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  Even the most intelligent thinker will, if he talks too long about cultures and civilizations, begin to spout nonsense. We must never forget when we speak about Mediterranean identity to consider the enterprise only a jeu d’esprit.

  So here are some ground rules for those wishing to acquire Mediterranean identity:

  1. Foster the view of the Mediterranean as a unified entity; it would be a good thing if such it were. This would provide a new doorway to the place of which we are a part for those of us who cannot travel to Spain, France, and Italy without visas.

  2. The best definitions of Mediterranean identity are in books written by non-Mediterraneans. Don’t complain about this; just try to become like the Mediterraneans they describe, and you’ll have your identity.

  3. If a writer wants to see himself as Mediterranean, he must give up certain other identities. For example, a French writer who wants to be Mediterranean must give up a part of his Frenchness. By the same logic, a Greek writer wishing to be Mediterranean must give up part of his Balkan and European identities.

  4. For those who want to become real Mediterranean writers, whenever you write about it, don’t say “the Mediterranean,” just say “the sea.” Speak of its culture and its particularities without naming them and without using the word Mediterranean at all. Because the best way to become a Mediterranean is never to talk about it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  My First Passport and Other European Journeys

  In 1959, when I was seven years old, my father went missing under mysterious circumstances; several weeks later, we received word that he was in Paris. He was living in a cheap hotel in Montparnasse, filling up the notebooks that he would, at the end of his life, leave to me in a suitcase, and from time to time, when he was sitting in the Café Dome, he would see Jean-Paul Sartre passing in the street outside.

  My grandmother was in the habit of sending him money from Istanbul. My grandfather, a businessman, had made a fortune in railroads. My father and his uncles had not managed to squander their entire inheritance under my grandmother’s fretful gaze; not all of the apartments had yet been sold. But twenty-five years after her husband’s death, my grandmother decided that the money was running out and she stopped sending money to her Bohemian son in Paris.

  This is how my father joined the long line of penniless and miserable Turkish intellectuals who had been walking the streets of Paris for a century. Like my grandfather and my uncles, he was a construction engineer with a good head for mathematics. When his money ran out, he answered an ad in a newspaper; having been hired by IBM, he was dispatched to their office in Geneva. In those days computers were still operated with punch cards, and little was popularly known about them. That is how my Bohemian writer father went on to become one of Europe’s first Turkish guest workers.

  My mother joined him soon afterward. She left us in our grandmother’s plush and crowded home and flew off to Geneva. My older brother and I were to wait until school closed for the summer, and in the meanwhile we both had to get passports.

  I remember that we had to pose for a very long time while the photographer fiddled under a black cloth behind a three-legged wooden contraption with a bellows. For the light to strike upon the chemically treated glass plate, he had to open the lens for a split second with an elegant flick of the wrist, but before he did this, he would look at us first and say, “Yeeeees,” and it was because I found this old photographer so ridiculous that my first passport picture shows me biting my cheeks. The passport says that my hair, which had probably not been combed all year except for this passport picture, was chestnut brown. I must have flipped through the pages of the passport too quickly to have noticed that it got my eye color wrong, a mistake I would notice only when I opened up the passport thirty years later. What this taught me was that—contrary to what I’d thought—the passport was not a document of who we were but of what other people thought of us.

  Flying into Geneva, our new passports in the pockets of our new jackets, my brother and I were overcome with terror. The plane had banked as it came in for a landing, and to us this country called Switzerland became a place where everything, even the clouds, was on a steep incline stretching to infinity. The plane finished its turn and straightened itself out, and when we remember our relief at seeing that this new country was, like Istanbul, built on level earth, my brother and I still laugh.

  The streets in this new country were cleaner and emptier. There was more variety in the shop windows and there were more cars in the roads. The beggars didn’t beg empty-handed, as in Istanbul; they would stand under the window playing the accordion. Before we threw one of them money, my mother would wrap it up in paper. Our apartment—a five-minute walk from the bridges over the Rhône at the point where it flows into Lac Léman—was “furnished.”

  This was how I came to associate living in another country with sitting at tables where others had sat before, using glasses and plates on which strangers had dined, and sleeping in beds that sagged after years of cradling other sleepers. Another country meant a country that belonged to other people. We were to accept that these things we were using would never belong to us, and that this old country, this other land, would never belong to us either. My mother, who had studied at a French school in Istanbul, would sit us down at the empty dining-room table every morning all summer and try to teach us French.

  It was after we were enrolled in a state primary school that we found out we had learned nothing. My parents had been mistaken in hoping that we might learn French just by listening to the teacher day in and day out. At recess, my brother and I would wander among the crowds of children playing until we found each other and held hands. This foreign land was an endless garden full of happily playing children. My brother and I would watch this garden of happiness with longing and from a distance.

