Arrivaderci, Istanbul

The following final entry for this travelblog (as it were) was material prepared for an article on "writers living in Istanbul" in POETS & WRITERS. As far as I know, the usual crowd is there, but my entry came in at the last trump and may not have been published at all. So I thought to publish it here.

Why did you move to Istanbul? Was it related to being a writer?

I moved to Istanbul partly on a whim and partly out of grim necessity: I needed a job, I had just gotten an academic degree where the rules of the game are that you have more of a chance of getting a job IF you already are working— "Istanbul?" I said to my friend, Ed Foster—poet, Talisman Press founder, and head of the Humanities department where I was adjunctiing—"but my field is Caribbean literature!" Furthermore, I had nearly finished my first novel, Beastly, set in Baltimore; and it had nearly nothing to do with anything east of the Chesapeake Bay or too much north of the Bight of Benin—

Istanbul? Turkey?

I asked Ed if I could think about it and went home. I thought. I figured. Why not? If nothing else, it would be another adventure, grist for my creative mill, I told myself; and I called Ed with my assent.

A day job, when you are any kind of emerging artist after all, is a precious thing.

How has living in Istanbul, or Turkey in general, affected you as a writer? What influence does the city exert on your work?

I came from New York, a big complicated city, to Istanbul, an even bigger, arguably more complicated one. In that regard, the New York experience did help prepare me for Istanbul. I certainly can't imagine coming to Istanbul from a red state, though I suppose red-staters might not even consider coming here in the first place. In fact, red state or no, I notice most folks in the U.S. haven't the foggiest notion of what Turkey is like, let alone having much in the way of factual information about it. So I decided to embrace my ignorance and determined to be positive and to go with an open mind.

Let's face it, though: Istanbul. Constantinople. I have a feeling that many folks from the U.S. have a mental picture of these places as a fairyland of minarets, domes and people running around in curly-toed shoes. I confess, when I was first taken by a student and her mother to the SultanAhmet area where the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque are located—when we emerged on that grey

February day to see the snow sifting down and the worn red brick of those
buildings, it felt very much like that vision.

I keep off and on again journals, as the natural thing seemed to be to record my observations and feelings about being here and about what I thought I saw—that petered out when I realized I was no longer a long-term tourist, but an ex-pat.

I flung myself into my teaching during the day, and my fiction at night. I met a few Turkish intellectuals; I met other writers. John Ash, the British poet became a good friend. I was shocked at the Turkish private university system—at least at the first one I taught in, full of over-indulged and poorly prepared students whom I was not supposed to fail, no matter how badly they performed. I clashed with that school's administration. I changed schools and, the students were still over-indulged, but there were some who were better, many who were a lot nicer, but the no-fail policy was still in effect and the steps towards better education slow. I became part of a writing group, a nest of ex-pat writers, mostly poets; I continued to meet some more interesting writers, usually Turkish, and more Turkish intellectuals.

When the day job turned sour, my refuge was—as it has often been in times of stress—my fiction. There I struggled with how to make sense of my experiences: what was this frustrating place, this fascinating place, that I was in? What was the metaphor that would guide me in making sense of it? That question is what ultimately drove me into an epistolary novel, Letters from Hell, beginning in Istanbul and centered on impossibly conjoined twins, of quite different points of view. They are currently about to travel into the peripheries of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire—I, as their creator, following them, still trying to understand this unique and layered place that I somehow landed in. James Wilde, a retired journalist here, gave a snort when he heard me read from it and commented, "Well, I am not sure the Turks will like you describing Istanbul as hell." I protest. In fact, that is not the location of my inferno; but that's another story.

In terms of the type of writing that I do: while I find contemporary Turkish poetry one of the under sung poetic traditions in the world (and I hope that changes—soon), I gave up poetry the minute I got an MFA in writing it. I wrote maybe two rather dreadful poems when I first arrived here—both during snowstorms. Presently I write in a fabulist genre, a fantastical one, if you will, and I think living in Istanbul did not so much change my way of writing as it intensified it: if civilization began in Anatolia when human beings settled down and farmed for the first time, and if I was witness to one of the oldest continuously inhabited metropolises on the planet, this place had to be a palimpsest of all the triumphs sorrows and inconsistencies of human beings' attempt to live on the planet. The music here is achingly sorrowful; the calls to prayer, among the most haunting, yearning for communion with the Divine—how does one write about all that in the dreary tone of a social realist? I believe you cannot. I guess, then, that you could say that Istanbul only encouraged me, for better or worse, to continue my writing as before and encouraged me to refine my craft.

