Love in the Time of Erdoğan: A Turkish Odyssey (Part 1)
If I had known that my trip to Mersin would result in me fleeing the country for Albania, and later fighting from abroad to reclaim half my possessions before my Turkish girlfriend made good on her threat to destroy them, I probably would have saved the gas money and stopped at Antalya. Allow me to explain.
Last April, I landed for the third time in nine months at Istanbul International. The sky a grey slate, it was humid and drizzling as I waited on the curb outside for a taxi. The weather unsettled me: the girl who I’d met in Istanbul the previous summer was named Yağmur, the Turkish word for rain, and for some superstitious reason I could feel in the moldy state of the weather an indication about the future of our relationship.
It didn’t help that dating in certain Muslim-majority countries introduces special constraints on any relationship. I couldn’t be seen in the windows of her apartment, because a male neighbor might spot me and, now that he knew she was ‘that kind of girl,’ he might come knocking on her door later to get a piece for himself. On the night I returned, for instance, we went out for a walk to see the water, but before we left she told me that she had to change. When I asked her why, since her gym shorts and sweater seemed appropriate enough to me (the skies had cleared, somewhat calming my superstitions). Her exact response was this: “If I went out in these clothes, I would get raped.” She said it with a dash of irony, but only to make the brutal reality of it a bit more palatable. Istanbul isn’t the capital of Turkey, but it is its cosmopolitan center: if a woman doesn’t feel safe there, then I shudder to think what it’s like in some of the more remote regions. The good news, however, is that the government is working on solutions to this urgent problem—in fact, the former Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım recently suggested that, perhaps, we can encourage men to simply verbally harass women, rather than resorting to physical violence. Progress, right?
So Yağmur changed into a modest sweatshirt and jeans, but I still caught men staring at her as we walked down Istanbul’s snaking cobblestone streets to the pier. Men anywhere in the world will glance at a beautiful woman on the street, but in Turkey the men don’t stop with a glance. They stare at women with a degree of insolence that shocked me. More than once, I saw packs of men folding their arms and staring openly at a nervous woman stalled at a crosswalk, shifting on her feet as she waited for the light to change. Yağmur described the look on these men’s faces as one that said, “I’m going to eat you alive, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Thank God I’m moving to Europe,” she said as the bridge strung across the water came into view, its towers lit a bold Turkish red that, in light of our conversation, took on a faint menacing tone. On the Bosphorus, the narrow strait that separates the European and Asian sides of Istanbul, a sleepy ferry drifted across, its gold lanterns playing on the dimples of the water. The clouds clearing had revealed the sickle of a moon, and as we arrived the last street vendors were shutting the grates to their shops, children rushing ahead of their parents in hopes of snagging a final sweet before it was too late. That anyone would be desperate to leave a place like this, so rich with culture and natural beauty, demands an explanation, and in her case one man in particular was to blame: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Erdoğan is the former mayor of Istanbul, a position from which he vaulted into the prime ministership, and later the Presidency. If you’re curious about the respective powers of each office, the simplest answer is that their powers are roughly whatever Erdoğan wants them to be—in fact, thanks to a recent spate of constitutional amendments that, in the aftermath of their attempted coup, the public narrowly approved in a 2017 national referendum, the prime ministership was abolished, making the President both the head of state and the head of government. To call him a dictator, though, would be an exaggeration: there remains the skeleton of a secular democracy in Turkey, one that gives the country hope, and which sometimes causes him to stumble on his road to reclaiming the former glory of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire. In any case, it’s a steep rise for a man who was once thought to be dead in the water politically. His mayorship ended in flames after the political party he belonged to, an outright Islamist group called the Welfare Party, was banned on the grounds that it ‘threatened the secularism’ of the country. During his time as mayor, despite being lampooned as a country bumpkin before he got elected, he had been surprisingly pragmatic, laying hundreds of miles of new pipelines to fix a water shortage, paying back the city’s debt, shifting to more environmentally-conscious public transport, and constructing massive recycling plants to cut down on the trash piling up on the streets. However, after the ban took place, enraged, he and his fellow party members marched in protest, during which he read aloud a poem that included the words, “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” That bit of wordplay landed him in prison, on the (in my opinion dubious) grounds that he was making an ‘incitement to violence.’ His enemies cheered as he was led to prison and slapped with a lifetime ban on holding political office.
