Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  In 2001, he founded the AK Party, and allied with another group of canny, smooth-talking religious Muslims called the Gülenists, after its founder, Fethullah Gülen, a preacher who lives in Pennsylvania. They were a mysterious and powerful group. They advertised themselves as peace-loving and “moderate,” a PR campaign that worked very well on Americans. Every month, Gülen representatives held seminars for foreign journalists in Istanbul, where they offered lectures related to the news of the day: the history of the AK Party, the compatibility of Islam with democracy. They introduced us to religious scholars and intellectuals, to young women pursuing PhDs who could confidently articulate their own reasons for wearing a head scarf. The Gülenists were aggressively helpful to foreigners. But many Turks, it seemed, feared their ubiquity; there was a sense that even the bread you bought at the local fırın might have been sponsored by the Gülen movement, that the bread itself could be “Gülen,” as Turks put it.

  The Gülenist newspaper, Zaman, one of the most popular in the country, also used Erdoğan’s language of American liberalism and capitalism: “modernization,” “human rights,” “freedom,” “pro-business,” “privatization.” Then I had not thought to even question these words, so dazzled was I that they—the Islamists—were using that language at all. The new AK Party spoke approvingly of the West, both as a model for the Turkish economy and as a beacon of religious liberty. Erdoğan advocated for a program of market liberalization once designed by the IMF. They were one of the only major parties—the formerly Islamist party—that fully supported joining Europe. In accordance with the EU’s demands, the AK Party passed more than forty pieces of legislation to protect freedom of expression, improve the rights of women and children, and eliminate torture, and would eventually strengthen civilian control of the military, the last of which, of course, was the one most in Erdoğan’s personal interest. For the first time in history, a civilian politician would be free to run Turkey how he chose. So enamored was I with this most important of steps toward real democracy—no more military in politics!—that I didn’t consider how this newfound liberty might be corrosive even to a politician with the best possible intentions.

  Both religious Turks and liberals were astonished at their “Tayyip’s” ability to bring about real change. In 2004, Time had noted approvingly: “Western leaders have been scouring the Muslim world for moderate politicians who see their future in democracy and pluralism. Erdoğan may be the best find yet.” Erdoğan and the AK Party appeared to be the sort of mild, moderate “good Muslims” who make Westerners feel better about the possibility of peace in the world, as well as the widespread appeal of Western-style democracy and market capitalism. And Erdoğan made me feel better, too. A friend from home said to me, “It feels utterly wrong that you would be more sympathetic to the Islamic party rather than the secular one.” But Erdoğan and his party, who so ably used words like “freedom” and “democracy,” appealed to me far more than the Turkish secularists who believed religious people were a threat to Atatürk’s country, whose bloodlust could be aroused because of a poem. Like many of the journalists, I celebrated the fact that Erdoğan was “pro-business,” because capitalism seemed like a Western antidote to the scary things about Islam. Many former leftists supported Erdoğan at that time—even the group of gay men I befriended in my neighborhood voted for him—and on some level, I supported Erdoğan, too. Could there be anyone more easily seduced by Erdoğan’s up-by-the-bootstraps story than Americans who treasured that same myth about themselves? “For so long, the secularists imitated the West, and they were ashamed of where they came from,” an artist told me. “Erdoğan doesn’t have any of that shame, and you can tell.” The AK Party won the election that year I arrived, and for the first time, Turkey had a prime minister, a president, and a ruling majority party in Parliament who were all former Islamists.

  Rana had by then moved past any concern she had about Erdoğan and Gül’s piousness. She was seven steps ahead of me already. Her concerns centered on potential corruption, the kind that might be especially tempting to a segment of society that never before had unfettered access to the state’s economic and bureaucratic largesse. I admitted that few people in the foreign press at the time questioned the party’s economic policies or finances.

  “So for a lot of people this is about a question of money?” I asked.

  I’m surprised she didn’t kill me. “Obviously!” she nearly yelled. “Money, power, whatever. They’re politicians! I mean, if you Americans aren’t thinking about money, then who the hell will?”

