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  • December 17, 2016

    The Best Turkish Literature in English: An Overview

    A PSA

    You may have noticed that I’ve been more-or-less absent from the blog for a while. Back in August I decided that my next post was going to be about the best Turkish literature published in English. Two months, 18 books, and ten single-spaced pages later, I have realized that a series of posts about this would be a better option for all concerned.

    An Intro to Turkish Literature


    Understanding Turkish literature requires an understanding of the history of the Turkish language. Turkish has been the official state language of Turkey, for a relatively short time. Ataturk’s language reforms of the 1920s mandated that Turkish be written in Latin, not Arabic, script and that the large numbers of Persian and Arabic loanwords be scrubbed as much as possible from the language. One of the main consequences of this is that modern Turkish literature is a relatively young beast. Other consequences are equally important. While the generally accepted interpretation of Ataturk’s language reforms is that were an attempt to instigate a rapprochement with Europe, the reforms had the messy secondary effect of rendering a large number of people with no experience of the Latin alphabet illiterate. This was not Ataturk’s only messy proclamation. In Portrait of a Turkish Family, Irfan Orga writes about how the abolishment of the fez wreaked havoc in the newly declared Republic of Turkey. At the time, some thought the idea of wearing European-style headgear so objectionable that they took to wearing women’s headwear instead. Ataturk is still much loved by many Turkish people. However it could be argued that his autocratic style of leadership and plethora of decisions made without significant consultation of the Turkish population set a precedent for the rest of the century. Turkish literature cannot be read without keeping in mind the struggle between autocracy and systems in which people’s voices are heard; not only are these questions are blatant in the content of the novels, they are implicit in the very creation and use of the language of Turkey.

    Turkish literature’s relative youth and the Turkish language’s relatively limited geographical spread restrict Turkish literature in ways that highlight striking commonalities between works. It is possible that this is only a consequence of a certain type of book being favoured for English-language translation; however, I suspect this not to be the case. Resistance is the most prevalent theme I encountered. Nearly all the books I read explored questions of how people can resist, whether resistance is worth the potential costs, how people feel when they have few to no options for improvement in their lives, whether there is even a point to resistance when new people and status quos to resist will always crop up, and where the line is between bravery and stupidity is in the fight against tyranny. Is any kind of resistance worth paying the ultimate price of death? What about losing your family, friends, or home? One of Turkey’s most famous writers, Yashar Kemal asks these questions succinctly in his work. In They Burned the Thistles, the character of Old Osman states, “There’s nothing worse than a frightened man. Just put fear into a man and you can make a slave of him for ever.” Later in the book however, the main character of Memed asks a different question. “Old Suleyman said it was right to struggle and fight and resist tyranny. What do you think? If it never comes to an end, is it worthwhile struggling against oppression, and trying to overthrow it?”

    Besides resistance, Turkish literature also demonstrates that, while some things change, many stay the same. The 18 books I read dealt with issues of freedom of the press, authoritarian government, military coups, forced military service, government that does not listen to its citizens, rapid inflation, corruption, disregard for children’s education, and the near-destitution of people who have the misfortune to find themselves, through no fault of their own, on the wrong side of the powers that be. This is not to mention the power of the Turkish family to dictate the lives of its members. There’s lots of that too.

    It’s not all negative. These books also showcase the best of Turkish culture: generosity and love of family and friends; the fierce fight of parents for their children; and the fierceness of many Turkish people who, though I may disagree with some of the things they fight for, are generally more willing to put themselves on the line for what they believe in than people in North America. In these books we see Turkish folk customs, Turkish traditions, and Turkish kindness. There are Turkish people struggling to come to grips with the history of their country even when this history is complicated and messy and at times horrifying. And, from many of the authors we see a love for Turkey and its land and people, and a true desire to change Turkey into the best Turkey it can be.

    The Best Turkish Literature

    If this is the only post you read in this series, here is a list of the nine books I would say are worth reading so far. (My adventures in reading being not finished, I may add to this list in future.)

    1. Özge Samanci – Dare to Disappoint
    2. Yashar Kemal – Memed, My Hawk
    3. Sevgi Soysal – Noontime in Yenisehir
    4. Sabahattin Ali – Madonna in a Fur Coat
    5. Irfan Orga – Portrait of a Turkish Family
    6. Ahmet Ümit – Patasana
    7. Nazim Hikmet – Life’s Good Brother
    8. Elif Shafak – The Bastard of Istanbul
    9. Fethiye Çetin – My Grandmother: An Armenian Turkish Memoir

    Most of them are available online. Only Ahmet Ümit is a bit tough to find. I’ll be writing individual posts about each of these works in the coming weeks.

    Do you have any other recommendations for Turkish novels or memoirs in English? Send them my way!

    No Comments / Uncategorized /

  • November 11, 2016

    Islamic Coverings in Turkey: Women, Young Girls, and Economics

    During my first trip to Trkey in 2014, I was surprised to see few women sporting Islamic coverings. Although public transit was plastered with advertisements for silk hijabs sported by smiling women wearing shiny trench coats and coordinated makeup, the street itself was relatively bare of covered women. In retrospect, the fact that I spent all my time around the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque explains my experience; touristic neighbourhoods are typically only frequented by foreign women since Turkish women understand that the shops and restaurants there are overpriced and the salesmen typically lecherous and inappropriately bold.

    The following summer, I moved to Izmir. Izmir, by Turkish standards, is remarkably liberal – a repository of the deification of Ataturk and his doctrine of secularism. In Izmir, bikini-clad ladies roam the beaches and barely-there sparkly dress-clad women roam the nightclubs (before returning home each night to save their virginity for marriage.) Wearing a hijab in Izmir was an act of rebellion, not a capitulation to a ruling social morality. Even my erstwhile boss, a self-professed Muslim from a more conservative city in the south eschewed it. “No, the hijab is not very good. Anyway the way women wear it these days, it is not modest!” she wailed to me once. “If you wear the hijab for modesty, you shouldn’t also wear makeup!” She showed me a picture on her phone of a Facebook friend of hers, smirking shiny red lips at the camera over a sumptuous meal, an orange hijab of expensive fabric carefully arranged atop her head. “See?” she said. “This woman is wearing so much makeup. She looks not modest.”

    My more recent forays into Turkey have allowed me to see a third snapshot of Turkish culture. I now live in a mixed neighbourhood of Istanbul. Here, Turkish students and Turkish and Syrian families of varying levels of conservatism live together. In my neighbourhood, it is a bad idea to eat in public during Ramadan. Shorts are a fairly rare sight on both men and women, even in the heat of summer. About 50% of women wear some sort of head covering, from the hijab paired with jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt to the face-covering niqab styled with matching long flowing black robes.

    I’m told that there has been a shift towards covering in recent years – that in the olden days of 20 years ago, women who covered typically only did so following marriage and usually simply tied a scarf loosely over their hair. The new style of more intense covering has been blamed variously on the government, the government, the government, and Arab influence coming in from Syria and the Gulf, a typhoon (apparently) blowing the winds of conservative political Islam Turkey’s way. Of course, these are only the perspectives of the ultra-liberal mostly-Marxist couche sociale that I find myself a part of – it’s not exactly easy for me to gather other perspectives because the people who have them aren’t in the habit of talking to foreigners like me and, as I don’t attend school or work in Turkey, I have equally few opportunities to talk to them.

