Full bloom

Until I moved to Turkey in 1999, I didn’t fully realize that a person could have more than one home, more than one country, more than one culture. That we don’t have to choose.  Having a personal connection to multiple cultures is the best way we’ll learn to get along with each other on this planet.

Living in Istanbul, we all know the cliche about this city and the country of Turkey being a bridge between East and West. For the year of 2010, to celebrate Istanbul’s status as a European Capital of Culture, there’ve been big banners on the Galata Bridge in Turkish and English proclaiming that Istanbul is “building bridges between the cultures.”

 I’m working to bridge cultures creatively, a passion that I’ve long had, but which has only recently come fully into focus. And largely thanks to that ambiguous, magical catalyst called Istanbul.

The bridge metaphor makes sense to me. But I also like how my friend Tara Agacayak talked about the indefinable Turkey in her post on Turquoise Poppy:

The cliché about Turkey is that it is east and it is west. It is old and new. It is modern and ancient. Europe and Asia.  Religious and secular. The juxtapositions are numerous but they demonstrate something. They show that a place can be both, it just depends on where you choose to draw the line.

She goes on to write that line is imaginary – we can draw it anywhere we chose. And in 2010, I chose to draw it in Istanbul, where all my passions intersect. I can create a life that combines them all: creativity, culture, fiber arts, language, community and of course, love.

The tagline on Tara’s blog is Bloom Where You’re Planted. I’m a late bloomer because it wasn’t until I moved to Turkey in 1999 that I really challenged myself well across all lines, proved to myself that being a hybrid of multiple cultures can only make me stronger. Let me tell you how I got here.

I grew up in a California beach town, Santa Barbara, before it was overrun with celebrities from Hollywood. It was a lovely environment, with whitewashed, red tiled buildings that were required by code to reflect the Moorish, Islamic decorative architecture of Andalusian Spain. But the residents were a little homogenous, a mostly white population, though at least 30% of the residents were of Mexican ancestry. I identified with that Hispanic culture, never thinking it was a separate culture from my own.

When I went off to Los Angeles to study textile and clothing design, I got a taste of what it was really like to live in a multicultural city. My third job as a clothing designer in my mid-twenties launched me headfirst into global business travel, when the president of the company I’d just joined publicly fired the head designer at the first sales meeting I attended, then announced to me and the audience of maybe 100 that I’d be going to Hong Kong in the morning to head up the young menswear division.

Working in the clothing industry was a great lesson in trial-by-fire living, a constant test to prove myself since I was only as good as the success of my latest collection. A designer must constantly reinvent herself, be able to turn trends into something that reflects her customer. Learning that the only thing constant is change truly prepared me for expat life, for living in a global world.

10 years on, after living in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland Oregon, working in about 20 countries and traveling for pleasure to at least 25 more, I returned to UCLA to study interior design and architecture.  These fields still allowed me to work with my three favorite design elements: color, texture and pattern. Those three elements form a universal language to me, whether you’re creating embroideries, mosaic tiles, carpets or stair railings. Understand the language they speak, and you can design almost anything.

But I also learned that just designing something was not enough. You had to know how to build it. The loveliest of environments could live in my head, but if I did not have the skills to make it real, it was only a dream. While I was successful in creating items and environments that suited the needs of my buyers and clients, I’d yet to create a life for myself outside of business that truly suited me.  It took a random trip back to Istanbul in 1998 for me to realize that I could create any kind of life I wanted.  A life whose seeds were planted in Turkey a decade ago.  A life coming into full bloom the spring of 2011.

Bridge to the future, unknown

Nationalism. Ethnicity. Religion. Economic status. Politics. If I had to pick a way to save our troubled world, to guide us beyond these barriers that divide us, the tool I’d start with to bring us together is music.

Monday night, I was among the 50,000+ people who made the long journey to an isolated corner of Istanbul, to a stadium built for Olympic dreams yet unfulfilled. A good friend invited me along when she realized she had an extra ticket; someone else’s ambivalence led to my good fortune. As trite as it may seem to attend a concert by an iconic rock band, experiencing the phenomenon of U2 was a revelation I deeply needed right now, as Turkey decides its future this weekend, and Abit and I reevaluate our personal and professional dreams as well. It’s a new moon, an auspicious time for beginnings.

