A Strange Week to be a Stranger in a Strange Land

Yesterday, my nephew watched his daughter being born. I watched him being born some 26 years ago. I can still remember how purple-blue his face looked, and the time that has passed baffles. I don’t feel any different than that 13 year old kid waiting for his sister to go into labor at the hospital. And yet here I am, a generation later, approaching 40. My new niece's name is Savannah.

(Delal's dad wanted to know what 'Savannah' meant--he picked his kids' names with that in mind at a time when giving the names themselves was illegal--they're Kurdish words--but I told him I think they chose it for the sound and we took turns guessing, as we walked down the rainy Kadıköy street--I told him it was an old Southern city, he told me it was an African flatland) 

My mom says that when Jeremy held Savannah, he cried. ‘She’s so little! What if I break her?’ (Delal's dad smiled at this--me,too)  I couldn’t be there. We talked on the phone—I could hear the electricity in his voice.

Last week in Japan, of course, there was the earthquake and the tsunami. The footage was nauseating. On CNN and the BBC and Al Jazeera I watched videos of people running for the lives as a wave carrying houses races up the hill to swallow them—and they fall and disappear. Radiation is pouring over Tokyo. My friends are there, just waiting to see if it turns deadly or not--but keeping chipper as always.  'We are genki!' Megumi assured me.  Kuniko apologized for worrying us. Kuniko's husband already has cancer—for years now, and doesn't need the radiation's help.  He could die within six months according to the doctors. And I can’t be there.

And things are happening here.

The night that my grand-niece was born, I went with Delal to her uncle’s house for dinner. We talked about the wedding—our wedding. We found a hall nearby, and Delal is fishing around for family approval.

Her aunt made a dish that they called qatmer for ease of translation. (There’s a dish called katmer in Turkish cuisine, too, but it’s different). We gathered around a huge flat pan of bread that had been hollowed out and filled with lamb, onions, and currants. It was delicious. I told them about my grandniece, and they were pleased. ‘Gözün Aydın’—‘May your eyes be bright’ basically, a way of congratulating someone on good news. We watched a quiz show after dinner and her uncle kept switching to the news where more images of the tsunami and nuclear power plant played over and over again. I had been excited about Savannah and glowing as I talked and now I went on just as excitedly about what was happening in Japan. There’s something cold about the way they report it—the English websites seem pleased to cover such an excessive disaster. What a professional coup!  It’s not just about having a selling point—it’s a pride in being on the front line of something so horrific. It sells for more than money, it sells for fame, prestige, honor. With this you can buy silences at dinner tables for the rest of your life—you were there when the tsunami hit? Holy shit!

This week has been a flood of good and bad news—my friend’s cancer, the earthquake, Savannah. I can’t quite fit my head around it. I don’t like being so far away from everyone. I am a traveler in some sense, always looking over that next hill wondering what is there, but so many foreigners here seem to so easily cut off their pasts, not everyone of course, but many. I, on the other hand, feel like I am in several pieces distributed around the globe.

Welcome Savannah, you are much loved. And as for Japan, you are much loved too, and I pray for you.

Savannah by the way, was originally a name used for the river in Savannah Georgia and probably comes from a word for the Shawnee nation who lived there for a spell, OR as Delal's dad suggested, it may come from the Spanish word sabana (which gave us savanna) to refer to the African like plains of the deep South--if so, the Spanish took it from the word zabano in the language of the Taino Indians of the Caribbean. So by any accounts it is native.

The Kurdo-Turko-Southern Engagement Party

Prelude



Nişan—the engagement. I have been traveling the States with a ring on my finger these past few days. My seatmate on the plane—a woman going to Tucson to hit the Gem Show—schooled me on the system here. She says a ring on my finger indicates marriage, and it should be on the left. She also said that according to her very good girlfriend who studied in Turkey all the women wore burkhas and thank God I’m American. She also said I should have babies as quickly as possible.

There are certain ingredients that every successful nişan must have. Unfortunately, neither I nor Delal really seemed to have any idea what they were. Her grandfather, for instance, gave me the idea of providing gifts for her parents as explained in previous blogs. Of course, Delal had a better idea than I.

