It's late summer and our Etsy shop is blooming with vintage gardens, an abundance of colorful silk and cotton suzanis from Central Asia. Each hand embroidered treasure tells a story of prosperity, fertility, longevity and love. To bring these beauties into your home, visit our Etsy shop!
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Tuesday, early evening, the last full week of August,
in the month of Ramazan. Our window on the fourth floor faces east, overlooking the mouth of the Bosphorus. I've taken to working here each late afternoon until the sun sets. Sounds from outside float in over a strong, cooling breeze; after so many weeks of excessive humidity, I'm almost tempted to throw on a shawl. Above my head outside, hanging from the flat roof one level up, a drying carpet hits the side of the building, fringe dancing in the wind, clanging an occasional rhythmic chime as the corner hits the window glass. The imam from the mosque a short distance away is softly singing the Koran; the acoustics of 600 year old bricks magnify his lilting voice. Waiters in the hotel garden below are filling glasses with tinkling ice cubes. Ferry boats and oil tankers are chugging through the strait 200 meters away; a buzz saw and hammers from a neighbor repairing his roof add their syncopated beats. Over it all, the whirling seagulls cry in perpetual motion. The imam at the Blue Mosque to our south bursts into the call to prayer; other mosques in this ancient holy district join in. The men's voices rise and fall in the same phrases, but all with differing inflections, timing and tonal skill. They harmonize in a communal chorus, for the third time of five a day. As the last voice disappears on the wind, a rooftop restaurant in the street below tunes up some cool jazz, in preparation for this evening's crowd. My husband comes in and turns on an old film with a soundtrack of funky Turkish R&B, about gangsters, cabaret singers, frequent fistfights and gunfire, and predictably, a man in drag. The slowly setting fun bounces off the yellow wall opposite, the red tile roof sags from age and a profusion of squawking birds, searching for bread crumbs tossed there by the carpet repair man, who feeds them even though he himself will not eat for another few hours. 
The film ends. Abit goes back to work in the shop downstairs. Another
tanker rumbles along the Bosphorus, and I continue to write.
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 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' |
The Romans
thought of artists as “having a genius”. Unlike the modern humanist idea
that
artists ARE geniuses, they believed that artists were visited by
entities that
gave them a spark, an idea that either burst into creative flame or was
dumped
on the ash heap. Whatever happened, the artists had a partner in success
or
failure. Their “genius” brought them divine inspiration. This notion,
learned from
a TED presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat Pray Love” fame, makes
total
sense to me. Great ideas do seem to spark out of nowhere…or more likely,
from
everywhere.
My genius
brings me vintage textiles, imbued with the spirits of the women who
made them
so long ago. These bits and pieces are sometimes buried in other works
or in
plastic garbage bags in the corners of carpet shops. They wait for my
genius to
strike a match, to bring them back out into daylight.
Like the small
Uzbek embroideries I’ve been carrying around with me for the past 7
months.
Originally parts of hats, belts and robes, these painstakingly
hand-stitched
wonders came to me as part of a poorly executed new patchwork quilt,
used as
centers of cheap bright polyester squares. Such small pieces, less than
8”
square by the time they come to me, are often from a larger original
work, so
some of them ‘match’. They are of little value to wholesalers no matter
how
detailed the handwork, in comparison to other complex pieces like a silk
carpet. But a woman still poured many hours of her life into designing
the
intricate patterns and stitching each tiny stitch.
So I save them,
until I decide what new life they’ll have. These red remnants just
called out
to be slippers. There is a certain magic to red, the color that
represents love
and prosperity here in Turkey,
in fact all over Asia. What better color to
dress your feet?
I cut the
embroideries into toe shapes – this is always an approximation, starting
larger
until I get it right to fit a small to medium sized woman’s foot in this
case.
Dense woven pieces like these have no stretch to them, which is why I
make the
rest of the slippers from pieces knitted in cotton so they will conform
to the
wearer’s foot. I especially love the floral patchwork on the backs of
the
embroideries. No scrap was left unused in the household of the woman who
stitched these!
The soles are a
double-ply of true tomato red and black cotton in my favorite
alternating rib
pattern. The backs are in red cotton ‘lace’; using delicate patterns in
thick,
sturdy yarns compliments the delicate looking but durable embroidery.
Finally,
I knit an I-cord drawstring to ring the top so the wearer can securely
keep the
slippers on her feet.
The first
slipper goes together with some trial and error, but that’s part of the
fun.