His story, of course, did not end there. In a twist of fate that should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks that muzzling their political opponents is a long-term strategy, Erdoğan and his allies learned from the experience that an explicitly Islamist party would never succeed in a formally secular country like Turkey, and so they learned how to dog whistle. They founded a new, ostensibly more ‘moderate’ party called the Justice and Development Party (otherwise known as AKP), and in 2002 they won control of parliament. After all, who could oppose justice and development? But since their leader was banned from politics, a nominal figurehead from the party was declared prime minister: his first act in office was to overturn Erdoğan’s political ban, and, in a remarkable act of party loyalty, his second and final act in office was to turn over the prime ministership to him. Since then, he’s retained a grip on power, while slowly shedding the more pragmatic layers that got him elected in the first place, revealing the power-hungry, Islamist core that animated his politics to begin with. For example, with the country’s economy in the midst of a crisis and the currency continuing to plummet, this year he went out of his way to withdraw Turkey from what’s called the Istanbul Convention, otherwise known as the ‘Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence.’ His priorities are a bit suspect, to say the least.
But it was the 2016 attempted coup against him that convinced Yağmur she had to leave. She was abroad at the time, fielding frantic phone calls from her relatives as she waited helplessly in Brussels for news of its outcome. Although the perpetrators claimed it was an attempt to save Turkish democracy, it was hard to see how letting the military overthrow an elected government accomplished that, and even Erdoğan’s political opponents condemned it. Ultimately, the coup did not succeed, but Yağmur’s family got entangled in the harsh crackdown that followed: her brother-in-law was a low-ranking member of the military, and his superiors, who had made one of the calls to instigate the coup, set him up as a fall guy to spare themselves. Protesting his innocence, he was hauled off to prison and remains there to this day. Since then, she began to plot her exit strategy, and when she was accepted to a Master’s program in Denmark she decided that that would be her ticket out.
The culture you’re raised in seeps into you regardless of how much you rebel against it. The longer I got to know Yağmur, the more I caught within her traces of the traditionalism that surrounded her. The morning after I arrived, she was doing her mascara in the mirror before we went to brunch, a prayer call sounding through the window from the megaphones on the streets outside. One of Erdoğan’s tweaks to the country’s secular character was to raise the volume on these prayer calls to become inescapable. I happen to like the sound of them, and their lyrics are charmingly simple (i.e. God is the greatest, God is the greatest, and I’m nodding to the beat like, He sure is!), but Yağmur rolled her eyes when I told her that.
“Close the window,” she said. “I hate that shit.”
The hip young liberals of Turkey, the kinds of people who would vote for AOC if they lived in the States, don’t defend Islam with the same vigor as their American counterparts. While it would be wrong to say that they’re anti-Islam, with a number of them participating in, say, Ramadan in the same way many non-believers in the States hang up a Christmas tree, I have heard them express disgust at American liberals for defending, among other things, head scarves. “It’s bullshit,” she told me once, “Men would dress us in garbage bags if they could.”
“But who cares if a woman chooses to cover her hair?”
She clenched her teeth. “I don’t care, I just think those women are fucking idiots.”
I closed the window and the prayer call muffled. “I’m almost ready,” she said, narrowing her eyes and inspecting herself in the mirror.
I remarked about what, to me, struck an interesting contrast: a prayer call in the background, harkening to this centuries old religious tradition, alongside her, a modern secular woman, poring over a Dior makeup kit. She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t see the contrast. It’s life to me.” She fluttered her eyelashes a final time and closed the kit. “I’m twenty-eight, I have to take care of myself. I only have a couple years left!” she laughed nervously, then, perhaps realizing she had made a mistake, she abruptly jangled her keys, almost as though to sonically divert the conversation elsewhere. “I’m ready!”
The implication of her statement was that a woman after thirty is basically ‘used up’ or ‘dried out,’ and the fact that she believed that both surprised and disheartened me. Not only because the age of thirty is hardly the end of anyone’s life, but also because, for someone who had done so much to loosen the bondage of her upbringing, it almost made it harder to see the parts of it that still clung to her. There were two veins to her personality that I underestimated: the first came in the form of these occasional flashes of traditional thinking around gender roles, which also affected her expectations of how I, as a man, ought to behave in a relationship, and the second was that there was a subtle undercurrent of anger to her, which she freely admitted to, and which I frankly don’t blame her for. If I was trapped in a country where I was harassed daily, and where if I reported the harassment the police would tell me to change into more modest clothing (a scenario that happened to Yağmur more than once), and where my family members were thrown in prison at the behest of a little man with a mustache (such types are, historically, a bad omen), then I’d be pretty fucking angry too.
But whatever the cause for someone’s negativity, it remains a fact that must be dealt with. I remember something my dad told me when I was thirteen, a story about a girl who he had briefly dated who was a child psychologist. She let slip that these kids’ problems were so god awful, and her treatment of them so hopeless, that she drank a bottle of wine every night. “I stopped seeing her after that,” he said. When I heard that, my thirteen year old self thought, No! That is precisely when you must be there for someone! Today, however, at twenty-six, a hair wiser and a bit more experienced, I side with my dad: a healthy relationship should not entail that you must crawl into someone else’s pit of despair to remain attached to them.
