These musings are inspired by a novel. I am writing this because I don't want to finish the novel. I am melancholically clinging onto the story like the main character who, for years, compulsively ponders over each object his beloved had touched. 

Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence has been occupying my hands for the last ten days. I am only thirty or so pages from finding myself face to face with the back cover. I am writing so that the book and I stay together a little longer, so we can hold each other, so I can caress its thick spine and feel its 700-plus pages of lightness. 

There is nothing light about this novel, other than its actual weight. For a book this thick, it is soft and unbearably light. Published on pulp-like, cheap, yellow paper, it feels like nothing in my hands. Holding the book, even after reading a few pages, presents me with a queer feeling. As the main character and narrator, Kemal, walks me through his love-obsessed, melancholic, and (in)significant decade of suffering, the physical book unsettles my hands with its lightness. The narrative and the physical book don't fit together. The narrative demands thicker paper, a hardcover; its own spiritual burden in measurable, physical weight. This unsuitable arrangement of body and soul allows me to live Kemal's decades with him, spanning from mid-70s to 80s in Turkey. His obsessive years, his years of utter pain lived as what he calls "dream-like semi-consciousness” grows into my fantasy. I feel out of place with this book in my hands. The book fails to fit my hands. As I sink into his suffering, his self-deceptive hope simultaneously lightens my mood. The book hopes, in its physical lightness, to take flight from my grasp.

With subtle shame, I confess, I don't read Turkish books. This is the first book by a Turkish author I have read in many years. And still, I read it in English. I came upon the book, out of all places, at a Chinese spa uptown. As I was scanning the floor-to-ceiling bookcase there, I noticed the book out of a thousand other books. And I stole it. Only if I knew how my little theft would be foreshadowing Kemal's obsession. His decade-long thievery of everyday objects from his beloved's house.

Orhan Pamuk is a controversial figure in Turkey. He is, by far, the most acclaimed, read, and popular Turkish author around the world. He is the only Turk to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In one sense, he is a national hero - a man who made Turkey proud! At the same time, he is a politically controversial figure since he is critical of the Turkish Republican era. None of this I mind. What I had in mind grabbing the book was my mother's words about his novels. 

My mother is, or rather was, the best reader I've ever known. I say "was" because after smart screens took over the world with Ipads and Iphones, my mom stopped reading. She slowly became addicted to meaningless online games. She put aside the stacks of books which always adorned her antique bedside table, and chose to grow crops and stack jewels on her Ipad screen. By the time I matured enough to appreciate how great of a reader she was, how my love for reading was inspired by her passion, she had already ceased to read. Now, writing these lines, remembering all those stacks of books, the thick plastic bags laden with novels she brought home from that one, single bookshop with its burgundy logo, tears fall on my cheeks in melancholy for a time lost. For a time, I don't expect to return. Maybe for my childhood.

My dad used to sleep on the couch downstairs (he still does). His sleeping figure impressed on to the surface of the cushions, carrying the soft stamp of his body, he would pass his insomniac hours, alone, in the living room. Those stacks of books, my mother's beloved friends, laying next to her as she fell asleep, filled my father's absence in the bed. I used to walk into my mom's bedroom at night, on tippy-toes, quietly to not wake her, and remove her reading glasses. Her fingers still caught between the pages, I would rescue her fingers, gently, one by one, and nestle the book on the side table, still open to the page she fell asleep. After a few months, my mom would go back to the same books and read them once again to my great surprise. I never understood how she could do that.

Years ago, my mom told me how she couldn't get into Pamuk's novels. Something stood between her and the narrative. For her, his great international fame and status had to be a gift of his translator. She had said, "there is something about his language that I don't like, but I don't know what that is." So when I saw the book in the bookcase, I had to make it mine. I opened the book and found myself in a time so close yet so far. My own birthplace 20 years prior to my birth. 

I grew up with stories of that era. What Kemal deemed left-wing terrorists or right-wing, nationalist reactionaries, the peripheral extensions of the Cold-war in the third-world, were the stuff of my father's stories. Now, I was walking the streets of my hometown in the year my dad had graduated high school. When Kemal decried urban militants who shot up coffeehouses and committed political assassinations, I remembered my dad's best friend who was assassinated by right-wing militants. I recalled the first time my dad told me about how he found his best friend: two small bullet holes on one side of his head, and the other side burst out like a watermelon, unrecognizable. His best friend's death saved my dad from pursuing his friend's footsteps. From attending political rallies and aiding militants, he moved onto another world. He joined the rise of Neo-liberalism in the third-world and climbed the corporate ladder. 

