Call For Submissions For The Expat Harem Collection

Calling all women writers who have lived, worked, studied or traveled in Turkey for at least a year: Contribute your voice to a new anthology of foreign women’s reflections on modern Turkey. Deadline: August 1, 2004 TALES FROM THE EXPAT HAREM: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, edited by Anastasia M. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gokmen

The book aims to be a personal, entertaining read for both students and scholars of Turkey as well as armchair cultural travelers, fans of women’s literature, and expatriates of all stripes.

During Ottoman rule, the word 'harem' (from the word ‘haram’, meaning sacred and forbidden) referred to both the population as well as the living quarters of the foreign-born brides and servants of the Turkish sultan. An intimate and confined community of women, it was a place for sharing womanly wisdom and cultivating cultural tradition.

In this non-fiction anthology we invoke a modern day Turkish harem with its chorus of voices and shared female experience -- in the sense that the expatriate population is naturally cohesive and isolated due to the process of assimilation. Newcomers learning to maneuver within a new set of variables and cultural boundaries necessarily experience a limitation of freedom: language barriers act as an obstacle to travel and independence, cultural naivete hinders social interaction, and ethnocentric rigidity impedes dynamic experience.

Taking the reader on humorous and poignant journeys of cultural contrast and discovery, our contributors break free of the confines of the harem, breaching the confined world of the unassimilated to touch the true heart of Turkey. Whether newly arrived or well-established expatriates, or Turks repatriating to their homeland after a long absence, all our contributors are foreign brides of modern Turkey: wedded to its culture, embedded in it even, and yet forever outsiders.

We are looking for high-quality personal essays, insightful flash non-fiction and colorful travelogue--in English, 2,500 words or less.  Unpublished work is preferred, although well-crafted previously published work will be considered.

Further information and to submit work please visit the rudimentary site: www.expatharem.com

Inquiries info@expatharem.com

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CHAPTERS:

• LAST STOP ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS: The last city in Europe and the first city in Asia, arriving in continent-straddling Istanbul, Turkey naturally commits a person to a state of permanent limbo, an ever-shifting flux between West and East. An expatriate can tie herself into existential knots while transitioning into a culture that is itself a metaphor for transition.
• PEDDLER IN THE BAZAAR: From the routine of the weekly open-air vegetable market to the entrancing delights of the Grand Bazaar, Turkey’s brisk street life includes haggling with street peddlers and shop keepers, narrow escapes from aggressive vendors, and sometimes deep friendships established over cups of tea. What makes the difference in still being quoted ‘tourist prices’ or becoming a vendor’s prized foreign customer? Other shopping issues.
• DIVANS, HOOKAHS & COFFEE HOUSES:  Turks are a communal people, opting for interaction and conversation whenever possible, each demographic migrating towards their particular haunts: young people play backgammon in cafes, puffing on fruit-flavored tobacco from huge hookahs, while older men gather on street corners, under shady trees, or in smoky kahvehaneler to play cards and sip from tulip glasses.  In the Ottoman court the divan was the public audience room, traditionally a gathering place of men, but here refers to the social pursuits and behaviors of Turkish men – from football fanaticism and drinking with the lads to their particular blend of machismo tempered by acute sentimentality. How do Turks accommodate social expectations of foreign women, and how do expats adjust to the sometimes exhausting, invasive communal spirit?
• KETTLES & CAULDRONS: Culinary effort equals family devotion and a freshly made dessert signals hospitality for the constant flow of “unexpected” guests. Any self-respecting cook lovingly creates time-consuming meals from scratch, efforts balanced by the lingering pleasure of dinners that last half the night.  Adventures in the kitchen, memorable meals, being a force-fed guest.
• SALVES & SOOTHSAYERS: Since the early days of the Selcuk settlers, Turks have clung to their shamanistic roots, while the folk art of natural healing has been passed down through the generations. Clove for a toothache, licorice root for bronchial complaints, fennel tea as an herbal birth control method. Doorways hung with blue glass talismans for protection, fortunes divined from coffee grounds, supplications made to Telli Baba. Do old wives’ tales—like infertility from walking barefoot on a cold marble floor or jaundice caused by failure to urinate immediately after a scare—apply only to those born into the Turkish culture, or should everyone on Turkish soil heed their witchy wisdom?
• SHIMMY AT THE DRUMBEAT: When a dish hits a restaurant floor, Turkish women will take it as an opening drum beat and get up and dance, so the joke goes. Traditional folkloric music and dance is in the blood, widely learned and performed by young and old, male and female, in formal costumed performances or just around the living room. An innate part of the Turkish psyche, song and dance can erupt at any moment and overwhelm even the most intrepid expatriate
• HENNA'D HANDS:  Courting rituals both customary and modified to accommodate foreign brides and clashing cultures. From traditional village weddings to big city civil services to high society receptions covered by voracious paparazzi, weddings are colorful events in Turkey.  The traditions both high and low, ancient and modern, whether simply witnessed, or lived.
• HAMAM:  The valide sultana, the ruler’s mother, once inspected prospective brides for her noble son in the hamam, the display venue for female comeliness.  It was also a place where women whiled away the hours in each others’ company. The traditional Turkish sauna and scrub remains a complex tradition of beauty practice, female retreat and even matriarchal power base, but our hamam doubles as a metaphor for acceptance into the Turkish female culture, and the value of female friendship.
• PRECIOUS DARLINGS: Worth their weight in gold, children are revered in Turkish society. All segments of the population expect a young couple to procreate and then join together in raising the children, often redefining boundaries for expat women.  Elaborate circumcision customs.  Typical overindulgence of offspring balanced by honoring the homemaker and priority placed on family.
• KEREVANSERAY: Traveling across the country, one witnesses places that still echo a way of life centuries old. Hospitality on the homesteads, natural wonders, historical ruins. Expat adventures across the expanse of the Turkish coasts and heartland.

