Cartoonist Saul Steinberg's “View of the World from 9th Avenue” graced the cover of The New Yorker magazine in 1976 and parodied the provincialism that lurks beneath Manhattan's inner conviction that it the most sophisticated place on earth. From a New Yorker's solipsistic universe, the Hudson River flows deeper than the Pacific Ocean, New Jersey looms larger than Japan. How would a Turkish Steinberg depict the view from İstanbul? It was a question I asked indirectly to the head of one İstanbul-based 24-hour news channel. Or at least, I listened to a reply of sorts as he complained about overstretched resources. And of course when you think about it, the number of stories he has to cover on his viewers' behalf was vast. There are between 3 and 4 million Turks living in Europe and Turkey is a candidate for the European Union, so what happens in Brussels and the rest of the continent matters. Turkey has an emotional interest in the Middle East and has full diplomatic relations with Israel. There have been Turkish peacekeeping troops stationed with NATO in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and even Somalia. No country on earth can ignore what happens in the United States, and Washington's invasion of Turkey's neighbor Iraq has left Turks on edge. Ever since the end of the Cold War, Turks have taken an interest in their ethnic cousins in energy-rich Central Asia. Conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan concern Ankara as well. Georgia has a common border, so when Russian troops march in, Turks sit up. As for Russia, it has become Turkey's largest individual trading partner, vital to Turkish efforts to be a key transit hub for gas and oil, but not always a comfortable neighbor. The Gulf states are investors in Turkey and go on shopping sprees for İstanbul real estate. Turkey has another border with Syria and one with Iran. Just before the collapse of its communist regime, ethnic Turks fled from Bulgaria to a country where they would be welcomed. Relations with Greece have historic ups and downs. Turkish businessmen are busy discovering the continent of Africa. And so the list goes on.
According to the harassed news editor, the average Turkish viewer was far better informed about the world they inhabited than the average American or European simply because they had to be. Yet I still had a niggling doubt. It seems to me that climate change and environmental concerns do not command the same headline space in Turkey they do elsewhere; they are still not headline news, and these are the sort of “one globe” issues that take as their first principle the world's interconnectedness.
So I called a Turkish cartoonist to ask his opinion. Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu speaks no English and is from a small Black Sea town which is about as far from the Manhattan skyline as you can get. Yet he was the one whose gentle drawing appeared on the New Yorker's cover for the second anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the city. It depicted a Manhattan where every building has its twin, with each twin reflected in the dark autumn colors of the water off shore. It is clear that he possessed a sensitivity that did not stop at national frontiers.
So what was the İstanbulite's view of the world? “It depends whom you ask,” he began diplomatically. His view was of a people very divided by great cultural chasms -- that many Turks may have a clearer and more sympathetic view of what was happening on the continent that of what was happening in the neighborhood across town. Conversely, many were so obsessed with the divisions within their own society that they could not see beyond its own boundaries. The “headscarf” issue or “the Kurdish overture” were like the buildings without planning permission that litter so many Turkish cities, structures that appear from nowhere which obstruct the panorama.
So I am left with the somewhat paradoxical picture of a society which enjoys an Olympian view of the world but which sometimes forgets to look out the window. In order to overcome its own problems, it needs the artist's most rudimentary tool -- perspective.
