Friday, January 31, 2014

Returned to life

I feel like April 1 of one year to February of the next is a reasonable blog posting schedule, don't you think?

Anyway, sorry. I've had an astonishing number of people tell me that they enjoyed reading this blog– far more than it deserves. I also just noticed, coming to this website, but I've had something like 3000 page views, which is far more than I could possibly have imagined. I don't feel particularly guilty that I've had nothing to say about turkey for something like the last nine months: I was, obviously, pregnant. Actually, not so much. (Although, of course, many of my colleagues seem to be living by the maxim "the world must be peopled." I recently dragged three copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, as well as the tres riches heures of Sandra Boynton, across the Atlantic. This is hardly a complaint.)

You'll notice that this blog stopped updating at roughly the same time that the Gezi Park protests started, and Turkish politics became, shall we say, complex. I would walk to my Turkish lessons past people going to the vast protests that happened in the middle of Ankara, and feel–I really don't know how I felt. Mildly apprehensive, more than anything else. One astonishing fact of the protests, to me at least, is that, right before their allotted times in the evening, you would see police and protesters chatting quite amiably, often behind the water tanks– that's military-type tanks – used for crowd control. I've never seen anything quite like it in my life.

Terry Eagleton makes a famous argument that one reason literature formed differently in Ireland was that it was simply too hard to represent what was actually happening in the country, under English, in normal generic forms. I will admit that I am more sympathetic to this position than I have ever been before. Nothing that I write feels to me like an adequate response to what is happening–and again there're others you know far more about this than I do. But do I want to write a shopping blog in the meantime?

I genuinely don't feel that I understand Turkish politics well enough to give an informed– or at least useful– opinion about what's been happening here. I would remind those around the world that Turkey is a country that has reasonably deep set of civil institutions– although, depending on whom you ask, these may or may not be in a state of erosion. My university is still one that I love. I have, additionally, many colleagues who have been here for very long time– some of them Turkish themselves, many long-time expats--that know so much more about Turkish politics than I do. This is not to say that I don't have opinions: for example, I take what I had thought was the relatively uncontroversial view that the government should not teargas, en masse, its people. (This seems to be a more controversial view here than I had anticipated.) It is a cliché to say that the sight of young people taking to the streets to protest for political causes inspiring– and indeed on some level it is. But I teach students– some of whom were in those protests, all of whom look like the students in those protests–and my primary concern was just that they seemed to be getting hurt, sometimes critically. Never in my life have I seen anything like that the Internet live streams of police blind firing tear gas into crowds of people, and then eventually into the crowds of smoke that resulted from the teargas. I do not know how much of this made it (speech-to-text says "mated") outside of the country. I would actually be interested in hearing what did.

With that being said, I think it is worth noting that– compared to what you may be hearing on the news– daily life in Turkey continues. The building of malls, the primary activity of our Ankara civic entity, continues apace– I think you really are something like two or three new ones within about 4 km of where I live. These, of course, are all the same: the same chain stores, several of them brands you'll know from North America, exist in various configurations. Semi-relatedly portion of the country, and it is emerging that this is quite a large portion, still wants EU integration to go ahead, even as it seems absolutely impossible to predict whether or not this will currently happen. I'm learning things about the quotidian existing alongside perpetual crisis; of course, I do so because of the stability of where I live.

Indeed, the news about Turkey leaks to the outside world seems to picture this as a country in a more or less perpetual state of crisis. And, on some level, this is true. But the distance between what is happening in Turkey. What is happening in Syria– a glib comparison, if a nearby one– is entirely different. Please don't worry about me, at any rate: I feel absolutely secure here, and not just in the protected gated community where I work. As to the overall situation in Turkey, I have been saying to many people that if you know someone who feels they understand the situation completely, please send them here– we certainly don't.

To the other state of siege, which is of course the Modern Language Association conference, the bane of every academic's life. For the first time, I can say that I had a good MLA. This came about, I'm sad to say, because I have a job. The job paid for me to attend the conference; it gave me the time to write my talk, and the research support to make it happen; and, by being stable, it gave me the payoff matrix (if that makes any sense) in which my work could help me in a professional context. I love my job, and what I do with my research. I am aware, though, that this position that I love– and, yes, I will use the word love– happens in the midst of the professional misery of many. This may again be glib, but there is a mild analogy to be made to my situation in Turkey: things are good for me, and for those like me, in a situation that floats above turmoil and a possible collapse of institutions that I feel I have just escaped, like Indiana Jones with the huge stone door in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." (That this analogy involves a hat pleases me.)

Neither of these problems is going to be solved by my blog. What I hope to do in the months ahead, assuming I'm not just perpetually lazy, is give some account of the middle condition that exists in the midst of a number of states of crisis. It is my great privilege to be able to do so. The work of the humanities is important, think particularly in Turkey. I am happy to be doing my work,  and making use of what my institution gives to me.

More actual description, and less meta-commentary, as I write– I hope more frequently–in the weeks and months to come. And my earlier reservation, that anyone without an academic job is welcome to punch me in the face, remains in effect.

A note: an earlier version of this was speech-to-texted, and may have been unreadable. Many apologies--you don't have aphasia, if you were worried.

1 comment: