Europe and the Turk

In Berlin, the plan was to begin a documentary photo project looking comparatively at the way different countries/cities in Europe and the US were coming to terms/dealing with large urban Muslim populations, especially since 9/11 raised Muslim immigration as a hot-button issue, and what was working and not working as far as multiculturalism/assimilationism. Berlin, Paris, London, Stockholm, LA, New York was the idea; I would start things off for just a couple weeks in Berlin so I had intelligent things to write and some photos to show grant communities when applying for travel money etc.
Afghanistan (my original thesis idea about bureaucratic incentive structures etc) was still the top choice, but if I’ve learned nothing over the past couple years of failed or half-done dream-up indy projects, it’s to have several backup plans. And Muslims in Europe is something safe I could get funding from university grants for, as opposed to Afghanistan.

The project never really went anywhere, in part because I realized that I didn’t really know yet what I was talking about. Actually it seems almost racist in retrospect to have assumed that any knowledge I have about Turkey the country would translate into understanding of a community living under a completely different set of circumstances: ie being “Turkish,” religiously devout Muslim, etc in Berlin means something completely different that in Istanbul. Alex, an American friend who speaks fluent German and much better Turkish that me and who was also in Berlin, accordingly told me that he didn’t think the comparison between Turks in Germany and those in Turkey was even particularly useful. According to him, Turks in Berlin tended to be more socially /religiously conservative than in Turkey, as many came as guest workers from rural areas, but in other senses much more liberal. Ethnically, for example, there seemed to be much less tension between Turks and Kurds—eg the other day Alex had seen Hurriyet, a standard-issue tabloid-ish high circulation nationalist-leaning Turkish newspaper, side-by-side with a Kurdish-language paper with an obviously pro-PKK headline. It seems obvious that the whole “THIS IS TURKEY, SPEAK TURKISH” linguistic nationalist mantra doesn’t make too much sense any more to Turks living in Germany, but having such polar opposites side-by-side on a newstand in Turkey itself would be just about unimaginable.

I asked the couple Turkish-German intellectuals I met with about this, and they seemed confused even by the question of why the newspapers appeared together. Yes, they were living together and in democracy and of course recognized each other’s rights to their own opinions; and anyway, splits between secular and Islamist/religious types were more salient and open than ethnic issues.

Also, according to Alex that a lot of people label themselves “Turkiyeli”—from Turkey—rather than “Turk”—Turkish, same word as the ethnicity—in Berlin, which generally only leftists and pc intellectuals use in Turkey proper (ie so as not to alienate non-ethnic Turks).

By far the most enlightening conversation I had was with Nevim Cil, a young political scientist. She had responded to my initial email about Turks in Berlin by tearing me apart for using the word "Turk.” We later met at a café and made peace. Her main point was that there’s been different waves of immigration from Turkey, roughly: poor, uneducated rural religious folk as “guest workers” starting in the 60s; intellectuals and urban Leftists following the ’71 and ’81 military coups; Kurds in the mid-80s to late 90s; and increasingly students who study in Germany and then don’t leave. These groups, themselves by no means internally homogenous, don’t necessarily have much contact or understanding of one another, and thus it doesn’t make sense to even refer to a “Turkish community” or design a photo project around the assumption of its existence. Conditions in West Germany, she said are also completely different from those in Berlin, as much of Turkish immigration took place during the Cold War when Berlin was in isolated urban bubble. Hence, Turks aren’t by any means a purely urban phenomenon in most of the former West, though one might get that impression from Berlin, where the original guest workers were recruited for factory jobs and many subsequent Turkish migrants moved to the same semi-segregated parts of the city for linguistic/cultural affinities.

How to even discuss the subject without reifying the notion of such a monolithic community, if only through semantics, is an issue that I’ve never really gotten past, hence my not really going through with the project after my first few days in Berlin. I think it might have worked to use the ready-made popular conventional designations of “Turks in Berlin,” “Persians in Los Angeles,” “North Africans in Partis” as a hook for buyers and starting point, but then to complicate the picture from there; but at any rate the more I learned about the issue the less qualified I felt to do an independent project on it, especially as my main gripe about most documentary photographers is superficiality/not knowing what they’re talking about.

A conversation I had the other night with an Iranian girl in her mid-twenties who's been living her in Vienna for 7 years may also be of interest. She said that growing up in Iran, she’d always thought of Turkey as part of Europe—her main exposure to the country was through TV: they got Turkish sitcoms and music videos with headscarfless/scantily clad women and the country seemed a bastion of relative cultural liberalism. Then she got to Vienna and was surprised that suddenly Turks were Oriental and Islamic, considered conservative and backward, which she attributed to the original wave of Turkish immigration of rural less-educated types as guest workers. What I thought was strangest was that when I asked her if people assumed she was Turkish, she said no, they usually though she was Italian or Spanish because she didn’t wear a headscarf. That seemed bizarre, as I hear non-headscarved girls chatting in Turkish walking down the street all the time around here.