Ending up in prison was once a possibility, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. But if that possibility ever becomes reality—if one day, out of the blue, a judge says, “I have decided to arrest you”—don’t be afraid. Anything can happen to a woman; everything is part of our lives.
Maybe you’ll get a chance for one last conversation with your loved ones; maybe you’ll be swept out the back door. In any case, you arrive at the prison at the time in the middle of the night. If you’re in a city like Istanbul, you’re lucky—especially if you have other friends with you, you have a bonus! One of the best things about prison is not having to sleep alone—you’ll understand when the time comes.
Imprisonment begins with a body search—the shorter the better. It’s a good thing if it doesn’t fall on the weekend; it’s bad if you were arrested on a Friday. You’ll arrive at your destination either immediately or three days later. If the place you’re going isn’t a cell but a dormitory, the best one is the political one. Different political factions may have separate dormitories, and this distinction shouldn’t be underestimated. The magic phrase you need to say upon first entry is “a ward appropriate to the scope of the case.” If the scope is broad, don’t hesitate—differences will help you grow.
In these days when no human being and no place can manage to be ‘average,’ prisons find an average. Even so, do not expect to see average populations, average conditions, or average practices. In our country, averages have a habit of shifting toward the worst. In an average ward, you will stay with fifty people in a space meant for twenty; in an average ward, you cannot sit in a chair unless someone stands up; in an average ward, you get hot water for only two hours a day. It is also certain that you will not be the only species capable of living in an average ward—you will protect yourself from all kinds of pests, so keep your eye constantly on the corners and edges.
In an average ward, first-timers are mixed with repeaters who constantly pass through. You’ll find those who first learned of prison through family visits before ending up inside themselves, alongside others who seem entirely out of place or have simply stopped caring. In a place like this, people are always coming and going—the only constant is the long-term convicts. It takes time to learn their sentences or how much time they have left, but surviving imprisonment starts with getting to know them. These women possess a deep humanity; they are sharp observers, offering support and lifting spirits. They are generally resilient and cheerful, and that cheerfulness brings a reassuring sense of safety to the ward. Before you even realize it, this safety binds you to them. You only discover how attached you’ve become when news of their forced transfer suddenly comes out of nowhere. You—who met your own arrest with a smile—find yourself crying as you embrace a woman you know you’ll never see again. Before anyone even gets the chance to say goodbye, they are ripped away in minutes from the ward they built a life in for years.
Such bad times may not happen very often, but you never really know—life has a way of making you experience every emotion one after another during your brief stint inside, and none of them last long. This place is the epicenter of sudden emotional shifts. Before the tears in your eyes have even dried, the door opens again—this time for the food carts—and after a brief jolt, you don’t even think twice about checking the menu.
While dealing with the troubles of the ‘inside,’ you keep braving the world ‘outside.’ Don’t think for a second that just because you’re behind bars, you’re cut off from the worries of the outer world. Even in prison, they will find you—taking away your sleep, wearing you down, making you lose your taste for life. And you’re forced to tackle every single one of them.
Other times, it’s the silence that breaks you. Not a sound, not a word; no visitors, no lawyers… You turn into a stone at the very bottom of a well. Abandoned, entirely alone… You end up wishing someone would just show up and pile all their troubles onto you. This loneliness creeps up on you most when everyone is fast asleep and the world falls quiet—leaving you staring at the ceiling, waiting for dawn in the shadows that barbed wire casts across your cell.
The isolation is broken only by the social rhythm of the ward, or the news that a visitor has been approved. But nothing beats actually making it to the visit. Every week if you’re lucky; once a month if you’re average. Visiting days bring a buzz of excitement from morning till night. Inmates with a knack for doing hair suddenly find themselves in high demand. Everyone picks out their outfit first thing in the morning. Clothes, jewelry, makeup—everything is up for grabs. You get to feel the pride of starting the day as Cinderella and ending it as a princess. And you go through all this commotion for a visit that won’t even last an hour.
Even if you manage to get an occasional visitor approved, you wait for them to come every week, knowing full well that such occurrences are as rare as a once-in-a-century natural phenomenon. The most prized visitor is the one who brings news from the outside, keeps track of your needs, and listens carefully to everything you say, holding onto it—though you rarely come across one like that. You watch what you ask for from the outside, keep your expectations low, and stay open to surprises. Especially when it comes to clothes, you are left staring in awe at the abysmal gap between expectations and reality. You ask for a small, a large arrives; you ask for a 75B, a padded 80 arrives; you ask for long, short arrives; you ask for shorts, capris arrive. Something you discarded turns up again and again; fancy clothes come, leopard print comes, crop tops come, lace comes… All of these are simply part of prison life and the visiting routine.
Sometimes, the clothes you wear stop fitting you altogether. Portions get out of hand, and eating the halva and kadayif sent from the administration feels a little too sweet. But seeing how prison meals can be transformed into something else is the most dangerous part of all. You can turn soup into lentil kofta, or chickpea stew into hummus. If there’s too much institutional cheese, it can be whipped into labneh; if a bad meal arrives, you can whip up an emergency batch of çiğ köfte or kısır. If your windfalls multiply, you must stop yourself before you go overboard, saving your right to overindulge strictly for the canteen. Because once you see an item on the list, you might never find it again; bitter chocolate and chips are precious—whenever you spot them, you must alert the entire ward.
