Many may well wonder what hardships or crises a Turkish diplomat’s kid could possibly have. You travel around the globe, usually living in countries with running water and no electricity cuts, you get driven around in duty-free Mercedes limousines, go to the best schools, are immediately guaranteed a particular status upon arrival in a foreign country, and when daddy becomes an ambassador, you have maids, butlers, cooks and chauffeurs to clean, clothe, feed and transport your pampered little ass to school, tennis, ballet, or other embassies to play with your diplobrat friends. And it’s all on the Turkish State’s expense. Sure, every now and again you had to dodge bullets from Armenian terrorists, duck rotten eggs and tomatoes from Greek Cypriots, or try not to be hypnotized by Marxist-Leninist slogans from émigré Kurds, but hey, luxury comes at a price – the price of a bulletproof Chevrolet and a few bodyguards to be exact (I don’t know the actual price, ask aforementioned Turkish State).
But that’s just where you’re screwed, because the diplomatic life is essentially luxury-on-loan, and when your father finishes his term in wonderland, he’s just another civil servant and you’re back in Turkey, sans Mercedes Benz, going to a school where your music teacher punishes your atonality with the blow of a metal rod to your bunched up fingertips (don’t laugh, it hurts), where your closest companion for at least the first two weeks is your good friend Diarrhea, where communists and fascists shot each other in the streets as tanks rolled by to implement the nightly military curfew, where you had one state TV channel on which the only black and white shows you could watch (if you had the miracle of electricity that night) were Candy, Flipper and Dallas – all badly dubbed – and where you never understood anyone’s Turkish, nor did anyone understand your heavily accented Turkglish. In other words, the diplomatic life is sort of an aristocracy-on-lease, and back in the 70s and 80s the poor diplobrat didn’t even have the opportunity to go to a 7/11 to buy a Hershey’s bar to alleviate the pain when that lease expired and he became just another son of a serf in civil servitude. I cannot alliterate this strongly enough. So how could you not feel sorry for us?
A Crisis for All Seasons
Fortunately, Turkey is no longer the hermetically sealed country it was when my family and I were going back and forth in the 70s and 80s, and as a result, any discrepancy in quality of life between the home country and a cushy foreign posting is almost negligible today. However, there are certain idiosyncratic qualities to the diplobratic character that arise as a result of this extra-ordinary lifestyle, and they present themselves in the form of crises – four crises in particular: namely, Identity Crisis, Legitimacy Crisis, Action Crisis and Existential Crisis.
Identity Crisis
This is the one which diplobrats secretly enjoy having a crisis about, because it differentiates them experientially from “normal” people, and that sort of differentiation is not only incontrovertible, it’s also desirable. What could be more delicious than telling someone who’s never even been overseas that you “don’t know if I feel American, British or Turkish” or that you’re “as much at home in London as I am in Istanbul or Brussels.” Considering this, it’s a wonder diplobrats don’t get the living pulp beaten out of them more often.
Needless to say, the identity crisis a Turkish diplobrat feels is essentially a cultural and national identity crisis born of the fact that their lives are often spent in liberal democratic countries where they have had access to “First World” amenities such as a liberal education, an open society, and generally relativistic moral attitudes which they find lacking in their home country where rigid moralistic values – both societal and political – a conservative populace, an underdeveloped civil society, and a rigid, didactic educational system all jar with the standards they have become accustomed to when abroad, and which they thus find difficult to identify with. Thus their “Turkishness” becomes questioned by themselves, but also by other Turks, who realize their different standards, behavior, attitudes and speech/accent sets them apart. When in Turkey, your sense of nationalist sympathy is dependent on the most personal and immediate effects of the day-to-day act of living there, regardless of whatever ideals you may have regarding nationalism in a broader, more ambiguous sense. You may be proud that Suleiman the Magnificent besieged Vienna, or that the Turkish army is among the strongest in the world, but your sense of Turkishness is questioned – and at times even despised – every time you have to use a public toilet, or the water gets cut as you stand all soaped up in the shower, or you have to deal with official paperwork in a government office. Nationalism is too close to the bone at home where there’s no distance in which to conveniently lose sight of all the icky quotidian details that can be filled instead with a more glamorous and ideal “Turkishness.”
