Apr 27 2012
3 Comments
Cross-cultural learning moments, On writing about my life with the Karagöz puppets

Mozzarella Mamma Rolls into Istanbul

Ortaköy Mosque, along the Bosphorus, in Istanb...

Ortaköy Mosque, along the Bosphorus, in Istanbul, Turkey. Français : La Mosquée Ortaköy, sur le Bosphore, à Istanbul (Turquie). Türkçe: Büyük Mecidiye Camii (Ortaköy Camii). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As one half of a  Turkish-American marriage, I am always interested in other people’s experiences in the living of a cross-cultural life. And as you may have gathered,  I have a troupe of traditional yet modern Karagöz shadow puppets who have assigned themselves to me in order to help me navigate my Turkish-American life.  That is what this blog is all about – a little bit reality and a little bit fantasy.

While I take the sci-fi meets anthropologist approach to documenting my experiences in between cultures, another blogger takes a more straightforward approach.  One of my favorite blogs on cross-cultural married life is written by Trisha Thomas, the author of Mozzarella Mamma: Deadlines, Diapers and the Dolce Vita.  Trisha dishes on all things mamma, all things wife and all things journalist as she balances the care of her three kids – with panache and wit.  However, at the moment, she is enjoying Istanbul, which you can read about by clicking here. Looks like she has ascertained that female Istanbullus are giving Romans a run for their money on the wearing of high heels and that there are more than one pimples on the face of Turkey’s current strong economic and political reality…I’ll leave the rest to her.

Enjoy Istanbul, Trisha and Gustavo!

Related articles
Tagged , , ,
Apr 27 2012
2 Comments
A Karagöz puppet battle, Academic hell

Living in the blue light of the Write-a-Matrix

Blue light exposure

Blue light exposure (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Upon my return from the conference in Oregon (and yes, I did get the “special treatment” package from TSA, but it was fine), the puppets and I were startled awake by the dog at the side of the bed, who was running excitedly from our room to the dining room table, where flashes of blue light seemed to be emanating.  I really could not be sure, as I was mostly asleep and my eyes were not working right.  I wanted to turn back over and keep sleeping, but Karagoz and the entire troupe nudged me out of bed and made me walk into the dining room.

And there we stood, me, the dog, Karagoz, Esma, Kenne, Hacivad and all the rest, looking at the rounded-square shaped characters crawling out of the computer screen.  One by one, those oddly-shaped electronic tumbleweeds clip-clopped onto the table, down onto the floor until they surrounded us, each one of us, with their tinny but deep blue electricness and before I knew it, I was sitting in an armchair made of those oddly-shaped laptop-induced beings, typing away at all hours of the night just to keep up as my days at work had grown so long.

I became so enmeshed in those lights that they carried me through the days of meetings and classes and more meetings that left my head throbbing and tired despite chugging on day-quil to keep what must be a sinus infection at bay.  I could see the puppets waving and yelling at me through the blue silence that was at the same time a din – but I could not understand what they were saying other than “when are you going to come back?” and “we haven’t been able to deliver tea to you in days – you should really stop with the Starbuck’s green tea lattes and Dunkin Donuts creamy coffee in the drive through – you can’t survive on oatmeal, bananas, bagels and cream cheese, you know” and “your husband misses you.”

Suffice it to say, the Write-a-Matrix has found some keen allies in these tiny blue electric beings, but they are not long for this world.  Their power source is fading like the electric lamp in the projector in my classroom and their jig is going to be up soon.  My students end-of-year thesis presentations are tomorrow and this will be a major turning point back to life as we know it!  Done will be the student tears, angst, gnashing of teeth and arguing.  Done will be the battling for rooms large enough to accommodate our audiences.  Done will be the endless stream of complaints about the presentation schedule, the fact that I, the alleged toughest grader in the school (so say my students), will moderate their presentation and ask “a scary question.” Done will be the after-party celebration with  my students at our local camp-o-rama Fantasty Island tiki bar.  It will all be done and it will be time to go home and reconnoiter with my puppets and more importantly my people.  I can see the puppets reading my mind behind the electronic barrier – and they are jumping with joy at the idea of coming back soon!

