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A Society Incapable of Reading Gravestones
by Elif Safak
I have always wondered why our graveyards have been so neglected and are in such a bad state. They are squeezed lonely, isolated and situated in cities; abandoned in villages and town corners; covered with weeds; without order and planning; a place where thieves roam freely.
Examining the political history of the Turkish Republic from the Ottoman era, through graveyards and gravestones, might provide striking perspective. These graveyards had headings written meticulously in special calligraphy, revealing the dead’s profession. How was the engraved gravestone concept, which had coded messages that could only be understood with the help of poems or sometimes through a very sophisticated calculation based on the Koran replaced by the arbitrarily-made graveyard concept which were similar to each other? In Turkey, graves have owners when viewed on a one-to-one basis, but graveyards have no owners. Every family offers prayers for their dead at the grave site, but nobody ever thinks of protecting the graveyards and keeping them groomed. The part of us that does not recognize and support the public domain is evident here.
Those living in Istanbul know this. Gravestones which are products of two eras are right before our eyes. Istanbul is a city that embraces diversity. In other cities, for example European capitals, orderly, protected and well-kept places are allocated for graveyards. However, graveyards are everywhere in Istanbul. You come across them unexpectedly in places such as shopping centers, bazaars, in the middle of the streets, and everywhere. The dead and the living live together in this city. Nevertheless, graveyards are also badly affected by disorderly urbanization. While becoming modernized we lose contact with death and the dead.
We need to study “micro-historiography†in order to understand our social adventure zigzagging between a “swift Westernization†and “Failure to westernize, one way or the other. “For years, under the pretense of formal history, an understanding of premolded history, without its principal actor (man) has been imposed on us. Conscientiously or otherwise, we internalized things we had been told. And most of us hated history courses. We couldn’t study the Ottomans as it deserved to be studied, nor did we learn the Byzantines. On one side, there is the impressionist and unthinking Western elite, who sees the Ottomans a genuine symbol of “reactionary†attitudes, turning their face only to the future; and on the other side there is the conservative reflex, which knows nothing other than to praise the Ottomans, undermines critical thinking, and only tries to react to those elites whose existence is based on reactional opposition. Both are extremely dangerous. Both are discriminatory and paramountly pro-reductionism. This is the deadlock, the paradigm politicians call the “Kemalist-Islamist†conflict keeps us trapped.
Since our contact with the past and death has been really broken, every structure we set up for the future will be left up in the air. For this reason, we don’t have writings or words in our beginnings but only bottomless pits. Lovely words we eliminate from our vocabulary because we consider them “old-fashionedâ€, the phases in our history we don’t accept because they do not suit our purposes, our belonging to the “East†we are striving to scrap from our Western image, our hybrid patterns we are trying to eradicate from our fabric of culture, our gravestones that stay with us; despite the fact we are look at and cannot read …They wait silently among the garbage that has been thrown on them and are stand all alone in the gaping holes of our pure and clean lives and clean cultures.
August 08, 2006
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