The pieces are hand-sewn with cotton thread, then all seams are
chain-stitched
for extra strength. As with all two-piece projects, my greatest
challenge once
the first slipper is made is finishing the second one. If only my genius
knew
how to use a needle!
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Later when Abit came home from work, he
turned on the news. “What was that event at Sarayburnu Port?”
I asked, pointing out the window toward where the ship had been. “Oh, that was
the Mavi Marmara. It’s full of people taking aid to Gaza.” And there it was, on TV.
I’d been proud of Prime Minister Erdogan’s
efforts to speak for the majority of his Turkish citizens, to focus the world’s
attention on the 2008 military operation against Gaza and later the UN-outlawed blockade.
Erdogan became a national hero when he had the guts to speak his mind and walk
out at Davos.
Perhaps he lacked a certain diplomatic polish, so passionately and publicly cursing
Shimon Peres like he did, but I admire a politician who’s not afraid to speak
his mind to the world. Turkey
may have been Israel’s
closest ally in this fractured neighborhood both countries live in, but being a
real friend means telling that ally when they’ve done something wrong.
I remember thinking, “What brave people on
that ship – I hope nothing happens to them.”
Then I completely forgot about the Mavi
Marmara, the aid workers and the Gazans, until this past Tuesday afternoon.
Caught up in our new Istanbul
life (and a problematic wireless connection), I was oblivious to events until
then.
I now wish I’d had enough curiosity to walk
the short distance to the Bosphorus shore. If I’d known what the rally was about, would I
have felt comfortable mingling with the crowd? Just as I wish I’d had enough courage
to walk the 20 minutes west to the Fatih Cami on Thursday, where huge crowds
held a service for the nine Turkish men, ages 19 to 61, murdered on the Mavi Marmara,
their plain wooden coffins draped with the red star and crescent flags that had
graced the side of the cruise ship. One crowd, jubilant, yet with full
knowledge that they may never return. The other, in deep mourning and asking
how in God’s name another country believed they had the right to kill as they did.
How would either crowd have felt to have this American woman in their midst?
I don’t have the guts to put myself in
harm’s way, even though I know that one person can make a difference. I still
perhaps naively believe that dialogue, elections and leaders can bring about
change their citizens want, but this year that belief has been sorely tested. I
wish President Obama had Erdogan’s audacity. Obama needs to speak the truth
about the United States’
dysfunctional relationship with Israel.
I have no ties to Israel, only good memories of design trips
there, the same itineraries taking me to Istanbul
and Tel Aviv before heading east to Hong Kong.
I have no ties to the Palestinians, yet have had my view of the conflict
completely changed by living in Turkey
and hearing their side – a perspective sadly missing from the American MSM. Israel all too frequently calls itself “the only
democracy in the Middle East”. They are not. Because
I too live in the neighborhood, what happens between my two countries with Israel and the
Palestinians matters greatly to me.
These past days the opinions I’ve read online
made my head reel. The television coverage here has been comprehensive; the
interviews with the survivors riveting. There is hand-wringing, flag-waving and
plenty of emotion; in all my years here, I’ve never heard “Allahu akbar”
chanted in Turkey
as much as this week. If the West is worried about Turkey
becoming increasingly Islamist, Israel’s
actions added fuel to that fire.
But Turks are talking about this from all
sides, and as I’ve seen happen before with big issues (like whether to grant
permission to the US to use Turkey as
access from the north in the buildup to the Iraq War), truly taking the time to
deliberate what the country’s reaction should be. One late-night news debate had
a closing song over images of the injured returning to Istanbul: Sting’s Desert Rose, with the haunting vocals of Cheb Mami. One telling
lyric: “These dreams are tied to a horse that will never tire.” I could not
think of a better way to sum up the will and strength of the Turkish people.
Yes, Turkey
has much in common with Israel
besides democracy and military partnership. Turkey has treated its minority
populations with the same paranoia, fear and violence. True, those minorities
have also used violence in attempts to make themselves heard. In fact, the PKK
attacked and killed 6 Turkish solders in Iskenderun
the same day as the ‘flotilla fiasco’. At least one of the solders killed was
Kurdish. Nothing is black and white in this part of the world.
31st May 2010 will be a day long
remembered here for more senseless deaths in this troubled neighborhood. “An
eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”, Gandhi said. Will blindness in
this region prevail? Or will we someday be able to mark this week as the one in
which we all truly began to take seriously the words “Never again?”
What Israel
did Monday was wrong, just as Turkey’s
past actions have been wrong. The difference between the two countries is that Turkey has had
the courage to start looking at its history, to open public dialogues, and to make
real change.
Israel and the US
– do you?
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