My second visit to Turkey four months apart in 2017. Turkey
has always been something of a push and pull for me at least for the last 20
years. When I left Turkey in 1998, with the hopes that I could establish a more
free, more peaceful, less hectic life in the US for both myself and my
daughter, I was more on the push wave. Although my financial future was well
secured in Turkey as long as I was willing to work 60-65 hours a week, to which
I was becoming more and more averted, the path to my academic aspirations had
seemed to be a dead end.
Cooking together, one of the cultural traditions in Turkish culture
I was a very future oriented person then, putting my ever-present
anxiety to good use; a propeller to build a future… I have to give credit to
myself, how could I not be? …having grown up in a developing country, where
nothing is secure, where most if not all aspirations may clash with a wall of
corruption any time, where ‘whom you know’ (mostly corrupt) override any and
every skill set and competency and where future is always a concern in one’s
mind with some hopes but mostly surrounded with a halo of fear...
Gezi resistance of 2015 in Istanbul when the government tried to destroy a centrally located park
Add to this,
the shame culture Islam pumps over especially women, there is almost no
opportunity to stay in the moment, joy almost blinks its eye for a moment during
a sunset walk, or a hike in the deep forests, or in the waters of the Aegean
along with peaceful strokes as if stolen from long narratives of struggle with
life. No wonder, when I had read this quote in a book “Life is a long telegram.
The relatively fewer dots are the blissful moments scattered in between
numerous lines that represent the struggles life presents. Treasure those
blissful moments.”, it had resonated perfectly with my then-experiences.
20 years ago, a gay rights march would be unthinkable
It took me a mere couple of months in the US to start feeling
the pull to what I had left behind. Relatively sterile and homogenous
environment at the Ohio State University, my port of entry to professional life
in the US opened my eyes to some of the beauties of the Turkish culture that
did not exist in Columbus, Ohio. I recall my discussion with my daughter, then
13, “There are good and not-so-good in both the US and Turkey. If we can
preserve what is good in Turkish culture and add to it what is good here, that
will make us the best people we can be.” She was in, and all too naturally, we
preserved our mother tongue Turkish, a must to remain connected to the culture.
Best cartoon I have seen on Tayyip Erdogan's approach to ISIS-Kurdish fight
Over time, having spent more of her life in the US than in Turkey, she became a
woman full of compassion, curiosity, freedom, exploratory enthusiasm,
fearlessness that she acquired, some, from American culture, some from Turkish
and some from both. She is probably the
person that I would have liked to become had I had all the resources she has
had. American culture, rather the section of it we chose to
connect transformed my life as much as hers. I discovered I was not a true
democrat as soon as I arrived in the US. Discussions about gay rights as part
of human rights had not been part of my activism at all! Even in my medical
training, homosexuality was taught to be a pathology! I had to wear my humility
hat and relearn homosexuality as part of human panorama.
Saturday mothers who claim their loved ones "disappeared" while in state custody due to political arrests
I learned about
secular volunteer work. I found myself as free as a bird in relating to other
people in a framework of non-judgmental, flexible, respectful connectivity. The suffocating “everybody has to be in your
business because everybody knows your business better than you” attitude in
Turkey dissolved into my past, only emerging in small doses during visits,
which I learned to manage over time, with compassion but sensible boundaries. Both my daughter and I are not American, nor Turkish, but at the same time both Turkish and American. Add to this, my Greek heritage and her probably Central Asian heritage on her father’s side, we don’t know where we belong anymore, but we feel at home wherever we go, all around the world for that matter.
