We present the The Rug on the Wall by Latifa Akay, taken from the new anthology well I just kind of like it, edited by Wendy Erskine.
well I just kind of like it comprises a collection of writing and images about art in the home and the home as art. Through a series of essays, conversations, photographs, fragments, drawings, and reflections, each contributor sheds light on the stuff of the home in a vital and compelling way
Contributors include Latifa Akay, Mauricio Alejo, Richard Billingham, Jo Broughton, Darran Anderson, Rossa Coyle, Emily Dickinson, Susannah Dickey, Wendy Erskine, Nicole Flattery, David Hayden, David Keenan, Heather Leigh, Philip Mann, Jan McCullough, Gareth McConnell, Lara Pawson, Keith Ridgway, Joseph Scott, Frances Stark, Annelies Štrba, Maurice van Tellingen, Joanna Walsh, and Shaun Whiteside.
The Rug on the Wall
The rug has been a feature of my life for as long as I can remember. Small, but bold, it is detailed with geometric patterns and blocks of recurring colour, most prominently deep red, burnt orange, and an olivey gold. During my childhood, the rug hung above the radiator in the living room of our family home in Belfast. As a child I assumed it must have had some importance to end up on the wall, but as far as I recall I never asked about it.
Many years later, the rug is now mine and lies on the wooden floor of my bedroom in North London. Sometimes I notice the colours greying with dust and, driven with guilt thinking of its more ornamental past, I carry it folded through the house and flap it about outside the backdoor, pulling strands of my own hair from its surface by hand. Once hoovered or shaken out, its colours are as vibrant as if it had been bought yesterday.
Recently I hung the rug, and another larger rug passed on from my parents, on my neighbour's scaffolding at the front of the house. I beat them first with a mop handle and then with the palms of my hands because the mop handle made no impact at all.
The sun was shining that day and the rugs looked particularly magnificent, swaying in the wind above the wheelie bins.
It is true and perhaps very basic that when I beat these rugs, I feel connected with the women on my father’s side of the family. I imagine those women in floral skirts with elasticated waistbands, their headscarves tied under their chins, squinting, and flapping in small dust storms of their own making.
I realise in writing this that I know little about the women on my father’s side of the family. Of the elders, I only have names and snatched anecdotes. There is Necibe teyze and Ayşe teyze, my grandmother’s sisters. My dad recounts how when he was a child Ayşe teyze used to beg him to speak Turkish with her because she didn’t speak it and wanted to learn, but he would continue speaking their mother tongue Zaza, because not many other relatives would speak it with him. He doesn’t remember any Zaza now. Then there is my grandfather Hacı Baba’s sisters: Asya bibi, Hami bibi, Gülli bibi, Ayşen bibi, whose names alone I know.
Then there is my grandmother, Hacı Anne. She died before my two sisters and I were born. I know her in a handful of photographs – her face a copy of my father’s – and as a name whispered in prayers.
I decide to ask my dad about the rug; how it was that it ended up on the wall, where it came from, whether Hacı Anne and other women in our family made rugs. My parents are in New York visiting my older sister, Mevlüde, who is named after Hacı Anne, so I call my dad on WhatsApp audio. When he answers he tells me he is watching the England vs Ireland rugby match in the basement with Ibrahim, the oldest of my sister’s three sons.
Oh that rug, he says, straining his voice over the sound of rugby fans blowing whistles. I suppose we didn’t know where else to put it, he says. That’s how it ended up on the wall.
There was nowhere else you would have put it? I ask.
It was tricky, he says. The other option would have been to put it in front of the fireplace, but then a spark from the fire could have caught on to it couldn’t it. If we’d had wooden floors it could have worked like that but we didn’t have wooden floors in that house did we, he says. So we put it on the wall.
I ask him where he got the rug and he tells me it’s from the Dedeman Hotel in Ankara. They sold beautiful handmade rugs there, el dokuma. He bought the rug over forty years ago, before him and my mum got married. He remembers that he paid £25 for it.
None of them made rugs?
No, unfortunately not, he says.
Hacı Anne sewed, didn’t she? I ask.
Yes, oh yes, he says. She would have sewn, crocheted; covers for cushions, large covers for settees and beds. Mainly dantel. She once said she would have preferred to know how to read and write rather than sew, he adds.
A few weeks later, I am visiting my parents in Belfast and we pick up the rug conversation again.
Look, my dad says from his armchair in the backroom, you know they’re handmade when you see the imperfections, you see there, the stripes in the red. That’s a sign that it’s not machine-made. We stare at the shades of red together.
You see with this rug, Baba continues, the bits that have seen the sun have greyed more than the bits that haven’t. But your one is different, he says. The dye is fast, so the colours retain their hue. Decades haven’t touched it.
I realise we’ve never really got to spend time with the women on your side of the family, I say.
Another way of telling handmade rugs from machine-made rugs is the tussles, my dad says, pointing at the rug with his fork.
Tassles, my mum says.
Tassles? my dad says. Tassles, not tussles. Yes, okay, the tassles. You can tell from the tassles. If you look underneath the rug and the threads feed into the tassles, then you know that it’s handmade.
I ask Baba again about Hacı Anne. What she liked doing when she was sewing. She would have chatted or watched television, he says. She was into her TV dramas. He remembers watching her watching television with his oldest niece. They both sat open mouthed, agog at what was going on. She would take it quite seriously, he adds.
I ask him again about Hacı Anne. He swallows. I write and delete here many versions of a sentence that tries to describe witnessing the physicality of something suppressed.
She always wore those scarves didn’t she, I say, the ones with the lace around the edges.
Yes, Baba says, yes. Tülbent they call that fabric. It’s light and breathes easily so it would have been cooler in the heat. google it, it’s like muslin, he says.
I google it then and read him back different descriptions.
I am just full of remorse for not spending more time with her, he says after a while, his voice clear now. Time passes, but the judge inside is always judging you.
The next day I do a plank workout upstairs. I can’t find a yoga mat so I do it on the rug in my bedroom, another handmade variety. During one plank I find myself staring at a tight, hard lump wedged in the rug. I touch the lump tentatively, worried that it might be a clutch of insect eggs. It’s hard like an apple pip. I tell Baba about this later in the day.
That’s a knot, he says, where the women will have paused for a break or a chat while making the rug. Maybe they were having lunch or a gossip, or a cigarette or a tea.
We both laugh.
About The Author: Latifa Akay is a writer from Belfast. Her prose and poems have appeared in places including The Good Journal, Popshot magazine, and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. She lives and works in London and formerly worked as a journalist in Istanbul.
