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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WELCOME BACK. Identity adventurers like you make this global niche what it is -- so, thanks!
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Hi Elmira… thanks for this!
Before I was married I recall being confronted with a variation of this situation — how my mother-in-law-to-be could be a European sophisticate on the outside but possess what I called “vintage morals, frozen in nineteen-sixties Istanbul” which is when the family relocated to Northern Europe. She didn’t have daughters, but as her daughter-in-law, I faced those morals.
Now that the family has returned to Turkey, she’s caught up with the more liberal attitudes of her sisters and friends, mostly.
In the wake of learning of Medina Memi’s death today, I can only say that despite what we may wish, virginity is still a major issue. It is amazing to me that side by side such contradictory ways of living can exist here: free, and shackled. Elmira, to do justice to your thought-provoking post, I may need to comment again later. For now, thank god there are communities who encourage young women to think for themselves. With hesitation, I have blogged a brief memorial with links to Turkish women journalists who are asking questions and changing the future for women, linked above. I am certain they feel this even more intensely having made their life work to create change.
Thanks for mentioning this nightmare Rose. Details here. This young girl’s death is a horrible reminder of how much progress remains to be fought for, in Turkey and in individual communities.
I don’t think the question of virginity is – or should be – really a ‘problem’ as nowadays even many Western countries are wishing for these old-fashioned values to come back. Many of my friends back home in England, and I myself, are frankly horrified by the alarmingly early sexualisation of pre-teen girls through young stars who are promoted as ‘role models’. As the mother of a 13 year-old girl, I feel uncomfortable with the way times are progressing for children. Yet, of course I wholeheartedly agree that virginity should not be so publicly imposed upon people. We can only guide our children towards safety, maturity and making the right choices. However, forcing it to the point of violent behaviour by male members of the family? This, I abhor.
Elmira, your post really stirred up images of my mother for me. She was exactly as you describe. Whisked off to England in the ‘6o’s she fit in at once due to her modern Istanbul lifestyle and Kemalist parents. Yet once she become a mother and the years away from Turkey flew by it was as if her soul began to change within itself. For a woman who had listened to Elvis and the Beatles and tottered around in the highest stilettos in Turkey, she would seek out awful, tacky Turkish music and send my dad out to Turkish food stores miles away. She would try to impose all of the traditional Turkish customs on to me. I didn’t understand. Why? Why try to hold on to Turkish traditions in England which were never important to her in Turkey?
Oh, Elmira, what a wonderful post you’ve written! We could discuss this forever!
Since I don’t have children, I can’t write about this from the perspective of a mother wanting to give her children her own culture. But I do know the feeling of wanting to protect the American part of me – my values, traditions and hopefulness. And sometimes to protect that it’s as if I push more forcefully against things that feel like they’re trying to change it. Whether or not they are, I just feel like I have to work harder to hold on especially outside the homogeneity of my own culture.
I often think this balance between tradition and progress is like what an English teacher told us about dead languages: they are dead not because they are no longer spoken, but because they have stopped changing.
We see this when it comes to our work modernizing traditional handcrafts; the most successful attempts don’t copy the past, but are inspired by them.
I think I am my best self when I become the perfect negotiation of what each has to offer without sacrificing what makes each special.
But talk to me again once I have children …
This is an eye-opening entry; I have heard those living outside its “homeland” are more likely to protect/stick to their traditions and not updating it. I live in Taiwan (I am from Japan) and here people keep the Chinese tradition more than in modern China. Here they use Traditional Chinese, keep colorful temples, and monks live along with people.
I have also visited Israel several times and was surprised by its openness and modernity completely blended with its rich cultural heritance. I think I will like the new Turkey when I will have a chance to visit there too.
“Those who don’t escape” have been much on my mind lately, Elmira. I’m regretful that my progressive husband and I did not have more influence to get his younger sisters educated beyond what is compulsory today in Turkey. It is criminal, especially since one of them aspired to be a doctor, but that dream was squashed. (We did however manage to talk one uncle into sending his very intelligent girl to medical school in 1999. More about her story in the book I’m writing…)
I’m feeling compelled to do much more to help break down barriers for the women around me. Will keep you all posted when I decide how!
