alazada

[alazada]

the May issue of the Bosphorus Review of Books has two poems by me, written in Turkish and translated into English. 

[alazada]

Information being objective is preferable by most to its being subjective – we trust objective information more easily because we think it reflects the facts and we want to think that we are getting the real, actual facts to form our own opinion, or to mirror the so called objective fact in our opinion and call it our own. However, true objectivity is impossible to reach in non-numerical data, all information passes through at least one human observer, us ourselves if not any middlemen. Even numbers can be manipulated and presented according to a person’s preexisting opinions, often without noticing. The natural sciences are not objective either: the data is read through the researcher’s lens and usually serves the purposes of a group. Research contains gender, racial, cultural, or other forms of bias. But we still value objectivity and consider it an ideal to strive to in our accounts, and we decide who is objective and who is subjective when acquiring information, and make up our minds accordingly. However, as everything involving human interaction, the way we evaluate objectivity is not neutral; it is political.

We tend to consider ourselves more objective than others if we do not consciously hold a bias, or at least we trust our objectivity easier than the objectivity of others, as we would know if we were not being objective. This leads to two things: first, we are more inclined to believe the words of people similar to us, because they are probably more objective. Second, we tend to disregard the societal influences on our ideas of objectivity.

Let’s explore the example of gender. We associate manhood with objectivity, or rather womanhood with emotional responses and a lack of logical thinking, while it has beenproven scientifically that there is no such thing as a male brain or a female brain, that women are socialized from childhood to be more empathetic and perform emotional labor while men are socialized to avoid displays of emotion and are not taught to perform empathy the same way women are, and that there is no significant difference between logical thinking of men and women. Still, we associate womanhood with emotional responses and second-guess women’s opinions or narratives of women, we do not consider them to be accurate and lived accounts but tainted with emotion and therefore subjective and therefore not worth considering in the so called real world. But the real world (laws, social policies, attitudes towards women) directly impacts the experiences women have navigating the said world, and it is only natural that their voices should be a driving force in shaping it, for example in issues like reproductive health. But then, the issue of subjectivity arises: according to the dominant narrative, a woman (or someone affected directly by a problem) cannot be trusted to opine or legislate on it because they cannot be objective(as it affects them directly).

But then, the dominant narrative of objectivity holds the opposite of this true as well. People outside the dominant narrative, for example, people from outside the Western world, or minorities in a country, or very young people, or very old people, cannot offer an objective account of the dominant narrative and therefore cannot be trusted. To give a concrete example: I cannot be trusted in issues about Turkey because I must be biased, as I am from there and I am a member of the ethnic majority there, and so on. But then, I cannot talk about American politics, because I am not from there, and same goes with Europe. This makes me think that the problem is actually about me, since some people can very well talk about their own countries (I don’t think I ever heard someone be told that they cannot talk about Switzerland since they are Swiss, that is, with conviction and in a serious discussion, as a random example), and then they can use their objective outsider perspectives to make objective and true declarations about countries they have nothing to do with, enlightening locals and other foreigners alike. I am sure the locals appreciate your objective perspective based on a few readings and a week-long trip (or even years of study, as these are not really what we use when classifying narratives), and want to thank you for rescuing them from the crushing subjectivity for spending a lifetime in their own country, from having a complicated and nuanced experience that can only be expressed in a complicated and nuanced narrative, and sometimes being unable to just walk away from the country because of their deep ties. As it seems, voices outside the dominant narrative are subjective no matter what, and voices from within are automatically objective due to the virtue of not being marginalized or holding any actual stake in the conversation. Of course dominance is highly contextual, but in most given discussions it seems to work like this.

