Turkey, Revisited

“On a recent night at a bar in one of the narrow alleyways of Istanbul’s European quarter, not far from Taksim Square, Duygu Duman said she was so exasperated with her government that she might finally take the green card for the United States that she won in a lottery and pick up and move. 

“ ‘The perception of Turkey has changed dramatically under this government,’ said Ms. Duman, 36, drinking Jack Daniel’s Lynchburg Lemonade while a Bon Jovi song blared from the bar’s speakers. ‘And now it’s getting worse.’ ”

—The New York Times, “Resisting By Raising a Glass,” June 10, 2013

The young woman in the window seat was reading a comics magazine. Stan was eyeing it from his seat on the aisle, but he couldn’t read the captions.

“Excuse me,” he said, leaning across me to the woman. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“Could you tell me what that says?”

She pointed to the image of a woman going into a toilet stall. A man in a suit appeared to be following her.

“He is saying, ‘How can you be trusted if you’re in there by yourself?’ ”

We were on a Turkish Airlines flight last June from Istanbul to Selçuk, preparing to visit the colossal Roman ruins at Ephesus. We had just spent a week in the beach resort town of Bodrum and in Istanbul with the Aydan Doğan Foundation’s International Cartoon Competition, for which My Beloved was serving as a juror. (I wrote about our experiences during the competition here.)

With the Turkish cartoonists on the judging panel, we had discussed censorship, freedom of the press (or the lack thereof), and the difference between the secular Muslim country that Turkey used to be and the increasingly conservative, religiously driven mandates of the government led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Many of the cartoons, entered into the competition post-Arab Spring, focused on themes of revolution.

Now the cartoon competition was over and we were traveling by ourselves to Ephesus, then to the phallic moonscape of Cappadocia, and then back to Istanbul before heading home to New York. The young woman next to us on this flight was a psychiatrist who worked with patients at a hospital in Istanbul and with residents of a poor community in the city.

As we discussed the political cartoons in the magazine she carried, she described with emotion and heat the changes she’d seen in her country in the ten years that Erdogan had been Prime Minister.

“It’s frightening,” she said. “Especially for women.” She cited some of the things Erdogan had done or vowed to do: ban abortion; “reform” education so that girls could leave school earlier, effectively lowering their marriageable age to about 14; increase religious education in schools. We've since heard about other edicts—restrictions on the sale of alcohol, forbidding public displays of affection, exhorting married couples to bear at least three children.

She also described a distrust of professionals on the part of the more conservative, less educated Erdogan supporters—to the point that her boyfriend, an ER doctor, had been kicked and had his ribs broken by a patient who thought the doctor was plotting against him because he read his scans on a computer screen instead of on old-style x-rays.

“Do you think about leaving the country?” I asked the woman.

“Many of my friends have already left,” she said. “But this is my country. My ancestors are here. Why should I have to leave?”

I’ve been thinking of her—and of our impassioned tour guide, Suleiman, who had said, “I have to speak out for my son, who is one year old”—as I’ve watched the coverage of the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square over the past week. Last year, I had wondered if or when the anger we heard in conversations would bubble up into physical protest.

So when the environmental protest over plans to raze Gezi Park and build a shopping mall evolved into a passionate demonstration against the government and for democracy, I wished I were back in Taksim Square to support the protestors.

On our first visit to Taksim Square last June, we had only been in Istanbul one day. I'd heard that the square was a center of political protest, and imagined it as something like the Federal Building in West Los Angeles, where you'll often see crowds with Iranian flags or placards lined up along Wilshire Boulevard. When we saw a march coming up Istiklal Cadessi, the famous pedestrian shopping thoroughfare that leads into Taksim Square, I got my hopes up that we were about to witness citizen outrage in action. But no—the marchers were carrying banners for cell phone companies and corporate brands.

I was continually flummoxed by the contradictions in Turkey—how the country seems to be moving forward and backward at the same time.

In the seat-back pocket on the flight from the U.S., a thick and glossy publication laid out in spectacular detail the hospitable infrastructure that Turkey offers to potential international business partners—including the country's growing young work force. (That three-children mandate seems to fit neatly with Erdogan's business plans.)

Shopping was already a thriving industry in Istanbul, from the historic Spice Market and Grand Bazaar...

...to the rushing river of Turkish lira-bearing humanity along Istiklal:

Yet on the societal front, the increasing religious conservatism seemed to be sending Turkey back to the dark ages. Marry girls off at 14? Ban abortion? Imprison opposing voices? As of June 2012, Erdogan's administration had jailed more than 100 journalists and 30 mayors—including the mayor of Bodrum, who was therefore unable to attend the closing night dinner of the cartoon competition as he had planned until two nights before.

I loved Turkey. I adored Istanbul. My heart broke for our plane companion and our gregarious young tour guide, who were watching the country they'd grown up in disappear into a dark tunnel.