On the12^th of September, 30 years to the day of a military coup, Turkey will be holding a complicated referendum in which voters are evenly divided about whether to lessen the power of the military and increase the prime minister’s authority to appoint the judiciary, among many other issues too convoluted to elaborate easily. After 12 years of living here, I’ve got my opinions but no vote, and concern about what will happen after this Sunday. Even a seasoned journalist may not quite get all the nuances of a culture after years of living and reporting from here, if some spirited commenters are to be believed. Is Turkish society so deeply divided that the referendum’s issues will further alienate and stagnate its forward progress? 

 

But this situation is not as baffling as in my birth country, where the population is psychologically terrorized in these days leading up to the 9^th anniversary of 9/11 by a mainstream media obsessed by Koran burning ministers, Obama’s religion and the real motives of a Sufi imam in NYC, because the concept that peace-seeking moderate Muslims exist is impossible to fathom. Turkey’s political issues may be complex, but those in the US are well beyond belief.

This was U2’s first concert in Turkey. They’d stayed away in the past due to Turkey’s troubled human rights record. It is symbolic that they relented during our European Capital of Culture year. Banners on the Galata Bridge in Turkish and English currently proclaim that Istanbul “builds bridges between cultures.” That’s a message I’m sure resonated with the group, ambassadors that they are for fighting poverty, hunger and the elimination of AIDS.  

Turkey has cultural bridges to build within the country, as well as in our troubled neighborhood. Which was why Bono not only called on Washington DC to listen to the people of Tehran and Palestine, and sent a candlelit message to Burma’s Aung Sun Suu Kyi that she is not forgotten, but reminded a Turkish audience about a Kurdish journalist, Fehmi Tosun, who ‘disappeared’ in the southeast in 1995, a public reminder that may get an average citizen prosecuted.

Bono then brought musical legend and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Zülfü Livaneli on to sing his “Yiğidim Aslanım”(My Brave Lion), about a man imprisoned and killed for his political struggles. Livaneli wrote the haunting soundtrack for Kurdish actor/director Yilmaz Guney’s classic and controversial film Yol (The Road), about the aftermath of that September 1980 coup.  

Livaneli said that he and U2 were “song makers”. That’s a humble description for what these men do. To stand among tens of thousands of people singing as one, many with tears streaming down our faces, Bono with his hand over his heart and showing emotion himself, reminded me of the power of music. A song can link human hearts and let us feel that strong current of common connection we all share – beyond those barriers of politics, ethnicity, and religion.  

 

Several songs into their two hour performance, Bono commented that “What is happening in Turkey now is important for the country, for Europe and the world.” That statement was met with cheers and applause. He went on to say they’d walked across the Bosphorus Bridge the day before with Minister of EU Affairs Egemen Bağış, a mention greeted with boos by much of the crowd, since Bağış is part of the ruling party pushing the referendum reforms. A surprised Bono reacted quickly, saying, “Okay okay! I won’t mention any more politicians, but can’t I be a tourist and walk across the bridge? It’s a beautiful bridge. It’s not just from Europe to Asia, not just from the religious to secular, but from the past to the future, from where Europe has been to where Europe needs to go.”

Where Europe needs to go. I wonder what leaders in the EU make of that statement? Real leadership requires visionaries, who sometimes come in the form of rock stars, while we the people get stuck with power-hungry politicians whose vision stops at the size of a corporate donation. Bono meets with politicians like Erdogan and Sarkozy, attempting to sway their views with his charismatic charm braced with knowledge. He champions that all-too-rare belief that with fortune comes the responsibility to give back, setting an example that democracy requires active involvement from all of us, regardless of our economic status.
 
Massive events like this concert are theater, I know. But human beings have been brought together by drama, by comedy, though performance arts since before recorded history. Though melodies and languages change, story-telling through song is in our collective blood. No one is immune. Some showmen are all smoke and mirrors, little substance. We listen for a good time, to dance and sing, to forget our daily lives. But Bono and U2 speak to something much deeper than mere entertainment. Not everyone may like their music, but it’s tough to disagree with the message: We’re all in this together.

Bono introduced “One” by saying, “We're going to change the name of this song to 'The Bridge' ". That metaphor is a cliché to those of us who live here, but that is the role that Turkey could provide with its unique position in the world. “We are one, but we’re not the same”, the song goes. It’s truly as simple as that. One planet, one human family in all its glorious diversity. That we fixate on those differences and ignore our commonalities is unfortunate human nature. But sometimes, even for two hours, a crowd of at least 50,000 people from not only Turkey but all over the world, can be on the same wavelength, can be reminded that there are many in this world we must help, can realize that we are in charge of removing those barriers.

Wherever we are, we are ONE. This is why I love U2 – the music is riveting and danceable, yes – but they have the courage to speak their hearts, and ours.