Part III
The Belle Époque à la Turk Mostly Fond Memories of 1990s Turkey
Wheels
When nowadays I bemoan my state of entrenchment in Turkey and think about what actions or inactions led to it, it is worth pointing out that I do not regard it as a mistake that I stayed in Turkey after my bouts with the college and high school.
On the contrary, I think that it was my perseverance and refusal to surrender that allowed me to live the nearly 10 years straight of relative bliss that I did. The mistake happened much later, at the end of those ten years, when I had become so complacent and unobservant in my life that by the time 2010 arrived, political and other forces had conspired to create a new and different Turkey. My blunder was that I failed to see that the country I wanted to live in no longer existed.
I think the most obvious source of these changes are political- more specifically the profound changes brought on by Erdoğan and his party when they emerged during the first decade of the 2000s. But there are many others more sociological in nature, some of which can be tied to the betterment of the economy and others to forces like globalization. The ones I want to talk about are those that I happened to witness front row center as the first years of my Turkish life unfolded.
Turkey, like any other country, is always changing face due to a myriad of forces in a process that has, moreover, accelerated immensely just in the last 30 years. Although the ones I noticed at the beginning of my sojourn here are undoubtedly a tiny fraction of all that were in play, these are nevertheless the ones I see as having worked toward erasing the Turkey that I had once felt so fond of, the Turkey that I discovered in Bursa 30 years ago and where the grappling of a love-hate relationship began.
I recently revisited Bursa, and I found not only elements of the cityscape totally changed- I hardly recognized my old quarter with its sex shops and bars - but also the inhabitants. The people in the stores and restaurants were not at all like I remembered them, welcoming and talkative, but rather remote and business-like.
But after two decades, what else could I have expected? The town has experienced enormous demographic changes in that time due to the huge industrial development in the region. It has attracted migrants from all around Turkey and from without so that the population has almost tripled since the early 90s to nearly 3 million. The character of the town that I once knew, the one that I idealized in the story of the eight taxi drivers, appeared to have been wiped out.
No doubt some would write off Bursa’s transformation as “big city malaise” that follows a swelling population and over-paced industrialization. But to account for the changes more generally in the whole of Turkey, or at least predominantly in western Turkey, I think those that I was actually witness to go a long way.
Of those changes, first and foremost I would point to the increase in personal mobility- that is the surge in the number of Turks who bought personal automobiles. Although there have been cars in Turkey for 100 years, buying en masse didn’t really get off to a start until the 70s in the largest cities and as late as 2000 in the rest of the country. It happened as Turks earned more money and banks began to lend more freely. People wanted cars for transportation, to be sure, but a people who had lived in extreme poverty pretty much since WWI also liked them as a status symbol. That propelled car buying as much as anything.
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Galata Bridge, Istanbul, late 1950s Walking and horse carts seemed to be the
mode of transportation in the middle of the last century (Photo from Google Images)
Even well into the 2000s, however, there were still lots of people without automobiles. When we bought our house in the small village of Cunda Island in Ayvalık in 2003, you were more likely to see someone moving along by donkey than by car. If you trekked through the narrow winding streets of our neighborhood, you would see a total of 2-4 cars parked along the wider areas of the road, which were really the only place to put your car if you were privileged to have one. In fact, when we finally bought ourselves a car in 2009, it was still that way and continued to be so for several years. We almost never had a problem finding a parking place.
I don’t remember exactly when things changed for the worse, but these days, when I return home from an errand with my car and look for parking I often end up grumbling four-letter words just as though I were trying to park in the center of Istanbul. If I am fortunate to score a good spot, I tend to stay put for at least a few days, just like I used to in Los Angeles, because I know that if I vacate the place for even a short errand someone will sweep in and take it. So I stay put, and barring stuff like invading Greek armies, I will remain in place until we have urgent needs for things the corner market can’t provide. Lots of people were walking even in c 1970, or taking a taxi (Photo from Google Images)
Thus life on Cunda, which was once one where your mornings were disturbed by donkey brays*, became one where your entire day is interrupted with the rumblings and clanking of cars bouncing along the wavy and potholed Ottoman-era cobbled streets, all of them, you are sure, scouring the area for parking spaces and eyeing yours as the prize to take the next chance there is.
