Against the Normalisation of Nationalism & the Personal Appropriation of Cities, Cultures & Countries

 A Personal Response to Orhan Pamuk’s Autobiographical Memoir

‘Istanbul: Memories and the City’

 

“Nationalism is an infantile thing. It is the measles of mankind.”

– Albert Einstein

 

For people who love reading, good writing is tantamount to magic. In my mind, in the modern age the closest thing we get to a magician is a good writer, for words have the power to produce magic. The act of mental transportation, suddenly being somewhere else through scanning one’s eyes across a page (a different time, country, planet, body, self) is nothing short of wizardry and witchcraft. If ever we could apply those notions to existence, it is in the domain of literature – within the very act of reading and writing.

The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is the closest thing to a magician I have encountered in my recent literary travels. Upon reading one paragraph I was instantly sucked into a portal – partly composed of my own mind and memories, partly composed of his. Out of the emergence of this ebb and flow of words, written by him and experienced by me, a new experience is born. A symbiosis of thought, a concatenation of recollection – and with that power comes new thinking, new perceptions, re-imagined narratives, re-considered lives. I love how that happens and recognise the rarity of such writing. I have experienced that in poetry, but less often in non-fiction and even less in fiction.

My partner handed me Pamuk’s book ‘Istanbul: Memories and the City’ as I was boarding a train. My one brief experience of Turkey and Istanbul was not great; but my partner’s experiences have been very different from mine – overwhelmingly positive, at least before the advent of recent political upheavals. So it was with slight hesitancy and scepticism that I took the book, but after reading the first paragraph all my doubts subsided and five chapters in, I was captivated. It was a revelation to discover that Pamuk’s Istanbul was similar to my one isolated encounter. My anticipated defences were never erected, instead I felt myself soften to the city he so tenderly yet truthfully depicts.

Alongside Pamuk’s biographical meanderings through his childhood, through the cobbled melancholic streets of old Istanbul, I also explored my own roots and reflected, simultaneously with his, upon the nature of personal identity and what it means to feel attached, or not, to one’s country of birth. As a teacher of English to adults from across the world, it has always been apparent to me that very often a person’s sense of self is intricately rooted in their ‘home’ country. In some regions of the world the extent of this I have found both startling and often unsettling. Upon entering conversation with one Omani girl, for example, I casually said how much I loved Muscat to which I received a bashful giggle and coy ‘thank you!’, as though she was personally responsible for the creation of such a city! By an act of chance she just happened to be born in that country and that city, so what makes her feel so bound to it, so personally attached? Would she feel the same way if she had been born in Stockholm or Chicago, Santiago or Sheffield? Is it a valid response – tenable and virtuous or a less thought out existential position to hold? I have never felt a sense of pride or attachment to the locale of my birth – is this a fault on my part, my parents, my home town, or conversely, a perfectly authentic response to my past? It is these questions that struck me as I was reading Memories and the City.

Pamuk refers to ‘his’ city time and time again. This grand collocation, a personal pronoun linguistically attached to an entire city feels so strange, so alien, to me. What gives him, anyone, the right (or desire) to possess a whole city? Isn’t this habit of homeland appropriation so imbued with everything problematic about the world we live in? Isn’t nationalism one of the greatest evils society and civilisation ever created? Personally I have always felt separate from the country and town I grew up in – I certainly do not feel that one nondescript Surrey location has in any way shaped, defined or belongs to me, quite the contrary. Would I feel differently if I had been brought up in Venice, Paris or in a crumbling city apartment with views overlooking the Bosphorus? I wonder if particular places on earth inspire greater love, create stronger attachment. I suspect that my lack of attachment could be due to the fact that I am Anglo-Persian – a child of two countries and, consequently, critical and appreciative of both. But it may also be due to my interest in identity per se, and how my psycho-philosophical excavations have unearthed the illusory and shaky foundations of the arbitrary, fabricated concept of self.

