by Orhan Pamuk
By presenting traditional costume as mud enveloping the Turkish people, Atatürk found a way of confronting the shame suffered by all Westernized Turks. It was, in a sense, a way of striking at the heart of shame.
Atatürk draws a line between the costume that he rejects (with Gide and other Westernizers) and the people who wear it. He sees dress not as part of a culture shaping the nation but as a stain smeared like mud on the race. So it was to bring the Turkish people closer to his idea of Europe that he undertook the difficult task of forcing them to discard their traditional dress. Even seventy years after Atatürk’s dress revolution, the Turkish police were still chasing people going about the conservative neighborhoods of Istanbul in traditional dress, as journalists and television cameras record.
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So let us speak openly now of shame, which has underpinned the idea of Europe from Gide to Tanpinar, from Yahya Kemal’s affront to Kemal Atatürk’s palliative measures.
The Westernizer is ashamed first and foremost of not being European. Sometimes (not always) he is ashamed of what he does to become European. He is ashamed that he has lost his identity in his struggle to become European. He is ashamed of who he is and of who he is not. He is ashamed of the shame itself; sometimes he rails against it and sometimes he accepts it with resignation. He is ashamed and angry when his shame is exposed.
It is rare when such confusions and humiliations are exposed in the “public sphere.” When Gide’s Journals are published in Turkish, the aspersions on Turkey are edited out and discussions of Gide are carried on in whispers. We admire Gide for sending his private journal into the public sphere, but then we use it to justify the state regulation of what must be the most private of concerns, the way we dress.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Family Meals and Politics on Religious Holidays
I enjoy visiting my relatives on holidays, and most especially my uncles, aunts, distant relations, elders, and betters. My aunts and aged uncles make a disciplined effort to be “good” during these visits, and with all they offer us—sweet words, reminiscences, and refined conversation—in the end, they are. This suggests that, contrary to what we like to believe, it requires quite an effort to be good. But this year, even as I listened to the jokes about cuckoo clocks that reminded me so much of my childhood, and enjoyed the silence that the holiday had brought to the Istanbul streets, and bit into the Turkish delight that tasted the same as ever, I felt the presence of evil. Let me try to describe it. It stems, I think, from hopelessness and jealousy. All those uncles and distant relations and sweet relatives who kiss my daughter, all those august heroes of my childhood holidays: They once saw themselves as Western, but now it seems as if they have lost their faith. They are angry at the West.
The Festival of Sacrifice is meant to be a wholly religious holiday, one that should link us to the present and the past. But throughout my childhood I experienced these and the other Islamic holidays not as religious traditions but as celebrations of Westernization and the Republic. In upper-middle-class circles—in Nişantaşi and Beyoğlu—the emphasis was on the holiday, not the sacrifice of lambs, much less of Isaac. Because it was a holiday, everyone wore their most formal Western clothes; they’d put on jackets and ties, offer their guests liqueurs, and then all the men and women would sit down, Western style, at one big table, to eat a “Western-style” meal. It was not a coincidence that when I read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, at the age of twenty, I was struck by the strange similarities and shocking differences between the family meals in the novel and the holiday meals at my grandmother’s house. It was with these impressions in mind that I sat down to write Cevdet Bey and Sons. When we see that other writers have had experiences similar to our own, we are inspired not just to read but to write and, most particularly, to explore the differences. I was at the same time telling a story about the Republic and about Westernization. Like my grandmother, the characters in that first novel are anxiously innocent about the West, even if they retain the old communal spirit and its sense of a common aim. I no longer like that communal spirit or that common aim, but I still yearn for the childish innocence with which my relatives once expressed their longing for and interest in the West. During this holiday visit, however, I noticed, amid the discussions and reminiscences of everyday matters, newspaper headlines, and anger expressed by elderly relatives—in the flow of ordinary conversation—a certain disquiet; the Turkish bourgeoisie was suffering pain and anger, having lost hope in their dreams.
It seemed they are having second thoughts about Westernization: that the previous blind faith in Western enlightenment was a bad idea, because it encouraged us to denigrate tradition and turn away from our own history! Gone are the childhood days at the old holiday meals, with their hope and innocence and childish curiosity. Among those who wished to be Western, there was a sincere desire to learn how it was done. The belief that there were things to be learned from the West was much stronger in those days, and the mood was optimistic. But everyone I visited in 1998—the elderly relatives grumbling so miserably in front of their television sets, their affluent middle-aged children, the Istanbul bourgeoisie that has taken the lion’s share of Turkey’s riches but prefers to shop in Paris and London—were all cursing Europe with one voice. The old interest in what Europe was; that had gone. So too had the jackets and ties that they’d worn to the holiday meals of my childhood. Perhaps this is as it should be, for over the past century we have learned a fair amount about the West. But the anger is real, and it comes from watching the negotiations with the European Union, seeing that for all our efforts to be Western, they still don’t want us, discovering that they intend to dictate terms on democratic structures and human rights. The anger that afflicts old people whose childhood dreams have come true—these days it’s everywhere.
