Sodom and Gomorrah on the Bosphorus: Emergence of Modern
Transkript
Sodom and Gomorrah on the Bosphorus: Emergence of Modern
Sodom and Gomorrah on the Bosphorus: Emergence of Modern Gender Roles in Turkey Murat Seçkin Nationalism and nation building activities need heroes and heroes are traditionally men by definition. The ideology of nation building needs to define a new masculinity and this is what we witness in the emergence of Turkish Republic at the beginning of the twentieth century. As R. W. Conell asserts, “gender ... [is] historically changing and politically fraught”i so we observe how gender roles and relations are constructed in this historically significant period in Turkey. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu’s novel Sodom and Gomorrah, written in 1928, reflects the period of 1920-22 when Istanbul was under Allied Armies’ occupation; and the war of independence was organized and fought by a nationalist underground located in Ankara to establish the indepent Turkish state. This period of history, the Armistice, is known to the Turks as “one of the worst periods of Turkish history”.ii The novel reflects the nationalistic ideology of the new republic which still regarded Istanbul (as it was the capital of the Ottoman Empire where the novel takes place) with suspicion. I would like to discuss Sodom and Gomorrah to examine the gender issues used as metaphors to expound problems of westernization and modernization in Turkey. The society which is creating itself as a modern nation-state defines its gender roles according to its nationalistic ideology, and therefore Karaosmanoglu deals with the questions of how the East and the West regard the East and its gender issues. The new nation is an imagined one and so is its national identity, as Benedict Anderson suggests.iii This imagined community must create its enemy or “the Other”iv so that it can establish itself as the politically, economically, and culturally dominant factor in the new regime. The author’s apparent homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny, which are shared by the new Republic, informs the emerging modern gender roles in the Middle East at the start of the last century. Murat Seçkin The novel was originally addressed to a reading public who fought the war and established the new republic in Ankara. Turkey was then going through an accelerated program of westernization since the nineteenth ccentury and its readers were eager to turn to the West for cultural inspiration. The West was the inspiration but it was also a source of anxiety for the readers since it came fraught with new and confusing gender roles for the men and women. The author makes a distinction between the “right way” of modernization (nationalistic, authoritarian, anti-capitalistic, and above all heterosexist) and the “wrong ways” of liberal modernity whose symbol is Istanbul. As the title of the novel suggests, we enter the world of the Old Testament and Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherch du temp perdu. On the one hand we have the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (as interpreted by the Christian ideology that the Cities of the Plain were punished for their sin of their male population for the same sex desires) and on the other, what Karaosmanoglu sees in Proust’s novel is a critique of an extremely decadent society at the end of the nineteenth century Paris. The novel’s hero Necdet is presented as a Western educated man (mainly in Germany and France) who seeks to find his place in a nationalistic Turkish society that is emerging from the ashes of a multilingual, multicultural, multiethnic Ottoman Empire.v The ideology of nation building needs to define a new masculinity first. The Ottoman Empire was, in the eyes of the West, the nexus of eastern masculinity; however, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, due to repeated defeats in the wars with the West, a new consciousness arose in the Empire to change the fate of military setbacks. Being defeated in war is always a blow to the masculine ego and the defeated regards the defeater from the perspective of a less-than-manly position. This is, of course, one way to rationalize the need for the reform movement; the conservative asserts the need for change only when his manhood is endangered. However, the state and the intellectuals were regarding the West with “a secret fear and loathing” yet also with “an admiration and something that comes close to love.”vi Istanbul is shown from the beginning a city teeming with evil individuals who are evil for the reason of their being foreign (both the occupying army and those Levantines who have settled there for commercial reasons) or for failing to be Muslim and Turkish. On the one hand we have a new generations of Muslims who is fed up with the economic crises at the beginning of the twentieth century look at the capitalistic system more favorably; and on the other, the inheritence of the Ottoman civil and military bureaucracy who regards this profit oriented commercialism and war profiteering as disgusting.vii Men in Turkey, whatever culture and religion they belonged to for centuries, learned to be men from the ideology of Islam that shaped their lives. With the westernization of society, new models of being a man came into play. One of the new models was the establishment of the concept of Turkishness that informed the new republic. This novel shows the confused years just before the establishment of the new nation state Turkey. We