There it was, the reason I had come to Istanbul in the first place, the words I heard on that documentary—more comfortable as a black, gay man there than Paris or New York—that made me apply for the fellowship and move to Turkey because I couldn’t imagine how complex Istanbul could be. I now knew almost all of my perceptions of the “East” had been muddled not only by ignorance but by deeply buried, unconscious assumptions over which I once had no control. A feeling of melancholy fell over me, as if I had only moved to Turkey for a silly reason.
“When he first got here, we were walking in front of the Marmara Hotel and in front of us were two soldiers, very ordinary soldiers, and they had linked pinkies—it’s very famous,” Cezzar continued. “It’s not like holding hands, it’s more an Anatolian tradition. Jimmy saw this and said, ‘My God, look at the way they are walking! They are holding hands! Oh, oh, what a beautiful country.’ Anatolian soldiers always walk like this when they come to Istanbul because they are afraid of getting lost in the big city. That was very typical in the sixties. But the whole of the Ottoman Empire was gay. It’s true. You know that?”
Those giant seagulls, the size of vultures, banged on the window with their beaks. Cezzar went to the kitchen to get some food and dutifully tossed it in the air.
“Were the sixties an exciting time for theater here?” I asked.
“For everything, baby!” He said “baby” like Baldwin did. “In 1960, there was this coup on the seventh of May and it was a very democratic coup. Very idealistic young officers, very well-read and cultured, they took down the party and my God they hung the prime minister, which is not funny at all, and then they made a new constitution—very liberal and open-minded. Very little censorship. So after the coup the Turkish theater took a great leap because the writers began to write freely and well and unafraid.”
“So could you do those same plays you did in the sixties today?”
“Are you kidding? That play we did in 1967—Fortune—if I put it on today, they would hang me. Or they would make me a suspect in the Ergenekon trial.”
The Ergenekon trial was the one the government had been conducting against the Deep State, military officers, and secularist notables. Many Turks by then suspected it was corrupt, a way for the AK Party government to ruin the opposition once and for all. Cezzar continued—“I’m not kidding! If I did Hair today, they would shoot me. It’s awful!”—suddenly veering in a direction I hadn’t expected:
“I’m very sorry but this awful American policy is killing us. They want Turkey to be a mild Islamic republic. Horrific! If we can survive this, this Holocaust—there’s going to be a Holocaust—we’ll be all right. Secularism is our only weapon in the Middle East. We’re the only secular republic in the Middle East! But we’re always under the dollars of the American state. But to be secular is something else. Look at these other places in the Middle East—you can’t come around the table and shake each other’s hand. This is what America’s policies…”
He walked away and went into the back of the house, talking to a cat that had been meowing like crazy. He spoke to him in Turkish. “Gel! Nemo! Gel!” I didn’t say anything in response to his American tangent because it sounded like the irrational rantings of a hard-core Kemalist who remains so convinced of his country’s destiny to be secular that he concludes the only reason many Turks are religious is that—of all things—the Americans were pushing them toward a more Islamic future. This seemed to me paranoia at its worst.
“Istanbul in the sixties was much different,” he continued. “Much more civilized, more human. Baby, the population of Istanbul was less than one million. Almost everybody knew everybody else. It was beautiful, it was Byzantium, it was the empire. Istanbul was not a commercial or political or touristic center, but it was intense. Very few people but very intense happenings. Jimmy became such good friends with Ya?ar Kemal”—one of Turkey’s greatest writers, a Kurd, and a committed leftist—“you wouldn’t believe it. They understood each other perfectly and they didn’t speak a word of each other’s language—talking about Dostoyevsky and Faulkner. They were singing blues. Ya?ar’s a real mountain Kurd. They were singing Kurdish songs and drinking rak?.
“Nineteen twenty-three to 1973—those were all Republican eras. We are the only group that’s feverishly holding on to secularism and the Republic. Then America started with NATO, other international treaties, and slowly but surely Turkey became a strategic partner—the most dangerous thing in the world to me. And dollars came in. Commerce.”
“How did Baldwin talk about this?”
“He always had this rage, this unbelievable rage against America. He already had this hatred from his Harlem days of the white American. The white American. He used to say there is no Negro problem in America, there is a white problem. After the assassinations, he lost all hope. Two things I would have loved to have seen Jimmy react to—one, 9/11, and two, Barack. I certainly don’t think Baldwin would have believed in 9/11. Most of the world thinks it was a plot by the CIA. Now it looks like a plot, because the American Middle Eastern policy went crazy. The most unjust war is what happened in Iraq.”
“Wouldn’t the America of today be an America Baldwin would like to come home to?” I asked, because he had mentioned Obama.
“That’s bullshit, that’s really ridiculous, sorry. It’s that simple, is it?”
*
WHEN BALDWIN ARRIVED on Cezzar’s doorstep in Istanbul in 1961, the fact that Turkey was a Muslim country had nothing to do with his decision, “except, perhaps, that it’s a relief to deal with people who, whatever they are pretending, are not pretending to be Christians,” as Baldwin said. Martin Luther King Jr. led a Christian civil rights movement, but many African Americans at the time predicated their resistance on the rejection of Christianity and the embrace of Islam—not only an alternative religion but a rejection of the white Christian West and all of its imperialisms. “In the realm of power,” Baldwin wrote in the 1960s, “Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty.” The Fire Next Time, the book that Baldwin would partly write in Istanbul, today reads like a foreshadowing of September 11: