writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Waiting for the clouds in silence
Beginning with her short films Yeşim Ustaoğlu step by step achieves a style of her own. Her
approach is deeply based on the stories of rupture in communication due to migration, exile and
isolation. Gönül Dönmez‐Colin asks Yeşim Ustaoğlu:
...you mentioned the feeling of guilt for being silent. The sense of ‘collective guilt’ is
also integral to the main theme of Waiting for the Clouds...” Yeşim Ustaoğlu answers:
‘There is history other than the official history taught to us, but we do not want to face it.
If we do we have to live in a dilemma. The film is the story of those who suffered on the
other side. I heard their stories. Ayşe carries the burden of silence. 10
Yeşim Ustaoğlu opens up the wounds of those sent to exile in her film Waiting for the Clouds
(Bulutları Beklerken, 2004). The traces of the ethnic and political refugees’ are felt in the silence of
the survivors of deportation as the living death. The silence of the characters in Waiting for the
Clouds reminds me of the sentence in Josef Lukomski’s work “Although they keep silent they cry
loud, their silence is more expressive than words.” (Josef Lukomski. 1920) 11
Mizgin Müjde Arslan points out that two films of Ustaoğlu are adapted from two books: Tamama
by Yorgios Andreadis and The Lost Girl of Pontus, regarding the forgotten Pontus language, however,
Yeşim Ustaoğlu explaines that she was influenced by the Japanese author Osamu Dazai’s The Setting
Sun (Batan Güneş, 1947) more than the book Tamama. 10 The book, according to Ustaoğlu, has the
aspects of a woman keeping a secret and thereby getting strong. Gönül Dönmez‐Colin points out that
Ustaoğlu was the first one to approach another sensitive issue, a long forgotten
tragedy of Turkish history, the forced deportation of the Pontus Greeks after the First
World War, and again after the founding of the Turkish Republic. The Pontus Greeks had
lived in the Black Sea region for thousands of years and had thriving communities with
schools, theatre groups and newspapers, but were forced into exile during the harsh
winter of 1916 when the Ottoman army evacuated the villages west of Russian‐occupied
Trabzon and deported the Greek residents. It is estimated that 350000 Pontus Greeks died
from cold, hunger and sickness. 12
Waiting for the Clouds (2004) is a silent sound film set in the 1970s in Turkey. Eleni (Ayşe) a
Pontus Greek keeps her secret about being sent to exile with her family to Mersin for years, even
after coming back to her hometown with her stepsister from the Turkish family that adopted her.
Niko, her little brother, is sent from the orphanage to Greece. After her Turkish stepsister Selma’s
death, Ayşe recalls her brother, Niko, along with the lack of her mother tongue and draws herself
back to isolation 13 on the Trebolu Mountains. The director begins the film with silence, the viewer
sees Ayşe sitting next to the window with closed curtains waiting for the lost ones. As Des O’Rawe
portrays:
Silence is not simply the absence of sound any more than black is only the absence of
color. Silence traverses all manner of contexts: it is never absolute and achieves
signif cance in relation to what it denies, displaces, or disavows. It is impossible to think,
speak or write about silence without invoking sound. 14
The loss of Selma triggers Ayşe’s transformation to Eleni, who digs in the primary worlds of the
cottage attached to the “transitional home” from where she sends herself to a voluntary exile in the
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