    The prevalence of Islamic covering in Turkey presents an intellectual conundrum for me. As a feminist, I support a woman’s right to wear what she wants. I’m not so blind to the fact that women are presented with many similar messages in the West as they are in Turkey – you should be sexy, but also not sexy. If you’re too sexy, people won’t take you seriously. If you’re not sexy, people won’t think you’re attractive. You should wear makeup to look nice, but not too much because there’s a possibility that people won’t find you attractive if it’s too much. They could also find you too attractive and then it will be your fault if they come onto you inappropriately. You should exercise and keep in shape – but God forbid that a man see the outline of your butt in yoga pants because he might get a boner or talk about seeing your butt to his friends. You shouldn’t care about what men think of you and you should wear what you want for yourself. But be sure that it’s sexy enough to be attractive and modest enough so that nobody can question your character. And don’t forget women. Women are the arbiter of what society thinks too, so if they think you’re not dressing correctly – well, you shouldn’t care, but make sure you’re sexy enough for women to compliment you, but not sexy enough to make their partners be attracted to you.

    But back to the hijab. As a Westerner, I’ve always had a live and let live relationship with the hijab. In Canada, whenever I see one I think one of these things:

    “I just remembered I forgot to buy dish soap.”

    “Oh, a woman wearing hijab.”

    “That must be so warm in winter.”

    “How does she make it look like a turban? How do the pins stay in place? I wonder if they can prick you by mistake, or are there safety pins specifically for hijabs that you can buy?”

    “Is that really all her real hair under that thing?”

    “She could be wearing it for so many reasons – it could be because she wants to express her religion outwardly. Or because it’s a way to publicly express her identification with her culture. Or maybe because her family wants her to. Or maybe she didn’t wash her hair today.”

    In short, I tend to make the assumption of a more-or-less free choice, or a choice that, at the very least, is just as free as the choice I and many Western women make to dress in ways that tread the brutal line between being attractive and being the sort of person one takes seriously.

    This live and let live attitude came with me during my first months in Turkey, and I ardently argued for my perspectives to secularist friends and acquaintances, probably to their great annoyance. After more time spent in the country, however, my perception of the hijab in Turkey has changed; I now understand that pressures to dress a certain way go beyond society and enter many strata of government. To hear my friends tell it, a certain level of conservatism is practically a requirement if you have your eye on a good post in government, and a post in government is like being thrown onto an island of job stability while other Turks drown in the treacherous sea of the Turkish economy. So, while I still affirm an adult woman’s right to wear what she wants, the social pressure that exists in Turkey to dress in a way that covers your body is bothersome to me because the more pressure there is, the less choice a woman actually has.

    What bothers me even more is when I see prepubescent girls who are already covered. I have seen a few girls around the age of eight. My sister-in-law told me she once saw a covered little girl around the age of 5. I’m no Muslim theologian, and I haven’t thoroughly studied what Muslim scholars say about Islamic modesty’s links to (female) sexuality. However, this lack of profound knowledge notwithstanding, I do understand that popular perception holds that the hijab is about hiding the body and sexuality or (more generously) about seeing a woman for virtues that have nothing to do with her body and sexuality. So whenever I see young girls with heads already covered, I can’t help but resent the implicit sexualization of the young girl’s body.

    If I’ve learned one thing from feeling frustrated about people who cover their children or people who refuse to admit that the hijab isn’t as free a choice as it could be, it is this: engaging another culture can present real and serious difficulty to people with a particular notion of ethics, morality, and what is good for people; it is not as simple as just “respecting” somebody else’s culture. Sometimes, differing beliefs can even motivate the essentially altruistic behaviour of trying to change something about a culture (although, of course this may not be perceived positively by the culture one is trying to change.) Even though I say nothing when I see eight-years-olds wearing hijab, I feel suddenly empathetic for the bad guy “orientalists” and “missionaries” and “colonists” of history, not because I think all their actions can be justified, but because I understand what it feels like to see something in another culture and believe that it’s basically wrong.

    When do we have the right to try to change something? Or to make a moral call? Does anybody have any ideas that are better than mine?

    **To be very clear: I believe that adult women should be able to make the free choice to cover or uncover. I also believe that implicit sexualisation of young girls and being forced to cover for economic and other unavoidable reasons is wrong.

    7 Comments / Turkey /

  • October 8, 2016

    A Few Specific Muslims I Have Talked To

    Over the course of the last few years, I’ve talked to many Muslim people about faith. For some reason, these are the ones that stand out in my memory for the unexpectedness of what they said, the sincerity of their belief, the difference between my perception of what a Muslim looks like and what they looked like, their personal qualities, or some combination of these things. I’ve tried to write what they said without interpreting it here – although of course the questions that I asked in order to get them to talk more may betray some expectations I may have had.

    Azerbaijan, 2015 – Khalid

    I met Khalid online while in Azerbaijan. We spent a day walking through the old city talking about life in Azerbaijan, life in general. Many people in Azerbaijan are not particularly religious. Khalid was more religious than many – religious enough in any case to feel the need to impress on me fairly early on that “ISIS and people like them are not real Islam.”

    As we were walking through Baku’s old city, he said, “You know, the world is a bit like a video game. Game companies and programmers create video games with certain parameters, and certain rules for winning. I understand that God could have created the world in any way he chose, but he chose this way. So I think that the most important thing about life is to follow the rules of this game, because the rules could be completely different if God had willed it.”

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    Kyrgyzstan, 2016 – Marina

    Marina did my nails at a salon in Bishkek. She was a cheerful ethnically Russian woman originally from Kyrgyzstan, who’d donned a shirt that day which betrayed more than a hint of cleavage.

    “Do you like this job?” I asked her. “Oh yes!” she said. “I love this job. I love making people feel happy and beautiful. It is very interesting and funny for me.”

    “How did you end up doing this job?” I asked.

    “Well,” she said, “I used to live in Dubai. My first ex-husband was Syrian. And I had no job. I was very bored. He said that I would get an education and continue university when I got married to him, but really I was just all the time at home – no education, nothing! And you know, in Dubai you have people to do everything for you so I didn’t even do houseworks. We divorced and I moved back here to where I grew up and got trained to do this job. I’m very happy now doing this.”

    “That’s great.” I said.

    “So where are you from?” she asked.

    “Canada,” I said. “But I actually live in Istanbul with my boyfriend.”

    “Is he Turkish?” she asked.

    “Yes, he is,” I answered.

    “Does his family like you?” she asked. “My second ex-husband was Turkish and his family did not like me.”

    “Oh?” I said. “Why not? Because you weren’t Muslim?”

    “I am Muslim!” she crowed. “I converted before I even married my first husband – and he didn’t even believe in anything, not anything, nothing. He didn’t want me to become a Muslim. But for me being Muslim felt right. My second husband’s family just didn’t like me because I was not Turkish. They wanted to their son a Turkish girl. You must be careful with your boyfriend and his family.”

    “How did you decide to convert to Islam?” I asked.

