Ако бях облак /Bir Bulut Olsam/ - тема 3

l this time that I have been watching ”Bir Bulut Olsam”, I was in thoughts about this utopian and unfulfilled love of Mustafa for Narin and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.
When I started watching the series due to the encouragement of a friend, the first scene of the chain-tied Narin from the hand of Mustafa, shocked me up to the point of disgust, because as a woman, I couldn’t imagine such behaviour, behaviour unknown to me, beyond every fantasy realm.
I took a deep breath and, being angry, but mostly being obstinate, I continued watching and I tried to understand why this person, that evilness and cruelty were the only things I couldn’t see while looking at his eyes, behaved with this abusive, savage way to his wife..
Mustafa was the eldest child of an authoritarian patriarchal family on the faraway Anatolia of Turkey, where the position of the woman was nothing more than giving birth to children, without getting education herself, without having opinion herself, not even about the raising of her own children. He was also unlucky, because his father was a greedy, intriguing dictator, for whom money was the only goal. So, Mustafa, having a special emotional mentality and temperament, while growing up, he became a spoiled child and an egomaniac person.
For Mustafa, everything that revolved around his daily life, was a toy that whenever he wanted, he stretched his hand and he acquired it. Besides, he was the son of the ”lord and master”, who could say no to him? They had also assigned him with the label of ”madman”, therefore, every kind of extreme behaviour of his was considered absolutely justified, since his family could never understand him, except for his brother and his two close friends…
At some moment, Narin gets into his life in a violent way, and he intensely falls in love with her and experiences the rejection from her. This is actually the hitting that activates his personality to begin to research about who he is, what he wants, how he wants to be loved, but also how he wants to love. The ”no” from Narin makes him experience, maybe in a rather harsh way, the pain of unrequited love.. The unfulfilled love, the curse that most times follows the falling in love..
Every love begins with a gaze, the eyes of Mustafa, however, got confused and carried away by looking at Narin’s eyes and were drawn into rivers of tears, into sleepless nights, but nothing was capable to make him forget her eyes and to change the priorities of his thoughts, because, unfortunately, nobody knows what is their fate. For Mustafa, however, his fate was Narin, he wanted to walk with her in life, even if this walk led to a cliff. For him it wasn’t a cliff, it was his Paradise.
Mustafa acts according to the heart and not according to the logic. And his heart tells him: ”Close your eyes and go on, because those who give importance to love and to what they do for it, they are worth living, even if the person they fell for has rejected them. Continue up to the point you want to and you can. Even if you don’t succeed, claim your happiness, whereas she just rejected you”.
Unfortunately, the unfulfilled love doesn’t let you cease the idealization of your desire’s object. And it leads you to paths full of pain, from which it’s difficult to escape. The Roman philosopher named Senekas said ”si vi amari amma” which means ”if you want to be loved, then love”. But this doesn’t mean that if you love someone, they will love you back too…
Mustafa stays sleepless at nights and it’s enough for him to just see her silhouette through the darkness. There are moments when he sings his fears and they penetrate his soul either with utopias or with their support, in a course that keeps going alternately to keep him in restlessness. Sometimes they give him joy and some other times they give him tears of sadness for what he hasn’t lived and he realizes little by little that he won’t live them. When his breath smells alcohol, close to him there is also ”Love”, that finally fooled him. But although he probably mourns for what ”Love” has deprived him, he goes on. Perhaps he finds this, that finally will be his own, that will be his own in soul and body, and this emotion is experienced by him when he takes his child in his lap for first time.
For Mustafa, Narin and his unfulfilled love for her was a repressed unfulfilled emotion, a destructive mania that led him to phychosis. It turned into a thorn that ”scraped” him. At some moment, his wounds were healed, but he continued hurting. It was always a love that burned him, but (also), when it was subsided through time passing, there was also some tenderness, some weakness that always made his heart flutter and made him feel as if ”a knot is tightened” in his throat, on the sound of Narin’s name.
Ending my thoughts, I will dwell at the scene of his committal to the mental institution when he has resigned from living, since he cannot have Narin in his life. At this scene, Engin reminds me of Jack Nicholson in the movie ”One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”, and it’s a scene that I adore, delivered with acting of Oscar level by Engin Akyurek.

Written by Sani Tsiris
English translation by Ann Tsts