  Neither of us realized at the time that it was precisely because I was American that I did not think about money, not in this context anyway. I was consumed by this country’s cultural revolution. I had never been somewhere, I thought, where national and personal identity had been so deliberately and methodically engineered, and here I was watching the whole thing fall apart. For me, everything was somehow representative of this what-it-meant-to-be-a-Turk question, and I took it as my duty to understand this strange virus—nationalism—to which I assumed the Turks had been uniquely prone.

  * * *

  AT THE TIME, I had three American friends working on books about the Armenian genocide, and when I applied for my fellowship, I, too, had wanted to investigate the Turkish-Armenian phenomenon, because for an American who knew nothing about Turkey, and who had read about the persecution of Orhan Pamuk for talking about the Armenians’ suffering, the denial of genocide was the likeliest subject about which to be enraged. “How does a people go about forgetting the past?” I wrote in my application essay. One of these American friends invited me to Gallipoli, which had seen one of the most important battles in World War I, a giant victory for the flailing Turks, and from which Atatürk emerged as a brilliant hero. Our guide, Bülent, told us the National Ministry of Education made it mandatory for all Turkish students—every student in the country—to visit the peninsula “to build national consciousness.” Thousands of kids ventured from all over Turkey to Gallipoli by the busload. In Turkey, courses in militarism begin early. One social studies textbook for fifth graders explained that “our duty is to eliminate all subversive and divisive threats directed to our country.” Another read: “Turkish existence would come to an end if nationalism were abandoned.” In high school, every Turkish student took a mandatory national security course, taught by military officers. “War and war-making are essential in our culture,” one teacher explained. Turks learned that the military must stay strong to protect them from constant foreign and domestic threats. They were told the Kurds and Armenians inside Turkey tried to take Turkey from them. They were told Westerners outside Turkey tried to take away Turkey from them, too.

  When, that October, six months after I arrived, Kurdish militants killed a dozen soldiers in an ambush in southeastern Turkey, my neighborhood turned into a strange fantasia of red flags. Even Caner couldn’t hide that he was worried; the anger, the nationalism, the war cries, only one day old, already seemed as bad to him as it did in the nineties, when the Turkish state waged a vicious war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, a Kurdish militant group, and by extension much of the Kurdish community. People marched down Istiklal Caddesi waving those enormous bloodred Turkish flags, the men sporting red bandannas like warriors, the women holding photos of Atatürk on sticks, the children clutching signs that read WE ARE ALL TURKS. Small vans decorated with photos of dead soldiers shuttled loads of people through the heart of the city and played 1930s-style anthems. Men sat out the windows of beat-up sedans wielding those man-size flags as if at the barricades; flag sellers stumbled beneath the weight of their wares on every block. Even Starbucks had a flag. At night, e-mails were dispatched urging people to march, to turn off their lights at nine thirty, to wear black. Flags were posted on Facebook, instead of personal photos. Black ribbons that had been worn on people’s chests to commemorate the fallen littered the Metro. Even women were enlisting in the army—one was six months pregnant—alon
g with the thousands of men who were volunteering to go back to it. Across Turkey men marched, armed with their young sons in one hand and guns in the other. Sometimes the young sons waved toy guns, too. The Beyoncé concert was canceled.

  “Maybe we should buy a flag,” Caner joked. “Just in case?”

  By then, I had been often hanging out with Caner and his Kurdish friends, most of whom went to Boğaziçi University, the Harvard of Turkey. One evening, Caner was slowly drinking his four-lira vodka lemonade at one of the few cheap bars in the pleasant Istanbul neighborhood of Cihangir, where his parents, Orhan Pamuk, dog-owning expatriates, and Turkish soap opera actors shared a fancy Carrefour food store and stunning views of the Bosphorus. He told a joke:

  Once there were two Kurdish men and they really wanted to be Turks. So they went to a military commander and asked him, “How can we become Turkish?” And the military commander said, “Just go to the highest mountain and scream three times, ‘I am a Turk, I am a Turk, I am a Turk!’ And you will be a Turk.” So the two Kurdish men went to the mountain and in order to get as high as possible the one stood on the other’s back. He screamed, “I am a Turk! I am a Turk! I am a Turk!” Then he stood there. When his friend below him said, “Hey, my turn,” the Turk on top looked down at the Kurd and replied, “Shut up, bitch.”

