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INTERVIEW: Kaya Genç on ‘rage and revolution in modern Turkey’
William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr

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People run as riot police use water cannon to disperse demonstrators in Istanbul on Nov. 5. AFP photo
People run as riot police use water cannon to disperse demonstrators in Istanbul on Nov. 5. AFP photo
Turkey’s feverish news agenda shifts so rapidly that it can induce vertigo among locals. Citizens face a truly daunting set of challenges - economic strife, hydra-headed terrorism, authoritarianism, and politics as a grim culture war.

Author Kaya Genç’s new book, “Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey,” takes a step back from the day to day. Profiling young Turks from across the political spectrum – from young leftist activists to government-supporting construction magnates - the book gives welcome perspective on the social undercurrents feeding into the country’s political turf war.

Genç sat down with the Hürriyet Daily News to talk about “Under the Shadow” and what it can tell us about today’s Turkey.

What did you want to achieve with this book?

I didn't start with a thesis. I wanted to listen to people, hear their stories, hear the way they articulate their views. I wanted to be a fly on the wall and just hear them out. I see lots of intelligent people, passionate about their political beliefs, who mostly disagree with each other but who all make legitimate points. The most difficult thing was to pick who to speak to. You can pick people from political parties, or you can pick people from the right and left, but what is right and left in Turkey? These are not very clear cut things.

I wanted this book to be about young people, so I had to find young articulate people who were willing to communicate their views to me. But I had to find people from different spheres of life: People from the cultural world, the political world, businesspeople. I wanted there to be lots of different voices that would somehow create the impression of the Turkish youth speaking throughout the book. It's curated and constructed, but the writer's role is to make it seem like a natural thing, as if we're just listening to the Turkish streets.

You started writing after the anti-government Gezi Park protests in summer 2013 and you finished just before the military coup attempt earlier this year. Things move so fast in Turkey that anything you write can quickly end up out of date. Was that a challenge for you?

When I was writing the book, Gezi Park was closed to all kinds of protests. If you went there with five people and started saying anything out loud you'd get in trouble with the police. It was very heavily guarded. There was stifling of people's voices across the whole political sphere, so for my book people were whispering their stories to me - people from both the left and the right. Then there were the 2015 general elections. One of my interviewees was running for election for the ruling AK Party, and there were others who supported left-wing MP Sırrı Süreyya Önder. So politics was everywhere. People had dreams.

The military coup attempt [of July 15, 2016] happened after I had finished the book and was working on its proofs and its index. I suddenly found myself in a very different place, thinking "how could I even publish the book now?" And then Gezi Park, close to where I live, was suddenly opened to all kinds of demonstrations and political views. It felt like everyone could go there and do whatever they wanted. The police became invisible. Suddenly the police were texting people to come and demonstrate in the park. It was a remarkable change in the course of Turkish politics.

The book includes voices from across the spectrum – each chapter is a kind of pen portrait of a different voice. There aren't many interjections from yourself.

I have both a scholarly and a journalistic temperament and I wanted to bring those things together. I wanted to hear the voices of the young people in the book. But it didn't really matter what I thought about things. What mattered was that I represented their beautifully articulated views in a truthful way. What I could also do, as a scholar-cum-journalist, was point to historical similarities. I'm an avid reader of late-19th century Ottoman literature and I can see reflections of the late Ottoman era in contemporary young people. The old Young Turkey spirit is there to be found in very different incarnations. My authorial voice should not be to say, "look at this conservative person, he's saying this but it's not really true," or "look at this progressive and how dreamy he is." Instead, let's put their views into historical perspective and show their historical echoes. I thought that would be a more subtle and elegant way of speaking as a writer.

The voice of the “other Turkey” - the conservative, nationalist, government-supporting majority - is rarely heard by English readers. Was there a deliberate attempt from you to get their voice across in the book?

Lots of the conservative people I spoke to were coming from what people used to call the "liberal tradition" in Turkey. But Turkish liberalism was something that had a very ambiguous meaning throughout the 2000s. If you supported the locking up of secularists, you were called a liberal. That was very strange. These people supported the governing party and also called themselves liberals. Because the ruling party was pro-EU and had a Europeanizing agenda, conservatives felt like they weren't properly articulating themselves.

But in recent years, in the past three years, the conservatives have found their voice. It's a voice that liberals don't like at all. The source of their voice comes from a kind of young Ottoman movement, which is a combination of Islamism, Ottomanism and constitutionalism. During the first decade of the AK Party, that voice was not articulated in the way it is now. It's a voice that's a bit violent and not easy to listen to. The last few years show us that we're having a post-liberal moment in Turkey. Liberalism was previously perceived as something behind which one could hide, as a way of not openly articulating your views. But the last few years have changed all that.

How did the fact that the book is in English and the audience is an English-reading audience change how you approached the subject? What would have been different if you were writing for a Turkish audience?

I've gotten used to writing for a British and American audience. First of all, English writing has to be very lucid and free of some stylistic playfulness. It has to be plain and understandable, like Hemingway. You are not writing for stylistic reasons; you want it to be very clear and open. You're writing for people who may not have seen the city or the culture before, so it's a big responsibility. Your writing will be their truth.

I used to write for Turkish book reviews and magazines. Here, everyone knows what you're writing about, so the trick is to articulate yourself in a different way so people recognize your voice and are able to say "Ah, that's Kaya Genç." But when I write in English it's a different game. I find it very liberating and educating to write in English because editors are very engaged in the act of writing and suggesting things to smooth your prose and make it more far-reaching. In Turkish, that's something we lack. I used to work as an editor for newspapers and book reviews and writers don't like editors to change what they write. They want to protect it and the editor doesn't play a big role of smoothing the prose. In English you get used to what editors pay attention to and how they're trying to make your writing more accessible. In Turkish if your writing is too accessible it's sometimes seen as a bad thing; people want to be more difficult.

