September 30, 2008
Seyhan, the little that I know her, has me entirely confused.
Seyhan, as far as I can tell, hasn’t passed a mirror that she hasn’t checked her makeup or her hair in. She is young, stunning, and well aware of it. Seyhan is also a feminist. And – as a tattoo of Ataturk’s signature on her wrist goes to show – a Kemalist. And, in her own words, a committed Muslim. And a dancer. Pictures of her performances, at least the ones she’s proudly shown me, feature her wearing a loincloth down low, whatever it takes to best expose her prodigious cleavage up top, laboriously gyrating to a hip-hop song.
It’s Ramadan and Seyhan, most of the time, sleeps. For all that Ramadan may mean to her – a religious duty, an cultural tradition, an exercise in self discipline, a hardcore diet regimen or, just as well, all of the above – it is more of an ordeal with every coming year. Not because Seyhan’s resolve to forego food and drink from dawn till dusk is growing weaker – it isn’t – but because with every coming year Ramadan keeps arriving earlier. When she was little, Ramadan, in line with the Muslim 354-day lunar calendar, used to come in early spring. By the time she was ten, it began in February. When she was twenty, it came in October. This year, when she turned twenty-four, it began in early September. September, in Istanbul, spells temperatures than routinely reach into the mid-30, which means that going an entire day without so much as a drop of water is increasingly harder to bear.
No matter. Seyhan – her world as confused and as confusing as Istanbul itself – perseveres and keeps the fast.
Ruckustantinople
September 29, 2008
It’s Ramadan. This, to a non-Muslim foreigner living in downtown Istanbul, translates to two things: (a) watching people cue up in front of restaurants in evening time and (b) jolting awake – bewildered the first time, annoyed the second, and resigned every time thereafter – to the clangor of an impromptu drum session in the dead of the night. The cueing is for the iftar meal, an occasion where families whop down local delicacies – skewered meats, rice dishes and a bewildering array of tooth-numbing sweets – to cap off a day’s worth of fasting. The drumming, meanwhile, far from impromptu, is a tradition dating back to early Ottoman times. Thousands of “Ramadan drummers” descend on the city about an hour-and-a-half before dawn, sing, holler and beat their wares silly to remind the good people of Istanbul to rise and shine in time for the suhoor (pre-dawn) meal. Some of the good people of Istanbul have recently begun suggesting that in an age of alarm clocks a city of 15 million might be spared communal pandemonium at 3 A.M. for thirty consecutive nights. To little effect.
Overall, Ramadan celebrations in the modern heart of the city – Taksim, Beyoglu, Cihangir – are rather noticeable by their absence. During the day, cafes and lokantas teem with students and thirty-somethings sipping tea or enjoying a snack. In the evenings, plaintive Turk pop melodies, as well as their die-hard, hair-dyed devotees spill out onto the alleyways along Istiklal Caddesi. At night, meanwhile, a drummer doing his rounds is more likely to bump into a crowd of bar-hopping locals than to see someone awaken to set the suhoor table.
“You can’t even tell it’s Ramadan”, complained Ibrahim, an Egyptian student I ran into my first day in Istanbul. “These people”, he said, referring to the people I was staying with – a single mom and her on-and-off again boyfriend – “say they’re Muslim, but don’t know the first thing about their own religion”.
If they did, Ibrahim later argued, they – the girls of the house, that is – would think twice before "prancing around" the house in ripped jeans and a T-shirt.
Note: Ibrahim's contempt for Turkish women, genuine as it may have been, apparently did not stop him from spying on them in the shower.
________________________
An excerpt from a newspaper interview with Turkey’s oldest drummer, Mustafa Çınar, a 30-year veteran and my personal candidate for Ramadan Reveler of the Year (and new frontrunner for the annual Urban Road Safety Prize):
“I am 91 years old. I used to walk through the streets drumming to wake people for suhoor, but now I drum while on my motorcycle. In this way, I fulfill my task without getting tired”.
_________________________
It’s Ramadan. This, to a non-Muslim foreigner living in downtown Istanbul, translates to two things: (a) watching people cue up in front of restaurants in evening time and (b) jolting awake – bewildered the first time, annoyed the second, and resigned every time thereafter – to the clangor of an impromptu drum session in the dead of the night. The cueing is for the iftar meal, an occasion where families whop down local delicacies – skewered meats, rice dishes and a bewildering array of tooth-numbing sweets – to cap off a day’s worth of fasting. The drumming, meanwhile, far from impromptu, is a tradition dating back to early Ottoman times. Thousands of “Ramadan drummers” descend on the city about an hour-and-a-half before dawn, sing, holler and beat their wares silly to remind the good people of Istanbul to rise and shine in time for the suhoor (pre-dawn) meal. Some of the good people of Istanbul have recently begun suggesting that in an age of alarm clocks a city of 15 million might be spared communal pandemonium at 3 A.M. for thirty consecutive nights. To little effect.