The coup de grace, the thing that makes you want to join a guerrilla group to eradicate car ownership, is when you are taking your afternoon walk along the hidden, meandering streets of the island and some outré SUV** with Istanbul plates rolls upon your heels out of nowhere and, failing to scare you out of the way with its growling motor, sounds you a short but clearly impatient blast of the horn. It is at this point when you ask yourself how you and the other island residents have been so passive as to let the car with all its nastiness take charge of island life.
*Twenty years ago I feared I might be getting a reputation as the ogre of the island when I felt I had no option other than complaining to our neighborhood "headman" (muhtar) about a man who routinely tied his noisy and rather smelly donkey to the shutter outside my living room window. Whenever I had confronted the man and asked him to hitch it up somewhere else, he just smiled at me as though we were exchanging greetings. Now, after all these years of living with noxious and noisy cars in its stead, I can only look back on the donkey with fondness.
**Whereas when I lived in Paris I noticed well-to-do French avoided the ostentatious looking car, and were content to be seen driving just a newer model Renault, for example, well-heeled Turks, quite the opposite, relish the moment they can be seen in a high-end luxury car, the more expensive and shiny the better. The preferred makes of wealthy visitors to our island, who are mainly from Istanbul, are Range Rovers, BMWs or Audis, ideally in a SUV model. The preferred color is Darth Vader black, though in the last several years, I’m-rich-but-virtuous white seems to have become a close second.
The sad truth, however, is that most of the island residents would not see themselves at all as victims in the matter of man vs car. For them, rather than presenting a problem, the invasion of the automobile is at worst innocuous –how could something so coveted be evil?- but most assuredly a sign that tourism money is coming into the local economy. If I am fed up with car culture, it’s because I’m a Southern Californian, where the automobile has been king at least since WWII, such a longtime that its reign has outlived most people’s adoration. It’s not that I don’t like cars, it’s just that I don’t think society should be subjugated to them on every corner. The Turks, on the other hand, are just getting started and are in the first stages of a love affair- the phase where the infatuated one refuses to see anything on the negative side.
Many postcards from Turkey in the 1970-80s are peculiar in that they feature scenes with cars in prominence. Although these cards may be marketed more toward the domestic tourist, the message seems to be “No more camels and donkeys here, we are a modern and developed country.” (Photo from Google Images)
It would not be a grand sociological supposition to say that whenever globalization or some form of pot stirring takes place in a society, some distinguishing features of culture fall by the wayside but some remain intact. One hundred years ago in the U.S., the differences between a Brooklynite and a Louisiana Cajun were undoubtedly more pronounced than they are today, but even in a population like the U.S. that has been mixing and transplanting itself at an increasingly frenetic rate for the last 75 years, many striking differences between the two remain. If the last 30 years here have taught me anything, it’s that Turkey is a paradigm of a country where the peculiarities of regional populations prevail over the onslaught of the 21st Century’s homogenizing forces.*
*I say all of this knowing full well that with my anecdotal tendencies I am skirting the bona fide sociological inquiry that the subject deserves. I do believe, however, my experiences in the last 30 years give me some boots-on-the-ground credentials. I may not be giving the full picture but I know that the one I do give is not wrong.
Having stayed extensively in Balıkesir in the mid 90s, and now living there for half the year, I think I am in a good position to compose ‘before and after’ tableaux of the town and illustrate to some extent the changes that have occurred in the last 30 years.
I have mentioned that in 1994 I moved from Bursa to Balıkesir to be a partner in a branch of my school there. Within days of starting, I noticed surprising differences in townspeople’s behavior. Not that I thought all Turks must be like Bursalians, but the differences after only a two and a half hour bus ride seemed disproportionate to the distance. For example, though the people of Bursa had impressed me as normally kind towards cats and dogs, I witnessed people in Balikesir, especially children, throwing rocks at them or poking them with sticks for no apparent reason.
