by Suzy Hansen
In his book Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk quotes a newspaper column from 1974 that advised its readers, “When you see a beautiful woman in the street, don’t look at her hatefully as if you’re about to kill her and don’t exhibit excessive longing either, just give her a little smile, avert your eyes and walk on.” In The Black Book, Pamuk refers to these stares as “scowls.” Shortly after I moved here, I decided the scowls were a test: I am looking at you, will you treat me like a human being? If I smiled at them, the men would relax, smile back, and respectfully look away. I detected something ugly in Turkish women’s voices when they talked about men on the street—these weren’t just men, but men from the East, members of the underclass. I reasoned that since the women were snobs, they couldn’t be right.
My second year in Turkey, I moved to Cihangir, the neighborhood of Pamuk and my friend Caner. The stone-planked streets were lined with broad-leafed trees; elegant, four-story buildings—some nineteenth-century, others mid-twentieth—had all been painted in yellow and pink and blue pastels. A tiny green mosque doubled as a teahouse and chairs and tables spilled out into the main square, where people sat all day and night. Cats draped their slinky bodies across motorcycle seats, in windowsills, atop coffee bars; seemingly every corner or doorway had been christened with water bowls or bits of cat food; and in spring, it seemed as if you couldn’t walk for stepping on kittens. Everywhere crumbling stairs descended down narrow, romantic passageways. The lucky tenants, those with apartments hanging from the hill, had the View, the Cihangir View, which spanned the Golden Horn, Asia, the Sea of Marmara as it meets the Bosphorus, and even the Princes’ Islands in the distance. In Cihangir, everything was graceful, a troupe of ballerinas reincarnated as a city neighborhood.
And it was a real neighborhood, the way Jane Jacobs intended, the way of the Ottoman mahalleler of a hundred years ago, everyone keeping the organism alive: feeding, loving, protecting. I wanted to contribute to it. Every day, I took care to greet the pastry shop men, to wave at the grumpy parking lot attendants, to shop at the vegetable stand rather than the supermarket, sometimes buying tomatoes twice, as if paying some sort of Cihangir tax. The vegetable man smiled at me in a gentlemanly way, no matter whether he liked me or not.
Cihangir wasn’t always so enchanting. In the 1950s, its mostly Greek inhabitants were chased out by Turkish mobs, their shop windows smashed; even this most cosmopolitan of old Istanbul neighborhoods saw the whitewash of Turkish nationalism. When the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews fled, rents plummeted and prostitutes planted roots in the gorgeous old buildings. Cihangir became a place you just didn’t go to. I had friends whose mothers still forbade them from living in Cihangir, even as it is now, studded with wide glass storefronts selling IKEA-inspired lamps. Cihangir must have been really bad if, even wearing the conspicuous jewelry of global gentrification, it still scared Turkish moms. Cihangir, named for an Ottoman prince, had been reduced to a lady of ill repute. In Turkey, honor is more important than a good view of the Bosphorus.
The lessons of Istanbul often had to do with honor, but I had always missed that during my conversations with Turkish women about Turkish men. Then one night, for the first time in over a year, I gave in to my lazy New York ways and ordered in some food. (Okay, it wasn’t food, it was two beers and a pack of cigarettes.) Two delivery boys arrived. They didn’t have change for my fifty-lira bill, so I had to fish coins out of a bowl to pay them, and sheepishly I invited them in while they waited. One respectfully cast his eyes to the floor. The other grinned broadly, amused to be inside a foreign girl’s home (I have red hair and freckles and am foreign-looking to Turks). In my mind, I was being neighborly; I almost offered them tea. I also felt stupid dumping all those coins in their hands, and so I overcompensated: “Please come back if I miscounted the change.” Now I know—because my Turkish is better and I know how difficult that sentence actually is—that probably the only thing they understood was “please come back.”