see a catalogue of different gender roles for men, both foreign and local. The foreigners are mainly British and French officers whose ‘abnormalities’ are obviously overstressed. Major Will is rumoured to be the second in command to the British Police Forces is presented as a man with animal traits: he is said to be ‘pink like a new-born pig’ (16) and ‘has huge and soft hands, like white bear’s paws’ (101). The character is created as a man that would look abhorent to the Turkish readers. Being like a pig is naturally the most disgusting animal for a Muslim reader. He is also a womanizer. Then there is Jackson Read who is created to be too beautiful; he is a heterosexual, yet he is likened to Dorian Gray. And worst of them all we see Marlow who is a homosexual. Our problematic hero Necdet struggles through the streets and salons of Istanbul in his quest for becoming a new Turkish man. To show this quest the author makes him meet the representatives of the British occupying forces, Levantine and non-Muslim men and women, and Turkish people who have degenarated into monsters due to their advanced levels of westernization. The book, like Proust’s, is constructed around large gatherings which illustrate the horrors of Murat Seçkin enemy invasion, the corruption of foreign soliders, the collaboration non-Muslim locals with the enemy, and worst of all, degeneration of Turkish people. In the middle of the book, a rich and enigmatic British army major throws a party in his mansion on the Bosphorus. He also has a Turkish aristocrat aide-de-camp (son of a financially ruined family due to the war with England) who has become a servant to Will. This is what has happened to Turkish masculinity, Karaosmanoglu seems to be saying, a mere servant to the occupying forces. It is corrupted by imitative westernization, evil capitalism, and military defeat caused by the first two. He looks back to a Ottoman past with yearning where none of these evils invaded the habitus of individuals as well as the public arena, yet he, himself is extremely muddled due to his western education which has stripped the vestiges of his Ottoman past. Our hero Necdet’s confusion arises from his insecurity of his masculinity. He seem to have the right impulses of a Turkish man: basically he hates the foreigners, foreign armies that occupy his homeland, and their non-Muslim collaborators. These traits he has inherited from his Ottoman ancestors. Yet he is a westernized man himself; even though he hates foreigners, he limits this hatred to the Anglo-Saxon cultures. He is described as someone who has sown his wild oats when he was abroad. As a true Ottoman gentleman, he has “experienced all the sensual pleasures of European life while he was there and even had a few mistresses.”viii He is a man and he has done what he is entitled to do. But the possibility of his fiancée Leyla to have a sensual life of her own will create a major blow to his male ego. He is learning the new prerequites to be a nationalist as well. In a drunken state Necdet leaves a party after having spats with Leyla and her liberal ways with foreign officers; he then stumbles into a bar in Pera and watches his surroundings like a good racist. The bar teems with the non-Muslim Ottomans and all Necdet does is to crane his neck, observe the horrifying scene and analyse it. He sees a conclave of evil forces having fun at the expense of the newly emerging Turkish nation. They are all depicted with the prejudice of what the nationalists see as the cause of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He sees drunk Greek shop assistants joke and scuffle around in a vulgar mannerix; on a table opposite him there is an Armenian man who “carries the large and round spectacles on an olive skinned, heavy eyebrowed, unrefined primitive face as if it is the only sign of elegance and civilization.” This man is not only Armenian (therefore, ‘unrefined and primitive’) but a man of business, a capitalist who ‘might be figuring out the easiest and darkest ways of making a financial swindle.”x The worst of all, of course, is the way women behave; they are shown to be all after one thing and that is to capture the eye of an officer of the occupying armies. A man may be driven into insanity when his country is occupied by foreign armies and when he sees certain evil elements of his country, due to their racial, religious, economic, cultural, and gender formations, feel happy about this. Necdet’s feelings of emasculation escalate and he has no way out but drinking himself senseless. What Necdet observes, of course, through the ideology of the new Republic that non-Muslim groups are not only racially inferior but also their greed clashes with the anti-capitalistic, corporatist economic system that is being promoted by the Ankara goverment. The foreigners and their local accomplices not only bring about ‘immorality’ but a new capitalistic system which finds adherents even among the Muslim bourgeoisie. Leyla’s father, for instance, gives parties in his house to foreign dignitaries so that he can better his chances in trade relations. He is less than careful in his protection of his daughter’s ‘honour’ due to his interest in commercial gain. If we go back to the ball of Will, we see that the greatest crime he has committed is his transformation of the mansion: once the house of an aristocratic Muslim Ottoman family, it has become the temple of orgies for the foreign enemy.His party starts early and both the locals and the the members of the Occupation Army