  He told this joke with the typical irony and sly grin that he and his Kurdish friends employed regularly—when they teased one another about not really being Turks, when they called one another “peasant,” when they derided ethnic music in favor of “modern” contemporary pop music, all as if pretending to suck up to an invisible Turkish minder. This humor protected as much as it might have isolated them.

  At the time one of the only newspapers writing critically about the government’s treatment of the Kurds, about the military, and about nationalism was a new one called Taraf. I went to visit the founder, the novelist and journalist Ahmet Altan. Taraf’s office was located on the Asian side of Istanbul, in a lively neighborhood called Kadıköy. Inside the office, I passed through two guards and a bag checkpoint. Very young people crouched over black laptops under fluorescent newsroom lights. It was carpeted, and felt like a bookstore. From the windows, I could see my neighborhood across the twinkling water.

  Altan had been fired from newspapers and prosecuted for his columns many times. In Turkey, censorship served to bolster Turkish nationalism. Altan was once sentenced to a year and a half in jail for “inciting racial hatred.” In 1999, he went to trial for insulting “the moral characteristic of the government and its armed and security forces.” The year before, his crime was writing, according to one newspaper, “about government doctors who issued conflicting forensic examinations on a nine-year-old boy who had been molested.” He had also been accused of collaborating with the PKK, and criticizing military generals.

  Altan wanted to start Taraf because of the Kurdish issue. “Most Turks are very suspicious about the Kurds,” he said. “The Turkish media likes to write ‘our army, huge and powerful army’—a very chauvinistic approach.”

  Former lefties, or secular liberals like Altan, were at the time pushing this idea that it was actually the Westernized elite in Turkey, not the Erdoğan Islamists, who were responsible for Turkey’s illiberalism.

  “We learn a lot of lies, which is called history in Turkey,” he said. “They worship Atatürk, he’s a kind of superman. He cannot do anything wrong. Criticism about Atatürk is against the law. Some countries you can see only one man’s statue. In Turkey, it’s Atatürk. In Iraq, it was Saddam. In North Korea, it’s Kim Jong. If there’s only one kind of statue in a country, it means that country has a problem. The only goal of our education is to create obedient citizens who worship Atatürk and Kemalism.”

  Erdoğan didn’t seem to believe in freedom of the press, either, I said, referring to some squabbles the prime minister had had lately with political cartoonists. Altan didn’t come down hard on the AK Party.

  “That’s another enigma of Turkey,” he said. “They are religious guys, conservative guys, but at the same time they are the most progressive party in Turkey right now. It’s unbelievable: progressive conservatives! There is no such category in sociology or politics. But we have it. The media tries to say they will bring sharia to Turkey, which I do not believe. Turks are not those kinds of Muslims. We have our own style in religion.”

  “This is hard for many people in the West to understand,” I said.

  “I think they cannot understand Turkey,” he said. “First of all, Turkey’s a narcissistic society. One way we think we are the best, the other way we are very fragile. We can easily believe that we are humiliated. Yet we also have the arrogance of an empire. If you try to teach something to Turks, they reject it. You must praise them first: Turks, yes, you are the best.” He paused, smoking. “For example, we learn that Atatürk said, ‘One Turk is equal to the world.’ We believe that.”

  He looked as if the conversation depressed him. Before I left his office, I asked: “Is it true your books sold a million copies in Turkey?”

  “It was my essays,” he said. “I like to write about emotions. Westerners do not like that. They like wisdom. I mean, Europe and the States—they adore intelligence and shallow literature. They don’t like depth. I think they are afraid of emotions, maybe despise them, as if they cut some part of themselves, cut their souls out. I just say, Westerners, pity for them.”

