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.