You paint a picture of a Turkey defined by these various social groups. You say that understanding those fissures are the way to understand what’s happening in the country. Doesn’t that neglect the important questions of raw power and how it is wielded?

I'm also fascinated by that "raw power" and how it is produced and disseminated in society. Political discourse, speech-writing, and the lofty concepts we hear in political speeches are something I'm working on for another book at the moment. But for a book where I wanted to hear different people's voices articulating themselves, I didn't want to press political discourse or political ideology on them and give a particular shape to their articulations through my own understanding of political power.

So I consciously saved all that material for another book and chose in the limited space of this book to hear people's stories. I wanted to point to historical echoes but I didn't want to impose Turkish political history or current political discourse on these things. I wanted to hear young people and their stories.

What about the current situation? There’s an awful lot of pessimism around amid the crackdown after the coup attempt.

People say current events are the last nail in the coffin for Turkish democracy. But people have been saying that for the past three years, so I don't know if that feeling has much to do with reality or how observers look at reality. There is a certain pessimism among people who are very depressed and thinking, "let's leave the country, it has become unlivable, let's go to the U.S. where it's going to be great." But if you look at the world situation in France, Britain or the U.S., politics are changing everywhere and you cannot escape from it.

There is the reality of the electorate everywhere. Politics are definitely changing here but people don't want to spend time understanding what's really going on.

In Turkey we have to pay more attention to why people right now are more intent on things like "independence" and "sovereignty." Why are politicians really successful when they talk about these things? Why does it strike a chord? If we don’t pay more attention to this people will keep on articulating these views and we'll continue not to understand them.

We have to try to understand why people get these notions from their families and their grandparents. They hear these stories about fighting against foreigners and trying to keep the country independent from foreigners, so it's like family heritage for a lot of people. And politicians use these personal stories and transform them into political machines. Some politicians are more successful at doing that than others, but we have to understand how they succeed in doing it, how that mood is recreated and instrumentalized. That is a responsibility of writers and intellectuals. You cannot just be pessimistic and escape from the country. You have to pay attention to what people say and how politicians make use of that.

* Listen to Kaya Genç discuss the book on the Turkey Book Talk podcast via iTunes here, Stitcher here, Podbean here, or Facebook here.
November/26/2016

Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey
Kaya Genc
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Kaya Genc is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul whose writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The London Review of Books, Salon, Guernica Magazine, Sight & Sound, The Millions, The White Review and TIME Magazine, among others. His first novel, L Avventura was published in 2008. Kaya has a PhD in English literature and is the Istanbul correspondent of The Believer and The LA Review of Books as well as a contributing editor at Index on Censorship. His article for The LA Review of Books Surviving the Black Sea was selected as one of best non-fiction pieces of 2014 by The Atlantic. Currently writing a history of Turkish literature for Harvard University Press, and due to publish his first English novel later next year, he is one of Turkey s most hotly-anticipated young writers."

INTERVIEW: Author Kaya Genç talks centuries of Istanbul writing
William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr

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INTERVIEW: Author Kaya Genç talks centuries of Istanbul writing
Istanbul has always been a rich source of inspiration and a new book (reviewed in HDN here) gives a taste of writing about the city by classic names including Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Kaya Genç, the editor of “An Istanbul Anthology,” spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about centuries of literary reflections on the city, the writers he included in the selection, and those he had to leave out.

Istanbul is constantly changing, but what are some of the recurring themes that visitors have written about Istanbul over the years?

There has always been a kind of feeling of mystery - a feeling that there’s a will over Istanbul that the foreign traveler could go beneath to discover something. There is a sense of discovery in most writings in the book.

One is by Arthur Conan Doyle, so there is a kind of Sherlockian quality to it. This power and how it fascinates the Western observer is a continuing theme in many of these writings.

I also picked some writings from the 16th and 17th centuries. Of course the concerns here were very different; as the ages change the observers’ point of view also changes. The 19th century was the great age of Orientalism, where all information about the Orient becomes something else entirely - something much more politically important. Earlier writings look more innocent in a way, but there was a great escalation in the number of travelers to Istanbul towards the end of the 19th century. That’s a period I really like to write about and explore academically. So it was fun and really interesting to read the Decadent writers visiting Istanbul from the 1870s, and how their observations were different from visitors in the 17th or 18th centuries.

I’d never actually read Conan Doyle on Istanbul before.

There is a great story waiting to be told about Arthur Conan Doyle's relationship with Sultan Abdülhamid II. The quote I use in the book gives some insight into this. Conan Doyle was here in 1907 and Abdülhamid was a big fan of his fiction. He didn’t much like his historical novels, but he was a real Sherlockian. I included the scene where Conan Doyle describes attending Abdülhamid’s weekly selamlik [procession to Friday prayers]. He sees the sultan and is fascinated with the whole thing.

Sultan Abdülhamid was very suspicious of foreigners, so he had a spy assigned to Conan Doyle in Istanbul. He was spying on Conan Doyle to see whether he was spying on the sultan. So this was a very interesting relationship and there's a little slice of it in the book. Conan Doyle was actually researching a book that he wanted to write about Istanbul. When he visited Abdülhamid he was taking notes inside the palace and talking to people to learn details about the sultan's life. That caused trouble because Abdülhamid became suspicious, so Conan Doyle lost some of his privileges about seeing him.

But when the Young Turk revolution took place [in July 1908] and the rebels surrounded Abdülhamid's palace, it is rumored that he was inside reading Arthur Conan Doyle's stories aloud to try to stay calm and not hear what was going on outside. He had the stories translated into Turkish by the Ottoman translation bureau. I would really like to see an episode of Sherlock taking place in Istanbul next season.

Writings on the Ottoman capital were often less revealing of the actual character of the city than of their author’s interpretation. In some ways we’re really reading about the authors rather than Istanbul itself.

