Actor Liam Neeson poses for a photo before a press conference to promote his film Taken 2. Souce: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/GettyImages[/caption]
Marka [MAR-kah] n. brand, trade-mark
A fortnight or so ago, just after Skyfall hit cinemas with its opening scenes filmed on the roof of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Ali Saydam, Turkish marketing guru, went with his wife to see the latest film by the French director Olivier Megaton, Taken 2. This sequel to the 2008 film Taken is a thriller starring Liam Neeson and is set almost entirely in Istanbul. Saydam disliked it so intensely that he devoted an entire column to the film in the Turkish daily Yeni Şafak.
He said the film ruined the Istanbul brand (İstanbul markası) by presenting the city as disreputable and backward. Saydam said, “We are face to face with a situation which goes beyond the basest form of Orientalism.”
Murat Menteş, a young novelist who writes columns for the same newspaper, took up the issue. What was the difference, he asked, between Saydam’s comments and the suggestion made a week earlier by a Turkish film director that Turkey should buy the loyalty of Kurdish rebels (a variation on a popular belief that the rebels are only rebelling because foreign powers are paying them to do so)? Istanbul, Kurdish rebels—it made no difference, Menteş said. Both were “brands” with market value. Both could be bought or sold. The answer, surely, was for Turkey to buy Olivier Megaton too, so that his next film did not damage Istanbul’s brand.
Menteş’ article was a cry of revolt against the commodification of things, and the assumption that if you polish the image enough the dirt covering the reality beneath will somehow miraculously disappear. And it is difficult not to sympathize with him: a day after his article appeared, Turkish newspapers reported that the “conservative” and “pro-Islamic” municipality responsible for the old center of Istanbul had plans to knock down scores of Ottoman buildings—including the lodges of Sufi brotherhoods, fountains and up to ninety mosques—to make way for two hundred new hotels.
But all this is beside the point. The point, or rather the question, is the following: the Turkish Republic is the product of one of the most radical cases of rebranding in modern history. New alphabet, new calendar, new hats: East became West, pretty much overnight. But what about the country’s rapid transformation over the last decade, under the Justice and Development Party, into something more Islamic, more Eastern, more visibly neo-Ottoman? How big a part of this transformation has been a concern over image? How much of it has been a case of brand repositioning for an explicitly multi-cultural globalized world that has new and different expectations from Turkey?
The question may sound frivolous, but you only have to look at the history of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century to see how intensely aware of Western opinion this part of the world has been. When an Italian author in the 1870s mentioned the number of stray dogs in Istanbul, the city authorities, stung by the perceived insult, rounded them up and shipped them off to an island to die. Western travelers mocked the slovenliness and ignorance of Sufi dervishes, so educated Ottomans began to look down their noses at them too. Even sexual habits changed under Europe’s prurient gaze. “Women-lovers proliferated while boy-lovers disappeared, as if the people of Sodom and Gomorrah had perished all over again,” wrote the Ottoman historian Ahmed Cevdet, mentioning one pasha who “tried to conceal his interest in boys out of fear of the criticism of foreigners.”
The Ottomans in their last years were—you could say—like children who turn up in fancy dress at a party where everybody else is in ordinary clothes, and the Republic was a radical attempt to cure the self-consciousness that resulted.
But the transformation was made easier by the fact that it took place at a time when the West, at the peak of its global dominance, assumed that the future was in its image. It is worth remembering that the Turks were fighting for their Republic when Henry Ford’s car factory was at its peak. Henry Ford famously said that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” but he could just as easily have said, “Any country can have any civilization it wants so long as it is Western.” Hardly surprisingly, most Westerners visiting the Republic in its early years sided wholeheartedly with the modernizers, praising their brave strides into the modern world.
The West today is not like that. Having exported its Model T vision of the world (the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss gloomily wrote that mankind was “preparing to mass produce civilization, like beetroot”) it is now looking for ways off the factory production line. It is looking for exoticism.
The search takes different forms. It is there in the rise of micro-nationalisms. It is there too in the growth of interest in history, and the increasing number of historical novels and TV dramas, windows onto a world where people do not have to look or act or think like the person reading about them. More obviously, it is there in the adverts you see on the streets of northwestern European cities for winter holidays in the sun. Palm trees, classical sites, and stone villages on steep mountain sides. Not an electricity pylon in sight. Pure, unadulterated, authentic, impossible. In all its forms, this new sensibility (shot through with a sort of Rousseau-esque vision of noble savagery) is catastrophic to the Kemalist idea of Turkey.