It follows naturally, then, that when diplobrats are abroad, their nationalistic tendencies grow and their Turkishness suddenly becomes something cherished, something contrary to what is felt in Turkey. This sense of nationalism is usually ideational and ideal rather than something concrete or proactive. The nationalism of the diplobrat when abroad is a wholly selfish one that seeks to alleviate personal dilemmas rather than take any real action for the sake of a truly inspired goal. Thus this nationalist feeling is more of an affectation than a truly inspired belief, and it serves various functions, namely: 1) Something to belong to and be proud of in the face of one’s Otherness abroad, 2) An illusion that you belong to something greater than your sorry little individual self – a great history, a great country, a great culture, all of which seems that much greater the further you actually are geographically from that history, country and culture, and 3) The convenience of “Textual Nationalism”, i.e. the history and grandeur of your nation and country always seems that much greater, clearer and more easily digestible and believable on paper, as simulacra, be it in texts, maps or on screen(s). Put it another way, when you’re looking at a map of the Ottoman Empire in 1689 or a photo of a squadron of Turkish-built F-16s, you don’t see beggars, you don’t see gecekondu slums, and you certainly don’t see a 4-foot-5 public servant with a limp and a mole on her nose asking you for fifty passport-size photos and a notary certified copy of a copy of a copy of your high school diploma signed by the sub-assistant-under-over-director of the Department of Time and Paper Waste so you can apply to be considered for possible enrollment at a university or something. In short, it’s a convenient kind of nationalism.
Legitimacy Crisis
Another critical aspect of the diplobratic life is that of proving that they are something other than just diplobrats, that they can stand on their own merits, without wading in the shallow end of the tepid pool of a lifetime of privilege and comforts that have been granted them from birth, to prove that they have done their own thing, become their own person, achieved their own place in life.
When abroad, the diplobrat is given the comfort and security of home, family and money in an otherwise unfamiliar environment while s/he sees local youths and friends his age having to take up jobs to support themselves, thus living what is – especially in the diplobrat’s eyes – a vigorous, well-rounded, more “legitimate” life than they experience in their safe shell which offers little scope for them to venture out of, because 1) They don’t need to, 2) They don’t have the savoir faire of someone who’s lived there all their lives in their home country even if they wanted to, and 3) They’re conscious that they’ll only be in that country for a few years anyway, and that they have no rights as a citizen of that country, so what’s the point?
Throughout the diplobrat’s life, going in and out of schooling and university is also always facilitated by their unique status, meaning, overall, that the diplobrat often feels a crisis of legitimacy in the sense that everything gained, every virtue acquired, feels hollow and impersonal, almost by the bye, because it doesn’t have any blood, sweat and guts behind it. Most transfer from one school to another, foregoing the standard exams and hardships (especially in Turkey) that other students are expected to go through. The result is a sense of over-indulgence in benefit devoid of the satisfaction of self-accomplishment.
Even when it comes to travel, all the exotic locations, all the trips and journeys, they too are prearranged by someone else, spent in hotels, devoid of initiative or risk, and although having been well-traveled is in itself something to be proud of, this pride is always overshadowed by a sense of the fundamental inanity and illegitimacy of this type of tame travel experience. All this can give the impression of one’s life as being sterile, unadventurous and forever half-lived, thus leading to a general crisis of legitimacy vis-à-vis their own achievements and life in general. In other words, diplobrats must make an effort to unbuckle the safety-belt of their own privileged upbringing and take action…
Action Crisis
But “action” is a problem too. The consequence of a life of privileged opportunities and limitless possibilities resides, ultimately, in one question for the diplobrat: What do I do? There’s no dearth of options, no shortage of possible schools and universities in which to study any one of a hundred subjects, no limit to the number of possible career paths. Many often think of going into the diplomatic corps themselves, but that rarely pans out as they realize the diplobratic life is way better than the diplomatic one, where they’ll have to start out in some menial bottom rung and work their way through the ranks putting up with the caprices and complexes of officious ambassadors only to eventually achieve at the age of 50 – if they’re lucky – the living standards they had in the first place when they were diplobrats.