When you look at the character of the observer, someone like Ernest Hemingway, you see how his temperament is very different from someone like Mark Twain or Theophile Gautier. The way they approached their subjects stylistically was important and their temperament was important because most of these writings were from diaries or newspaper articles - not from novels. So what we get is not their fictional artistic style but more like their temperament.

In a way, Istanbul was used as a canvas on which the observer reflects his or her current mood. So we get a very sad and melancholic character like Gerard de Nerval, or a very alcohol- and entertainment-focused character like Hemingway, or a very good journalist like Gautier, whose writing was very precise and focused on bringing the detail of the city to readers in Paris.

And at the end you have a very depressed Andre Gide. The final section of the book is titled “The City as Hell,” which really resonated as I struggled around Istanbul in the freezing cold snowy sludge last week.

We all love to hate Istanbul. Hating Istanbul is a way of loving Istanbul. Of course you can’t expect Gustave Flaubert or Gide to write love letters to Istanbul. You expect them to write angrily or nihilistically, as they do elsewhere. So when I proposed to include the chapter as the city as a hell, my editor said “let’s do it.” When Istanbul is seen as a hell it becomes another source of inspiration. Some people get their inspiration from hating things and that’s what happened with these French writers.

All the passages are from American or European travelers. Was that a deliberate decision on your part or was it demanded by the publisher?

This is part of a series of books from the [American University in Cairo] AUC Press. There is also “An Alexandria Anthology,” “A Cairo Anthology” and “A Beirut Anthology.” The format was to use European travelers, so I couldn't use writers like Evliya Çelebi or other Eastern writers.

Actually I’ve been researching some of these figures because I’m currently writing a history of Turkish literature and I’m writing about how they saw Turkey and Istanbul. But for this book it had to be European and American writers. Also my preferred language was English and I picked writings before the 1920s. So Hemingway is one of the last writers in the book.

If you could have cast your net out wider, which non-Western travelers to Istanbul would you have included?

I'm really fascinated by this figure Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who I discovered through Pankaj Mishra's book about Asia, which looked at what happened in the first half of the 20th century through the perspective of Eastern intellectuals, the colonized and those who were oppressed. Al-Afghani was in interesting figure. He was invited to Istanbul by Sultan Abdülhamid II and he was an Islamist - a very angry one. He was very disillusioned by Abdülhamid because he didn't find the sultan militant or angry enough. He thought he was in the pay of foreign countries, doing business with them, when al-Afghani wanted a big revolution or uprising as part of one caliphate.

Interestingly, he lived in Nişantaşı in Istanbul, which is now associated with so-called White Turks and secularists. Abdülhamid gave him a place in Nişantaşı, where he lived for many years.

I’ve just been writing about Mehmet Akif Ersoy for my book. He was another Islamist figure, but he didn't like al-Afghani; he found him too angry, too passionate. Mehmet Akif wanted a calmer version of Islam.

So it would have been interesting to include something by al-Afghani, even though he was found problematic. It would maybe be an interesting parallel to someone like Flaubert, who was also an angry and passionate guy. But his passions were more about aesthetics and the art of the novel, composition and the correct word to use in a novel. It would be interesting to see the things he paid attention to alongside someone like al-Afghani. Of course, it would also be interesting to see the Nişantaşı neighborhood from the perspective of this proto-Islamist.

*This and other interviews are available on the Turkey Book Talk podcast. Subscribe via iTunes here, Soundcloud here, or Podbean here.

January/09/2016

Kaya Genç is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul. He is the author of Under the Shadow (I.B.Tauris, 2016) and An Istanbul Anthology: Travel Writing through the Ages (American University in Cairo Press, 2015). Kaya is writing a history of Turkish literature for Harvard University Press. His first English novel The House on Arundel Street will be out soon. In 2015, Kaya’s writing was picked by The Atlantic for the magazine’s ‘best works of journalism in 2014’ list. He is represented by Laurence Laluyaux at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Kaya’s writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review, Believer, Guardian, Financial Times, New York Times, London Review of Books blog, New Republic, Prospect, Time, Newsweek, Sight & Sound, New Statesman, VICE and White Review, among others. L’Avventura (Macera), his first novel, was published in 2008. Kaya has a PhD in English literature. He is a contributing editor at Index on Censorship and the Istanbul correspondent of The Believer and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Book Review: Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey by Kaya Genç

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In Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey, Kaya Genç draws upon a range of interviews undertaken following the 2013 Gezi Park protests, bringing to light the diverse perspectives of different members of Turkish society at a time of division and dissent. Genç’s innovative use of oral history makes for a fascinating and magnetic read that particularly deserves praise for giving voice to young Turkish dissidents, writes Nikos Cristofis.

Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey. Kaya Genç. I.B. Tauris. 2016.

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The Gezi Park protests that took place in Istanbul in late May 2013 started when a small environmentalist group protested the neoliberal ‘urban renewal’ plans of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) and then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to protect Gezi Park, one of the few green areas in Taksim. The Gezi Park project was just one of many sell-off plans initiated by the AKP to reshape Turkey and make it more actively part of the neoliberal market economy. In a purely symbolic act, the protests started exactly one month after the suppression of the 1 May demonstrations. Quickly they took on unprecedented proportions to become a mass social movement. In their brutal repression of the protests, the police burned tents and belongings. The violence unleashed by the authoritarian state triggered large-scale support for the demonstrators, and within hours it had transformed into Turkey’s largest anti-government movement in decades, inspiring protests in all of the country’s larger cities. In short, a minor event—the protests at the park—led to a widespread social uprising that faced unprecedented police violence backed by undemocratic statements by the Turkish Prime Minister that stand as testament to his authoritarian tendencies.

Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey, authored by Kaya Genç, is a day-to-day account of the Gezi protests that offers insights into the mindsets of the range of young Turks that took part in the resistance and examines the complex dynamics that shaped mentalities at the time. Under the Shadow lends an ear to the Turkish people, specifically the youth, as a way of bringing to light their thoughts and perspectives as regards the protests and Turkish society in general.