    “Well,” she said. “It didn’t happen immediately. Actually, it used to be, I used to have a job and on my breaks I would go out behind a mosque… to smoke. And I would hear the call to prayer – you know the call to prayer? And it didn’t happen immediately, but I felt something. I really felt it. And for me religion is something you feel. So I converted. Not everybody understands that religion is something you feel. I tried to explain it to my mother once. I said, “If you named your daughter Ayshe, how would you feel?” And she said, “That name is feel wrong for my daughter.” And I said that if I had a daughter named like “Maria,” or “Anna” I feel myself the same way that “Ayshe” is for her. Then she was understanding me.

    At the end of the pedicure, I asked her if she drank.

    “Of course!” she said. “Yes, of course I drink!”

    “What kind of vodka would you recommend I bring home from Kyrgyzstan?” I asked.

    “They are mostly all nice,” she said. “If you pay a little more, they are better.”

     

    Kyrgyzstan, Ramadan 2016 – Nurdin

    Nurdin was an AirBnB host in his late twenties that I found along the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. Despite being ethnically Kyrgyz (Kyrgyz people are – at least traditionally – Muslims) he was observing his first Ramadan fast. His parents, brother, and sister-in-law were not fasting, so he spent a lot of time in his room until after sunset when he would come and join the rest of us to eat. I didn’t understand he was fasting until I’d been staying at his place for five days already; I invited him to go hiking with me if he wasn’t busy and he apologized for not coming as he didn’t think he could force his body to hike if he wasn’t eating all day.

    “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I hadn’t realized you were observing Ramadan. Of course you shouldn’t go hiking.”

    “Yes,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t tell you, but I just think Ramadan and religion are private things – you do them for yourself, they are between you and God. It is not good to do them only to boast to other people that you’re doing them. You know, here in Kyrgyzstan we have big problems with radicalization these days – these people are not practicing the real Islam, but I want to practice Islam in a good way. So that’s why I didn’t tell you.”

    Turkey, 2014 – Ayse

    Ayse was an incongruously kind and patient housekeeper for the first (and last) family I worked with in Turkey. She arrived wearing her hijab every morning, but usually removed it to tie her hair back if the man of the family wasn’t home. One day I tried asking her to help me with something in broken Turkish; she asked if it could wait until after. It was then that I noticed she had her head covered. “Oh sorry,” I said. “Yes, go do your prayers. It’s not urgent.”

    “You know the prayers?!” she asked excitedly. “Do you know Ramadan too?!”

     

    No Comments / Azerbaijan, Ex-Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey /

  • September 17, 2016

    How Reverse Culture Shock Led me to Google “Atheist Yoga”

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    I came ‘home’ last week to a surprise bout of reverse-culture shock; as soon I stepped off the plane in Toronto, a profound feeling of depaysement hit me like an unexpected rainstorm on a sunny day. My flawless Canadian accent and manners seemed but tools in an espionage operation designed to infiltrate Canadian society, not a natural part of my identity.

    I’ve felt out of place before, of course. I feel out of place each time I re-enter Turkey after an extended bout in Canada. Still, Istanbul, with all its charms and flaws, begins to feel like home after a while. And, as I learned as I walked through the Toronto airport, Canada begins to feel like a foreign country after a while too.

    In the lineup to go through passport control, Canadians stood with metre-wide spaces between them and complained about nothing. My inner monologue started working overtime, like a jaded old person who thinks age grants a license to say anything, no matter how mean or unconstructive.

    For example: Shut up two guys with nice clothes complaining about Winnipeg. You don’t understand what it’s like to have problems. I can’t believe you guys can’t even appreciate Winnipeg. Seriously, Istanbul is so much harder than Winnipeg. People from Winnipeg can’t even imagine how much harder life is in Istanbul than it is in Winnipeg.

    Complaining about Istanbul is an unpleasant sort of municipal sport of Istanbulites, a habit I had unconsciously embraced as a confirmation of my belonging to the city.

    An officious woman of Caribbean stock was in charge of making people line up properly for passport control. She bustled her way up and down the lineup of empty spaces like a pacman, opening barriers and zipping them shut, yelling rude things at travellers, which as a recently transplant from Istanbul, I found strangely comforting.

    “You need to keep moving,” she bawled across the line full of empty spaces. “Don’t stop, keep walkin’. And don’t cut in line like dis idiaht heyaah.”

    Over the next few days I felt foreign. I knew people couldn’t possibly because I lived in Istanbul. My inner monologue stayed nasty. To the smiley guy at my local coffee shop, my inner monologue sniffed, “You’ve never been to Istanbul have you? You don’t understand.” To some girls I heard complaining about some love interest, my inner monologue sneered “You are so vacuous and people in Istanbul have harder lives. Shut up.” To the squirrels at the park across the street from me my inner monologue mused, “These squirrels don’t know how lucky they are to have all this green space. Istanbul doesn’t have any places for squirrels. Also, I wonder what they taste like? I bet they’re delicious.”

    The unchecked condescension of my inner monologue was worst at my yoga classes. I have never depended on yoga for anything but exercise, but I was always easygoing and patient when it came to listening to the spiritual teachings of the instructors and unscientific statements they came up with about our bodies. But after Istanbul, I suddenly felt less tolerant.

    Teacher: When we feel stress, tension lands in our hips.

    Inner monologue: YOU KNOW WHAT ACTUALLY LANDS IN OUR HIPS? SITTING DOWN.

    Teacher: We have to remember that it’s love that binds the world together, that amidst the darkness there’s so much light and you can shine that light out onto the world.

    Inner monologue: First of all, that is just a glib thing to say. Second of all, you’re paraphrasing Jesus with that light of the world stuff and not citing your sources. Third, this spirituality is like pablum masquerading as fusion food (Canadian water! Rice from countries that actually grow rice!), a bland mix of West and East cobbled together to create the illusion of effortless self-actualization. Fourth, we all know that most of us are too occupied with our lives to do any major light-shining or contributions to making the world a better place. Our fancy yoga clothes are stitched by children in Bangladesh and that’s just the most immediately obvious problem with our lavish lifestyles.

    Teacher: We come together to take some time for ourselves in this spiritual practice of yoga…

    Inner monologue: CUT THE CRAP WE’RE JUST A BUNCH OF BOUGIES GETTING SOME EXERCISE

    Meditating was impossible; concentrating on the asanas was difficult. Even just showing up at the studio made me feel guilty for the ease of my life in Canada. Everything about the place – the candles, the slick wood floors, the Better Homes and Yoga Studios decorations, the prodigious expense of taking classes – contrasted with the difficulties I encountered every day in Istanbul. These aren’t my own difficulties though (those are fairly minor), but the difficulties of those around me. In Istanbul, I get to see people whose purchasing power is half of that of a Canadian making minimum wage struggle to make ends meet all the time! There are Syrian refugee children begging in the street! Women are treated as second-class citizens! The government likes to arrest anybody they feel is critical of them! It’s a bouquet of daily difficulties that, somehow, made me feel somewhat less guilty about having a comparatively easy life.

    To add to these feelings that nobody understood what I’d been through, I began to feel uncomfortable with the fact that I’d allowed the world’s (and specifically, Istanbul’s) problems to determine some of my feelings of worth. Cognitively I understood that no Canadians were at fault for being born in Canada, that the insignificance of the problems they experience is directly related to being from Canada. I also understood that I shouldn’t feel self-righteous or good about myself for living in a place with problems or for doing things to solve those problems. My own and others’ problems do not exist to make me feel better about myself, and living in a place with relatively few problems like Canada shouldn’t and doesn’t mean that I, and other Canadians, can’t carve out a meaningful existence. Not only are those feelings of self-righteousness and annoyance presumptive, they also exploit the lives of those with major problems for my own gain.

