Sarajevo-Skopje-Belgrade

Tesko Je Biti Fin

The film set the tone for my foray into ex-Yugoslav cinema, with its concerns about genealogies, cars and the nouveau riches. Beautiful nostalgic views of Sarajevo with its impossible minarets, and the melodrama of one family that verges on tragedy but swerves from it the last minute. (Spoiler coming!) The chance discovery of the man's impotence suggests dark thoughts about the baby's father, especially when the woman in Bosnian (maybe especially for a Turkish audience who's been fed news about 'war bastards') My favourite scene is when, as their taxi driver, he speaks to the Japanese war tourists after they have just been assaulted by a gun man whether they want to continue the excursion or go back to the hotel with the dexterity of a carpet seller in Sultanahmet 'Go home? Go go?'. And of course the endless discussions they have abıut the nes taxi-car he buys. There are also references to the Europe-wide ex-Yugoslav mafia that now organizes heists as far as Hamburg.

Senki (Shadows)- Manchevski

A disappointment after his Before the Rain, I have not been able to see Dust yet, I hear it's racist and antiTurk, sounds rather interesting! Senki is about ghosts that haunt a Macedonian doctor, it turns out they are the souls of the people whose bones they have been using as teaching material. There is an abandoned house. There is a tomato grove. The sign of the newer times is the scene when he enters a fist fight with his mother for the jeep, she cries 'I won't let you take my jeep', which he does of course, with force. Most significant scene of the film. I am also intrigued by one of the ghosts whose national affiliations were translated as 'Aegean' in the Turkish subtitles. She did look kinda Greek.

Klopka (The Trap)
Set in Belgrade about a middleclass couple whose son is diagnosed with a heart disease and who can be operated on only in Germany, for which they need 26000 euros. A mafia guy tries to exploit this by offering the father money for shooting dead some mafia head. Class crops up everywhere in the film nicely, the mother's students using their mobiles in class, trying to buy their grades, and the father's car stopped and cleaned by street children. Of course there is a lot of emphasis on the jeep once again. And the fragility of family ties.

and two related films on the side

Fraulein
about a totally unbelievable Bosnian character who is supposed to be very ill and working somewhere in Switzerland at a restaurant run by Serbs. The owner of the restaurant recaptures her love for life with the help of the sick Bosnian girl, who, having brought the woman back to life, disappears. There are scenes where we are supposed to ooh and aaah about how they are like a mother and daughter who are reunited.

The Banishment
much better Russian film Tarkovski style opening with trees and long landscapes and big sheep herds walking in the distance. You just have to take it all in as the background for the drama that unfolds, again about genealogy and husbands who learn they've been fathering children not their own- possibly. An abandoned house once again finds its inhabitants, however, the man has been away too long working and the family he comes back to is different. Half way through the film bitter truths are revealed to the audience in flashbacks. I later learnt that the script is based on a William Saroyan story, hats off! Will go see his exhibition in Tophane ASAP.

Janus-faced

Two nights before Eid al Adha, the day of Abraham's sacrifice, I find myself tired, a heap on the bed, and all I can do - I decide - is to listen to something interesting (even watching seems too much of an effort) and so I check out Radio 4's sample of afternoon plays and lo and behold, there is the story of how Richard Burton entered Mecca, and the Kabaa itself, disguised as an Afghan (echoes of course with Lawrence and the German guy feigning to visit Aaron's tomb when in fact he's searching for Petra) So along with the images and stories and news from Mecca coming from friends and family visiting Mecca at the moment for Hajj, I also get Joseph Fiennes' droning voice telling me why he's getting circumcized, then challenging the Arabs to quote as long a passage from the Koran and then as he enters the Kabaa, his sense of 'pure personal success'.

Who is Elif Batuman?

(from her blog)

Who is that bearded man?

In my capacity as a relatively obscure writer, people come to me with all kinds of questions. “Will I enjoy Infinite Jest?” they ask me. Or: “Does Turkey belong in the EU?” Sometimes, they send me pictures of bearded men to identify—for example, this one, from the cover of a Korean book about IQ.

for more obscure stuff and the origins of the garden gnome see
http://www.elifbatuman.net/

Mirror Image

I'm wearing a corduroy jacket and looking down into the depths of the abyss, only, this time, there is no river but a flow of cars. I am a non-participant observer who lifts her eyebrows when she hears one of the participants speak with a perfect British accent. Still I remain aloof. I take out my Iris Murdoch and read it like my life depended on it. At the end I network. A shy looking young woman speaks Russian at me.

Urfa and Its Saints

remember, remember
the 21st of December

Reflections on Driving, Running out of Petrol

How fast are women
in the city of your exile?

How fast
are you
in deciphering
the road signs
the gestures, the looks
languages and alphabets?

learning so much, knowing so much
in order to change gears
to keep mum.

In Praise of Oxford

(dedicated to those who like the blasé pose)

For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasing for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time.

Here in Oxford, the one really decisive factor is not just that I'm a foreigner about whom no one knows or cares, about whom the only fact of any biographical significance is that I won't be staying for ever, it's that there's no one here who knew me as a young man or child. That's what really troubles me, leaving the world behind and having no previous existence in this world, there being no witness here to my continuity, to the fact that I haven't always swum in this water.

In Oxford the light remains the same from half past five, when the shops close and teaches and students return home and when the cessation of all visible activity first obliges you to notice it, until gone nine o'clock when the sun sets - as suddenly, apart from a lingering distant, ghostly glow, as if turned off by a switch - the signal for those who have determined on going out that night to rush impatiently into the streets. The same unchanging light, that accentuation of static quality or stability of the place, makes you feel as if you yourself were at standstill and even less a part of the world and the passing of time than one normally feels here.

There's as intense a longing for the known as there is for the unknown because one just can't accept that certain things won't repeat themselves. That's why I sometimes I envy Will, the old porter at the Taylorian, who must be twenty years older than me and yet, now that he's let go of his will for good, he lives in a constant state of joy and anxiety travelling back and forth in time throughout his life, both enjoying great new surprises and repeating things he knew before.