  I looked at him quietly, reminded of something. He sounded like Baldwin, whose thoughts I believed were only thought by him, who I never imagined occupied the same reality as this Turkish stranger sitting across from me.

  * * *

  I HAD BEEN approaching Turkey like some specimen I could place under a microscope. This process is inherently hostile, but I did not know that at the time. I automatically sized up the country according to its successes and failures, delighting exaggeratedly over the former as if I had the lowest expectations, and feeling like an impatient teacher about the latter, one who believed her student just needed encouragement and guidance. Turkey was one of those “democratizing,” “modernizing” countries, a condition that could be assessed through everything from its human rights to its national curriculum, its economy to its health care, its fashions to its urban transportation. To get around Istanbul, for example, you could buy something called an Akbil, a tiny button that attached to your key chain and was usable on buses, metros, and ferries. To me, the Akbil was brilliant, a stunning invention, and proof that the ruling religious government at the time must be as modern as—possibly more modern than—any American party.

  But in Turkish nationalism, I saw Turkey’s ugly, violent heart. It was necessarily exclusive, masculine, macho. Nationalism was a modern phenomenon, but Turkey’s felt antimodern to me, stuck in the past, an antiquated force that compelled Turks to hate someone in order to maintain their love for themselves. Modernity, I believed at the time, and as I evidently believed about the United States, did not privilege the nation over the individual, did not worship myths conceived centuries ago. Turkey still needed to evolve, I thought, and nationalism, not Erdoğan, not Islam, was the impediment to its maturity. If there was anything that made Turks unique on earth, it was this brand of nationalism, and I wondered, innocently, how many years it would take for this young republic to mature. I felt proud of myself for feeling repelled by this nationalism as an observer, that because of my outsider neutrality, my unique objectivity, I could see this self-love for what it really was.

  Here’s the thing: no one ever tells Americans that when they move abroad, even if they are empathetic and sensitive humans—even if they come clean about their genetic inability to learn languages, even if they consider themselves leftist critics of their own government—that they will inevitably, and unconsciously, spend those first months in a foreign country feeling superior to everyone around them and to the nation in which they now have the privilege to live.

  In one passage of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda N
gozi Adichie’s Americanah, she describes her Nigerian narrator’s encounter with a white American woman. They are discussing V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, a novel about an Indian man living in Africa. The white woman says to the Nigerian woman that she had learned so much “about Africa” from it. The Nigerian woman

  did not think the novel was about Africa at all. It was about Europe, or the longing for Europe, about the battered self-image of an Indian man born in Africa, who felt so wounded, so diminished, by not having been born European, a member of a race which he had elevated for their ability to create, that he turned his imagined personal insufficiencies into an impatient contempt for Africa; in his knowing haughty attitude to the African, he could become, even if only fleetingly, a European.

  To this, the white American woman responds huffily that she could understand why an African person would read the book that way. The white woman believed, Adichie writes, that she “was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally.” The white woman believes white people are neutral and everyone else is not.

  I didn’t live in Turkey in those days, I didn’t live in the world. I lived in my zone of miraculous neutrality, an American neutrality, the most miraculous and neutral of all.

  2.

  FINDING ENGIN: TURKEY

  Given our power and influence, which seem only to grow as disorder and misfortune afflict so many populations, it seems a sad failure that we have not done more to make the world intelligible to ourselves, and ourselves to the world. Shared history is certainly one basis for understanding.

  —MARILYNNE ROBINSON

  IN THOSE EARLY YEARS, Turkish women often asked me what I thought of Turkish men. “So are the men attacking you on the street?” they said, smiling. “No, of course not. They’re all very kind,” I replied. “But they must stare,” they insisted. “No more in Istanbul than any man stares at any woman in any other city,” I said, and we continued our dance. I wondered whether they were asking because Turkish men had been so oppressive, or because I was from the United States, where, in some fantasy, all women were free, and all men were well behaved.