On Cities and the Parallels of Unbelonging
"This is why I love this bustling hotbed of humans! I love them! I love them all! I love them all so much!"
I set up a Twitter account! It is @theturkishrug, if you wish to follow me there.
In The Anatomy of Story, John Truby describes the city as the “biggest man-made microcosm” and further introduces the idea of combining natural settings with the city for effective writing: the mountain, the ocean, the jungle, and the forest. The combination turns the city to a single unit with “special traits” the audience can recognize that hints at the tremendous potential of the city — for both good and bad. The potential in question isn’t just the world, but the character; their inception, their current state, their future development. It sounds obvious put this way, of course, but a city person lives a completely different life from someone in rural areas. Fiction is ostensibly acting the same way, under the parameter that the author chooses to focus on the city’s influence on a character. In the biggest man-made microcosm, it’s easy to feel small; in cities that look different in every district, it’s easy not to know what home is. In a city, home may not even exist, leaving you adrift and alone.
This post focuses on a small selection of media that embody this feeling.
“London makes you grow up real fast,” Rina Sawayama writes for her Genius liner notes on the song Paradisin’, a song that details her teenage escapades much to the chagrin of her mother. It’s the only other city with importance mentioned besides Tokyo, though nowhere near as often sung about as Tokyo is. Sawayama mentions the metropolis in Japan on on three different songs.
Sawayama, who immigrated to the UK when she was five, links her lack of belonging to several things: family struggles, the burden of intergenerational trauma, living in a place where she’s subjected to racist remarks, and bullying. And so, Akasaka Sad details a trip to Tokyo only to have her depression catch up with her: sad just like her parents, seemingly “forever and ever”. Sawayama has this to offer in the Genius liner notes: “I always hope that Tokyo will make me feel happier but it doesn’t.”
It’s only six songs later — in which she curses at the world, details her teenage escapades, admits to being a bad friend who falling out with people she’s traveled to Tokyo before, she arrives at Tokyo Love Hotel. Tokyo, in this song, is a shimmering place but misunderstood and wrongly appreciated by everyone else, unknown to anyone but her. In the bridge, she sings: “All the years figuring out / Spent my life shutting you out,” suggesting a time in which Sawayama felt the need to choose a side, or otherwise shut out her place of origin in order to belong where she lives now. For Apple Music, she mentions that in this song she both got afraid of tourists visiting Japan for the Olympics but also recalls Bad Friend, where she was the loud tourist with nothing to lose. In the end, she comments of the song:
It’s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I’m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.
Or, put more succinctly in the opening line in the next song Chosen Family: “Where do I belong?”
In Turkish series Halka, which ran on TRT in 2019, director Volkan A. Kocatürk frequently flies drones over Istanbul. In his vision, the sprawling high-rises of the city bend, flip, and get mirrored, an endless labyrinth of glass and concrete, nightlife refracted through a city that swallows everything in its wake. It’s a different vision of the metropolis compared to more traditional depictions of touristy places for the foreigner’s eye like in The Protector (Netflix), old and winding streets like in Alef (FX/BluTV), or a faceless could-be-anywhere city like in Love 101 (Netflix).
The show follows Cihangir Tepeli (Serkan Çayoğlu), the son of a mob boss, and Kaan Karabulut (Kaan Yıldırım), a man falsely convicted of murder, which both receive an anonymous tape that mentions a murder of two mob bosses and a swapped child in the middle. What connects it all is a mysterious symbol: two conjoined circles, with one in the middle, called halka (ring). There’s an event that Cihangir can’t quite recall and is receiving therapy for, but he’s also not sure if that even works. Things happen that reveal the cause of Cihangir’s amnesia and what he’s forgotten, and, as conventional of the mafia subgenre, trust is a revolving door. By the end, two friends break their ties, but still meet the end together. Istanbul plays a vital part what with it being a centuries-old city that connects two continents, just like how there’s two halka (up and below) in the series. The show plays this connection as early as in the second episode includes the insert song Istanbul by Pamela Tekin. In the second chorus she goes, “Istanbul lost you / Poisoned and worsened you / Who knows, oh God, how many people have played your stretched skin like a davul?” As Cihangir and his girlfriend Irem drive into a nighttime Istanbul, the song speaks for them, him, and everything to happen in the show.