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TIPS FOR WRITERS

We prefer personal essays with evocative language and dialogue, detailed description that sets the scene and sketches the people. You may have heard this type of writing referred to as creative or literary nonfiction – facts conveyed with the devices of a novelist.

TELL US A TALE, A MOMENT WHEN YOUR SENSE OF SELF WAS CHALLENGED, WHEN YOU LEARNED A TRUTH ABOUT TURKISH CULTURE.

SET THE STAGE – TELL US WHO YOU ARE, WHERE YOU ARE,  HOW YOU CAME TO BE THERE AND THEN TELL US WHAT HAPPENED.

BE SPECIFIC. FOCUS ON YOUR THEME WITH EVERY PARAGRAPH MOVING FORWARD TO YOUR DESTINATION, YOUR POINT. DESCRIBE DETAILS THAT YOU WANT US TO EXPERIENCE.   GIVE US A SENSE OF PLACE,  A SKETCH OF A PERSON. SIGHTS, SOUNDS, SMELLS.

BE LIKEABLE. REGARDLESS OF TOPIC, WIN US OVER WITH YOUR HUMANITY, YOUR HUMOR, YOUR GOOD INTENTIONS. REVEAL YOUR MOTIVATIONS, AND BE POSITIVE.

BE RELEVANT.  HOW DOES YOUR STORY FIT INTO THE BOOK? WHICH ASPECT OF TURKISH CULTURE, OR BEING A FOREIGN WOMAN IN TURKEY, DOES IT ILLUMINATE?

POSSIBLE BREAKING POINTS/BOUNDARIES/AREAS OF ILLUMINATION

•  Code of Ethics
• Morals
• Independence
• Common sense/folk wisdom
• Expectations
• Culture/Social conditioning
• Fashion/trend-setting
• Privacy
• Modesty
• Language skills
• Femininity
• Wifely duties/skills
• Motherly duties/skills
• Domestic skills (cooking, cleaning, shopping)
• Mother-in-law

TIPS FOR NONWRITERS

TELL US A TALE, A MOMENT WHEN YOUR SENSE OF SELF WAS CHALLENGED, WHEN YOU LEARNED A TRUTH ABOUT TURKISH CULTURE.