Two minutes after they’d left, the grinning delivery boy returned, claiming I had indeed left them a few coins short. I turned my back to him again to get his money. I had already acquired a kind of guilt being a foreigner in Turkey, as if all I did was cause Turks trouble. I am not sure where this came from. But as I was feeling ridiculous, the grinning boy came inside, shut the door behind him, and with one swift motion pushed himself against me and grabbed my ass.
I pulled away and he began to come toward me again until I ran for the open window and screamed at him, “I will scream!”
He looked at me, more surprised than I was, and left.
I called Rana, who was out to dinner. She rushed over in minutes. I noticed she was cracking her knuckles like some thug ready for a fight, and laughing.
“So what should we do?” I said. “Go to the police station?”
“No, what, are you kidding?” She laughed. “We don’t go to the police station. We’re going to tell the neighborhood. And they will beat him.”
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
First, we talked to the guys at the bakkal, or market, in my building. Then the bakkal where the delivery boy had worked. Each time, the men seemed angry about the delivery boy, and perhaps even more intimidated by Rana’s declaration, “I am a lawyer.” As Rana had predicted, each guy we informed of the event immediately declared, hands shaking, that he would find the kid and break his face.
“I swear, I will beat him,” one promised her.
“He will never be allowed in the neighborhood again,” said another.
“Okay,” said Rana after an hour or so of this extraordinary acquisition of pledges to violence. “So now you have three men who will beat him. That should be enough.”
“For what? Enough for what?”
“So that he never does it again.”
I had been robbed in Philadelphia and, worse, in New York. I would, in the years to come, go through far fewer moments of harassment, ass grabbing, and home following in Istanbul than I ever did in America. The neighborhood was indeed watching. But the particularly Turkish remedy of neighborhood justice unnerved me. “Why didn’t you just call the police?” said one good-liberal, American male friend. “You just let these guys beat this kid up?” Yet when I told my friend who had grown up in India, he said: “Yeah. Sounds like the boy needs a slap.”
The Turkish police, notoriously corrupt and violent themselves, had long ago faded from society as a proper regulating force, but neighborhood justice seemed to be more than mere punishment. This delivery boy had denigrated not only my honor but the whole neighborhood’s—perhaps all of Turkey’s—and so it was up to ordinary Turks to win it back. They would beat him not only because he was dangerous but also because he didn’t know his place.
It was clear to me, as my neighbors listened to my story, that I hadn’t known my place either. “These animals!” said a Turkish friend. “But why did you even open the door all the way? What were you thinking?” Caner shook his head. “I am telling you, you are too friendly, you smile too much. You cannot be this open.” I had confused this young man with my friendliness. My self-conscious American class sensitivity had upset the order of things. But it was this kid who would be set straight, not me. When we told the owner of the deli where the kid worked about what happened, he said, “I am so sorry.” Then he turned to Rana with shining eyes, looking as though he might dissolve from shame. “Sister, she is foreign, but I know her. She is a neighborhood girl.”
Turks couldn’t do anything about foreigners moving to their city, they couldn’t do anything about the mysterious country folks moving there either. Instead, they exerted control over that which remained manageable—the boundaries between classes and sexes. My friends’ point was: While this class snobbery may offend your Western sensibilities, you, foreigner, are perhaps better off playing by the rules of this country, instead of your own. If I was going to live in Turkey, I had to learn to think like a Turk. These were not my rules to break.
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ONE DAY I WENT to Gebze at the end of Istanbul’s commuter train line that runs along the Sea of Marmara. The thirty-mile trip took eighty minutes and passed through suburbs called Fenerbahçe, Suadiye, Bostancı, Kartal—the city couldn’t be that big, could it?—but it wasn’t until Gebze, an industrial village of cheap lime-green apartment buildings, metalworking plants, shipyards, and dreary, alien highways, that you felt you had really left Istanbul behind. Ask someone: “Where does Istanbul end?” They will say: “Gebze.” Along the way I listened to a conversation between the man and woman sitting across from me, which was about the Italian peace activist who had been raped and killed in Gebze just two weeks before.