Overall, Ramadan celebrations in the modern heart of the city – Taksim, Beyoglu, Cihangir – are rather noticeable by their absence. During the day, cafes and lokantas teem with students and thirty-somethings sipping tea or enjoying a snack. In the evenings, plaintive Turk pop melodies, as well as their die-hard, hair-dyed devotees spill out onto the alleyways along Istiklal Caddesi. At night, meanwhile, a drummer doing his rounds is more likely to bump into a crowd of bar-hopping locals than to see someone awaken to set the suhoor table.
“You can’t even tell it’s Ramadan”, complained Ibrahim, an Egyptian student I ran into my first day in Istanbul. “These people”, he said, referring to the people I was staying with – a single mom and her on-and-off again boyfriend – “say they’re Muslim, but don’t know the first thing about their own religion”.
If they did, Ibrahim later argued, they – the girls of the house, that is – would think twice before "prancing around" the house in ripped jeans and a T-shirt.
Note: Ibrahim's contempt for Turkish women, genuine as it may have been, apparently did not stop him from spying on them in the shower.
________________________
“I am 91 years old. I used to walk through the streets drumming to wake people for suhoor, but now I drum while on my motorcycle. In this way, I fulfill my task without getting tired”.
_________________________
Now, Ramadan or no Ramadan, I’m off to dinner. If there’s ever been a time to pray for making it through the night without getting hit by a motorcycle-mounted nonagenarian playing percussion, this is it.
Flustantinople
September 23, 2008
Having hardly left the house over the last two days – owing to a flu-like virus which has me coughing up things I never expected a human lung to contain – I'm slightly at a loss as to what to write about. You see, I was never any good at sitting behind a desk and picking my brain for inspiration, coming up with paradigm-bending theorems on micro credit or drinking a pint of vodka on the way to a new idea for a TV series. Not that I haven't tried.
First, there were the “writers’ soirees” with my freshman-year girlfriend. She’d crank out ten pages of quality prose in three hours, take a break, smoke through a pack of Chesterfields, drink a bottle of wine, go back to writing, and crank out ten more. I’d watch her type, read ten pages of a magazine, smoke two or three Chesterfields, drink one glass of wine, get dizzy, and fall asleep.
Second, there was the inevitable summer backpacking trip through Europe. Nineteen years old, lured by the thought of sitting at a café armed with an expensive pen, a black notepad and a fashionably anorexic French waif looking adoringly over my shoulder, I tried my hand at novel writing. What I came up with, plot-wise, was this: A twenty-year old up-and-comer ditches school, friends, and the promise of a six-figure salary to pursue a writing career; fails (miserably); writes a long and self-pitying letter about the torments of a creative soul unable to create; and shoots himself.
Really. That, at age nineteen, was my idea of a book. (Well, it probably still is. Which is why I haven’t tried writing fiction since).
Thirty-odd pages into this disgrace – thanks largely to a thirty-year old Dutch woman who made me realize that there were better things to do on summer break in Europe than to write dull and pretentious prose – I stopped. Later in life, with no Dutch women around, I tried to fuel my writing with alcohol. For a while, it actually worked, and I'd manage to draft a decent poem or two each night before passing out cold. After a few months, however, the inevitable liver problems aside, I began to lose focus. I stopped thinking, “I need a shot to get me going” and began thinking, “I need a shot”. Not that I was becoming an alcoholic. I was becoming the sort of guy who'd pop open his laptop, pour himself a drink and – two hours and five drinks later – find himself staring not at a laboriously contrived poem, but at something along the lines of “Top NBA dunks of 2005” or a documentary on animal husbandry.
All this is to say that I've always found it exceedingly difficult to write “creatively”, that is, from scratch. To write at all, I needed something to react to. A person, say, or a scene. It’s probably what fuels my need to travel. If I can’t come up with a good story on my own, I need to witness one, and describe it.
Which is why, two days into my stay in Istanbul, sick as a dog, I have little or nothing to write about. I do, however, have plenty of stupid internet videos to watch.
Video 1: Donkey Sex
Video 2: Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference
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