cross+ROADS places of hybrid identity ... a chance to do things differently
identity+QUESTS. cultural exploration +ENTERPRISE. intentional travel +INTERACTION with our world.(refresh page for more links) |
+++IST2010 web-carnival March city+SCAPES+++
+DIALOGUE2010 Spring podcast "Mapping the hybrid life"+
By HILDA SAFFARI
I’ve qualified as a cultural mutt starting at the age of one-and-a-half, when I became an expatriate. “Iranian by birth, French by citizenship and American by residence” is how my grandfather encapsulated 10-year old me the year we moved to the United States.
 Crossroads by H. Saffari I’ve always fit in everywhere and, by definition, nowhere.
Defending the American “pursuit of wealth and status” to my childhood friends who treated me as if I’d betrayed my French nationality by moving to the United States became a chronic occupation. Meanwhile my American friends were often unable to see anything beyond a terrorist or movie villain in anyone coming from the Middle East.
I moved fluidly between my personas. Being Middle Eastern as I listened to my parents speak Farsi and happily ate my mother’s rice and stews. Gallic in my longing for Le Goûter and refusal at 14 to say the Pledge of Allegiance because I wasn’t an American citizen. Anglo-Saxon in defending the indomitable and entrepreneurial American attitude that anything is possible by working hard enough.
Always pulled in various directions by old traditions or new expectations, I now live in the United Kingdom, married to a Pakistani by birth, Brit by education and Saudi by childhood residence. My stepson is Pakistani-Kuwaiti-Swedish, my stepdaughter Pakistani-American.
So where does this leave my 10-month old daughter? How do I raise her to benefit from the cultural smorgasbord into which she was born as well as instill a specific sense of belonging so she doesn’t have to constantly shift her persona?
How do I teach her to embrace all her roots and yet avoid transmitting my fragmented identity and cultural jet lag to her?
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Hilda Saffari is a film editor/mother/blogger/photographer/dreamer juggling her multiple cultural personalities and life in London, England.
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By AMANDA VAN MULLIGEN
Many aspects of living outside your birth country can be unsettling and difficult to adjust to. Forging new relationships in a foreign language is certainly top of my list.
Using a second language, it’s hard to convey a real sense of yourself to those around you. Sarah Turnbull, author of a book about expat life in Paris, relays her experience of attending a dinner party. She spoke little French and other guests wrongly perceived her as quiet and shy.
“I’d said very little all night. When I did speak, it was to issue childlike statements or ask simple questions which made me cringe at my own dumbness.”
I can relate, even though I am by nature a quiet person. An introvert. It’s why I choose to write for a living instead of pursuing a career in public speaking. I’m not the most verbal person with strangers in English, but for a decade now I’ve faced the dilemma of communicating primarily in Dutch.
I speak it well enough to get by in daily life, understand the education system my son is entering, follow the country’s news and political events, watch Dutch television programmes and chat to the neighbours.
 Forbidden entry, in Dutch However, when it comes to deep, meaningful conversations about something other than the weather or the state of the local park, a foreign language is one of the biggest barriers to sharing my personal identity.
I find myself lacking the vocabulary to express the real me.
I scrape the top of the emotion and describe a basic feeling, but there is no depth to my foreign words. A perplexed look and a shallow comment is really not representative of who I am.
I wonder if my Dutch family and friends will ever know the me who does have an opinion on important matters, who does have deep feelings on a range of topics.
How do you overcome the obstacle of language and let the real you shine through?
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Amanda van Mulligen is a British-born writer, blogger and mother experiencing life in the Netherlands.
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 By ELMIRA BAYRASLI
“You live with your boyfriend?” I recall asking Meltem, one of the teaching assistants at Istanbul’s Boğazıçı University.
Just after college, I attended for a semester for Turkish language instruction. I grew up speaking the language. But that was in Brooklyn, not Turkey. I wanted to understand Turkey better.
What I knew about Turkey I didn’t like. Turks were a conservative, traditional bunch who believed in arranged marriages, virginity and a girl’s place in the kitchen. Imagine my shock when the teaching assistant just a year older than me confessed she lived with her boyfriend — with her parents’ consent.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” she asked me, not guessing it was impossible for me. Not under the watchful eye of my Turkish parents. Even worse was not being able to talk about it, or any of the things that confuse us most: sex and love.
Much to my surprise, Turkish girls in Istanbul were having these discussions with their mothers, aunts and grandmothers. They assumed I did too. After all, I lived in America, the more progressive place.
I realized progress doesn’t come from a location, it comes from a community.
It doesn’t come by protecting traditions, it comes by supporting people, especially women. The open and honest exchanges that Meltem had with her mother in Istanbul gave her confidence, enabling her to focus on becoming the woman she wanted to be, not the one others wanted her to be.
I liked this Turkey. I wished the community I grew up in Brooklyn could embrace this Turkey. Instead their focus was holding on to traditions, so we children wouldn’t forget our glorious, proud roots. Ironically, by suppressing progress and modernity they made us all too anxious to abandon anything Turkish.
How can an emigrant community preserve its roots while adapting to the times?
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By day, Elmira Bayraslı takes care of press for a global non-profit that supports entrepreneurs. By night, she’s a writer and a yogi.