SET THE STAGE – TELL US WHO YOU ARE, WHERE YOU ARE, HOW YOU CAME TO BE THERE AND THEN TELL US WHAT HAPPENED.

BE SPECIFIC. FOCUS ON YOUR THEME WITH EVERY PARAGRAPH MOVING FORWARD TO YOUR DESTINATION, YOUR POINT. DESCRIBE DETAILS THAT YOU WANT US TO EXPERIENCE. GIVE US A SENSE OF PLACE, A SKETCH OF A PERSON. SIGHTS, SOUNDS, SMELLS.

BE LIKEABLE. REGARDLESS OF TOPIC, WIN US OVER WITH YOUR HUMANITY, YOUR HUMOR, YOUR GOOD INTENTIONS. REVEAL YOUR MOTIVATIONS, AND BE POSITIVE.

BE RELEVANT. HOW DOES YOUR STORY FIT INTO THE BOOK? WHICH ASPECT OF TURKISH CULTURE, OR BEING A FOREIGN WOMAN IN TURKEY, DOES IT ILLUMINATE?

Radical About Face: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the General

I want to see a general in the White House. For a woman born and bred in Berkeley, a leading community in any anti-war movement, this urge should generate an identity crisis. But it doesn’t. That disorientation has already occurred. In seeking the presidency, former Supreme Allied Commander Wesley K. Clark fused my conflicted self and brought me back to Democratic ground.

The general and I have a lot in common. Now living in Istanbul, the Turkish site of four recent terrorist bombings, and a former ground zero resident with a view of New York’s smoking pile, my world is a war zone. Instead of activist or escapist pursuits, I choose geopolitical chess.

After September 11 I worried I was turning into a Republican, practically an out-of-body experience. Longtime leftist friends marched in the streets while I was glued to the couch, waiting for the latest Osama tape on Fox.

I was already apolitical, having come unmoored from the leftwing in my twenties, when superficies concerned me most. Ineffectual packaging and delivery of a message, a typical province of radicals, seemed the ultimate self-indulgence and more about making statements than differences.

But then I saw myself acting like someone else. I was displaying the flag in my New York apartment window, on my lapel, and in the car, without a hint of irony and much emotion. Brandishing the flag was a homecoming after a lifetime of being an outsider. There was a time when I felt I couldn’t even buy one.

At a 1975 church rummage sale, my sister and I coveted a star-spangled banner as a bedspread, but the elderly seller chastised our disrespect. I was better educated about icons of Communist China than emblems of the nation, my progressive school abandoning the pledge of allegiance that year for an alternative morning ritual: calisthenics to a scratchy Chairman Mao record.

Most people can’t go home again, but I can’t even visit. My bohemian parents no longer recognize my political identity as an offshoot of their own. One Berkeley notion I’ve sloughed, illustrated by NATO generals at my wedding (groom’s side) is that the military is solely negative.

My Northern Californian childhood was steeped in a fundamental enmity for the armed forces, sinister wing of an objectionable government. Instead of tying yellow ribbons around gnarled oaks, neighbors papered telephone poles to get the U.S. out of Latin America. When my rebellious younger sister requested an Air Force brochure, the corruptive material was confiscated directly from the postman.

However alien in our mailbox and out on the scruffy streets, the service was familiar to me. Counter to Berkeley counterculture, and owing to my father’s drafted acquaintance with Army discipline, I was raised in a spit and shine household. Excellence was the only option, elbow grease the lone method, hierarchy unimpeachable, and punishment swift. Ever grunts, my sisters and I scrubbed bathroom grout with toothbrushes and grew steely with push-ups when afoul of regulations, while good report cards and judo promotions netted weekend passes for R’n’R sleepovers at friends’ houses. I trained seventeen years in boot camp, I discovered in college.  A first year West Point cadet described the climate he was expected to endure at the elite academy. “They take away basic rights and give them back as privileges,” he whined, trying to impress me.

