All posts in Essays

  • 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.

  • The Perils of Cultural Criticism

    When I was a teenager this guy named Joey, an Australian, moved in next door. Joey was a generally loud person, and spent a lot of his time making negative comments about Canada. The main points that I remember were that taxes weren’t included in the prices and that “you would never see Australian drivers stopping for jaywalkers.”

    Joey’s opinions about Canada grated on me. I even went so far as to justify the Canadian way of doing things in my head: “Well, not having taxes included in our prices makes us better at mental math, and people stop for jaywalkers because Canadians must care about each other WAY MORE than Australians.”

    Later that year Joey hosted Kim, a young woman from Australia. If I had thought Joey was annoying, this woman was 1000 times worse. On top of her seemingly constant criticisms, she had a whiney voice, and I have this one memory of her sort of moaning at me, “It’s soah weiird that you guys dye your cheese yellerhhh.”

    Ergh! I just wanted to tell her where she could stuff a block of white cheese. Leave us and our yellow cheese alone! Nobody forced you to come here!

    Needless to say, I may have taken Joey and Kim’s cultural observations a bit personally.

    Now that I’m older and better travelled, I understand that it is a bit strange that Canadian prices don’t include taxes and that our cheese is dyed a truly disconcerting shade of yellow. I’m also a bit ashamed about having been so defensive about Joey and Kim’s criticisms, although I also still understand why I felt that way.

    The point of this story is that, now that I travel a lot, my feelings towards Joey and Kim have become more gracious because I have realized that I sometimes make similar comments in the countries that I visit. I struggle with the tension between the fact that, while I like expressing and communicating my feelings and I don’t generally consider them illegitimate, these comments can actually cause personal hurt or irritation to people from that country.

    Here is one small example: I love food. I cook a lot at home. I spend more money on food than I do on rent. And I have generally have high standards for what I eat.

    I’ll be honest: I don’t love Turkish food. I know it is famous around the world. I wouldn’t say that it’s unpalatable or disgusting. I have had some really good meals in Turkey, and some Turkish dishes are counted among my favourites. I am also especially thankful to Turkish people who have hosted me and cooked for me.

    Generally, however, I find that Turkish food all tastes pretty similar and that the Turkish spice repertoire is limited. And there’s no vanilla in the cookies.

    And so every time I come to Turkey, I end up dropping 5-10 pounds because, even though Turkish food is fine, I’m rarely enthused about eating it. To add to this, almost all Turkish restaurants serve exactly the same meals, so knowing that the same foods are all available to me at any time takes away my motivation to get really excited.

    After a little while in Turkey I looked in the mirror and realized that, once again, I’d lost weight. Turning around to observe the new way my shirt was hanging, I made this observation out loud.

    In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have done this. People were being very hospitable to me, and I wouldn’t want to imply that they weren’t feeding me well. Except that maybe that’s exactly how the comment came across. Now that I’ve left Turkey, I can’t help but think back on that moment and feel kind of ashamed by how rude this comment must have sounded. And it isn’t just that comment. There are actually a lot of things I don’t like about Turkey, and I comment on them fairly often. I would not be surprised or blame a Turkish person if I made a comment and they thought, “Nobody forced you to come here.”

    On the other hand, I also think that it’s okay to feel conflicted about a place. I love Canada, but there are a lot of things about it that I don’t love (ranging from our history vis-à-vis our Aboriginal populations to the fact that it’s a lot harder to make friends to our generally sub-par public transport systems etc etc.) The difference is that, in Canada, if I make some comment about us having a bad public transport system, nobody will take it as a personal affront to Canada, but when two foreign girls did the exact same thing last year, they were disparaged as sanctimonious foreigners who had absolutely no understanding of how Canada works. (Make sure to read the comments at the bottom of the article. They are embarrassing.)

    It’s a balancing act that I hope I don’t flub up too much. I love Turkey, but I don’t love all of Turkey. And I love Canada, but I don’t love all of Canada. And I try and hope to express my opinions in kind ways, and to express only opinions that matter, but often I don’t. Unfortunately for me, my status as a foreigner makes this a trickier road than usual to navigate. Who am I to say anything? Nobody forced me to come here!

    It’s maddening. It’s one of the really uncomfortable things about travelling. It sometimes makes me wonder if I am actually a decent person. And yet, somehow I have to get past it and keep going and live with myself. Even if I’m not proud of things I’ve said or done, or if I feel conflicted about the value of expressing my opinions, or if it irritates me that my opinions are interpreted differently than those of a person from the country I am visiting.

    I wish I could come up with some better kind of conclusion, but I can’t. This is just a challenge that comes with being on the road.