and their wives mingle with the visiting American billionaires. The Turks are regarded by the foreigners as zoo animals and the former are busy to inspect the mansion and its luxurious oriental wonders they never imagined existed in the Orient (103). When the guests tour the house they come across Will’s bedroom which was the mesdjid of the mansion until the Muslim owners had to leave. Then comes the Murat Seçkin sacriligious part. Major Will’s bedroom lights are turned on and we see that he has transformed the room into a bedroom filled with erotic pictures and statues.For instance, the mihrab there is a statue of a couple, as large as two ten year old children, kissing on the lips and coiling around each other’s bodies. From a distance, these give the impression that it is a work of art but at close inspection one saw how these plaster of paris statues were made for lecherous purposes. There were also wall to wall pornografic paintings.xi We see the Muslim temple blasphemed by a Christian marauder.These shocking details are lovingly admired by all who visit the room. The visitors and their exclamations help to create the shocking scene for there appears to be the ideal decadent atmosphere where the author expects God’s wrath to strike it down any minute as it happened in the Bible. The party progresses with wild abandon. This “Babylonian gathering”xii turns into an orgy of scandals where two “Sodomite girls[sic]” are captured “entwined as one.” People realize that Will, Fanny Moore and Nermin have dissapeared and they find them in his bedroom: two women making love, naked on his bed and Will is watching them from behind a curtain. Such “outrageous” incident is laughed over by the guests.xiii Moore is a lesbian American journalist who seduces the American educated young woman Nermin. This debauchery is then ogled by the decadent British. Moore’s lesbianism is understandable to Necdet because she is American and therefore bad, but this is unacceptable for a Turkish woman. Yet Nermin has been educated by these “abnormal” American at a school founded and ran by missionaries. Another shocking character in the novel is Captain Marlow; he represents the homosexual masculinity and is presented in an ideal man of Sodom. We see all the western/Christian prejudices about homosexuality played on him. He comes to the East to have sex with eastern men, following the tradition of Lord Byron. Marlow says he has come to Istanbul “with the dream to be ravished by half-wild handsome faced Turks.”xiv He is, at first accosted by Muslim woman Azize who falls in love with him and tries to lure him by turning herself into an Aziyade figure of Pierre Loti’s eponymous novel.xv Of course, Marlow ignores her and yet visits her because he has a sexual interest on her husband Atif. He is a professional gambler and a bisexual man. His gender role is explained by his marginal status in society and his shady business interests. But even he regards Marlow with disdain for he is a homosexual man (and obviously Atif does not regard himself as one) and a foreigner and makes him shave of his moustache. This emasculation reduces the English man to a feminized position in his eyes and puts himself in a superior position. All these anomalies present a major blow to the newly developing consciousness of Necdet. As the Turkish Army approaches Istanbul, he focuses on the new patriarchal system which will make a new man of him: a man who abandons his beloved Leyla and her wanton sexuality and he will become a monogamous, loyal husband, and civil servant helping the corporatist state to run smoothly. Murat Seçkin Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Berktay, Halil. ‘Taklitçi Türk Irkçılığı’ (‘Imitative Turkish Racism’). Taraf: 12.08.2010. P.2. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Polity Press: London, 1995. GLBTQ, An Encylopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Culture. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/loti_p,2.htm Karaosmanoğlu, Yakup Kadri. Sodom ve Gomore (Sodom and Gomorrah.). Bilgi Yayınevi: Ankra, 1972 (rpt). Milas, Herkül. Türk Romanı ve ‘Öteki’: Ulusal Kimlikte Yunan İmajı (Turkish Novel and the ‘Other’: Greek Image in National Identity). Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2000. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Saraçgil, Ayşe. Bukalemun Erkek (Chameleon Man). Trans. Sevim Aktaş. Istanbul: İletişim, 2005. Seyhan, Azade. Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context. New York: The MLA, 2008. i Masculinities. London, 1995 iii ‘Mütareke.’ Hilmi Ziya Ülken in Mütareke. Ed. H:N: Pepeyi. Istanbul, 1938. Cited in Turk Romaninda Isgal Istanbulu (Occupied Istanbul in Turkish Novel). Mehmet Torenek. Istanbul 2002. Kitapevi, p.19 i Imagined Communities. London, 1983. iii i Edward Said. Orientalism. New York, 1994. iv v Azade Seyhan. Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context,.6. New York, 2008. v Halil Berktay. ‘Taklitçi Türk Irkçılığı’ (‘Imitative Turkish Racism’). vi Taraf: 12.08.2010. 2. vvii Ayşe Saraçgil. Bukalemun Erkek (Chameleon Man). Trans. Sevim Aktaş. Istanbul, 2005, p.180. v Sodom 37 viii i Sodom 40-41 ix x Sodom 41 x Sodom 110 xi x Sodom 115 xii x Sodom 121 xiii x Sodom 189 xiv x Aziyade. She, together with Karaosmanoglu, fails to see the xv homosexual subtext of Loti’s novel. However, Roland Barthes refers to it is ‘a little sodomitic epic’ in the preface he wrote for the Italian translation. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/loti_p,2.htm.