Normal Turks
On "The Abduction from the Seraglio", Burning Days (2022, dir. Emin Alper), and sinkholes
Last Friday, I was at Vienna Volksoper for a modern production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera, “Die Entführung aus dem Servail”, known in English as “The Abduction from the Seraglio” or “Il Seraglio”. Originally debuting 1782 in Burgtheater, this opera is about Belmonte (a tenor), who must travel to Bassa (pasha) Selim’s servail (saray, meaning palace) to find his love, the abducted Konstanze (a soprano). By his side is his friend Pedrillo (another tenor), who started to work as a gardener - one of Selim’s great interests besides architecture -, and he manages to smuggle Belmonte into the Ottoman Empire as an “architect of great talent”. Pedrillo, too, must find his love, Blonde (a soprano). But there’s the palace guard Ossmin (a bass), who sees right through Pedrillo and Belmonte’s schemes of “stealing women from them”, and also harbors some feelings for Blonde himself — and, who could forget, Bassa Selim himself, who would like Konstanze to fall in love with him voluntarily. Hijinks ensue. The whole play is quick-paced and often hilarious, especially Ossmin’s songs. Near the end, our main four are apprehended. Bassa Selim, a convert who had to flee to the Ottoman Empire, finds out that Belmonte is the son of the man that made Selim and family flee, but in the end, he lets them go. Violence can’t beget more violence; Konstanze has never loved him back.
Or that’s how the play usually goes. In this modern production, directed by Ankara-born and Berlin-based Nurkan Erpolat and new spoken passages written by Sulaiman Masomi, the almost three-hundred years old play gets a facelift and a whole lot of annotations: Belmonte makes a snide comment about how “Arabia and Turkey are all the same”, Blonde asks the girls in the harem to unite against men, and over wine, Pedrillo and Ossmin talk about how they can’t help but be enemies — but really, it’s all the Chinese fault, since they invented gunpowder. In what felt like a serious side jab at a certain kind of Turk, a Turk very familiar with an audience that hears about this kind of Turk in the news, Ossmin declares how superior Turks are over the Westerners, how they learned everything from the Turks. But it’s Selim who takes the cake of spoken word moments that sound like annotations by the smartest Twitter person you know. He speaks of how male supremacy expects women to be “sex goddesses without the sex” and, in the end, completely breaks the fourth wall.
In this production, German actor Murat Seven, who plays Selim, talks about his own struggles — as a Turkish man who is constantly othered by this society, as an actor always getting the same kind of roles (usually criminal or perfect), living in a European Union that turns the Mediterranean Sea to a mass grave of dead immigrants. What was once the backward, exotic, strange Ottomans to the collective imagination are now a working class that cleans toilets. Did Austrian audiences really need a character like Bassa Selim — “not even an actual Turk!” Seven shouts — to realize that Turks are just people, too? When will he be able to play a normal Turk? He shakes his head at the end of his monologue. Finish the play, he says. The other actors clamor around him. No, Murat, that’s not you, Stefan Cerny (the bass playing Ossmin) says. Seven grabs a machine gun and shouts: “Finish the play!” An artificial gunshot is sound, and the five singers finish the play. The last aria is, ironically, about how great Bassa Selim is. Selim stands around, listening to it for a bit, and then turns around and leaves. Murat Seven got thunderous applause at the very end — not as much as the soprano playing Konstanze, Rebecca Nelson, nor as much as Stefan Cerny (and the bass who had to dub over him for Ossmin, Ante Jerkunica).
My sister, who I saw the play with, had an issue with the end of the monologue. Did he really have to point the gun at the sky, forcing the cast to finish the play? Wouldn’t it be better if he was ultimately reasonable about it? After all, she reasoned, he declared this theater world safe, free from all the violence. The show must end, which is a bummer. But at least let’s leave this world as safely as we entered it. Something like that. It bothered me the morning after, truth be told. I like violence in fiction. I don’t really care for the sanctity of a fictional world that is free from the friction that I see all around me. It added a layer of irony to it, the way the play ends with how great Bassa Selim is, played by an actor who is tired of being glorified or vilified just for being Turkish. That worked for me. It’s all the other things that felt on the nose. I thought of how the Ottoman Empire, them Turks, were Europe’s archenemies for centuries, mostly just to make the lame joke in my head about how we were the children of these janissaries that couldn’t conquer Vienna. It doesn’t have the “daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” ring to it. Mostly, all night, I thought of “normal” Turks.
