Like names, religions, birthmarks and congenital diseases, nationality is yet another burden we’re born with and which is – for better or for worse – a major factor in our definition of selfhood. But what the hell does it mean to be a Turk?
You know the dictum “Happy is the one who says s/he is a Turk.” Now, if you haven’t already thrown yourself into the arms of glorious Turkish citizenship upon hearing it, I understand. That propaganda was meant for an overwhelmingly illiterate population which had just come out of over a decade of wars, had lost an empire, and had fought tooth and nail for a homeland in the face of occupying powers. In other words, you’d better be happy, because that’s all you’ve got. So you probably wouldn’t get it. But the problem is, neither do I, and I’m a Turk. In fact it sounds more like someone’s trying to get away with something, like everything is justified for the sake of Turkishness – war, corruption, incompetence, oppression, whatever… “Just be happy and don’t worry about the details.” As a result, I’m often left pondering instead on how “Confused is the one who considers him/herself a Turk.”
Let’s face it, Turks don’t have a great reputation. Europeans used to scare their children by saying they’d feed them to the Turks. In fact you can sum it up in two words: Midnight Express. Very few times have I met someone outside of Turkey who, after I told that person I was Turkish, didn’t at some point in the conversation bring up that they’d seen that movie, usually immediately. In fact that’s all they’d do, just mention that they’d seen it and then look at you expecting a reaction with a slightly malicious twinkle in their eyes. I’d of course just ask where the beer is and move on, but there’d always be a part of me that just wanted to ram an ashtray down that person’s throat. And it would get me thinking what the hell a Turk is – in other words, what I am.
Read up any history book – or our own Turkish high school textbooks – and the Turks will appear to have come from Mongolia. The oldest Turkish inscriptions – the Orhun inscriptions – are still there, and the Turkic languages are included with Mongolic and Tungusic as being Altaic languages (into which some linguists also include Korean and Japanese). That’s all cool, but then I look around me – and at myself – and I see nothing that makes me feel even the remotest sense of affinity with that supposed origin. We don’t have epicanthic eyes, or look anything like those people. In fact we don’t even look like our fellow Turks in Central Asia. Sure they speak a related language to us, but I’ll be damned if I can understand more than a few words of Kazak, Tatar or Uzbek, let alone care to.
DNA research shows that we are most closely related with all our neighboring nations, but then that poses another problem: we hate all our neighboring nations. And they’re not exactly in love with us either. Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Cypriots and Persians generally define their national identities in opposition to Turks, and vice versa. We all celebrate the time we kicked one or the other out of our “homelands.” And yet we’re all more racially – and in many ways culturally – interrelated with our neighbors than we are with our fellow Turks in Central Asia. A comparison of the DNA of the local population of Selçuk near Ephesus in western Turkey with the DNA from the bones of people who lived in that area thousands of years ago reveals that the local population is directly descended from the people that lived around there in antiquity. So the obvious dilemma arises: those people who were taught to believe they are descendents of Central Asiatic Turks who conquered Anatolia in the 11th century are actually descendents of the local Greeks that lived there instead and whom they’re supposed to have conquered! The ties between southeastern Turks with Arabs and Kurds, of northeastern and eastern Turks with Georgians and Armenians, of Thracians with Bulgarians, of central Anatolians with the ancient Hittites will also be apparent in the same way. Thus, the word “nation” is, etymologically speaking, a lie that comes from the Latin root “nascere” meaning “birth” as in “of the same mother’s womb, of the same origin.” But as our racial mixture proves, this is not the case.
So what the hell are we then? We obviously have to forsake the racial aspect to our national identity. But then that means our whole concept of nationality is just based on language and state, and more significantly the latter. Ultimately language is an instrument of state power, and whatever state holds sway over a population, the language it propagates through its ideological apparatuses (school, media, propaganda, myth) becomes the language – and identity – of that population. But then you can’t help but see how fickle your sense of nation is… all it takes is for another state and language to conquer you and your national identity changes, the way it became Turkish over the last few hundred years. So national identity is really just a convenient means of domination that is upheld by – and in turn upholds – a systemic power apparatus (the State), and is merely a tool for instilling a sense of self-subjugation by internalizing State power into the consciousness of the subject-citizen…?
Maybe, but nationalism does have one magic recourse that never fails to seduce: the printed word. Ultimately, we like to cling to national identity because we want to feel like a part of something bigger, like a part of history, of glorious conquest and empire, success and greatness. Every time we read of our nation vanquishing foreign armies, building magnificent empires, conquering continents, being led by great heroes, we enjoy associating ourselves with that if only to overcome our own inevitable mortality, to live glory vicariously through history books in spite of our average, mundane, ordinary personal lives (which is also why we like football, because it’s basically a self-contained, easy-to-use micro-war). When you get on the bus to go to work and see the people around you, you hardly feel a sense of empathy – let alone solidarity or pride – with your fellow nationals. But when you open a book and see the magic word “Turk,” it’s like you’re looking at your own name as you besiege Vienna, conquer Egypt, defeat the Greeks, do battle at Gallipoli, and so on. The “I” becomes “We” and you feel like you’re a part of something greater. So ultimately nationality is just a delusional narcissistic vanity trip. Sure, there are the horrible things we’ve done in history too, but we tend to overlook those and leave them for our enemies to remind us about, God bless them.
And what if I didn’t have that nationality? What could I be proud of? Writing some silly article in a magazine? Graduating from university? Speaking English well, maybe? I’ll take a tiny part in the Conquest of Constantinople over those any day. So, all in all, I guess I am one who is happy to be a Turk – even though I’m still somewhat confused… and, come to think of it, three-quarters Circassian. Now my head hurts.