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By FIGEN ÇAKIR
Why are you visiting Turkey this summer, one of my smart school friends asked, her eyes very wide. “Goodness, it’s all desert mostly, isn’t it?” She no doubt imagined me in flowing robes on the back of a camel.
I went to an all-girls’ secondary school in Britain and back in the early ‘80’s we were a bright new breed of young woman. Lucky to be unhampered by adolescent boys, we focused on over-achieving. Getting into the best universities. Being pioneers. Perhaps we were influenced by Margaret Thatcher, a powerful force whether loved or hated. We had a tough school curriculum, too.
 Roxelana by Anton Hickel Which is exactly why I was stumped by the question. I had never met this level of cultural ignorance first-hand. Maybe I was haughty to assume everyone should know basic geography.
I had been to Turkey several times. A large part of my maternal family, of pre-revolution White Russian descent, was now ensconced in the country. My English father, of expat parents himself, had grown up in a Greek Orthodox community and still speaks with such an unidentifiable accent that people think he’s Italian.
Is this why I had never assigned stereotypes to places myself? Because I could not claim any kind of stereotype as my own?
My impulsive reaction to the friend’s question was to defend the country I was later fated to live in. Now I find so many things here difficult and I miss England. But when I am back there and anyone makes a derisive comment about Turkey and the Turks, my hackles immediately rise.
Likewise, it seems everyone in Turkey has something awful to say about the Brits. Espionage theories. Drunken louts in Kuşadası. Then I feel I have to defend them. I’m practically a double agent.
As a global citizen, when (and where) are your loyalties torn?
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Interior designer Figen Çakır lives in Turkey with her husband and two children dividing her time between developing an online venue for creativity and fostering a love of Turkish fiber and traditional arts.
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By CATHERINE YIğIT
The challenge of figuring out the school system. Dealing with constant and unexpected changes of plan. Feeling the ground being pulled out from under our feet makes expats quick to adapt.
“You nearly have to be born into a place to know what’s going on and what to do.”
So says Jamesie Murphy to the English-born wife of an almost-local man in John McGahern’s outstanding description of Irish rural life That They May Face the Rising Sun.
 St. Brendan the Navigator jigsaw by Rachel Arbuckle Just as St. Brendan didn’t know he may have been the first European to set foot in North America, as an Irishwoman in Turkey I feel a strange sense of displacement. Expats may be able to duck-and-roll our way out of many circumstances yet the simplest things leave us wondering.
A few weeks ago I broke a friend’s dish. A simple accident, regretted all the more as the syrupy pumpkin dessert it contained also had to go in the bin. I did the most natural thing to me. I bought a replacement dish and gave it to her along with some hazelnuts. We routinely exchange produce from our garden or my husband’s homeland of Giresun with things from her own homeland of Datça.
Instead of the usual ‘you shouldn’t have, but thank you’ the response was an emphatic refusal. “I’d feel bad,” she said and tried to hand it back.
After five minutes I succeeded in making her keep the dish. Still, my friend threatened to return it to me, filled with more dessert. This could lead to the dish being sent relentlessly back-and-forth between us, a never-ending reminder that by adhering to my own cultural norm to right a wrong I apparently did the wrong thing.
Where do our own ethics fit in the puzzle of intercultural relationships?
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Catherine Yiğit is a native of Dublin, Ireland and writes from Çanakkale, northwestern Turkey where she lives with her Turkish husband and two children.
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By ANASTASIA ASHMAN
If you’re over 30 (OK, over 40) you probably don’t yearn to recapture 20-something days of gritty uncertainty. It’s even less appealing if you’re from the tail end of the Baby Boom, a generation gap in itself.
My birth year alone meant I’d always occupy an entry-level position in that cultural generation.
Last week a visiting friend and I reminisced about our salad days in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Now Sex and the City types fill its fashion showrooms, art galleries and wine vaults but in the late ‘80s — when our loft went Hollywood in the film Fatal Attraction and Madonna launched her naughty picture book from the basement nightclub — it was a no man’s land. Motorcycle gangs. Transvestite prostitutes. Bloody meatpackers in white coats and industrial rubber boots. You know, affordable. Plus, our landlady (a dominatrix!) didn’t complain about the party noise.
 Meatpacking District party invite circa 1987 Unconventional freedom after-hours compensated for our brick-wall career prospects in mainstream media, entertainment, architecture and advertising. Unlike the disaffected GenX slackers a couple years behind us, my downtown loftmates and I refused to embrace the fact we’d never build equity with our marquee employers.
We still had our eye on the ball! Just. Needed to. Get. A foot. In. The door. No surprise the rising tide of GenY and its status quo rebellion has recently uplifted me.
Even with today’s dismal economy, the blogosphere is abuzz with possibility for young adults. A location-independent lifestyle design site launched this week challenges us to “live an awesome life on your own damn terms” while top blogs of young entrepreneurs spearhead social renewal.
The idealistic, brazen careerist mindset resonates because I’m old enough to have faced the corporate cubicle and young enough to frolic with a novel and unbounded reality.
Time travel to GenY’s brand of 20-something grit is a trip I’m willing to take. Ever felt in synch with a different generation?
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Anastasia Ashman is a writer/producer of cultural entertainment and the founder of expat+HAREM, the global niche.
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