Her criticisms of the government made as much sense as her class-based comments were unseemly, but when I expressed this feeling to Rana, she said:
“You don’t get it. If you are alone on the street, and they attack you, they will think that is fine because, well, why were you alone on the street? And the police and the judges might think the same thing. You take too many risks walking around at night. I don’t think you understand. It’s not like the United States. I don’t say this to you because I think Turkish men are all so terribly violent that there is a high chance of something happening; I say it because if you get unlucky, you are really, really unlucky.”
Some months later, headlines came from the conservative Anatolian town of Yozgat. “The Second Pippa!” Two men on motorcycles had raped a Danish woman who’d been biking to Cappadocia. The Dane told the press that she didn’t blame Turkey for her assault, that Denmark was just as bad. I, too, believed that you could probably sooner get raped at a Georgetown University house party than anywhere in Turkey. But there was something strange in this sort of reaction—to quickly dismiss the idea that personal violence had anything to do with nationality or ethnicity or religion, to jump up and shout, “Don’t worry! We, too, have rapists!” This European—recently traumatized, her life forever changed—went out of her way to not cause offense. Those were tough days for Turkey and the European Union; it was the era of anti-Muslim cartoons, and the beginnings of a crisis in Paris banlieues. Pippa’s Italian parents, too, had hastened to clarify that they did not blame the Turks for their daughter’s death.
“It could have happened anywhere,” said my American friend about the rape in Yozgat.
“It happens all the time.” I shrugged.
But some people were angry and ashamed and not shrugging. Those people did blame Turkey and the Turks for these bad things, and those people were the Turks.
In Turkey, newspaper columnists are celebrities. There are seemingly hundreds of them. They take, and dictate, the country’s intellectual and emotional pulse. These columns can be operatic, riddled with exclamation points and ellipses. But nothing had prepared me for the columnists’ howling in response to Pippa Bacca’s death, perhaps because that kind of self-flagellation would never occur in a country with a different understanding of individualism, or with a different sense of collective responsibility. One columnist, Semih ?diz, in a newspaper called Milliyet, was concerned that Pippa’s death justified the Ottoman-era Italian expression “Mamma li Turchi!” (Mama, the Turks are coming!) He wrote: “There is such a great distance that we have to cover to reach the level of contemporary civilization that one is inevitably filled with pessimism while thinking how we will be able to cover it. Poor Pippa, I wish you had done your research without passing through our country.”
“Pippa Bacca, why did you do such an unnecessary thing to send a message of peace to the world?” wrote another. “Wearing a wedding gown and touring the war-torn regions of the world and trying to prove that people are good in essence while hitchhiking. Why did you need to prove it? What purpose did this trip serve? We are ashamed, we are saddened, and we are trying to soothe ourselves by recalling the fact that the murderer was a former criminal.”
Turks saw this devastating and public crime as an excuse to talk about the kind of behavior toward women that was apparently common in their society. In turn, they exposed the complexities of Turkish psychology—first and foremost, as Ahmet Altan had explained, their obsession with how the world saw them. “I wish somebody had warned her that people would start to degrade her death by calling it ‘disappointing’ because of the effect it would have on the promotion of Turkey,” commented one writer. The dark joke was that even the murderer, at some point, exclaimed, “Oh no, this will be bad for the EU, won’t it?” What psychological suffering these people have endured, I thought. First, the humiliation of World War I, and now the torture to get into the European Union, always this endless process of kissing the feet of their humiliators to join the Ring of the Civilized. In Turkey one man’s disgrace was everyone’s disgrace, just as one woman’s sexual mishap ruined the whole family. The Turks, still at work in their laboratory of modern evolution, couldn’t enjoy the luxury of American individualism. As an American friend put it: “Should we be feeling this kind of self-loathing every time an innocent person gets killed in Bedford-Stuyvesant?” Pippa’s rape was the fault of the Turkish nation somehow, and one part of me wished they would give themselves a break.
But a growing part of me admired that the Turks still felt compelled to agonize about such things. The Western diagnosis of the murder—that Karata? was simply deranged—left me unsatisfied. A man who sees a woman on the street alone and because that is new to him, and because it suggests a certain kind of openness, decides that he should take her to the woods and force her to have sex with him—that’s not derangement. That’s decision making. And it’s decision making by someone who doesn’t perceive or care about the consequences related to his unfettered desires, perhaps because he’s grown up in a world—whether that be his family, his village, or his country—where he truly believes that he’ll get away with his crime. I couldn’t help but see an unwelcome parallel between the Western diagnosis of derangement as the sole reason for rape and the Western artists’ international art project; both were acts of erasure: “We were going to wash away the traces of war,” Silvia told the press, “to cancel them.” The inclination to suggest that a crime couldn’t have a social cause, or could be so easily dismissed as an individual illness, seemed part of the same worldview that inspired Silvia and Pippa to set out in wedding dresses and wash the world free of memory.
*
I STILL HAD NOT traveled east throughout the rest of the country, so when a photographer friend of mine set out to take photos of the former Armenian lands of Anatolia, I attached myself to her adventure. We planned to start in the northeastern corner of the country, in Erzurum, then drive to Erzincan, down the back roads through Kemaliye to Elaz??, up to Bing?l, beyond the dark green mountains of Lice, A?a?l?, Kulp, and over to Mu? and Bitlis. Tourist companies compared this drive to Route 66 in the States, but despite the natural beauty, there were very few tourists. The Turkish military fights a war with the Kurds in the east, and many Western Turks view the east as not only violent but behind.
“How did you find Internet in Bing?l?” Rana asked via e-mail from Istanbul.
“We’re at a hotel and they have wireless,” I replied.