German Faces, Russian Faces

"There are genocides happening today, and they are being shot off the front pages by Nazi cows - Nazi cows! - and interviews with Mortensen talking about playing a depressed Nazi: "I spent a lot of time in Germany just looking at people." Really? Five million have died in the Congo in the last 10 years, in a war for the minerals that we use. And Heil Honey I'm Home! has nothing to say about that."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/23/nazi-culture-film-hitler

what an oppurtune article that speaks to my disparate observations in Moscow.
Mortensen- I was talking about his Eastern Promises at the conference, and as I was listening to another participant giving his paper about how Russian nationalism fared in the face of the Russian adoration of all things French, he seemed strangely familiar to me (and I know no Russians) and then I realized some of his facial gestures were exactly like the Mortensen character I'd been talking about. I'm guessing Mortensen also spent a lot of time in Russia just looking at people. Hats off! Now I'll have to go an see his depressed Nazi.

THE Embittered Marxist

On the sunniest day of my visit to Moscow I was at a conference where I could follow only half of what was going on. But I could follow the man in the picture alright, with rebuttals in Russian and English to everyone who spoke. His remark to my paper about 'everyone having their own East' was "I think the Muslims and the Orthodox are no where comparable, I don't think you'll find our youth, Orthodox youth protesting on the streets of Paris even twenty years from now". But the Marxist in him came out when I picked one of the above seen bottles of water to fill out a glass. He said I should take the whole bottle, and I said one glass was enough to which he retorted "Oh please, take the whole bottle by all means (he did have occasional English mannerisms), now if it was our American friend who needed the water, he would have taken the whole bottle without asking." The American, one of the three people who gave their papers in English, simply smiled. I could only say "Do you mean to say that I have also failed in etiquette by not properly asking you? (which I really hadn't)" to at least try to make myself as culpable as the American (Moscow makes strange bedfellows) But then the silly conversation stopped, and when it was his time to give his paper, a number of younger Russian students challenged him, which my lovely translator summarized at the end as "They have just had a very interesting discussion about nationalism" Excellent. Now I know what I missed.

An Unexpected Find

A Russian dissident sits across from me in the park.
He must be a dissident because
he's Russian, and he's
here
in New York City.
Does he know that Central Park
is
muggers only
after dark?

(Ahdaf Soueif)

A Boston Encounter

Ecce Polis! We are riding a tram, huddled into a wintercoats, and we're returning from seeing a nice play in a nice university town. There are a group of girls frolicking at the back, singing, dancing and my companion asks me whether I remember a time being so carefree and doing such things. "Well, a couple of weeks ago when I was in London..." I start to tell her. She is an established psychologist and has been telling me about her patients half of whom happen to be musicians - professional or amateur. She sees one of them at the metro station now and then. By this time the girls have turned up their volume and the Rabindranath Marx looking guy sitting in front of me who has been listening to our conversation revolving around the play (Beckett's End Game) since we got on the tram with eager interest now starts to make eyes at me. No, of course not that way, he's got his girlfriend by his side but Rabindranath, let's call him Ed, with his Marxist beard and grey tweed coat suggesting the 1930's thinks me, for some reason, equally inconvenienced as he is by the girls. He probably has guessed that I have been sending Embittered Marxists left and right on facebook and wants to capitalize on this familiarity.
Then the girls leave. He takes a theatrical sigh of relief, clasps his master of the revels hands together and announces, bass "Now, our next act..."
"Yourself maybe" I venture.
At the next stop, taking a half bow, he gets off the tram.

An Atlanta Encounter

Since there is not much to be seen in Atlanta (except for Stone Mountain of course where we went to encounter a plantation but managed only to see the back seat of an American police car, more of that maybe later) I spent most of my time socializing, almost Oxford-style, bench hopping and trying to raise my voice above the din. At one dinner party with a German-language poster like Democles's sword over us, we ate, we discussed Iraq, Vietnam and Israel. And right after everyone had managed to upset everyone else, a number of us took their leave and one among us with a decidedly public school education (no matter which or where) and one that had tried to calm everyone during the debate retired to a darker corner of the room and asked the gentleman of the house "We shall smoke?" We had not quite realized that the event was black tie.
I met the same public school graduate, whom we shall call Snap's Master, at another party whose themes this time ranged from food-poisoning death to whether as a child one had been oiled and massaged. Love, too, came up, and as one of those present was sort of lamenting that his brother was in love with a Pakistani girl Snap's Master asked like nothing "Is she brown?" and then told us about the various nannies he had had, named after various fruits and flowers.

