August 15th and Identity

I feel fine today. Istanbul’s splendor woke me smiling. Its complex hillsides and bright blue skies greeted me as I took my first look out the window. I saw the slopes of this captivating city covered with aging buildings; they look like steps going up the earth’s slant, and there live the people of Istanbul. The colorful, playful Turks busy themselves as they move about the city, their motorcycles, which their boys helped them wash by hand, buzz by on their way between peddling jobs. My lips press through a cherry near the rich blue water today to find a pit, which falls between the stones I’m walking on.
I don’t know Turkish, but it’s okay: a smile spans all languages.

“You’re beautiful,” he says to me after teasing by placing the cowboy hat he’s trying to sell to tourists for a moment on my head. The cool breeze and his cool words refresh me. This lighthearted, loving community humbles, houses, and comforts me—its hands and my hands intertwine with meaning (I feel Turkey must give meaning to everyone. What it feels for me is not something miraculous or special, and I’m okay with that). The tight grasp between our fingers causes me to sweat and my heart to pound with honest provoked emotion. This doesn’t happen often.

Places like the bazaars of this city capture its essence perfectly: a diverse collection of Istanbul’s people, each one tumbling with excitement over a new person, who themselves are stumbling with elation of a new taste, smell, or sight. Patterns, patterns, patterns! The complex array of this scarf before me, resting in my hand, calms me: it looks to me like a mosque ceiling. Tangled swirls and flower shapes accented with brilliant colors, it registers as cashmere as I smear my fingerprint across it. “For you, thirty lira!”

Being in Turkey makes me think about money. How much we long for something that has such intense power to ruin our lives. Having it and not having it can prove to be the same; we feel the same emotions, sing the same songs, bitch about the same type of trivial things. The haves and the have nots are essentially divided by what they can attain, for they both feel a sense of I want what I want when I want it and it’s really just the ones who can get it who we may call “privileged.” I beg, however, to differ. The privileged ones are those who are surrounded by not a cushion of money but a cushion of love. Their nest egg is health and their net worth is measured by happiness. Ethics remarks that it is not a large wallet that we strive for, it is happiness that makes our life worth living. Money will come and go—and maybe I can sit here typing on my laptop as an American student in Germany saying these things because I have lived a life with money (mind you not a bottomless sum, but enough), and maybe my remarks and economic leftism would differ had I grown up in a different part of my fiscally diverse city, but I still maintain my viewpoint. Why should something so unimportant –seeming have the power to divide us when our common human experiences should be strong enough to bring us together? But it does. Money does divide us. And very few people share my borderless viewpoint.



Istanbul.

Here are the rich and here are the poorer. Three city blocks and one hill away from each other. There they sit, sipping their steaming Turkish tea in what I can only imagine are their stuffy lofts, overlooking a city they care not to venture through. Some can see the slums from their prided real estate, turning their backs on that word in their mailing address which pin-points them on a map for they live in a place made by Escher, a futuristic stark-white simulated home of a world they don’t actually live in. White sterile tiles, white walls and glass dividers. Open air but you’re not outside. Eerie music bounces off the untouched walls on this in-home mall and Cineplex. She gets her Dior at home, of course. Two million Euro. We make fun of this place, we mock the people in it. I ask Orhan if this is a desired way to live, in this multi-plex, cinemax shopping world. Apartmall, they should call it. “It is the posh way to live,” he tells me, “the rich people of the city could purchase an old house on the outskirts of the city and fix it up. They could have a whole house! They could make it very nice after buying it for just a couple hundred Euro. But no, they choose to live here.”

And away we walk. I stand at a point where in one direction, about a hundred feet away, I see this Euro-topia, standing ambiguously proud and all-knowing. I turn just half way around and there, another hundred feet away, are the poor. Orhan points this out as well. I have a short discussion with Cassie about how picturesque the poor homes are and how I would love to live in this section rather than the other. Grey and red faded cobblestone, pink houses, yellow houses, red houses, blue. Children playing, clothes hanging. The danger lies in poor infrastructure and the risk of earthquakes but I’m okay with that, I’ve lived in fear of earthquakes my entire life. This seems so carefree. It just seems barefoot, if anything can seem like such. There are animals here. There’s suffering, but there’s laughter over the little things. Here, there is blistered hands and scraped knees. There’s dirt. The kind of stuff life should consist of. The Homo sapien did not know “stark-white.” What is that?

“But they’re trying to change exactly what ‘Istanbul’ means,” she says to me.

She’s right, and it pains me. What exactly does that mean for someone’s identity, though? We are defined so strongly by what we innately are. Kettle, stop being black. That doesn’t work. Is it still even a kettle? We know well that a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but whether or not this holds water in the question of identity, I am not sure. I’m quite skeptical, actually. It’s just not how things work. Might Istanbul’s redefinition reversely ruin its name, its icon, its content? It will absolutely change it. New Istanbul might be in order, for what else is left of its identity after all these things are washed away?



“They’re gathering to watch us,” Sally says as Turkish children, playful boys, address our group from the porch where they hang out. In Turkish, of course: “What are you doing?” “Very beautiful.” “We found an Asian!” Maybe the children of this neighborhood will preserve the name of Istanbul and thus maintain its essence.