I wasn’t
born in Istanbul. I went there when I was seven weeks old. My parents
had already been living there for two years, but due to insurance reasons
my mother had gone back to Austria to give birth to me. I wouldn’t
stay for very long in Istanbul, barely a year. I never moved back there,
and only visited once, 24 years later. My Turkish hardly exceeds ten
words these days, and I cannot claim to have spent a lot more time studying
Turkish history and culture than those of many other countries.
Yet, a
curious attachment remains to Turkey, and, in particular, the city of
Istanbul. In part this has without doubt to do with the fact that I
did spend the first year of my life there, that my first words were
Turkish and not German, and that the time spent in Istanbul always had
a special status within my family.
However,
this does not explain the phenomenon entirely, I believe. Other factors
are at play. Taking a guess at them will be the main theme of this essay.
My claims aren’t high. I would hope to be able to raise a few
thoughts that might be of interest to people who enjoy reflecting on
questions of identity and migration. That’s all.
The main
questions that will guide the text are: Why do I feel this attachment?
How does it tie in with both personal and more general concepts of identity?
Does it represent nothing but romantic sentimentality, and is it, as
such, an affront to Turks and those who have really immersed themselves
in Turkish culture? Or does it have legitimacy? And, if so, wherein
would that lie?
I sometimes
wonder if my attachment to Istanbul is akin to that of Americans that
have never left the country, speak no language but English, and represent
pretty much anything the world would perceive as stereotypically American.
At the same time these Americans would fly the flags of their parents’
or grandparents’ home countries on their lawns, sport traditional
German or Irish or Lithuanian garments on occasion, and finance respective
culture clubs or festivals.
I often
can’t help thinking that there is something pathetic in these
demonstrations, something essentially unmerited. How can you claim any
special link to a place if you have never been there, do not speak its
language (hence can not really participate in any deeper cultural exchange),
and do not even have a particular knowledge about it that goes beyond
well-trodden stereotypes? What I believe to witness in these cases seems
the commodification of identity: the same Americans might as well fancy
themselves as Ethiopians, Tibetans, or Martians (and it does happen
often enough), because it is a somewhat hip thing to do.
However,
maybe this assessment is too harsh. Arguably, certain traits of peoples’
cultural origins have been passed down to them through the generations
even when they themselves have lost direct contact with them. This does
by no means (I believe) justify proud nationalistic bravado (what ever
does?), but it would explain (and maybe merit) sentimental attachments.
My own
sentimental attachment to Istanbul (Turkey) rests on similarly weak
(yet possibly justifiable) material grounds. Arguably, the natural and
social environment a child spends a significant amount of time in as
an infant has an impact on the development of the child’s personality
with traces reaching far into his or her life as an adult. I am not
one for a lot of esoteric speculation, but to me it seems explainable
in rather concrete materialistic terms why I felt more ‘at home’
when I first re-visited Istanbul at the age of 24 than when visiting
other cities: the memory of sounds, smells, climates is mostly subconscious
– yet undeniably strong.
Still,
even if certain material grounds might justify certain spatial and cultural
attachments, they by no means fully explain them. I spent my kindergarten
years in Dortmund, Germany. I lived in the city for two years, have
many memories of being there, and arguably kindergarten years are still
very forming and influential when we speak of personality development.
Do I feel any sentimental attachment to Dortmund? I remember supporting
Borussia, their soccer club, till I was about 14. And that’s about
as far as that went.
Clearly
(and regardless of how materially legitimate our claims are or not)
our spatial and cultural attachments are to a large degree fabricated.
My examples from above weren’t random: some Americans who have
never left the US do believe themselves to be Ethiopian, Tibetan, or
Martian in some way or another and for some reason or another (the allegedly
very sophisticated “being xyz is a state of mind” ostensibly
functions as the perennial explanatory favorite). I guess most of us
would agree that such claims lack so much material grounds that they
appear pathetic, but this does not change the fact that many of these
folks themselves sincerely believe in them, or – and this seems
more crucial for this paper – that we fabricate/create our own
identities too, even if we have stronger material grounds for our fabrications.