A New York Encounter

What better way to spend the one Sunday you have in New York than to buy yourself a camera which should enable you to shoot your own news reports, thought my cousin. She had thought the same about the Saturday, but she had been recommended to go and shop at the B&H which, she found out later, was run by orthodox Jews and so no luck on Saturday. And so I come in fresh from Atlanta and so it is Sunday morning with us and a shop full of kippa wearing salesmen- men, of course. There's also a Metropolis like pulley and train system right above our heads, carrying I don't know what I don't know where.
So we munch on our kosher sweets, and two of the salesmen are very keen to get my cousin the best deal, when the sickly looking one disappers, we get into a convo with the healthy looking one, he asks where we are from and says 'So, reporting live from Turkey, eh?" "Eh" my cousin concurs. "Reporting more, like, from New York, from a shop that closes on Saturdays" I say. He laughs and adds "Well, you know, not only is the shop closed on Saturdays, but the website is down as well". Hats, kippas, headscarves off. The Spanish tourists are watching our conversation with hidden glee. Then the sickly salesman appears. He wants in on the conversation. "So where are you from?" he asks.
This time we want to play it. "Guess" we tell him. First he smiles signifying impossibility. My cousin says the inevitable cliche "Somewhere between the East and the West". He smiles impossibility for one more second, but then the cliché has worked and he says "Turkey?" We are now in a full-blown conversation. We want to take it somewhere but we don't know where. I venture "So where are you from?" "New York" he says. I try to push it a little to find some common ground and ask "And your people?" . "New York" he says again. In the sociality of the moment I loose grip of the situation and ask as I do any American "How about in Europe? Where are they from in Europe?" His look tells me before he says anything that I am touché. "Germany and Poland".
Silence.
"Interesting, I spent two years in Heidelberg" is not going to cut it this time.

An Exegesis of Shoe Throwing

Yesterday a secular crowd gathered in Taksim to bid farewell to Bush. Turkish Communist Party among them. They had pictures of Bush and they were throwing their shoes at his likeness.
Now this makes me think of a recent debate on Turkish television. You have to know that Turks are religion obsessed. Some spend their life fearing it. Some spend their life defending it. But most spend their life asking incredibly creative questions like "So if I chew gum with no flavour when I fast, do I have to re-fast one day after Ramadan?". The latest debate revolved around the question of whether the ritual of 'throwing stones' at the 'likeness of the devil' (which happens to be a stone wall) was an essential part of the Hajj. The reformists were saying No, the traditionalists were saying Yes.
I think last night's scene provides argument for the Yea-sayers, secular or religious, throwing things at something you don't like seems to be a genetic tendency in human kind, and its therapeutic effects cannot be underestimated.

The Fight Against Terrorism, The Fight Against Wind Mills

As Cervantes would've said, this story is not mine. So there will be similar errors and subfuscations in my telling. A friend just came back from a 'Gulf State' where they had a meeting of sorts for muslims, of sorts. A group wanted to add a paragraph about condemning Israel's actions in Gaza to the final declaration, but they were told, by the American (of sorts - Muslim) organizing committee that the meeting - a meeting that had the title ''Is political Islam a threat to the West?" for one of its panels - was NOT a political gathering and so it wasn't appropriate to speak about Palestine. There was much food and drink, the whole thing was a great Hollywood production of exquisite script followed to the letter, one that could put Obama's inauguration in the shade (bear with me). She also met a certain American Abraham (religious persuasion insignificant) who ended up in the same plane with her heading, let's say, to the most beautiful city in the world (yes, you can read into my partiality).
This Abraham had 5 hours to spend in the most beautiful city in the world before he took another plane to the US and asked my friend whether she had time to show him around. My friend did not, and her refusal probably set the tone for the rest of the day's events. We will never know what happened to Abe in those 5 hours. But by the time he got to the airport he was very tense, so tense that once he boarded the plane he decided he didn't like the look of one passanger. Later in the police station his excuse was that this particular man had a coat on - oh horror of horrors!- although the weather was warm. He insisted on getting off the plane. The plane was searched and nothing found. The flight was delayed for two hours.