After World War II, Europe was ravaged with labor shortages. That meant that countries like West Germany (from 1955 on) signed agreements with other countries to send workers here, for a brief time, to do that labor. In 1961, Turkey and Germany signed an agreement, and Turkish citizens from rural areas started to live here. The brief time started out with one-two years, but turns out living in a new country with poor wages wasn’t enough to go back… and why even go back? Eventually, families were allowed to move with the guest workers. My mom told me it was in the seventies, when she was four years old. They used to live in a one-room apartment, all five of them, for years until my mom married my father and they moved out — after which they lived in another dinghy apartment. I remember moving to the place we are at now in 2001, back when the room I am in now was completely empty, my dad in the work uniform, painting the walls (or working). Dad moved from Turkey to here in 1989. Originally an accountant, he started working first as a groceries vendor at a local market, then lifting heavy plates at a wood-processing factory.
I couldn’t tell you what generation immigrant I am. For my own convenience, I say I’m second generation. I am the third child of this family and was the first to be born here. Honestly, though, from my mom’s side, I’d count as third generation, and from dad, second. Two and a half-th? I can tell you Austrians don’t care as much as I do. Austrians don’t care for a distinction between being Turkish, a nationality and ethnicity, being Muslim, a religion, and being Ottoman, a former nationality although not an ethnicity. For all my school life, I was the only Turkish girl in class, and eventually the only Turkish person. I was asked how many times “we Turks” prayed. I was asked to account for every “shitty” thing Muslims do by a class that kept shouting at me in high school. I was told in middle school I was not like the other immigrants, because I was “integrated”. Integration is mostly about how good your German is, how accentfree. If you speak Turkish at home, that’s not great, but if your German is flawless, it’ll have to do. If there was a match between Turkey and Austria, and you rooted for Turkey, the understanding was that the immigrant kid would never be fully integrated. They can’t shake off their Turkishness, nevermind how much the Turk themself would want to.
I was told that my face was very Turkish, in high school. How I was not like the other Turks, because I worked hard and I paid taxes and I was not “abusing the social welfare state”. I obsessed over the face comment and asked people at my summer job or even at my physical therapy sessions if I seemed so. I was told I look Austrian; I still don’t believe that. I was told with an accent like mine — a very put on Viennese dialect I had picked up from my Viennese coworkers — nobody could ever question my Austrianness. That sounds funny when I type it like this. Question my what? My name is enough to let everyone know I’m not. Hell, Elif is one of the most popular girl names in Turkey, and Austrians will still ascribe it as a guy name. Or ask me if Elif is my last name.
To my parents, my Turkish — linguistically, culturally — has always been a slippery slope that I do not do enough to cling onto. I was feeding from Western waters. The Austrians were crude, backwards in culture, and all they did was excessively drink and talk shit. I was not speaking, reading, listening to enough Turkish. But I hear the other Turks in Vienna speak Turkish and they don’t speak like I do. We were at a pizza joint once and it turned out to be ran by Kurdish people. The waiter asked us, my brother and me, how come our Turkish had no accent. I was stumped by the question. Meanwhile, of course, Turkish people in Turkey have different opinions. I was in Izmir one time, and I happened to say the name “Stefan Zweig” right. The girl at the counter asked me if I could read Turkish, “since you said the name right”. That was just one time, though. I would probably fit in Turkey better than some other Turkish people from Austria do.
I don’t say this to humblebrag. I don’t live in Turkey. I live here, and my Turkish contacts here are quite fleeting. Even if we saw eye to eye on some of the basic facts, of being oppressed in Austria in a million different ways, there’s the politics. There’s the aspect of faith. There’s the culture, I suppose. I don’t watch dizis. I watch limited series and exclusively in English. I like to write, and my stories may feature Turkish characters, but they’re not “normal”. They are always haunted, always obsessing over something. I write these stories, this very essay, in English because I knew from a young age that if I wanted to reach the widest amount of people, I’d have to speak the worldwide lingua franca. I couldn’t write you this essay in Turkish. I guess that means my parents are right. But also, I speak to animals and babies of all ethnicities in Turkish. I would have the hardest time naming some vegetables and fruits in German or English. I only know them in Turkish.