(That's enough Oxford nostalgia, Ed.)

The Second Coming

For D. (you rock baby!)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Musical Chairs

The scene is the following. B is driving the car up a winding road in Istanbul, S is telling me about X, joking. I have not done all my summer travelling yet. I still do not know many characters in the farce. A is about to be engaged.
Cut to 5 months later. It is now me driving the car up winding roads in Istanbul. S is in London. I now know many more characters in the farce. Some of them twice over. I wait for W’s call. X writes me an email to tell me he is in town. A’s engagement is off, but she’s just been to a party at the British Consulate where she mistook an Armenian priest for an Iranian businessman.
These things happen. Such is life.

In which N is kept completely in the dark

in the dark, in the dark
planes whizzing above head containing one bound for-
the city of spires

Srebrenica

When after cleansing the town of Muslims Mladiç, close to tears, says "Today we take revenge for Kosovo" I see the map of Europe crumble before my very eyes. Gone is my beloved England and the pretty lace of the low countries, they just disintegrate, Rome remains, maybe. I see the Balkans rise up to the skies. Russia to the north remains, maybe. All I can clearly see is this stretch from Kosovo to Istanbul, blotting out everything. All that has ever happened since 1389 becomes a footnote.
Henri Bernard Levy said Europe died in Sarajevo. I think history died in Srebrenica.

Tea and Sillery

Nick Jenkins: Everybody seems to know everybody else
Charles Stringham: They do, that's just the way it is.

My mother, my mother
Think of the first question asked upon learning you were at Wadham.

Palimpsest IV

Erivan Açılımları

babamdan kaldı bir geyik
zaten onun da çoğunu yedik

Yerevan Associations

all my father left us was a deer
we already ate most of it dear

darling, darjeeling,
dear, deer, darjeeling

Southbank Vistas

If it's not Lucian Freud it's

An Armenian, A Hikmah

An Armenian character appeared towards the last pages of 'Cities of Salt' which had become a drag to read. The character is a driver named Akoub, and I realized this was the short version of 'Yacoub' when they laid his gravestone. An Armenian whose family ends up in Aleppo like so many others after the deportations. It is interesting that the Armenian name in an Arabic context is once again 'Yacoub' as in the Yacoubian Building.
The hikmah, in the spirit of Ramadan, is the following. The Prophet always recommended that people finish their plate to the last bit. He said that any given 'gift' from God contained benefit, but you never know in which part of the gift the 'benefit' is hidden. It might be in the last grain of rice on your plate, so eat up. So even when the book gets boring, read up, an interesting bit of information (that can be recognized only by you- it has your name on it, so to speak) might be hidden in the last page.
Such proved to be the case with my perseverance of A Dance to the Music of Time as well.
Amen(na).

A Kabul-based Fuel Trader

Matthew Leeming, a Kabul-based fuel trader, told the newspaper that it had become increasingly difficult to get convoys of essential goods through to more distant bases.
“The Taliban’s new tactics of blowing bridges between Kabul and Kandahar, forcing convoys to slow down and become softer targets, is causing severe problems to companies trying to supply Kandahar from Kabul,” he said.

http://www.app.com.pk/en_/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=48604&Itemid=39

Oda Tiyatrosu

My good cousin tells me our lives have become like a piece from the theatre of the absurd, or maybe an Oscar Wilde play. Enter X. Enter Y. Exit X. Enter Z. und so weiter... the scene is us sitting on the couch watching, possibly, In the Thick of It, while these characters enter and exit. We have such little dealings with them as we laugh away at the show. They plot, scheme, war and make peace among themselves. Sometimes they fill our cups of tea. Some make grand entrances, others quiet exits. They leave. They come back. The cycle repeats itself.

Second Sighting of Valley of the Wolves T-Shirt

Watching the news item about the newly restored Muradiye Mosque in Filibe/Plovdiv, I saw an eight year old in the mosque wearing a Valley of the Wolves t-shirt, with the faces of various characters from the series imprinted on the shirt. I had not quite believed it when Tom had said that he'd seen one in Yerevan, but there's now proof. It also says something about macho tendencies in post-communist countries, any dark man with a frown and a gun is legit for streetwear. (even in Yerevan and the dark man is a Turkish ultra-nationalist!)

Ben Abdülhamid

Ben Abdülhamid
sızlıyor her yanım
Almanlarla dostluklarım
zihnimde İngiliz kelimeler

Kudüs- kitlesem kapıları
deliklerden giriyor tefeciler, tüccarlar
Çeteleri besliyor Selanik
Ağrı'nın kar-pak zirvesi
uykularımı bölüyor her gece
anılarım, ve açılacak yaralarım

ben Abdülhamid,
sızlıyor her yanım

Al Quds- media contingencies

I have been watching the ad for the documentary on genetics on MBC since I got to Amman "leke en tetehayyel maza yumkin en yahdus...." and today was the first time I got to watch it. An Anglosaxon production that is dubbed into Arabic.
Apart from very disturbing pictures concerning obsessive compulsive behaviour, we were also transported to Quds, where the Israelis were conducting research on genes that regulated a person's need for change. So we were shown pictures of an English/Israeli moving into his house in a settlement, the voice over saying that this was his nth move in so many months, and that he had the urge to buy any new electronic equipment, etc. His need for change was a "genetic condition", the documentary suggested.
All the objection that the Arabic translation could offer was calling Jerusalem "al Quds al muhtalla".

What Hamid Ismailov's "The Railway" makes me think

as I record the number and patterns of the bedouin tents that have camped up the hill these past two months

way too many lands, way too many books to go looking for the beloved-

Palimpsest III

This purple-blue-yellow evening finds me trying to decipher a Kabbani poem with the help of Hans Wehr, and I am transported to more than a decade ago, when I had not heard of the name Kabbani or Wehr, and when, in a dark and dingy cafe in Istanbul someone passes me 'To Beirut'.