“Prison is not the solution,” the woman said. The man glanced at me. The mere presence of a foreigner might have re-aroused what had become a national, collective shame.
That March of 2008, Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, or Pippa Bacca, a thirty-three-year-old Italian artist from Milan, had set out on a journey of performance art and peace activism. Following the lyrics of an Italian singer who prophesied that one day we would all come as brides to a world of peace, she and her friend Silvia Moro wore wedding dresses—frilly ones with cascades of lace—and began hitchhiking through Europe and the Middle East and Turkey, to show that all over the world, or, more specifically, in these maligned countries that border the eastern Mediterranean, human beings could be trusted. If these human beings saw two foreign women in wedding dresses standing on the side of the road, they would pick them up and help them travel to their next destination. The women believed that some sort of innate generosity needed to be proven in places like Bosnia, Turkey, and Israel. Their endeavor was called Brides on Tour. Its website proclaimed: “Hitchhiking is choosing to have faith in other human beings, and man, like a small god, rewards those who have faith in him.”
For some reason, Pippa and Silvia decided to take two different routes in Istanbul and reunite in Beirut. Two days after Pippa left Istanbul, no one had heard from her, and her friends and family in Italy began to worry.
Over a week later, the police tracked down Pippa’s phone. It led them to Murat Karataş, an unemployed man from Gebze. Karataş himself led the police to the woods where he’d stashed her naked body. He had also stolen Pippa’s cash and camera; newspapers claimed there was a photo of Karataş on it, perhaps hours or minutes before he turned on her. Karataş had then used the camera at a relative’s wedding, taken pictures of people dancing. Karataş told the police that he’d raped Pippa and then panicked, so he strangled her to death.
My previously scheduled trip to Gebze just after the murder of Pippa Bacca was a coincidence; I was going to visit a scholarship boarding school for poor kids. From the get-go, my Turkish friends frowned on the idea that I would go to Gebze, as if one foreigner’s death would create a domino effect of embarrassing hate crimes. Heated conversations followed. Of all the weighty political issues in Turkey, the problems between men and women were the most elemental. They drove the debate about the head scarf, about modernity and secularism, the fears of the Islamic conservative ruling party. The reverse was also true: all those abstract questions dictated what happened in love, in the bedroom, and on the street.
To liberal Turkish women the harassment of women on the street was political. “I think this is what this pious government has done to Turkish society,” said one thirty-year-old activist I spoke to. “By using women as a symbol in their political discourse, they have divided women into the pious and the bad. That’s why the men stare so much, and make comments. Because they see me and they judge that they can treat me that way, as opposed to pious women who they’d never do that to. It used to be that they would see me, and see an educated woman, and so they would never treat me that way. But now it’s different. It’s worse in places like Istanbul or other cities where all these forces are thrown together. At least in the country they still have their strong families to keep the men in line.”
Her criticisms of the government made as much sense as her class-based comments were unseemly, but when I expressed this feeling to Rana, she said:
“You don’t get it. If you are alone on the street, and they attack you, they will think that is fine because, well, why were you alone on the street? And the police and the judges might think the same thing. You take too many risks walking around at night. I don’t think you understand. It’s not like the United States. I don’t say this to you because I think Turkish men are all so terribly violent that there is a high chance of something happening; I say it because if you get unlucky, you are really, really unlucky.”
Some months later, headlines came from the conservative Anatolian town of Yozgat. “The Second Pippa!” Two men on motorcycles had raped a Danish woman who’d been biking to Cappadocia. The Dane told the press that she didn’t blame Turkey for her assault, that Denmark was just as bad. I, too, believed that you could probably sooner get raped at a Georgetown University house party than anywhere in Turkey. But there was something strange in this sort of reaction—to quickly dismiss the idea that personal violence had anything to do with nationality or ethnicity or religion, to jump up and shout, “Don’t worry! We, too, have rapists!” This European—recently traumatized, her life forever changed—went out of her way to not cause offense. Those were tough days for Turkey and the European Union; it was the era of anti-Muslim cartoons, and the beginnings of a crisis in Paris banlieues. Pippa’s Italian parents, too, had hastened to clarify that they did not blame the Turks for their daughter’s death.
