*
A MAN IN HIS SIXTIES named Tayfun, a representative from DISK, began telling the history of Soma. Most of the men had been tobacco farmers subsidized by and in service of the state-run company Tekel, which produced cigarettes popular among domestic consumers. For decades, Tekel sustained the farms of three million men and their families. Then, about forty years ago, the country opened its markets to foreign goods, including cigarettes. “We started to see on the streets your Parliaments there,” said a miner, smirking and pointing at the Parliament in my hand.
In the 2000s, at the behest of the IMF, and in line with the ethos of privatization at the time, the Erdo?an government broke up Tekel, as they did so many state-run firms. The farmers lost their protection, and their jobs. “It happened step-by-step, it was slow,” Tayfun said. “The farmers had hopes. They tried tomatoes. They tried cucumbers. But it wasn’t enough. So the children of the farmers went into the mines.”
In Soma, as in many places, the mines were run by a private company that sold all of its coal to the government for a low price. The government was also responsible for monitoring the mines’ safety conditions. This codependent system made for zero accountability. The companies didn’t care much when the ceilings of the mines had shoddy supports, or when the gas sensors, meant to detect methane and carbon monoxide, didn’t work. Electric cables were old and hung haphazardly. There was no escape plan, or accident protocol, in the event of a fire.
The miners’ working conditions were terrible, too. Their bosses punished them with enthusiasm, insulted them, yelled at them, even cursed their mothers and sisters. It was always those same words, Hadi, hadi, hadi. Come on, come on, come on. All day long, hadi, hadi, hadi. If a miner rested, he’d hear it again. If something went wrong, hadi, hadi, hadi, back to work. The bosses would do whatever it took to get the most production out of the miners, and production stopped for nothing.
“So the first two pillars of the tragedy were the state and the company,” Tayfun continued, “and the triangle was completed with the union.”
I was startled by this. “The union?”
Other men joined in enthusiastically.
“I bet they already know you are here!” one said.
“They have spies everywhere. If we talk to you, they will tell,” said another.
“What do you mean they ‘will tell’?” I asked. “Who will they tell?”
“They will tell the union.”
“Not the company?”
“They are the same.”
The miners’ union with the black reflector windows, Türk-??, had never advocated for better working conditions, or better pay, or even paid sick days for their miners. The miners were now convinced that everyone in the town was controlled by the union, which in turn meant the company, which in turn meant the government. The men called this thing the octopus.
“How did this union become this way?” I asked. “Was it always close to the state?”
“Of course,” one man named Ayd?n said. Ayd?n had the manner of a historian. “It was an American-style union. It was founded in the early years of the Turkish Republic”—in the 1950s—“with the help of the United States.” In other words, he suggested, this American influence, and America’s own labor history, had helped to create a union that did not protect Turkish workers and whose negligence had led to the deaths of 301 men.
Ayd?n told me this and, later on that day, the entire history of the United States’ and Turkey’s workers, in a matter-of-fact tone. American influence usually was not invoked with particular venom or outrage, but merely as a fact of history. Most foreigners were not emotional about it. The only person suddenly emotional was the American, me, because of course for the American nothing about this was matter-of-fact. Americans are surprised by the direct relationship between their country and foreign ones because we don’t acknowledge that America is an empire; it is impossible to understand a relationship if you are not aware you are in one. Those weeks in Soma, I heard about the way the United States had governed the world during the Cold War and after, and how its foreign policy shaped a course of history for Turkey that, even in small ways, led to the Soma tragedy. But of all the things I had discovered those days in that humble Turkish town, the resilience of my own innocence was the most terrifying.
As an adult I hadn’t had a strong sense of what life should look like. I rarely imagined my wedding day, or the man I would marry, the house I would live in, my financial status, or whether I would have children. It wasn’t always that way. My mother recently found piles of notebooks of mine from when I was a small child that were filled with plans for my future. I wrote out what I would do at every age—I was very ambitious: when I would get married and when I would have kids and when I would open a dance studio. This sort of planning stopped when I left my small hometown for college. The experience of going to a radically new place, as college was to me, completely upended my sense of the world and its possibilities, a transformation that happened again when I moved to New York, and again when I moved to Istanbul. All change is dramatic for provincial people. But the last move was the hardest. In Turkey, the upheaval was far more unsettling: after a while, I began to feel that the entire foundation of my consciousness was a lie.
For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans—who do not know that is what they are—and has a trajectory unique to the history of the United States. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. We can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us, the unfamiliar contours of ourselves. After I moved to Istanbul, I bought a notebook, and unlike the confident child I wrote down not plans but a question: Who do we become if we don’t become Americans, at least not in the way we always understood the word? I asked it because my years as an American abroad in the twenty-first century were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance, the kind we see in movies; mine were more of a shattering and a shame, and even now, I still don’t know myself.
*