Nothing is over, ever

This purple-blue-yellow Amman evening finds me running from one Abraham to another. Yet again.

Palimpsest II

Qasr Azraq, Front Quad, if you please

Arabs, Turks and Englishmen, and stories told late into the night

Turks, Armenians, Palestinians

I discovered the Fishawi of Amman the other day with a large group of Turks. There was Turkish coffee, excellent lemon and mint and cocktails, backgammon, the whole thing. There was also a book room, a photograph of Mourid Bargouthi and a burnt on wood portrait of Ghassan Kanafani. Obviously, the place to be. Oh, and then live oud music.

When the girl at the next table warned me about her nargileh we striked up a conversation in Arabic, she asking where we were from and then quite unexpectedly saying that we all looked very Armenian. Of course, I said, we're from the same part of the world, but you'll hardly find Armenians wearing hijab (she herself was a non-hijabi). Yes, she said, they're Christians, aren't they? Anyway, it gives you a warm feeling inside to see that despite the obvious difference, they still recognize Armenians on Turks' face. She, for her part, it turned out, was a Jordanian of Palestinian descent, from Nablus.

Germans, Armenians, Kurds, Palestinians, Turks

We went to a concert of the Jerusalem Youth Orchestra in Amman this evening. The very many yellow heads we saw before the concert started turned out to be members of the University of Bonn Orchestra (whom I had listened to in Bonn- and that is another long story. Memories of fleeing Giessen and the train diverted through Mainz while I was reading a thriller with Mahler as the protagonist, in German, mind you) They played Khachaturian operatic pieces concerning the Kurdish Ayesha and Armen. Then there was a very sad Palestinian song with the refrain Sara, Sarai.
The Turkish presence was not limited to me and my friend- I had spoken to H of my suspicions that the kanun and ney music soundtrack of the opening audiovisual was Turkish, and the suspicions were verified when we saw the contents of the CD's they were selling outside with piece names such as Hicaz Longa, and the names of two Turkish musicians. I am pleasantly surprised. There isn't half enough cultural bridges between the two countries.

Turks, Jordanians, Circassians, Armenians

Having listened to an Armenian soprano singing the 'Room With a View' arya last night at the Roman theatre in Amman and having decided that the red haired violinist was of Circassian descent, here's a note on Armenian connections.
Firstly, Tariq Ali suggests that Salahaddin's family is from a village in Armenia though they themselves are Kurds. (note: visit to Ajloun castle is called for) And then I find out about Janset Berkok Shami, an Amman based writer, Jordanian, raised in Istanbul in the early days of the republic and then she finds out about her Armenian heritage.
The Circassians are still elusive, I will have to phone their center. Chechens, however, are accesible in Azraq.

The Art of Losing

(To the tune of Wish You Were Here)

First
I lost my Baedeker
then, my Herge

But you Harriet,
shall always remain here

The Secret Sharer

I see men going into battle
in their flying colours
waving their apologetic goodbyes

their battles for fame
their battles for love
and their battles for territory

and I
pin little flags
on my map of invasions
here a country, there a temple
here a river, there a gorge

and long after the battle is done
I am called to sift through the ruins
as they tell me their stories of conquest
and surrender

I, like Harriet, watch the men go by.

Dark Essences

(after Zeki Müren)

What if there'll be separation in our fates
tomorrow
do not think that the story of those trembling branches
finishes with the fallen leaf
it is the finality of black earth
that will house this love for ever.

Do not cry
Do not be sad
face tomorrow with a smiling face
do not think
your beauty will fade away (for it did not belong to you to begin with)
with the white that has fallen
upon your silken hair

it is the finality of black earth
that will house this love for ever.

Valley of the Wolves- a Zizek moment

On my latest to trip to Thessaloniki (on my way to Korça) across from the aisle where I sat, there was a man of quite some stature, bald head, quiet manners, presence. I was thinking it must be in the image of this sort of man that the director of Valley of the Wolves must have painted the various characters in his ultra-nationalist drama series, and I was thinking, there is no shortage of such men to be drawn upon on the streets of Istanbul. The puny extent of my knowledge of the series was revealed (puny, but knowledge it was!) when during the break a group of Turkish/Greek students (we need some qualification here, Turks from Thrace who are citizens of Greece) who studied in Istanbul who were going home for holidays surrounded the man and asked him whether he was a particular character in the series. Of course he was! So what I thought was the signified, was in fact the signifier! That was the cause of his presence.

Here we have the dangers of passive TV watching, much much worse than the active one.

The Good, The Bad, The Undead

I do not remember what it was that had made me so upset. This was pre-Wadham. It was still Lincoln times. I had found myself sitting on a bench across from Christ Church, admiring the ivy clinging to the façade, trying to imagine the lives of the students inside. I was also feeling very small and sorry for myself. Then a woman approached me out of nowhere and asked me if I was feeling alright. When I lifted up my face she was startled and said "Sorry, I thought you were someone else" and then shared with me the story of the very clever British Asian kid who'd fled home, and how from afar I looked like her. I must've looked very small indeed. I had heard of the story alright and this case of mistaken identity cheered me a bit. The girl was dis/recovered, so far as I remember, a couple of days later.

That, is the first memory in the palimpsest.

Khor Virap Catechism

Nothing's over, ever (Jamaica Kincaid)

Doppelgaenger to Doğu Beyazıd, doppelgaenger to the Soviet, doppelgaenger to the North Parade, doppelgaenger to Hrdlika, doppelgaenger to...

a place for sacrificial lambs, my guide tells me
I'm going up the stairs alright, going up the stairs...

A Song for My Mother

Salonique: La Princessa ye el Caballero
Constantinople; Francoise Atlan (voice)
Taken from the album Terres Turquoises
Atma Classique ACD 2 2314

Pass the port Stephen, here's to Boris!

