A Few Reflections on 'Equality as Demotion'
After publishing my essay about class and elitism in Turkey, I still feel I haven’t quite managed to fully pin down an admittedly impressionistic idea, and I’m working on a part two adding a few more historical and political layers.
As I wrote, many kinds of divisions in Turkey, including class, just feel much starker to me, and I’m still trying to understand why that is. I may very well be mistaken, but I’d like to keep exploring it a bit.
Sometimes when comparing societies, there’s a ‘devil you know’ aspect, where problems in your own country are somehow less shocking because you’re inured to them. I was stunned when I first realized how little most Turks know about Kurds, or when people told me they’d never knowingly met a Kurd until university, but is that any worse than most Canadians’ relationship with the First Nations? Similarly, I often hear Turkish people describe racism in Europe, the treatment of migrants, or the history of colonialism, slavery, fascism and genocide as though they’re sui generis, without a hint of irony.
I think comparing countries is often useful, if fraught, but rather than judging one country’s problems as worse than another’s (‘starker’ feels safer but is perhaps a dodge), I’m much more interested in how the same problems are manifested differently between countries, according to their unique history, social and political culture, demographics, etc. I hope to probe a little deeper into the history and politics of Turkey’s class divisions in part two.
Moving on, I’d like to address a thoughtful counterpoint to my piece, hinted at by Nick Danforth (in his and Selim Koru’s recent podcast) and Hugh Pope (in a comment), which is the communitarian ethos in Turkish society coinciding with the elitism, inequality, and class conflict. For me, this culture has always been exemplified in expressions such as the famous ‘kolay gelsin’.1 I joked years ago about the frustration and shame Turks abroad feel when they’re unable to translate this ubiquitous expression:
It was that culture of calling strangers kardeş/abi/abla2 and teachers hocam3, the many linguistic niceties4, sharing food with strangers on a bus, and of course the hospitality, that I first fell in love with two decades ago (I’ll eventually tell that story in more detail).
When I first lived in Istanbul, I had a romanticized view of Turkish society (like many Turks with a similar enthrallment of Europe, as discussed in the podcast). Conversely, I had a dim view of what I saw as soulless Western culture (especially in the frozen suburbs of Canada), and was turned off by the cool aloofness I’d observed in so many Westerners, or a sometimes cloying niceness that prevails in North America (I wrote about this a lot many years ago in my slightly angsty old blog). But both of those perspectives proved superficial, and after spending much more time in Turkey and elsewhere, I developed a more complicated, nuanced perspective.
I still have the same criticisms of Anglo culture, but dismissing the entire Western world as atomized and vapid doesn’t account for the whole (dare I say collectivist?) ‘everybody pitches in’ mentality, or the high levels of interpersonal trust and social acceptance in places like Canada compared to much lower levels in Turkey and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I still love and miss that very real egalitarian spirit in Turkey, but I’ve also seen a darker dog-eat-dog mentality that rewards kurnazlık5 (cunningness, shrewdness) and tends to eat saf (naive, soft) people alive. The Erdoğan regime exemplifies and feeds off of it. The elaborate pageantry of the kolay gelsin ritual, as sincere as it usually is, can serve to paper over the uncomfortable social realities I discussed in my essay.
Anglo cultures have a similar spectacle of linguistic and cultural practices that often mask ugly aspects of their societies. In Canada, it’s the excessive apologizing, indirectness, and political correctness.6 Rather than confrontation and outright aggression (more common in Turkey), many Canadians and Europeans often opt for non-confrontational passive aggression, which many Turks can find maddening to navigate.
Selim mentions in the podcast that class divisions are the subject of an enormous chunk of Turkish art, particularly literature and film. A great example of tensions between upper/middle-class and working-class people in Turkey is Toz Bezi (Dust Cloth), a film about two Kurdish cleaning ladies in Istanbul and their often painfully awkward interactions with clients. The protagonists refer to the women they work (precariously) for as abla, creating a soon-to-burst illusion of warm relations. As Nick and Selim mention, many people euphemistically call their cleaning ladies yardımcı (helper) rather than the colder kadın (woman). But as Toz Bezi’s director explains, these words often provide cover for an unbalanced and exploitative power dynamic: “It’s unclear who is who: Is she a middle-class female employer, or is she simply “abla”? A woman from the lower class is referred to as a “helper” — a term that obscures the employer-employee relationship.”
None of this should take the magic out of calling your pilavcı kardeşim and wishing him kolay gelsin in response to afiyet olsun. I still find it soothing being very polite as a Canadian, or apologizing at an unhealthy rate, even though I know it doesn’t fix society’s ills or make me a better person. I tip my couriers even though I know it doesn’t give them a more stable job with proper rights. Sometimes it’s just nice being nice.
Literally “may it (your work/efforts) come easy,” but there’s just no way of translating it to English (it’s closer to bon courage, but still quite different) because it’s a cultural practice that’s specific to Turkey. You say it countless times per day to anyone working or exerting any kind of effort, especially if they’re poorer than you. If I’m passing a cleaner in a hallway or staircase in Turkey, I’d sooner hit myself in the face with a hammer than not say kolay gelsin. Saying it becomes second nature, almost involuntary, which is why not being able to say it outside the country takes a conscious, shame-inducing effort, much like a Canadian unable to say sorry in a foreign language.
Kardeş means literally sibling, a non-gendered brother/sister, usually used in the possessive, as in “My brother, could you point me to the nearest metro station?” Abi (technically spelled ağabey; used in the diminutive abiciğim for ultra colloquialness) means big brother, and is a familiar form used for friends and older men (my wife uses it for her female friends too, like ‘dude’). Abla is the female equivalent.
“My teacher.” There’s quite a respectful attitude towards teachers in Turkey going back to the days of Atatürk, and Teachers’ Day is celebrated every November 24. I have many fond memories of teaching English in Istanbul way back in 2006, and of students calling me “my teacher.”
Geçmiş olsun, afiyet olsun, sıhhatler olsun, hayırlı(sı) olsun, hayırlı işler, gözün aydın, emeğine/kalemine/eline sağlık, eyvallah, estağfurullah, yolun açık olsun…I could go on…
Another quote from Sevgi Soysal’s Noontime in Yenişehir: “If you asked his father, everyone was a thief...From his father Salih learned to survive by not trusting others.” A fairly common mentality in Turkey.
David Foster Wallace wrote that political correctness expresses “the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness,” and “functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker—scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language.” I think a similar conclusion could sometimes be drawn about linguistic niceties in Turkey.
I too appreciate being able to salute street sweepers and grounds keepers by saying "Kolay gelsin." Still, the idea seems to be that everybody would rather be doing nothing but, say, sitting and drinking tea. Doing more than the bare minimum of work is for chumps.
Nice contemplative follow up. I had similar impressions, one that stands out to me a bit is what you wrote about how Kurdish people are seen. Being Greek I often am introduced as such in Turkey and told things like my grandfather came from Salonica. The leaving of Greek people from Istanbul as well is presented in terms of an outside force. The real sympathy people feel thus comes with a denial of agency. Like the cleaners in your example sympathy is there to an extent because nothing can be done, I sometimes think sympathy requires less agency. We can sympathise about our mysery together if neither of us can change it.