    What a cornucopia of contradictory feelings!

    Another problem: It wasn’t until I came back to Canada that I fully appreciated the worry that my friends and family felt during a Turkish summer that was objectively terrifying. The worst moment, I think, was the airport bombing at Ataturk International Airport. That day, I was flying to Istanbul and I’d mentioned it to lots of people. What those people didn’t know was my flight time and that I was flying to a different airport. While I was waiting for the baggage counter to open, my phone died. Only a few minutes later, the bombs went off in Istanbul. It wasn’t until two hours after the bombing that I was able to get messages out that I was okay. The bombing was hugely upsetting for me, but it wasn’t until I came back that I truly understood how horrible it was for my family and friends, since at least I’d enjoyed the privilege of being aware that I hadn’t died the whole time. And so coming home, which entailed being sucked into a whirlpool of condescending feelings, also entailed feeling hammered by guilt about the decisions I’ve made to live in Istanbul and to have a Turkish partner.

    I’ve been back a week and a half now, and many of the feelings have softened as I’ve readjusted to the ease of living in Canada, but they haven’t disappeared. I still feel guilt about my decisions to put myself in danger that I could just as easily avoid. And I’m still challenged by feelings of condescension for the ease of Canadian life.

    The feeling that has persisted the strongest, oddly, is an utter contempt for yoga spirituality. The other day I found myself thinking of ways to tackle this problem – should I quit yoga and take a different exercise class? Should I look for a dance tradition that’s heavy on stretching? Should I just try to find yoga teachers that are more into the exercise aspects of the practice?

    It culminated in a late-night googling session where I googled many things including, “Non-spiritual yoga,” “yoga for people who just want to exercise,” and “yoga for athiests.” Unfortunately, all I found were the musings of a few angry bloggers about the culturally appropriative and classist aspects of yoga, which was cool because I agreed with them but not that cool because no studio anywhere seems to have embraced a yoga without daytime television-esque spiritual pretensions.

    In conclusion, Turkey and Istanbul have changed me in ways I did not expect. Canada feels like a home again, but a slightly more ill-fitting one. And I might hate yoga now.

    No Comments / Canada, Essays, Turkey /

  • September 3, 2016

    Gulshada from Osh

    I arrived in Osh, a small city in Southern Kyrygzstan, in the evening. The light fell warmly on the unkempt buildings as my taxi driver whipped me around corners before finally depositing me in front of a grocery store and overcharging me a paltry dollar.

    The owner of the guesthouse I’d booked for that week came to pick me up there. She boasted several gold teeth and a friendly demeanor. The garden of her house, which had received wonderful reviews on Booking.com, smelled strongly of pig shit. I would later learn that it was also infested with cockroaches, and purposely left the bathroom lights on all night so that I wouldn’t see them scurrying out of the way as I marched towards the porcelain throne, my nocturnal bathroom journeys an unpleasant side-effect of eating Kyrgyz watermelon, apparently too early in the season.

    Gulshada’s husband, who spent most of his time working in the garden, spoke Russian with a strange accent. The night I arrived, Gulshada informed me that Osh was part of a traditional Uzbek kingdom and that, because of this, much of the population including her and her husband, was Uzbek. “Now there are fewer Uzbeks than before because there was some fighting between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz people a few years ago,” she said.

    I attributed Gulshada’s husband’s accent to an Uzbek linguistic influence and his slow speech to consideration for my own poor Russian. People in Osh seemed to have a generally tenuous grasp of Russian anyway; one woman at the bazaar didn’t even know her numbers in Russian, only in a language that sounded to me like funny Turkish (the language was definitely Kyrgyz or Uzbek, but I couldn’t tell which one.) So I thought little more of it until Gulshada showed up the next day to see how things were going. I was weighing my options about leaving because of the afore-mentioned cockroaches and pig shit smell, and wondering if it would be worth the hassle to find another hotel and get a refund. I mentioned the cockroaches to Gulshada, who shrugged and said, “They probably walked in from the garden. It’s warm, you know, the door is usually open.” Having not made a decision one way or the other about leaving, I changed the subject.

    “So how did you meet your husband?” I asked. “Oh, she said, “you know, he actually worked for me. And then of course, we fall in love and get married. He’s a good man and he loves my son, even though I had my son with my second husband. He even likes to pretend they look alike. But now he is kind of like a child because he has a brain tumour. Actually, that is why I started running guesthouses. Three years ago it was bad – he forgot everything, he even forgot his name. We took him to the hospital and they said, ‘It’s a brain tumour. There’s nothing we can do so take him home.’ In Kyrgyzstan the hospital system is very bad. So I brought him home and took care of him with natural remedies, and because of that I had to quit my job and I couldn’t work for three years. So because of that I started doing guesthouses. Now he is doing better. He can talk, he can work. But as you probably noticed, he is kind of like a child…”

    I felt a pang of curiosity about whether or not the diagnosis of a brain tumour was correct (is it possible for patients to make that kind of recovery in the event of a brain tumour? Or were the symptoms more consistent with those of a stroke?) This was immediately met with a pang of guilt, and I decided to stay for the remaining few days, pig shit smell and cockroaches or no. Meanwhile, Gulshada sat on the couch and answered her phone, chattering loudly as I sipped kvas and continued feeling slightly guilty about the fact that I come from a place with free socialized healthcare and relatively small number of cockroaches.

    Gulshada hung up.

    “That was my daughter,” she said. “She is feeling stressed out. Her husband is feeling frustrated at work.”

    “Oh,” I said.

    “They live in Bishkek,” Gulshada continued. “And because there are tensions between Uzbek and Kyrgyz people in this country, Uzbek people can get a job but it’s very difficult for them to advance at work. They have to work in low-level positions, because there is fear that if they get some power than something will happen.”

    “That sucks,” I said.

    “Yeah,” said Gulshada. “It’s tough to be Uzbek in Kyrgyzstan.”

    No Comments / Ex-Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan /

  • August 24, 2016

    The Armenian Genocide in Conversation

    Summer 2012

    I first learned about the Armenian Genocide in university, but the first exposure I had to the controversy it is the centre of in Turkey and the Caucasus came a year later, when I found myself a student at a summer program in France.

    For a reason unbeknownst to me, the group of fifteen classmates had come to include four Turkish women, two of whom spoke a very approximate  French and one of whom provided little evidence that she knew any French at all. Her name was Deniz.

    One day after class, about ten of the group members decided to go out for a beer, including Deniz, the Turkish girl who didn’t talk. We sat down, and I asked the unsmiling waitress which of the beer selection was her favourite. In true French waitress fashion, she shrugged non-committally. I pointed out a white beer of middling price. “What about this one?”

    “Bof,” she said. “People know it.”

    “I’ll have that one then,” I said, mentally making a note to tip the next North American waitress I would meet extra for at least bothering to pretend to have an opinion on beer.

    A few minutes later, the aforementioned unsmiling waitress returned with the alcohol, and the tongues loosened as we put our middling French to use.