The first thing required was parents, in particular a father to say the all-important words to the bride’s father,’ Allah'ın emri Peygamber'in kavliyle kızınız Delal'ı oğlumuz Jeff’e istiyoruz.’ In English, ‘by the command of God and with the consent of the prophets, we request your daughter Delal for our son, Jeff.’ (This bit necessary despite the fact that her father is an atheist and grandfather an Alevi) With my mother in Alabama and my father ‘with the mercy of God’, as the Turkish euphemism goes, we had to find a proxy. Delal chose my good friend and housemate Padraic. Ideally, the man speaking as my father should have been older than me, but elders are getting harder and harder to come by and since Padraic was taller and had more gray hair than me, it amounted to the same thing. It was between him and Ekrem, who often acts as if he is everyone’s wizened grandfather, but I was not a hundred percent sure what Delal wanted done, so I mentioned nothing to Ekrem and left the recruiting to her. In any case, I will, to the day I die, always assume that people shorter than me are younger, and people taller than me are older, so Padraic was a good choice. He spent two weeks memorizing and practicing the phrase—which also involves some ruminating and ‘the love that has sprung up between these two young people’.

For engagement day, the weather took a sudden turn for the Arctic. I met Ekrem around five o’clock down by the metrobus station.

‘So have you bought chocolates yet?’ he asked.

‘What for?’

‘The groom’s side always brings these things, Damat!’

We walked shivering and huddled toward each other in the cold toward the nearest bakery—the Kara Fırın (Black Baker). He kept calling me ‘Damat’ or ‘groom’. How do you feel, Damat? How many chocolates do we need, Damat? We settled on a box of one hundred and sixty which he generously paid for. Then we bought flowers from the Gypsy man at the bus station. I chose white daisies mixed with lavender, because I knew Delal hated red roses. The Gypsy approved then poked me with the bouquet. ‘Kommst du nach Deustchland?’

‘Whatever you say,’ I answered.


Now Delal told me to make sure everyone was there by eight. When I asked her grandfather (hereafter referred to as Dede) what time I should be there he said, in typical Dede fashion, ‘Well I am not one to tell others what to do, I mean, what do I know? But if I were you I would show up at six o’clock.’ And so I did, thinking I would find just Dede and Zelal and we’d help set up tables or move furniture or whatever, but I discovered Delal not at home (she was at the hairdressers’) and in her stead, a whole team of relatives meeting me at the door, none of whom I had ever met before. So I hit the ground running.

Or kissing.

My first task was kissing the hand of Dede who sat grinning on the couch. I completely screwed this up, of course. Though I had not been nervous all day, I suddenly felt like someone had released the world’s entire population of monarch butterflies into my stomach and they were now spreading to other organs, until my whole body felt aflutter. Normally I should bend down, kiss Dede’s hand, then touch it to my forehead, but I got so flustered I just kind of mashed his fingers into my mouth like a dog play fighting. He laughed and pulled me up into a hug. Bright red at this point, I was introduced to a whole new set of aunts, uncles and cousins I had never met before. I immediately forgot all their names.

(A word about Turkish-and Kurdish-families. While we have one word for aunt, they have three. Hala is for your father’s sister, teyze is for your mother’s, and yenge is for the wife of your uncle. Now I can keep track of who is an aunt and who is a cousin, but I find it much more challenging to figure out who is the hala, who the teyze, and who the yenge. The same goes for uncle—your father’s brother is amca, your mother’s brother is dayı and your aunt’s husband is enişte. Generally, I have no idea who is who, which makes Delal think I am simply not listening. This occasionally bears a modicum of truth. Worse, when I try to just wing it, as, for example, when one of Delal’s cousins refers to Delal’s father as ‘Dayı’—I have to back calculate. If he is her dayı then she is Delal’s what which makes her father Delal’s what?)

