To honor!

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

  “How do Turks say ‘Cheers before taking a drink?” asked an American photographer about to leave for one of the most picturesque cities in the world, namely, Istanbul.

  “We say ‘Serefe ,” I replied absent-mindedly.

  “She-re-fe!” he jotted down in his notebook in which he had already written down a few basic things on Istanbul and Turkey -- if not some crucial information on cultural differences. From where I stood I could read a few random words; “Muslim,” “secularism” and “Atatürk.” When he finished spelling out the word he said smilingly: “In America we say ‘Cheers ; in France they say ‘A votre sante (to your health); in Israel they say ‘L chaim (to life); and in Turkey you say ‘Serefe (to honor). Everybody toasts what is the most valuable to them.”

  As soon as he said this I became irritated. For the first time in my life, a word I must have used abundantly while drinking with friends and family felt heavier on my tongue. Also, for the first time in my life I realized I did not want to drink to “şerefe” again. As a Turkish woman writer, in each of my novels and non-fiction works, I have to this day struggled to re-evaluate the words that the Kemalist elite had purged out of daily usage, all in the name of creating a national language. Words of Arabic and Persian origin were banished from use in Turkey; concomitantly, countless expressions of folk and mystic origins were sent into exile. Although the spoken word could not be easily controlled and thereby managed to retain its autonomy, the written language was systematically centralized, homogenized, indeed, “Turkified.” The different languages of the numerous Turkish minorities could not as a consequence find a voice in written culture. The “modernization” of the Turkish language went hand-in-hand with “linguistic cleansing” and “linguistic homogenization.”

  As much as I tried to bring back the exiled words and as much as I opposed the elimination of words from our language, for the first time in my life I wanted to flush out a particular word from my mother tongue: honor. I do not want to drink “to honor” ever again.

  Hatun Surucu was a young, single mother living in Berlin. She was the daughter of Turkish-Kurdish immigrants in Germany but had broken away from her traditional family, just as she had divorced the husband she was forced to marry at 16 years of age. With the help of feminist groups, she was earning her own living, studying to become an electrician, in fact, but at the same time committing the one big crime for such a woman of her background: independence.

  Her fate was to be shot on the street by her brothers and to become the sixth Turkish woman murdered by these so-called “honor killings” in the past five months alone. After all, the honor of her family, the honor of her brothers and the honor of her community depended upon her body and her sexuality. Hatun Surucu s slaying has triggered a litany of questions as to the integration of 2.5 million Turkish immigrants into German culture and all the old stereotypical arguments about the coexistence of Islam and Western democracy. Some among the Turkish elite, in the meantime, sounded more worried about Hatun Surucu s fate than the “image” of Turkey in the eyes of the Western world.

  By and large civil society in Turkey is sensitive to this question and is calling for bigger punishments for those involved in “honor killings.” Nevertheless, while numerous feminist, modernist and secularist groups, as well as individuals -- both in Turkey and abroad -- reacted quickly and expansively, it is simply not enough. As long as we do not directly challenge that deeply rooted word “honor” and stop searching for it in women s bodies, nothing is enough and even one killing is way too many.