Also, whereas the people in Bursa were remarkably friendly, those in Balikesir, hardly a small town with 200,000 inhabitants, seemed cold and suspicious. When I first walked down its streets, I noticed that people were staring at me, obviously a foreigner by my dress and demeanor, and showed no awkwardness when I stared back at them. I also got frowns when I spoke Turkish with my American accent, something which had never happened to me in Bursa.
I once asked a friend of mine, a proud native of Balikesir, why the residents were so unfriendly compared to Bursa. Curiously, rather than be offended by my question, he took it as though I had stated an obvious fact. He told me that Balikesir was originally settled by people from Central Asia and that their collective personality, which he says has persisted to this day, formed a group prizing self-sufficiency, though unfortunately at the same time, one wary and mistrustful of the outsider. He also raised a fact about Turkey in this regard that I hadn’t thought about. Turkey, he explained, is a country settled by more than 80 different ethnic groups, a fact which by itself explained to me a lot of the diversity of customs and ways among various towns and regions. It’s interesting to note in this vein that Bursa, which contrasts so much to Balıkesir, was in the last century and a half settled predominantly by Balkanites.
In my daily outings, I also noticed that Balıkesir men seemed to like to spit as they walked down the sidewalk, something which I didn’t recall seeing in Bursa at all. This wasn’t done to relieve an immediate need, like someone who is chewing tobacco might do, but seemed more like an expression of machismo. Both men and young boys could be seen doing it, and in the crowded city center maybe you’d see 2-3 instances per city block.
But the real head turner was the crotch tugging. This could be anything from pinching the end of the upper inseam of the trousers with the thumb and forefinger and lightly pulling downward several times, to using one’s entire hand to grope or massage the wider crotch area for maybe a full 5 seconds. To me this was as vulgar as ‘scratching your balls’ in public, which is what it was most of the time. I only could imagine what Balıkesir women felt about it. It was I thought a gesture that must have originated somewhere in Ottoman times expressing male dominance and sexuality- sort of a “me Tarzan, you Jane” thing.
Boys as young as 13 or 14 were doing it, obviously having learnt it by watching their fathers and other older men. Since this happened to be the age of the students I was teaching at the school, during a break in a class one evening, when I found myself sitting with four boys and no girls, I put the question over. Since they were pretty much beginners, I had to actually mimic the gesture of the crotch grabbing. Fortunately, they caught on quickly: “Ah, Balikesir men!” was the amused response.
Although they acknowledged that it was a prevalent habit among men in the town, they all quickly disavowed ever having done it in public themselves. Their explanation of this phenomenon, to which they were unanimous, was something I never would have guessed. Men do it, was the claim, because their undershorts become too tight. This was also the answer I got when a little later I asked some guys in their mid-twenties. Why no one’s shorts ever got too tight in Bursa, as I deduced from the total absence of crotch tugging there, or for that matter in the other scores of towns that I had been in, was never explained.
I can gladly announce that though it took about 25 years, this crotch tugging is nary to be seen in Balıkesir nowadays. Neither is the spitting. I ascribe the disappearance of both to the influx of new blood from the cities, with the accompanying dose of “sophistication,” that followed Turkey’s mushrooming car ownership and increased mobility in the nineties. I think when the Balikesir crotch grabbers and the spitters were walking in town and passed these newly arrived families emanating Istanbul urbane-ness and toting their Montessori tee-shirted children, they got the update about socially acceptable behavior packed in one horrified, condemning stare.
This poster from around 1950 admonishes citizens who show “disrespect” by, among other things, spitting on the ground (top sign). Apparently, there were a lot of spitters in Turkey, who by mid century became an embarrassment to some in the new Republic.
I guess campaigns like the one behind the poster "re-educated" them so that by my arrival in 1990 there were few to notice, at least in the towns of Istanbul, Bursa, Ayvalık and other places I frequented in the west.