Anyway, with introductions made, I sat on the sofa, made small talk, and rose to greet the next thirty people to walk in. This was when the category 5 nervousness really hit. This engagement party, what I was about to do, was not just some nod to tradition (as we had been making out for weeks). It was heavy. Everyone was here for me and Delal, and our lives were about to change forever. And it was like a veil lifted—for so long we had been so off-handed in talking about this engagement party. We made it sound like a game of scrabble or a night out for beers, but I suddenly understood how much more it was, how important to me, how utterly and uniquely special. I desperately wanted some of MY other guests--my side of the family--to show—yeah, to even the sides up a little, but also to share the moment with me, to lean on in my terror, to be a part of this-- but they weren’t coming for a while. I was ruminating on all this when Delal walked in and literally took my breath away—she was that beautiful. She wore the ruby necklace I had bought her in Syria and it lay gracefully against her olive skin. (I gave her that! I wanted to shout. See? I’m no cheapo!) Her black hair was wound gracefully in a spiral around her head and she was glowing, that warm smile of hers flowing like the Southeastern sun throughout the room. She was nervous, I could tell, but hiding it from her guests, and even from herself, by playing the magnanimous host.

I don’t often write about Delal. The subject feels a little overwhelming, and I feel like my own feelings for her are a vast secret continent which I am only just discovering, clumsily diving into the forests with a machete and a backpack full of ill-prepared provisions—potato chips in a desert-- but here I will try.

I watched her float about the room with a mix of pride, love, joy, and fear. I knew why she was there, I mean this whole thing had come about because she was going to give herself to me. The idea of this gorgeous woman surrendering her life to me (and me to her) made me shiver—was I good enough? Life seemed big all of a sudden, like when I was diving in the Philippines and I looked down and saw a deep cobalt blue below me and I knew that the bottom lay two miles down and then when I looked to the sides I saw infinite blue in all directions, forever, and I felt so small and fragile and the ocean seemed so majestic and huge and other that I felt that old, ancient feeling of awe, fear and joy and surrender and passion before something holy. I felt a little of that awe now in the face of what we were about to do. And this isn’t right, this isn’t really touching it. It was much quieter than this, the feeling I had. It was more like how in Raising Arizona Ed sits down to take a photo with the baby they’ve just kidnapped and says portentiously, ‘Now Hi, this is an awful BIG responsibility.’ She’s thrilled and terrified at the same time.

The rest of my people showed up at eight--Padraic and two other friends, Stephen and Cari. I looked around-- everyone had surreptitiously gathered into one room. ‘Canım,’ Delal said. ‘Honey, it’s time. You have to tell Padraic it’s up to him to start.’ I sent him a text message because he was so involved in conversation with Delal’s father—the two of them merrily lecturing other like mad—that I knew there would be no lull where I could discreetly hiss his name. But then miraculously a moment of silence fell.

‘I think it’s clear why we are here. Two young people have found love.’ This made me smirk—he was calling me young. But as he spoke, we all settled into a solemn silence and when he finished, asking Dede and Delal’s father for her hand, there were audible sniffles. I felt my own eyes start to water up.

‘Well Dede,’ Delal said. ‘Are you going to give me THAT easily or what?’

There was a possibility of a no. One of Delal’s cousins sitting in that very room had brought her fiancé home only to be told by her father that there was no way they were getting married. Dede smiled and said ‘I’m not sure the groom’s side has given anything worthy of you.’

Everyone whispers amongst themselves in surprise.

‘What do you mean, Dede?’ Delal asks.

He raises his hand and rubs his thumb against his fingers.

‘Money?’ I whisper to Ekrem. ‘Do I have to give money? Is that part of the tradition?’

He shrugs.

‘No one told me about this part? What the hell should I give?’

It’s been like this all night. Ever since I tried kissing Dede’s hand. No, that’s not quite right, Jeff. No, Jeff, don’t kiss her hand. Wait, why didn’t you kiss his hand? You forgot to do this, you have to do that. So here is another thing I was screwing up and no one had warned me about. With an embarrassed sigh I started digging around in my wallet and then Dede said, slapping his knee, ‘Şaka şaka!’ Just kidding! This was a little joke they had worked up at my expense. What cards! Ahem.