"One could say that Islamic worship, education, and even legal codes were 'left alone' more than were those of any other religious systems in the colonial world. One consequence in some places was that by the time of independence, Muslim-majority regions lagged substantially behind others in the numbers of Western-educated, widely travelled, or highly qualified personnel they could command [...] Access to certain key skills and oppurtunities, one could almost say certain key aspects of transnational modernity, was greater, earlier for Hindus (especially West Bengali ones) in the former, members of Christian minorities in the latter, than among Muslims."
(my emphasis p. 102)
and rightly is our right and honourable friend Stephen puzzled by the following:
"It has also been argued that there existed in the West an especially intense prejudice against the Islamic world, different in kind and greater in virulence than that against other non-Europeans, operating across a broad historical period but persisting into the present. The problem with such a claim is the lack of comparative analysis which might test or validate the claim, measuring Western anti-Islamism against any other kind of prejudice, any other discourse of discrimination, hierarchy, stereotyping, or demonization. For that matter, it is hard to see just how one could quantify different kinds of colonial prejudice in that way, or assign them to a ranking order." (p. 103)

This is the end of Stephen Howe's chapter on Empire by Sea, in his OUP Very Short Introduction to Empire.
It sort of reminds me of the Monty-Python skit in which one of the actors dressed as a Tory MP says he will first make some general posh noises and then fall over backwards foaming at the mouth, which he does.

Ziauddin Sardar's "Orientalism"

Sardar describes Orientalism as Europe's surrogate intellectual field for self-definition, along with a will not to know the truth about the "orient" so that it can remain the mythical place where fantasies concerning the European self can be played out. Dating orientalism further back than Said does, he shows that orientalist accounts are deeply intermingled with anti-Islamic sentiment. Said also sees this thread, however, because his reading remains secular (by necessity) Said remains closed to some aspects of orientalism, indeed, because the responses to orientalism have usually come from religious scholars, Said does not find them interesting, and as a result, a whole set of scholarship remains closed to him- and he cannot come up with instances that respond to orientalism critically, which is the main criticism that he gets from not just Islamic but also secular writers. So Sardar's contribution is best when he does provide the genealogy of these Islamic responses to orientalism, and indeed, responding himself, especially to Satanic Verses, revealing that Rushdie takes crusade romances as his model, as revealed in his choice of moniker for Muhammad "Mahound", the name used in chanson de gestes. Thus does the orientalist tie himself to a tradition of orientalism, which has roots in crusader mentality. However, in parts the slim volume falls short, and you get the sense that Sardar is being superficial for the sake of brevity, to produce this slim volume. Good effort, leaves you wanting more.

Jaffa History

From wikipedia:
"The Arabs rejected the plan and on November 30, 1947, the day following the adoption of the UN resolution, seven Jews were killed by Arabs in Palestine in three separate incidents: at 8 o'clock in the morning, in what came to be seen as the opening shots of the 1948 War, three Arabs attacked a bus from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five Jewish passengers. Half an hour later a second bus attack left a Jewish passenger dead. Later in the day a twenty-five-year old Jewish man was shot dead in Jaffa, where there were alleged attacks on Arabs by Jews."

and then the not so "alleged" attack, oh I see, it's called an "offensive" on Jaffa of course, not on real people:
"On April 25, 1948, Irgun launched an offensive on Jaffa, then the largest Arab city in Palestine, during which many of its Arab residents fled through the harbor. Haganah units took the city on May 14. Out of 70,000-80,000 Arabs, 3,600-4,100 remained."

So the 76,000 Arabs who may or may not have been twenty-five years old, who may or may not have been male must have just got on their luxury yachts waiting for them on the harbour, and left.

Law of Return

"that Palestinian refugees from 1948 should be allowed to return to homes in what has become Israel - a move that threatens Israel's very existence as a Jewish state. " (BBC)

a very good example of spin where one thing is made to look as the direct cause of another: especially when the result is "threatening Israel's existence" which is the most unforgivable thing in the book. Once you read the word "threat", the preceding proposition of course becomes unacceptable to liberal minds in Europe, without really reading or trying to understand what the proposition is:
simply that people should be able to return to their homes

Bab al-Asbat

(Lonely Planet: Although Süleyman called it Bab al-Ghor the name never stuck and it became known as St. Stephen's Gate)

Is this the gate
that we negotiated
with the taxi driver
for him to take us to the closest entry
to the Holy of Holies,
during that bit of night
when it is another day when you might
tell a black thread from the white

is this the gate
that launched a thousand...
no, unleashed a squadron
of Israeli soldiers
to 'capture' the city
and whose fame is now immortalized
on the wall of the muslim graveyard
that might be home to martyrs
other than St. Stephen?

is this the gate
that Palestinian school children
come in through early Sunday morning
to commit to heart verses from the Koran
that mentions the masjid?
the masjid in whose memory
Helena built Hagia Sophia,
and Süleyman built Süleymaniye
and these walls and gates
protecting his home away from home,
his Constaninople away from Masjid al-Aqsa

Bab al-Asbat
that finds no room in annals of today
but shall forever remain in the taste of the bread we broke
making our way towards home
during that bit of day
when you just start to be able to tell
the black thread from the white.

Tire 16.03.08

They were here before us
we were here before us

My great grandfather who fled
(a flight similar to those who were here before us)
to found a dynasty, here on this patch of earth
one that perpetually warred
perpetually laid to ruin
all that he had ferreted
inherited
from those
that were here before us

we were here before us

the birds still chant
to the same tune
tempered by marble columns
imported from the ends of the Empire

red earth brick and round shaped domes
and that colour of blue in the sky
over the same old grey-green olive trees
they still chant in concert
with the church bells
and the call of the müezzin

they still sing to the birth of the praised one
as I today salute the dead
great grandfather who fled
and thus was named
"Gacan".

In Judea

A stone's throw from Jerusalem
I was running away from one Abraham to another

But he
he was a sight to see
as if bargaining for his life
as he asked
to pass

and slowly
yet surely
waiting at the gates
wailing at the gates
someone else's longing
became mine
yet again

in perpetual resistance
in perpetual surrender
we set offf
yet again
on Via Dolorosa.