    I don’t remember how long it was into the conversation, but at some point somebody mentioned the Armenian genocide. A few minutes passed as we spoke about the genocide; I can no longer remember in what context we were discussing it, but the point is we were discussing it on more or less the same terms. Nobody was questioning its historical veracity.

    Well, not nobody. As everybody paused to catch their breath, Deniz’s voice mumbled from the end of the table. “It didn’t happen.”

    There was a long and awkward silence.

    Summer 2014

    I was talking to Kerem, a Turkish academic I’d met online, about my distaste for Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Winning Novelist and (in my opinion), self-indulgent bore.

    “There are some people that think he won the Nobel Prize for political reasons,” he said. “Because he came out in public and talked about the Armenian genocide without denying it.”

    “That could explain why somebody who writes such boring novels about himself could have won the Nobel Prize I guess,” I said.

    “Maybe,” said Kerem.

    September 2015

    I was back in Turkey for a few days, staying in the home of an erstwhile friend. She was a university educated woman – a teacher, in fact – and absurdly liberal. So I made the mistake of assuming she believed in the Armenian genocide and mentioned it casually when talking about something related.

    She did not.

    “You want to know what I think?” she retorted. “I think that Armenians are powerful and have a lot of money and influence, and because they are all around the world their story got very popular, but that’s not the truth. It was a war. Lots of people died and I don’t know why Armenians spread this story.”

    A few days later I had drinks with another friend, an academic. “Why are Turkish people so defensive about the Armenian genocide?” I asked. “Well, Turks are very nationalistic,” she said. “But to be honest, I’m not entirely sure. You know, actually a lot of the Armenian genocide was actually perpetrated by Kurds, but they are usually more willing to accept responsibility.”

    October 2015

    I took the train to Armenia. It was the centenary of the Armenian genocide, and Yerevan was decked out in commemorative material. I met a Polish guy at the hostel I was staying at. He knew more about Armenia than I did.

    “You know,” he said. “Of course I believe in the Armenian genocide, but I think Armenians need to stop making it a big deal on the international stage. Armenia has so few friends – their borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey are closed. All they really have is Russia. If they just made peace with everybody, they might have some chances to develop, but as it is….”

    The Next Day

    I met a woman at the post office who invited me to her house for dinner. I accepted. We spoke about her children, both adults, both successful. She was proud of them. We spoke about her divorce. She was proud of that too. We spoke about her vacation to Turkey. “You went to Turkey?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “But when people asked where I was from, I told them I was Russian, not Armenian. You know history? They are our enemies.”

    “Huh,” I said.

    A Few Days Later

    I made my way to the Armenian Genocide museum in Yerevan. I hate genocide museums, but I felt like I had to go. The museum was up on a hill; the way up was flanked by commemorative posters, including one that portrayed an eraser erasing Armenian words and a pencil replacing them with Turkish. The woman at the museum front desk suggested I join a tour that had just started. I was clearly the only person participating who was not Armenian.

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    The tour guide had a monotone voice and unconsciously blasé attitude towards showing very graphic content. “The Ottomans liked to decapitate their victims” she intoned. “Here is a photograph of some Ottoman officials posing with a disembodied head in Macedonia.”

    A few minutes later she showed us photographs of a starving woman, ribs sticking from her torso, clearly close to death. One of the women in the group broke into loud sobs.

    The guide continued without seeming to register. “Some Armenians were even crucified. Look, here are some pictures of Armenians that were given face tattoos brought into harems.”

    November 2015

    I was in Azerbaijan. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union Azerbaijan and Armenia have been at war over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory which used to have a mixed population of Azeris and Armenians. After the territory was granted to Azerbaijan, Armenia claimed it; as a result of this Armenia now counts next to no Azeris and vice versa due to refugees flowing both ways. Refugees to Azerbaijan from Nagorno-Karabakh were not well taken care of, and there is a lot of resentment and hatred towards Armenia among Azerbaijanis.

    According to the owner of a bookstore I went to in Baku, Azeris are not great readers, but Azerbaijan does have a national novel, a romance called Ali and Nino. The book is about the Caucasus in the early 20th century, as exemplified through Ali, an Azeri youth, and his Georgian love Nino. Unfortunately for Ali, there is also an Armenian fellow with his eye on Nino, and Ali exacts his revenge by killing him when Ali believes that Nino has been kidnapped by him.

    I met an Azerbaijani while I was staying in Baku, and mentioned I was reading the book to him.

    “Oh,” he said, “I read half of it but never finished. What happened at the end?”

    “Well,” I said, “The Armenian guy dies and—“

    “Good,” he said.

    Baku by night.

    Baku by night.

    A Few Days Later

    I was staying at an AirBnB in Baku, home to a wonderfully hospitable family and an exchange student with whom I spent every evening. This particular evening, the extended family had been invited over. One of them mentioned the Armenian genocide. Needless to say, I was surprised.

    “You believe in the Armenian genocide?” I asked.

    He seemed taken aback, but quickly recovered himself.

    “No!” he said. “Armenians are – Armenians are, well it was a war, and lots of people died. Turks died, Armenians died. The same number of Armenians and Turks died, that’s it. Same number, same number.”

     

    No Comments / Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey /

  • August 9, 2016

    A Fearful Man is a Bad Man

    A few weeks ago, we went to see my in-laws for the end of Ramadan. It was a whirlwind. We ate my mother-in-law’s (unparalleled) Turkish cooking, and received honest-to-goodness calls from relatives in my mother-in-law’s honest-to-goodness parlour (complete with china cabinet, tea and coffee in fancy cups, and elaborate slightly uncomfortable furniture, natch). The pre-call routine involved gossip about who hadn’t shown up yet; during the call, the gossip was about other relatives’ news; and after the call everybody put themselves to discussing who’d decided to wear a hijab this year, the relatives who’d stopped wearing them, and that one relative that talked so fast that nobody (not just me!) could understand her. Perched uncomfortably on the parlour couch I willed my ears into understanding the direction of the conversations, answered questions about my family and did my best to act polite, shake hands the right way, and definitely not shake the hand of the father of a tidily hijabbed family who, Adem informed me later, bothered him because they even refused to touch his hand even though they were family, and that he really didn’t feel it was necessary for them to sexualize a familial relationship in any way.

    Then there was the story that got told and retold of how my brother-in-law once ate an entire tray (60 cm diameter) of baklava, the extremely-cool-for-a-nine-year-old manicure I gave my niece, walks by the seaside, a whole host of childhood and high school friends that Adem and I ran into on the street and in cafes, a trip to buy some new clothes -“Don’t mention your boyfriend’s belly too much! You’ll hurt his feelings!” said the salesman to me after I told Adem that he should get a larger size – and then, when I thought that I couldn’t eat any more again MORE BAKLAVA and chocolate and coffee and relatives and neighbours asking who I was and on and on it went.

    It was pleasant and normal and a bit tiring, but mostly pleasant.