“My parents feel guilty,” said the young psychiatrist on the plane. “They said, ‘We should have stopped this years ago. We failed you.’ ”

Now a new generation is trying to succeed in Taksim Square.

Istiklal, June 2013.  Photo: EPA  From The Telegraph

****************************************************************
For a more complete photo album of our trip to Turkey in June, 2012, click here. 

The beast

In the spring

After the swallows return to Capistrano

The air conditioner returns to the window by my desk.

The big-bottomed beast,

Its face squashed between sill and frame,

Waggles its behind

Six stories above the sidewalk

Where cell-yakking striders

And hopping third graders

And splay-footed joggers

And stoic dogwalkers,

Five leashes in hand,

Court doom.

This living organism

Joins our micro-ecosystem,

Delivering wisps of chilly breath

Through slotted teeth

During late-spring snows;

Striking a percussive beat

As the rain pings off its back,

The way my brother drums a solo

On his stomach

To the song on the radio.

He cuts my light in half,

He swells our bill like a snarfing houseguest,

He shelters pigeons,

Who gather in the shade of his overhang

And coo from their cloak of invisibility.

And come July,

I love this monstrous beast

With unseemly sweaty gratitude.

The charm

We lie on the bed, nose to nose.

I tent the quilt over our heads,

Drawing a shadow across our faces.

We’re going to close our eyes now,

I tell him.

We’re going to take a rest.

This is our nap fort.

Meh, he says,

Out of the side of his chupeta.

A hand reaches out.

A finger inspects my bottom teeth.

A slow blink, as his long, long lashes

Come to rest on his cheek.

Across the country,

My dad reaches up

And kisses a nurse’s hand.

Undercurrent

you are here | 2002 | NYC by Soledad Arias

Hola! I’ve started taking Spanish, an extension course through Borough of Manhattan Community College. It’s me and several 20something women, many of them au pairs from Germany and Russia and Poland and Croatia, learning at least their third language. Aside from some fumbling high school and college French, I have no second language, which is a ridiculous state of events. And not to speak Spanish after decades of living in Los Angeles is just shameful.

Pero, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

Today I visited my Spanish teacher’s website. Soledad Arias is an Argentinian-born artist who uses text in pieces and installations that encompass meaning, questions, thought. A few months after 9/11, she created neon tubes, placed in Times Square and other New York City locations, that slowly illuminated to reveal “you are here”—then gradually went dark again. For an “urban intervention” in Montreal, she created pennants that spelled out, letter by letter, phrases from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: “What would I say if I had a voice” flapped over a gritty urban park frequented by junkies; “Who would I be if I could be” rustled between two trees in the city’s popular Parc Lafontaine. Their meanings changed with the viewer, the time, the mood.

Also, Soledad teaches Spanish at BMCC. I’m guessing that most of the other students in my class will never visit her website, and never think of her as other than the woman they took Spanish from. Which made me think about how our selves, like Soledad’s art-phrases, shape-shift depending on the circumstance—and on whether we’re defining ourselves or others are defining us.

I know this isn’t an original concept; all of us are multifaceted, different people in different contexts. But I’ve started to wonder if there’s some essential core of who-I-am-ness that doesn’t change. And if so, what the heck is it?

We learned in class that in Spanish you don’t say, as you do in English, “I am a writer” (as in, “I’m one of a million billion writers, all of whom have blogs”). You say, Soy escritora—I am writer! Is that bold, confident creature really down there running things in my engine room? I’m not sure I recognize her.

A long time ago, a cousin of mine said, “You’re not very ambitious, are you?” I was a little insulted—we’re supposed to be ambitious, dammit!—but I couldn’t deny the basic truth of it. It’s not that I didn’t want to work; I love to work. I love to create beautiful, true things from 26 characters. But I wasn’t compelled to get to the tippy-top of a success mountain, or to be famous (it seems like hell, actually), or to make obscene amounts of money.

Between some combination of talent and luck, I fashioned a career that’s enabled me to use my fingers and my brain (more or less of the latter, depending), made me enough money to enable non-starvation, and has kept me ocupada. Meanwhile, my deepest priorities were life priorities: raising the extraordinary Child-who-is-no-longer-a-child, finding my way to My Beloved, making the human connections.

Now I’m at that magical middling age when people lift their heads up from their desks and blink, mole-like, in the unexpected light. “What? What’s going on? How did I get here? And what have I done with my coffee cup?”  

For me (and I know I’m not alone), it’s a reassessment time, a time of thinking, Shouldn’t I be doing something that matters? Shouldn’t I, like a backpacker in Yosemite, leave the campground a little cleaner than I found it?

So I’m slowly working my way toward knitting together the dual impulses that have been at the core all along: the writer who believes that a properly crafted sentence is a weapon and a gift, and the person who believes that the human connection can change everything. I want to use my fingers and my brain in the service of something that I feel in my gut. Something that’s worth it.

It’s a process, it may be murky, sometimes clumsy, but I believe it’s the road worth going down, toward the neon sign that says, “You are here.”

Sketches of Turkey

"NO PITCHAS!"

I lowered my iPhone and walked over to the guard, who'd been yelling at me from 25 yards away and was now shaking his head with disgust.

"I'm sorry. I looked for a sign that said No Photography, but I didn't see one. Where is the sign?"

"You don't need a sign! There's no pitchas here!"

I paused. I spoke more slowly.

"But how do you know not to start taking pictures if there's no sign?"

"I just told you—there's no pitchas!"

Yes, I'm back. Back in New York, land of the free, home of the nutty. God bless America.

My arrest-risking photo, taken in the rotunda of the courthouse where I went to postpone jury duty, caught my eye with its representation of Byzantine justice—a phrase that sounds ironic in more ways than one.

My Beloved and I have just returned from Turkey, whose nerve center, Istanbul, is the former Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. I think I was at a frat party when they offered Byzantine history in college, so I can't tell you what justice was like in that Empire, but it's not pretty in today's Turkey. Currently more than 100 journalists, 30+ mayors, and thousands of citizens have been thrown in prison by the current government; many of them remain there for years without trial.

The issue hung over us during an otherwise spectacular two weeks in this gorgeous country. It lingers, like the bruise on my knee that I got one late afternoon, walking up (up, up) an unpronounceable cobblestone street in Istanbul, where I waved at an old man on the third-floor balcony of a 19th century building and he waved back and I smiled and he smiled and I walked smack into one of the knee-high stanchions that separate the "driving" portion from the "walking" portion of the impossibly narrow street. The joy, the beauty, the bruise.

We were in Turkey thanks to the generous Aydın Doğan Foundation, who had invited Stan to be a juror for their 29th annual International Cartoon Competition. The competition was founded on the premise that "tolerance is more important than ever and that cartoons rely on tolerance and wisdom, and form one of the building blocks of societies open to differences of opinion and beliefs." I found this a particularly compelling and poignant mission statement, given that many of the competitors and half of the jurors came from countries where tolerance is on something of a sliding scale.

"Does the government tell your editor what he can and can't run?" Stan asked one of the Turkish cartoonists on the jury.

"They don't have to," came the translated reply. "He edits himself." 

"In America," I said in the heavy lull that followed, "the only people editors are afraid of offending are advertisers."

Communication was sometimes a challenge during our week with the cartoonist-jurors. They came from Turkey, Iran, Ukraine, Portugal, China, England—and one single mild-mannered cartoonist from the U.S. Translators spoke Chinese and Turkish...or Portuguese and Turkish...or Persian and Turkish. Or a Turkish woman who spoke no Portuguese and a Portuguese cartoonist who spoke no Turkish would instead communicate in their shared language, French.

It was eye-opening and refreshingly humbling for two Americans to discover that the U.S. is not the center of the universe.

But as My Beloved always says, English isn't his first language, anyway—drawing is. And if there was one thing these cartoonists did with no failure to communicate, it was draw. They drew each other, they drew their translators, they drew the spouses. They drew me!

I might have hoped for a tiny bit more resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, but I am very fond of my caricature by the adorable Turkish cartoonist Tan Oral:

And of the interpretation by Ukrainian cartoonist and architect Viktor Kudin:

 "I look sort of sad, or serious," I said.

"A serious woman is very good!" he said in Russian.

Wanting to show my appreciation, I rummaged through my attic for appropriate responses. I put forth one as if I were offering a too-small sweater.

"Das vedanya?" — "Goodbye?"

The day after the judging was over, the competition organizers treated us to a day sailing on the Aegean—the first and last time I'll ever feel like Jackie Onassis.

We sailed to a serene cove and parked the boat; then the swimmers among us jumped—I was very, very brave, and dove from the top step of the ladder, 8 feet above the water—into the unlikely turquoise-cerulean sea and swam with the tiny fishies who scuttled to the surface in search of bread. Then we sailed to another cove and started again.

At the end of the afternoon, we sailed back to the marina in the coastal town of Bodrum, where the cartoonists met some 12- and 13-year-old art students from the local school. Stan was matched with three boys, and assigned them to draw me while he drew each of them.

One boy had more English than the other two; he was a talker and joker, who drew everything in caricature.

Another was quiet and dead serious; his work was a flurry of erasures and redrawings, until he presented me with this:

The third boy, shy, sweet, and reticent, seemed to be searching for his own style among a host of others. Aren't we all?

"Enter mine in the cartoon competition," said the brash young caricaturist, confidently pressing his drawing into our hands.

We told him the winners had already been chosen for this year—but who knew what could happen next year? The future waits to be drawn.

To see the tied-for-first-place winners of this years International Cartoon Competition (and many others), click here.