Turkey Is a Homeschool Kid
I once asked some of my Turkish friends, “If the world was a high school and every country was a student, what would some of the students be like?”
One friend answered without hesitation, “Turkey would be the homeschooled kid.”
I was once a homeschooled kid, and I understood exactly what he meant.
One of the guys
Every school has its share of odd kids, but homeschoolers are odd in a very particular range of ways. Their oddness comes from having encountered the world in a completely different order from the gen-pop kids.
Homeschoolers don’t witness or participate in many of the school-centric stages of social evolution: the emerging individual identities of grade school; the awkward first dates and first kisses of junior high; the separation into cliques at the opening of teenagerhood; the coalescing of favorite bands and movies and slang around those cliques — not to mention prom, house parties, and all the other accoutrements of American teenagerhood.
Instead, homeschoolers encounter the world on an ad-hoc basis. They might grow up listening to Beethoven or The Beach Boys or Metallica — or all the above; or none of them, ever — depending on what their parents are into. They might write essays on film noir at age ten, but arrive at high school without ever having seen Seinfeld or Star Wars. Prom and house parties are abstractly familiar, absorbed via movies and songs.
The homeschooler probably knows all the curse words, but has little idea how to use them in modern idiom. He probably pursues his interests with intense passion, but has no idea how to “be cool” when talking about those interests; or about anything at all, because coolness evolves in response to one’s cultural context, and the homeschooler’s cultural context is a patchwork.
Compare this to Turkey, a country whose Gen-X population had access to only two TV stations — both nationalized — until their late teens; who only got dial-up Internet around the turn of the millennium; whose helicopter parents were as horrified as fifties housewives at any mention of sex, drugs, or rock-n-roll; for whom English was a mysterious, exotic tongue; for whom “cool” was a strange English word that seemed very important, and seemed to mean something like “beautiful” or “strong” (maybe?) based on contextual clues.
Now unleash this generation — and subsequent ones — on the high-speed Internet, armed with VPNs to get around their country’s still-ubiquitous online censorship, and with a hit-or-miss knowledge of English. Let them fall headfirst into everything from Led Zeppelin to Britney Spears; from Disney cartoons to hardcore porn; from Marilyn Monroe to Mike Tyson.
Let them encounter all these cultural elements out of context, largely out of chronological order, in an adolescent Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole freefall — one of their friends in junior high burns an N-Sync CD; at a high school party they watch a dubbed version of Terminator II; a selection of printed-out 1970s Playboy spreads adorn college guys’ walls; club DJs scour the web for hit singles and dazzle the public with mixes of Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and Avicii.
The picture you end up with looks strikingly like a young homeschooler’s vision of the West.
And what that homeschooled kid wants, more than anything (I know, because I’ve been him) is just to blend in. He wants to be One of the Guys. He buys the right jeans and CDs, and says the slang, doesn’t get why he’s not part of the cool crowd.
Or, worse, he thinks he is part of the cool crowd.
Try to explain the truth to this kid, and all he’ll hear is that you seem to be putting him down somehow. But you’re not trying to put him down — you’re trying to explain to him, in the clearest way you can, the he is not doing what he thinks he’s doing. Even though, in his heart, he kind of knows it already.
If you have to ask…
The problem isn’t that Turkish culture is different from Western culture — that’s not even a problem. The differences are fascinating. No; the problem is that many Turkish people seem to think they are part of Western culture; that they’re core participants in it.
But in their most secret hearts, they doubt this.
One of my Turkish friends knows a young Turkish woman who’s lived abroad in Europe for a few years. Like an American girl who comes back from Italy throwing “Ciao!” left and right, this girl never misses an opportunity to describe her modern European ideas, and her casual flings with European men.
One night, we saw for ourselves how she acts around European men, in a nightclub in Germany.
As soon as the music kicked on, this girl leaped on the stage and started running through her entire repertoire of Flashdance moves. She kept this up for a few hours — while everyone else was having fun on the floor, she ran through her list of moves all alone, in earnest seriousness, without drawing so much as a glance from any of the European men.
The next morning, my friend commented that she’d seemed to be having a great time last night. She went quiet. “Was it too much?” she asked. “Did I look sexy?”
My friend decided to play it out a little. “Did you feel sexy?” he asked.
The girl had a mini-meltdown. “I don’t know,” she exclaimed. “I don’t even know. I’ve always felt like I belong more to this culture than to Turkey, but I never know if I’m doing it right. I mean I do all the right things…” on and on in this vein.
Her reaction, in other words, was that of a homeschooled girl after her first high-school dance. That homeschooled girl spent hours on YouTube the night before, practicing moves in front of the mirror, finding just the right way to swing her hips and arch her back, just like the women in the music videos. She expected cute boys to be throwing themselves at her left and right. And on the night of the dance, she worked so hard to fit in that she stuck out like a sore thumb.
Well. Insecurity is rampant all over the world. We’ve all seen girls dance like that in clubs in Los Angeles; Las Vegas; London. Ask any girl if she’s ever had a mini-meltdown and asked someone if she’s sexy; and if she’s honest, she’ll answer yes. And at the same time, this one young woman isn’t exactly a statistically significant sample of the Turkish population.