As I reported, I noticed them only in Balıkesir. But that actually makes sense. It's a town stuck in a deep valley, often shrouded in mist, like a sci-fi film setting for a dinosaur-ridden time warp. (Image from Google of poster by Turkish artist İhap Hulusi Görey, 1898-1986)
Unfortunately, one feature of 90s Balikesir that has continued to thrive into the 2020s is their suspicious dislike of non natives. I can attest to the fact that I receive the same stares and frowns that I got 30 years ago when I walk the main street, this in spite of a burgeoning student population at the University of Balikesir, whose sheer size would lead you to think that the residents of the town would just give up being wary of outsiders. On the upside, however, I can report that the proprietor of a corner shop I have gone to 3 or 4 times a week for 12 years now has allowed himself, when I bring my stuff to the sales counter, to display just a tinge of a smile in his greeting.
Although on the positive side the burgeoning of car ownership meant a newfound freedom of movement for the Turkish people, there’s really little much else in it that I see as a good turn for the country. I know it’s an unavoidable phase of a developing economy, but it wrecked the peacefulness of life in Turkey that soothed me so well after I moved to Cunda. More concerning, as a toll on the whole country, those cars have been ultimately responsible for the slamming of the environment: bringing about pollution, excessive wear to natural sites and, perhaps worst of all, unbridled construction.
In the last 30 years, the latter, overdevelopment, has been especially horrendous for Turkey. On Cunda as well as other areas of both the Aegean and Mediterranean, you ask yourself whether they will go so far as to actually kill the golden goose once and for all for quick money, or to realize that long term economic interests are served in a natural touristic area when there is at least some serious preservation of the landscape.
As for my own backyard, there had always been summer residents and tourists on Cunda, mostly from Istanbul or Ankara, but the economic boom of the 90s brought about a tsunami-like wave of vacationers from everywhere. As I remember well, it seemed that somewhere in the mid 90s the summer crowds on my island increased 10-fold in a matter of a few years.
This influx of visitors has meant a healthy boost to the local economy, for sure, but it also showed itself to have more than a few adverse effects, ones beyond car fumes and noise.
Another particularly undesirable by-product of our holiday makers, one that irks me like a personal affront, is the enormous amount of trash that is left everywhere, especially in picnic areas and on beaches. You’d have to see the sprawling rubbish at the end of season to appreciate what I’m talking about, it’s that unbelievable.
This photo was taken just outside Bergama in western Turkey. What makes the scene more appalling- and perhaps an example of what many decry as the de-evolution of mankind -is that this is right at the base of the ancient city of Pergamon, representing what was a high point in ancient western civilization.
A lot of this rubbish spews forth from broken bags: some Turks gather together their picnic waste in plastic sacks and just leave it on site, rationalizing that it will be picked up later by some mythical groundskeeper (i.e., “Yörük Ali will come later with his tractor to take it,” I've heard more than a few times). Instead, the bag is either opened up by animals or, eventually, by the weather and let to spill its contents. (Photo by Peter Nybak, 2015)
It was because these new visitors decided to buy up a lot of the houses here and turn them into summer residences and boutique hotels that the makeup of the island's population got revamped. Now, after about 20 years, what was its idiosyncratic "island" personality has been at least half neutered. If at one time the personality had been a rich, flavorful and aromatic Turkish-Greek mixture, it got replaced over time by a dull generic Istanbul house blend.
A typical row of Greek style houses in the old part of Cunda. It seems like every other house these days is a boutique hotel or pension. This has brought about a concern among some residents for who will be living next door to them in the next few years, or, as the case may be, 'won't be.' (Photo from Google Images)
Many of these island residents were descendants of ethnically Turk Greeks brought over from Crete in the population exchange following the Turkish War of Independence in 1923. They’ve lived for generations in old Greek style houses, which were built and then vacated by the ethnically Greek Turks that were shipped to Greece in the exchange.
