Adjusting the Aperture: A Craft Essay on “Turkish Fortunes” by F.T. Rose
As a child, my aperture to sensory input was expansive. Colours, sounds, voices, smells and textures engaged my endless curiosity. This openness narrowed as I aged and began focusing attention exclusively on what seemed relevant to my interior and exterior life. Conversely, when I was young, my aperture to the contextualization of that sensory input was constricted. I didn’t always know how to create meaning out of what I was sensing. This widened as I got older and came to understand the implications of what I had lived through, as well as the personal struggles of the adults who were my caregivers.
Steeped in the innocence and self-focus that is characteristic of children, I naturally assumed that I must be the cause of my parents’ suffering. For a long time they felt like gods—infallible, and omnipotent. In my mid-to-late teens, however, I experienced a series of turning points that permanently altered my personal mythology. Truths that I thought irrefutable were shattered in an instant as new bits of information were assimilated. My identity and presumed history began to shift like sand seeking to level itself. These moments brought relief—I was neither crazy, nor “too sensitive”—but came with a significant quantity of destabilization. Each was a kind of ego death.
Though I’d originally set out to write “Turkish Fortunes” as an homage to my maternal grandmother, it inadvertently became a catalyst for the integration of one of these newly re-written narratives. Not the most cataclysmic of figurative earthquakes perhaps, but one that helped me acknowledge and claim a piece of matrilineal inheritance from a family line that I am now largely estranged from.
My grandmother, Rose, was the only consistent presence of unconditional love that I had before the age of eighteen. She was more of a mother to me than my own. When I penned her voice into dialogue, the familiar cadence of her Arabic-accented English returned immediately, eliciting a nostalgia that brought me right back to sitting in her kitchen shaping savoury sambusac, or rolling orange blossom-scented malfouf while listening to her talk. It felt important to capture the rhythm of her speech, as repetitious and strange as it felt to write. Taking creative liberties in that respect felt disingenuous, and I wanted to conjure as much of her authentic self present for the reader as possible.
The focal point of the story, her penchant for reading Turkish coffee cups as a form of divination, is ironic when juxtaposed against the absolute unpredictability and lack of control that characterized her life at that time. Her husband (my grandfather), her sons (my uncles), and my father were entangled in a criminal court case that would go on for over twelve years. I would not know any of this transpired until I was nineteen years old, but she did. While writing I began to wonder whether she’d ever consulted the cups for herself. I imagined her sitting in the silence of the house after the rest of the family had dispersed, staring into a white ceramic demi-tasse. Given her fear of her very real psychic abilities though, it is equally possible that she may have been too afraid to look. I will never know whether she felt that the events of her life were chance or pre-ordained by fate.
The practice of Turkish coffee cup reading is thought to have gained popularity in Baghdad, Iraq in the 16th century, after the concept of coffee drinking as a social activity spread into major Arab cities from the Ottoman Empire. Although historical accounts of the practice frame it as a way for women to socialize and share the news of the day, it also seemed, for my grandmother, to be a kind of escapism into a fantasy world where everything was perfect, luck was abundant, and nothing bad could ever happen.
As a child, I wanted very badly to believe her words. At the time I was being buffered from the harshness of reality. I can appreciate that the motivation was protection of my innocence, but I could “see” what was unsaid and could perceive that something was terribly amiss. It was present in the loud, incomprehensible (to me) arguing in Arabic and in the worry lines on their foreheads. It was in the smell of danger like wafting smoke in the aftermath of my father’s explosive temper, and it throbbed painfully on the occasions when everyone would forget to pick me up from school. I may not have been able to put my finger on what was wrong, but I knew that the people I loved were hurting.
So while I have always held my grandmother close to my heart, writing “Turkish Fortunes” brought us closer. We both contained deep wells of love. We both wanted everything to turn out okay. And we both knew that sometimes, that’s not how the coffee grinds fall into place.
