Guest post: Some time in Turkey
Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Not angels.
As many of you know, I spent some time in Turkey about 30 years ago. In total I was there for about a year, including a summer in Istanbul and about ten months in Ankara. While I was in Ankara, I also had the opportunity to travel around the country, and visited pretty much every region. I met a lot of wonderful people there and had a fantastic time, and have many cherished memories. Of course spending a year in the country three decades ago doesn’t give me any real insight into what is going on now, but the recent actions of the government have brought back some memories.
If you’re in Turkey, it’s hard to avoid Kurds, though you may not realize it. In Istanbul there was the shoeshine boy who wanted to clean my sneakers; impressed with his persistence, I finally agreed to him cleaning one of my shoes. In Ankara, I had several Kurdish students, though even admitting that was an act of trust on their part. One of them took me around one weekend to show off the apartment he had just bought (that was still under construction), and then brought me to the office of his uncle, a prosperous dentist in the center of the city. While we were there, his uncle took out some cassettes he had hidden away and played them for us. The music was fairly typical Turkish pop from the time, but the songs were in Kurdish, a language that was officially unrecognized and effectively prohibited. Again, this was an enormous amount of trust on their part.
In the summer we had about five weeks of vacation, so I took a long, slow tour around the country. Toward the tail end of the tour, I found myself in Diyarbakır, in the south, wandering around with some time to kill before my next bus. A kid of around 17 approached me offering to take me to a carpet shop. This was a fairly common occurrence in Turkey at the time, and with nothing better to do I agreed, though I made clear I wasn’t interested in buying anything. He took me to the shop, where the served me tea while a man roughly my age (mid-twenties at the time) launched into his spiel about how the carpets were woven while another man in his thirties or forties looked on. Eventually the older man left, and the tone of the younger man changed. He abandoned the spiel, explained that the older man was his math teacher and a Turk, and then explained that he was a Kurd, and denounced Turkey as a fascist state. Yet another act of trust.
I don’t have any grand conclusions to draw from these relatively random encounters, but I’m sickened by what the Turkish government is doing now in Syria, and by our role in it, and I want to believe that the people I knew thirty years ago would be sickened too.
Whenever Middle Eastern troubles are mentioned, isn’t it odd that nobody ever mentions Ottoman imperialism as a root problem? Or the ‘pan-Turanian’ dreams of Ataturck? The Kurds are a nation, spread across 4 states, each of them hostile to the existence of a Kurdish minority.
Especially in the context of Israel/Palestine, imperial politics (of both the Ottoman and British varieties) seem to get swept under the rug to make room for some imagined past where Palestine existed as a free and independent nation that Israel brutally conquered and subjugated.
But, generally, it’s because the Ottomans weren’t white and weren’t European, so those who bother to even know the relevant history can’t fit it into the narrative of unrelenting European white supremacy.
This is not really apropos of anything, but your story triggered a memory, What A Maroon. At pretty much the same time that you were spending a year in Turkey, I was spending a year in Germany. I was taking language classes, and about half of my peers in the class were Bosnian refugees who had fled from the war that resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia. They all had a haunted look about them, and spoke little, except for one young woman. She was 19 years old, close to my age at that time (I was in my early-to-mid 20’s), but she acted and spoke unlike any 19-year-old I’d ever met before (or since). She was absolutely full of hate for the Serbs, and a good bit of the time during breaks in the class the conversation would wander to that war and she would relate some anecdote that made it clear where the hate came from. She told of neighbors executed by Serb troops in the night, of friends raped on their way to school, of relatives killed by land mines, and more, as if it were just a stream of consciousness of “this is my normal”. She was only in Germany as long as she was forced to stay, by her family; it was clear from the way that she spoke that she wanted to return to Bosnia and take bitter revenge on the people who had destroyed her youth, as soon as she possibly could. I wonder about her sometimes. I have no doubt that she’s long since dead–either by someone upon whom she meant to take revenge after returning to her splintered country, or (more likely) by her own hand.
James,
That in turn triggers a couple of my memories. The first: when I was studying Turkish at college (not because I had any connection to or interest in Turkey at the time; I was a linguistics major and had to study a non-Indo-European language, and Turkish seemed interesting) one of our classmates was an imam from Bosnia named Mustafa. He was probably in his forties at the time; had a family; and was a bit of a Nasreddin character–always saying things that seemed silly and made you laugh, but that sometimes had some wisdom behind them. He had a strong admiration for his namesake Mustafa Kemal, aka Atatürk, and a vision of a heterodox, secular society in his homeland. About a decade later, when the war was at its worst, NPR interviewed an imam from Bosnia; it took me a bit before I recognized Mustafa’s voice, lamenting that they had always considered themselves European, but now the EC was abandoning them.
The second: in Ankara, where I was a TESL teacher, we had several young male students whose family’s had sent them there to escape serving in the war. They were mostly teenagers from well-off families; Turkey was officially neutral and wouldn’t offer them refugee status, so they had to leave the country every three months, usually to Greece or Cyprus, to get their passports stamped. But one of the Iranians was in his mid-twenties; he had been called up, or perhaps volunteered, at the beginning of the war, and out of his group of 18, only 3 survived. He figured he had done his time, but now the government wanted to call him up again, and so he left.
And now more memories are coming back; I really should write them down sometime. I was at a conference this week for teachers of what we used to call English language learners (now the preferred term is multilingual learners, and there’s good reason for that), and one of the themes was listening to the stories of your students. It’s important to keep in mind that with all the shit that’s going down, these are real people with real families who are being affected (I know no one reading this here has to be reminded of that, but it seems that many of my compatriots do).