Since the invading Istanbulites are willing to pay ridiculously high sums for even a dilapidated, falling down structure, the generally poor natives are easily seduced to sell. It gives them more than enough money to get a modern apartment with the heretofore elusive conveniences of a non-leaking roof and central heating.
But my regret over changes brought by the Istanbul influx is not just about a vanishing culture or micro history. It is also a consequence of this incursion that life on the island is getting more lonely. This is because it is the sad nature of summer vacation homes that they remain empty for 10 or 11 months a year. This also means that a lot of us permanent residents now have only one or even no neighbors, which in Turkey will be perceived by many- and by you if you lived here - as a no small handicap in your daily existence. Turks say, for example, that a primary asset for a house when you buy or sell is its having good neighbors.*
*A Turkish adage is “A bad neighbor means you have to buy your own pots and pans,” which is to say that good neighbors are those you can depend on when you need something.
The attitude is quite different from the American one, which I shared when I first moved to Cunda, well summed up with the adage “Good fences make good neighbors.” This kind of wariness guided me in the first months of residence when I planned right off to create a trellis on top of a 4-foot high stone wall separating me from my left side neighbor so that a grapevine would grow to blot out their view of my yard. In the meantime, however, during my many absences for my job in Izmir, I discovered that my neighbors had taken on a responsibility without being asked to look after my place. The young girl of the family watered my garden regularly and the man across the street kept an eye on who knocked on my door, even on one occasion scaring off a likely intruder by brandishing his shotgun.
This, the value of the neighborhood community, was an important lesson to me, a man who had stubbornly tried to be Mr. self-sustainability ever since he moved abroad. If I think of our island perhaps 50 years down the line when that spirit no longer has any residents to embody it, I could console myself with the cold realism that it really doesn’t matter because it can’t be missed by those who never knew it. But the truth is that things like that do bother me, just like the imminent extinction of a language* or custom always disturbs a certain number of people and rallies them to the cause of preservation.
*There is one loss of the island culture that I particularly regret: when I first arrived on Cunda in 1995, you could still hear a Greek patois- used originally by the transplants from Crete in 1923 - spoken by older residents in cafes, which I thought added some real mystery to the island. Sadly, it completely disappeared by about 2000, and I haven’t found anyone these days who can tell me many particulars about it.
As the face of Turkey changes at an ever-accelerating rate, I’m wondering if some of these more subtle pieces of culture that are falling off in the process shouldn’t be rescued, preserved and protected, just as Cunda’s old Greek houses are by the state’s historical commission. With those, strictly speaking, you’re not even allowed to install a bathroom in the house during restoration since when they were first built, these Greek houses had the toilet in the garden. Imagine if the same level of concern was directed toward stuff like preserving the dynamics of historic neighborhoods against the assault of gentrification.
There is some irony in the fact that the aforementioned article in “Aktuel” magazine about me- me being the staunch proponent of “Keep Turkey the same, please” - was one of the first of a half dozen about Cunda appearing in national publications in the 90s that eventually helped draw throngs of newly mobile Turks to the area. The article featured a few photos of me in various places on the island meant to add luster to me and my mission- like this one of me chatting cross-legged on a dock with a local fisherman, the last thing you would ever find me doing naturally. (Photo from Aktuel Dergesi)
Turkish Airways
Another event of equal importance to the car that I think helped change Turkey dramatically is the media revolution that occurred in the early and mid-nineties, right after my arrival. By this I mean the introduction and subsequent rocketing proliferation of independently owned radio and TV. *
*The Internet obviously also played a huge part in what I am calling the media revolution, though it didn’t get off the ground in Turkey until the late 90s. Measuring its role in the transformation of the Turkish landscape is, however, a daunting task way beyond my intent and ability.
Although I felt pleased and privileged when on my arrival the school lent me a television for my teacher lodging, I soon discovered disappointingly that there were only three channels in Turkey, all of them government-controlled. Generally, they offered not very interesting programming, though one miraculously showed old Hollywood films in a subtitled original English soundtrack.