To deepen the personal example, I (and when I say I, I don’t mean just I, I know many people experience this, but I will speak for myself for now) am not trusted on many issues about Turkey because I may be subjective about it. Which is, to this day, odd to me because it encompasses several assumptions: it assumes that I am not able to make the correct decision for myself based on the information I encounter, which is infantilizing and condescending in itself. It assumes that I am incapable of reaching accurate information based on the press freedom limitations in my country, which is honestly insulting as I was 8 when I learned how to use anonymous proxy filters to access banned websites, and 12 when I learned to change my DNS settings and use VPN’s – not out of interest but more out of necessity. I think I am capable of using my English skills (I am proficient – I even have IELTS scores to prove it) and my Turkish-citizen-starter-pack tech skills to access information. Moreover, I can access information in Turkish provided by dissidents and independent sources, and even by non-independent sources, so that I have an idea of what all sides are thinking (and somehow not believe everything I see!). I do not have the luxury of considering being available in English as a measure of worth when it comes to information, thankfully. And then the last assumption, or rather conviction is that the direct impact of the issues we are discussing on my life are negligible or somehow a hindrance to a pure logical discussion. The truth is – you can go on with your life without remembering my country exists. There are millions of people who live and die without even learning anything about my country. I cannot do that. I can move away and have a life elsewhere but I will always be carrying the country with me, and I will have a level of attachment to there. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s complicated, but it shapes most interactions I have. Additionally, I most probably cannot go on with my life ignoring your country as well, as its policies influence my country and my life.

The next time you feel like telling someone that they’re not capable of talking about their own country because they must be brainwashed, please consider that you’re assuming they’re incapable of assessing their own situation – usually some kind of Orientalist assumption that the Oriental peoples are incapable of self awareness and self determination. You are assuming their critical thinking skills are not as developed as yours. Also, people of all countries may be manipulated and brainwashed to an extent about their country through childhood and education, and most people put effort into unlearning this. I know that I personally had to question and reconsider many things I was taught in school and reached different conclusions, and so did many people I know. This is a real effort one has to make, and it is important to recognize this before writing someone off as being brainwashed. I would not claim to have more insight about the functioning of French society even if I studied France extensively, because I did not grow up here and can only learn about some aspects instead of living through them and observing firsthand. I may have a different perspective based on my own experience and origin, but I would not claim to be more objective and therefore a more reliable source on France.

I’m definitely not saying only the citizens of a country should be able to speak about it, of course not. But the problem begins when we start ascribing this title of “objective” to outsider voices, and “subjective” to insiders, and go on to only considering the objective as legitimate. The insider voice isn’t necessarily subjective, but more importantly, especially in the social sciences, subjective is not inherently less valuable and less valid. A subjective voice is colored by personal experience and even reflects what an (objective!) ethnographic study can reflect. I find it important to listen to a variety of subjective voices and construct a narrative combining them, considering the reasons for differences in these narratives and experiences. The fact of not being from a country can have its own subjectivity, as your information will be either from research that’s been through other people’s lenses already, or what you can observe as an outsider with an inevitable gap in context. We should stop considering objective and subjective as adjectives evaluating the validity of a narrative, or as inherent traits, and start questioning the reasons behind our classifications, and the selectivity in our application of this framework. Let’s learn from subjective insider accounts, and place the outsider accounts in their own context of being an outsider, perhaps being from a globally dominant perspective or having a different worldview. Everyone’s accounts of the same topic will be colored by their individual circumstances, but some colors are considered default while others are marginalized with the title of “subjective” and everything it carries – and we need to change the way we think about objectivity.

[alazada]

“In the first hours of this year, a massacre happened in Istanbul, in the nightclub Reina, and 39 people were killed by an Islamic State militant. Everyone can guess the shock and grief that followed, and the almost omnipresent feeling of solidarity with the victims. I had the chance to talk to a variety of people after the attack about it, and conservative, religious people of all ages acknowledged that this was an attack against a lifestyle considered alternative in today’s context, and they all considered this unacceptable. People celebrating the attack or implying the victims deserved it were marginal and few, and legal action was taken against them. There was substantial international media coverage of the event, partially because of the shock factors – New Year’s celebrations, high end nightclub, many tourist deaths. Along with these, there was a second kind of coverage: a series of articles on why “we” (we being the Western world) don’t care about Turkey or Istanbul or generally deaths outside the West. These articles explore the reasons why we (again, I am not in this “we” but the authors are) do not care about these deaths as we do for others, but fall short of critical thinking and consider their reasoning justified.