One that Disappeared into the Wood- or Stone Work

Having persevered with the Dance to the Music of Time, I now like it and have understood at last why it was (not in so many words) recommended to me. It is all about how the have nots get what the have all's are supposed to have, all the time. How can Widmerpool rise so high, it is a mistake, surely, says Nick's smirk everytime he sees him. I wonder who D's Widmerpool could be. Ah so slighted by life, all one can do is turn to drink.

Charles Stringham reminds me so much of Matthew, and I don't believe he's been killed in Singapore. Anyone seen this guy recently?

Turkish Europeanization- The Musical

Everyone, simply everyone knows a tune or two from this musical. My mother sings a particularly well-known one especially when she thinks I am living above my means, and we had sung it a lot at the time that my sister had bought a car, so now along my father's there were two cars to our name. We'd sing the line "Two automobiles/one convertible, and one not" (although obviously neither car was a convertible), and when my mom stays out of the house too much she sings the line "The woman is free, who can interfere with her business". All this to point out the cultural archive quality of the piece, even at a practicing Muslim (albeit rather informed of the "European ways") household like ours.

Having now penned an article or two about what I refer to as "Istanbul criteria", I decided to revisit this production of the musical (the original was written in 1933). It has been running for 24 years now, and there were several TV versions as well. Before going to the theatre this time around, I couldn't quite construct the whol plot-line in my head so I wasn't quite sure whether I had seen it from beginning to end. But when I watched it I realized I knew all the scenes, so yes, it turned out that I had caught a bit here and a bit there, and my memory stick had all the Lüküs Hayat lines stored in several different files.

Several contemporary references were added, like cell phones, and Starbucks, but these were tastefully kept as asides to the audience, the costume and the setting not changing. The setting is Moda- which Pamuk also mentions, but which of course still falls short of the mantra of the musical "An apartment in Şişli/that's the bare minimum", Şişli being right next to Nişantaşı of Pamuk fame.
I looked for references to multiculturality in the play, as I argue texts about Istanbul are always reviving, but found little evidence of it. The hero- a street-wise gansta (who has been played by the same actor with equal vigour since the very opening of the play 24 years ago- kudos to that. He is meant to be portraying a fetching but rough young man, and his counterpart is now played possibly by the third actress in line, tells you about how the two sexes age differently!) speaks of his debts to a Greek moneylender, and once when telling someone to leave in rough terms, he says "Okso", which I guess is a Greek word (and Brava- which could be Ladino?). It obviously is not harking back to multiculturalism, it describes, on the contrary, how the Turks recoil to the centre, and bring the wealth back to the centre, in the person of the wealthy elder sister returning from Egypt with her pearls- the objet a of the whole play, everyone trying to get at them (the bankrupt elites and the gangsta gang that wants quick money) which drives the whole action.

Another source of money is represented in the person of an Anatolian coal merchant who bids to buy the house in Moda. He comes into the villa and ends his sentences with "as it is my right"- a very apt critique at what some believe to be the upstart rich from Anatolia (whose daughters, as you will read in the press nowadays, have the audacity to claim it is their "right" to go to university) The "some" in "what some believe" surely includes the company and the director of the theatre, for throughout the play the actors make snide remarks (addressing the audience) about the "current establishment" who pay the actors very little and who want to tear down theatres etc. The "current establishment" of course being the AKP ruled municipality which the theatre works under.

That this play is part of the cultural archive and one that sanctifies the early republican period was made even more evident when at the end, during the standing ovation, the characters came to the fore one by one and after bowing, pointed to the screen above the stage which displayed photographs of the first ever players to have acted out these parts, in the very republican years of the 30's (a republican nostalgia, then, that runs counter(?) to the multicultural nostalgia)

but whatever the political ramifications, there will never be a crowd pleaser such as this, and the words and music correspond to something in the very heart and souls of Turks.

raising a script from the dead

(Arguably) The best calligrapher alive, Hasan Chelebi tells how he grew to learn the art at a period when the Arabic language- reading, writing, reciting- was banned in Turkey. Everything locked up in libraries or attics (see Orhan Pamuk's White Castle), the one thing that was open to the public and that offered up vestiges of a forgotten language and a forgotten script were the cemeteries. So he started to haunt them, and indeed, learned his trade from a stone carver, who now presumably carved in Latin letters, but who preserved his knowledge of the Arabic-Ottoman script. This is how one traces his lineage through tombstones, how one revives a language with the help of the dead.



There is so much to be said about how the dead preserve our lineage. Consider the above, Christian tombstone in Cairo "el merhum iskender kasim"

Herkes kendi ahiretini hazırlarmaktayken...

İstanbul is pus içinde
martılar kulaçlarken havayı ve suyu
ve bir takım kelaynaklar
hayaletler ve ifritler
cirit atarken çatı katlarında

herkes kendi ahiretini hazırlamakta

Palestine, not Israel, It's Nobody's Business but the Turks :-)

My mother remembers the mass exodus of Jews from her hometown Tire, and what she remembers is that they were going to Palestine, as Turkish Jews still used to refer to it at the time (the 50's, they were being offered citizenship and land) That's why she still believes Palestinians to be Jews, and disinterested in politics as she is, when one tries to update her on the developments, one has to lay the ground for her each time, who is of what religious persuasion. I love doing it everytime and see the puzzlement on her face, indeed, it sums up the ridiculousness of the whole thing. She needs to be at these negotiation meetings and bring a breath of fresh air.

I'll be going to Jerusalem with her in a week, and after that she won't have any doubts or confusions about who lives where and who rules who. Alas and alack.

