by Suzy Hansen
* * *
I STILL HAD NOT traveled east throughout the rest of the country, so when a photographer friend of mine set out to take photos of the former Armenian lands of Anatolia, I attached myself to her adventure. We planned to start in the northeastern corner of the country, in Erzurum, then drive to Erzincan, down the back roads through Kemaliye to Elazığ, up to Bingöl, beyond the dark green mountains of Lice, Ağaçlı, Kulp, and over to Muş and Bitlis. Tourist companies compared this drive to Route 66 in the States, but despite the natural beauty, there were very few tourists. The Turkish military fights a war with the Kurds in the east, and many Western Turks view the east as not only violent but behind.
“How did you find Internet in Bingöl?” Rana asked via e-mail from Istanbul.
“We’re at a hotel and they have wireless,” I replied.
“Oh my God.”
At the Erzurum airport, we ate at the Snow City Airport Restaurant, which had broad windows and resembled a steel version of a ski lodge, with its high triangular ceiling and view of the mountains, its bad hot sandwiches and impatient children. The wireless connection worked upon our arrival and a week later did not. A large flat-screen TV was hooked up to the video game Tetris. A family of six watched a plane rev up on the runway, the tears steadily gathering in the women’s eyes as the plane prepared for takeoff. They finally let themselves cry once the plane sped away, as if they hadn’t believed that their relative would actually be leaving them until they saw the evidence themselves.
It was a spotless, proud airport complex, built to usher in more skiing-related tourism, aspiring to be a holiday destination, except that there were women moving slowly in black chadors and lots of tesettür, the belted, long coats and tightly drawn head scarves of current Turkish fashion. The women didn’t look like skiers. There were mescit areas, tiny warrens for praying, and walls of windows facing the thick, jade-colored grasslands, and the gleaming, blinding, silver snowy peaks that cast their glare on us like the tips of light swords. The landscape looked as if it had been swept clean of unnecessary objects. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe the emptiness made the land seem vulnerable: to ugly condos, ski lodges, more Snow City Airport Restaurants, English-language signs stabbed into ancient grounds. The Euphrates begins there.
In his memoir Blood-Dark Track, the novelist Joseph O’Neill, who is of Turkish and Irish descent, writes of nothingness in a country that ought to be full of something. Everywhere you are conscious of the great absence discovered beyond yet another hill, mountain, ancient river, or contemporary man-made lake. The emptiness is a mirror. He writes:
What I was really feeling, during these journeys, was the solipsistic anxiety that can result from being plunged among people with whom I stood in a relation of near-total mutual ignorance. To be among such strangers was a form of eradication; for which of them could bear witness to who I was? And the converse was also true: unable meaningfully to incorporate these Anatolians into my construction of the world, I lacked the ability to do them justice.
O’Neill’s passage resonated with me because driving around eastern Turkey—my first time east—felt like confronting an enormous void. Although the landscape was beautiful, I often felt completely terrible, beset by a sense of menace that I couldn’t shake for the rest of the trip.
I began to realize why I felt this way when we reached Kemah. The roads had been slow that day and it had gotten dark before we made it to a decent-size city. Kemah was a creepy place, I knew that before I even saw it. One hundred years ago, in June of 1915, the Turks had sent thousands of Armenians on a forced march and then shoved them off the cliffs overlooking the town. This, I found, was what happened so often to me in Turkey: You’re learning about a country, you have read books, and so you know what bad things have happened, and where, and then you go to those places, and you can’t help but feel haunted by your knowledge of the invisible past. You keep wanting to see it, though; to see those bad things playing out on the land before your eyes, to imagine that that big old tree was once watered with blood, to feel certain that the people who inhabited the town also carried with them if not the motives, then the memory of the crimes committed before their own births. Would the people of Kemah always bear a kinship to those thousands of Armenians pushed from the Kemah cliffs, or to the people who pushed them?
I kept seeing these connections—the dead Armenians, the Kurds, the ubiquitous Martyrs’ Parks—connections I had never felt the moral compulsion to look for while traveling in, say, the Native American blood lands of Colorado or the old plantation fields of the American South. Suddenly, though, it was all I could think about—that I never made the same inquiries into my own country as I did here in Turkey. I judged the Turks; every time I read of another massacre, another disgrace, I somehow brought it to bear on the collective character of the people I was meeting, as if that history had formed them. But then what of mine, and what of me?
We drove into the village of Kemah along a river and across a bridge. On the right, there was a famous Selçuk türbe, or tomb, and then the road wound to the left and up a hill to the town. The mosque and teahouse sat at the center of the place and about ten men were sitting outside, drinking their tea. Most of the buildings seemed run-down, tables in front of restaurants turned over, unwelcoming. Two guys hung out of what passed for a sports car, their terrible techno music rattling the windows. There was a small hospital and one bank and three restaurants. The ever-faithful jandarma, or military police, stood guard at the bottom of the hill, right where the road began, as if it were a gate. At one point, I saw trucks of soldiers pass on the main road—a parade of camouflage unfolding forever, one after another, men’s legs jangling together in the open-air back.
