The Needle That Changed My Life — Becoming a Tailor

After my father died, the future ceased to be an idea belonging to some distant tomorrow. It became an immediate question: What was to become of me?

I was still a young boy, but childhood in Enhil did not offer much shelter from necessity. My mother was struggling to provide for four children, my grandmother Macida and my great-grandmother Sitto. Every pair of hands mattered. The most obvious path for a boy in our village was to work the fields, labouring from one season to the next in the hope that the harvest would be enough to keep the family alive.

My grandmother wanted something different for me.

Macida loved all of us, but after the loss of my father she watched over me with a fierce and almost frightening devotion. She had no formal education to offer me and no money with which to purchase an easier life. What she possessed was authority, determination and the conviction that a trade could protect a child from a lifetime of dependence.

In Enhil, there was only one trade available to learn.

It was tailoring.

A Trade Instead of the Fields

The village tailor was Hanna Özbakir, my father’s cousin. Hanna had lost his own mother at an early age, and my grandmother had helped care for him and his brothers, Yusuf and Malke. For that reason, Macida did not politely ask him to take me as an apprentice. She told him that he would.

This was entirely in keeping with her character.

My grandmother was one of the strongest personalities in the village. Her voice could fill a courtyard, cross a street and bring an argument to an abrupt end. When she had decided what was right, negotiation became a formality. Hanna understood both the debt he owed her and the love that lay behind her command.

And so, while other boys went to the fields, I entered his small workshop.

It was not an impressive place. There were no rows of machines, no shelves filled with fine fabrics and no abundance of tools. Among the apprentices, there was a single needle for hand sewing. We passed it from one boy to another, each waiting impatiently for his turn. Hanna owned two needles of his own, but those belonged to the master and were not to be touched.

Today, a sewing needle is such an ordinary object that most people would not think twice about losing one. To us, it was the instrument on which our work depended. Without it, our hands were useless.

Newly made clothes were a luxury that many villagers could not afford. Much of our work consisted of giving old garments another life. A worn coat, jacket or waistcoat would be taken apart seam by seam. Every piece of thread had to be removed. The sections were pressed flat, turned so that the less worn inner surface became the new outside, and then sewn together again.

It was slow, exacting work. Turning a single coat could occupy us for an entire week. When it was finished, the customer paid very little in relation to the labour involved. But that was the economy of our village. People did not pay little because they failed to understand the work. They paid little because they had little.

The workshop taught me one of my earliest lessons about value: an object could appear exhausted and still contain another life within it. If one had the patience to take it apart carefully, understand how it had been constructed and rebuild it piece by piece, what seemed worn out could become useful again.

At first, Hanna paid me one Turkish lira a month. After some time, he increased it to one lira a week. The other apprentices worked without wages, apart from the occasional tip that the four of us divided. I was paid because Hanna was my father’s cousin and because everyone knew the burden my mother carried.

I never considered the lira mine.

I gave it directly to my mother. With it, she could buy sugar or another necessity that our household could not produce for itself. It was not enough to change our circumstances, but it allowed me to contribute. My father’s last words—that I must become the man of the house if he did not return—had begun to acquire a practical meaning.

Sometimes responsibility is not announced by a grand act. Sometimes it is a small coin placed quietly in your mother’s hand.

The Most Precious Gift

One day, a relative named Seyde Kelesh returned from a visit to Qamishli, across the border in Syria. She called me over and said that she had brought me a present.

It was a sewing needle.

No gift could have delighted me more.

For the first time, I did not have to wait for the workshop’s single needle to pass from hand to hand. I possessed my own tool. I could practise whenever there was work before me. I could improve more quickly. I could hold it between my fingers and feel, with all the certainty available to a child, that I had moved one step closer to becoming someone.

I displayed it proudly to the other apprentices. Their envy gave me a new kind of power. When they wanted to borrow it, they sometimes offered me fruit, nuts or some other small treasure in exchange for a little time with it.

That needle may have cost almost nothing in Qamishli. In Enhil, it made me rich.

It represented independence, skill and possibility. More than that, it belonged to me in a world where almost everything had to be shared, repaired or made to last far beyond its natural life.

I could not have known that this tiny object would become a symbol of the road ahead. But even then, I understood that a person with a tool and the knowledge to use it was less helpless than a person with neither.

The Day I Walked Out

Not every lesson in the workshop came from cloth and thread.

One day, a Kurdish woman from the village whom we called Aunt Sare brought in a pair of trousers belonging to her son. She needed to explain where they were too tight and what had to be altered. Embarrassed by the subject, she phrased her request in such an awkward way that all of us apprentices burst into laughter.

We were boys. The more we tried to stop, the more impossible it became. Aunt Sare grew visibly ashamed.

Hanna was furious. We had humiliated a customer in his workshop, and he began striking us in front of her. Perhaps he also wanted to demonstrate that her dignity mattered and that our behaviour would not be tolerated.

When he came to me, Aunt Sare immediately stepped between us.

“Please, Hanna,” she said. “You must not hit Circis’s boy. If you do, I will never come here again.”

Her intervention stopped him, although not before he had struck me once.

By then, the people of Enhil had treated me with such tenderness since my father’s death that I had become unaccustomed to punishment. I could not accept the blow. Hurt and humiliated, I left the workshop at once and went home, determined never to return.

When my grandmother arrived, she demanded to know why I was not working.

“I hate going there,” I told her. “Hanna hit me.”

Macida’s anger rose instantly. She was ready to march across the village and make Hanna regret what he had done. I knew what her anger could become, and for once I found myself defending the man who had struck me.

“Please, Grandmother, do not go,” I said. “We were at fault. We laughed so loudly that the customer was ashamed. Perhaps Hanna was right.”

