8.12.2013 A STAGED TRADITIONAL TURKISH WEDDING IN OTHER WORDS MODERN KIR DUGUNU
Mission accomplished! The wedding is over, a great success, all went according to Melike's plans, and she is probably peacefully asleep in her husband's arms now as I type up these lines. I replay everything in my mind over and over as I try to get all the details of the wedding in my blog:
I am a "hala" (paternal aunt), enjoying Melike's happiness first and foremost, of course but also a relentless academic, who can’t avoid but look at everything around me through the eyes of an anthropologist, even if I am not one. Having spent significant chunk of my life in other lands, observing other cultures, I think, this has become second nature to me if not by training but by experience.
My two brothers with their abla (older sister)
I am observing different sections of the attendees as much as I can identify their origins, their group identifications, and their potential paradigms through how they dance, what they like to sing, what they wear, how they address each other, whether they touch each other (if they do how closely) or not, whether they have eye contact or not, on and on and on... This will go on throughout the night. The wedding format is one of a "country wedding" or "kir dugunu" in Turkish. "Kir" is one of the expansive words in Turkish. In one context, it may refer to picnic place, in another to expansive meadows, in yet another to countryside, among other references to wild and natural spaces.
When I first heard this term, kir dugunu, I was delighted (soon was clarified by others to be a false understanding) that it would be simple and natural, but still beautiful displaying the extraordinary beauty of the simple. The wedding unfolding before my eyes is indeed beautiful, but anything but simple and natural. I can’t help noticing and feeling disappointed that every single moment of the bride and groom's movements are either choreographed, or dictated by the cameramen, video-recording the entire wedding. It is as if the wedding is staged so that it is filmed, cameras primary, the wedding secondary. As a result of all of this, my poor Melike has to carry a photographic smile on her face throughout the night that will rarely leave its place to her natural, innocent, and beautiful wide variety of mimics and gestures. I wish, from the bottom of my heart the cameramen had left them alone and just recorded the entire night in its own flow and whatever spontaneity was left to exist.
I recall my daughter telling me "country wedding" concept having become one of the "in" commercialization methods of tradition. Furthermore, I discover from Kezban that this fashion had started after one of the soap operas played with the kir dugunu concept in one of its sections that eventually led to a whole industrial sector springing out of nowhere, producing and pumping all kinds of goods and ideas to support and maintain the concept, thus, its market share. When I look at my surroundings with this new awareness,
With my youner brother and his wife
I can now see what kind of a new industry must be supporting all this totally scripted production. I am sad one more time that we are losing our authenticity and adopting American ways in every walk of life, at least in urban settings. Yet, I can’t help but wonder whether the Turkish society has yet again played a trick on globalization and interjected tradition into commercialization. One may certainly argue: is it commercialization of authenticity or authentication of commercialization? If anybody knows the answer to chicken or egg question, perhaps the answer to this question is within that mind, too
Some of the many delightful moments of the wedding involve meeting people from my past that I hadn't seen for decades.
My older brother and his wife, the parents of the bride
One of my high school friends approaches me at the beginning of the wedding with a tall, handsome young man, almost reminiscent of Bratt Pitt! It turnes out the handsome man is my friend's son Utku, who was also one of my patients at my practice until 4-5 years of age, until I left Turkey 16 years ago. He is now a confident, lovely man, who is comfortable telling me "as soon as I heard Resmiye would be at the wedding, I decided I would come, too!" His mother, who is one of the wedding organizers, just by chance, is also ecstatic with our reunion. She tells me "He grew up with stories of his 'auntie Resmiye'. I wasn't surprised when he perked up about coming to the wedding along with us when I told him, you'd be at the wedding", so heartwarming. I give him my card so that he may contact me when he comes to St. Louis to complete the last two years of his college studies at the University of Illinois. I am pretty sure, he will come visit us.
Some of my cousins from my father's side that I hadn't seen for a long long time, appear before my eyes. I discover the daughter of one of them is in New York City, whose mother also receives a card with my contact info to connect. I hope I can bring her in for a weekend visit, too. All in all, this trip to Turkey was full of a combination of tradition, evolving Turkish culture, and anthropology, which I didn't mind at all, in fact thoroughly enjoyed. I can't say, I was able to silence my inquisitive and analytical and somewhat critical mind as much as a trained anthropologist might have done, but all in all, in all that analytical observation, I still enjoyed my time in Turkey in this August of 2013, thoroughly.
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| One of spontaneous, caring emotional moments from the wedding, my mother teary and Melike connected with her |
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