If you don’t want all these opportunities to turn into a full-blown crisis, you need to stay active to keep both your body and your sanity in check. If the ward is crowded and the courtyard starts feeling like Istanbul’s bustling Istiklal Avenue, don’t let it intimidate you. If you keep an eye out for gaps and rhythms, you can easily carve out a space for yourself. Pacing the yard is the aspirin of prison life—you must never forget that.
If walking wall-to-wall starts feeling boring, you can try a regular workout routine. Running between walls, working your arms with water-bottle dumbbells, doing squats, stretching—all of that is good. And if you happen to find someone doing pilates in the ward, you jump right on it. If group pilates classes pop up, you grab a mat without a second thought. You try to talk away the soreness in a body unaccustomed to such movement, and after a few sessions, you start going more for the chat than the workout.
Group activities are an absolute must for any ward. To keep from losing touch with the outside world’s routine, you should hold a political discussion at least once a week and a meeting on another day. You need to keep a close eye on the mainstream media, the chronic opposition, and the streets alike. You mustn’t miss the morning and evening news, and you should steer clear of soap operas—as much as you possibly can, anyway. When you realize you just can’t stay away, you commit this sin as a collective, turning TV nights into tea-and-chat sessions in the ward. You should also make time for films now and then; you mustn’t go without art, nourishing your soul just as much as your body.
Some of the most fun group activities are the parties: çiğ köfte parties, kısır parties, sunflower seed parties, endless endless parties with cakes that never seem to run out. Sometimes watching or playing a match turns into a full-scale party. You can watch women’s volleyball matches together, think to yourself, “What makes Vargas better than me?”, and apply national team tactics right there in your cell block. Spatial limitations will try to stop you from showing off your talents, but you mustn’t give up trying. If you can’t make the team, don’t fret—you can try your hand at being a fan, a coach, a referee, or even a cheerleader. You have to keep the teams’ morale high so the match is even more fun. You must never drop chanting, the lifeblood of motivation; you have to root for whoever is falling behind, standing on the side of the underdog even in a game. But you need to think carefully when naming the teams—if you’re bound to use words like “red” or “star,” you’d better push the limits of your creativity.
Or you can save your creativity for other games. You can set up plastic water bottles as pins and go bowling, try Taboo by describing prison life using forbidden words, organize a singing competition when there are plenty of confident voices around, or battle it out in a trivia quiz when the book-lovers outnumber the rest. Every single activity contributes to the unity and solidarity you so deeply need. But one of them stands out as your undisputed favorite. This activity is all about feeding that enduring sense of connection with the outside world.
You can only do this activity on one specific day of the week, during fixed hours. When the time comes, you start stirring in your cell, checking your watch constantly, and heading out to the yard. After pacing back and forth as much as you can, you pull a chair close to the door and sit down to watch the activity outside. You wait until the very end of the visiting hours, and as a final resort, you bang on the hatch to check in with the guard: “The letters still haven’t arrived, could you check one more time?”
And at the sound of the metal hatch, the common area suddenly fills with excited women. The best moment of all is when you hear your own name called out by the inmate holding the letters. But what if no letter comes for you? That, right there, is the ultimate disaster. You retreat to a corner, watching from afar as other women read their letters with subtle smiles. The familiar feeling of being a stone at the bottom of a well comes rushing back to settle heavily on your chest. Still, even if weeks pass without a word, you never stop writing, sending short messages to everyone you know to say, “I am still here.”
Reading does as much good for the soul as writing. Give up on everything else, but never on reading! Especially if there are female authors in the library, give them top priority. Seek out women who have known imprisonment, find yourself in the pages of Yıldırım Area Women’s Ward (Yıldırım Bölge Kadınlar Koğuşu). Political female prisoners leave behind a richer heritage for one another than you might think. Don’t underestimate this legacy. Whether you are alone or surrounded by fifty women, a political female prisoner must live her womanhood, showing—first to herself, and then to her fellow female comrades—that life can be organized even between these cold concrete walls.
Female camaraderie in prison is something else entirely. The paths of women who set out with the dream of a free world intersect behind bars, laden with the struggles they wage first against themselves and then against the whole world. Every single story is educational and inspiring for the other women. When you listen to them, you realize just how different—and how much the same—they are from you and your struggle.
Some finished elementary school through correspondence, while others are working on their doctoral dissertations; some never left their village, while others never saw a village in their lives; some were married off as children, while others only came to know life after a divorce; some matured under a father’s blows, while others were raised like princesses; for some, an exiled husband meant years of separation, while for another, his journey led to eternity; some have a child who visits regularly, some are imprisoned alongside their own child, while others yearn endlessly for their grandchildren…
Yet in the heart of every single one of them blossoms the excitement of the struggle for the liberation of humanity. They feed the fire fueled by this excitement, growing it with every day they greet between concrete walls. With that very fire, they burn every shackle waiting to tame them, scattering their ashes to time. Erasing all traces of the past so they will never experience captivity again, they finally live out their own time. First for themselves, then for their mothers, their sisters, and all women everywhere…
Sena Şat
Writer-Illustrator
From Bakırköy Women’s Prison
