We Sent Him Off to Be an Engineer and He Became a Darbuka Player

On 28 March I had a seminar on the main campus of 18 Mart University in my home town, Çanakkale. I had given a seminar on the Biga campus before, and my family had come along. They watched my seminar on the main campus too, from the front row, together with our esteemed lecturers. I would like to thank the members of the 18 Mart University Tourism Society once again for the respect, courtesy and hospitality they showed both to me and to my family.

After Emre Urfalı’s enjoyable presentation I took the stage, and we had a lovely seminar in which I got my family thoroughly involved. We had my father and mother do the prize draw for the diamond, too.

The truth is that my father didn’t want his son, who was studying mechanical engineering, getting mixed up in such “nonsense”, and used to say, “We sent him off to be an engineer and he became a darbuka player.”

Because their own working lives were irregular and exhausting, my family always wanted me to have a respectable profession, such as engineer or doctor. I, on the other hand, wanted to be an astronaut or a rock star. I wanted to travel the world, and beyond the world, and make music as I went. I wanted to be the one on stage, not the one watching.

At every stage of my schooling, nursery included, I was always involved in some artistic activity such as theatre or music. At nursery I was a clown. In fact, Yıldız Asyalı was at our nursery too, and I used to be very jealous watching her sing on television in the TRT Children’s Choir.

At primary school I was in the play Gündüz Feneri; at middle school, Cumhuriyet. And at high school I had a fun part in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. In fact, on the evening held for Shakespeare Week at Şişli Terakki High School, where we won the Special Jury Prize, I was Hamlet! In a show in which the most important scenes from the master’s works were performed as sketches, I had landed the role that is every actor’s greatest dream. A skull in my hand, raising it to the sky, I cried out: To be or not to be!

When, at high school, I wanted to study at the conservatoire, my father said I would “go hungry”. “Do it as a hobby, but have a proper profession,” he said. Those words sound familiar, don’t they?

Years later, I had not let them down — I got my engineering degree — and, with a job that is intertwined with art, I am also doing the work I want, the work that makes me happy. While following what I believed was right for me, I tried to fulfil my family’s wishes as far as I could as well.

As we were leaving the seminar, many of the students had their photograph taken with my parents. When they said, “What a fine son you have raised,” my mother was moved and her eyes filled with tears — the clearest possible sign that they too were now proud of me and of the work I do.