Indeed, based largely on oral accounts, i.e. interviews with young dissidents who were involved in one way or another with the Gezi protests, the book tells us less about events and more about their meaning. As such, the interviews often reveal either unknown events or unknown aspects of known events, and cast new light on unexplored areas of the daily life of the non-hegemonic classes. In this sense, the book’s approach evokes Alessandro Portelli’s observation that oral histories can provide historians with new ways of understanding the past, not just in terms of what is recalled, but also with regards to continuity and change in the meaning given to events (Portelli in Perks and Thomson 2006).

The backgrounds of the people who participated in the protests varied widely, ranging from young leftist activists, like 21-year-old Cenk Yürükoğulları and his friends (27-37), to people like Beybin Somuk, an animal rights campaigner and project manager at the NGO Genç Siviller (Young Civilians), who initially treated the Gezi protests with suspicion (37). She feared that they would lead to an outbreak of civil war as she watched the news on CNN International whilst in The Netherlands; when she returned to Turkey, she realised that was not the case at all. For Somuk, the politicisation of the protests (in the sense that the young people who participated would soon fall under the hegemony of particular political groups) led her to not participate.

Image Credit: Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey, 10 June 2013 (francis mckee CC BY 2.0)

The following two chapters are devoted to young artists (Chapter Three) and journalists (Chapter Four). Aytuğ Akdoğan, a 22-year-old underground poet, Lara Fresko, a young artist who was conducting research for a show at SALT in Istanbul, and the filmmaker Can Evrenol are some of the figures that are given a central role in the former, and Berke Gol, Berkan Ozyer and Betul Kayahan in the latter. The personal stories of all these figures are very much of interest: for example, Fresko’s experiences of being the recipient of racism and discrimination from an early age, which contributed to her politicisation. Aytuğ, on the other hand, a young ‘White Turk’ and apolitical youngster who nonetheless has deep awareness of the social and political inequalities of Turkish society, became highly politicised through his participation in the protests, and even more in the months that followed. He wrote his first poetry book years before the protests when he was just 17 years old; not long after, he moved out of his parents’ home. After being falsely accused of attacking a police officer, his experience of the judiciary system for over eighteen months after the Gezi protests made him see things differently. Aytuğ was finally acquitted, but he had to pay a heavy price: unable to make ends meet, he moved back with his family to the site, the housing developments inside the city protected by private security guards. Isolated from the rest of the world, it is these that contribute to making the young people of Turkey apolitical: cut off from different social classes and socialising only with one another.

Equally of interest is the final chapter concerning ‘Turkey’s angry young entrepreneurs’: one of the central elements of the AKP’s power base. Indeed, when the party first came to power, it offered new hope backed by conservatism, pro-EU policies and the maintenance of Turkish-US relations. These elements all blended together with avid capitalism largely based on the construction sector. As the author rightly states: ‘the Turkish state and industrialists are twins born in the same instant’ (187). The author’s account, however, gives the impression that the construction sector is a well-oiled machine free of scandals and without ties to the government, which is not the case.

Genç’s historical knowledge is evident within the book by his bolstering of information about Ottoman and Turkish history to frame the context of the recent developments in Turkey and to offer an explanation for the rise of young dissident voices. In that respect, as one of the most critical issues of performing oral history is that of verification, the author manages to create a well-balanced account of the events that transpired and offers an impartial analysis that is generally not being swayed by the personal experiences of the interviewees.

Although in general the author does an exemplary job of describing events, there are points where clarification should nonetheless have been made. To name just two, firstly Genç implies that the coup of 1980 took place as a means of re-securing secularism. As he writes: ‘the armed forces brought Turkish society back to its Atatürkian factory settings’ (4). At the same time, however, through the ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’, there was also an attempt to unite the country against the ‘enemy of the state’ (e.g. communism) by putting Islam at the centre of Turkish identity and history, thus opening the way for the rise of political Islam in Turkey and today’s ruling party. Although that point is an issue of perspective and interpretation, the author’s argument that Doğan Avcıoğlu theorized the rise of the MDD (National Democratic Revolution) in the early 1970s is plainly false. A major ideological break within the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP, 1961-71) became apparent in 1966 at the Malatya Congress, but the MDD’s first manifesto, albeit perhaps in primitive form, had already been made public by Mihri Belli, the leader of the MDD, who used the pen name Mehmet Doğu in an article he wrote for the review Yön (Direction) in 1962.

Under the Shadow is nonetheless a fascinating book written using magnetic language. Genç largely manages to avoid getting carried away by his own ideological views or those of dissidents. It is also the first book of its kind to use oral history as a methodological framework and to give voice to a mosaic of young Turkish dissidents, making it well worthy of praise.

Nikos Christofis received his PhD from the Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden University, in 2015. His dissertation has the title, ‘From Socialism via Anti-Imperialism to Nationalism. EDA – TİP: Socialist Contest over Cyprus’. Read more by Nikos Christofis.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.

Kaya Genç's Under the Shadow Offers a Snapshot of Turkey's Political Landscape

By B. David Zarley | December 30, 2016 | 4:30pm
BOOKS REVIEWS KAYA GENÇ
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Kaya Genç's Under the Shadow Offers a Snapshot of Turkey's Political Landscape
In choosing to focus his book on events lost to many in the Western world, the Gezi Park protests of 2013, Turkish author Kaya Genç offers a snapshot of his fractured country. Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey follows a chain of events that began with protests against Gezi Park’s redevelopment followed by the violent removal of the protestors, which morphed into a multifarious opposition to Turkey’s encroaching government. Here were Kurds, Grey Wolves, members of the LGBTQI and corporate communities, and even the Ultras of the country’s big three football clubs all arrayed against the conservative government of then Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

1undershadowcover.jpgGenç set out to better understand Turkey via the various voices that felt displeased within it, either with or at the status quo, and his resulting work is a chorus of discontent. He speaks with both conservative and liberal journalists—one must realize that for long stretches of its modern history, secularism, not religion, has been an oppressive factor in Turkey—and popular filmmakers, successful entrepreneurs, and student activists. The only thread binding them is their country and their unease at their place within it. While the various positions Genç chronicles can make one’s head spin, that same complexity also presents an honest face of the nation.