That particular West Pointer failed to stir me, but crisp four star General Clark has. On television after 9/11, Clark anchored my attention with his magnetic and commanding presence, and drew me to his reasoned and reasonable commentary about Iraq, the war on terror, and the importance of the U.N. and NATO.  Later, the grassroots draft of the worldly and diplomatic warrior stoked hopes for a better world.  Eighty year old Midwestern veterans called the general back to duty, West Coast thirtysomethings pledged unemployment checks, and Europeans ineligible to vote declared “the world needs you”.  In announcing his Democratic candidacy, the brilliant strategist and Rhodes Scholar restored my place in that party. I recognize my complicated self in the Democrat he defines, a patriot forged from diverse life experiences and high-stakes demands of our time. Clark’s erudite defense of our Constitution reverberates in my idealistic Berkeley heart.

With the general in the White House, America is my home.

In a brainy, principled, comprehensive Clark world I’m not a traitor because I performed calisthenics to Chairman Mao, and intense athletic and academic achievements made me the stalwart character I am today. Clark’s well-delivered presentation of important issues is standard.

A liberal in conservative uniform, a peace-lover who knows how and when to prosecute a successful war, a thinking man of action whose own self-respect is a pleasure to esteem, Clark is where I’ve been headed my whole life.

The Boys Next Door

As beleaguered Iraq continues to list, lawless and malfunctioning under ineffective American leadership, I am reminded of a prophetic evening before the war, a dinner of fortune telling and historic premonition, when the guests could not yet envision a positive post-Saddam Iraq, and an Ottoman imperial setting supported the chaos theory. It was a warm autumn night in Istanbul 2002 and I was dining with my Turkish in-laws and some friends, members of Turkey’s military elite.  We sat at water’s edge in the shadow of Feriye, a nineteenth century Ottoman palace now transformed into an elegant restaurant. Over platters of grilled grouper and plates of garlicky eggplant, familiar jocularity soon devolved into graver matters, the geopolitical concerns of soldiers: succession in bordering Iraq.

“There is no clear replacement for Saddam,” declared General Çevik Bir, large palm striking linen. Vigorous and handsome, the sixty-three year old retiree paused dramatically. Candles flickered in the breeze, the black Bosporus lapped at ancient stone embankments. And we, family and friends, waited, forks poised.

The general knows the pandemonium of a power vacuum. Rising to world prominence in 1993, he commanded the United Nations peacekeeping force in Somalia during the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident. He is also one of Turkey’s most engaging dignitaries.

“No one can go in there before the leadership problem is solved.”

Up went a chorus of supportive murmurs. “So right, paşa,” chimed well-wishers who’d gathered behind our chairs, waiters and chefs and other diners charmed by the celebrity of prominent soldiers. Since its founding in 1923, in the democratic, Western-oriented but Muslim republic, the military is especially revered as guardian of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular philosophy.

Bir lifted to his lips a tall glass of milky rakı, the national anise liquor, signaling he relinquished the floor. The crowd, including Istanbul’s chief of police Hassan Özdemir who had drifted over from the next table, returned to their respective dinner parties and kitchen duties.

A wiry guest with dark eyebrows seized his opportunity.  Leaning forward in a roomy navy suit, General Neçdet Timur, former chief of staff of the Turkish army, countered that stabilizing Iraq demands more than locating an appropriate leader, it requires a government palatable to the region. “Arab nations won’t support a new war,” predicted the soft-spoken Timur, in Turkish. Another guest, an elegant woman wrapped in a beige shawl, translated for me.

“Even if the U.N. institutes a democracy, he says, it will be poorly received by those who lack that kind of culture,” she whispered to me as the small man concluded, folding his hands in his lap as pristine waiters swept the table of fish-bones and lemon wedges.

Intrepid civilian from the U.S., drunk on the geopolitical experience at the table, I tried my hand in the debate before considering its strength. “What about that fellow from the Iraqi National Congress – you know, the one exiled in America?” As I interjected, I realized my failure to even remember Ahmed Chalabi’s name signaled that my words did not demand serious attention from the military men. The clueless question hung in the air while the generals turned in their chairs and scanned the terrace for servers with trays of plump figs and oozing, flaky baklava. They had grown bored with the circuitous and intractable issue, one they had undoubtedly pondered many times before.