Then the rings were brought out, two bands of white gold (No Dedei, they are not silver!) tied together by a red ribbon with gold trim. Delal and I stood and faced each other. Dede took each ring and placed it on our fingers. Then he stretched the ribbon out and snipped it in two. This was it. We were engaged. Her father—a man not known for his gushing emotion to say the least—pulled her into a tight hug. ‘Kızım!’ he said, blinking back tears. ‘Kızım!’ He seemed at a complete loss for words. The whole room was in tears--Ekrem, her family, my friends—the all formed a line and one by one came up to us for a kiss on both cheeks and a hug for the special ones. (There was so much kissing and hugging this night that I felt it had become a kind of sport—we kissed on greeting, after the ribbon cutting, and then on leaving as well—and several times in between just for the hell of it.)

After this we ate, talked, laughed, and had an all-around good time. Surrounded by the warmth of friends and new family, I felt a feeling I rarely have in life—contentment. Stephen played guitar while Cari made up a song on the fly about mine and Delal’s first meeting. ‘He was a CIA agent!’ she crooned, in tribute to Delal’s weird assumption that I worked for the CIA when we first met. ‘And then she rocked his world! This beautiful girl.’ Zelal translated as Delal and I grinned. Delal’s dad talked about the evils of capitalism to Ekrem, perhaps capitalism’s number one fan. He also baffled the boy by quoting Socrates at one point.

The various halas, teyzes, and yenges amused themselves by piling my plate with food, and the food was excellent. I had made deviled eggs (everyone kept demanding the recipe) as my own little insertion of the South into the proceedings. Delal’s mother had made helva and Kurdish katmer—a kind of layered pastry with dried fruits and onions. Her aunts had brought börek and a Kurdish bread called pirgaç. We had cakes and salads and wine. I gave Delal’s father his book on the banality of evil and he actually beamed.



The last event of the night was the eating of the ribbon that had been tied to our rings. I gave it to the single men, Delal gave it to the single women. Traditionally they had to nibble a piece off and swallow it, but most of the girls said 'There's no way I'm doing that' and stuck it in their pockets. The boys were more daring.  Papa Padraic even gnawed off a cord and swallowed it all proper like (although he wasn't convinced that the whole ritual was not just another joke at the expense of the poor foreigners)

I had been nervous for weeks about getting married. That Friday I had broken down at school and blabbed everything I’d been thinking to one of the other teachers—another foreigner who had married a local many many years ago. I hadn’t even realized how freaked out I was. But now I was calm. And it still hurt to look at her, at Delal, but it was a good pain, one it made me happy to have.

I remember a meditation I did a long time ago with a German monk in the Thai Buddhist tradition. His name was Stardust and I thought he was a complete goofball, but he had some wisdom. He had given away his company in Berlin at 40 years of age and wandered the world seeking truth—walking with nothing but a robe and a begging bowl from the Southern tip of India to the North. This man never quit smiling. In the meditation, he told us all to imagine our hearts on the outside of our bodies instead of on the inside, completely exposed and vulnerable, fragile, delicate. We would feel every breeze and every touch of sunlight a thousand times more powerfully than we’d ever had because the exposed tissue was that sensitive, that raw. That was love, he’d said. It made everything hurt. That’s the kind of love you should strive for.

SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A brief break between engagement party blogs

One must have a mind of winter....

Last night, I lay at the bay window of my Chicago hotel room, upside down, and watched the snow rage down. The way the flurries were lit up by the sodium lamps made the lamps look as if they were surrounded by billowing white skirts. At times, the wind was so powerful it howled around the hotel making the snow fall up rather than sideways or down and sometimes the whole window went white. It was gorgeous. On the way here in the service bus, we saw a small baby rabbit rush into the snow drifts.  One of the women on the bus with a strong Jersey accent lamented 'It's real sad.'

