There was Kurdish music spilling out of one shop, Turkish pop from another. The contrast with my first visit to Turkey in the early 1980s was quite sharp. At the time, the population had struck me as being far more uniform, and in fact rather drab. Now the personality of each individual shines through. You see young men with creative hairstyles who make ample use of colorful dyes, women with headscarves and girls in miniskirts, businessmen in suits, Anatolian villagers and teenage pseudo-rappers in baggy pants. Istanbul today presents the rich canvas of a 21st century cosmopolitan metropolis. This is what I love about this city.
From diversity, our conversation veered onto the growing intolerance and nationalism that is sweeping through Europe, and of course Turkey. Like me, my British visitor felt no real sense of national pride. We have both lived abroad for a major part of our lives, and we both believe our nationality to be mainly an accident of birth. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have feelings for the places we grew up in -- in her case Britain, in mine Switzerland -- but the attachment stems from ties with relatives and friends, and from happy memories, rather than from an intrinsic sense of national pride.
People move around so much these days that the notion of a single identity has become increasingly problematic. And yet, multiculturalism is questioned more and more in Europe. People are expected to choose one identity and forsake all others. In Turkey, of course, the idea that people can have a secondary identity is often seen a betrayal. But can you really close the lid on such diversity?
Whenever you spend time in a new country, you are inevitably influenced by your environment. My ties to Turkey are probably as strong as those to my native land, and yet I’m not Turkish. The guest workers in Europe, who spend 30 years dreaming of returning to their homeland and never learn to speak the native language, often find themselves quite isolated when they finally return to their village. Without even being aware of it, they have changed. Birthplace and lineage are only a fraction of our identity.
A British television documentary recently demonstrated the futility of seeking ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Eight people, some of them well-known like Margaret Thatcher’s journalist daughter Carol and the former Tory politician Lord Tebbit, volunteered to have their DNA tested using state-of-the-art technology. All of them were white, had been born and raised in England and had in common a strong belief that they were 100 percent English.
The results surprised all the participants, though not the geneticists who know that migration is in fact not a new phenomenon. These “pure” English people turned out to have African, Mongolian or South Asian blood. Carol Thatcher had Middle Eastern roots. One participant was so upset to discover she had Roma origins that she threatened to sue.
Perhaps some enterprising Turkish TV producer will be willing to invest the $250 per person needed to repeat the experiment here. Given the dozens of civilizations that have succeeded one another on what is today Turkey’s territory, it is fair to assume that the results would take a few nationalists aback. Perhaps it is time to abandon attempts to label people and place them in neat categories. We need to get back to the lowest common denominator: We are all humans.
