About the title of the column: Some years ago, during a transatlantic telephone conversation that proved in retrospect to be fraught with what Alfred North Whitehead calls “causal efficacy,” this writer’s ex-husband informed her that he had just been offered a job in Istanbul and that he thought it would be just super if the whole family moved there. “Istanbul?”, she said, in a tone of voice that must have embodied the Platonic form of disbelief. “Yes, Istanbul”, he answered. “Why not?” Why not?, indeed. Anyway the rest as they say is history, and the opening lines of that fateful conversation became the title of a work in progress and now, this column (on the theory that such things can help give form to projects like that of the book).
About the approach used for this first article: How to write was not easy to decide. Should I go all out Mary Poppins style, extolling the marvels of Istanbul? Should I immediately launch into a no-holds barred, scathing critique of this or that aspect of the place? Or, finally, should I write as would one with a priviliged persepective, as a woman who very, very obviously has it all together? Well, the first option I couldn’t hack. It isn’t credible at all because I am convinced that Mary Poppins herself would have fled, screaming bloody blue murder, from the place half and hour after she’d set foot in it for the first time. The second seemed to coincide more with my deep personal aspiration (as opposed to reality) – to become a mature, jaded cynic – you know, the kind of woman who’s seen it all, done it all, and even originated some of it all, and now believes in none of it, rather than with reality. That approach wasn’t going to work because the truth is, even though I damn well should be by now, I am not, and probably will never ever will be, cynical. The third one isn’t even credible to me, so how could it pass muster with readers who happen to know me personally? In the end, I decided to follow Aziz Nesin’s advice about how orta is always best and adopt a moderate approach for this first column – not too pessimistic, not too optimistic – hopefully, just right. After deciding how to write, what to write was easy. The topic is how to see through the ugliness (which after all is largely the result of a too rapid influx of first-world marketing and technology in a “developing country” without the benefit of the education necessary to handle it) to the gold that is underneath and very, very real.
I set eyes on Istanbul for the first time in my life on Sunday, September 26, 1993. I stayed for only a month before fleeing it, yet I came back. There were many reasons why I came back, the main one then being the fact that I couldn’t get a working permit to stay in Paris and needed money to stay alive. Going back to the States wasn’t an option, again, for lots of reasons, but teaching English in Istanbul was. So, I opted to come back and stay. Istanbul, a place so ancient that it is almost beyond my ability to grasp, made such a deep impression on me that hardly an hour has passed in which I haven't contemplated what I've already experienced here and imagined what I'd experience here in the future.
Struggling to learn how to live in Istanbul has been and still is a profoundly spiritual process. If you have trouble with that word (which I solemnly swear not to use very often) substitute ‘existential.’ Living in Istanbul can teach us something about how to be human, really. Everytime something horrible comes along (which is, you know, like every day) the other side of it is almost immediately apparent. Take riding on the bus. Since being regularly employed I don’t have to do that very often anymore but in the early days I did it all the time. There’s an art to riding the buses in Istanbul. I even wrote a short story about it. Anyway, you know the buses are usually crowded and uncomfortable, hot and smelly, and almost always providing temporary shelter to some guy trying to do unspeakable things to you (which is why, by the way, more than one Turkish woman has told me to bring a hat pin with me on the bus). Anyway, there you are, riding the damned bus and suffering when then you see some kid looking up at you. “Hah!,” you may think to yourself. “Even the kid caught that I’m yabancı.” You take a closer look. The child is beautiful, as children are, and beautiful in the way that Turkish children are. Anyway, he (or she) is looking at you. You look back. Then you both smile. Life feels possible again. “Yes!,” you say to yourself. “Yes, yes, yes!” Or there’s an old woman, covered, whose face looks like it could belong to someone who lived a thousand years ago and whose hands are impeccably clean and worn smooth with decades and decades of work. All the things here hands have done and made and expressed. You feel you want to say something to her about how magnificent her hands are, and words bubble up, but you know your Turkish couldn’t possibly manage the poetry required so you keep silent. She feels you, though, and catches your eye and again, as happened with the child, you smile at each other.
Or let’s take walking. A woman walking alone, especially a foreign woman, can get hassled. That in itself will be the subject of another column. Besides the getting hassled, though, there’s something else that happens sometimes; something I’ve never encountered anywhere else in the world. Sometimes as you walk past a man who finds you beautiful he starts to sing, softly – very, very softly -- and continues walking, and you realize that the mere fact of your presence evoked -- song.
Then there’s Meçidiyiköy. I hate Meçidiyiköy. Hate it. One day when I was walking to get to a business meeting there I was feeling incredible stress because of the whole combination of noise, crowds, uneven sidewalks, ugly cement buildings, all that, when I stopped dead in front of a vegetable cart. The vendor had arranged the vegetables with what could only have been love. It was incredible. More care had gone into arranging those vegetables than most people put into getting dressed in the morning. I bought a half kilo of apples I didn’t really need just because they were gorgeous. While the apples lasted, every time I bit into one the whole scene came back to me – the juxtaposition of all that ugliness which stems from a soul-dead apathy with the exquisite caring manifested by those damned vegetables.
I suppose the point in recounting these vignettes is that each of them illustrates how everyone who lives here is repeatedly confronted with a choice about how to live, how to feel, how to act, what to do, and ultimately, what to be. Living in Istanbul necessitates our grappling honestly with Hamlet’s struggle, or not.
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Readers can write Karen-Claire Voss at karenclaire3@yahoo.com