So I arrive in Chicago almost to the minute that the most intense storm in decades descends. There are warnings of tornados, 'thunder snow', sixty mile per hour winds, blackouts. I love storms. And I love the way these kinds of minor disasters create this camaraderie, a kind of bubble society of the people trapped together. The people at the airport were extremely helpful, rushing out into the storm to see if our bus had arrived. They set up hotel reservations for us, gave us vouchers for reduced price--sometimes American service can be the best in the world--after years of dealing with foreigners and living in foreign countries where the US is almost always an object of criticism, it's nice to come home and feel proud of something.  The Turks are fantastic hosts. We are fantastic service providers--usually.

And there's an American style of camaraderie with strangers that I like.  On the bus, everyone was talking up a storm (ahem!), cracking jokes, and making plans to have dinner together--me, a the New Jersey accented woman who, as it turned out, lived in LA; an old Texan farmer and a Mexican American business man all hanging out together...

One must have a mind of (Istanbul) winter

There’s no snow, but it’s cold in Istanbul. And it’s 11:00 and though it is Friday, the streets are as quiet and deserted as 3 AM on a Tuesday. I love this about winter. The air is clear and crisp. All the stars are bristling above the buildings, the frosty air burns my lungs, but it also wakes me up. I feel very aware. There is the occasional lone figure wandering far ahead of me. Always a male, wrapped in heavy coats and sweaters and hats, bent against the wind, his hands shoved down in his pockets. But mostly I am alone. I walk the back streets of my neighborhood. There’s a green grocery sitting inside his shop. A string of naked lightbulbs hang over crates of radishes outside on the sidewalk...these are the only lights on the whole street and they glow like moons. The green grocer himself sits inside watching a small television. A space heater sits at his feet and the windows of his shop are completely fogged. Why is he even open at this hour?


Tonight Delal, her sister Zelal, her grandfather and I had shish kebab and went shopping. Tomorrow is the engagement ceremony and despite all the insistence that it’s all going to be very informal, we have spent a lot of time talking about exactly what we’re supposed to do. I have to buy gifts—earrings for her father and a book for her mother. I just typed that backward. The earrings are for her mother. Certain things must be said—my father should say them, but without a Ouija board, he can’t say a thing so a friend is going to say it in place of him. Someone must get chocolates (me). Her grandfather has suspicions that the wedding rings we have bought are actually silver and not white gold as we claim.

For weeks I have been tense about the looming wedding related shenanigans, but tonight, walking home, I just smiled and smiled. 
The streets are gorgeous when they are empty like this. Long swaths of quiet quiet shadow. A man sitting on his stoop in the dark—the orange light of his cigarette the only thing giving him away. A sudden lighted basement window in a tailor’s shop. The place is tiny—barely room for two men to stand inside. There is a Singer sewing machine on a table surrounded by scraps of cloth. A chair full of multi colored spools. It looks like someone has just left. Or like ghosts are still working here, or something else invisible.

The gypsy warren of houses are mostly empty—most of them will be down in the center of town this time of night. They’re houses are all pushed together around a central courtyard invisible from the road, all small, all leaning slightly, all patched with boards and pieces of scrap metal and painted a bright pink. There’s a bubble gum colored house at the front of the complex. All the windows are covered over in boards nailed haphazardly in overlapping X’s and crosses and then painted over in the cotton candy pink. The roof is make of a bushy vine pouring up and over the eaves. It looks like a hobbit house. A woman is hanging clothes in the courtyard. Most of the others are musicians. They will be in the restaurants drumming or singing or playing the zurna or tambur. Delal and I will have a band of them at our wedding. Gypsy music is the best. Drummer and fife.

There’s an alley way and a gigantic graffitti fork painted in luminous silver. Under it in yellow letters it says ‘Illegal Sanat’ (Illegal art). A cat jumps from the dumpster and pads away and then more silence and cold and shadow. I remember a Wallace Stephens poem I love...it’s about snow, but it could be just as easliy about this silence here now.

It begins ‘One must have a mind of winter’ (Which tonight I do) and ends like this.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

School Daze

I claim to be a writer and don’t write, not even for a simple blogsite. (The job is currently sucking all the time from my day and soul from my heart). Well, I’m sticking something up here just to be sticking it. I don’t claim it’s Tolstoy.