In the greater scheme of things, I think Abe, corresponds to the Harlequin in The Heart of Darkness, flailing his arms about, his mind 'enlarged' by all the conferences he attends about political Islam that are not political.

The Book of Numbers

Srebrenica. 8200...
Gaza. 1203...

Heart of Israel

A former Israeli minister says that unlike Hamas, Israel is 'not trying to target civilians'. It is the 'idea' that counts, he tells us, not the actual 900 people dead.
What redeems it is the idea only.

Mistah Kurtz, he not dead
a penny for the old guy

Pestilence

UrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfa

La Question Humaine (or please leave Europe to its own demons)

A nostalgic film about how all evil in Europe can be neatly traced back to the Nazis. One of the comments on the imdb website says that the viewer has understood 'why EU was launched and why we need it now more than ever'. So that executives from good European families can come together to form their own orchestras to play Schubert? Capital reason! And also so that black illegal workers can be efficiently picked up from Turkish bistros (interesting detaille) and put into custody so that intellectuals have enough space to do the serious business of gestating over the second world war. Another bout of psychose europeenne.

Joyeux Noel!

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

Merry Christmas

Had this been a time to celebrate
in my own calender
I would've wanted nothing more
or less
than the red flowers I found this evening
on my desk, waiting
for a name to be put on them.

it is I,
Mrs. Dalloway
who's arranged them
to be put there
by simply being a very good
daughter and cousin.

Çoban Çalılığı Anıları

babamdan kaldı bir geyik,
zaten onun çoğunu da yedik

The Turkish March According to Zizek

This comes very timely, after I have purchased a book on Opera by Zizek (and in German to boot!)- I guess he doesn't treat them any more or less discerningly than he does film, so I should be alright, I think :-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?ex=1199163600&en=47c5664276e90d20&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Maps for Lost Blitcons

I have just finished reading the very very sinister Maps for Lost Lovers, and turning to the internet for help have found unequivocal praise for it. TLS and London Review of Books do not report, but the Guardian does, in laudatory terms.
Every single ill that you can imagine that is attributed to Islam can be found in this book, it's almost like a check-list.
However one thing I find very hard to stomach is that the book implies that blind Islamic adherence is also at the heart of the fact that abortion is condoned in Pakistani communities if the baby is female--- subhanallah- so far as I know Koran is the only holy book that speaks of the plight of just such babies when speaking of judgement day: "And when the female infant buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed (so she may testify against those who killed her)" (81:8-9)
Blind adherence to Islam would stop anyone from messing with female foetuses, methinks.

Conversation Starter/Stopper

Overheard at a dinner party

the rah-rah-rah son of landed gentry: (addressing the crowd) ... I can never get my father to read that rag
the racial/social debu/dilittante: What does you father do?
rah-rah-rah: He's the Minister of Defence
debu/dilittante: Oh

Zauberberg

She came to me with the tell-tale signs of her distress
An urgency to the step
A shortness to the skirt,
And the kohl reluctantly smeared over the eye-lid

It took her some time to name it

Here they had dined together
And here, they had had coffee
This mountain was the mountain from where
They had observed the villages beyond

And it took a giant’s reserve
To keep my mouth shut or exempt
From asking questions as I
Gorged chocolate covered pineapples and bananas
under the cacaphony of the Europe’s biggests christmas tree,
Thinking, everyone to their own devils
(oh, that sofa, the sofa, the hands, the shoes, the receding hair
and whispered questions below the decibels of the general conversation
the hand shake, the promise unkept)

The day wore on, and another
And then the goblin confronted us
With an outstretched hand and a smile
And she fed her with fruits and conversation
And when it was time to go to bed
She made one last offering

“Take him!” she said to me
but I had heard these cries before
I had heeded such words before
And knew them to be the false maps they were
For the uninitiated
For the disinterested,
for the little hopeful girl I once was.

But now I sail through life
With not a care in the world
And these goblins,
these magic mountains,
these false friends,
the ghosts of Europe
can’t touch me anymore
for in my breast pocket I keep
enough eastern promises
to last me a life-time.
***
darling, darjeeling
dear, deer, darjeeling.