My relatively strong attachment to Istanbul compared to the almost complete
absence of any attachment to Dortmund (or other non-Austrian cities
I’ve lived in as a child) is, I believe, a case in point.
So, what
influences the attachments we groom, and how strongly we do so? This,
without doubt, could be the topic of a thesis. A whole range of very
complex issues seems at work here. All I can talk about are the ones
I find at work in myself.
Looking
back at my personal history, I would say that the single most important
factor in identifying more with Istanbul again was political. And I’m
consciously saying “more again”, because this is how things
played out. I do not remember this identification having been very strong
when I was in elementary or junior high school. As I shared in a former
contribution to BAP Quarterly (“Once Upon a Time in Turkey…”,
vol. 1, issue 2), my year in Istanbul did, for example, not mean all
that much to me when my parents took me on an outing welcoming the first
Turkish family that had moved into the Austrian village I spent most
of my early school years in.
I only
got really interested in this part of my history again when I became
politically more conscious, at around the age of 16, 17. There were
(as there are now) a lot of Turkish migrants in Germany and Austria,
and more and more Germans and Austrians felt this to be ‘a problem’,
reiterating all the well-known xenophobic accusations that migrants
have to endure the world over. For me as a left-wing high school and
university student, it became mandatory to show solidarity with the
Turkish migrant community.
In this
context, my time in Istanbul as a child took on new dimensions. I admit
that these consisted partly of rather trite adolescent attempts to bolster
my progressive identity, “I have lived in Turkey! My parents even
speak the language!” However, I’d like to think that they
also had more noble and reasonable sides: the fact that I knew that
I had had a home in Turkey once seemed to demand not only that Turks
could of course make homes in Austria, but also that you’d want
these homes to be as comfortable for them as you hoped that yours was
at the time.
Although
the solidarity I was eager to express for the Turkish community in ‘my’
country never extended to re-learning some of the language or establishing
very strong personal ties within the community, it put a special focus
on my time in Istanbul. It provoked a certain ‘pride’ that
(as any pride) was partly stupid (the mere fact that I had lived in
Turkey as a child in itself obviously didn’t say anything about
me, and I obviously hadn’t made the decision to do so at the time),
but partly served a positive (I believe) purpose in strongly self-identifying
as anti-xenophobic and anti-racist.
Even though
other factors played into the special embrace of the Istanbul chapter
of my personal history (Istanbul was without doubt the most enticing
and ‘alluring’ place I had lived in as a kid, and, as said
before, it had always had a special status in my parents’ lives
as well – they would always talk much more about their time in
Istanbul than about any other they had spent abroad), this political
factor was probably the decisive one.
Whether
this makes the identification more or less justifiable, or whether it
pushes it on the acceptable or shady side of things, I do not know,
and this is for others to judge. Personally, I would hope though that
some significance lies in the claims attached to it. If I claimed to
be ‘part Turkish’, sported the ay yildiz on my backpack,
or sent donations to the Grey Wolves, I think it would be pathetic,
offensive, and (dangerously) stupid. However, these might still be things
different to expressing that the fact that I had spent the first year
of my life in Istanbul provided a particular incentive to combat anti-Turkish
sentiments in Western Europe, and that through this process my time
as a child in Istanbul took on a new and special meaning for me. And
maybe this can pass as legitimate and does not mean exploiting a non-dominant
cultural identity to deal with one’s own dominant cultural guilt?
Maybe things
are a matter of awareness: Once you are conscious of the problematic
implications certain identities (or certain thoughts or actions) can
have, you at least have the chance to keep these problematic implications
at bay and/or make them an explicit issue allowing for critical reflection.