The 14 people Genç interviews serve as the skeleton of the book. By relying on these sources to carry the work, Genç provides Under the Shadow with both its greatest strength and weakness: an accurate portrait of the country that is challenging to navigate without preexisting knowledge of Turkey’s history and current climate. There is precious little handholding, but the further reading appendix—and journalist Alexander Christie-Miller’s “Occupy Gezi” piece for The White Review—is much appreciated.

It is not Genç’s job to hold the reader’s hand, of course, but to elucidate, and Under the Shadow does not fail in this regard. Tracing modern activists’ ideological lineage back to the famed Young Turks and Young Ottomans, Genç both vivisects modern-day Turkey and grounds it in the country’s past. There are no answers in the book, no tidy, big picture proclamations; the work is rather a snapshot of a nation during a crucial time in today’s political landscape.

Under the Shadow is, in short, both complicated and absolutely necessary.

B. David Zarley is a freelance journalist, essayis, and book/art critic based in Chicago. A former book critic for The Myrtle Beach Sun News, his work can be seen in Hazlitt, Sports Illustrated, The Chicago Reader, VICE Sports, The Creators Project, Sports on Earth and New American Paintings, among numerous other publications. You can find him on Twitter or at his website.

Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey

Kaya Genc. I.B. Tauris, $19.50 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-78453-457-8

Turkish journalist Genc profiles young Turkish activists organizing on his country’s frontlines in this fascinating and informative compilation that represents both investigative and literary journalism at their finest. He profiles people from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds and with contrasting and often clashing ideologies, demonstrating the diversity and passionate drive of Turkey’s politicized youth. Each profile provides an intimate lens into youth culture and the dynamic political landscape of modern Turkey, with the Gezi protests of 2013 as the common ground for each disparate party demanding political change. Some of Genc’s subjects include an environmentalist, a Jewish art historian, a filmmaker, a poet, journalists, and a conservative business executive. The stories of these different activists, their family histories, and their politicization are nuanced. Genc explores modern Turkey’s past and present, from the military dictatorship of the 1980s to the rise of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative and capitalist Turkey. He captures the distinct yet tenuous identity of a nation led by a repressive government and caught between Europe and the Middle East. Genc—who includes a foreword addressing the failed 2016 coup—has found a brilliant form to tell the story of a nation in turmoil, with the voices of young dissidents leading the narrative. (Jan.)
This review has been corrected to fix a mistake in the price.

Book review: Kaya Genç’s novel tells tale of the political journeys of younger Turks ahead and following Gezi Park protests
David Lepeska

November 10, 2016 Updated: November 10, 2016 02:31 PM

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During more than three years living in and reporting from Turkey, I met all sorts of people – from Sunni imams and Alevi dancers to displaced Kurds. But never did I uncover the exhaustive personal political histories that the Istanbul-based novelist Kaya Genç presents in Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey.

The author recounts the political journeys of more than a dozen younger Turks leading up to and following the ground-shifting Gezi Park protests of mid-2013. The profiles underscore the diversity of Turkish political perspectives today, yet highlight just how little has changed in the past century.

Early in the book, Genç recalls the hope that attended the rise to power in 2002 of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP. On a wave of anti-corruption sentiment, Turks chose the party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gül for its marriage of conservatism with western-friendly capitalism. Many in the West also took to the AKP: the party received friendly notices from The New York Times and The Guardian, British prime minister Tony Blair and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The fawning may have been more about a post-9/11 need for a model Islamic democracy than the potential for a stronger Turkey under the AKP. Either way, a decade of relative stability and economic growth followed.

Yet by early 2013, many had begun to sour on the AKP, thanks mainly to a dubious judicial system and a widening crackdown on free speech. A sociopolitical cleavage began to emerge. To explain its origins, Genç reaches back a century-and-a-half, to the first modern dissident movements of the Ottoman Empire.

A secret society founded in 1865, the Young Ottomans were conservative, pan-Islamic and pro-sultanate. The group sought to incorporate some European ideas of government but feared that full westernisation of the state apparatus would crush Islamic law and lead to an ideological vacuum. Its great achievement was convincing Sultan Abdul Hamid II to adopt a constitution in 1876. The sultan revoked it two years later, reclaiming power, but the Ottoman Empire’s First Constitutional Era marked a real step forward.

A generation later, another underground society emerged. The reform-minded Young Turks (organised politically as the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP) rebelled against Abdul Hamid II in 1908 and ultimately installed a multiparty democracy that served as a western-leaning stepping stone to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular republic.

"Young Turks and Young Ottomans survive in modern-day Turkey," writes Genç, outlining the book’s core argument. "Despite hurried analyses of the political unrest in Turkey that describe it as a fight between a monolithic group of young activists and a repressive system supported by ignorant masses who should know better, the real dynamic of unrest among Turkey’s furious youth exists between these equally influential and long-lasting historico-political positions."

Today’s descendants of the Young Turks would include Gezi Park protester Cenk Yürükogullari. "We had built there a non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian system," he tells Genç of the 15-day occupation of the park. "It felt like the Paris Commune!"

Another would be Sarpan Uzunoglu, a promising political adviser to the activist filmmaker and Istanbul parliamentarian Sirri Süreyya Onder, who was wounded early in the Gezi protests when a tear-gas canister hit him in the head. A revolutionary socialist, Uzunoglu was disappointed when communist organisers commandeered the Gezi movement in the months after the protests.