Thanks for your thoughts ladies – Catherines! Catherine, you read my mind. I was thinking when writing this that most women in Turkey still, as you point out, ascribe to my parents’ belief about women. The majority of Turkish women are still forced into arranged marriages and are expected to be virgins. A progressive mindset is rare. Yet, it is not unlikely.
That a progressive mindset can be found was so heartening to me. It made me hopeful that perhaps one day, as Catherine Bayar, you say the next generation can have the confidence to become who they want to be – and that as a community, culture and country Turkey take tremendous strides. And that that progressive mindset is in Turkey and not New York is perhaps even more effective.
Still, I can’t help my frustration. To think that in a place like America, in New York no less where there are so many opportunities – particularly women, that women are shanghaied; prevented from imagining, creating, experiencing and reaching their potential is criminal. I broke out of that mindset, but barely. What about all those other Turkish girls that don’t escape?
I really appreciate both your comments and encouragement!
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Tradition can be like a straitjacket at times but breaking out of it can be difficult for an expat, fearing they may lose more than just limitations.
There’s a saying, usually about Americans visiting Ireland to trace their ancestors, that they are ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. They create a myth of Irishness that bears little relation to the modern Ireland. In essence that is what your parents did. The complicating factor in Turkey is that there are still people who ascribe to your parents views, possibly even a majority. Changes accepted in Istanbul can take decades to filter out geographically and to filter down socio-economically.
A person living with their partner is still a huge deal to a lot of families, even well-educated ones. Children choosing their own partners is more common, but those relationships are often impossible without family approval. For women especially, previous relationships can still impact their chances of making a ‘good’ marriage. Progress is there, but it is slow.
@Catherine,
What you write about Americans visiting Ireland rings true for Dutch Americans as well. They may be totally “today” as far as developments in the U.S., when it comes to Dutch traditions they adhere to what was done and proper at the time that they immigrated in the 1950’s.
As for myself, a Dutch correspondent says I show my Dutchness by ironing ny clothes and sheets.
“I like it,” I say.
“Precisely,” she says, apparently pleased that she escaped what she sees as the tyranny of Dutch style housekeeping.
For me the pleasure I derive from smoothing sheets and such on the ironing board has to do with the blurring of boundaries as mentioned by Rose Deniz in her post “Hybrid Domesticities” on this site http://www.expatharem.com/2009/11/04/hybrid-domesticities/.
The fact that I choose to enjoy that particular activity may very well have to do with a wish to hold on to certain roots, to remembering my mother. And perhaps that re-discovery of domestic arts is a sign of adapting to the times.
Thanks for mentioning my post, Judith! I love how the rediscovery of the domestic arts helped you to grow your roots.
Rose’s latest blog ..Path finder
A heartfelt post, Elmira, with excellent links. Not an easy question you ask, nor one with quick answers since I think it takes generations for communities to change. You are so right it’s not the location. My Kurdish in-laws, now 25 years in Aegean Selcuk, are living the same traditional life in terms of community as they and their ancestors did in eastern Turkey. 5 of my 7 sisters-in-law, who range in age from 39 to 22, had arranged (and one possibly forced) marriages. The youngest two married early, but chose their own husbands, one a Laz from the Black Sea region, the other a Turk. These women marrying ‘outside the tribe’ was not something that seemed to cause anyone in the extended family any problem at all, which frankly surprised me. Of course, the men in our family have no restrictions about marrying women from anywhere on the planet.
Excellent point that progress does not come from protecting traditions; progress must start in the home with how the women are treated, how much freedom to learn and grow as a human being they are allowed. By holding so tight to its roots, we’re in danger of damaging the family tree. As a member of our family from well outside these traditions, I can’t push them to change, but I can try to be patient and nurture the younger generations to have the confidence to become who they want to be.