Anti-semites, Semites and the Semud

Evliya Çelebi, the intrepid traveller and most renowned confabulator of the 17th century, has opened my eyes to the Semite-Semud-Thamud-Nabatean connection. For an account of a modern day (alas too short) travelogue of the lands of the Thamud that are in Saudi Arabia read:

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=21&section=0&article=81033&d=20&m=4&y=2006

and this

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=9&section=0&article=21224&d=19&m=12&y=2002

A Tale of Two Boys

The Turkish one that got killed in the latest atmosphere of aggression against Turks in Germany:
Although still unclear what exactly went on at the police station, Salih Özdamar said: "He received strong blows to his head. He is having brain surgery because of all the swelling in his head and on his face. How can a healthy man be put into a coma within six hours? How can that be?"

http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=18351

and the German one that was spirited away after the "abuse" incident at the Turkish resort last summer:
“It is outrageous how the Turkish judiciary is criminalising this young man,” said Monika Frommel, a German criminologist. “It suggests that the Turks have not yet arrived in Europe.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1987673.ece

Hanging Out with Pamuk's Aunties

so we were, me and my outrageously glamourous hijabi friend in the Harbiye Theatre where we went to see Pirandello's "It is So If You Think So!". What one of the Warwick girls has called "zero tolerance people" were high in abundance in their badly-aged format, shooting us looks of interest/pity/horror the proportions of which kept fluctuating. Now we had been exposed to such looks before, but we both agreed the intensity had intensified (mark my semitic emphasis) in the last few weeks. As we sat there having our hot beverages (my glamorous friend won't be converted to tea) one of them shot us a what one could even call a coy look that said "Come come now little girls, out with what you really came here to do"

Now I had come with very little preparation about the play, but the set looked promising with perspectives going haywire. We were in rather a "Nişantaşı" salon (for further information see Pamuk) and a mother and daughter kept complaining about a woman who had recently moved to their apartment block- woe is me!- someone quite below their social standing, a woman dressed from head to toe in black, and who was kept locked up by a man.
You get my drift. (No, no, not Antoinette, we have other oppressed fish to fry)
Then they and their very curious friends (lo and behold, one of the actresses is the very lady who sat across from us at the cafe and gave us the coy look- step in Zizek, with your Virtual and the Real)kept enquiring about the man and the woman who's moved into the block whose common tie is revealed to be the daughter of the woman and/or the wife of the man, who stays an enigma, talked about, philosophized and politicised) over.
Both the mother in law and the son in law are brought to the salon to "testify" (for the Nişantaşı elites are a veritable court) as to their 'motives' and their relationship to 'the young woman who's locked up in some distant part of town'.

Many a character used the injunction "Enlighten us!" with various degrees of irony, which I thought was very deft. But of course no 'enlightenment' is forthcoming because their stories are contradictory, and the curious folk can't get the truth because- well well well, all the documents have been destroyed in a catastrophe (an earthquake) in the hometown of these new arrivals (which explains their black mourning clothes- and which neatly salutes an inaccessible past, inaccesible documents, the language revolution in the Turkish context)The story interests the town so much, the man stands to lose his job if he doesn't provide a satisfactory answer. But at the end it is him who decides to resign- the play really revealing the hierarchy between happiness and truth. It is the society's avid search for the 'great truth' which puts an end to this strange family's form of existence.

The curiosity of the society ladies was aptly exaggerated- it was the utter feeling of unknowability that spurred the investigation and you had to love them for it ("Do you sleep with your headscarf on?")

At the end, to end the various 'false' stories that both the mother/son inl aw pair and the socialites spin, they bring the "locked up young woman" onto the stage and she defies them saying "Believe whatever you're inclined to believe- but the truth is, I am noone!"

and that's that ladies and gentlemen. Believe what you want to believe for man is quite uncapable of changing or un-doing the stories already spun. The black clothes, the staying at home, there are reasons for all of it, but maybe this family is too tired explaining it all over again to people and even have gone beyond staying silent and have moved onto the stage of fabricating preposterous stories.

Not a bad strategem to follow, methinks.

A Note on Zizek and the Veil

after his rather A Glance at the Archives of Islam, I think Zizek would fine the current debate on the veil in Turkey very interesting. Such that:
Zizek proposes women to be the philosopher's stone, that which lets men/prophets tell between truth and falsity. It is the woman's bodily presence that proves the litmus test: his references to the body of Hagar that unbalances hierarchy in Abraham's society, and Hatice as the first puts her faith in Muhammad and therefore verifies his claim. This, of course, is a rather nice way of reading what he says. Thus he says, women are central vessels of truth and therefore must be veiled, kept out of view.
The current debate about the headscarf in Turkey has also revealed the veil/headscarf to be the philosopher's stone, revealing the genuine nature of liberalism and the women's emancipation movement in the country. The republican elite who believe themselves to be the actors and writers of this history of emancipation have too readily written "the woman with the headscarf" out of the records of their history and have put certain other ideologies before the emancipation of women. Because the women in headscarf, they claim, has chosen to stay out of history, which should take us to more and more power to women. Quite an interesting point of view when those very women are trying to write themselves in, trying to get into universities while their un-veiled sisters protest and say "You shall not pass!"

But then, this takes me back to Woolf's Three Guineas- why should a woman want to enter an institution that is so obviously built on a patriarchal model. But this is the wisdom of the defeated and does not count for much in this eleventh hour.