    Soon after the holidays, of course, came the coup and a whole host of unpleasantness and abnormalcy. These days, while Turkey has returned to normal in many ways, it’s a new normal and a not altogether agreeable one. What I have learned is that there are still the small normal joys of Istanbul life – when the grocer down the street tries to tell me that they are selling spicy tomatoes that day because he thinks my delayed reactions are funny, when the baker gets me the bread I always buy off the shelf before I ask for it, when I pet the street cats outside of my apartment, and when I watch the neighbours who leave their lights on at night do normal peaceful things – washing dishes, playing computer games, smoking and drinking tea, lying in bed, playing with their phones, feeding their babies.

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    Istanbul is densely packed like this, so spying on neighbours is both easy and affordable!

    There is a dark undercurrent of fear in daily life now though. No matter what nationality you are, if you are taken into custody by the Turkish police they are legally authorized to hold you for thirty days. (The American and Australian embassies warned their citizens that, should they be taken into custody they could ask police or prison officials to please, kindly, notify their embassies. Because, of course, there is a huge incentive for police and prison officials to do that when they suspect you of terrorism. Oh, and the Canadian embassy did not warn Canadians that this was a potential threat, I guess because they feel like sending an e-mail round and having a Facebook page is a heinous waste of government manpower.)
    There have been some police seizing cell phones looking for anti-government messages. (I always delete my most recent messages before going outside now – not because I supported the coup, but because I vehemently do not support the government.) Additionally, many Turkish people believe that the CIA was behind the coup, a theory that seems quite farfetched from where I’m standing, but has even been aired in major newspapers. And so far tens of thousands of people have been arrested or detained, many of whom have no links to Fethullah Gülen, the man now more-or-less universally accepted to be behind the coup, at all.

    Last week, a woman who was six months pregnant was attacked in our neighbourhood by three people, who accused her of dressing immodestly and of being a Gülenist (these two things are actually a bit incongruous since Gülen is an Islamist, but Turkey never seems to make sense, so whatever.) The attackers, apparently, told her that there were four other people in the neighbourhood that they had an eye on. Hearing this sent me furiously googling Krav Maga classes somewhere – anywhere – so that I’d have something to do if I were assaulted in a similar way and was forced to physically defend myself, my freedom to wear bloomers, and my position that anybody who would send soldiers out to their deaths without telling them that that might be what they’re in for is not somebody I would like to align myself with, ever.

    It hit me then that something had changed in my responses to learning about what’s going on around me; or at least, I’m learning how I respond when these kinds of things are going on around me. In Canada incidents like this are essentially unheard of, so I’ve never been in a position to really think about what I would do. I’ve never been physically violent with anybody outside of fits of childhood rage, and I have no desire to be. But I’ve learned now what it’s like to live in fear, to have your decision-making be reduced to the autopilot of fight or flight responses. Even now, when I think about what the appropriate course of action would be if I were attacked, I find myself at a loss despite the fact that, when I left Canada, I was definitely of the opinion that I was a pacifist if nobody but myself was in a position to be harmed.

    I’ve been reading through famous Turkish writer Yashar Kemal’s oeuvre, and in one of his books he writes “A fearful man is a bad man.” I think this is true much of the time. Fear has made me question my own values, and I see very clearly now how quickly it can change a peaceful person into somebody who accepts and normalizes violence because I have become that person in moments of thoughtlessness and … perhaps even in moments of thoughtfulness.

    No Comments / Uncategorized /

  • July 20, 2016

    Tanks A Lot Turkey: A Coup and a lot of Uncertainty

    I know some of you might have been waiting to hear me say something about this, but I’ve held off on writing. It’s been a rough couple of days.

    We watched the coup via social media the night it happened, staying up all night to hear the new developments. Immediately, people on social media began saying that it was an autocoup – that it had been designed by the government in a bid to consolidate power. Then people thought it was real, and then they decided it was staged again because it was too sloppy and the government was able to play too many cards to end it. Then some people decided it was staged, but not by the government, while others began to accept that it was a real coup. Nobody however, at least in my social media feeds, seemed to believe that Fethullah Gulen, the man who the presidency has claimed is responsible for the coup, had anything to do with it.

    The most horrifying thing about that night, however, wasn’t the wild conspiracy theorizing, but the government’s response to the coup. Turkish citizens began to get text messages from the government and imams began yelling from mosques for Turkish citizens to go out in the streets and protect their country. From what I heard (or rather read from Turkish friends on Skype and Facebook during the coup) from my incongruously peaceful balcony in Georgia, people were marching in the streets towards the soldiers yelling Allahu Akhbar. When the soldiers surrendered, many of them were beaten and some killed by this angry mob, who spent the next night celebrating in the streets their victory, as if they really ended the coup.

    On Facebook, one Syrian woman wrote something the next day to the effect of, “I saw this kind of thing is Syria. Believe me, these people did not end the coup – the coup ended because of orders from on high. I know from Syria that unarmed people can do nothing against a tank. And yet they believe they ended the coup.” Yet people still went out in the streets with the belief that they could, which caused me to remark to Adem that “every Turk is born a sucker,” in reference to Ataturk’s famous statement that “Every Turk is born a soldier.”

    It wasn’t only that. The day after the coup ended, news stories started to appear that stated that the privates involved in the coup had been told that it was a military exercise. Some of them were doing their mandatory military service – and some of them, at 20 years old, died or were severely beaten by the mob.

    As far as I am concerned, citizens who went outside during the military coup to protest it are moronic sheep. You can’t defend democracy with your fists when you’re faced with a tank. It just doesn’t work. This being said, the fact that the government asked its citizens to perform this operation means they have a total disregard for the lives of their citizens as long as it serves their interests. Citizens were killed for nothing. Not for democracy, certainly, and not for positive change either.

    The other horrible thing about this is that, despite claims from the Turkish government, this is not about democracy. The last Turkish election was not democratic – government-critical media outlets were raided and destroyed prior to the election, and a previous election was considered invalid because a coalition could not be formed because the ruling party was just unwilling to form one. Another thing is that many domestic (and foreign) media outlets have stated, “Well, they’ve elected somebody bad, but the people have spoken.” This isn’t a fair analysis either. Since the Gezi Park protests, nearly all non pro-government protests, no matter how peaceful, have been silenced by police. Why weren’t the government opposition out in the street, also voicing their support for democracy? Because people are terrified. There is now no question on everybody’s mind about who holds the country’s power.

    As for me, I’m shaken up. My boyfriend and I had always planned to leave the country – we could see that things weren’t headed in a good direction, and we didn’t want to raise children in a society as hyper-nationalistic and competitive as Turkey. But, we thought that we could survive it for a few years before thinking about moving back to Canada, that a further consolidation of government power would come gradually and not all at once. Now, I don’t know what we can realistically do – or rather, what I can realistically do. We spent this week in Georgia, and even pre-coup it was like a breath of fresh air. Nobody bumped into me or stared at me in the street. Women were walking alone at 3 a.m. without incident. And people were even baring their midriffs like it was the most normal thing in the world, and not a 90s trend that has suddenly become “vintage” enough to come back into style (oh God, no.)