“It could have happened anywhere,” said my American friend about the rape in Yozgat.
“It happens all the time.” I shrugged.
But some people were angry and ashamed and not shrugging. Those people did blame Turkey and the Turks for these bad things, and those people were the Turks.
In Turkey, newspaper columnists are celebrities. There are seemingly hundreds of them. They take, and dictate, the country’s intellectual and emotional pulse. These columns can be operatic, riddled with exclamation points and ellipses. But nothing had prepared me for the columnists’ howling in response to Pippa Bacca’s death, perhaps because that kind of self-flagellation would never occur in a country with a different understanding of individualism, or with a different sense of collective responsibility. One columnist, Semih İdiz, in a newspaper called Milliyet, was concerned that Pippa’s death justified the Ottoman-era Italian expression “Mamma li Turchi!” (Mama, the Turks are coming!) He wrote: “There is such a great distance that we have to cover to reach the level of contemporary civilization that one is inevitably filled with pessimism while thinking how we will be able to cover it. Poor Pippa, I wish you had done your research without passing through our country.”
“Pippa Bacca, why did you do such an unnecessary thing to send a message of peace to the world?” wrote another. “Wearing a wedding gown and touring the war-torn regions of the world and trying to prove that people are good in essence while hitchhiking. Why did you need to prove it? What purpose did this trip serve? We are ashamed, we are saddened, and we are trying to soothe ourselves by recalling the fact that the murderer was a former criminal.”
Turks saw this devastating and public crime as an excuse to talk about the kind of behavior toward women that was apparently common in their society. In turn, they exposed the complexities of Turkish psychology—first and foremost, as Ahmet Altan had explained, their obsession with how the world saw them. “I wish somebody had warned her that people would start to degrade her death by calling it ‘disappointing’ because of the effect it would have on the promotion of Turkey,” commented one writer. The dark joke was that even the murderer, at some point, exclaimed, “Oh no, this will be bad for the EU, won’t it?” What psychological suffering these people have endured, I thought. First, the humiliation of World War I, and now the torture to get into the European Union, always this endless process of kissing the feet of their humiliators to join the Ring of the Civilized. In Turkey one man’
s disgrace was everyone’s disgrace, just as one woman’s sexual mishap ruined the whole family. The Turks, still at work in their laboratory of modern evolution, couldn’t enjoy the luxury of American individualism. As an American friend put it: “Should we be feeling this kind of self-loathing every time an innocent person gets killed in Bedford-Stuyvesant?” Pippa’s rape was the fault of the Turkish nation somehow, and one part of me wished they would give themselves a break.
But a growing part of me admired that the Turks still felt compelled to agonize about such things. The Western diagnosis of the murder—that Karataş was simply deranged—left me unsatisfied. A man who sees a woman on the street alone and because that is new to him, and because it suggests a certain kind of openness, decides that he should take her to the woods and force her to have sex with him—that’s not derangement. That’s decision making. And it’s decision making by someone who doesn’t perceive or care about the consequences related to his unfettered desires, perhaps because he’s grown up in a world—whether that be his family, his village, or his country—where he truly believes that he’ll get away with his crime. I couldn’t help but see an unwelcome parallel between the Western diagnosis of derangement as the sole reason for rape and the Western artists’ international art project; both were acts of erasure: “We were going to wash away the traces of war,” Silvia told the press, “to cancel them.” The inclination to suggest that a crime couldn’t have a social cause, or could be so easily dismissed as an individual illness, seemed part of the same worldview that inspired Silvia and Pippa to set out in wedding dresses and wash the world free of memory.