So I figure there are a few people out there who picture my situation here in Turkey—teaching Middle School teens in Istanbul—along these lines. There’s a dusty rundown building in the midst of some sad looking houses. All the students from 5th to 9th are huddled over their slate boards in the same room, meticulously copying down whatever scrawl I scratch on the chalkboard. The girls are meek and sit with shy smiles, their hair covered in scarves. The boys will have to leave early for some apprentice work—perhaps at their father’s carpentry shop. In the distance, the melancholy sound of the call to prayer echoes and the students rise and drag out their rugs.

Ahem. Let’s just talk about yesterday.

When I walked into my sixth grade class, three boys were lined up at the windows throwing paper planes to the playground below. I reminded them that I had threatened just the day before to toss each one of their heads out the window if I ever caught them at it again, and they all three swore they hadn’t thrown a thing.

‘You have an airplane in your hand right now, Canberk,’ I say.

‘See!’ he says. ‘That proves I didn’t throw it.’

Our basketball star Alp walks in. He says he forgot his notebook at home, despite the fact that I saw him with it in the hall. He starts to cry, huge glistening tears flowing down his cheeks. ‘Oh, oh, I need my notebook’ He’s a professional. I’ve watched him make himself cry for a variety of fake reasons—his school book was marked up, I didn’t give them enough homework, he wasn’t getting enough grammar. He won’t tell me how he produces the tears, but I think it has something to do with his own personal biology and how hard he rubs his eyes. The other day his eyes were burning and red pretty badly—for real—and he had to go to the school nurse for it. Perhaps he’d overdone it.

Eyes. What is it with eyes? Why don’t I just pass out the pins I use to hang up bulletin boards and let them all skewer their eyeballs and yank them out. It would be quicker. One boy had red eyes the other day, not Alp, but a kid named Berk who speaks in a high voice and reminds me an awful lot of Ralph Wiggum. ‘Why are your eyes red, Berk?’ I ask. ‘I sprayed Lale’s perfume in my eyes!’ he says. ‘Why would you do that?’ I ask. ‘I don’t know.’ Lale herself was once about to spray some kind of athletic cold spray into her friend’s eyes—the friend seemed a willing volunteer. She leaned her goony smiley face forward and said ‘Do it! Do it!’ before I snatched it away.

Lale is a tiny girl that sits in the front of the class. She wrote in her introductory letter to me the following, ‘I know I am supposed to write about my dislikes as well as likes, but I can’t because I don’t have any! I am perfect! PERFECT!’ The all-caps perfect was done in a red board marker she’d pinched from me.

Then there’s the girl that announced, at 11 years of age, that she was the sexiest girl in the whole school when I asked them to tell me their names and a talent. I saw her out in the hall the other day drawing pictures with two of her friends. When I asked what she was doing out of class, she said ‘Jewish homework’. I laughed. ‘No, really!’ she said. ‘I’m not lying this time! Religion class is now and we get to sit outside.’

‘And the Jews have to draw big balloon versions of boys’ names?’

‘Yes!’

I took it away. I have a whole collection from this girl. She uses my class often to create her name art. I have a folder full of it and think maybe it’s time to open an exhibition. Confiscating from students is fun. Yesterday I had to confiscate no less than two laser pointers, an I Pod, ten rubber band animals, four pairs of rubber gloves, a ping pong racket, and a cell phone. The cell phone was absolutely necessary despite all the rules against them because the kid was going to call her mom after school to let her know when water polo practice was over.