Past the Mission

behind the prison tower/present hour
looking for a way to catch up
with the music of time
getting ready for the next mission
to conquer Jerusalem

The Maiden of Istanbul's Tale

Not once had she been to Jerusalem
and yet she had such stories to tell

Chiswick Tales

The Long Way Home

As I sit facing the sun,
Reading the words of a long lost lover
England passes me by,
The river, the dogs and the joggers

Reminding me that had I
Defected
This would’ve been my stretch to walk
On sunny November mornings,
And over there,
With its boathouses
Would’ve been my workplace

This is the house
Where the first telegram was sent
And this, where, a certain calligrapher lived
But the book in my hand tells me
It doesn’t matter if these stories are true
What matters is that they shape the future to come

The future,
Elided by so many unheld promises
So many unheld hands
So many cross-named lands
Constantinople, for instance, or Jerusalem
Where Furnival fought and fell
Where Eyüp fought and fell

Sitting cross-legged in this drift-wood house
I count all the sign-posts
All the check-points
that do not add up to my defection
walking towards Furnival
walking towards Eyüp,
taking the long way home.

Sleeping with Rumanians

In the great tradition of listing who one has slept with, along with my predecessors Tracey Emin and a certain Ms. Eker (to quote Emin "it's everyone I have slept with not made love to!!"), I now continue from where I left off- that is the Germans, see entry October 2, 2006 http://nhaliloglu.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

I was the one who suggested it. I had just realized that the German girl at the reception desk at the Ibis Hotel had not quite understood how many nights I would be staying (I noticed there were at least 4 Germans in the hotel staff- is there some sort of an Ibis exchange programme?) and so I had had to clear out that morning. Of course I could've headed to Oxford straight, but there were several conversations that had been cut unfinished as it happens at conferences, and I wanted to pick them up, if only for another day. And of course I quite liked Anamaria (I do sincerely hope she will read this at some point, it would mean we're back in touch- sorry about the pun!).
We had met a couple of months ago in Thessaloniki, in fact, when I first saw her she was enquiring after her lost coat in that Woody Allenesque mode of hers, a coat, it turns out, she had bought in Istanbul and which held dear memories, hence the Woody Allenesque insistence on her tone with the hotel staff (who incidentally were quite trying on the nerves) Then one thing led to another and conversations about Lisbon and her friendship with J.P. There we were, friends, though in between she had had a personal crisis and not written to me, there we were, in Northampton Ibis Hotel, me roomless for the night and going up to her and saying "I say, what if we split the cost tonight and share a bed?"

The evening had started with us, a group of conference guests, looking for somewhere to have a drink. "Down town" Northampton was quite small, and each time we made a circuit looking for some place, the number of open establishments were dwindling, and the number of police presence increasing. The fifth time we crossed the town hall one of the officers gave me a strange look and we decided it was time to quit patrolling and sit some place. Indeed, we found a nice pub where my request for a cup of tea was treated as everyday and around 11 we went back to the hotel. By the time we reached the Ibis, which is close to the train station, so not exactly a posh spot, three burly men had taken post at the door. It looked like now we actually had to pass bouncers in order to get into our hotel. They greeted us kindly, asking for nothing, and once we were inside, we saw that the bar was full of blond women and men who looked like they had jumped out of an episode of EastEnders. They did not even see us come in, we quietly took the lift up to our room.

Anamaria fretted over her packing as I eased into bed. Last I heard her voice she was wondering where she should put the bottle of wine she had brought as a present for her friends in Reading. Then, sometime toward 2 o'clock, we were woken up by a fire alarm. A-ha! I thought, same old tactic as in St. Cross to see whether people have taken people into their rooms. I half heartedly put the scarf on, got into the corridor and saw only one other person there, bleary eyed, asking me whether one should go down. We decided against it and went back to bed. Anamaria had not budged. Then a couple of hours later there was shouting and running in the corridor. This time we both got up. I heard police sirens and went to the window. They were causing such flashes and racket that I thought there must at least be a dozen of police cars down there. It had happened. The headquarters of the notorious white women trafficking and drugs syndicate had just been discovered. It was right in the cellars of Ibis Hotel Northampton, this piece of earth, this England....
I then saw a man run across the street and sirens getting louder. I turned back to the room. The racket continued for a while more and then Anamaria told me how the night before the man above her room had paced up and down the whole night. It must have been the spooks who were waiting the right moment to attack, eh?