So what to do? How about some economics or law, maybe become an environmental lawyer, but just a year in that’ll be boring, so maybe I’ll switch to an art school to do some painting, the tuition’s a little high, but daddy’s got me covered… Actually I’ve always thought about making films, I’ll do some film studies in New York, maybe rent out a little flat – daddy can help me out. Actually, screw it all, how about nothing? Sit in a flat my parents bought and spend the time doing nothing, but a creative nothing: reading, writing, that sort of stuff. That’s it, an early diplobratic retirement, that’s the ticket. Professional procrastination… And maybe I can write something about being a diplobrat? Or should I be out looking for a job instead?
Existential Crisis
Naturally you don’t need to be a diplobrat to have an existential crisis, but it certainly helps. In fact, the previous three crises all commingle to morph into an overbearing existential one in a case of “three wrongs make…one big Wrong.” Years of deracination, countless encounters with different moral standards, religious environments and political systems, and a worldly and comprehensive Western education that focuses relativistic epistemology, all eventually and unavoidably lead in turn to the relativization of all values… The diplobrat learns in the most formative years that every faith is equal, that every difference should be tolerated, that although everyone has different ways of doing things and identifying with things, they’re all qualitatively equal. And so the obvious happens: An all-encompassing, all-engrossing Truth gets drowned out by a hundred little inane truths; an all-binding Cause and Purpose to life becomes doled out equally among everyone as “everyone’s little purpose in life”… and eventually this leveling perspectivism leads to the inevitable question: “If everything is equally worth doing, worth believing in, worth identifying with, even though they’re all different, then isn’t everything also equally not worth doing, not worth believing in or not worth identifying with?”
As a result of the diplobrat’s inevitable experiential over-saturation over the course of a lifetime spent in dozens of countries, schools and cultures in the space of 20-odd years, what you get is an ingrained sense of the banality of all difference, which inevitably leads to a sense of existential in-difference, and even, in extreme cases, an ontological void. And so, moral standards, cultural and national values, tradition, religion, all of it eventually becomes, for the diplobrat, irrelevant, if not total fluff. All Truth merely becomes truism. In fact, the diplobrat lives in a world of -isms, beliefs devoid of meaning in anything other than a solipsistic sense.
Here, There and Nowhere: Diplobratic Limbo
And so, neither here nor there, the diplobrat goes on through life, right through his or her 30s, in a sort of limbo, caught perpetually between an enchanted past and an ever-slippery future. It’s a hard mindset to get out of… Every country and experience is temporary, every friend will be left behind, as will every city, every school, and every time a new life is established, it’s nearly always time to leave it behind and move on. And so for the diplobrat, the present is always perceived as past and future, but never a “present” in the sense of a Here and Now that is fully realized – or realizable – in its potentiality. Thus the diplobratic “present” is like a perennial limbo.
But all in all, it’s not all so bad. I mean, despite not knowing who you are, where you belong, or what the hell kind of meaning your life has, you still get to attend lots of cocktails, have lots of parties, eat lots of good food, be attended to your every needs, pass through queues and checkpoints with flashy red passports, and all at no expense to you. The clichéd and classic perquisites of the diplomatic life still hold – and hold doubly for the diplobrat. Eventually it’s all gone, of course. Your shiny red passport turns into a dull blue plebeian one, and you too have to go through the humiliation of applying for visas; the mansions, cooks, maids and chauffeurs, bullet-proof limousines, swimming pools and tennis courts all disappear in a puff of smoke; the cocktails, dinners and confabulations with free booze, celebrities and hors d’oeuvres are no longer there… And suddenly you find yourself in your mid-thirties, broke, jobless, still dreaming of a future as a writer, or an actor, or of living in New York, or planning your next adventure across Asia…
But in the meantime, I’m just going to enjoy my beer and finish the last sentence of this essay. Here it is, and it’s appropriately meaningless.