My childhood in Turkey in the 90s and 00s was akin to Kemal's childhood in mid-century Turkey. Like him, I grew up in a bourgeois household. We could afford the things we wanted while being surrounded by poverty. Even though Istanbul "society" was much smaller and different in Kemal's time, I shared his socio-economic setting. I attended elementary school with the children of the richest families of Turkey - the 1%. If time could slide backwards for a few decades, I thought, I could have been Kemal. His mother's worldly cautions and maternal anxieties reflected my own mother's fears. His mother's subtle spite for not-so-Western-oriented Turks, women with headscarves and religious families, mimicked my mother's sentiments. Through Kemal's life, I felt melancholic for a time I never lived but grew up with.

As Kemal fell out of the "society" circles, the circles of opulence, high-brow culture, and subtle resentment for provincial Turks, I felt even closer to him. The reigning president of Turkey, Erdogan, had cunningly labelled people who belonged to these circles as "White Turks:" educated Turks who grew up with Western ideals. And I am one of them too. Even when I go back home now and visit more touristic places, other Turks do not right away assume I am a Turk. 

Growing up, we used to visit Antalya and stayed at Dedeman Hotel which boasted a water park. The workers who gave instructions on how to ride the water slides at the park would speak to me first in German, then English, then Russian, only to be cut off by "Abi, Turkum ben!" (Brother, I am Turkish!) I was a Turk, but, at the same time, I was a Turk of a different kind, one of the few, lucky, privileged ones. I stood out with my blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. 

Even though I grew up with White Turks, I could not endure their hypocritical, contradictory, and exclusive attitudes. I think this is what brought Kemal and I closer. After his life turned upside-down, he also couldn't relate to his "people." He witnessed their hypocrisy and false bravado with a refreshed sight. I remember one day, when the fierce political debate on "headscarves in higher education" was unfolding in every corner of Turkey, I jumped into a tirade while my parents’ friends were debating the issue. I couldn’t hold myself back and told them how they were stuck in an archaic age, in an oppressive stance. At that time, girls who wore religious headscarves were banned from entering university campuses across the country. Some even wore wigs on top of their headscarves to access higher education. Most of my parents' friends supported the ban. To allow girls with headscarves was akin to spitting on the founding ideals of the Republic for them. "What's next," they denounced with worry and fear in their eyes, "is the end of our beloved secularism!"

As a fed-up little boy, I asked them, "So what about religious guys, why can they attend university but not girls who wear headscarves? If you think wearing religious headscarves is a sign of ignorance and backwardness, how do you think these girls will do away with their ignorance? By keeping them at home, not allowing them to be educated, by enslaving them to arranged marriages at a young age!" Sometimes, I struggle to believe this is actually what I said in front of so many adults. So well-spoken, a point so articulately put forward. This is a memory I don't have. This is what my dad told me years later. I believe he might have embellished it a little. Yet, thanks to his subtle rearrangements of memories, today, I believe I am capable of making good points, and even writing this text. His embellishments of my childhood gestures and words have always been a fountain of self-confidence and trust in my abilities. Memories are weird like that!

During this political debate, which ended up with the doors of higher education opening to girls with headscarves, another greater political strife was brewing in Turkey. Erdogan's party coming out of nowhere, at least for a young child like me, won the elections. However, Erdogan was still under a political ban due to a poem he had written. His islamic tendencies did not align with the Republican ideals, and under the pressures of the military leaders, he was banned from politics for a period of time. His second-in-command, Abdullah Gul, was to take the position of prime minister. This meant that his wife, a woman wearing a headscarf, was to be the first-lady of the nation. The same indignation mixed with worry filled all the White Turks: "this is the final nail on the coffin of secularism," they all whispered in their small, exclusive circles in Nisantasi and Baghdad Avenue. Here, I would like to remind you that most Turkish women, for religious or more traditional reasons, wore a headscarf back then. But the first-lady - that was too far.

Political rallies were organized by White Turks and ultra secularists to protest this development. I attended at least one of these rallies with my parents and their friends. What a grand show that was! I deeply enjoyed it. It was my introduction to politics on the streets. Until the rally, politics happened on TV or between the lips of my parents' friends. 