How Not to Salute a Romanian Princess

The ides of March, almost, and here's how things stand this very day

12:30 I arrive at the north campus, enter through the gates without the guards calling out that I have to put a hat (of my own choice) over my headscarf like they had 2 times out of 9 in the last week during which I have been testing the "lifting off the headscarf ban" at my almamater by dragging myself to the library to do some serious work on the thesis.
12:35 I enter the library, it's one of the librarians from my undergrad years, I daresay he recognizes me and does not ask for an ID (unlike yesterday when the younger porter did ask and I could not produce a photocopy of my diploma, which I now have folded and fitted into my purse- oh, but he let me in anyways)
13:25 I leave the library for my driver's training
14: 35 I come back, no one at the gates, no one at the porter's desk inside
16: 30 I leave the library to go down to the south campus (which is the real heart of the uni) where a Romanian princess is guest of honour at a very odd conference, about Turkey-Romania relations. My interest lies in the fact that one of my very old profs to whom I am indebted very much indeed will be talking about the history of the university in the interwar years. I wanna see him, ask how he is and see if he remembers me. I can't imagine how he will fit his talk to the theme- but maybe he was not asked to do that either. I am also thinking the programme is very eclectic and there won't be much of an audience
17:00 I arrive at the south campus gates and as I pass them I am on the phone to one of the Warwick girls, planning the Indian evening tomorrow
17:03 I have passed the gates and there's a guard shouting from behind "Miss, you have forgotten to put on your hat!" I shout back "Well, I don't have one, I am not a student anyway, I am alumni, and I am here for a conference". "Then you'll have to leave some sort of identification". I retrace my steps, show one of the porter's my folded photocopy, he informs me the conference is at the Rectorate. I think, that's a small place to hold a conference.
17:25 I get into the rectorate and for some reason the door closes with a loud bang behind me. I head for the info desk where the guard tells me the meeting's upstairs. Just as I am headed for the first step he says, making a gesture of outlining his face and then pointing to his chin "But you can't enter like that" I say "Ach, sooo!" and go back the way I came, going back to the Pirandello of yesterday- while the town, the husband and the mother pushes this way and that the woman declares "I am nobody!"

Sex, Wine and Puppet Theatre

and all of it in the Anglican Church in Istanbul on a Friday night. It was a wierd introduction to one of the bizarrest constellations for a church. Down an alley from the pedestrian and more and more Oxford Street look-alike (OK, let's make that Kalverstraat) Istiklal Street, round the bend from the Kısmet (no-alcohol served!) Market and (the possibly alcohol serving) Hamburg Coffee House, we come upon a Norman looking, I say Jesus College, my cousin says Leuven-esque church. There's a crowd that makes you wonder if this church has also been converted to a night club Freud's Style, but as we cut through the crowd under let us not say hostile, but definitely perplexed gazes to pass the gates because, yes we do have tickets, we go down the stairs into a lovely garden where we are met by Quisimodo impersonators, with masks and hands outstretched for alms.

We are set in the mood for a night of soul-moving puppetry, but alas it doesn't deliver. At the portico they have set up a wine stand, understandably, to warm the audience, and we will be entering "this is my blood" territory, so all's cricket, and more so when I hear unmistakably subcontinental voices, yes, there are three, possibly Bangladeshis right by the side of the table, and when we leave the performance they are still there, with no wine left on the table, possibly having been wise enough to enjoy the early spring night in the lovely garden rather than endure the what was the worst puppet theatre production I have ever seen (though I have to say they are not that many)

Firstly, they had not quite decided whether they wanted to puppeteers to be a part of the show or not. They moved about the place as, if not more, visible than the puppets themselves and the rather unclever set design with a lot of ropes and ladders required quite a bit of getting around in order to make the puppets move. They started off with playing music and song rather than making the puppets talk, which was alright, but half way through the show the priest started to speak of sins of the flesh- that is the rather bad actor under his mask that blocked the mouth, so he was hardly audible. We were, all the while standing up at the very back groundling style, for having a ticket did not ensure a seat, as it turned out.

The most aesthetically thought out scenes were the shadow/puppet scene where Esmeralda and what's his name make love, and then the priest raping the now possibly dead Esmeralda (the puppets were so badly handled that it was difficult to make out what they were doing- there was a rather stupid scene with Quisimodo and Esmeralda doing something with ropes and chains, for the life of me, I did not understand what it was all about- most of the time was taken up with the puppeteers moving about the place anyway!) Anyway, it was an interesting moment, the audience with wine in their hands watching puppets commiting several of the deadly sins in a church. (a church, one has to point out, that is adjescent to a mosque)

As we left the church we discovered the deadliest of these sins- commercialism. The crowd as we entered had blocked the huge "Doluca Wines" poster that was put at the entrance. So this was no more than a gimmick to let the unsuspecting consumers taste the wine, the "theatre" was just your average "animation". I am still perplexed about the fathers of the church though- there seemed to be noone that would be from the congregation (does the Anglican church have a congregation in Istanbul?) and I wonder if they were aware of what they were letting in themselves in for.

Maybe this is worth starting up a correspondance with Rowan Williams for, signed a friend

A Dance to the Music of Time

This is the discovery I have made for my pains for watching a series (the first Staffel anyway) in which they make the same actor play a character both when he's 15 and 25! maybe it is a subversive comment on the passage of time...

Don't talk to me about Matisse

talk to me instead

of dinner parties

of monsters with champagne breath

and reclining on the sofa

how names and learned and forgotten

Germany will tear us apart, again

I watched the delectable Sam Riley play Ian Curtis in Control- and brushed up on my Brit Punk. They started off as Warsaw and then renamed themselves after the prostitution section of concentration camps, it appears. The film ties in nicely with the German film Requiem which I've watched recently with equally interesting dance scenes and where the young hero/ine goes into fits. In Control Ian Curtis's doctor was also played by an actor with a German accent, and then he goes and falls in love with a Belgian girl- played by an actress again with a German accent- a German citizen of Romanian origin. Alexandra Maria Lara (Plătăreanu- the surname that dares not speak its name) also happens to be Sam Riley's girl friend and they live in Berlin, if you please.

Ah, this is what I so much love Europe for. Do take a seat dear, just mind you leave your name outside.

On another note, it was so touching (dare I say refreshing?) to actually see a man break (and a pop-star at that) into pieces because he cannot handle his relationships- rather than leave the usual wife- girlfriend- wife- mistress trail.

Inter Milan as Aumerle (of Richard II fame)

Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks, Saracens (IV.1)

this must no doubt have been going on in the mind of the lawyer who filed a suit against Inter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/12/wfootball112.xml

It is not for nothing that Turks are the most symbol obssessed Volk and have been talking about yet another 'symbol' for the last few months.

