My Life as an Immigrant- “Translating” My Culture
And the similarities between me and a 19th-century Ottoman female intellectual
This is the fourth part of a series of posts where I look back on my experience as an immigrant.
You can find the first three parts here, here, and here.
Last week, I wrote about my efforts to make connections with my American friends and the role the TV show Friends and rap music played in the process. After I posted it
, who writes (check her newsletter out if you haven’t yet), asked me about the other side of the equation, meaning what my American friends thought about me, where I came from, and what kind of interactions I had with them within a “cultural exchange framework,” if you will.It is a great question, which was also on my mind while I was working on my previous post. Frankly, the reason I didn’t include it was that I was feeling guilty about not posting anything last week and was in a rush to finish up what I had and send it out. Now that I have given you this long-winded and slightly rambling introduction/explanation, however, I can come back and address it.
I have to say it was mostly an uphill battle since most of my American friends in my dorm have not left the United States in their lives, let alone been to Turkey. I don’t remember them as being particularly curious about the culture we (meaning my Turkish friends and I) grew up in unless we explained to them how we would go about doing things in Turkey in specific contexts, which would usually highlight the differences between us.
I think deep down we realized the unevenness of the situation (even though we didn’t consciously articulate it this way) and used specific strategies, such as self-deprecating humor or exaggeration (depending on the context), to present Turkey or Turkish culture in a more acceptable way to the “Western” gaze. One thing my dorm friends were interested in, though, all of us being immature 19-year-old guys, was the swear words in Turkish, and we gladly taught them everything we knew.
It would also be a fair question to ask how much of Turkish culture we really represented since almost all of us were coming from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds. I mean, is that even possible? Did our experiences represent the Turkish culture as a whole?
And on the reverse side of it, how fair is it to demand from an individual that they carry the burden of representing a whole country or culture? This is actually a pet peeve of mine and a strong characteristic of being a member of a “developing country.” When an American goes abroad, do we automatically assume that they represent America or American culture as a whole? So why do we feel like we can make this assumption so easily, so naturally, when the person is from a developing country? And it is not simply an imposition of the “Westerners” on others, either. Subjects from non-Western countries, myself included, impose this framework on themselves all too readily, too, which is something I realized over the years and which continues to irritate me to this day.
While writing this little rant, I had a little epiphany about the parallels between my experience and the experiences of a 19th-century Ottoman female intellectual, a woman named Fatma Aliye, about whom I wrote a while back in an academic context. Although I was definitely not planning to talk about her in this piece (I was actually going to change direction and talk about the social life on campus, but I guess this is the beauty of thinking through writing), I think it would be an apt story to tell.
Fatma Aliye was a prominent intellectual and the first female novelist in the late Ottoman Empire. She was also a pioneer in feminist thought, whose works examined the major changes in gender roles that Ottoman society was experiencing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
She came from an elite background (her father was the famous Ottoman statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha) and grew up in a very prosperous household. From an early age, Fatma Aliye had a great interest in education, and by the time she was thirteen, she was fluent in Arabic, Persian, and French. Throughout her career, she published a number of novels as well as articles that examined gender roles in Ottoman society and advocated for the advancement of Muslim women’s rights.
The reason she came to mind, though, and the reason I found a parallel between her experience and mine, is another little-known work of hers, this short biographical dictionary of historical female figures from Islamic history called Namdaran-i Zenan-i Islamiyan (translated as “Famous Muslim Women”), which I examined in my article about Fatma Aliye and which has an interesting backstory.
Since she came from an elite background and was fluent in French, Fatma Aliye had the opportunity to correspond extensively with women from the Western world who had a desire to know more about the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman women. Before the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, some of her Western acquaintances, including the American philanthropist Bertha Potter Palmer, asked Fatma Aliye to write a short work to be displayed at the Exhibition, which was what she did.
She first serialized this work in Ottoman Turkish in an Istanbul newspaper between 1899 and 1900. Although there were plans for the book to be later translated into French, it never happened and, as far as I could see from my research, the book was never displayed at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900 either.
Regardless of whether this little work reached its intended audience or not, what is in fact significant for me are the strategies that Fatma Aliye used in it while conveying her arguments. Going through the work, you can clearly see that Fatma Aliye tacitly accepted the assumed differences between her own world, which she labeled the “East,” and the world of her Western audience. She took it upon herself, however, to demonstrate that this gap between the East and West was not as big as it was generally assumed to be, and the way that she tried to do this was by domesticating the Orient and explaining it in terms that her European audience would easily understand.
To give you just one example among many: speaking about the harems in the Muslim world, for instance, Fatma Aliye compared them to the private chambers of European women of her time so that her audience would know what she was talking about.
Looking back at my own experience as a 19-year-old college student in the United States, I can see that although we were worlds apart, I was trying to do something similar to what Fatma Aliye struggled to achieve in her work.
I, too, was very much aware of the differences between my culture and the culture of my friends and instinctively knew that whenever I had to convey something about where I was coming from (in multiple senses of the phrase), I had to be able to “translate” it and express it in terms that they could understand. It was a process so automatic and so ingrained within me that I did it almost unconsciously and did not simply recognize the power dynamics (to my disadvantage, of course) on which it operated.
As I said, this post definitely went in a different direction than I had first planned. I hope you enjoyed it. I would also love to hear your own thoughts and experiences as an immigrant and whether you also needed to find ways to communicate your own culture to others.
I’ll pick up my tale from where I left off in a future post.
Until next time!
Hi Doga, I very much enjoyed your detour into a meaningful and insightful discussion of how we, "the foreigner," have tried to bridge the cultural gap with Westerners by explaining things in our culture in a way they can digest (a great example is the General Tsao Chicken dish in Chinese-American restaurants... there's a documentary about this fun subject!). I loved reading about Fatma Aliye. And I feel that those of us who have come to the West, like you and me, all share similar attempts in our own ways. I can relate to the "tactics" you used when explaining cultural differences. I also relate to your preception of the general lack of curiosity among Americans for foreign cultures. I find that to be still true today, to my chagrin. Well, this essay was a delight to read, and now I'm left with a cliffhanger of your interactions with your American dorm mates!
Hi Doga,
I really enjoyed the turn in your writing of this piece that made you reflect on the parallels you shared in your journey with Fatma Aliye. I'm interested in intellectual history too, especially from the perspective of literary primary sources, and it was so fascinating to learn more about Fatma Aliya through your post.
I really resonated with what you wrote about the individual immigrant taking on the burden of representing an entire country and culture, the inadvertent defining of the self in relation to the gaze of the Western other and the power dynamics implied in this whole interaction. Through my process of learning to express myself more fully and unapologetically in my writing, I became aware of this tendency of taking up the burden of representation and universalization in myself too. Layered on top of the familial and cultural expectations that I came from as well, they compelled me to do everything I could to live up to the model of a "good immigrant", and in the process lose a lot of myself. I am slowly unpicking and unlearning a lot of this in my journey now to live a life that is more true to who I really am, learning to let go of this invisible burden and at the same time honour my own roots and heritage in my own way.
As I start building a new life now in a new country, I am curious to see how my self identity evolves with the consciousness and intentionality I now bring to it, which I didn't have before when I started building my lives in other countries. I'm also really looking forward to reading how you continue to explore this theme in your upcoming writing!