All posts tagged Turkish Literature

  • Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey – Turkish Literature in English

    Özge Samancı’s bildings-graphicmemoir Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey chronicles her growing up years in Izmir in the turbulent period following Kenan Evren’s 1980 military coup. Turkey’s 1980s was a time of rapid inflation, a dictatorial government, curfews, and persecution and killings of opposition members. Samancı’s parents were both public-school teachers and, as the currency devalued in the wake of the coup, they became increasingly poor. In order to silence the protests of public servants being paid less and less, the government implicitly suggested its employees begin to take bribes. This allowed for a near-complete absence of recourse for people who didn’t have money and wished for any sort of legal protection.

    Samancı’s father’s response to the treacherousness of life in Turkey is to push his two daughters to do well in school and get well paying jobs. At one point, he tells them, “you have to be good at school. Otherwise, in the future you will be dependent on your husbands or us. Your husband will tell you what to do. You will lose your freedom. In this country, if you are a woman and you don’t have a job, you are ZERO, nothing, NOTHING!” Özge and her sister Pelin respond to this pressure by working very hard and attending weekend school so that they can go to more prestigious high schools and colleges. (This educational pressure was a reality for many Turkish kids of the period, including Adem.)

    The political narrative is a perfect pairing to Özge’s own personal journey to find herself amongst the obstacles of the Turkish education system and her father’s insistence that she be financially successful. Through Özge and her family’s stories, Dare to Disappoint poses questions of what to do in the face of a society that restricts you and its other citizens and forces you to behave in certain very prescribed ways. Do you try to follow your dreams, or is it best to just try to survive?

    This graphic novel also provides a clear window into how the Turkish present mirrors the Turkish past. The modern Turkish “democracy,” the legal system that favours those with money and power, and the intense competition among people who can be trying to raise a family working six days a week for 400 American dollars per month are all foreshadowed in Samancı’s work.

    Samancı also explores the question of whether resisting the status quo is even worth it, both through her own life and in a more political sense. In one scene, her parents watch two protesters protest the government on television and remark that “they’re so brave.” However, the with backdrop of executions and jailings one can’t help but wonder where the line between stupid and brave lies.

    Despite all the serious questions, Samancı is able to demonstrate the turbulence of Turkish society and its effect on her and her family in a way that is gracious rather than angry, humourous rather than jaded. If there is one book I would recommend to people trying to understand modern Turkey, this one is it.

    Other things about Turkish culture you can see in the book include: political graffiti and movements, Kemalism and Kemalist attitudes towards Ataturk, Turkish communism, and the rise of kumpir.

    Kumpir!

  • 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!

  • 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.

    IMG_3943

    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.

  • This Girl Moved to Turkey After Falling in Love with a Man Who Didn’t Use Toilet Paper!

    Once upon an undergraduate classroom, I was reading a fantastic book partially set in Turkey called From the Holy Mountain. My friend Holly was also in the class, and at some point, one of us turned to the other and said, “Let’s go to Turkey and BUY! A! CARPET!”

    This was a far-fetched dream, considering neither one of us had a job that would allow for the sort of time off or  financial support we would need for such a foray into the world of international travel. So we sat tight, and dreamed, and sighed forlornly, and looked out the window at the pissing rain as we dreamed of the way our lives could be if we could just finish our degrees and do something else.

    By some strange stroke of luck, we both managed to get jobs at the same time that had paid vacation time. And so we booked our tickets, bought our visas, and jetted off to Turkey in February and March, 2014.

    When we finally found a good place to perform our planned carpet purchase, the carpet merchant and I really liked each other. We spent four days together in total, and when I came back to Canada we were both pretty upset about it.

    Looking back, this feels dumb. But a lot of things happened in the following months. I got word that I would be doing my Masters in September. I started feeling a lot of trepidation about moving again, because I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be able to find a summer job in the city where I was living, I had already moved three times in the previous year, I’d had a lot of trouble making friends, a pretty brutal breakup, and a job that I was really excited about but never really panned out into what I’d hoped it would be. Basically, I’d had a shit year, and the prospect of being more uprooted was a lot to bear.

    To combat the sense of displacement and rootlessness, I decided to make the most logical decision I could: move halfway across the world! Not to Western Europe, which is the most far-fetched thing my Mom could wrap her head around being a good idea. To Turkey! In the Middle East! To see if I could make things work with a carpet merchant!

    Yup.

    Since I didn’t have time to get a proper working visa, I found an au pairing gig online, and I got said carpet merchant to check them out for me. He gave the all clear, and I arrived in June.

    Things started fizzling between me and him before I even left Canada, but I was already committed to the job. They finished fizzling rather quickly on my arrival in Turkey. I went to visit, and asked for the bathroom.

    “It’s upstairs,” he said. “But there’s no toilet paper. But don’t worry. It’s not so bad to go without it.”

    “Oh, haha!” I laughed nonchalantly. “That’s not a problem at all. In fact, I shall just waggle my dick to dislodge the last few droplets, and we shall go on our merry way into the world of stuff and fun! It will be a laaaark!”

    After 24 more hours of similarly inhospitable treatment, I told him we wouldn’t be seeing each other again, and suddenly found myself thrust into the muddy waters of living in Turkey for no reason in particular.

    And that, my friends, is the story of how a holiday fling can motivate you to spend large amounts of time living in a foreign country equipped only with your sense of adventure and general pig-headedness. It is a foolproof formula to have the most wonderful, horrible, and bizarre experiences of your life.