Mehmet Algan would be among the present-day Young Ottomans. At the height of the Gezi protests he went to Ataturk airport to greet Erdogan’s plane returning from North Africa – a decision that changed his life. In June 2015, Algan was elected an AKP MP for the southern port city of Iskenderun.

So too would Betül Kayahan. She briefly met Erdogan in the United States a week before Gezi. "He had an incredible aura," she tells Genç. These days, Kayahan defends the AKP on Twitter and contributes to the English-language government mouthpiece Daily Sabah. Genç’s jumping-off point for his political bios is the idea of angry young Turks; "being a rebel in our youth is in our genes", he explains. Yet many of his subjects seem neither angry nor rebellious. They tend to act soberly, rationally. Beybin Somuk, a liberal Kurd who supported the government largely because of the peace process it launched in early 2013, stayed away from Gezi because she believed the protests had been hijacked by nationalists – a group with which she, as a Kurd, had issues.

Horror filmmaker Can Evrenol recounts his protest experiences as a visual artist encountering cinematically pleasing images. And Lara Fresko, an art curator from an old Istanbul Jewish family, delivers a clear-eyed appraisal of the Gezi occupation – noting the sudden emergence of an alternative economy, while questioning the overly vocal presence of nationalist groups. It’s a credit to Turkish youth that, despite incredibly stressful, unpredictable circumstances, they are often able to maintain a cool remove.

Except, that is, for the writers. Crippled by anxiety after a long protest-related court case, Aytug Akdogan can no longer make a living as a writer after Gezi, and moves back in with his parents. Several weeks before Gezi, the young film critic Berke Göl is choked by a policeman during a protest to save the Emek Theatre. A photograph of the incident is broadcast on television, and, since Turkey had by this time become the world’s leading jailer of journalists, goes viral as a symbol of oppression.

After Gezi, the government switched tactics, muscling media outlets to self-censor. Editors and reporters who refused were either fired or forced to resign. When the journalist Sibel Oral was working at the liberal newspaper Taraf in late 2013, its founders, Ahmet Altan and Yasemin Çongar, chose to resign rather than toe the government line. Oral followed them out the door. A few months later she was fired from her job at the conservative Aksam for a tweet directed at Erdogan. A report released around that same time by the Shorenstein Centre at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government found that more than 1,000 journalists lost their jobs in similar fashion in the months after Gezi.

A century ago, Genç reminds us, the shoe was on the other foot. In the early days of CUP rule, Hasan Fehmi, editor-in-chief of the conservative newspaper Serbesti, vocally opposed its liberal-minded reform agenda. In April 1909, he was shot and killed on the street, likely on the order of the Young Turks. Years later, Atatürk would launch a broad crackdown on conservative voices. In 1925, his government executed the Islamic scholar Mehmet Atif for arguing, in an influential pamphlet, that it was absurd for Muslims to ape westerners.

Genç’s profiles do neglect a few key players: we never hear from members of the police or military, the militant left (Kurdish and communist groups) or the Gülen network. One might argue that the politics of the members of these groups would be predictable. Yet this book is largely about undermining political predictability.

Also, both Somuk and Uzunoglu ultimately decided that the AKP government’s peace process with the Kurds made the regime acceptable. Yet since the resumption of violence in Turkey’s southeast in mid-2015, it’s been all but impossible to argue that the ruling AKP is working to resolve the Kurdish issue. Genç wrote the book in late 2015 and early 2016 – when violence in the south-east was at its peak – yet he never checks back to learn whether events have altered their views.

Still, Under the Shadow serves as an excellent field guide for Turkey’s emerging generation. One of its most impressive achievements is something the author has left out: his own political views. In a deeply polarised Turkey, this Istanbul native has dived bodily into the muddy trough of Turkish politics and emerged nearly spotless, making strong points for government supporters and critics.

The book closes with an epilogue about the July 15 coup attempt, after which many thousands of Turks again filled Taksim Square. "Powerful politicians started talking about the flow of free media and the value of information," Genç writes. "People were ecstatic to be on the streets."

But now, months later, as the purge against government critics expands to include more than 100,000 people, with about 130 journalists in jail and social media recently blocked, it’s hard to talk of the flow of free media and ecstatic people in the streets.

"We are undergoing a period of change, and such periods are always painful," Somuk tells Genç at one point, referring to Gezi. "This energy had to be released, this confrontation had to be made. There was no other way for Turkey to go forward."

One wonders when that might happen. Nearly 30 months have passed since Gezi, and Turkey looks to be sinking ever deeper into this painful period of change.

David Lepeska is a freelance writer who also contributes to The New York Times, The Guardian and Foreign Affairs.

Reflecting on Istanbul through the centuries
William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr

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Reflecting on Istanbul through the centuries
‘An Istanbul Anthology: Travel Writing Through the Centuries,’ edited by Kaya Genç
(American University in Cairo Press, 160 pages, $19)

This is a very welcome pocket-sized collection of classic travel writing on Istanbul. Edited by Turkish novelist Kaya Genç, the focus is heavily on Western writers visiting the Ottoman capital in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although limited in scope, it is a handsomely illustrated book made up of bite-size morsels from some of Istanbul’s greatest travelers – familiar names like Theophile Gautier, Mark Twain, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It’s a charming, modest volume that nicely fills a gap for those looking for a literary companion on a trip to the city.

Montaigne wrote somewhere that when he expressed his opinions “it is to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.” That has also been true for most visitors to Istanbul. Reflections on the Ottoman capital were often less revealing of the actual character of the city than of their author’s interpretation - but that makes them no less interesting.

Through this slim collection we see a kaleidoscopic city refracted even further through a prism of Western fascination and often superciliousness. As Genç writes in the introduction, “Travelers from Europe and America came to Istanbul to observe this curious legacy but they went further and projected their dreams of a society free from the constraints of the western world.” Over centuries of touristic activity, “Istanbul became not only an object of observation, but also an inspiration of oriental fantasies for the observing subject.”

