Thicker skin

HYBRID AMBASSADORS : a blog-ring project of Dialogue2010 You met our multinational cultural innovators this spring in a roundtable discussion of hybrid life at expat+HAREM. Now in these interconnected blog posts they share reactions to a recent polarizing book promotion at the writing network SheWrites. Join the discussion on Twitter using #HybridAmbassadors or #Dialogue2010  Looking like a tourist while living in Sultanahmet , the touristy heart of Istanbul, it’s obvious I’m going to be taken for a visiting foreigner. Even though I walk like a Turk along the narrow cobblestone streets, someone is bound to say in English “Hello, the Blue Mosque is this way”. I’m perfectly comfortable being the only ‘one like me’ when I’m on the road.  But now I’m home. I don’t like to be a foreigner on my own turf. This is not about my ability to speak the language or to behave as local women do. This is about the outside package: what I look like, and people’s reaction to me based on purely that. Multinational visitors to our shop show little hesitation in stating, “You’re not Turkish” before I’ve even opened my mouth. Do they expect an explanation, an apology? Is that a polite thing to say to someone you don’t know in any culture? And why can’t I be Turkish? I respond that I’m a hybrid, which stops most from asking further, and gets an excited reaction from those who know what I mean. This week, as I was sitting in our shop, a Turkish woman about my age and her daughter came in to try on some vintage Turkmen clothing we sell. She sat down and launched straight into telling me about a gathering the next morning, a festival of sorts, about an hour’s journey up the Bosphorus from here, and asked if I would be free to come. For a Turkish woman I’ve just met to invite me somewhere was totally normal in my experience…until she continued, “There will be others there – from Spain, Germany, Italy, as well as some British friends who live in Capadocia. When I saw your face, I thought maybe you’d like to join us.” She even gestured to her own face to make sure I understood. Granted the Turkish I speak is far from perfect, but I’d just been thinking as this woman and I spoke how lovely it was that we conversed in unhalting Turkish, that we could communicate. But she’d invited me because of my face, not because she liked what I’d said or even that I was a foreigner who speaks her language. Perhaps I need to develop thicker skin. A funny phrase when it is indeed my skin, my features, at odds here. It intrigues me that she didn’t think it was wrong to call me out as the ‘other’; in fact, she was pleasant while direct – my face was why she was interested.   My appearance put me firmly in the category ‘foreign’, that large block of humanity that is anyone different than you. Quite like a conversation the previous week, involving a black American author who’d posted an entreaty on a writers website asking for ‘White Ambassadors’ to promote her new book. At first, the post read as an awkward joke, until it became obvious that the author really did want to appeal to “ White people”, another homogeneous block of humanity. The friend who called this anachronistic article to my attention had been deemed ‘uncivil’ when questioning the writer’s manner and motivation. Perhaps the post was meant to be a humorous way to draw attention to the very real fact that the US publishing industry pigeonholes writers by race, sex, religion…whatever narrow ways they have to define us. But here it was again – this time I was wanted not because I was foreign, but because I was white. In an age when identities and boundaries are increasingly blurry and lifestyles are becoming hybrid, I understand the confusion and fear that arise. I wanted to comment to that author that I’d be happy to read and recommend her book if I liked the subject and her way of telling the story, but now I’d be averse to doing so because I don’t like someone who wants to put me in a box. Just like the Turkish visitor to my shop.  Is it just me, or are other human beings rankled when they are grouped like large herds of anonymous sheep, expected to follow the latest shepherd in any direction they are prodded? I could have posted this opinion while defending my friend’s truthful and direct criticisms. But since living in Turkey I’ve learned to stifle my strong opinions about controversial subjects in public forums, though in private I rarely keep my mouth shut. Not because I’m a foreigner here and will always be considered so, but because my husband is also an outsider of a different kind: an ethnic Kurd. Now, while Turks will claim that there is no second tier of citizenship in this country, there is an underlying and easily understood rule that everyone here must be Turkish, end of discussion, no hyphenated ethnicities need be added. “ Happy is he who calls himself a Turk”. Not such a different situation than black Americans have, when they assert they have their own culture, way of speaking and want to keep both that heritage as well as fit in and be accepted as a part of the larger American whole. But when I’ve questioned looks of consternation after I mention my husband is Kurdish (from my husband as well, for he’s been conditioned to keep ethnic issues private), or equate Kurdish identity in Turkey with any ethnic civil rights struggles that I’ve seen in the country of my birth, those looks become stony and cold.  After all, I’m a foreigner from a very young country. What right to an opinion should I have? Worse yet have been reactions online, when I’ve posted my thoughts about anything pertaining to the Kurds in Turkey. I’ve been told by Kurds (especially those living in Europe), by Turks and by Americans that I can’t possibly know or understand, that no one would honestly tell me the truth of their feelings or beliefs, that I’m unable to walk a mile in their shoes.  After more than a decade living with my husband and to a large extent his numerous Kurdish family, spread out all over not just Turkey but the globe, I find it heartbreaking to again be the ‘other’, the perpetual foreigner. So that may be why I left the defense of my ‘uncivil’ friend to other mutual friends and writers: to our strong-willed woman of color, who could state what we all thought, though we ‘White people’ could not; or to our two European sisters, who could compassionately or cleverly say what we as Americans must not, or be considered ‘uncivil’, a catty comeback women use to bat down assertive female behavior. Insiders, outsiders, each in our own boxes.  Will we ever be able to state what we feel without all the identity baggage attached, and leave those boxes curbside? I don’t want to develop a skin so thick that such subjects no longer rankle me. If that 1% difference that we human beings have in our various facial features and skin colors is enough to keep us at odds, what hope do we have of ever reconciling cultural, moral and religious differences? It’s been 18 years since I watched Rodney King utter that famous cliché on the TV in my Los Feliz living room during the Los Angeles Riots, but truly, “why can’t we all just get along”? More thoughts on this subject from my fellow HYBRID AMBASSADORS: Catherine Yiğit's Special-ism Anastasia Ashman's Great White People Book Club Sezin Koehler's Whites Only? Rose Deniz's Voice Lessons from a Hybrid Ambassador Tara Lutman Ağaçayak's Circles Judith van Praag's We Write History Today Elmira Bayraslı's The Color of Writing Jocelyn Eikenburg's The Problem with 'Chinese Food'

