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