I ride a service bus to school—all the teachers on my side of the Bosphorous ride the same one. There’s a guy on it I call Prell, because his hair is absolutely perfect. It shines, it glows. He should be standing outside and swishing it back and forth in the wind. Sun glistens on it. Even the dreary florescents in the break room glisten on it. It’s styled like something out of the seventies, feathered my sister called it, which is why I dubbed him Prell instead of something more modern like...what? Fructus? In front of him sits one of the primary teachers with her offspring, a girl of about 8 who seems to need the heater on full blast even when its 70 degrees outside. ‘My baby will catch cold’, the mother explains. She reminds me of a rather shabby looking peacock for some reason. It’s something about the way her hair fans out and pushes forward, and about the mother bird-like way she treats her kid. I just know she wants to sit on her and shield her from the rest of us with a big tail-fan of warm feathers. And of course from the debilitating ravages of fresh air, a thing all Turkish mothers fear. Yesterday, dripping with sweat, I cracked the window next to me and pressed my face into the tiny opening. For the first time in the past two weeks, I welcomed the rain (It’s been raining forever). It was cool, refreshing. The Peacock ‘pssst’s me and says, ‘Pardon, would you be so kind as to close the window? My daughter...’ She smiled wanly. I give her a very nasty look—it really is 70 degrees outside, and the heater really is full blast--then comply for whatever reason.

Everything is computerized in the class room. Attendance, the smart boards. I am struggling to turn my usual white board scrawl into snazzy power point presentations. We had a Jewish man from the local community come and speak to the 7th graders about Anne Frank, the Holocaust, and prejudice in our super high tech Nautilus Auditorium. Some of these minorities need to get it together a bit, is all I have to say. Here is how one conversation went:

Student: Why are black people and white people different?

The Speaker: Well they’re not, as we have discussed. If you cut a white man’s arm off what happens?

Student: He bleeds.

The Speaker: That’s right. And if you cut a black man’s arm off?

Student: He bleeds.

The Speaker: That’s right. You see, there are no real differences. We’re all humans. (HE SHOULD STOP HERE AND TAKE THE NEXT QUESTION, BUT DOES HE? NO! JOY OF JOY’S, OUR LECTURER ON TOLERANCE AND PREJUDICE CONTINUES) Actually, culture can be a big factor. The blacks (I am quoting,remember, I didn’t say it) grow up in a different environment, more physical, outdoorsy. So naturally they are better athletes than us. You grow up here, so naturally you are good at things like...I don’t know, science and art.’

I groan so loud that half the auditorium looks at me with a quick sideglance. What is it with people? Only your own minority can be stereotyped and mistreated? If you do it to others, it’s perfectly fine?  Here's a discussiong topic:

Now that I am a minority here in Turkey do I get to say all sorts of racist things, but have it all be okay?  Or does me being a non-minority back home make it off limits?  What do I need to do to get legit enough to be a bigot?  Is marrying Delal enough?  She's a minority.  Do I need to apply for Turkish citizenship and be an official minority?