The rest of the night we slept well and in the morning went to the conference venue. The people with whom I had wanted to continue the conversation had all but left, but we enjoyed the cold Indian food buffet anyway.

Zizek as Closet Ottoman Revivalist

Once again 'the bearded one' is using Turkey as the stick to beat the EU with. Turkey as that lamella (the Ottoman "undead"), if you will, that nags at European consciousness, revealing all the points of contention between European nations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2197161,00.html

Rediscovering Nasreddin Hodja

Reading Ziauddin Sardar, and the way he juxtaposes Nasreddin with Rumi opened my eyes to the possibility of reading Nasreddin as a sufi philosopher, to whom I believe I am already a disciple, through my mother's stories

One day they told the Hodja that his wife was going around and travelling too much, something not befitting the wife of a hodja. He said "No, that can't be true!", and when asked why he said "She can't be travelling all that much, had that been the case, her route would've her taken her home at some point!"

Hieronymo's mad againe

(upon watching Starter for 10)

what a pointless time to remember

the lesson unread
the sin unwashed
running up and down the stairs
up and down
running noses, in sync
what a useless time to remember

but of course each Ramadan will bring it back to me
each beginning, and each end

mad againe,
for just a while

A Few Days in September

French film about intelligence personnel... very good acting, excessive camera work which is beautiful but pointless, a cross between a 'French' film and a spy thriller, with a baddie who contacts his shrink continuously on the phone, and father figure issues, shared with the two kids.
The two Arab corporate men were also quite good- not au fait with what's going to happen on Sep 11, but being informed by it by a CIA agent (one of them was being played by - I think- an actor from Lost. The fact that he speaks French so well makes me think he's Iranian, again perfetc American casting! Iranians for Iraqis!)
The film also reminded me of the effort of another film I've seen recently, The Stone Merchant, which was trying to place Italy somewhere important on the fight against terror, and this one seems to lift its head up and says, hey, we in France are also involved with these efforts, more or less.

This is England (film about 80's in England)

very crucial scene that stiches things I have been reading recently all together

one racist-leaning skinhead asks a Jamaican rude boy who belongs in a non-political skin head group whether he feels himself to be Jamaican or English. After hesitation the boy says 'English' and then the racist skinhead applauds him and goes on a diatribe about 3.5 million Pakis infesting England, living in council flats, in a country that fought to keep out the enemy through two world wars, and that this boy should be proud to call himself English.
an Englishness defined against the Germans (the two world wars) and Pakis (taking up jobs and flats), and the boy of Jamaican origin is welcomed into the fold possibly because he is considered to be part of the history described in A Small Island, good Jamaicans protecting the mother country against Germans.

the Faulklands victory is portrayed as empty, the last attempt to define some national identity, and the vacuum is then underlined by Saun throwing St. George's Cross into the sea....

12 July 2007

Visit to Trakai
My history as
a series of Stalinesque manouvers
from this side of the Urals
to that

standing in the rain
looking at his iron face at a shop window
huddled in my Gestapo coat
was my rude introduction
to uncle Joe

to be repeated
with a difference
over the rolling hills of England,
through the lakesides of the Baltic,
and along the banks of the Rhein

Summer Reads

The Islamist

Volumes to be said about this one. Started its life (for me) on a rainy day in a pub in Shepherd's Bush. Resisted it for a while and then succumbed, and now happy about it. Accompanied me in Damascus and my observations there- good investment. Very acute observations, however some very naive. That is the main problem of the book- it's thoroughness is unbalanced. Some observations are very superficial and stereotypical while others go in depth. Appreciated the Saudi Arabia bit. It's insistence on calling the British Intelligence to more vigilance when it comes to Muslims makes it read like an informants report- which is a real shame because it does offer a very interesting snapshot of Islamist movements in London. Eye-opener for a hill-billy from Oxford. To be consulted for my upcoming definition for 'British Muslim' and worse 'British Muslim Novel'.