Tagged , ,
Apr 15 2012
2 Comments
Married to a Turk in America post 9-11, Turkish food!, Visits from the Karagöz puppets

Care for some hummus with your pop-culture terrorist images?

Pop culture muslim terrorist flight 93 lillies

"Popular culture image of Muslim terrorist with lillies" or "Is it perverse to call this a nature-mort?" But seriously, this is the image of air travel that popped on the TV tonight, just a few hours before I leave Oregon for home - and the usual TSA treatment. This image is my own, it depicts the man who flew Flight 93 into the ground on 9-11 who is praying just before his death (with some of the lillies in my room in the foreground).

It is late at night, and I am thousands of miles from my cozy New England home here in Oregon.

I am cooped up in my tiny, yet luxurious, hotel room, frantically making notes for my report to my boss about the (scintillating and a bit intimidating) conference I have just attended.

It has been a couple of hours of passionate writing and figuring out how I want to present my thoughts to my boss.

And until this moment, I was ignoring the fact that I needed to eat dinner (it’s going to be room service), or pack my bag (newsflash to Kenne, the Queen of Manners puppet who is stalking me: “I am not folding my laundry into the suitcase and so what if the baggage reviewers see that!”).

And so there I was, finally ready to take a break and order some food (it’s going to be nane cayi (peppermint tea) and a hummus plate in honor of the dumb cultural question of the day “Oh – your husband is Turkish? Isn’t Turkish food, you know, like, Israeli food really?”) when I made the move to turn on the television for a little bit of balance from the workaholic intellectual over-stimulation that I tend to get waaaayyyy into when alone in a hotel room.

The Flight That Fought Back

The Flight That Fought Back (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Do you find it odd that the background here is dark - as if the incident did not happen in the light of day?

And there it was, a whole lot of yelling about “Allah” and “All-ah” and “Allah u akbar” on a plane – and I realized that the Discovery channel was showing the film entitled The Flight that Fought Back about the famous Flight 93 of “Let’s roll” fame.

It took me about 10 seconds to figure out what I was watching, of course. And I must say, as an interested observer of the portrayal of people from the Middle East in American culture, this gem did not at all disappoint.

Of course, it immediately made me think with a defeated shrug, about tomorrow morning, and the TSA-ness I will likely endure as I did four days ago (you can read that here)

I stood, somewhat mesmerized until my hummus plate arrived, for about 20 minutes of LOLing at both the gender stereotypes and the ethnic stereotypes that were rampant throughout it (e.g. big burly men saving the day while women prayed and sniveled and macho looking Muslim men intoning Allah at every possible turn and generally being violent and angry the whole time).

This kind of pop culture image gets me everytime – or – I should say that it gets my rile-able self.  As the wife of an American born in Turkey, I know that for most people, this is one of the major images of people that come from M.’s region of the world.  Now, forget the fact that most Turks I know consider themselves European – but that’s a story for another time.

In my intellectual but also gut-level (yet manageable) anxiety, it’s all I can do to stop myself from fantasizing about antagonizing those TSA lovelies once again tomorrow morning by wearing a scarf on my head.  In a rare show of stern-ness that I can respect, Kenne calls me out on the need to show respect – versus mockery – of people who wear scarves as part of their religious or spiritual practice.  I quickly shut my mouth for all but hummus consumption.

Kenne nods her approval before corralling the little chorus of dancing ladies to come and fold my laundry for me.

 

Tagged , , ,
Apr 14 2012
10 Comments
Cross-cultural learning moments, Early exposure to Islam, Visits from the Karagöz puppets

Getting kids to eat in Turkish and American households: Your food is crying behind you…and “the starving Armenians”

Lately, I have been writing a set of posts about my early exposure to Islam – or anything remotely related to it (click here for a link to all posts of mine on that topic).

I am trying to get back in touch with how I came to learn about Islam – even if it was biased learning.