Some of those subjects are better observers than others. I’ve never been a big fan of Italian bon vivant Edmondo de Amicis, who wrote quite unremarkably about Istanbul on his visit in the 1870s but has somehow taken his place in the pantheon of classic chroniclers of the city. The most recent contribution to this selection comes from Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s, while most are taken from the late 19th century: An age of orientalism when a great number of Europeans were making their way to the Ottoman capital.

Of course, there is plenty of quaint talk about “the aromas of the East” and “Mussulmans.” One excellent observer of the city was the Frenchman Theophile Gautier, who visited in the 1850s. Unlike many others, Gautier never tried to pretend that an unpicturesque scene was picturesque. After reeling off a familiar list of the dizzyingly multifarious social fabric visible on the city’s streets, he captured the essence of most Western writing on Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century when he described the metropolis as “The most amazing carnival imaginable.”

The book comes to an original conclusion, with a final brief section on “The City as Hell.” In it we see a cantankerous Andre Gide letting rip in 1914, declaring that “Constantinople justifies all my prejudices and joins Venice in my personal hell.” This final section is a useful return to reality: Many accounts of the Ottoman capital focused on delicate oriental gardens and beautiful odalisques, but the overwhelming soundtrack to today’s bloated and rapidly expanding Istanbul is the incessant jackhammer.
January/07/2016