    The point is – violence is like alcohol. Your liver can metabolize so much, and I think I’ve reached my limit. The past few days were a series of difficult conversations with my boyfriend. “We should try to leave Turkey as soon as possible.” “That makes me feel really horrible. It makes me feel like giving up.” “I know.” “I wonder how we’ll get you to Canada. I can support you in a cheap country, but if you can’t find a job in Canada I’m not sure what we’ll do.” “Do we need to get married this summer? Will that help us?” “I think it will, yes. But we won’t get to celebrate it properly. Even if we managed to have a wedding in Turkey at a more appropriate time, the situation means that most of the people I would want to invite won’t feel comfortable coming for who knows how long – and who can blame them?” “Yeah, I see. I do want to do it properly.” “We can’t leave until you finish school.” “I can’t get a passport until I finish my military service.” “If you do your military service, you’ll be working for Erdogan. They could order you to do anything, like those boys in the coup.” “I know, but I can’t apply for Canadian permanent residency without a passport.” “In September I’m going back to Canada.” “Maybe we can meet in Georgia instead of you coming to Istanbul. During my school holidays. Then when I finish my military service we can go somewhere else.” “I thought it would be okay. I mean, I can take some of it. You know – terrorist attacks, okay – that’s just the normal stuff.” “Do you realize what you’re saying? If there were terrorist attacks in Canada, nobody would call them normal.” “You’re right, they wouldn’t. I don’t want to go back tomorrow.” “It’s just a month. You can make it until September. We can go to the seaside.” “Okay. Maybe it will be nice to go to the seaside.” “If we have to stay in Turkey for my work, we’ll move to a small town, okay?” “I guess, okay.”

    I remember once seeing a series of photographs of a wedding in Syria. The photographs were taken amidst the piles of rubble of a building, and the photographer said he took them to show that life triumphs over death or something. What I didn’t understand (and understand now) is that they are actually a symbol of all the people who were robbed of their weddings – people who died too young to have them, people whose relatives and friends who they wanted to be there couldn’t be there, the people whose weddings were perfunctory affairs and not the celebrations they had hoped for. And although we’ve been lucky enough not to have any of our loved ones be significantly harmed by any of the forces of evil in Turkey, considering a shotgun wedding this summer makes me feel sad and resentful, not excited. We could have had a wedding after many years together, we could have had time to save up for a nice one, we could have had the time to prepare mentally or the huge step that is marriage, my family and friends might have felt comfortable coming to attend it – of course we may still get to have a wedding at some other time, but it’s still not quite the same as doing it on our own terms.

    On the other hand, many things about Istanbul are still the same, but the question is whether it will stay that way. Everybody knows that the government holds all the cards now – and the government has made a point of not protecting those it deems anti-government or anti-Islamist. Will women be harassed for not dressing sufficiently modestly? Perhaps not, but now the playing field is different. When I first came to Turkey two years ago, the tourist sector was thriving, and everybody know that severely harassing women over their choice of dress was, at the very least, bad for business. The violence this year has ensured that there is no longer any tourism sector, and therefore no financial incentive to do anything about protecting women’s rights – but plenty of ideological incentive to do otherwise. Lots of other things are up in the air too. Foreign academics have been barred from leaving the country, and 30,000 educators have lost their jobs or been suspended. Police are stopping people in the streets to look at the WhatsApp messages on their phones, to make sure they don’t say anything bad about the government.

    Things may settle into a bad but predictable rhythm, but now everything is up in the air. It’s now impossible to assume the best, and not knowing how things are going to play out makes it worse.

    1 Comment / Uncategorized /

  • July 3, 2016

    A Turkish Brazilian Wax Gone Wrong

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    Today before work I ran over to the hamam to get my lower body waxed, an activity I choose to do there because it is cheap, close by, and has hygiene standards no worse than I’ve seen in any other Turkish salon. BUT, as I’ve written before, the affordability of the service does come at a cost, which is the hamamgoers complete and utter lack of inhibition. Take today for example. I enter the hamam, ask to be waxed, am handed slippers and key to a locker where I may put my purse, than beckoned over to the waxing room and told to have a seat.

    Except there was already somebody in there.

    A naked somebody.

    A somebody who was, at that very moment, getting the hair waxed off her vagina.

    A woman in her late sixties, I’m guessing, casually getting a Brazilian wax. In front of me.

    Nobody else seemed to think this was awkward, so I sat down obediently while Brazilian waxer and waxee gossiped about godknowswhat and I studiously attempted to keep my eyes away from the danger zone.

    It must be said, before I continue, that in Turkey it is quite normal for a woman in her sixties to be getting a Brazilian wax. In fact, in Turkey having a clean pubic area is considered – and I quote – “a matter of basic hygiene.” So it was not the age of the woman in front of me that surprised me or made me uncomfortable, but the part where she spread her legs to get her butthole waxed?

    Maaaaybe a little.

    Before long there was a cry of “hadi bakalim!” which signaled the end of the Brazilian wax in front of me. The erstwhile waxee rose, adjusted her stomach, and sailed out the door. It was my turn.

    At this point, at the risk of oversharing, I should state that I am also a Brazilian wax-subscriber, and have been since the first time I got waxed in Turkey and asked my waxer to leave the bikini area alone only to have her look at me like I had two heads. So I shrugged, thought, “When in Constantinople…” and succumbed the next time to enduring the most painful beauty process known to man short of surgery.

    So, one of the other reasons why I like this hamam for my waxing is that the waxer is a veritable Brazilian speed-demon. I have seriously never had a less painless Brazilian than at her hands, and there is no bleeding or anything. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a miracle.

    There are two downsides to getting waxed by a Brazilian speed-demon in a room with an open door at a local hamam where people hang around naked and have no inhibitions. One is that anybody can walk in the door at any time, usually nude or nearly-nude. The second is that there is no opportunity to hold the skin taut because there are literally milliseconds between each rip of the wax strip. Because it’s a lot less painful than a customary Brazilian wax, I have learned to let this go.

    However, not everybody feels the same way.

    Midway through the wax, another woman sailed through the door in order to ask about getting a massage and saw me naked from the waist down on the table in the middle of a tornado of hair being ripped from my groin. She, it is fair to say, was not pleased with what she saw and started yelling at the waxer.

    “What are you doing?! Her skin is pasty like mine! If you do it without pulling the skin it will get red! You need to pull it! What are you doing?! Don’t do it like that!”

    The waxer responded in similarly raised tones. “It’s alright! No problem! She’s fine! Look, almost all the hair is gone already!”

    The new client did not take no for an answer, strode to the other side of the bed, and yelled again. “You have to hold her skin! Otherwise it will hurt her!”

    Then she paused for a moment as she realized I had been mute the whole time. “Do you understand Turkish?”

    I nodded, but was too shocked to formulate a response.

    My mistake. The new woman took the burden of relieving me of my ability to choose, and helpfully reached down and held my vagina skin for me.

    An unauthorized stranger touching my vagina helped jar me into action. I helpfully replaced my her hand with mine so that she would know that I would henceforth take better care of my nether-regions. She nodded approvingly, made another comment about how white my skin is and how I’d better not get it red, and went to sit in the courtyard.

    When I left she was still sitting there, and wished me Iyi Bayramlar (happy holidays for the end of Ramadan.) I responded in kind, because how the hell else do you respond? “Bye bye random vagina-touching lady! Hope to see you again never! Anyway, it’s all smooth down there and not too red, thanks. Okay, uh, see you! Bye!”

    And that, my friends, is the story of my Turkish Brazilian wax, and all I can say to conclude this festival of overshare is iyi bayramlar to you too, and I wish you a lifetime of no unwanted body hair.