Cairo Reading

I have been trying to finish my Cairo reading and have at last gotten somewhere, although not quite the end. I finished reading The Yacoubian Building today by Alaa Al Aswany. The style was so much like Mahfouz, I even thought Aswany must be his pen name. I had actually started reading Midaq Alley to see whether there was a particular thread in Egyptian literature that I could follow--- and lo and behold, I had chosen the very two books that seemed to be part of a trilogy.

Aswany's more risqué, of course, written as it is in the new millenium, however the themes of honest girl sells her body for money, the young man's hopes are thwarted, the greedy merchant who considers getting a second wife and who gets into politics gets his comeuppance, political 'stands', the cunning crippled and the unrepentant sexual deviant... And for Mahfouz's World War II, there is Aswany's even sexier terrorism. Whereas Mahfouz's novel takes place around Halili, Aswany's takes place downtown on Talat Harb.

However, one more novel wants to get into this discussion here, and that is Shafak's Flea Palace. Yacoubian Building and Flea Palace both hark back to La Belle Epoque, levantine cosmopolitanism, whatever you may want to call it. And they do this also through the fact that both apartments' original owners are Armenian. Exiled Armenians and their apartments in ruin has become an Eastern Mediterrenean topos of lost multiculturality. I think there's a paper in there somewhere.

Eastern Promises- II

Today, having made my way through the blizzard, and seeing many interesting sights on the way, like the opened iron gate of a Greek church that is always closed up, and the path that looked so enticing but...
I was on my way to discover Kurdish sufis, however, when I entered the apartment I was met with smiles and one particular one I couldn't quite place and which bugged me during the whole conversation. Like the smile of the vanishing cat in Alice in Wonderland (thank you Zizek), the lamella, the undead, the excess that bugs you until you have attached a body unto it.

Forty days
After forty days of having to see the faces you have to see
shaking the hands you have to shake

Forty days,
in a man-forgotten land
surrounded by man-forgotten tombs
man-forgotten tombstones on which
are inscribed the lives of the undead
in a man-forgotten language
as you go looking for
errors committed
in a man-forgotten alphabet

and yet how that smile
opens a thousand gates
pulls you to a thousand shades
of eastern promises
kept
and unkempt
till you put a name to it
in that man-gotten, man-forgotten
alef-be.

The Conversation That Did Not Take Place at the Cecil Hotel

Her heart skipped a beat when he
told her this one story about the man she loved.

***
Many, many moons ago
on a beautiful winter evening
as wintry as it could be in Alexandria
we had stopped to take
the usual ablutions
the usual salutations

entering the white washed mosque
there were children waiting
holding hands
holding shoes
and when we had taken enough photographs
taken in as much as we could
I stepped out alone

to be hailed
by his friend who took me to one side
and offered me coffee
as we sat on
rickety chairs and placed our cups
on a rickety table
he told me how he knew him,
how everyone knew him
how two men stranded on a desert island knew not each other
but knew him

thus chid
I went back to the bus
back to those known constellations
back to the hotel with the pyramid view.

Islamic Law: Everyone's Talking About It

After the 'Friday sermon' delivered by the staunchly secular opposition party leader in Turkey on Wednesday on the correct way to wear Islamic dress, quoting from the Koran and speaking of "Big Sins" and "Smaller Sins" (I think he was trying to say that not wearing a headscarf was a smaller sin that should easily be committed if one wanted to go to university) with the know-how of an Islamic televangelist, today the Archbishop of Canterbury says that implementation of Islamic law is unavoidable in Britain. I quietly refer him to Nadeem Aslam's apocalyptic "Maps for Lost Lovers" if he wants a depiction of what that could lead to. Britain has been forewarned.

Here the archbishop:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080207/tuk-sharia-law-unavoidable-archbishop-6323e80_1.html

Here Nadeem, the oracle:
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2004-02/aslam.htm

Joseph's Inmate's Dream in Saqqara Tomb

"12.36": And two youths entered the prison with him. One of them said: I saw myself pressing wine. And the other said: I saw myself carrying bread on my head, of which birds ate. Inform us of its interpretation; surely we see you to be of the doers of good.

Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörder

Returning from Old Cairo where the Coptic community still live, we were accosted by a group of taxi drivers who all wanted to take us to our next destination- The Citadel. The brouhaha was caused because the first one we stopped did not speak English and hence revealed our origins- we were looking quite Egyptian a minute ago. A rather complex and intriguing bargaining happened between the drivers and we were led to a rather dingy looking car- that was it, we were going to reclaim our freedom, and so on we walked, with three taxis driving behind us in our walking pace. We walked, we crossed the streets- and yes, ended up taking a taxi that was involved in the very first argument. There was no escaping the net. We could've tried a bit harder, but we had to make it to the bus that was to take us to the airport quite fast.

This made me think of the various networks of the city and reminded me of Fritz Lang's Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörder, where the networks of beggars and burglars join the police to search for a child killer, as all these groups have men covering certain parts of the city. The Cairene incident made me think that one should add the Taxidriverbund to the list.

Because evil will find you

this
is a colonial disease

whether in Damascus
or two hour's drive from Vienna,
evil will find you

how'ever you may try to skirt it.

Eastern Promises

I checked my breast pocket
for eastern promises today
and found one
polished to perfection
hard to improvise
hard to utter
without premeditation.

The Leuven Tune

The following is a free (read faulty) translation of a song I'd listened to managed to record two summers ago in Leuven. It has fascinated me since. I have to find a Belgian music enthusiast to tell me who the singer is.

The blue in your eyes
Wilderness
The allure of princesses in your soul

The hair that cries in deserted carosses
The sparrows that singe themselves as they fly
The air circulates and turns
Each time I hear your name

I want you to give me reassurance
You can lift my chin up, let me sleep like a nightingale
That no one should embrace you

Because each time it is like the pain of death
Pain of faith
Pain of being childlike again
An anxiety

Come here
And put me in order

The red colour of your skin
And fingertips on fire

it was impossible that you should sleep naked
in the night, when the ache awaits
And afterwards the divan, the sofa
Without rules or explanations

Without expense, without laying bare
To believe that your everything was dead
The soul, the core, to infinity