One of my possibly most viewed anime clips ever is entitled “Izaya loves humans”. It’s a clip of episode 9, in which Orihara Izaya (of Durarara!!, set in Ikebukuro, Tokyo) twirls in his seat with shots of the metropolis interspersed. He shouts: There's just so much going on in this town that even I don't know anything about! It's an endless sea of entertainment! This is why I love this bustling hotbed of humans! I love them! I love them all! I love them all so much! “ In the Japanese, he mentions that there are “so, so, so many things in this town that continually appear and disappear!” Part of the reason why I love this clip so much is because of Hiroshi Kamiya’s excellent voice acting. But mostly, I love that it hits the nail on its head when it comes to living in a city, or just the city’s existence itself. Things do continually appear and disappear here; when you’re in a city, things happen - good or bad - every single day. All of it is human-made and human-sold.
Durarara!! includes gangs that usually have a certain colored tell on their clothes to mark themselves. Unlike them, however, Dollars - a new and dangerous gang - wear no such tells and are exclusively in their own chat. Needless to say, the city is filled with strange characters, among which protagonist Ryugamine Mikado - who enters Tokyo at the start of the series - doesn’t stand out at all. Or so we assume, until midway through the show, we find out that he is the leader of the Dollars (from dara dara, “not doing anything”). The timid boy turns laser-focused in front of the laptop, and as he arranges a meeting of the Dollars to find Celty Sturluson’s missing head, he says: “I wanted to lead a different life from other people”. Two episodes later, Orihara Izaya responds: “Life in Tokyo will become routine for you after six months or so,” three days, even, if Mikado were to choose the non-ordinary fact of life. The only way to escape it, Izaya continues, is evolving or devolving. Almost as if to prove his point, Shizuo throws a giant vending machine towards Izaya, and Mikado is left alone on an emptied plaza.
Driving in the Bayview, California of Need For Speed Underground 2 means that you will never see a human soul.
Sure, there’s comic drawings of Brooke Burke playing as Rachel Teller introducing you to the game, as well as various comic strips of gangsters and bribed guards before a race. You’ll hear people via phone. You’ll read people challenge you to races in horrendously mangled AAVE on the SMS system (oh yes, 2004). But you will never see a human outside of races. At night, Bayview is only a place for cars. Maybe that’s for the best; seeing people on the streets of Bayview would suddenly turn the crashes - displayed in delicious slow-motion - suddenly a lot less funnier than they tend to be. Driving through, only civilian cars will stop when you drive the wrong lane. Racers like you do not; why should they? Speed matters most and everybody’s in a hurry.
But as you drive over residences like the northern Jackson Heights, you still wonder about the Bayview residents. Perhaps they are the racers themselves. Or perhaps Bayview civilians have understood that nighttime means this is a place for cars only, that cars rule over human life, and are below the lawless. It’s a racing game, sure; “humans” sit behind the wheel, including you. But driving through the city in a race in Easy mode, when you’re +30 seconds ahead of your competition and you still hit the gas like there’s no tomorrow and there is just no soul out there besides you, an odd feeling sets in. Punk rock pieces play out loud while you drive on the highway, pass through large apartments and blinding lights of the South Market, or maybe even the nuclear plants down south in the Coal Harbor area. The characteristics of these districts - blindingly bright here, then dimly lit there - are stark and odd and there’s not a single soul besides you driving through it. The longer you spend there, the more the sprawling metropolis of Bayview - a fictional city composed of parts of Philadelphia, Beverly Hills, Camden, NJ, and Paul Brown Stadium, Cincinatti - becomes cold and artificial.
This is a city, but a place only to be admired and driven through, never to be lived in. Dawn never breaks. Compared to everyone else, their boring cars, you’re an oddity. Driving around in Need for Speed Underground 2, I often get the sense that my belonging to this city is purely transactional. That maybe, I can’t imagine anyone living there because all this city offers is a race.