The hardest thing about living in Istanbul was that I found many—not all—of my fellow ex-pats living like flies in amber, caught in the last time they participated in their own national culture, being virtual Rip van Winkles who had not kept up with the creative and intellectual movements of the times, often not even being open to them, "orientalizing," even, this Istanbul culture they had been living in. They drank too much, they created the world/the house/the academic department/the business they could never have created at home, all they while trashing their hosts who made such endeavors possible.

Among those in the writing group—mostly poets, all male, all ex-pat—their relationships, I found, were fraught with more petty gossip and catfights than a ladies sewing circle. That, quite frankly, wore thin and wasn't very inspiring.

Have you come in contact with other writers whose work is similarly affected?

One of my dear Turkish friends (and a brilliant translator), Önder Otçu, once said that "Istanbul is the place where you break your heart, so you stay." The line about being in a complicated city I stole from John Ash, who is both an ardent Byzantinophile, Turkophile, and Istanbul-o-phile. Most writers that have interested me here, however, are either bound to the place for life by choice or by birth. I haven't met any artists who have chosen to leave, as I will soon be doing. Finishing the new novel will give me a chance to reflect on this further.

Can you identify a common strain running through your work?

My own work is very much about people who do live on the fringes, as do exiles, ex-pats and most foreigners in not only Istanbul, but in many other elsewheres. I am fascinated by twins, by freaks, by enacting the impossible in order to understand the possible, by astonishment in general.

How has the experience of not being around your first language affected your writing?

Of all the places I have spent time in outside the U.S., I found Istanbul the most challenging. The language, for someone whose other languages are all Latin-based, is extremely difficult to learn (and, conversely, I admire my students for their facility with my mother tongue.) In the long run, only if you are prepared to marry a Turk, raise children and grandchildren as Turks, and become an immigrant, can you become more a part of this scene. Just being an "ex-pat," a voluntary exile, with minimal command of the language, leaves you on the periphery, making silly generalizations about the people you live with and building even sillier sand castles on other people's shores. Ultimately, I believe you have to go back home—at least once—in order to decide who you are and where you want to belong. And that return is almost never the fault of your hosts, but more the need to reexamine oneself, one's place in the world, and one's work.

Thus, I got to the point where I realized that I must either learn Turkish for real, or leave. The wall of incomprehension was a terrible barrier, as I depend upon talking to ordinary people—cab drivers, waiters, shop-keepers, people I meet in coffee houses—to get a sense of my environment, to learn.

Not being around my first language had certain benefits, however, like going to a lovely country retreat to finish that novel, that book, etc. without having to interact, to dole out social niceties when all you really wanted to do was work. It is the ultimate sense of privacy for a writer.

What is your interaction with Turkish literature or Turkish writers--the Turkish/Istanbul literary community--and how has that affected your work?

I have read and still read everything I could and can get my hands on by Turkish writers that has been translated into English. The most frustrating was to read bad translations, of which, alas, there are legion. All I can say is that translation should be a team effort—working with a "pony," a literal translation, developed by a native speaker and then a writer—not merely a translator—
rendering that into a writerly version of the original. I would love to have been engaged in that kind of project, but did not have the opportunity.

I have, on the other hand, ploughed though dreadful translations just because I wanted to read a particular author—Tanpinar's The Time Regulation Institute was one such novel. While I find Pamuk interesting and, at times, absorbing, I was one who was sorry that Yashur Kemal did not get the Nobel, as he has more of a corpus over time than Pamuk. New writing in Turkish is quite exciting and I hope to read more; but I can't say that has affected my work so much as legitimized my persisting in it. A region's fiction, I still believe, is far better than a textbook if you want to learn about someone else's world: one senses a community in fiction's pages—its generosity and its tolerance—and you feel a comradeship with the authors, despite your work perhaps being quite different from theirs.

Anything that sustains the human imagination, I believe, is vital in these times. Turkey, in its mélange of east and west, its history, its position in the world, has much to teach glib writers of the west. Ultimately, I am glad to have had to opportunity to practice my writing in this beautiful and complicated city.