Esmeray is a
transsexual Kurdish artist, a former prostitute and feminist, she lives and
works in Istanbul Istanbul
A transgender
evening with Esmeray, Saturday 17 September at 9:00 p.m.
At the beginning,
she was called Memet. Very soon, this little shepherd from a Kurdish village
near Kars in eastern Anatolia ,
began to feel a difference, an uneasiness regarding his social role as a young
male. One evening in front of the television, a realization: the singer Zeki
Müren, the famous transvestite of the Turkish pop scene. There are others,
elsewhere, who share this difference. Elsewhere was Istanbul
and the search, in the disreputable quarters on the banks of the Bosporus , for others like oneself, like him, like her.
Then began the long process for Memet of bringing Esmeray (literally the brown
moon) to the world, the assumed, final incarnation of the woman inside him.
There is only one profession open to a young transsexual in the metropolis:
prostitution. But during her long stay in the Beyoğlu and Tarlabaşı quarters,
Esmeray again felt imprisoned within a forced social role. To break out, she
became a street vendor selling stuffed mussels… Then one day, she decided to
tell her story in the form of an autobiographical performance titled The
Witch's Basket which she presented in Berlin , Cologne , Brussels , and
today, Paris
She retraces her
journey with a humor of rare bluntness, proffering a truly troubling object - a
cross between confession and harangue - which blithely reveals her colorful
personality while questioning others. "Starting with the story of my life
as a transsexual, I throw some light on the back alleys of my sexual relations
with people both political as well as apolitical," explains Esmeray.
"I speak of the face that the men crossed in the alleys do not show to
women, the measurements that the women do not see in the mirror… All that the
one does not give to the other."
While gradually
establishing herself as an artist – Esmeray appeared in several shows in Istanbul