Bizi Bırakıp Nereye Gidiyorsun Türk (memoirs of a Turkish officer in Syria and Palestine)

Not Seven Pillars of Wisdom but hey! Considerably shorter and very heavy on unit manoevres, now and then cultural clash with the Arabs, with the protagonist falling ill now and then, which hit home with girls running with high fever in the house in Zabadani, and no one got spared the diarrhea. There's also a curious meeting with T.E. Lawrence where he offers him money but of course the Turk refuses. But the best is the passage where he is trying to convince bedouins that he knows more about Islam then they do. He devises a contest and beats them all :-)

The Pickup

Book read on promise. The reward was the unexpected reference to Shahrour, and through Göle, of all people! So Shahrour has entered main stream, although word on the Damascene street is that he is a scoundrel, and how can you trust your eyes with a dentist? (and this coming from a half-blind man, so one has to mark his words) Here I am looking at how Rhys plays with subjectivity in her novels and comes Gordimer with her bag of tricks, I mean, Rhys looks so elementary after that, I may as well throw the diss into the bin. Very cross with Gordimer. I did not like the protagonist(in), her motives were a bit too vague whereas the 'Middleeastern' (Syrian? Yemeni?) guy looked much more believable. This 'ethical turn' in the South African novel was also there, with the sexual harassment case. Who can say which country belongs to whom blah blah blah

Ahmet Mithat Efendi Avrupa'da

The father of the Turkish novel visits the Stockholm Exhibition, and then takes off to Paris with a married Russia woman, to discover the similarities between the two cultures--- well, both lagging behind Europe it turns out, but unspoilt human nature etc. etc. Madame Gulnar (her pen name) speaks perfect Ottoman Turkish and translates Pushkin into Turkish. So another to be reckoned with in the Utrecht database (make a mental note!) Of course far more progressed than the 'Orient', Ahmet Mithat finds little fault with the orientalists' treatment of, say, Egypt. Anyway, orientals at the time were not quite so militant about correcting misconceptions. Where did all this laissez-faire go? *sigh*

Sweetness in the Belly

An Irish girl brought up in a shrine in Morocco spends her youth in Harar. Now despite the improbable story-line, the protagonist was much more believable. I really like the idea of a sufi order around Bilal Habeshi, it turns out it is Camilla Gibb's brain child. Probably not Muslim herself. Again the question. Does the British Muslim novel have to be written by a Muslim? Or is it enough that the narrator or the focalizer is Muslim?

Small Island

Started in an overcast June day in a basement kitchen and ended on the beach facing Chios. The bits in Jamaica were really nice and chimed in with Rhys's descriptions, me feeling I'm doing something for the diss. What a wonderful 'founding myth'. I am tempted to write to one for British muslims. Did they fight in WW2? where can I get such info? (maybe yahoo questions) does a community need to have fought in WW2 to be considered to have contributed to the 'nation'? I enjoyed even the jungle bits, which I would not have had I not spent my last hours in Istanbul watching 3 episodes of Lost back to back!

Homo Faber

Thanks to Merle. Had I not been sent this book, Max Frisch would have remained as the writer of Biederman und die Brandstifter. What rubbish! Anyway, now he's a cross between Isherwood and Auster in my mind. Kept thinking of Neubauer as I read the book and my terrible gaffe. Again relished the plane bauch-landing bits no doubt due to my Lost-mania. There's almost a touch of McEwan as well, with him introducing scenes and unravelling what they mean slowly afterwards.

Maze

Greek writer based in London. Looked promising but again a novel about troup movements with not much to lighten the page--- certain aphorisms about the end of the Ottoman Empire. Text book. Will probably ditch it for Hanan ak-Shaykh's Only in London in my search for the British Muslim novel.

the road from Damascus

It was not the same thing.
The grass was thousand feet below and we were watching it from the plane rather than our backs on it looking upwards comfortably to see the craft.
We were not talking about Isherwood and Auden.
We were talking about Eliot and his poems with an oriental theme, the journey of the Magi and one other with a very long title which he had read and I not. We complained about Lonely Planet and impressed each other with our educated questions. So what are the Mosarabs? what is the difference between the Sunnis and Shiites? do you celebrate the Reconquista? what do you say on your rosary?
and then he told me where he came from they did not celebrate the Reconquista but the battle of Lepanto, where Cervantes had lost a hand and then I had to recommend White Castle. But they did play Moors and Spaniards alright, each family having chosen their side quite some time ago and sticking to it no matter what.

The strange sensation of speaking once again.