Welcome to Istanbul!

Sunday, July 9, 2006

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAk

  As soon as the Turkish Airlines plane lands at Istanbul Airport, the fidgety brunette in front of me jumps to her feet and starts rummaging for her suitcase up in the locker. The flight from New York to Istanbul lasted almost 10 hours and it amuses me to see that those who managed to stay perfectly still for so long cannot possibly remain tranquil for another couple of minutes the moment the airplane arrives at the airport. These are Earthbound People; they can be compliant as long as they are in the air, but they will not show a speck of compliance on land. On earth they feel safe and authoritarian, so much so that once they feel the ground beneath their feet they can go astray, do things their own way. She too is one of them. So she opens the locker, pulls her leather jacket out and starts to put it on.The man behind me, whom I suspect is a technocrat in Ankara, warns her loudly: ‘Lady, lady, don t you see that the fasten seat belts sign is not turned off yet. Can t you behave yourself?   The brunette is a famous top-model and she made some consummate enemies during the flight due to her arrogant ways. Now that she has made a gross mistake, nobody wants to let go of the opportunity to reprimand her. She, in turn, shrugs her shoulders with visible disdain, but sits back in her place. I hear some people tsk-tsk.We Turks love to do that: we frequently, lavishly, persistently tsk-tsk one another. When we tsk tsk, we remind each other of the responsibilities of being a good citizen and a good Turk, and of our civilizational duties as good Westerners...

  The woman who sits next to me and who I by now know is an unhappy high school teacher with three kids, snaps: ‘A lay worker wouldn t do that. Looking by the way she is dressed, you d think she is civilized. Apparently not!   Yes, we Turks also love doing that: Teaching one another “the lesson of civilization.” 

     ‘Why do you insult lay workers, asks a man with a husky voice a few rows behind. ‘We are the ones who work hard for the Germans, we work like dogs night and day. Even the Germans appreciate us, I have dual citizenship but when it comes to our own people, let alone being appreciated, we are constantly accused of being uncouth Black Turks. Now who is uncouth? Obviously manners cannot be sold or bought. Apparently hanfendi is an uppercrust white Turk with no manners.   The brunette in front of me chuckles nervously as she inspects her manicured fingernails, a sign clear enough to show that she has no intention of answering that. But her silence is instantly filled by the rest of us. The two NYU students at the back row, the prim technocrat, the businessman who had just signed a contract with an American company, the idealistic high school teacher, the worker with dual citizenship, and the covered mother with a nonstop crying baby in front… we all start talking at the same time, each eager to put in our two cents worth . We talk and talk, complain and exaggerate happily, until the stewardess scolds us all: ‘Twenty years in this profession and I am yet to see a peaceful landing without yet another quarrel among the passengers.   We all shut up, feeling guilty. Thank God the fasten seat belts sign is turned off exactly then and we all jump to our feet eager to run away from one another, eager to leave the plane behind.   I slowly turn my head and it is only then that I make eye contact with a tall blond man, a foreigner next row, whose face tells me that he knows a bit of Turkish to follow the quarrel but not enough of Turkish culture to understand the dynamics of the quarrel. He is trying to make sense of this spontaneous squabble where all of a sudden ordinary people started to wallow in colossal ideological debates, such as East versus West, White Turks versus Black Turks, premodern culture versus modernity, and the duties of a citizen under democracy and civilization.   And that indeed is the very first shock perhaps every foreigner to Turkey has to go through. We are a passionately politicized country. And we love to quarrel and tsk-tsk, we love to mix macro issues with micro issues so deftly that one cannot easily detach one from another. And a trivial disagreement can easily become the zone of ideological and social and historical clashes.   That s the way it is, and once you learn the mechanism, you might as well enjoy seeing so much excitement and sweating over small things, and so many easily incensed, hot-blooded people around. Welcome to Istanbul.