At the time, even though we weren’t technically dating yet, I glossed over these traits, because the positives outweighed the negatives, and because I had convinced myself that I was in love. Here’s how:
The December prior, I had visited a friend of mine in Houston, Texas, my first time back in America after a year abroad. The day before I arrived, however, he texted me that his live-in girlfriend had cheated on him and left the state. He was justifiably emotional, and probably not the right person to turn to in that moment for relationship advice. But after he regaled me with the saga of his relationship’s demise, and we had walked through all his emotions to the point where they were utterly spent and he was done talking about it, he asked how things were on my end. So I told him about Yağmur. What I told him was that I wish there was a word between ‘like’ and ‘love,’ because saying I ‘like’ her sounded too kindergarten, and saying I ‘loved’ her sounded too fast for someone who, while we had kept in touch, had only been in my physical presence for barely a couple months. Now, it was well past midnight and neither of us was in tip-top mental form, to put it delicately, and so we were both susceptible to making grand foolish pronouncements on life, with my friend taking the lead. “I don’t know, man,” he shrugged, “Maybe that’s just love.” He said it in such a way that suggested that I was caught in a conformity trap: of course this feeling could be called love, he seemed to say, but I was too attached to what was and was not the proper timeline of emotional events to name it as such. Dead Poets Society shit, in other words.
The next morning I woke up early and went to breakfast alone at a nearby diner, while my friend snored off the night before. I sat outside at a table on the sidewalk and, stirred by the memory of what he had said, as well as something sensitive about that big pale overcast Texas December sky, I asked the waitress for a pen. As I waited for a plate of eggs Benedict, I wrote the following poem:
24 hrs. in Istanbul
when across the sublime horizon swings a tail of boiling cream
spawning endlessly, endlessly out of the bow,
and we had not yet landed,
and I still had so much time to tell you I love you.
Fast forward a few months to when I got back to Istanbul. I hadn’t actually taken the ferry with Yağmur up to that point, which is the image I had in mind for the poem, and looking back at it now it’s telling that her presence in it is basically nil: the only hint that she’s there is that she’s the second half of that we, but the rest of the poem is a dream of my imagination, and it was the dream I was in love with, not her.
A week and a half into my stay in Istanbul, though, Yağmur announced that she had to leave the city and go south to her hometown of Mersin. Frankly, I can’t remember the exact reason why, but it had to do with her mother and a sudden operation that she needed. The day before she left, I met her in Kadıköy, a neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul where she had gotten a last-minute spa appointment before the trip south. For the first time, we took a ferry together to return to her apartment on the other side of the strait.
In the beginning of this piece, I mentioned my superstition about the fact that it was raining when I arrived, because Yağmur’s name means rain, and I’ve come to realize about myself that if I wasn’t such a strict Western materialist, I would probably be neck-deep into astrology and energy crystals. That’s why, once we were on the ferry, and there really was a tail of froth extending out of the bow, and the shore was getting nearer, as though to say my time was running out—added to the fact that she was about to leave the city for who knew how long—I couldn’t help but feel that my imagination had come alive. There was only one thing I had to say to complete the poem, so, not as though I didn’t mean it, but certainly not entirely confident that I did, I turned to her and told her that I loved her.
I could feel her body language change instantly, growing straighter and more serious, even as she started to smile, like I had to be joking. “You love me?”
Somehow, having voiced it out loud, and hearing her ask the question back to me, my doubts about what exactly my feelings were had become totally clarified, and the answer was no: love, in fact, was too strong a word. In my defense, though, what the hell was I supposed to say after that? No, not really. But I wrote a pretty poem about us being on a ferry, and since we’re here I just couldn’t resist. Anyways, no hard feelings, right? I had never before said something like that to someone on the spur of the moment, and I got an instant lesson about how careful you have to be in throwing around a word that heavy. But, like a coward, I couldn’t back out now, and I said yes.
“That’s not some small thing, you know.”
“I know,” I swallowed.
She paused for a while to think. “I feel… happy? I’m not sure I’m there yet, though.”
“That’s fine,” I said, relieved. “Glad we got that out of the way before we never see each other again.”
“No,” she put her arm around my shoulder, not realizing that my comment wasn’t a subtle way of me asking, Are we ever going to see each other again?, but was in fact an honest statement of my feelings. “You should come visit me in Mersin.”
I had just got a new job and would have a couple weeks off before I started, and I had already been planning a road trip around the country, so I figured that adding one more coastal city to the tour didn’t sound so bad. After which, I figured, we would sadly say goodbye and I would ride into the sunset forever.
“I’d love that,” I said, then corrected myself, “—I mean, that sounds good.”
I didn’t know it then, but she had other ideas about where this relationship was going—and what neither of us knew was that Mersin would be the beginning of its unravelling.