Stranger in your own land

Often our life experiences manifest themselves in ways we don't realize. Like this mosaic I drew for a interior design project I was involved with, in San Francisco last year. Inspired by ancient Roman floors (not unlike those I live near in Selcuk) and made from my rough sketch by Tunisian artists who do incredible things with tiny pieces of marble, this floor (and the surrounding antiqued mirror walls) has transformed a tiny bathroom into a mini Mediterranean holiday. Like any inspired design can transform a mood, a perspective, even a way of living.

As my Dialogue 2010 sister Judith commented today, "While mosaic is often made of pre-cut standardized materials, what comes to my mind are the beautiful chards of ceramics and pottery, put together to form a tantalizing image; something new made out of something broken, something splendid created from what might have been discarded, but was saved by a thoughtful mind, a creative person with the eye of an artist, the soul of a warrior-poet, the heart of a lover."

I call this mosaic the "Fire Worshiper" because it reminds me of my husband, descendant of Zoroastrians. Judith's quote sounds a bit like him as well. Especially now that it's spring and we'll be jumping our own fire of renewal soon...but more on that to come. May we take Judith's fine words to heart as we take the leap.

Meanwhile, visit my latest post at expat+HAREM....

 

http://www.expatharem.com/2010/04/21/stranger-in-your-own-land/

A Thousand Ways

The Universe works in mysterious ways. My spirit has been filled with a grateful energy since late Saturday evening, which found me sitting alone on the telephone in my dad’s California study, yet in the miraculous company of a diverse assortment of 9 like-minded women, showing me that connections such as these are not coincidental, that people are brought together for a reason. Today my soul is more grateful still, because my husband Abit had his 40th birthday yesterday, and a hit-and-run driver in a Jeep careening down a rain-soaked Sultanahmet alley sideswiped him to the sidewalk…and he survived. Mindful, that though cuts and bruises are a nasty way for him to celebrate such a milestone, it could have been much worse. And thankful, that I not only have a husband with 9 lives, but that I’ve connected with 9 women with crazy, joyful, challenging hybrid lives so like my own. Lives that seem to hinge on one particular characteristic we all share – creativity. Tonight, this Universal energy had me planning to add to the posts written by some of these women, who are so beneficial to my own work and wellbeing. But then I remembered that I have a niece who will be confirmed into the Catholic Church this spring. My sister-in-law had reminded me again to write a letter of affirmation, to be presented at a retreat celebrating spiritual relationship and how each child attending is gifted. It’s been years since I’ve attended a Catholic Mass; organized religions leave me cold, yet sacred interiors of churches, mosques, temples, or museums touch the spiritual cord that strongly reverberates in me. What do I write to my very talented niece, this taller-than-me-now 13 year old girl with the long strawberry blond hair, huge blue eyes, a disconcertingly smoky deep voice, and a wicked ability to train and ride horses, so much so that her room is papered with blue ribbons and I’m certain we’ll be watching her in an upcoming Olympic equestrian event? I’d love to tell her about our conversation Saturday night. How creative, gifted women can come together from the disparate yet similar paths they’ve taken and create divine inspiration – for work, for art, for love, for living. How finding what she’s meant to do with her life is God’s greatest gift to her, and her greatest gift to humankind. And how creativity in its infinite forms is our best tool to realize what we are on this earth to accomplish. So of course, when wondering what I could possibly write, I did what any creative being would do – I Googled “gifted”. Here’s what the Universe wrote: "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.  To them...  a touch is a blow,  a sound is a noise,  a misfortune is a tragedy,  a joy is an ecstasy,  a friend is a lover,  a lover is a god,  and failure is death.  Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - - - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off ... They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating."  The passion that Pearl S Buck, Nobel Prize-winning Christian feminist, put into this statement nearly jumps off the page, yet she’s so right. Following our dialogue, I’m not sure I’d describe us 10 hybrid souls as “abnormally, inhumanly sensitive”, yet we do vibrate on a different level. We are compelled to create, to explore, to evolve. Were we born under wandering stars, or were we gifted these characteristics when we took our first step off the beaten path? Regardless of how we came to be, my thanks to my hybrid sisters, already along amazing paths of their own, would be the same as my affirmation to my niece, just starting her path in life… Rumi’s simple 13th C reminder to find our purpose, do our work, and be grateful: "Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth."

Sink or Swim

“I’m Kurdish. What do you know about the Kurds?” the attractive man at the sidewalk café asked me. Scrambling for a witty response, I said the first thing that popped into my travel-weary head.

Uzbek rings of folkdancers by CS Bayar

“Lonely Planet says not to talk about the Kurds while I’m here in Turkey. All I know from the media in the States is that they’re either refugees or terrorists. Which are you?”

http://www.expatharem.com/2010/01/15/sinkorswim/Sink or swim