Someone Build Me an Ark

Last week, it was Israel's killing of the Turkish activists.  It set the city on fire--or at least at certain times of the day; protests erupted everywhere, especially in the Fatih district, a rather conservative, religious neighborhood where bellowing boys were unfurling Palestinian flags and shrieking for "vengeance."
This week, the disaster is the flood.  Four straight days of heavy rains and two more to come.  It rolls in down from the Black Sea in black clouded wave after wave after wave.  Streets turn into rivers, rivers into lakes, and schools are closed...well at least most schools.  Not Fenerbahce Sports Penitentiary and High School.
I took the bus this morning, as did every other human being in this city of 15 million.  The water was sluicing down in huge sheets when I got to school.  It was a half foot deep at the gate and racing down the hill like a muddy waterfall (We're on the city's highest 'mountain').  My shoes, socks, and pants legs all got soaked as I hopped toward the entrance.
As soon as I entered school, a gaggle of women closed on me demanding I take off my wet clothes.  "You'll catch your death of cold!"  I couldn't argue.  (Though on the whole, as I've mentioned before, Turks are paranoid about the elements--air and water are the enemies of every fragile man or woman child who walks the earth--contact with either means certain death).  Upstairs, a salesman had left samples for next year's school uniform in the school's library.  I went up and changed into a pair of blue and yellow sweats and a Fenerbahce T.  The students giggled when I emerged.
"Oh, Jeff," said Mete.  "You look like a student."
Mete, of the infamous class 9B, is one of the biggest pains in the ass at school.  I've perfected an imitation of him that other students ask me to do when he's not around.  It's not hard, you just have to glaze your eyes over, let your mouth hang slack, and talk like a movie zombie, kind of like a slightly undead version of Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
"Why don't you just go home, Mete." I say.  "Lie.  Say you're sick.  Please."
"You are so funny, hoja," he says.  "You are looking so hot in those clothes."
"That's true.  Please.  Tell someone you're sick.  They'll believe it.  It's raining outside for God's sake.  Rain kills."
Behind him his friends are trying to get me to mimic him, mouthing "Do it! Do it! Do it! Pleeeeease!"
My clothes hang in every free window of the teacher's room, trying to dry.
Puddles and small lakes are everywhere.  The construction site for the gym that will never be built is a grey sludge of mud water.  The parking lot reflects back the sky, pecked with endless rings of water from the falling rain.  On the school's soccer field, there is what looked like an army of seagulls--about forty in all, big and bright white, milling casually through the puddles in the grass and turning their heads back and forth as if mingling over drinks while waiting for someone to call the meeting to order.  They lingered there till mid morning when the rain slacked off from a Biblical deluge to a steady drenching.  
And I had just swore to Ekrem's mother, Seyhan, last night that I would not go out without an umbrella again.  She, Ekrem, and Ekrem's Dad, Emin had invited me over for dinner, and though it hadn't rained all afternoon, as soon as I stepped off the Metro, the clouds opened up and the clouds emptied themselves out.  I quickly got lost and roamed the backstreets of Cerrahpasha for nearly twenty minutes until Ekrem's father found me looking like I had just crawled out of the sea to give this evolution a shot.
"Where's your rain slicker?  And your umbrella?"  He had both.
"Broken and lost," I explained.  "Then forgotten."
He gave the Turkish tsk tsk tsk of dismay and worry, and hurried me home.  When we got to the house, Seyhan met us at the door with a look of hysterical amusement.  Look what the foreigner's done now!
"What happened to you?!"
"If you're thirsty," I said.  "I could wring out my shirt."
They immediately made me change clothes and then spent about fifteen minutes taking turns working me over with a hair dryer to make sure I was warmed up.  I started giggling when the gravelly voiced, cigar smoking Emin made me lift up my arms so he could take the hair dryer to my armpits.
"Don't miss a spot!" Seyhan called.  She threw one of Ekrem's T-shirts at me and gave me a fierce look.  "Now you must promise me not ever, ever to go out like that again without at least a rain slicker."
Well, I broke that promise and paid the price.
This afternoon I was running down by the water when the rain finally let up for a bit.  Clouds of steam roiled on the sea.  The Princes islands were swallowed in white water vapor.  A fissure opened up in the clouds and the sun was out for the first time in days, then promptly went back in as the clouds rolled shut again.  Men were huddled in their boats playing poker and backgammon.  They made snide comments as I passed, as usual.  "Run, Forrest, Run!".   Then suddenly, as I rounded the cape, a gang of police and firemen were crowded about the bridge that separates the boat docks from Fenerbahce Stadium's parking lot.  They were fishing a corpse out of Frog Creek--(The quaintly named stream is a cesspool, filled with garbage and raw sewage that burst out into the sea when the water broke the little net that filters out the bigger shit and keeps it from pouring into the Marmara.  Turks may be psychotically clean in their own homes, but on the whole, people treat this city as if it were a garbage dump/human litter box).  A family of women stood around a wet fireman, who was desperately explaining something to a young teenage girl.  She was near tears, her eyes wide, nodding and nodding.  A man had fallen in when the water burst over the barriers--a city worker sent to survey the damage.
A group of rubberneckers had formed a swarm along the bridge over Frog Creek and along the newly paved footpath.  Everyone was craning their heads over everyone else, trying to see what was going on.  A news crew was setting up a camera and cat weaved in and out of their feet, soggy, its hair matted, a dead kitten in its teeth--it had drowned, as well.
Istanbul's strays are roaming the streets, sodden and sullen, having given up on places to hide.  As the bus sludged through puddle after puddle on the way home today, I even saw a black and white rabbit with a collar hopping through puddles in an outdoor cafe.