Except that anyone — anyone — who’s lived in Istanbul for any length of time can tell you a story just like this. And it’s almost always about insecurity in the face of Western culture.
Now why would a confident core participant in Western culture have any concern about whether Westerners approve of them or not?
Inaccurate packaging
Istanbul locals — many of whom have never left Turkey — love to tell visitors that anything that can be experienced anywhere in the world can be experienced in Istanbul. This is patently untrue — but that’s not even the point.
The point is how locals respond when you point out the inconsistencies.
Draw attention to the fact that every bar has the exact same cocktail list (which seems to be cribbed from a TGI Friday’s menu), and they’ll chuckle and say you must be some kind of hipster. Ask why the restaurant called “Tacos” serves only Turkish food (yes, this is a real thing), and they’ll tell you you’re in Turkey; stop having such outlandish expectations.
There are plenty of things to love about Turkish food and drink. But if we go to a 1950s-themed diner where Turkish music is playing, and Turkish food is on the menu, I may point out that this isn’t really an American-style diner.
Now, if you respond, “You’re right — this is a Turkish take on an American diner; it’s not really the same thing,” we’re all good. I can enjoy a Turkish diner; it’s a new experience for me. The problem begins when you don’t accept my thesis — when you say, “No, this is an American diner. It’s a little different, but it’s basically American.”
Well, no, actually. No, it’s not.
This cardboard quality of Western imitation — and, more to the point, people’s unblinking unwillingness to acknowledge it — began to make me feel I was slipping loose from reality. Not because Turkish culture is different from my culture, but because people kept trying to tell me it was part of my culture. And when I insisted, “No, it’s not,” they looked at me like I was ranting about invisible alligators.
Imagine, hypothetically, going a Turkish film festival which everyone insists is a Hollywood film festival. The actors are speaking Turkish. The films are set in Istanbul and Ankara. And when you point these things out to your fellow viewers, they respond, “Turkish is a perfectly normal dialect of English! Istanbul is a beautiful American city! Stop being so critical!”
All you’re trying to do is make it clear that this isn’t a Hollywood film. And all anyone can say in response is, “Why are your standards so high? These are perfectly good American Hollywood movies.”
Can you see how, day after day, this would eat away at your sanity?
Reasons to believe
In conversations with my Turkish friends who recognize this cardboard quality — almost always people who’ve spent significant time in Europe or the US, and thus have firsthand observations to compare — I’ve often asked why the vast majority of Turkish people pretend the differences don’t exist, or that they’re not significant.
One reason — the most obvious — is that many locals have never traveled outside Turkey. The vast majority of Istanbul’s population hail from small villages, most of which don’t have nightclubs or bars or foreigners at all; some of which don’t have wi-fi or cable TV. These country folk pour into Istanbul in their millions every year, and they pull the mega-city’s culture ever village-ward. For many of them, Istanbul is indeed the greatest, most multicultural, most modern city they’ve ever seen — or ever will see. For them, it is the West.
A second reason is cultural pride. Over the past 94 years, the Turkish people have fought their way up tooth-and-claw from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire. In that historical eyeblink, they’ve transformed themselves from a nation torn by tribal loyalties, in which the telegraph and railroad were novelties, to the acknowledged technological and military powerhouse of the Middle East — and probably the only Middle-Eastern nation most Westerners feel safe visiting. Turkish kids grow up reciting this national narrative with a pride and earnestness that’d be recognizable to any allegiance-pledging American child. In other words, “Just let us into the club already; we’ve earned it.”
The third reason, though — which I suspect is the one many traveled Turks keep secret in their hearts — is that Istanbul may very well be the best it’s going to get. Part of the national narrative was that Turkey would eventually overtake the West; that it’d become the capital of the world; a mini-America straddling the Bosporus. The Turkish Dream hasn’t lived up to expectations — but some childhood hopes never really die.
Pile on the difficulty of getting a visa to Europe or the U.S., and the all-but impossibility of taking up permanent residence there, and…
Well, maybe, if you squint your eyes just right, this restaurant really is just like one in New York. Maybe dreaming of the West doesn’t have to hurt so much, because maybe the Western Dream is coming true right here in Istanbul. At least, maybe that can be true tonight, just for tonight, while the drinks are flowing and we’re dancing together and everything feels so warm and hopeful. Just for tonight, can we agree to believe it?
…what can I really say to that?
I’ve got an American passport. When I pine for Paris or New York, I hop on a plane. Can’t bring my Turkish friends with me. Even if I could, I can’t bring all their friends and families — most of whom wouldn’t want to be uprooted anyway.
At the same time, waving, “Bye; hope it works out for you guys!” is insulting; dismissive — and yet, as explained above, trying to make a life in this cardboard West is enough to drive me (and many other Westerners) up the wall.
The only answer I’ve arrived at — and I’ll admit it’s a bit of a cardboard one — is to admit that the closer I get to Turkish people, the more I understand that I have no idea what it’s like to grow up so torn between two worlds; and to live with the very high probability that, despite your most relentless efforts, you may never make it out — and that even if you do, you will never truly be accepted as part of the world you want to live in.
In the end, I couldn’t take it here. I admire you because you can — because, one way or another, you’ve learned to love the dream more than the things you dream of.
