wouldn’t have lasted twenty-one years in jail. And I am aware of my peculiarities…I greet them like old friends…sometimes they make me smile. Even now, even tonight, on my way to here, there was a football match at White Hart Lane, so there were very few buses, but I couldn’t bear to stand still and wait for one, I had to keep walking…I can’t bear standing still. This is alright here, underground, but out in the street, out in the open…I still feel hunted. I get angry about stupid things…if someone throws litter in the street, I get unusually angry…it’s about order. I see people who don’t have a plan for tomorrow. I had to have a mental plan to survive from day to day to day…even here…I have to have a plan to deal with things. And the most shocking things happen out of the blue. Let me tell you my friend. I was born in a tiny Kurdish mountain village in the south-east of Turkey, not far from the Iraqi border. In winter the snow was so deep, we had to dig a tunnel to the well. I mean remote, and yet seventy per cent… yeah I would say seventy percent of the people in that village are now living in Hackney, Dalston or Tottenham. I work in my uncle’s newspaper shop next to Highbury and Islington Station…I unpack things and help behind the counter, and you know how busy it gets, specially in the morning and evening…and one day a fortnight ago, morning time…there is a queue, and we are serving, and busy, and…there is a laugh, from a man in the queue…he is talking in Turkish and laughing with his friends behind him, and he turns round to face the counter with this grin still on his face…and he does not know me, this man with the smile on his face, but it is a face I could never forget. The last time I saw him he was fitting electrodes to my testicles, and he had a magneto…you know this thing?... it is like an old wind-up gramophone…the faster you wind it the more the shock. This man was an expert…he would slow down and speed up to keep you on the edge of consciousness. The man next to me in that cell was having needles inserted into his balls, and the two guards were laughing and getting pleasure from inventing new ways of causing us pain. And now here he was in my uncle’s shop laughing with his friends as he bought a packet of Drum rolling tobacco for his roll-ups.