Istanbulite pickpockets and Gucci bags

Sunday, May 8, 2005

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

  Recently an American colleague traveled to Istanbul for fieldwork in Gender & Sociology and came back to the United States with most beautiful memories, most beautiful presents and having her money stolen.

  “Can you believe this? It all happened while promenading blissfully along the most crowded, most vibrant street in Istanbul. They cut the bottom of my handbag, carved out a huge hole there and gingerly pulled my purse out, and I didn t notice a thing!” she frowned as she showed me what was once a Gucci leather bag but now a dazzling avant-garde design developed by Istanbulite pickpockets, some sort of a hybrid creation of antagonistic cultures and lifestyles. “What I don t understand is, if they were so professional at what they were doing, why didn t they simply steal the bag?”

  That helped me to realize: apparently, the Gucci-something-bag had much more value than all the money inside her purse could ever amount to.

  “They don t need the bag,” I shrugged. “We have just as good imitations everywhere in Turkey. Fake Guccis, fake Pradas, you name it, whichever you fancy, you will find an exact replica.”

  Gucci, Burberry, Nike, Lacoste, whatever, makes no difference… Turkish street vendors have them in plenty. Is there a particular brand you were secretly pining for but could not afford to buy, no worries, just take a walk, meet the streets, before long you will find what you were looking for in the hands of a street vendor, at a cost definitely lower than the price tag on the original item, and if you know how to bargain, for even less than that.

  Hearing the ease with which her bag could be imitated in Turkey seemed to make the professor more distressed than having her purse stolen, so I tried to give a better explanation: “You see, it is almost a cultural phenomenon. We are good at this.”

  “You mean you Istanbulites are good at purse snatching?”

  “No, no… well, I guess some of us are good at that too, but what I meant was imitation. You see, imitation is second nature to us. Whatever is produced in the West, we can reproduce it better than the original and then even successfully sell it back to its initial manufacturers.”

  We fell quiet for a fleeting moment, as one of the closing episodes of "The Apprentice" appeared on NBC right at that instant, and we couldn t help sneaking a glance. “You see we have imitated this too,” I mumbled.

  Duplicating and “nationalizing” the TV shows on American channels is a pervasive trend all around the world. In Turkey, it is more than that. It s an addiction. Just like an addict would get hold of the item he is addicted to without really pondering why, almost following an instinct, a reflex, the Turks too like to first carefully observe what s going on in the world of Western popular culture and then simply, imitate.

  Fake Gucci bags might be the area of expertise of numerous swindlers in Istanbul, and they might be pretty good at that kind of imitation. Yet when it comes to imitating Western popular culture (since we tend to act as if we are destined to imitate anyhow) at least, I don t see why we can t be more creative. If they want a real challenge in the Turkish Apprentice, for instance, they should send out all these contestants to the most religious and conservative neighborhoods in Istanbul and have them sell bottled red wine there!

  Why not? That would be far more creative than this baseless imitation. After all, wasn t “the marriage of the East & the West” the basic motto of Turkish modernizers, what better marriage than an eclectic amalgamation of seeming opposites? One should always fuse the technical material borrowed from the West with the noteworthy features of the domestic culture one operates at. That s what I call a Donald Trump ingeniously alla turca. So he should, for instance, ask the contestants to sell packaged pork in a Muslim neighborhood. Now, that s a challenge. Let s then see those marketing strategies flourish. I stare at the slashed open Gucci bag now lying on the table like a crestfallen kite once happily soaring up in the blue skies. This, I do not confess to my friend but it occurs to me, in some puzzling way, Istanbulite pickpockets have reached a level of aesthetic inventiveness and cultural resourcefulness, which writers and scholars might still need some time to fully fathom.