You know the dictum “Happy is the one who says s/he is a Turk.” Now, if you haven’t already thrown yourself into the arms of glorious Turkish citizenship upon hearing it, I understand. That propaganda was meant for an overwhelmingly illiterate population which had just come out of over a decade of wars, had lost an empire, and had fought tooth and nail for a homeland in the face of occupying powers. In other words, you’d better be happy, because that’s all you’ve got. So you probably wouldn’t get it. But the problem is, neither do I, and I’m a Turk. In fact it sounds more like someone’s trying to get away with something, like everything is justified for the sake of Turkishness – war, corruption, incompetence, oppression, whatever… “Just be happy and don’t worry about the details.” As a result, I’m often left pondering instead on how “Confused is the one who considers him/herself a Turk.”
Let’s face it, Turks don’t have a great reputation. Europeans used to scare their children by saying they’d feed them to the Turks. In fact you can sum it up in two words: Midnight Express. Very few times have I met someone outside of Turkey who, after I told that person I was Turkish, didn’t at some point in the conversation bring up that they’d seen that movie, usually immediately. In fact that’s all they’d do, just mention that they’d seen it and then look at you expecting a reaction with a slightly malicious twinkle in their eyes. I’d of course just ask where the beer is and move on, but there’d always be a part of me that just wanted to ram an ashtray down that person’s throat. And it would get me thinking what the hell a Turk is – in other words, what I am.
Read up any history book – or our own Turkish high school textbooks – and the Turks will appear to have come from Mongolia. The oldest Turkish inscriptions – the Orhun inscriptions – are still there, and the Turkic languages are included with Mongolic and Tungusic as being Altaic languages (into which some linguists also include Korean and Japanese). That’s all cool, but then I look around me – and at myself – and I see nothing that makes me feel even the remotest sense of affinity with that supposed origin. We don’t have epicanthic eyes, or look anything like those people. In fact we don’t even look like our fellow Turks in Central Asia. Sure they speak a related language to us, but I’ll be damned if I can understand more than a few words of Kazak, Tatar or Uzbek, let alone care to.
DNA research shows that we are most closely related with all our neighboring nations, but then that poses another problem: we hate all our neighboring nations. And they’re not exactly in love with us either. Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Cypriots and Persians generally define their national identities in opposition to Turks, and vice versa. We all celebrate the time we kicked one or the other out of our “homelands.” And yet we’re all more racially – and in many ways culturally – interrelated with our neighbors than we are with our fellow Turks in Central Asia. A comparison of the DNA of the local population of Selçuk near Ephesus in western Turkey with the DNA from the bones of people who lived in that area thousands of years ago reveals that the local population is directly descended from the people that lived around there in antiquity. So the obvious dilemma arises: those people who were taught to believe they are descendents of Central Asiatic Turks who conquered Anatolia in the 11th century are actually descendents of the local Greeks that lived there instead and whom they’re supposed to have conquered! The ties between southeastern Turks with Arabs and Kurds, of northeastern and eastern Turks with Georgians and Armenians, of Thracians with Bulgarians, of central Anatolians with the ancient Hittites will also be apparent in the same way. Thus, the word “nation” is, etymologically speaking, a lie that comes from the Latin root “nascere” meaning “birth” as in “of the same mother’s womb, of the same origin.” But as our racial mixture proves, this is not the case.
So what the hell are we then? We obviously have to forsake the racial aspect to our national identity. But then that means our whole concept of nationality is just based on language and state, and more significantly the latter. Ultimately language is an instrument of state power, and whatever state holds sway over a population, the language it propagates through its ideological apparatuses (school, media, propaganda, myth) becomes the language – and identity – of that population. But then you can’t help but see how fickle your sense of nation is… all it takes is for another state and language to conquer you and your national identity changes, the way it became Turkish over the last few hundred years. So national identity is really just a convenient means of domination that is upheld by – and in turn upholds – a systemic power apparatus (the State), and is merely a tool for instilling a sense of self-subjugation by internalizing State power into the consciousness of the subject-citizen…?
Maybe, but nationalism does have one magic recourse that never fails to seduce: the printed word. Ultimately, we like to cling to national identity because we want to feel like a part of something bigger, like a part of history, of glorious conquest and empire, success and greatness. Every time we read of our nation vanquishing foreign armies, building magnificent empires, conquering continents, being led by great heroes, we enjoy associating ourselves with that if only to overcome our own inevitable mortality, to live glory vicariously through history books in spite of our average, mundane, ordinary personal lives (which is also why we like football, because it’s basically a self-contained, easy-to-use micro-war). When you get on the bus to go to work and see the people around you, you hardly feel a sense of empathy – let alone solidarity or pride – with your fellow nationals. But when you open a book and see the magic word “Turk,” it’s like you’re looking at your own name as you besiege Vienna, conquer Egypt, defeat the Greeks, do battle at Gallipoli, and so on. The “I” becomes “We” and you feel like you’re a part of something greater. So ultimately nationality is just a delusional narcissistic vanity trip. Sure, there are the horrible things we’ve done in history too, but we tend to overlook those and leave them for our enemies to remind us about, God bless them.
And what if I didn’t have that nationality? What could I be proud of? Writing some silly article in a magazine? Graduating from university? Speaking English well, maybe? I’ll take a tiny part in the Conquest of Constantinople over those any day. So, all in all, I guess I am one who is happy to be a Turk – even though I’m still somewhat confused… and, come to think of it, three-quarters Circassian. Now my head hurts.