More than once, Ray in In Bruges mutters: “Fucking Bruges.”
To him, the Belgian city - an old, charming city - could very well be hell. It’s definitely not Dublin, however, another thing Ray is clear about. Though his assassin partner Ken takes him to several touristy locations, Ray snaps: “Ken, I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I’d grown up in a farm and was [redacted], Bruges might impress me. But I didn’t, so it doesn’t!”
The city represents the past in the film. Ray and Ken’s boss Harry mentions that Bruges was the only happy vacation he had as a child - something he wanted to leave Ray at. An important scene happens at a park, on a slide. In churches, of which the old city of Bruges seems to have a lot of, Ray is constantly haunted by his past. Ironically enough, Bruges doubles also as a reminder that at this point, Ray will never be able to return to Dublin and that he doesn’t belong anywhere anymore. And so, we watch him go from one tourist spot to the next, wishing he was home, sensing - then knowing - that he never will return.
When we first meet the Syrian-American protagonist of Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night, he has no name yet. At least, not one he identifies with. Five years after his mother’s death, an orthonologist who was looking for a rare bird prior to her death, and unable to really paint outside of graffiti in a district of New York known as Little Syria, he stumbles one night upon the notebook of Syrian-American artist Laila Z, who mysteriously disappeared over sixty years ago - the only person to have drawn the bird that the protagonist’s mother had spotted.
In this novel, what unbecomes is a historically important part of New York, where Arab Americans have lived for decades, only for reconstruction, lack of landmark status, and - as it happens in this novel - hate crimes to rise in its stead. It’s in this setting that the protagonist finds a new chosen family, a connection to Laila Z’s own struggles to become whole in a completely foreign country. And birds, of course, migratory animals; a variety of bird species play a vital part for both Laila and the protagonist. Joukhadar weaves the fabric between identity and nature and country with expertly ease and in doing so, answers his own questions that he’s asked in the Goodreads interview for his first book, Map of Salt and Stars:
“I am tied by blood to Syria, and the country where my father was born is suffering while the country in which I was born still views us as not fully American. Where, then, does that leave me? And for people of Syrian descent living in diaspora, particularly for the generation of children who will grow up in exile because their parents left Syria for safety reasons, what can we take with us? What do we carry with us that cannot be lost?”
In a pivotal moment in the book, a little earlier before naming himself, the protagonist draws himself with feathers, covering himself and his chest - a part of gender dysphoria for him - up. It becomes the first painting of himself he doesn’t toss away. In the sketch, the protagonist becomes more than human: an angel, something divine and unique, part of a community both past and present.
The name he chooses for himself reflects that. In the wake of a city that tries to erase him, he becomes.
I grew up thinking Vienna, the city and not just its people, harbors animosity towards me. Then I visited Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, and all I could think of was how not-Vienna they were. Sometimes this was good: Istanbul and Izmir both have access to the sea, still the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen. The subway stations are far larger in both cities than they are in Vienna, light shining into them, spaces covered with beautiful tiles in Turkish motifs. But the streets don’t have the evenness to them that Vienna has, even in the outskirts. Both Istanbul and Izmir are hilly in a way Vienna isn’t. Markings for the visually impaired randomly ended in Karşıyaka, Izmir, where they wouldn’t in Vienna. It’s not just the Turkish cities I’ve been to: in Linz as well, all I can think of is how it isn’t Vienna. This makes sense, of course. Vienna is where I was born and grew up. At this point, it will always be my reference as to what a city is. But is it a home? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve come to love this city, both its historic inner city and its newly made Aspern-Seestadt; I love its history and I love the future that it holds. But that sense of never belonging in your birth city always stays, like a ghost just hovering right above the places in your heart and brain that speak of home.
"as a child of the diaspora" let me refrain from making a joke but how you've always been able to weave through the topics and make the connections to your identities has always been something i have greatly admired in your writing. i love the way you were so able to expertly channel the feeling of living in a city especially as children of immigrant parents we navigate these huge spaces where we more often than not feel we get lost in these crowds. another well-written piece can't wait to sit on the rug once more to take in the depth of your words again!!