Turkey: One week away and reading

When I’m planning a trip I read about local culture in novels and traveler’s tales rather than guidebooks. These latter certainly are useful once I get to where I’m going. But, for me traveling is about people in context and history. What is the point of seeing Troy or Gallipoli without a sense of all that went before my visit?

By sheer accident and grace of the Los Angeles Public Library system my intro to Turkey was Phillip Glazebrook’s  “Journey To Kars.” Most pertinent to me was how he distinguished between the  “traveler” steeped in literature and history of the place and the “tourist” who clutters the environment while seeking “gaudy souvenirs” 

He was interested in the divide between Christian Europe and Moslem Turkey and frequently referred to English authors of the mid-nineteenth century. I loved his comment,” What was the impulse which drove middle-class Victorians to leave the country they loved so chauvinistically, and the company of the race they considered God’s last word in breeding, to travel in discomfort, danger, illness, filth and misery ….. in lands which, at best, reminded them of Scotland? This was the question I set out …to answer.”  I can’t take the same trip, he traveled in the 1980s, and times have changed, but I can carry the sense of history and mystery through the journey. Also, I’m not going to Kars though it seems to come up often in stories from Turkey.

 

“Snow” by Orhan Pamuk was next. And this novel takes place in Kars. Pamuk is concerned about the clash between the religious right and the secular state. No one comes out looking good; both sides are refuges of charlatans and farcical players. Religion vs. secularism is being played out every day in Turkey with women wearing or not wearing the headscarf.

 

My book club elected to read “The Bastard of Istanbul,” by Elif Shafek. A rape, a bastard, choices made and the ties between modern Turks and the Armenian genocide are played out here. It also describes growing up in present-day secular Istanbul. Seems there is a lot of spiritual and emotional malaise for at least one group of teens and those who are long past that age.

 

“Bliss” by O.Z. Livaneli came next. His themes are rape, spiritual malaise, military action in the mountains, a suggestion of female suicide and a journey to Istanbul from the extremely rural and poor countryside. The headscarf looms large and is a political as well as religious symbol. Class and location seem to determine the relationship of men and women. In “Bliss” a young woman is quietly urged to commit suicide because she has disgraced her family by being raped. In “Snow” young women commit suicide because they are forbidden to wear the headscarf. I wonder how high the suicide rate is among young women in Turkey. It is so curious that two current authors would write about this.

 

All the authors write about the “old Armenian houses.” So I guess I’m going to make sure I identify these. I’ve got some ideas now about Turkish culture (of course I also read the newspapers) and I’m off to experience the new, eat some wonderful food, and hopefully see more than the sights.

 

Less than one week to go

I’m still doing my homework. Although I’ve left the pre-WWI colonial Kenyan set behind, most of what I’m reading is still American-European. I started with Bill Bryson’s tiny book, African Diary (2000), that he wrote as a fund raising device for Care International. There are some terrific word pictures about refugees, travel on light aircraft and on trains to Mombasa. We will be doing the first, and I am holding on to my valium. As for the second, Mombasa is not on our schedule.

A real find was Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s The Present Moment, (1987). She’s English, came to Kenya in 1954 as an Anglican missionary, stayed and married a Kenyan. The Present Moment is about seven African women living in The Refuge, an old people’s home in Nairobi. The women, from different ethnic groups, Kikuya, Seychelloise, Luria, Luo, and Swahili, all ended here because of the shattering of tribal support systems brought on by changes in Kenyan society over 50 years. Macgoye raises issues about Moslem and Christian conversions, the so called freedom fighters, and the roles of women in this developing society.  The book makes interesting reading about a non-European segment of Kenyan society.

  

And then there was the Jewish experience of Kenya. I didn’t even think about Jews in Kenya until I started to read Nowhere in Africa by Stefanie Zweig. I forgot seeing the film a few years ago. This is a different world from that of the pre-WWII European settlers. The German Jews who fled to Kenya were mostly from the cities little prepared for farm life. Zweig, as a child, appreciated the beauty of the country but her parents experienced  drudgery, isolation, hardship and strangeness. Worse, English anti-Semitism was not dead. And, not unlike the U.S., émigrés from hostile nations (Germany) were interned, though only for a short while.

My last effort before leaving is True At First Light, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous “fictional memoir.”  There are vivid depictions of  life in a safari camp during Mau Mau days–a lot of sitting around, psuedo-philosophizing and drinking. Also there was a constant search to kill a prize lion. It made me cringe. I never got why anyone would want to kill an animal just to say “ I did it.” But–there is an interesting tie in to a made up religion. Maybe even Hemingway couldn’t really justify the killing. Tribal conflicts between the Kenyans keep surfacing and of course relations between the white man, in this case Hemingway, and the natives, both men and women. He was a womanizer, no doubt. Must have been amazingly charming, though judging from this book I think alcohol also played a large part.

All these people, real and fictional  pasted their lives on to the countryside. I’m curious what my experience will be.