That admission calmed her. I was angry with Hanna, but I also knew that our behaviour had been cruel. Even as a child, I could see that my own humiliation did not erase the humiliation we had caused Aunt Sare.

Still, I refused to go back.

Smuggler Boss Macida

To understand what happened next, one must understand my grandmother.

In the stories passed down through our family, Macida was known as “Smuggler Boss Macida.” The borders separating Turkey, Syria and Iraq cut across a region whose villages and families had been connected long before those lines became barriers. Goods that were available on one side were scarce on another, and many families survived through informal cross-border trade.

My grandmother led groups of relatives who carried local products—syrup, raisins, lentils and acorns—out from Tur Abdin and returned with silk, dates, finished clothing and other goods. Among her trusted companions were her cousins, the brothers Suleyman and Shamoun Yoken, also known by the surname Akcan.

These journeys were dangerous. According to our family’s account, border guards sometimes fired on the groups, and the armed men travelling with my grandmother returned the fire. I was not present on those journeys and cannot independently establish every detail. What I know is how the villagers remembered her: fearless, forceful and unwilling to be intimidated by soldiers, distance or danger.

This was the woman who had decided that I would become a tailor.

Hanna came to our home several times and tried to persuade me to return. Each time, I stubbornly refused. At the same time, my grandmother made it very clear to him that he was expected to bring me back and teach me the trade properly.

In truth, I was not as certain as I pretended to be.

I missed the workshop. I had my own needle now, and it seemed unbearable that it should lie unused. More importantly, I understood the alternative. If I did not learn a trade, I might be sent into the fields, where my mother and my sister Seyde already performed exhausting labour. My pride told me to stay away. My fear of having no future told me to return.

I needed a way back that would allow me to believe I had not surrendered too easily.

Hanna eventually came once more while my grandmother was at home. He spoke gently and asked me to return to the workshop. I said no, although inside I was hoping that he would continue asking.

Macida had heard enough.

“Get up, you donkey!” she shouted. “Do you want to live without a trade and without a future? You are going back with Hanna now—or I will beat you myself.”

No one argued with my grandmother when her voice reached that pitch, least of all a boy who was secretly waiting for permission to change his mind.

I stood up and followed Hanna back to the workshop.

He never struck me again. He never even raised his voice in a way that might bring my grandmother to his door.

Learning to Build Something Whole

For approximately five years, tailoring became the rhythm of my life. I attended the village’s five-year primary school, and when the school day ended, I went directly to Hanna’s workshop.

At first, I waited for a shared needle and learned the simplest stitches. Gradually, my hands became quicker and more certain. By the age of twelve, I could cut and sew trousers, skirts, dresses, waistcoats and shirts. Jackets and overcoats remained beyond me; mastering their construction would have been the final step toward being regarded as a fully accomplished tailor. But I had already travelled a great distance from the boy who entered the workshop with no tool of his own.

Tailoring trained more than my hands. It taught me to look closely, to understand how separate pieces relate to one another and to recognise that accuracy at the beginning determines the quality of the final result. A careless cut could not be repaired by beautiful stitching. A strong garment depended on every hidden seam.

These lessons remained with me long after I left Enhil. In later years, tailoring and textile work would become central to my working life and to the businesses I built in Sweden. Yet the foundations were laid in Hanna’s modest workshop, among boys taking turns with a single needle and villagers bringing in clothes that had already lived one life and needed to be prepared for another.

Before I could build that later life, however, I first had to leave the village.

The decision came after an incident in our home when I was about twelve. A family acquaintance named Isa Elo was visiting from Midyat. The friendship between our families reached back to the aftermath of Seyfo, the mass violence against Assyrian Christians during the First World War. According to our family history, my great-grandmother Sitto had saved Isa’s father and uncle from starvation after they were orphaned.

Hospitality was sacred in our culture. A guest was to be treated as though sent by God. Although food was scarce, my mother fried a large plate of eggs and brought out freshly baked bread. Isa ate everything while my siblings and I watched, hungry and silent. There were no eggs left for us.

Then, after finishing the meal, he began to complain. He belched and made insulting remarks about the food, saying that it had made him feel ill and that he regretted eating it.

I felt my blood rise.

I could accept going hungry for a guest. I could not accept hearing that guest insult my mother after consuming every bite she had placed before him.

“You ate every crumb and left us hungry,” I told him. “And now you insult my mother. Go to hell, and do not come back to our home.”

My language was unforgivable by the standards of our household, especially toward a guest. My mother slapped me.

Almost immediately, I saw her leave the room in tears, distressed by what she had done. She was not accustomed to striking any of us. But I was twelve, proud, furious and unwilling to retreat. I told her that I would leave home and go out into the world. She opposed me with all her strength. I insisted that she could not stop me.

There was more beneath the argument than one ruined meal. In those days, people from towns sometimes looked down on those from the surrounding villages as poor, uneducated and primitive. The contempt travelled in layers: larger towns mocked smaller ones, and city people mocked villagers. Isa’s behaviour seemed to me an expression of that hierarchy. I felt that he believed our poverty gave him the right to accept our generosity and despise us at the same time.

I wanted to prove that the place of my birth did not define the limits of my future.

Soon, my path would lead me toward Diyarbakir and into a world larger and harsher than the one I knew. I would take with me the responsibilities left by my father, the stubbornness inherited from my grandmother and the skill Hanna had placed in my hands.

But perhaps the most important thing I carried was smaller than all of them.

A needle had taught me that a life, like a garment, is made piece by piece. It can be torn apart by loss, necessity or humiliation. Yet with patience, courage and the right hands, those pieces can be joined again—not into what existed before, but into something strong enough to be worn into the future.