One article by Robert Fisk identifies racist reasons, military reasons and political reasons for this indifference. The reasons he identifies are not wrong in themselves, but the way he approaches the issue is from a perspective which assumes certain things, none of which relate to actual compassion or mourning for the dead, as the dead now have a nation and country and a government and a military which makes them unmournable. I am not asking for Robert Fisk’s compassion, actually, I have survived rather well without it for the past 19 years, but seeing a series of performative articles on why the Western world does not care about “Turkish deaths” (giving the act of being murdered a nation is iffy on its own, if one is talking about care at least, and not cold, hard politics) while trying to process said deaths is a bit jarring and frustrating.

First of all, this line of thinking subscribes to the “Every country has the government it deserves” approach, which just overlooks some things about how electoral systems work in real-life societies, especially complex and divided ones like Turkey. This is then painted as a valid reason not to care about Turkey (“Turkish deaths” to be more accurate, but as there were lots of victims from different backgrounds and as I don’t want to refer to dead people on the basis of their citizenship, I do not want to use this expression). The way this is framed would imply that the author is against the current government for its policies in the country and outside the borders. Which is reasonable, but then using this government and its policies as a reason not to care about the citizens living under the government (who are, by chance, the ones most affected by these policies, much more than any Western writer of opinion pieces sitting comfortably and safe well out of range). Following Fisk’s reasoning, if this attack is a result of government policies, then its victims, by extension, would be people negatively affected by the said government. Therefore, it would make sense that instead of using this fact against them, (as if you are punishing them for electing this government), one would be more inclined to show compassion to them. However, this specific perspective of Western media and people alike prefers to bask in a false sense of moral superiority instead of recognizing people who are killed as a result of terror are people who are killed as a result of terror regardless of their assumed nationalities and political alignments.

This also assumes that the entire country is in support of an elected government or has a finger in its acts. Beyond a misunderstanding of electoral systems, or a blatantly selective application of this fact (I don’t think every living American citizen is blamed for the election of Donald Trump, and American citizens who may be hurt by his presidency will not be met with indifference because of the election of Donald Trump, for example, and I have never heard of American citizens being denied compassion due to the war crimes and atrocities committed by their government), this shows a misunderstanding of Turkish society and the circumstances that led to the election of the AKP government. There are many reasons, and one would have to carefully examine 20th century Turkey to get a clear image but one of the primary reasons is the long-lasting societal cleavage between the urban-westernized-Kemalist section of the society and the rural-conservative-Muslims. AKP came forward as the party of the latter section, which had been pushed away from the elite centers of power.

One cannot paint the current government as the representative of or beneficial to the entire country and its people, this is so in most countries, but every citizen of Turkey has to carry this fact everywhere they go, in my experience I can say that one is constantly quizzed on their opinions of the government, and apparently one has to carry this fact in their death too, as a reason to be denied attention. This is not so for every country. The current situation is born of a divide, and it is convenient to ignore this and treat a society and country as a concrete block. It is also convenient to ignore the current situation of press freedom and social repression, if one wants to blame the opposition and imply that a lack of opposition is the reason for everything that happens, as if to say people wordlessly accept everything that happens in their country because they are indifferent. In a wider perspective, there is also a contradiction in this way of thinking. This way of thinking would consider the people of Turkey (along with many other non-Western societies), are incapable of determining their own future or understanding their own situation and choosing what’s best for them. There is this assumption of Western primacy that is condescending to other societies, seeing them as children who cannot tell good from bad, right from wrong. If that is the case, then the choices made by these societies are not the “right” choices to be made, but then they are still blamed for these choices collectively, even those who may not agree. Even if the people who die are pro-government, it is not up to some people living far away to decide the amount of attention anyone deserves, as they are not the people who are actually harmed by this government and this pretense of caring is very transparent. Terror has consequences affecting the entire country (worse economy, more fear, tightened political control, et cetera) and terror should be the focus of attention, not the “deaths”, if one is not a vulture seeking suffering to grade on an ideological purity scale.