  Although he didn’t know French, my brother was top in the class at counting backward by threes. But the only thing that set me apart in this school where I couldn’t understand the language was my silence. Just as one might refuse a dream in which no one speaks, I refused to go to school. Carried to other cities and other schools, this tendency to turn inward would protect me from life’s difficulties, but it also deprived me of its riches. One weekend, they took my brother out of school too. Putting our passports into our hands, they sent us away from Geneva and back to our grandmother in Istanbul.

  I never used this passport again—though it bore the words “Member of the Council of Europe,” it became a memento of my first failed European adventure, and such was the vehemence of my decision to turn inward that it would be another twenty-four years before I left Turkey again. When I was young, I was full of admiration and longing at the thought of those who acquired passports and traveled to Europe and beyond, but in spite of all the opportunities, I remained fearfully certain that it was my lot to sit in a corner in Istanbul and give myself over to the books that I hoped might complete me as a person and others that might one day make my name. In those days, I believed one could best understand Europe by contemplating its greatest books.

  In the end it was my books that prompted me to apply for a second passport. After years shut up in a room, I had managed to turn myself into an author. Now they had invited me to go on tour in Germany, where many Turks had taken political asylum, and it was thought that they would appreciate hearing me read from books that had yet to be translated into German. Though I applied for my passport in the happy hope that I would get to know Turkish readers in Germany, it was during my travels that I came to associate the document with the sort of identity crisis that would go on to afflict so many others in the years that followed.

  The first story I need to tell about identity: In the mid-1980s and afterward, I returned to those wonderfully punctual German trains in recurring dreams, speeding from city to city past dark forests, distant village church towers, and platforms of passengers lost in thought. At each destination I would be met by my Turkish host, who would apologize f
or any number of things I had not noticed as lacking, and as he took me on a tour of the city he would tell me who was expected at that evening’s event.

  I remember those readings fondly: They were attended by political refugees and their families, teachers, young people who were half German and half Turkish—people who wished to know more about intellectual life in Turkey—and at every meeting there were a few Turkish workers and a few Germans who had decided it would be a good thing to take a warm interest in things Turkish.

  At every reading, in every city, the scene would play itself out in much the same way. After I had read from my book, an angry youth would raise his hand to be recognized, and then he would heap scorn on me for daring to write books that spoke airily of abstract beauty when there was still oppression and torture in Turkey, and though I rejected such harsh words, they would awaken in me feelings of guilt. The angry youth would be followed by a woman trembling with the desire to protect me, and her question would have to do with the symmetries in my books or some other such refinement. This would be quickly followed by broad questions about my hopes for Turkey, politics, the future, and the meaning of life itself—these I’d answer as an eager young writer would. Sometimes someone would make a long speech laden with political terminology, though the intent here would not be to blame me but to address others in the audience, and afterward the directors of the association that had invited me would tell me which left-wing faction this particular orator came from; they would go on to explain what meaning he had intended members of other splinter groups to take from his words. From the excitement of the young people who would ask me to share with them the secrets of my success, it became clear to me that young Turks in Germany were less ashamed than their peers in Turkey to have ambitions in life. Then all at once, someone would ask a question that either stemmed from their own broken dreams—“What do you think about Germany’s Turks?”—or else touched upon mine—“Why don’t you write more about love?”—and as the eighty or ninety people in the hall would begin to titter and smile, I would understand that I was speaking to a group who knew one another, if not intimately then from a distance. As the reading drew to a cosy, friendly close, an elderly gentleman, perhaps a teacher approaching retirement, would praise me excessively, then turn an admonishing eye on one of the half-Turkish, half-German youths laughing and smirking in the back row; for their benefit he would go on to make a nationalist speech, proud but gloomy, about how there were writers of distinction in Turkey—their motherland—and why it was important to read them and acquaint themselves with their own culture, which fine words would only make the youths laugh a little more.

  So these conversations about identity, and the endless questions about nationality, only added to the family atmosphere. When the reading was over, the organizers would take me and ten or fifteen others out for a meal. Usually it was a Turkish restaurant. Even if it wasn’t, the questions I’d be asked at the table, the jokes the others started among themselves, and the subjects they brought up would soon give me the impression that I was still in Turkey, and because I was more interested in discussing literature than in talking about Turkey, this would depress me. What I realized later was that even when we seemed to be discussing literature, we were really discussing Turkey. Literature, books, and novels were simply pretexts for broaching—or evading—the troubled uncertainties of self from which our deep unhappiness stemmed.

  During these journeys, and all the others I made later on, when my books became better known in German, I would look at the people who had come to hear me read and it was as if I could see in their faces a perpetual distraction, the preoccupation with questions about Turkishness and Germanness. Because my books were partly about the contradictions between East and West, and because I was the sort of writer who explored the indecisions and hesitations that such contradictions bred, in allegorical games that turned them on their head, my audiences assumed I must be as exercised by questions of identity and as intrigued by those dark areas as they were, but the truth was that I was not. When, after trying for an hour to draw me out, they would retreat silently to the secret world of Germany’s Turks, arguing endlessly about the degree to which they were either German or Turkish, I would begin to feel lonely on account of being just a Turk and not a German Turk, and then I would come to see the unhappiness in the room in my own way.