I remember not long after I moved to Turkey in 2001 meeting a man called Bedri Baykam, a very well-known Turkish artist, fluent in English from many years spent in America—and something of a political provocateur, the sort of man who would set up a table in the middle of the street, uncork a bottle of wine and drink it solely for the purpose of irritating conservative municipal officials. At the end of our talk, he gave me a copy of a book he had written in the 1980s called Monkey’s Right to Paint. This is how it starts:
[blockquote]The American or German critic, standing in front of a group show by Turkish artists (or artists from any other developing country), tilts himself . . . in a standing position, hands clasped behind his . . . back, coughs a little and then starts speaking in a clean, clear, slow pace: “It’s a nice show, but in most of the works, there is too much of a Western influence. Your artists should dig more in their own cultural background . . . ” [/blockquote]
Baykam criticizes the “not-so-discreet arrogance” of this position, the critic posing as a wise man “giving some very clever advice to a bunch of ‘cannibals,’ or ‘gypsies’ who are feebly trying “to copy Western art.’ His approach—that even third-world monkeys like himself should have the right to be treated as serious contemporary artists, and not just as a bit of ethnic color on the side—is profoundly Kemalist. It says not only that there is only one valid “contemporary civilization” (Atatürk's famous muasır medeniyet), but also that Turks are as contemporary as anybody else, and therefore Turks should be taken seriously when they express themselves in a contemporary way.
In today’s world, the thesis put forward so pugnaciously (and wittily) by Monkey’s Right to Paint does not stand a chance. Westerners do npt want to pay hundreds of pounds to get on a plane to visit people who look exactly like they do. Their attitude is like the French critic that Baykam quotes satirically on page twenty-two: “When I come to Turkey . . . I want to find the Turkish spirit. This is what interests me. Who are you Turks, how do you live, I want answers for that.”
To which a Turk might perfectly reasonably say, ‘I live in a flat, take two hours to drive through rush hour traffic to work in the morning, eat more ready-prepared meals than are good for me and have 2.2 kids, just like you.’ But you see what you want to see. Hence the Turkish Tourism Board adverts showing on the television screens in Istanbul public transport: a dervish in a white robe and tall hat whirling over a backdrop of Ottoman mosques and hammams and the odd unspoiled beach, and a voice-over borrowed from the spiritual father of the Mevlevi Sufi order, Rumi: “Come, come, whoever you are.” The Mevlevi order, it should be pointed out, is still officially illegal in Turkey, along with other Sufi orders.
Look at the changes in the Turkish book market too. In a series of articles published in the New York Review of Books after 2010, the English writer Tim Parks argued that the globalization of the book trade has affected literary styles, as non-English language authors strive to appeal not just to a national audience but to a far larger international one too. “[Anything] that would require real inside cultural knowledge to be understood, is avoided, or shifted away from the center of the book,” he writes. Linguistic experimentation is out because it is too difficult to translate. Instead comes what he describes as a colorful non-realism full of extravagant extended metaphors, foregrounded literariness and oneiric elements of fantasy and fable—in a word, exoticism.
The articles reminded me of Orhan Pamuk, the famed Turkish author, whom Parks in fact mentions. His first novel was a sort of Turkish version of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, a great, thick realist depiction of three generations of a bourgeois and very Westernized Istanbul family. His second novel was realist too. Neither have been translated into English. His third, The White Castle, has. It is the story of two men, an Italian slave and his Ottoman master, the spitting images of each other, whose lives entwine so much you end up wondering who is who. Pamuk followed on with the books that made his name, My Name is Red, an Ottoman whodunit with chapters quirkily narrated by coins, dogs, and Death as well as people. His best work, Black Book, is a novel full of references to Turkish mysticism.
It’s interesting, while we’re at it, to note Pamuk’s affection for the thriller format: My Name is Red, Black Book, Snow, even New Life all have elements of the thriller about them, because no story-telling genre has negotiated globalization more successfully than the thriller. Think of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, The Killing and Inspector Montalbano. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that thrillers provide the reader with tighter fictional framework than other genres—a mystery to be solved and a lone protagonist to solve it. That clarity of premise and certainty of final destination shields the reader from the potentially intimidating strangeness of the foreign backdrop. The fictional detective is a bit like one of those tour guides who carry bright flags so as not to lose their charges in a crowd. He is a bit like a tourist too, baffled at first, before the hidden grammar of the case—or the country—begins to become clear.
The re-branding of Turkey’s other internationally-known novelist is equally striking. Elif Şafak (outside Turkey she refers to herself under the Anglicized version of her name, Shafak), now writes her books in English and oversees their translation into Turkish, and her themes increasingly seem to be chosen to appeal to an international audience. She became famous in the West with The Bastard of Istanbul, her take on Turkish attitudes towards the 1915 Armenian genocide. It is an important issue in Turkey (and a sensitive one too, as the court case brought against the book showed); although I would humbly submit that it is perhaps not quite as important as Western coverage of Turkey would have us believe. But Şafak’s treatment of the theme was instructive: her protagonist was an American girl of Armenian origin who comes on a visit to Turkey. The same distancing technique appeared in her next novel, Forty Rules of Love. Again the protagonist is an American—an East Coast housewife this time—tired with life and her loveless marriage, who finds meaning in a book about Rumi, and eventually travels to Turkey. The book within the book is also written by a Westerner, a Sufi who hails rather improbably from Kinlochbervie, a tiny village on the northwest coast of Scotland.