Additionally, having one’s attention considered valuable enough to have written articles on why some people (or deaths) don’t deserve it seems like a level of confidence and entitlement I’d like to achieve one day. As I said before, I have lived to this day without the meaningful attention of Western societies, tragedy after tragedy, and I think when I die not much will change in this respect. However, I would like my life to have value in the eyes of the global community regardless of a government. The thing here which is “given” or not being given is not the attention itself but the value and humanity that some people are considered to have inherently, and some not. Attention itself has little material consequences, but this valuing of life and death determines how we react to tragedies, how we help those affected and the preventive measures we take and so on. Let’s stop pretending people’s attention is driven by their deep analysis of politics, let’s stop pretending it’s attention that’s the valuable commodity we need to deserve, and let’s admit that it’s not normal to write article upon article to justify a lack of response to a massacre. It helps nobody, changes nothing and is an easy way to demonstrate the lack of humanity allowed to people (dead or alive) in the collective imagination of some societies. It is easy to make statements from well out of range, and it is easy to disguise this as concern. It is true, nobody is obligated to pay attention, but let’s not pretend it’s about attention and let’s not pretend it’s a natural response to justify a lack of response to a massacre with a series of points about politics.”

[alazada]

“I am skeptical of using dictionary definitions as a measure of what a word actually means when in use, dictionaries are written by people and the people who write dictionaries have the power and authority to dictate what a word’s “official” definition is. What the dictionary says is not a justification for using and not using a word.

The Oxford dictionary defines “immigrant” as “A person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country”. The same dictionary defines “expatriate” (expat for short) as “A person who lives outside their native country”. Building on dictionary definitions, we can see that in theory, all immigrants are expats, and the only difference between an expat and an immigrant is the permanence of this move. The problem with dictionary definitions is that they appear neutral – it is rare to see moral judgment on the pages of a dictionary, but the words themselves are loaded with the connotations we surround them with, and the supposed neutrality of a dictionary definition allows us to deny this – it doesn’t mean anything bad after all! The fact that expat and immigrant are only distinguished by the condition of permanence in one (expats are also very frequently permanently installed in their new country, although it is not a prerequisite) does not change the fact that once we graduate, some of us will be immigrants and some of us will be expats. Not all expats are immigrants, but all (at least) first-generation immigrants are expats. Then why do we reserve this title for a certain group of people, and call the rest “immigrants”, even when the distinction of permanence is not there to be made?

When we look into the daily use of these words, we can see the divide between the two is due to the origin of the immigrant in question – people from the West are rarely immigrants, especially if they live in a non-Western European or North American country. But if they moved to a different country and have no plans in the foreseeable future to move somewhere else, why are they not considered immigrants in casual conversation? What determines whether a person is an immigrant or an expat? Here we can see that our use does not reflect the dictionary definition, so returning to Oxford will not help us much.

If we are being honest with ourselves, it is plain to see that we call people who experience hardships – discrimination, financial hardships, and culture shocks and so on – immigrants, and the rich, those who are exempt from otherness are expats. A person will not receive the treatment as an immigrant in two different countries in the world: this difference is shaped by their socioeconomic class, local perception of their origin, their race and racialized aspects of their life: religion, culture, and language. Our conception of an immigrant experience, an immigrant narrative reflects this – the story of a family moving abroad would not be considered an immigrant story without economic hardships, integration problems, alienation, discrimination and so on. The issue also differs in permanence: children and even further descendants of immigrants still carry or can claim the label of immigrant, while children of expats are not considered foreign by the virtue of having been born there. These are few of the differences in our understanding and treatment of these words – this both exists in our minds while we try to keep a pretense of egalitarianism, but it has also been occasionally institutionalized in countries with overwhelming immigrant populations like Gulf States, with a very clear cut divide between rich and mostly Western expats and migrant workers, who almost provide coercive slave labor. Both race and socioeconomic position plays into this.