Talk about conspiracies in which multiple states are intermingled
This reminds me of what Pema Chodron, writes about groundlessness:
“Groundlessness makes most people uncomfortable, unknown generates anxiety, and
we try to avoid it at all costs. Life is a river, if we try to swim to either
shore to grab onto something, we will lose the opportunity of enjoying the
river. Staying in the middle of the flow is groundlessness. To meet all
challenges and beauties of life with the same calm and peace, we should make
ourselves comfortable in the groundlessness of each moment.” Once upon a time,
I could never ever consider this, engulfed with anxiety that we call
goal-orientation, aspiration in developed countries I was in need of
controlling every single moment, day, month, year of my life. It took me over
50 years of learning to understand what she means: embracing in peace and with
calm the groundlessness life presents to us day in day out. Although, it isn’t
easy to do this when unworthy, incompetent presidents control the lives of
millions to serve their best interest, try, I do my best… With this paradigm
shift, to my surprise, I am thoroughly enjoying what is happening as life
happens to me in this “life is a work-in progress” attitude...
Pema Chodron is one of the wisest and most compassionate philosophers I have been reading lately
As I am typing these lines, something happens on the place
that draws my attention to cultural clashes and biases that are all around us. The
incident involves a middle-eastern couple sitting in front of me. The lady’s
traditional attire, topped with a conservative head scarf and the gentleman’s
dark features coupled with their accent made it clear they were not born in the
US. As the stewardess is going through her last minute checks, she tells them
to put under the seat in front of him the backpack that he apparently is
holding on his lap. She is about to pass by my seat when I ask her whether my
bag is OK (I had put a seat belt around my bag!!). She politely says it is
unacceptable, and I move it to where it belongs, under the seat.
One of Pema's wisest quotes
When she returns, she is very upset with the couple in front
of me, since they had moved their bag onto the seat across the aisle that is
empty! As she tells them what she already had instructed earlier, the lady
reaches out across the aisle and tries to buckle the seat belt over the bag!
The stewardess now looks like she is about to kill someone. Having lost her
hope in the customers’ capacity to abide by the rules, she tries to move the
bag to under the seat, unfortunately, it is too voluminous to fit there!! The
couple is almost paralyzed, they are murmuring something not quite audible, the
lady is trying to do something about it with minimal success. The gentleman
sitting on the window seat, who would be expected to resolve such problems in
Middle Eastern culture is just not doing anything that makes me think ‘this is weird,
I wonder what is going on with this family?’
Are we this afraid of the truth!?
The stewardess is fighting with the bag to push it under the
seat without much success. In the end,
she manages to have the bag get stuck between the two seats, and walks down the
aisle, clearly fuming and frustrated. To
tell the truth, I am slightly frustrated, too: I wonder if the couple was
simply being sneaky in putting their bag on that seat, rather than under it; I
wonder what their motive might be in not obeying the rules of the flight…
Luckily, I also catch myself thinking “who knows what you don’t know about the
justification of their attitude, Resmiye, let’s not be judgmental.” At the same
time, I am feeling for the stewardess, but am also wondering whether she could
have approached the problem in a more peaceful way. Did she have a bias against
this couple the moment she recognized they were “other” in her mind when she
didn’t even feel the need to check my seating because I look more like of the
dominant ethnic group in the US?
That is me versus the below picture of a Middle eastern couple: Appearances leading to biased treatment?
As we get ready to deplane, I notice that a younger woman
from behind approaches the seat of my neighbors, who clearly seem to be her
parents. As I pass by them, my physician eyes notice that there is some neurologic
abnormality with the gentleman. He is of the age, he might have had a stroke.
No wonder he was sitting by the window, the lady as his protector on the aisle
seat. He most likely was not able to stand up and find a place for their big
backpack. She on the other hand is either not strong enough to do the task or
as a woman of her own culture didn’t feel comfortable being the center of
attention of all the passengers at the time the bag became a problem. I feel
grateful that my inner voice had cautioned me against sharing the stewardess’
frustration in full. There was indeed something I didn’t know and recognize,
which I could appreciate now. How many incidents do we encounter when we form
an opinion that may be totally baseless and wrong? How often we miss the
opportunity to “find the space between an experience and a response” to pause in order to make a just, fair, and
kind decision to act… If only we could always manage this…
 |
| The couple in front of me pretty much looked like this sweet couple |
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