They say there is “also” torture in the West. They say that the history of the West is full of oppression, torture, and lies. They say that Europe’s real interest is not in human rights but in its own advancement. In such and such a European country they “also” persecute minorities in such and such a way; in a certain European city the police “also” quell vociferous discontent among the citizenry with brute force. What they mean to say is that if they do commit an evil in Europe, we should also be permitted to go on doing it here, and perhaps do it even more. What they mean, perhaps, is that if Europe is to be our model, then we should emulate its torturers, inquisitors, and two-faced liars. The optimistic Kemalists of my childhood holidays admired Europe’s culture, its literature, its music, its clothes. Europe was the fountain of civilization! But in the seventy-fifth year of the Republic, it has come to be seen as a source of evil.
This anti-European sentiment has been growing fast over the past few years, faster than I could ever have imagined, and I have no doubt that it has much to do with the rapidly rising number of newspaper columnists who take an anti-European stance—the ones who write that Europe “also” has torture, that “they” also persecute their minorities and abuse human rights; those who take every opportunity to remind the public how much “they” look down on Turks and our religion. It is clear that these columnists are doing this to cover up, and to legitimize, the human rights abuses, the banning of books, and the imprisonment of journalists in our own country. Instead of using their energies and their pens to criticize these homegrown outrages, they vent against the Europeans who have drawn attention to them. Perhaps this is understandable. But it has had consequences they could never have dreamed of. In the wake of all this anti-European, anti-Western, ever-more-nationalist invective, holiday meals have become gatherings at which everyone sits around talking about the devils of the lying West. I found uncles like this in three successive houses! In the old days, they would talk brightly about how we would all be more Western one day, but now they go on and on about the evils of the West, using the sort of broken, coarse language one might expect from the neighborhood thug. After a lifetime of going to Europe to do their shopp
ing, drawing upon European ideas about everything from art to clothing, and using Western culture to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and so legitimize their superiority, they have now turned against Europe because of its perceived double standard on human rights. Now they want Europe to serve as the bogeyman, so they can say that when people are tortured and minorities persecuted here, it is happening not here alone but in Europe too.
In the old days, too, there were East-West tensions; as we drank our liqueurs and nibbled our sweets, our polite chat would sometimes descend into spats about the left and the right. But even if you found them superficial and naïve, you could not feel too angry, if only because these well-meaning people had their eyes fixed on the West. I see no sign of the old optimism today. After drinking two glasses of liqueur, let us prepare ourselves for the evil things my angry and unhappy relatives have to say about the devils of Europe.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The Anger of the Damned
I used to think disasters brought people together. During the great Istanbul fires of my childhood and after the 1999 earthquake, my first impulse was to seek out others, to share my experiences with them. But this time, as I sat across from a television screen in a small room near the ferry station—in a coffeehouse frequented by horse and carriage drivers, porters, and tuberculosis patients—and watched the twin towers crumbling, I felt desperately alone.
Turkish television went live just after the plane hit the second tower. The small crowd inside the coffeehouse watched in amazed silence as those hard-to-believe images flashed before their eyes, but they seemed not to be overly affected by them. At one point I felt like standing up and saying, I too once lived among those buildings, I walked penniless through those streets, I met with people in those buildings, I spent three years of my life in that city. But instead I remained silent, as if dreaming my way into an ever deeper silence.
No longer able to bear what I saw on the screen, and hoping to find others who felt the same way, I went out into the street. Sometime later, I saw a crying woman in the crowd waiting for the ferry. From the woman’s demeanor and the looks she was getting, I could see at once that she was crying not because she had loved ones in Manhattan but because she thought the world was coming to an end. As a child, I had seen women crying in the same distracted way when the Cuban missile crisis was threatening to turn into the Third World War. I’d watched as Istanbul’s middle-class families stocked their pantries with packets of lentils and macaroni. Returning to the coffeehouse, I sat down and as the story unfolded on the television screen I watched as compulsively as everyone else all the world over.
Later, when I was again walking down the street, I ran into one of my neighbors.
“Orhan Bey, did you see? They’ve bombed America.” He angrily added, “And quite right too.”
This old man is not at all religious; he makes his living by gardening and doing small repairs and spends his evenings drinking and arguing with his wife; he had not yet seen the shocking scenes on television; he’d simply heard that there’d been a hostile act against America. Though he was later to regret his initial angry remarks, he was far from being the only one I heard expressing them. This despite the fact that—as in so many other parts of the world—the revulsion for this savage act of terrorism was unanimous. Yet after cursing those who had brought about the deaths of so many innocents, they would utter the word but and launch into veiled or open critiques of America as a global power. It is perhaps neither fitting nor morally acceptable to debate America’s role in the world in the shadow of terror, after terrorists wishing to engineer a false divide between Christians and Muslims have savagely killed so many innocent people. But in the heat of their righteous anger, some people can find themselves venting nationalist views that could lead to the killing of still more innocent people: As such, they invite a response.