Years later, after I moved to Canada, I realized the motives of these rallies with clarity. A sudden regret came over me, the negligible and forgettable regret of a child for the most part clueless. I remembered the red and white Turkish flags draped over everyone, gathered to protect our democracy, Republic, and dear secularism. Probably the key insight of the whole event was that this was "our" democracy, "our" Republic, "our" secularism. All of these people, the White Turks, the secularist, the people who embodied the Western attitude of the Republic's founding father, they faithfully believed that this country was "theirs." 

For the White Turks, these new people, the traditional people of the provinces and the sympathizers of religious political parties, had appeared out of nowhere. Yet, this was only another illusion caused by exclusion. Growing up, my parents had no friends who wore headscarves. My father's mother would occasionally throw a scarf over her head, but that was a sanctioned gesture, a middle-class, older woman's accepted attire. Women with headscarves were mysterious creatures to me. I only gazed at them from the backseat of my father's car. Yes, they would come and clean our house, once or twice a week, and my parents would treat them with respect and care, but they were outsiders to us and we were outsiders to them. But more importantly, what separated us was our "superiority." We were the educated, the wealthy, the cultured, the sons and daughters of the Republic, the protectors of democracy and secularism.

People like to think Erdogan came to power through the coalition of religiously-minded groups repressed by recurring military coups. They claim that the imposition of Western, Republican ideals on a predominantly Muslim country led to a "return of the repressed" after eighty years of political oppression. Without a doubt, this played a part in the political shift in Turkey. But I also think these are some grand, overly-academic, maybe even too psychoanalytic terms to understand the land I grew up in. Never in my life, and I remind you I stood out like a sore, blond thumb, I witnessed any ill-feelings from others for being a White Turk. I never felt a tinge of resentment from the women who cleaned our house in headscarves (actually, since we lived on the wealthy side of the street, the cleaning ladies would take off their headscarves while entering our house and put the headscarf back on when they were ready to leave the house. There was always this minute moment, which caught my eye. When the cleaning lady finished up, she would put her headscarf on, adjust it, and wait for my mom to get paid for the day's work. As if the headscarf re-established the line between the employer and the employed, the class division). No one ever gave me bad looks. Rather, people entertained my hair and eyes, my "Western" look. As they were peculiar and foreign to me, I was to them.

Being a Turk meant to look at the West with infatuated eyes while decrying its imperialism. Being a Turk was, and is, to be tugged between East and West, between the Orient and the Occident. So growing up, like people do with dogs in Toronto, strangers would walk up to me and pet my head. They were fascinated. It was endearing. I never felt any spite from others for being a White Turk. 

Yet, this was not the case for White Turks. Their sense of superiority came out in spiteful comments about provincials. They degradingly called provincials "peasants." The tone of reference was always one of condescension. You could not trust these people. If they came to your house to do some repairs, you could not look away in case they slipped something into their pockets. The provincials were beautiful, "naive" people in the provinces, but when the “great migration” to big cities shuffled the demographics of the country, these naive people had become conniving con-artists. They were good for service jobs. They were good at cleaning your house, working at the grocery stores, but the invisible line had to be protected. They were there and we were here, at the heart of the Republic and democracy. 

So when these people came out of "nowhere," from the woodwork of the aging Republic, and won the election, the White Turk circles imploded with utter shock and disbelief. All my parents' friends who, for years, told horrible stories about the history of military coups in Turkey, began their long wait for another secularist coup to do away with the Islamist government. And thank god, that day never came! Thank Allah for that!

I have this weird habit, what I would deem in my pretension ways a "postmodern" habit. Religious Turks before they put their Quran back in its precious place, usually kiss and place the book on their forehead three times as a sign of respect and love. I do the same with all of my precious books after finishing them. I could never feel that kind of religiosity for the Quran, and growing up in a wave of Islamophobia, I never even read the Quran. But I have the same devoutness towards books which move me, transform me, and teach me the beauty of existence. 

The Museum of Innocence will be one of those books. It will, for a moment, or three moments in a row, touch my forehead and lips. And I wrote all these words to avoid that approaching moment. I wrote so I could put the book away for a short while, to savour its painful ending, to share my friend Kemal’s melancholy a little longer. I don't want to lose my friend. A friend whose melancholy has become mine, a friend with whom I walked the streets of Istanbul before I was alive. A friend who invited me into his ‘56 Chevrolet for a stroll, and seeing me sitting a little too close to his beloved, lit up in jealous thoughts.

Maybe my mother was right. Maybe this is the gift of the translator. And maybe, it is not. I don't mind.

D - 1/7/2022