Turks in this part of the country often didn’t allow women to stay in hotels alone, and in any case there wouldn’t be any hotels in Kemah. We knew to ask for the oğretmen evi, or teachers’ house, which was where civil servants stayed while traveling. It looked a bit like a high school, as if they wouldn’t want their retired teachers or guests to ever feel displaced, and had the cold, tinny feeling of a psychiatric ward: no carpets, no cloth, no comfort, no niceties. In Turkey, I thought this was the aesthetic of an aggressive modernity: like the cold busts of Atatürk, his austere face and translucent eyes reminding his people of a vision of modernity now being wiped away by time.
Three little girls called to us soon after that: “Abla! Abla!” (Sister! Sister!) The three girls looked not at all like they might be from the same country. One, with fair, peachy skin and freckles and light brown hair, had nondescript features and a rangy athleticism. The second child looked drawn from an old Eastern European postcard: her face narrow, her nose large, her eyes the saddest and most stunning blue, her eyebrows thick as a brush, but her hair plain and straight brown. And the third girl didn’t really look as if she were from Turkey at all. I assumed she was Kurdish, but even then she looked more like she was from Central Asia. Enormous almond eyes wrapped around the width of her head like sunglasses, her face tapered into a heart shape; her skin a perfect bronze, her hair stick-straight and black. My Turkish friend Aslı later told me that the reason all the girls looked different might have been because at least one of them was Armenian.
“Do you think you will ever leave here?” I asked one girl.
“No,” she replied immediately, “we’re of here.”
We wondered whether everyone in the town knew one another, and they said that it was one big family, actually: Turks and Kurds.
We needed a restaurant, and asked the girls for advice. It was the night of the national soccer finals and yet everything was closed except for the köfteci, the man who made meatballs. It was empty and had about four tables, a pleasantly wooden place of the sort twee Brooklyn cafés tried to imitate. One man stood behind a counter, his back to an oven. We gingerly sat down, and the girls mistook our exhaustion for wariness. “Really, this is a very good restaurant,” one girl said. “Promise.” She looked so sad th
at the foreigners might be disappointed that I smiled with all my might.
The köfte was in fact very good. At some point, without even a goodbye, the girls had scattered, but later I saw them watching us from a balcony across the tiny street. The owner seemed pleased when we told him how good the köfte was, after he’d come around from the dusty counter to bring more bread to our table, swinging his stocky, strong body with the help of a crutch. He had only one leg.
Numerous men in Turkey had only one leg, and I realized I didn’t know why. What could be the cause? Some outdated disease I wasn’t familiar with? Some war I’d forgotten—the war with the Kurds, a stint in the army, an accident at work? This leglessness told me that there was something that I as an American, long isolated from the world’s horrors, could not understand about a country like Turkey, maybe any country for that matter. This was a place where people lost their legs, and hobbled on crutches for the rest of their lives. They did not always have replacements fashioned on the knee, and they did not even bother to cover up the fact that they were legless. I watched the man’s stump as he hopped back to his counter, and at that moment in the köfte restaurant in the middle of Anatolia, I realized I also had no idea how to meaningfully incorporate these people into my world, how to do them justice.
* * *
ONE EVENING, RANA invited me over to show me what she wryly called “a proper Turkish house.” Her five-room apartment, which she shared with her mother, revealed little, if anything, “Turkish,” save maybe the cabinet by the front door filled with slippers to wear after you removed your shoes. In Turkey, if you only moved between the Westernized homes and cafés—they didn’t have to belong to wealthy people, just families who supported Atatürk’s modernizing reforms—you wouldn’t really feel as if you were in a foreign country at all. Even in those houses and cafés, however, there were things that reminded you that you were in a foreign country, like when, at some point in our conversation, Rana told me about a conversation she had with a Turkish man after September 11:
“I was horrified, of course,” she said. “And I remember I spoke to a guy at a corner store that day who said something like Finally, it’s happened to them, too. We’re not the only ones.”
I had been telling her about a passage in one of Orhan Pamuk’s essays, in which he said that what Americans didn’t understand about Muslim men around the world was their sense of “humiliation” by the West. “The real challenge is to understand the spiritual lives of the poor, humiliated, discredited people who have been excluded from its fellowship,” he wrote. What drives men “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.” I was impressed but confused as to why Pamuk had come up with this idea, because I thought that someone like Pamuk, a rich White Turk, had probably never been humiliated in his life.
Now here was Rana saying more or less the same thing about this male Turkish store clerk. It wasn’t that I was surprised by these thoughts in general, but I was surprised by these thoughts coming from a Turk. What had “happened” to them? I wondered. Clearly something else was going on, some deeper emotional response to September 11.
Rana had once told me how as a child she felt she had to choose between the Soviet Union and America—she had to choose sides. She chose America because she liked the cartoons.
“Come on!” she had said. “Can’t you see that for my whole life so much has been defined by America?”
I could not. But then, I hadn’t known anything about Turkey at all. For someone like Rana, America defined her life in the broadest terms; it was an American world, with American-made international laws, American wars on her borders, American military bases on her country’s soil, American movies in her movie theaters, American songs on the radio, American monetary exchange rates, American economic policies, American-style marriage proposals, and four whole pages devoted to American news in the Turkish newspapers. As we spoke, I could see that foreigners grew up without the very thing that Americans cherished so much about their American selves—their self-made story. In America, we believed we shaped every bit of our own history. Much of the rest of the world felt at least in part pushed along by an unseen force. We had good-and-evil narratives, and pop anthems of renewal. Turkey’s music was all about despair and longing and loss. While I drew conclusions about Turks from their music, I had never applied such analysis to myself; I didn’t stop to think that the way I was looking at Rana, at Turkey, at the world, was born of this particular place that I came from. I also had not been conscious at all of what my country had done to get to that place of dominance, while for Turks, for Turkey, that dominance meant so much.
That same year, Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, one of the first great novels since September 11 to address the war on terror, had provoked some controversy because its protagonist smiles as he watches the Twin Towers fall on television. The character, Changez, is a Pakistani Princeton graduate and wealthy consultant living in New York. “Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased,” Changez says. “I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees.” Hamid’s character is telling this story to an American, in fact, and so as to extend his empathy, the Pakistani says that he is sure the American has such feelings, too. “Do you feel no joy at the video clips—so prevalent these days—of American munitions laying waste the structures of your enemies?” Hamid seems to know both that Americans have those thoughts and that they do not see the parallel.
Was Changez’s smile not also the recognition that America was finally vulnerable like everyone else? Perhaps in some way, their reactions expressed the hope that Americans might now empathize differently with the suffering and death of others. “No country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries,” Hamid writes, “frightens so many people so far away, as America.” If when our mortal enemies, the Iranians, sat vigil for us after the attacks, was it also because they understood the pain we might be experiencing? The Iranians might have felt sympathy for us because they knew us. Americans were human to them, real things, real people. Which, for us, Turks, Iranians, Iraqis had never been.
In his novel, Hamid describes the post-9/11 New York that I had lived in throughout my twenties. “There was something undeniably retro about the flags and uniforms, about generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honor,” he writes. “I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back.” Hamid was unquestionably correct about those days. But what shook me as I sat in Istanbul reading these words was how much this description of America reminded me of the Turkish nationalism I despised.
* * *
I GREW UP without a sense that the patriotism that saturated my life was somehow different from the nationalism of any other country, mainly because I hadn’t known of those countries’ existence. I grew up in a town in New Jersey called Wall, a Shore town that did not have its own beach. There were wealthy areas along the river, and winding avenues of white-fenced and red-barned horse farms, and poorer parts closer to the railroad tracks and the high school. Much of it was a landscape of pavement, plastic signs and Dunkin’ Donuts, metal-framed shopping carts in vast parking lots. There was no center, no Main Street, as there was in most of the pleasant and plentiful beach towns, no tiny old movie theater or architecture that bespoke some sort of history or memory. On the timeline of suburban and exurban development, Wall felt stuck somehow.
During my childhood, I wasn’t very conscious of anyone’s professional life, but most of my friends’ parents were teachers, nurses, cops, and electricians, except for the rare father who worked in “the City,” and a handful of Italian families who did less legal things. My parents were descendants of work
ing-class Danish and Italian and Irish immigrants who had little memory of their European origins, and my extended family ran a small public golf course (eighteen dollars a round), where I worked as a hot dog girl in the summers. Like many families, we owned guns; I am not sure I was ever exposed to the “liberal” argument about gun control, but I also never saw anyone shoot their gun. I felt, though, an undercurrent of violence in the town. I knew girls who had abusive boyfriends; the one gay kid in the school was pushed into garbage cans in the cafeteria. Kick your ass. Get your ass kicked. He beat the shit out of that guy. Every year, it seemed, someone died in a car accident, usually from drunk driving; one time, the high school displayed the smashed-up car on the school lawn.
We were all patriotic, but I can’t even conceive of what else we would’ve been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays until church time was usurped by soccer games. I do not remember a strong sense of civic engagement; not with the community, or for the environment, or for poor people. I had the feeling, rather, that people could take things from you if you didn’t stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, cookouts in the backyard. The lone Chinese kid studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us.
My father didn’t fight in Vietnam, so the world did not come to me through those stories. “Only ten percent of the country were hippies,” my father said once. “It’s misrepresented in movies.” “Did you protest the war?” I asked. Oh, of course, my mother would say, everyone did. My father didn’t answer. Why did the war happen? Money, he replied. My parents hated “Washington,” so sometimes they sounded like Ralph Nader and sometimes like Ronald Reagan; and they complained about Wall Street, New York, lawyers, Ivy League snobs, and Bill Clinton, who they seemed to believe had been elected president just to torture them.