We all know that the longer this campaign continues, the more the U.S. Army seeks to satisfy its own nation by killing innocent people in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the more it will exacerbate the manufactured tension between East and West, thereby playing into the hands of the very terrorists it wishes to punish. It is at present morally reprehensible to suggest this savage terrorism is a response to America’s world domination. But it is nevertheless important to understand why millions of people living in poor and marginalized countries that have lost even the right to shape their own histories might feel such anger against America. This is not to imply that we must see their anger as justified. It is important to remember that many Third World and Islamic countries use anti-American sentiment to occlude their democratic shortcomings and shore up dictatorships. Muslim countries that are struggling to establish secular democracies are not helped in the least when America allies itself with closed societies like Saudi Arabia, which claim democracy and Islam to be irreconcilable. In much the same way, the more superficial variety of anti-Americanism that one sees in Turkey allows those at the top to waste and misappropriate the money given to them by international financial bodies and to conceal the ever-growing gap between rich and poor. There are many in the United States who support the offensive unconditionally, just because they wish to demonstrate their military dominance and give the terrorists a symbolic “lesson,” and some who discuss the likely locations of the next bombing raids as cheerfully as if they were playing a video game, but they should understand that decisions taken in the heat of battle can only intensify the anger and humiliation that the millions in the world’s poor Islamic countries feel against a West that sees itself as superior. It is not Islam that makes people side with the terrorists, nor is it poverty; it is the crushing humiliation felt throughout the Third World.
At no point in history has the gap between rich and poor been so wide. One might argue that the wealthy nations of the world are responsible for their own success and so bear no responsibility for world poverty. But there has never been a time when the world’s poor have been as exposed to the lives of the rich as they are today through television and Hollywood films. One might say that the poor have always entertained themselves with legends about kings and queens. But never before have the rich and powerful asserted their reason, and their rights, with such force.
An ordinary citizen living in a poor, Muslim, nondemocratic country will, like a civil servant struggling to make ends meet in a former Soviet satellite or any other Third World nation, be only too aware what a small share of the world’s wealth his country has; he will know, too, that he lives under much harsher conditions than his counterparts in the West, and that his life will be much shorter. But it does not end there, for somewhere in his mind is the suspicion that it is his own father and grandfather who are to blame for his misery. It is a great shame that the Western world pays so little attention to the overwhelming sense of humiliation felt by most people in the world, a humiliation that those people have tried to overcome without losing their reason or their way of life or succumbing to terrorism, ultranationalism, or religious fundamentalism. Magical-realist novels sentimentalize their silliness and their poverty, while travel writers in search of the exotic are blind to their troubled private world, where indignities are suffered day in and day out with compassion and pained smiles. It is not enough for the West to figure out which tent, which cave, or which remote city harbors a terrorist making the next bomb, nor will it be enough to bomb him off the face of the earth; the real challenge is to understand the spiritual lives of the poor, humiliated, discredited peoples who have been excluded from its fellowship.
Battle cries, nationalist speeches, and impulsive military ventures achieve the opposite ends. The new visa restrictions that Western countries have imposed on those living outside the European Union, the police measures that limit the movements of those coming from Muslim and other poor non-Western countries, the widespread suspicion of Islam and all things non-Western, the coarse diatribes that equate terrorism and fanaticism with Islamic civilization—with every new day, they take us further away f
rom clear-headed reason and from peace. If a destitute old man on an Istanbul island can momentarily approve of the terror attack on New York, or if a young Palestinian worn down by the Israeli occupation can look with admiration as the Taliban throws acid into women’s faces, what drives him is not Islam or this idiocy people call the war between East and West, nor is it poverty; it is the impotence born of a constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one’s voice heard.
When they met with resistance, the wealthy modernizers who established the Turkish Republic made no effort to understand why the poor did not support them; instead, they enforced their will with legal threats, prohibitions, and military repression. The result was that the revolution was left half finished. Today, as I listen to people all over the world calling for the East to go to war with the West, I fear that we will soon see much of the world going the way of Turkey, which has endured almost continuous martial law. I fear that the self-congratulatory, self-righteous West will drive the rest of the world down the path of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, to proclaim that two plus two equals five. Nothing nurtures support for the “Islamist” throwing nitric acid in the faces of women more than the West’s refusal to understand the anger of the damned.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Traffic and Religion
We were driving through a poor neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Tehran. Through the window I could see a string of bicycle and car repair shops. Because it was Friday, all the shops had their shutters down. The streets, the pavements, even the coffeehouses were deserted. Just then we pulled up to a huge empty square that had been fashioned into a roundabout of a type I’d seen all over the city. To enter the street that was just to our left, we would have to turn right and drive all the way around the circle.