    No Comments / Turkey /

  • June 30, 2016

    Kyrgyzstan: Yurts, Russian, and Radicalization Fears and Realities

    As an adolescent, I hated yurts, which smacked of a patronizing variety of poseur-hippie that rubbed me in all the wrong ways. The offensive yurts always seemed to pop up on university campuses, at homeschooling conferences, and random stretches of grass, accompanied by a posse of beckoning dreadlocked evangelists, “Hey, do you want to come and see our yurt? Come inside!”

    It’s not that yurts aren’t cool, it was just that they seemed so cliché.

    With this in mind, it is with a touch of embarrassment that I confess that my greatest goal for my trip to Kyrgyzstan was to, at some point, sleep in a yurt. I knew it was likely to be a tourist yurt, but sleeping in a yurt in Kyrgyzstan makes me less of a poseur than homeschooling-conference hippies, right?

    Maybe not, but people can change.

    Anyway, at an undeniably touristic yurt camp where I stayed, where German tourists flock to bask in the natural glory that are the pastures and mountains of Kyrgyzstan, I fell in with a group of Kyrgyz tourists who, like me, were entirely unused to yurt-living.  They arrived a few hours after I did, and cheerfully plonked themselves beside me in the dining yurt and began chattering.

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    The afore-mentioned dining yurt

    “I slept in a yurt once before actually,” said one of my new buddies. “But it wasn’t as comfortable as these ones. It was a real yurt.”

    “You mean you don’t stay in yurts regularly, not even for vacation?” I asked. “No,” said another girl. “We don’t. We’re from Bishkek.”

    The following night, the same girls regaled me with tales of their daytime activity, a show of traditional horse games and archery. As we ate we watched a young Kyrgyz girl dance to traditional music and then stood while she conducted a “master class” which was supposed to be a way for us to experience Kyrgyz dance, and was definitely a way to make us all look like total idiots. The Kyrgyz women were barely better than me at the moves, which surprised me. I’d thought that they would have at least some background, though movies or a lesson in an elementary school gym class – something. It didn’t appear to be the case.

    We sat down again to munch on cookies and sip tea mixed with jam. The conversation went on in Russian, so I mostly focused on eating because unless I’m being spoken to directly, it’s hard for me to follow. I looked around at them. They comprised a wider variety of ages than I’d first assumed. The youngest girl I met was 15, and the oldest member of the group was in his early thirties.

    “How did you all meet each other?” I asked, as the conversation lulled.

    “Actually,” one explained, “This is a program called Muras and it’s about kochman. In Kyrgyz, kochman means nomad, and this program is about bringing youth who are Kyrgyz but who don’t have their culture anymore to experience the traditional Kyrgyz culture. You know, all Kyrgyz people used to be nomads and live in yurts, but now there are also a lot of people like us who live sedentary lives in Bishkek and speak usually Russian.”

    “Are there any Kyrgyz people who don’t even speak Kyrgyz?” I asked.

    “Yeah, maybe. We go to school in Russian and university in Russian, and maybe there are some parents who speak only Russian at home. In Bishkek, it’s possible. Or people speak Kyrgyz, but not at an academic level. Anyway, with this program we go around Kyrgyzstan for ten days for free, and we see some traditional things like what it is like to live in yurt, riding horses, dances, crafts and things like that. Some of us are writers, bloggers, and journalism students. We take pictures and write about our experience in order to encourage other youth to know more about traditional Kyrgyz culture.”

    “I have another question,” I said. “During the Soviet Union, Kazakh people were forced into collective farming and more or less stopped being nomads. Did that happen in Kyrgyzstan too?”

    “Actually, yes, there are lots of sedentary Kyrgyz people now,” said the woman sitting next to me, a doctoral student called Gulbara. “What usually happens nowadays is that people in the villages have some animals, but instead of taking them to pasture in the summertime they pay another shepherd to take his animals to pasture. So maybe only five people from every village go to live in a yurt in the summer. The rest stay in town and work. A lot of people don’t want to stay in yurts. Moving is expensive, and being in a yurt can be a bit boring.

    Next up was an interview with camp staff, conducted by the journalistically inclined members of the group. The gist of the interview, translated for me later, was that the woman working at her camp loved her job because she saw it as a way to combat the rise of radicalization in Kyrgyzstan. “Why are youth interested in radicalization?” she asked. “Why not be interested in our traditions? That’s why I do what I do.”

    I asked one girl, a journalist called Jibek, about her job outside of this program. “I mostly write about success stories,” she said. “In Russian and sometimes in English.” “Not in Kyrgyz?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Actually, my English is better than my Kyrgyz.”

    At the next meal, I got a question I wasn’t prepared for: “So, what did you know about Kyrgyzstan before coming?”

    I stammered, both because I was expected to answer in Russian because I hadn’t expected the question. “Um, I heard that you have yurts, that you eat a lot of meat, that you used to be a part of the Soviet Union… but you know, North Americans really know nothing about Central Asia. Really nothing. So I can’t say I was raised to think about Kyrgyzstan at all.”

    “Well,” said one of my conversation partners helpfully, “Kyrgyzstan is actually kind of a contradicted country. We are right next to China and we look Asian, but we’re not Chinese. We speak a Turkic language, but we’re not Turkish. Many of us speak Russian and we were part of the Soviet Union, but we’re not Russian either. And we have many different ethnic groups – Kyrgyz, Russian, Uzbek, Muslim Chinese, some Turks and Koreans. And we’re kind of at a strategic location between all of those countries, so everybody wants a piece of the pie – especially China.”

    The next day the group was rejoined by a woman working for UNICEF Kyrgyzstan, and the topic of radicalization came up again. “I work with education and things,” she said, “and some healthcare too. There is a big problem with radicalization in Kyrgyzstan, so we had a measles epidemic recently because of it. There were some people that were telling parents that vaccines weren’t halal, and that’s all it took.”

    It seemed funny to me. Kyrgyzstan seemed utterly different from Turkey; few women were wearing Islamic coverings and I heard the call to prayer drifting from a nearby mosque only rarely. Still, the topic of radicalization had come up twice, and it seemed as though people were talking enough about it that it must have been current.

    I left the yurt camp and my new friends to work for a few days in the nearest large town of Karakol. My homestay host had things to say about radicalization to. “Kyrgyzstan has some very nice, very good traditions and very good things,” he said. “But also some problems. Like radicalization is a big problem. In the south, about 1000 people went to join radical Islamist organizations this year. (Note: I’m just quoting, but this link claims 500.)  It is mostly happening in the south, among young men who are not educated and don’t have anything good to do in their life. Yes, it’s a problem. A very big problem.

    It seemed almost preposterous to me, as on the surface Kyrgyzstan had none of the overt aggressiveness that Turkey sometimes has, particularly when it came to young men. I occasionally got greeted in the street, but nobody touched me or tried to follow me, and most people did not even extend their greeting to flirtation.

    I was standing in line at the airport in Bishkek waiting for my flight to Istanbul when the bombs went off at Ataturk airport. The latest news appears to indicate that one of the bombers was from Kyrgyzstan, so I guess there was something to what everybody seemed to be saying.

    The main gist of the trip, however, was not radicalization but hospitality. And yurts. They were as good as I imagined.

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