Perhaps more surprising than the paucity of TV channels was the fact that on my portable radio there were only two or three channels you could get, all of them likewise Turkish governmental enterprises. One surprisingly played western classical, but I quickly guessed that it, like the weekend Hollywood films in English, was purely for consumption by foreigners in Turkey and conceived to impress the EU, in which Turkey sought membership. Never once in a period of years did I witness a Turk who had tuned in this radio station.
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Then, a little while into my residency, the school got a satellite dish and started to get the recently conceived American 24-hour news channel CNN.
It was August 1990 and the Gulf War had just begun. Although CNN geared news for American consumption, it’s a well-known story that its around-the-clock war news from the Gulf made it a global sensation.
Wanting to watch the live war news myself, I convinced the school to run a cable from their satellite dish to my apartment, which was right across the way. “May that be the last of shows like the dubbed-in-Turkish ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,’” I thought. When I returned home from teaching every night, Wild Kingdom always seemed to be on my one watchable channel, and I was delighted indeed to think of being spared henceforth from hearing Marlin Perkins speak Turkish in a basso profondo, Ottoman warrior voice.
I was soon having second thoughts, though. In no time I began to see a nightly throng of students, mine and those belonging to other teachers, wanting to watch the war news- or perhaps more accurately, non-Turkish government-controlled media -that I came close to passing my TV on to another teacher. I’d always have BBC shortwave, I consoled myself.
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The straw that nearly broke the camel’s back was when, as I carried coffee back from the kitchen during a commercial break one night, I noticed that my TV was once again playing the theme to Wild Kingdom. Though I may have groaned and rolled my eyes, I decided- not without a lot of pain - to say nothing. It was apparent by the attentive looks of the students strewn about my living room that herd movements on the Serengeti were for the moment more captivating than troops traversing the Arabian Desert. Besides, I conceded, even though I had heralded CNN to my students as a bright light shining in the dark ages that was Turkish television, I myself had begun to wonder how many times one could watch grainy videos of falling smart bombs.
As I look back on those years, it seems clear to me that the coming of CNN was instrumental in whetting the Turks’ appetite for something besides reruns of bland American programs and government scripted news. If you consider that CNN had, even in my best students’ words, “fast talking American English, impossible to understand,” its popularity in Turkey might not make sense. However, CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War kept people glued in front of their sets all around the globe primarily because watching a war unfold live, for the first time in history no less, was visually mesmerizing. In Turkey, moreover, it wasn’t just the fascination of war that made CNN a social phenomenon, but of a war in one’s own back yard.
Even if the demand for better and more expansive programming can be explained away as just a global Zeitgeist at work, the initial effect, one lauded by the Turks in the end, was the displacement of the government's monopolistic control of the media. Beginning 1993, it was only a matter of 1 or 2 years before the country had scores of homegrown TV channels and so many radio stations that they literally began to interfere with each other’s frequencies. In just 10 years after de-privatization, Turkey had licensed a total of 257 television stations and 1,100 radio stations. Today we have just as many cable or satellite TV channels as anybody in Europe or North America. Even streaming channels like Netflix have become an ordinary feature of the mediascape here.
If Turkey could be characterized as “provincial” at the start of the nineties – my mother described them in the 80s as “charmingly naïve” – then by the beginning of the 2000s, after nearly a decade of mostly foreign-born programming, they had already shaken off several layers of that naïveté.* This loss of innocence, though mourned by me, was probably inevitable and might even be said to have been a necessary precondition for the development of the Turkish nation into the stronger, more advanced country that it is today.
Although generally younger people like my students regarded all the new TV, especially the American programming, as a good thing, I also heard talk by older Turks and even some young people that all the new media constituted a dark force aimed at Turkish society. Sometimes this was the expression of fear that Turkish culture would be diluted or altered by the seductive display of the western way of life. More often than not it was the fear that the Turkish family’s well-being was threatened.