This also
rings true when tying the fact that I have lived in Istanbul as a child
to my anti-racist activism in Europe. The danger here clearly lies in
creating the myth of a cosmopolitan post-colonial European subject whose
social and economic privilege allows it to travel and live in different
places, thereby allegedly transgressing borders defining the racism
of what, in another discriminatory manner, this subject often happily
and readily labels as ‘white trash’.
Nothing could be further from my intentions, and by no means was I trying to suggest that experiences of spending time in 'foreign' countries as a child make
better anti-racists. Apart from this simply being empirically wrong (there are many people who have lived in cultures other than 'their own' for many years without losing any racist traits - to the contrary, some people foster and embellish them under such circumstances) , an activist elitism that considered a cosmopolitan upbringing of sorts a precondition for anti-racism wouldn't do good to anybody (and violate a number of principles anti-racists should adhere to - at least if they see their activism as part of a wider struggle for social liberation).
Many of
the most committed anti-racist Europeans have had very little exposure
to cultures different to the ones they were socialized in. Their anti-racism
is nurtured by other motivating factors (which I cannot explore within
the scope of this essay). All I was trying to describe above was what
I see as a personal component of my own activism, a biographical coincidence,
if you will. And the way this manifested itself in was anything but
a one-sided affair: in fact, I probably regained more interest in my
Istanbul past because of my anti-racist activism than having had the
activism itself inspired by this past. In other words: I was trying
to make sense of my biography; I was not making any big political claims.
Having
by now (I hope) clarified that I am sharing a personal story much rather
than attempting to present grand explanations for anything, I will try
to summarize the thoughts I meant to convey, along the lines of the
questions I raised in the opening paragraph. It seems that (nothing
new here) the places we choose to have a special significance for our
identities (whether we call them home, or a second home, or something
different altogether) take on a significance because we – for
whatever reason – want them to. (The fabrication.) If no material
grounds seem to merit this identification at all, it might look pathetic,
even offensive, from the outside. Where material grounds seem to exist,
however, it becomes a question of how these places are adapted and incorporated
into our identities, on our claims (modest or strong), and our awareness
and measure, as to how much sense these identifications will make to
the world around us. In the best case, such identifications can help
overcome borders and exclusive cultural and territorial claims –
something that should be in any progressive internationalist person’s
interest.
This
text was written for a special Istanbul edition of a Turkish-American
cultural journal. I am neither Turkish nor American. I wrote this article
as an Austrian who has spent many years abroad, who lived in Istanbul
as an infant, and who has spent time in the US as a university student
many years later. While I expect many contributions to the BAP Quarterly’s
Istanbul issue to deal with questions more concretely touching on experiences
of migrating from/to Turkey, or living ‘between two worlds’
(most likely between those of Turkey and the US), I feel like I’m
writing as an outsider whose contact with both worlds (and others) has
been much more fleeting. Writing neither as an arriving nor a departing
long-term migrant, I feel like I’m writing as a migrant who, at
best, ‘passed through’. However, given that the number of
those who merely ‘pass through’ seems ever increasing in
an increasingly mobilized world, maybe there lies some merit in including
such a perspective.
In
any case, I’d find it remarkably apt to articulate such a perspective
with respect to Istanbul. Cliché or not, there are few cities
in the world that have historically been so much on the crossroads of
different people, their cultures and traditions. To this day, Istanbul
remains one of the planet’s most diverse, multi-faceted, and contradictory
cities. If a passing migrant took a particular liking to any city he
or she passes through, it seems not surprising that it would be one
that, like Istanbul, encompasses all that a passing migrant’s
life inevitably involves: change, fluctuation, multiplicity.
Maybe
– after all the clarifying attempts above – it is all very
simple: Istanbul is one of the places where everyone can make a home
– especially those without one. A perpetual passing migrant’s
refuge. Living up to the notion as much on material grounds as on those
of romantic allure. Thinking of it that way: Who would not embrace the
fortune of having spent the first year of one’s life there as
a part of one’s identity? Really?
Gabriel
Kuhn
