Of joy and sorrow in Turkey

As usual, we are in Turkey for the holidays. But this feels different, somehow.

There is pure joy. As when spending whole mornings, whole afternoons bent over manuscripts diligently written, paintings painstakingly made, almost half a century ago in the same city where I would be born many years, fires and earthquakes later, amid a growing concrete monster engulfing the vestiges of the imperial ambition that produced and safeguarded those manuscripts. Meeting a dear old friend in her house to talk, but really talk, for hours. Getting together with the whole family at mum’s, in the family home I grew up in. Three generations of siblings, siblings’ spouses, in-laws, cousins, nephews, nieces and more, all dressed up, all happy to see each other, all in a good mood. Good food and drinks presented in impeccable festive atmosphere, according to plans made many days in advance by mum, who still manages to emanate a light of kindness and serenity after all that hard work. The three-four hours of wilful self-deception that nothing can ever go wrong, that we are all bound to be happy, and the rest of the world may as well not exist. Priceless. Returning to Ankara from Istanbul, suitcases still in the trunk and longing for a portion of Iskender each, Kutal and I sit down at a table in Uludağ Yeşil Vadi as the kids run to the play area. We let out a simultaneous sigh, and confess that we love Ankara for its calm. It feels good to be away from the hectic crowd in Istanbul. It feels good to be together, and good to be agreeing on this basic matter.

Doorknob from the Great Mosque of Cizre, thirteenth century. Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi, Istanbul.

Then there is deep sorrow. As when reading the news, which one mustn’t do, mum and friends keep telling me, if one is to keep sane in this country. I do it anyway. I see the video shooting of a very different family home being searched by a special antiterrorism squad in a very different neighbourhood of the same concrete-engulfed city.  In the background to the footage of men searching (for a suicide bomber, they say) inside a cupboard, under a bed and in a bedside trunk, we hear a man telling someone to do as they are told and the 27-year old daughter of the family asking “what are you doing?” right before being shot. Shot by a policeman. In her house, in her pyjamas, at around 4-4.30am when she should be sleeping as in a few hours she has to embark on her daily journey, tiresome in itself, to work. Those were her last words. She couldn’t go to work the next day and never will. I read reports of a baby shot dead while waiting for an ambulance in auntie’s or granddad’s arms (reports vary) in war-torn Cizre, another historic city at the other end of the same country. Still the same country, but for how much longer? The mental image that the name Cizre, home of the brilliant inventor al-Jazari (d. 1233) and famous for the medieval door panels of its Great Mosque, used to bring up in my mind was one of two elegant dragons holding hands on a doorknob. Now it’s the bullet hole in the face of a three-months-old baby that is astonishingly still cute. So painfully cute and dead is that face that I feel like my heart instantly freezes when I look at it. One mustn’t look at such pictures, I’m being told as well. I do it anyway, but that’s only because I still have not reached that level of overload where I couldn’t take any more. [Considering those who have reached it, I have deleted the picture from this post after some deliberation.] Were I to stay here longer, sooner or later I would have to adopt the same complete shut-off tactic to avoid insanity. I already do this for limited periods when I feel that I have to, in order to keep sane and keep working. It is much easier to do when you’re physically away from that which you want to block out. To block out all the gore in the country you actually live in, you really need to be committed to deliberate emotional detachment, and once you’ve managed to numb yourself fully, you may no longer be the same person.

Children in Cizre, September 2015. Photograph: Murat Bay, sendika.org.

The country I normally live in gives me neither of the above as long as I can stay away from the news from the Middle East. No big joys. No deep sorrows. A mostly flat, occasionally mildly undulating line could easily make up the course of my life. As long as the whole family is healthy, I could have a constant, not too high level of reasonable contentment lowered only by the ripples of minor nuisances here and there. I am still unsure whether that is or should be my choice. I certainly keep going against it by reading and worse, caring about, the news from my home country. It promises a far less tiresome form of family life; this much I am sure of. Surviving as an individual is one thing. Raising children among the sharp turns of the extremes that make up urban daily life in today’s Turkey is another. I’ve tried it again for one year and enjoyed it thoroughly. Yet all the immense joys aside, one inevitably gets protective, seeking safe environments for education and child-friendly entertainment, which in turn makes life not only restrictive but also expensive, and by extension stressful. Safe/good school, safe neighbourhood, safe transportation, safe outdoor and holiday activities with adult supervision at all times – all of this comes at increasing prices, monetary and otherwise. It worked. We bought safety and education for a year, and child counselling at the end to deal with the anxiety caused, it seems, mainly by the restricted environment. We could have continued to buy more of it, but at the price of growing debts, nerves stretched to the extreme and children prone to anxiety. Maybe later on we will try again, but for now, I am fine with a duller, humbler but more effortless life in an adopted country. Whether this will make us a happier, less anxious family is yet to be seen.

My forthcoming coaster

I am full of admiration for people who can continue to work as efficiently as ever even when the world seems to be falling apart. Aziz Sancar, a Turkish Nobel laureate in chemistry based in the United States, said in an interview that he does not follow the media of our shared home country because if he does, he gets too upset to do research. Not that there is a Nobel prize in art history or that I think that I would have deserved one, but I do understand him and regret not being like him. I envy his quiet, purposeful existence in a lab, where I understand he spends more time than anywhere else. It was reported that he even lived in a lab and showered with a fire hose for several months at an early stage in his career. Admittedly, his research on the DNA has a chance of eventually curing cancer. Nobody can blame me for not having a sense of purpose in my research on a bunch of bureaucrats and artists whose purpose in life was kissing the sultan’s you-know-what, or failing that, the current grand vizier’s.  If my research had the slightest chance of making anything better in this world, I swear I would have camped in a library (not lab, thankfully) until I found the answers to all my questions on those brown-nosers.

As that chance is non-existent, I choose to procrastinate. It’s great during term time as I am so insanely busy with teaching and the kids that I don’t have to find excuses to keep me from writing my book. But now that the term is coming to an end, I will need proactive ways of dragging my feet to see me through the Christmas vacation with minimum intellectual activity. I could have a go at Minecraft if my children allow me. Cook lentil soup. Watch Big Bang Theory or any other sitcom that has been on forever. Read news. Write a blog. Clean the kitchen.

I don’t need convincing to prioritise any of these over my book. To me, clearly, a squeaky clean kitchen top is far more crucial an element of a perfect world than a(nother) book on Ottoman illustrated manuscripts. My friend Evrim would disagree. He is a firm believer in the contribution we are making as humanities scholars. I envy and respect his dedication, but don’t quite understand how he can even imagine his book being more important than my kitchen. My book, thanks to friends and colleagues who pushed me very hard to finish it, has proven to be a satisfying achievement. It is, at this very moment, a coaster. I am delighted to have put it in good use, and feel that all those years spent reading hagiographies, examining shrines, writing and rewriting would have remained a sad saga of a wasted youth otherwise. But how can Evrim guarantee that his book will fill an equally vital void between wooden furniture and cups of tea?

Since we are clearly not curing cancer with our books, motivation can escape us just as easily as hope can when we listen to the news. What do we do if the world seems too far removed from being humane for the humanities to make any sense? Is there really any point in forcing ourselves back into an often truly pleasant but nonetheless painstaking, long-winded endeavour that is likely to return a book-length coaster every five years or so?

When I put my teacup down five years from now I will surely find something to protect my furniture, whether I write another book or not. But who knows which country will be bombing whom.