All my adolescence, I considered that I had to make a choice: be Austrian or be Turkish. I considered the two to be a gap, one that I had to bridge by making the splits, ripping my muscles apart to manage two extremes that seemed irreconcilable. Then at eighteen/nineteen, I listened to mor ve ötesi, and through that discography listening experience, I thought: I’m a Turk now. That’s what I’ll call myself. I’m not Austrian. That German-Turkish soccer player Mesut Özil came to similar conclusions in 2016 (when he wins, he’s German; when he loses, he’s “Turk”) made me feel very seen. But, like… I like this city. I was raised here, and not in Turkey. I was raised among Austrians, and not with Turks. I’m Viennese (but not Austrian). I can’t exactly deny one aspect to highlight another. In the end I fell into the gap of Turkishness and Austrianness, and I realized the dark was comforting and always at the exact temperature I needed, and I made my home there. I realized that there were other people in the dark, in the same place (mentally, not physically), and felt comfortable. I am from Vienna, which pisses the right people off; and I’m a Turk, not Austrian, which hilariously pisses the same people off. And I won’t vote for the parties that remember every single election cycle that Turkish votes (or the votes that are against them Turks, them Syrians, them Chechens, etc) can bring them to parliament. Integration is a game, and I’m not playing it. Or rather: I’ve played it, and now I find the game is done and I don’t have to.
I don’t consider myself the exception to the rule of Turks that are tossed to the wayside by the government that considers integration a way to bootstrap yourself out of the miserable conditions and class they created. But I also don’t consider myself the rule, either. Turks are too broad a category. I understand Austrians and Germans don’t like to hear that, though. Why risk displaying that breadth of humanity when you can make all Turks perfect immigrant side characters or criminals that need to be dealt with? After all, if these Turks were truly normal, they’d be back in their country already, where they “come from”: where they belong.
Emin Alper’s movie Burning Days (in Turkish: Kurak Günler, “days of drought”) needed some time to come onto domestic theaters, and it eventually did so last December. The reason for that was because the Turkish ministry of culture felt “betrayed” by the script, so Emin Alper was asked to pay back (which he eventually did). The script features a homosexual relationship between the two male leads, the prosecutor Emre (Selahattin Pasali) and the local newspaper editor Murat (Ekin Koc), although anyone who has seen the movie knows that using the word features is much too strong for what’s going on in the movie. What Burning Days actually features — in the very sense of centering, highlighting it — is what’s been going on in Turkey for the past twenty years, especially the last six years.
The metropolitan-born and raised Emre arrives to Yanıklar (Turkish for “burns”), a village in southern Anatolia. The village suffers from gigantic sinkholes, likely because the village causes them from pulling water from underground and doesn’t want to take the more expensive, but safe variant. Right away, arriving at the village, Emre is disgusted by what he sees: a wild boar chased by the locals, its corpse carried through the streets, leaving a bloody streak on the concrete. He’s also miffed by people shooting at the sky (relevant meme), and if the locals keep this up, he’ll have to fine them. But no matter, he’s new here. Here is a place of scarce water and scorching hot days, where the only way he can wash is by a local pond, full of people that his mother looks down upon. Here is a place where the newspaper editor will look at you smolderingly, with so much intensity that it makes you suspicious of everyone. Here is a place where everyone knows everyone at their absolute best.
So accordingly the mayor’s son and his best friend want to invite Emre over. Emre accepts reluctantly. He accepts quite a few things reluctantly: very strong raki, food, staying late to the night, passing out at the mayor’s house. What he doesn’t accept is sex trafficking, which the company alludes to (with the snide remark that if he doesn’t accept this, well, then is he… y’know…). Does that matter, though, when he’s passed out and the morning after, local Roma and dancer Pekmez ends up raped? Emre finds himself caught in a web of justice and crime, lost and altered memories, animosities and a forbidden kind of cordiality with Murat… In all of this is the looming election, between the re-elected mayor and another candidate that we never see.