I was conceived in Iran but born in the UK just after the Islamic Revolution in 1978. In the womb I subconsciously listened to the sounds of Persia, through my mother I received nourishment grown and picked from the soil of the Middle East, but I took my first breath in English air. My mother caught one of the last planes out of Tehran. I grew up in Purley, Surrey, had an idyllic, innocent and care-free childhood. My memories predominantly consist of time spent playing with my best friend, playing and fighting with my younger brother, being with my doting parents and often visiting extended family. I was largely oblivious to the wider world, cocooned in my own safe, happy existence. I paid no attention to the weather, the people, the buildings, the culture or the passing of the seasons. It was all background, just existent in a pleasant and insignificant way. I cannot recall poetic or profound experiences, watched no meandering river flowing past my window, had no sense of history, no real sense of self – and what a wonderful sheltered simplicity it was.

When I read Pamuk, and journey through his childhood alongside him, sharing in his discoveries and personal revelations, I cannot help but feel acute sadness. The melancholy of Istanbul seeped into his soul, permeated his pores, and saturated his existence – he was not free, in a childhood bubble, sheltered from the adult world with all its myriad adult problems. Later he would become a literary magician, but at such a cost. His adult life would be one of rich reflection and creativity, but how he suffered. I have come to realise more and more, as I move through life, just how significant our childhood is in shaping us and the way we perceive the outside world and our place in it. Deep and stable adult life contentment might only be possible once we understand and come to terms with the profound significance of our formative years.

As I read Pamuk I pondered the question: should we be so bound to the randomness of where our parents chose to live and raise us? I like to think, possibly idealistically, that we can overcome certain givens, overcome certain circumstances thrown our way at birth, that we can take control of our own choices, lives, destinies – not be at the mercy of what we had no hand in creating. I suppose, in this respect, I consider myself to be an existentialist. I believe a sentimental attachment to one place undermines and contradicts the unity that could exist between people of different countries and cultures. Love of the sheer randomness of where we lived as children is divisive. It creates unnecessary boundaries, creates imaginary separation, fosters difference, and promotes discord. It can also create a defence mechanism within us so strong that an entire town, city, country, creed, culture, even continent becomes as intimately associated with our identity as our immediate family. Couldn’t we, in all honest simplicity, attribute the flowering of wars and the poison of nationalism – to this ‘love’ of where we grew up? Perhaps loving one’s hometown is not such a benign human habit as it is often thought. My time spent living in China and the Middle East revealed how far this ‘loving one’s country’ can go – I observed first-hand the catastrophic existential limitations of lives lived in chains forged by the iron-grip of forced communal thinking and unquestioning faith in religion, culture and where one is born.

Pamuk writes: “I’ve never wholly belonged to this city, and maybe that’s been the problem all along.” I would say that the very notion that he feels it necessary to ‘belong’ to a city is the underlying problem. Pamuk continues: “Why should we expect a city to cure us of our spiritual pains? Perhaps because we cannot help loving our city like a family. But we still have to decide which part of the city we love and invent the reasons why.” Unlike the regard and attachment we have for our parents, who nurture us, care for us, shape us, affect us positively (or not), I would argue that it is erroneous and untenable to regard the arbitrariness of our childhood locale in a similar fashion. It leads to a kind of deterministic resignation, defines us before we can approach self-governance, keeps us indelibly bound to a particular culture, creed, communal thought pattern or regional mores – all at a profound cost to the development of self, and humanity.

Of course, sociologically speaking, nationalism, patriotism (including the social constraint mechanism of sport) and the maintenance of cultural traditions keep people from questioning the state and the people, forces, dictatorships, monarchies and powers that control them. Philosophically, psychologically, existentially, the problem is even more problematic. Reading the beautiful torment of Pamuk’s melancholic soul provides us with tremendous insight into the profound personal battles one can have when we link our sense of self to a particular country or city. I have never rooted myself to a particular place on an arbitrarily created map and feel so much more at home in the world and in myself than many others, Pamuk included. I feel that I am shaped by experiences of my own choosing, a person at the helm of my own life, a person ultimately unchained from the oppression of nationalism, religion, culture or attachment to geography.

I would argue that, ultimately, the personal appropriation of cities, countries and cultures only leads to a self-identity rooted in inauthenticity, self-limitation, and the divisive horrors of patriotism, nationalism (and religion). Travel, appreciation of the natural world, conversation, reading, creative pursuits…are good antidotes to this, as is philosophy – perhaps one of only a few endeavours that causes the unravelling, and potential re-stitching, of the very fabric of existence and that strange, slippery, oft-chaotic concept known as ‘self.’

 

“National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic, religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.”

– Carl Sagan