Former lefties, or secular liberals like Altan, were at the time pushing this idea that it was actually the Westernized elite in Turkey, not the Erdo?an Islamists, who were responsible for Turkey’s illiberalism.
“We learn a lot of lies, which is called history in Turkey,” he said. “They worship Atatürk, he’s a kind of superman. He cannot do anything wrong. Criticism about Atatürk is against the law. Some countries you can see only one man’s statue. In Turkey, it’s Atatürk. In Iraq, it was Saddam. In North Korea, it’s Kim Jong. If there’s only one kind of statue in a country, it means that country has a problem. The only goal of our education is to create obedient citizens who worship Atatürk and Kemalism.”
Erdo?an didn’t seem to believe in freedom of the press, either, I said, referring to some squabbles the prime minister had had lately with political cartoonists. Altan didn’t come down hard on the AK Party.
“That’s another enigma of Turkey,” he said. “They are religious guys, conservative guys, but at the same time they are the most progressive party in Turkey right now. It’s unbelievable: progressive conservatives! There is no such category in sociology or politics. But we have it. The media tries to say they will bring sharia to Turkey, which I do not believe. Turks are not those kinds of Muslims. We have our own style in religion.”
“This is hard for many people in the West to understand,” I said.
“I think they cannot understand Turkey,” he said. “First of all, Turkey’s a narcissistic society. One way we think we are the best, the other way we are very fragile. We can easily believe that we are humiliated. Yet we also have the arrogance of an empire. If you try to teach something to Turks, they reject it. You must praise them first: Turks, yes, you are the best.” He paused, smoking. “For example, we learn that Atatürk said, ‘One Turk is equal to the world.’ We believe that.”
He looked as if the conversation depressed him. Before I left his office, I asked: “Is it true your books sold a million copies in Turkey?”
“It was my essays,” he said. “I like to write about emotions. Westerners do not like that. They like wisdom. I mean, Europe and the States—they adore intelligence and shallow literature. They don’t like depth. I think they are afraid of emotions, maybe despise them, as if they cut some part of themselves, cut their souls out. I just say, Westerners, pity for them.”
I looked at him quietly, reminded of something. He sounded like Baldwin, whose thoughts I believed were only thought by him, who I never imagined occupied the same reality as this Turkish stranger sitting across from me.
*
I HAD BEEN approaching Turkey like some specimen I could place under a microscope. This process is inherently hostile, but I did not know that at the time. I automatically sized up the country according to its successes and failures, delighting exaggeratedly over the former as if I had the lowest expectations, and feeling like an impatient teacher about the latter, one who believed her student just needed encouragement and guidance. Turkey was one of those “democratizing,” “modernizing” countries, a condition that could be assessed through everything from its human rights to its national curriculum, its economy to its health care, its fashions to its urban transportation. To get around Istanbul, for example, you could buy something called an Akbil, a tiny button that attached to your key chain and was usable on buses, metros, and ferries. To me, the Akbil was brilliant, a stunning invention, and proof that the ruling religious government at the time must be as modern as—possibly more modern than—any American party.
But in Turkish nationalism, I saw Turkey’s ugly, violent heart. It was necessarily exclusive, masculine, macho. Nationalism was a modern phenomenon, but Turkey’s felt antimodern to me, stuck in the past, an antiquated force that compelled Turks to hate someone in order to maintain their love for themselves. Modernity, I believed at the time, and as I evidently believed about the United States, did not privilege the nation over the individual, did not worship myths conceived centuries ago. Turkey still needed to evolve, I thought, and nationalism, not Erdo?an, not Islam, was the impediment to its maturity. If there was anything that made Turks unique on earth, it was this brand of nationalism, and I wondered, innocently, how many years it would take for this young republic to mature. I felt proud of myself for feeling repelled by this nationalism as an observer, that because of my outsider neutrality, my unique objectivity, I could see this self-love for what it really was.
Here’s the thing: no one ever tells Americans that when they move abroad, even if they are empathetic and sensitive humans—even if they come clean about their genetic inability to learn languages, even if they consider themselves leftist critics of their own government—that they will inevitably, and unconsciously, spend those first months in a foreign country feeling superior to everyone around them and to the nation in which they now have the privilege to live.
In one passage of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, she describes her Nigerian narrator’s encounter with a white American woman. They are discussing V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, a novel about an Indian man living in Africa. The white woman says to the Nigerian woman that she had learned so much “about Africa” from it. The Nigerian woman
did not think the novel was about Africa at all. It was about Europe, or the longing for Europe, about the battered self-image of an Indian man born in Africa, who felt so wounded, so diminished, by not having been born European, a member of a race which he had elevated for their ability to create, that he turned his imagined personal insufficiencies into an impatient contempt for Africa; in his knowing haughty attitude to the African, he could become, even if only fleetingly, a European.
To this, the white American woman responds huffily that she could understand why an African person would read the book that way. The white woman believed, Adichie writes, that she “was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally.” The white woman believes white people are neutral and everyone else is not.
I didn’t live in Turkey in those days, I didn’t live in the world. I lived in my zone of miraculous neutrality, an American neutrality, the most miraculous and neutral of all.
2.
FINDING ENGIN: TURKEY
Given our power and influence, which seem only to grow as disorder and misfortune afflict so many populations, it seems a sad failure that we have not done more to make the world intelligible to ourselves, and ourselves to the world. Shared history is certainly one basis for understanding.
—MARILYNNE ROBINSON