The movie is split in four chapters. The last chapter is about the election night and when (spoilers) the mayor is re-elected, the local townspeople decide to celebrate. They celebrate with guns (trying to kill Murat), fires (burning down the local Roma camp, Murat’s print house), and chants (that they have rotten morals for… y’know…). Murat arrives at Emre’s place, and the mob goes after Emre’s house. When the only solution to find any kind of peace is to arrest Emre, Emre decides to leave his house. The mob stares at him, calmly, frozen in place, as he and Murat get into the car and start to drive. The drive goes okay until they encounter the hunters — those boar hunters — and then the hunters chase the two like boars. Then a sinkhole opens up, and on the other side are Murat and Emre.
There’s so many metaphors in this film, right, and the film itself already says in no uncertain terms what it is about. Murat, discussing the election, says: “The mayor’s time is over. The people are fed up.” and it was almost too real in the way people (typically the ones persecuted by Erdogan’s party, AKP) discuss his regime. The local newspaper (not the one Murat works for) plants a couple stories about how Emre raped Pekmez, that he’s a homosexual, and also wants the water supply to stop, and the people believe it — the chokehold government-aligned media has on the people, too, felt too real. This isn’t the safe world of fiction where friction can be abstracted. This is all friction. The blood. The heat, the drought. The water that the movie frequently uses to convey sexuality.
But I like to think of the sinkhole, the gap made literal, an unbridgeable gap. You’d think, after seeing the film, that the sinkhole was unambiguous in its symbolism. But it ends up representing a whole lot of things: a division of class, religion, ethnicity, gender (women are utterly sidelined here, and Pekmez is silenced and belittled) and yes, even sexuality. It’s a small wonder that Emre didn’t fall into the sinkhole. But there is one inside of him too: the sinkhole of that fateful night. Has he raped Pekmez alongside the others? Did he have sex with Murat; did Murat try to force himself to having sex? Did Murat lead him away? Is Murat manipulating him? The sinkhole is, well, what it is to be “normal”. The movie just asks you to behold the gap, in all its deep, endless glory. There are no people in these sinkholes, only inanimate objects: sand, stone, buildings. Careful not to fall into it.
People have fled Turkey into all sorts of directions: the United States, Sweden, Germany. This German fluter article talks about the New-Wave Turks for whom immigration “isn’t just a background, but a choice”. It was a choice for my dad too, to come here. It’s not treating him any different than my mom. So excuse me if I’m cold about this distinction: nobody here cares, Turk is Turk. Your name betrays you, your skin tone betrays you, and even if these things don’t, the game of integration will shift its rules so you lose. You will always lose. Is this a fate of the Turk? Our geographic fate, as we like to say? I understand, and deeply sympathize, with Murat Seven asking for better representation. That’s what this really is about, “normal Turks”. For that to happen, you’d need Turks to write these stories. Just the fact that this play is performed with a 2023 facelift where an actor has to mention their entire career of being sidelined is… it’s sad a bit, isn’t it? It’s so sad it’s banal, to ask for representation in 2023 (the year two thousand twenty-three).
Me, you can’t ask me to do that. I’m not interested in “normal”. My close friend told me that surely, I don’t write Orientalist sultans. I wouldn’t know what normal entails. I am more interested in people that do not consider themselves normal, or aren’t seen as normal. I am curious about the lines drawn in the name of “normal”. Who falls in the sinkhole, willingly or unwillingly, and what they do in the face of it. Who survives on the other side, irreconcilable with the others. The marginalized, the oppressed. The day people with names like mine, skin tones like mine, big noses like mine feel like they no longer need to “belong” to be a part of something. The world we have to fight for is the one where normal becomes no longer a thing. This world has none of the gossamer safety that fiction does. It’s all friction, all violence. The people that fight for everyone to be normal, the people that want differences eradicated, know this. It’s time for everyone else — the people I care about and respect — to stop pleading for inclusion, too. Don’t ask for Konstanze to fall in love with you. Don’t force her to it, either. You are the bassa. You have a palace in the sinkhole.
This was an excellent read! I always love the way tie these multimedia pieces together so neatly with your own insights throughout and the conclusion here is particularly strong.