It is undeniably true that I was born in the United States, and this means when I go to Brussels I have to enter the slow queue for non-EU residents and when I land in New York I get to speed through the border controls much quicker than those with passports a different color than my own. On the other hand, I have spent three-quarters of my life living in someone else's countries, growing ties and attachment to places far from where I began. Through some Jungian coincidence I am writing this on an Amtrak train traveling from Washington to New York, and we are just pulling into Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, within the shadow of the maternity hospital where I made my debut. By rights, my emotional Geiger counter should be clicking madly. Except it's not. This confession would suggest I am uniquely unsuited to identify with the results of an attitudinal survey of my adopted homeland conducted by Yılmaz Esmer, now of Bahçeşehir University. If the study shows anything, it is that many Turks are uncomfortable outside their immediate circle and that they do not wish to have much contact with people whose lifestyles might contradict their own. Over half those surveyed were uncomfortable with the idea of having Christians as neighbors, and an even larger percentage didn't want to live next to Jews. Only around 5 percent said they faced some sort of direct pressure to conform to an alien set of beliefs or that they had immediate experience of discrimination (gender or race and religion). That might appear to be a comfort to those who say there is no such thing as “neighborhood pressure” -- a much-debated mobilized intolerance that others say threatens a secular way of life.
On the other hand, it might also suggest that many people have no experience of ways of life other than their own, and that most people have neither the inclination nor the possibility of straying far from their cultural comfort zone. At the same time one of the survey's other findings (and which is confirmed by other studies) is that people have a not entirely irrational fear of outside challenges to their way of life. Some 71 percent of those questioned thought the EU was out to divide Turkey and an even larger 81 percent thought Brussels had a mission to inculcate Christianity. Yet there was a sizeable majority (57 percent) who are eager that Turkey should become a member.
Much of the intolerance the survey detects seems to me a lack of real exposure to other ways of life and a fear of intolerance in others. True tolerance, I suspect, is not just the ability to negotiate other cultures and identities but being comfortable with one's own.
There are contradictions as well within my own proud sense of “rootlessness.” When I return to America, I look up people who know me not as I am now but what I might have become. Part of the pleasure of sitting down to dinner with an elementary school chum is not that she also went on to become a journalist but that we see each other without the tarnish of the intervening years. Inevitably, many of my friends in America are people whom I know from my long years in Turkey, but they too represent a fixed moment in time: an American friend from high school who left Turkey decades ago and whose view of İstanbul is fixed back in the same decade I left America, or a Turkish friend whose life is the mirror of my own and who interrogates me closely on what is going in Turkey, in part to live vicariously through me an alternative life in which he had stayed at home.
Before I know, I will be back on a plane to İstanbul. But will I be going home?