  Was this unhappiness, or was it a source of riches? I can’t decide. No matter how passionate they are, or how sincere, no matter how much light they may cast on the dreams and fears from which our anxieties stem, such conversations leave me feeling hopeless and thinking that life has no meaning.

  Let me illustrate this point with my favorite kind of scale. As I sat around those tables, listening to the talk grow more heated as the night wore on, I noticed that there were quantitative differences in degrees of Turkishness and Germanness, which my Turkish-German tablemates all demanded that I adopt. Among these, let us assign the number 10 to those who believed that it was important to become fully German (if indeed such a thing is possible; in any case, this sort of person shies away from any memories of Turkey and sometimes even calls himself a German). To those who are unwilling to contemplate any dilution of their Turkishness, let us assign the number 1 (this sort of person is proud to be living like a Turk, even though he is in Germany). Among those at the table who found themselves between the two extremes, there were several varieties. Some dreamed of one day returning to Turkey forever but spent their holidays in Italy, others refused to fast during Ramadan but still watched Turkish television every night, while a few grew ever more distant from their Turkish friends even as they nurtured a deep resentment of Germans. When I considered the choices (or, rather, vows) that these people had made, it was clear enough what lay beneath them: fears of humiliation, unfulfilled desires, pain, and isolation.

  But what surprised me the most—what made me feel as if I were watching the same mysterious scene play itself out over and over and no matter where the people at my table might find themselves on my scale—was the absolute and fanatical certainty with which each would defend the rightness of his own degree and reject all others. So for a person who would be a 5 on the scale, it was not enough to believe that his only path was to be both German and Turkish; he would go after all the 4s as being closed-minded and backward and all the 7s and 8s as being cut off from their true identities. Later in the evening, it would not be enough to promote their own relative degrees of Turkishness and Germanness as the best way to be; in fiery tones, they would proclaim them an article of faith too sacred to be questioned.

  This reminds me of the famous sentence with which Tolstoy began Anna Karenina, to the effect that all happy families are alike but that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. The same applies to nationalism and obsessions with identity: Happy nationalists expressing their love for flags or celebrating victories in soccer matches and international competitions are the same all over the world. It is when national difference is not a cause for celebration that a terrible variety emerges. It is the same with our passports, which sometimes bring us joy and sometimes sadness: As for the miserable ways they cause us to question our identity, no two are alike.

  It was because we stood in that school playground in Geneva in 1959, holding hands and watching at an envious remove as the other children laughed and played, that my brother and I were sent back to Turkey with our passports. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of other children settled in Germany, with or without passports, destined to sink into a much deeper despair. Ten or fifteen years after I first met them, these same people will now be trying to lighten their misery with the German passports they are now almost certain to be granted. It may be a good thing to know that a passport—a document that records how others stereotype and judge us—can lighten our sorrows, if only a little. But our passports, which are all alike, should never blind us to the fact that each individual has his own troubles with identity, his own desires, and his own sorrows.


  CHAPTER FIFTY

  André Gide

  When I was eight, my mother gave me a diary with a lock and a key. I treasured it greatly. That this beautifully produced notebook was not a foreign import but was made in Turkey is interesting in and of itself. Until I received my elegant green diary it had never occurred to me that I could have a private notebook in which to record my own thoughts, or that I could lock it and keep the key, probably the first I had ever owned, in my pocket. It implied that I could produce, own, and control a secret text. A very private sphere indeed, then: It made the idea of writing more appealing and so encouraged me to write. Up to that time, it had never occurred to me that writing was something you did in private. People wrote for newspapers, for books, for publication, or so I thought. It was as if my locked notebook were whispering, Open me up and write something down, but don’t let anyone else see.

  In the Islamic world there is no habit of keeping diaries, as historians sometimes like to remind us. No one else pays the matter much attention. The Eurocentric historian sees this as a shortcoming, reflecting a reduced private sphere and suggesting that social pressures stamp out individual expression.

  But the journal was probably in use in many parts of the Islamic world unmarked by Western influence, as some published and annotated texts seem to indicate. Their authors would have kept these diaries as an aide-memoire. They would not have been writing for posterity, and since there was no tradition of annotating or publishing diaries, most would have later been destroyed, either deliberately or accidentally. At first glance, the idea of publishing a diary or even showing it to others would seem a mockery of the privacy embodied in the very notion of a diary. The idea of keeping a diary for publication suggests a certain selfconscious artifice and pseudo-privacy. On the other hand, it expands the concept of the private sphere, and in so doing it extends the power of writers and publishers. André Gide was among the first to exploit the possibilities this practice afforded.