Sunday, September 3, 2006

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

The other day I had tea with a woman scholar from Chicago who had recently been on vacation in a summer resort along Turkey s Mediterranean coast. She and her extended family had then visited Istanbul and she wanted to share her impressions with me, which I listened with great interest and delight. As one subject led to another, we talked enthusiastically about culture, politics and family structures in our respective countries. She being very religious, I not at all, we politely refrained from the subject of religion, although I noticed, with a slight discomfort, that she saw absolutely nothing in common between Christianity and Islam, and treated the latter as “an immature faith system” at best, and “the product of some backward cultures” at worst.  In our mutual endeavor to avoid the subject of religion, we ended up chatting lavishly in and around a mutual terrain: womanhood. It didn t take us long to see we were on the same wavelength on numerous subjects and equally critical of the respective patriarchal regimes we had been born into. Excited by this discovery, I must have talked a good half an hour on the dimensions of patriarchy in Turkey. It was after my fervent soliloquy that she unleashed that issue:“You know, I love your critical perspective and your fiction writing. But I could not, for the life of me, understand how on earth you were a feminist. I mean, I couldn t possibly see you on the same page with those miserable losers who take their personal failures on men. ”Tongue-tied, feeling awkward, I looked at her in deep surprise. By now, I am rather used to hearing numerous Turkish readers, both leftists and rightists, automatically sneer at “feminism,” without necessarily knowing anything about feminist history or feminist literature, but it doesn t happen everyday that you meet a Western female scholar who shares the exact bigoted perspective. ‘But now, I understand you much better,” she continued earnestly. “After coming to Turkey and visiting this country, I understand why you feel the need to be a feminist. This country is so beautiful and more modern than I expected, to tell the truth, but obviously there are so many problems that need to be taken care of when it comes to women s issues…”Now this, in my book, is a subtle, elegantly formulated form of Orientalism but Orientalism nonetheless. After all, as Turner says: “Orientalism is a discourse which represents the exotic, erotic, strange Orient as a comprehensible, intelligible phenomenon within a network of categories, tables and concepts by which the Orient is simultaneously defined and controlled. To know is to subordinate.” Orientalism draws a clear line between “us-the developed world” and “them-the undeveloped Others.” Once you have this imaginary duality firmly constructed in your mind, it is relatively an easier step from there to maintain that an emancipatory movement, like feminism, is needed “there” -- in the Other s land -- but certainly not “here,” -- in the developed Western world.  If there is reason to be a feminist in Turkey, there is reason to be a feminist in the USA or France or Switzerland. Patriarchy is multifaceted but universal. The more we attest the commonalities, the better we realize the complexity of the framework and thereby the limitedness of our stereotypes. Unfortunately, few observers are genuinely interested in the complexities of the so-called East and fewer have genuine knowledge, especially the language skills, to capture the spectrum of meanings that exist in these societies. Eventually, ignorance buttresses stereotypes and stereotypes engender ignorance. As I watched my American colleague distance Turkish women from American women, albeit unintentionally, I remembered and missed a particular concept and bond that the feminist movement in America had once cherished greatly: sisterhood.