City of Heaven and Hell
By Alev Scott

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FEBRUARY 17, 2016

FOR ANYONE who has lived in, or even visited, Istanbul, this anthology provokes a strange cocktail of emotions: a powerful shot of nostalgia for a city long gone, envy of those who walked its streets hundreds of years ago, and a kind of affectionate surprise at recognising aspects of urban life still present today. It is an especially moving read in the wake of the suicide bombing which struck Sultan Ahmet Square on January 12, 2016, killing 12 tourists who came to marvel at the famous sights described by equally marvelling tourists centuries ago. “Within the [square],” wrote Théophile Gautier in 1852, “as with an open-air mosque, are contained all the spoils of antiquity.” Today, those antiquities have been temporarily overshadowed by terror, but if this book shows us anything, it is that Istanbul’s legions of fans will endure.
A collection of travel writing dating from 1599 to 1922, An Istanbul Anthology encompasses more than 300 years of writers, diplomats, and tourists’ impressions of a metropolis in transformation throughout the late Ottoman period. The book itself is like a letter from the past, beautifully bound, with cream-coloured pages and sepia sketches of old Constantinople scattered throughout like intermittent memories. The eclectic author list includes unexpected megastars of the 19th and 20th century like Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain. These are mixed with lesser-known writers with a more intimate knowledge of Istanbul, including several British women who lived and wrote there in the 18th to 20th centuries. These give us sneak glimpses into the feminine realms of the hamam and harem, as well as some of the most beautiful descriptions of mosques, city life, and the linguistic mosaic of a wealthy household’s staff.
I read the book while in London, and the experience was like reading an unusually candid obituary of a close friend. More than a few weeks away from Istanbul feels to me like a small bereavement, and to make matters worse, like many romantically-minded modern-day residents, I also suffer from a hazy longing for “old Istanbul” — the pomp, beauty, and eccentricity of a true cosmopolitan capital, in which palaces were actually inhabited, gardens were abundant, and Ottoman gondolas carried Levantine merchants across the Golden Horn — a city unsullied by gaudy hotels, constant construction work, and the globally recognisable wafts of Burger King.
Of course, old Istanbul was no bed of roses — even the Ottoman gondolas, or caiqs, were not as glamorous as they sound. “A [Venetian] gondola is infinitely more roomy and comfortable, and it has the great advantage of not forcing you to sit nose to nose with a perspiring boatman,” wrote the American diplomat Harrison Griswold Dwight in 1915. Editor Kaya Genç, born and brought up in the city, has made a point of including vivid descriptions of the filth, danger, and corruption of its ancient streets and waterways; today’s fashionable Galata neighborhood, for example, beloved by tourists and moneyed artists, is referred to by Will Seymour Monroe in 1907 as “the fermenting vat of the scum of the earth.” Genç is shrewd enough to know that any engaging portrayal of a city contains the good, the bad, and the ugly. Istanbul is as repellent and perplexing now as it was in the 17th century, and that is part of the bond that connects those who love it.
Genç has chosen to arrange the entries by theme, rather than chronology, and these range from landscape and architecture to social life, covering the humblest of coffee houses and the grandest of imperial haunts. The result is a collage of memory jumbled across the centuries, rather than a strict historical narrative, which is entirely in keeping with Istanbul’s chameleonic character. In his introduction, Genç points out that Istanbul has never been a single entity, but rather a mix of its roles as the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and the primary metropolis of the modern republic: “So is it an Islamic city? A Byzantine one? Or a modern metropolis? ‘All of the above’ is a good answer to give to most questions about Istanbul.”
The first section, “Sea and Views,” contains impressions of the approach to the city via the Marmara Sea and the Bosporus straits, a beautifully appropriate opening. The chapter includes this anthropomorphic description of early morning fog by Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, writing in 1856:
The fog only lifted from about the skirts of the city […] It was a coy disclosure, a kind of coquetting, leaving room for the imagination & heightening the scene. Constantinople, like her Sultanas, was thus veiled in her “ashmack” [yaşmak, veil].
This Anglicised yaşmak is one of many examples of writers taking brave stabs in the dark at transliterating Turkish (or Arabic) words into English. (The French and Italian entries have been translated into English.) The approximations are comfortingly similar to the linguistic struggles of modern visitors — for example, Harrison Griswold Dwight refers to the “Missir Charshi” (Mısır Çarşı, Egyptian Bazaar); if written in an email to a friend today, this might perhaps have been followed by a tentative “(sp.?).” Though Dwight was born in Constantinople, and probably spoke Turkish fluently, from this evidence of his pronunciation I cannot help but imagine a version of Brad Pitt’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, confidently booming out “Arrivederci!” in a Southern drawl.
As descriptions of spectacular vistas make way for the phenomena of urban life, the chapters get progressively more interesting for readers drawn to the social quirks of Istanbul, past and present. It goes without saying that much has changed over the centuries, in the aesthetics and politics of the city, the demographics of its inhabitants, and the attitudes of foreigners who have observed them. Some of the most fascinating entries provide unique vantage points into history — the awkward clash between the European aspirations of the last, fading Sultans, their Ottoman traditions, and their vainglorious overspending. The children’s storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, who attended a march of the Sultan’s bejewelled private guard in 1841, wrote:
In general, pieces from Rossini’s “William Tell” were played, but suddenly they were broken off, and the strains of the young Sultan’s favourite march were heard. […] It seemed as though we were looking on the work of a spirit of Aladdin’s lamp.
Yet, for readers who are familiar with Istanbul, it is almost more fascinating to discover what still endures today, like someone who discovers a long-lost relative and searches for themselves in her face and mannerisms. Some things really haven’t changed at all. Arthur Symons, a British poet writing in 1903, observed that:
To walk, in Constantinople, is like a fierce and active struggle. One should look at once before, behind, and underneath one’s feet; before, behind, and underneath one’s feet some danger or disgust is always threatening. I never walked up the steep road which leads to Pera without the feeling that I was fighting my way through a hostile city.
I have not yet met a resident of Istanbul who does not complain about the difficulties of walking through its ill-paved streets, yet somehow this flaw becomes loveable when shared by grumbling pedestrians across the centuries.
Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1922 that: “The nightclubs open at two — the more respectable nightclubs, that is. The disreputable nightclubs open at four in the morning.” Still true. Mark Twain, visiting the city in 1867, was struck by the abundance of street dogs: “The dogs sleep in the streets, all over the city. […] They are my compass — my guide.” I have often given directions to friends in the city by referring to fixed canine points. “You know the corner where the really fat brown dog sleeps? Well, turn left there …”
On the subject of directions, if I have a criticism of the anthology, it is that it could have done with a map. Given the many different epochs discussed, it might have been difficult to give a definitive “historical” map, but even an up-to-date one would have been helpful for readers only slightly acquainted with the city, to be given a sense of its geography, and to marvel at how much the city has expanded since the time when it barely covered the few square miles containing the major tourist sites of today.
It would also have been useful for current residents to keep their bearings — I was totally unaware that “the Sultana Valide bridge” ever existed, for example. This apparently refers to what is now Galata Bridge, connecting the area of Galata to the New Sultana Valide Mosque (Yeni Camii). These defunct names are a reminder that neither the city’s architecture nor the labels ascribed to it are permanent. Istanbul is now so stamped by the legacy of Atatürk — his image gracing walls and schools, his name attached to major industrial projects and institutions — that it is almost strange to think of pre-Atatürk Istanbul, but of course the republic has been but the blink of an eye in Istanbul’s grand history.
At the back of the anthology there is a list of the authors, with short biographies, but only a select few are introduced along with their entries. For instance, one of the most interesting writers enters unannounced: Lady Mary Montagu, whose husband served as the British ambassador in Constantinople between 1716 and 1718. Her published letters from this posting remain one of my all-time favourite reads, and I suspect she was a more talented diplomat — with her fluent Turkish, political acumen, and close friendships with women in the Sultan’s harem — than her husband, who was recalled to London after an unsuccessful two-year mission, much to his wife’s distress.
Other intrepid British adventurers include Grace Mary Ellison, who published accounts of her experiences in a Turkish harem in The Daily Telegraph in the early 20th century, and Lady Hester Stanhope, who settled and eventually died in Lebanon as a senile recluse, but not before she had explored Constantinople. Writing in 1811, her observations on the psychological fetters of women confined to the harem (“the feeling, impressed upon them from their infancy, of the positive criminality of showing their faces to strangers”) and the elaborate rituals of the hamam (“the women make a parade of bathing”) are valuable, but it is her observations of the drunkards of Pera that give us a clue that this aristocrat of the Georgian era was not afraid to explore the wilder side of the city: “The effects of spirituous liquors on the Turks are remarkable. Naturally sedate, composed, and amicable, they become, when intoxicated, downright madmen.”
Genç has curated a compellingly real picture of the city, taking care to match the poetic with the crass, the enthusiastic with the disapproving, and everything in between. Mark Twain, for example, is at his best when describing the spectacularly deformed beggars of Constantinople: “The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud. The truly gifted flourish only in the by-ways of Pera and Stamboul.”
The anthology ends with a section entitled “The City as Hell” — a wonderfully wry counterpoint to the romanticism of some of the earlier entries. Gustave Flaubert has the final say, predicting the demise of Eastern customs, and of Islam, in 1850:
The East will soon be nothing but a question of sun. […] Soon the veil, already slighter and slighter, will pass from the faces of the women, and with it Moslemism will fly away altogether. The number of pilgrims to Mecca diminishes day by day; the ulemas fuddle themselves like vergers. Voltaire is talked of!
By ending with this spectacularly misguided proclamation, Genç reminds us at the book’s closure of the crystallised nature of travel writing. Its job is to capture the moment, the details of the here and now. Some of these details have completely disappeared, others can still be seen — but to prophesize a city’s future is tantamount to hubris. Many observers of today’s Turkey would argue that we are going not forwards but backwards; just not, sadly, to the glory days of Istanbul.
¤
Alev Scott was educated at North London Collegiate School and New College, Oxford, where she studied Classics. After graduating in 2009, she worked in London as an assistant director in theater and opera before moving to Istanbul, Turkey, in January 2011, where she now works as a freelance journalist for the British press.