Bolero and modernization

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Opinion by Elif Şafak

  The year was 1928 when Maurice Ravel composed "Bolero." The melody was unlike any other hitherto composed in the sense that it was based on the technique of deliberate repetition -- the tune was repeated 18 times without change during the course of one single piece. So unconventional was the style, Ravel himself would later define it as an experiment in a limited direction. “Before its first performance, I issued a public warning,” he would maintain. “I issued a warning that what I had written was a piece lasting 17 minutes and consisting wholly of one long, unbroken crescendo.”

  Now imagine being in the year 1932 and living in Istanbul. If you were a middle-aged Turkish citizen then, in all likelihood you would have gone through turbulent days, witnessed the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and then seen and probably actively supported the fabrication of a new, modern, secular nation-state, the Turkish Republic. So middle-aged Turkish citizen that you are, try to imagine traveling from one place to another along the Bosphorus on a public ferryboat. The journey on this vessel lasts no less than 40 minutes. And as you sit still there on your bench sipping black tea from tiny glass cups, all of a sudden you start hearing this music being broadcast, and before you get the foggiest sense as to what s going on, you find yourself listening to Maurice Ravel s "Bolero," the world s longest musical crescendo, over and over and over again until you finally disembark.

  The whole idea was among the numerous ventures of the newly established Turkish Republic to Westernize and modernize its citizens as swiftly as possible, by discouraging them from listening to traditional music and instead encouraging them to enjoy Western classics starting with, why not, Bolero. Many went along, many others simply felt estranged, perhaps hated it. Fortunately, the endeavor was stopped shortly after, but the impact and the venture behind remained. Indeed, multifaceted and convoluted was the process of birthing the nation, especially in its reflections in daily life. At times a piece of music composed in ecstasy, in artistic frenzy, composed to serve the Muses served instead nation-states, patriarchies, and nationalisms.

  So little has yet been studied where Turkey s masculine, modernist trajectory is concerned. Groundbreaking developments in gender and women s studies have been strikingly slow in being reflected in studies on the Middle East in general and Turkey in particular. Despite the salient contribution of numerous eminent feminist scholars both in Turkey and abroad, the question as to how ordinary individuals managed or failed to transcend gender zones in a society traversing civilization zones still remains a marginal topic of research.

  In the official discourse, the shift from the Ottoman Empire to republican Turkey has oftentimes been associated with “progress at every level” and modernization, which is automatically thought to embody political equality, dynamism and, above all, the emancipation of the individual from the yoke of traditions. As such, the country is thought to have safely and successfully moved from traditional to modern, religious to secular, static to dynamic, and from a multiethnic empire to a monolithic nation-state. Last but not least, it goes without saying that the whole process is thought to have gone hand-in-hand with a drastic transformation from a patriarchal society into one in which women were legally, politically and economically emancipated.

  Modernization may indeed seem to constitute a radical break with the past. Yet when it comes to the texts and contexts of femininity and masculinity, perhaps more than discontinuities, it is continuities that come to the forefront. In this respect, one can attain significant similarities between not only the Ottoman male elites and the republican male elites but also the latter and their political/ideological opponents. As Zehra Arat argues, despite the basic differences in their theoretical positions, “They all manipulated the same images and metaphors in the presentation of their own ideology.” In other words, when gender and sexuality is the issue, members of the Turkish male elite seemingly situated at different ends of the ideological spectrum might have strikingly similar attitudes and ideas. “Fundamentally different ideological positions might not necessarily mean fundamentally different attitudes towards gender roles and patterns,” says Arat.

  If that were the case, perhaps it can be plausibly argued that between Ottoman times and today s ups and downs there is more continuity than we are ready to accept. The story of state, sexuality and modernization in Turkey resembles a song in a repeat-track mode sometimes, a familiar melody full of deliberate repetition.