I can remember my Bursa student Hakan telling me around 1994 that he had been shocked to see some young people about 15 years of age openly kissing in the park. Given that Bursa’s population is, religiously conservative, this kind of behavior was a prime example of children flaunting both social and familial moral dictates. Ten years before, Hakan explained, such a display would never have happened. It was, he said, because Bursa children had been exposed to so many western ideas that they no longer heeded their father’s authority.
About this same year, I crossed paths with a young girl whose unusual ensemble of dress would have been interpreted by Hakan in the same manner, as one more nefarious effect of the ever-present western TV. The girl, a well endowed 16-year-old, was wearing high heels, a bright orange mini-dress, a tight chartreuse sweater and, to top it off, an olive drab head scarf.
The director, with whom I happened to be out walking, told me that this was not all that uncommon a sight in bigger cities, and that most likely the girl had left the house in a full-length coat, stashed it somewhere to pick up later, but had not taken the hijab off because nothing would incur the wrath of her family more than being reported as having been on the street without it.
But as far as her attire being a result of the sudden invasion of western television in Turkey, my director pointed out this sort of dressing was nothing new and had been going on in larger cities to some degree at least since the early days of the Turkish Republic.
That indicated to me that newly available American and European TV shows were only exacerbating or accelerating the “decadence” of western influence but getting blamed by angry Turkish fathers for fostering all non-Muslim behavior. They were the most obvious target because they were currently showcasing the values that supposedly put Turkish culture at peril- a convenient bête noire for the times. The fact is, however, that these values had been seeping, maybe even flowing into Turkey for decades.*
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*In this regard, it is worth recalling that Turkey is directly adjacent to Europe and that a good part of Istanbul is on the European continent itself. In all, though only 3% of Turkey's land mass is in Europe, 10% of its population lies there. (Photo from Google Images)
I saw a television instigated dispute between east and west values played out in the arena of my classroom in the early 2000s when two students got into a fight about what was appropriate dress for women hosts on TV. The class was made up of university students in their twenties, and one student had mentioned that he was regularly watching ‘The Ellen Show’ with Ellen DeGeneres to improve his English. He also remarked that he liked very much how DeGeneres dressed simply and casually, usually with just jeans and shirt, and how this contrasted so favorably with Turkish women TV hosts, who, he said, “always had to dress in shiny cocktail dresses, wear diamond earrings and everything.” He then asked, “Why can’t our women be more relaxed?” At this point another male student, who sounded annoyed and upset, interjected, “Because they’re not American! They are our women and they dress to please us.” After this remark, there was sustained silence, which I took as an indication that my students thought the subject was too volatile to continue.*
*Turks don’t like to get into group arguments. This was explained to me once as a wariness that came out of the awful street fighting of the late 1970s. My students, most of whom had not been born then, might have learned to be this way from their parents.
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In the vein of the conflict of western and Islamic life styles and values, this TV newscaster was called out for her low cut dress by a spokesman from Erdoğan's AK Party and recommended to be fired, which she was. (Note: She was not wearing the dress in a newscasting role.) (Photo from Hurriyet Daily News)
The mini skirted hijab girl is in particular a symbol for me of Turkey’s identity crisis, a ‘schizophrenia,’ as many Turkey watchers put it, that’s been going on since the days of the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This conflict is more than one just about western or Islamic dress, however. It goes deep in the soul of modern Turkey, making itself known in the continual yanking back and forth of the government and citizens to face east or west, where the choice confronting one is between a Middle Eastern Islamic identity, like in Turkey’s brethren Iraq and Syria, or following the western, secular orientation as originally proposed by the Republic’s founder Kemal Atatürk. At present you can see this conflict being played out in the ‘war’ between, on the one hand, Islamism and a turning toward “our muslim brothers” in Asia, namely Erdogan’s side, and, on the other, those seeking to establish strong links with Europe and the ideals of democracy and justice they think it represents.
Continued with Part IV
Links in the Blogger sidebar to the 5 parts of this blog are not always readable- this is an html problem beyond me -so for easier navigation, go to Part IV here