Sometimes generals just want to have dessert.

These particular retirees have other more satisfying outlets for discussion than dinner with uninformed civilians like me. Alongside fellow generals, admirals, ambassadors and university intellectuals, both men contribute geopolitical and military analysis to National Strategy, the Turkish defense magazine where Bir is managing director.

As a sliver of moon rose above the colonnaded palace the woman in the beige shawl once again came to my rescue, introducing a different subject: the history of the palace.  In the very rooms our dinner was prepared, she explained, in 1876 a disastrous sultan committed suicide after being deposed by reformers known the Young Turks.  I had actually heard of the Young Turks, and was quick to tell her so. Encouraged, my feminine companion glanced around the table for other contributions but no one was listening. The generals had reverted to trading jokes with a new visitor, the stylish Vedat Başaran, Feriye’s chef and general manager, a man dedicated to reviving the glories of Ottoman cuisine.

“With no fitting successor, the empire suffered what we call the year of the three sultans,” my impromptu historian explained, describing a spiraling year of unsuitable and decadent leaders, all quickly replaced.  Her tale trailed off as Turkish kahve was served in tiny cups painted gold with tulips. Thick black coffee was too strong for me to drink at that late hour, but there was no refusing tradition.

When I urged her to finish her story, she pressed on, irony beginning to dawn. She had not succeeded in changing the subject.

“Finally, a liberal sultan was enthroned, and he swore to make a constitution,” she wrapped up tidily, drained her coffee and flipped the cup onto its saucer. Not yet tired of prophecy, one of the generals had offered to interpret our fortunes from muddy grounds.

Later that night, amped on caffeine as expected, I couldn’t sleep.  A quick peek at the Ottoman history books revealed that progressive Sultan Abdul Hamit II -- the broadminded ruler who swore to improve the welfare of the people -- soon reneged on his promise, over-burdened by the task. There was simply too much work to do.

These days it often seems that there is too much work to do in Iraq, from restoring basic utilities to protecting the populace and the economy. But if the generals’ theory and history’s warning that night in Istanbul offer any insight, Iraq is suffering the initial power vacuum of a poorly-planned reformation attempt. Call it “Iraq’s year of the three sultans”.  A time of confusion, danger and spiraling ineptitude, the substitutions certainly are underway in Baghdad as U.S.-appointed interim administrator L. Paul Bremer III swiftly replaced General Jay Garner and local councils emerge, corrupt and disband. Perhaps by this spring a promising new Iraqi leader will be installed, one who will swear to make the necessary changes.  For the sake of his fortune, he better be a student of history.

++ This appeared in The Drexel Online Journal, September 22, 2003.

Figurehead Travel Model For The Sharing Economy

Acknowledging a tendency for certain students to be natural leaders in their social circles, Kerim Baran, principal of a figurehead travel service based in San Francisco, invites magnetic personalities to serve as unencumbered trip leaders while their classmates cement social and professional bonds in style.

“Imagine jetting off to an exotic locale with your favorite college crowd,” says Baran. “Without the buzz-killing responsibility of being in charge.”

Inspired by his own social travel peaks while in the academy, this Harvard MBA offers a short-cut to quality group travel in Turkey and beyond, absorbing intensive logistics and tailoring trips to culturally curious, active collegiates.

In its maiden season this past summer, Baran chartered Istanbul nightclub hopping and Aegean yachting tours for several assemblies of Harvard students.

Staging my destination wedding in Turkey last year was a first-hand lesson in the immense energy investment -- and memorable profit -- of group travel. Through social connections I have become acquainted with Mr. Baran and his travel philosophy.

I see it as a way to maximize college holidays: students with less cash to drop than shoulders to rub can benefit from the economy of scale offered by this new form of group trip. The figurehead model.