In a way, the strangest thing about Forty Rules of Love was that hundreds of thousands of Westernized Turks, many of them anti-American to the marrow of their bones, read it. Not only is a Turkish reader of the novel essentially introduced to an aspect of his or her own history by a foreign protagonist, there is a strong underlying emphasis on an exotic vision of Turkey that they should by rights detest. In Şafak’s novel, the West represents sterility and elaborate consumerism (with a lot of attention given to the complicated dishes the protagonist cooks for her husband and children: rhubarb lattice tarts every Friday, for example). The East is the profundity of the mystical spirit and of the heart. Cultural conservatives in Turkey and elsewhere in the Muslim world have always loved this cliché (compare Said Qutb’s description of his time in America as a student). Increasingly, the West, nourished by its fantasies of noble savagery, seems to love it too.
What about Turkish politics, though? Surely that is different from literature, too focused on domestic perception and too downright solid to be affected by wishy-washy matters like global image and brand?
I am not so sure. For a start, I think part of the success of Forty Rules of Love among Turkish readers is down to a (largely unconscious) political realization among the Westernized Turks who read it that their civilizational model has fallen from favor. They are the children of a worldview that formed at the high tide of nineteenth century Western optimism; but the tide has turned and they, having vainly screamed on the beach, like King Canute in reverse, for the sea to come back up, and they have now been forced to adapt. Islam is the brand in Turkey today, not the idiosyncratic secularism of Kemal Atatürk and his descendants. To talk, you have to make a show of using its jargon.
In political terms, the key milestone in the re-branding of Turkey was 9/11. Before it, the West was willing to turn a blind eye while the Kemalist army shunted an Islamist prime minister from power. Afterwards, amid all the fiery White House talk of crusades against Islamic terror, there was a need for a counter-balance. ‘Moderate Islam,’ ‘Muslim democracy,’ ‘mild Islamism’—the exact terminology varied, but it meant that the leaders of Turkey’s new government (the former right-hand men of the man the army had taken out in 1997) found a much more sympathetic ear in Washington than he ever had.
At the same time there was Turkey’s European Union accession process. The impulse behind the European experiment seems universalist: the idea of a civilization that transcends nations, of democracy triumphant and the universality of human rights—but in the case of Turkey, the rhetoric of accession was increasingly colored by a heightened post-9/11 sense of the need to combat perceptions of a clash of civilizations.
Christopher Hitchens gave a good example of the sort of rhetoric I am referring to in an article he wrote in 2004. The speaker is George Bush talking in Istanbul in 2003, but the words could just as easily have been issued from the mouth of a European politician. The fact that the finest view of Istanbul was not from its European or its Asian shores but from the “bridge that unites them” should be a lesson to us all, the president opined. For the important thing in this world “is not the clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West.” No! What is important is to recognize “that other peoples in other continents and civilizations” are “exactly like you.” Bush’s quotation, by the way, came from Orhan Pamuk.
All the more reason to bring on the European Union. What better civilizational bridge than Brussels? Turkish membership would be a final proof that there was no gulf between East and West after all.
It would be silly to blame the slow death of Turkey’s accession process on this rhetorical turn. European bungling on Cyprus alone was enough to do that, and the Turkish government ultimately was not very keen on the whole accession idea either. But it did serve to make Turkey’s “difference” from the rest of Europe more visible. If every article about Turkey in a Western newspaper reminds readers that Turkey is a ‘mainly Muslim’ country or, even more spuriously, ‘ninety-nine percent Muslim,’—even if the aim is to push the anti-clash of civilizations agenda, there is a risk that readers stop thinking about high-minded things like the universal attraction of European democracy and begin thinking about beards and suicide bombs instead.
Whatever the reason, Turkey and Europe are drifting apart: inside Turkey, neo-Ottomanism became popular, and with the start of the Arab Spring the West began to re-brand Turkey as a Muslim democratic model for the Middle East. The two, when you think about it, go together rather well—but some in Turkey protested. Kürşat Bumin, a philosopher, observed that once Turkey had been on a scale with Europe on one end and the Middle East on the other; now the scale had been Islamized, with Turkey at one end with its liberal Islamic model and Iran at the other representing conservative Islam. The change, Bumin said, constituted a down-grade: “Democracy is a universal value, not a regional model.”
Then Syria collapsed, taking the Turkish government’s hopes of regional domination with it. All that remains brand-wise—in a country that has just been promoted to investment grade by Fitch, and blasted by the Committee to Protect Journalists for its dismal record on press freedoms—are Ali Saydam’s protests against Olivier Megaton and the favorite slogan of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: ileri demokrasi—‘Forward democracy.’ Make of it what you will.