But then, if all foreigners are not created equal – or if foreignness by itself does not equate discrimination and persecution, what is xenophobia? Let’s return to Oxford one last time – “xenophobia” is defined as “Dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries” here, but it is plain to see that dislike or prejudice (and its systematic repercussions) are not aimed at “people from other countries” because of this sole fact. I can give examples – people from European countries and people from North Africa are both “from other countries”, but this does not mean both will face xenophobia in France. Similarly, my experiences relating to my citizenship were vastly different when I was a tourist in Europe and a tourist in Jordan for a month this summer. So the determinant is neither the person, nor their origin, nor the country where the events are taking place. It is a reflection of the origin in the person, and the perception of this in the context of the host country.

To expand on the word “xenophobia” – we can even claim that the presence of this word and its widespread application distracts from the real problem. It is possible to pretend that people are not treated according to their origin and their class – it is because they are foreigners, so the problem lies in the fact of foreignness and not a systematic problem within the host society. Foreignness does not mean anything if it is not combined with a set of formed opinions about one’s origin – adjectives like uncivilized, barbaric, dirty, misconceptions about their cultural practices, values, and so on. Two people from Sweden and Turkey are both foreigners in, let’s say, Germany but their foreignness is not worth the same. What is faced by the Turkish “immigrant” is not xenophobia, but a permutation of racism in its manifestations – racism, Orientalism, Islamophobia, and the Swedish “expat” is free of these connotations. Writing this off as xenophobia and putting the weight on the fact of foreignness allows us to overlook the nuances of the situation and the faults in how we view different forms of foreign.

The other aspect I want to discuss is class – when we examine two people from the same cultural background – the same kind of foreignness, let’s say, we can still see a wide range of experiences. A person who is financially very comfortable, a person able to get a well paying and respectable job, a person who has access to good neighborhoods and schools, a person whose English is passable as proper does not have the same experience as an unskilled worker forcibly integrated into the local working class as a second class within it. The varieties and nuances in this aspect are infinite – there are countless cases where it may boil down to the individual’s conditions, but simply: what is clear that we do not call rich people immigrants and we do not call poor people expats. If expats lose their relative wealth and experience financial hardships, or downwards mobility across generations, they will not suddenly become immigrants. If immigrants experience upwards mobility, they will most probably be immigrants who made it despite everything – despite being immigrants. This is again, an aspect of the permanence of the immigrant label when compared to the expat one.

But then, is there no xenophobia at all? Do people really not have a knee-jerk reaction to outsiders, national rivalries between similar states, jokes and stereotypes prevalent in all communities about every community with a different identity? I obviously cannot claim these do not exist – but again, just as not all foreigners are created equal, not all prejudice is created equal as well. People and communities will have ideas and prejudices about others, this is almost essential to defining one’s own identity – the process of putting it in opposition to others’ identities, but when two communities are “equal” institutionally – let’s say, two neighboring countries in Europe with similar socioeconomic conditions, the perception of the citizens of a country will not be a defining to the experience of a person who moved there from across the border.

Furthermore, the existence of these institutionally insignificant reactions can be used to justify actual harmful mechanisms – people are just trying to preserve their culture, their identity, their way of life, once again the problem lies in the foreignness and not in the systems making a problem out of it. Usually, the values being protected are invented and reproduced for the sake of a cultural identity to facilitate certain aspects of our modern life, and there is no real imminent threat to whatever exists of them.

Considering my skepticism regarding official definitions, I am not suggesting we get rid of these words altogether. In fact, losing the differentiation between these two distinct categories of moving people will have a similar effect as the xenophobia problem and prevent us from accurately expressing the problem at hand, effectively ruling out an attempt at a solution as you cannot combat something you cannot identify. On the more individual level, it may rob people of describing their experience as it is – there is a reason “immigrant experience” brings certain things to mind while “expat experience” reminds me (me personally, no offense!) of irritating travel and lifestyle blogs written with half-baked information and a patronizing tone, listen to my crazy life experiences among these quirky locals! We should instead stop pretending that words mean what dictionaries claim they mean and recognize the value judgments we make with our choice of words, and stop placing these labels (and building from it, people carrying them) into hierarchies. We should not put our focus on the fact of foreignness but try to see why it matters so much in our world – the questions “for whom does it matter?” can be a good point to begin.”