This is part of my effort to examine the potentially deep-seated views I may hold about M., his family, or his nation of birth, in my sub-textual reality or as the hard-core Freudian psychoanalysts might perhaps say, my id.

And it was this dredging effort, this effort to remember, that led me to turn to M. one day and ask, “canım, what did your mother say to you to get you to eat all of your food as a child?”

Of course my M., who was apparently the perfect child (which he annoyingly points out when we see screaming children throwing a tantrum in public or being too loud), explains that he never ever had a problem with this other than the times that he had pneumonia (you can read more about his childhood illness and the oxygen cure here).

During those bleak days, he told me, his mother would encourage him by saying in the sweetest of maternal voices, “canım, eat your food please, or it will go crying behind you!”  Hmmm.  I thought, “crying behind you.”

A bit of further explanation left no etymological data for analysis, and neither did a Google search.  Was this rooted in some historic challenge to food availability?  Unclear.  Probably just the non-culture bound efforts of yet another mother attempting to get her kid to eat – one of millions around the world.

As I was engaged in my googling effort, M. turned to me and asked the obvious follow-up question to mine – “what about you, canım sweetheart, what did your mom say to you?”  I sighed, put my laptop aside, and said “she told me to eat my New England boiled dinner without complaint and to remember the starving Armenians.”  M. sat up, eyes wide – “no kidding!”

Nope, no kidding.

M continued, with a look of shock: “And what did  you think about that – I mean – did you understand this was about the Armenian genocide?”

Sighing as I squinched my brain into looking-back mode, I said “honestly, no, I just had the sense that people were hungry, that there was some kind of a tragic emergency – akin to what was happening with the droughts in East Africa at that time, I suppose.  I had no idea about the hotly-contested matter of whether or not there was genocide or not. It wasn’t until I met you and you explained the controversy when we saw that Armenian genocide poster in the Armenian district here that I put it all together.”

I was referring to the massive memorial billboard about the some-say alleged atrocities committed during the Ottoman empire that M. and I had seen in the Armenian neighborhood where we do our weekly shopping for Turkish staples for our home (e.g. white cheese, really good olives, Tamek sour cherry jam, etc.)  M. got out of the car, looked at it, and hoped that he would still be welcome in the neighborhood he has been visiting for years where he delights in shared Turkish language conversation with the Armenian owners of the shop we frequent.

"Buy Liberty Bonds. Give them 2 1-2 milli...

Image via Wikipedia

At the mention of this, the Armenian genocide,  Zenne, the nervous nellie puppet crawls into a teacup and plugs her ears, but not before saying, “I am very nervous, m’lady, about you even mentioning this g-word on a Turkish-American blog.”

So, in order to honor Zenne, and to stem the potential fallout from the Turkish blog censors, I’ll leave it at that, and just ask you – what did your parents say to get you to eat your food as a child? :)

Related articles
Tagged , , , , , ,
Apr 13 2012
4 Comments
Academic hell, Cross-cultural learning moments, Visits from the Karagöz puppets

On (Turkish?) teaching tactics: Roses grow where a teacher hits? Hocanın vurduğu yerde gül biter

Cape Cod Tea Rose Pale Pink

A pale pink tea rose from my Granny's garden...a much nicer image than the Turkish proverb brings to mind...

Lately, dear readers, when I am not in the midst of a TSA “special” line, I have written much about the fact that I have been grading papers – a lot of papers.

As you may have gathered, it is a process I don’t love that much anymore. The heady and idealistic days of the joy of providing feedback have shifted into foggy, dark nights of a crumpled forehead and a pounding headache.

Hacivad Bey, the learned elder puppet statesman, reminds me to get back in touch with this passionate teacher side of me – that burnout nears if I embrace the pounding headache. I am too tired to respond, really. Karagöz is adamant that I should instill the practice of beating my students – and this student in particular – in order for her/him to regain his/her sense and sense of respect for me. I sigh.

And in part, that crumpling-brow-furrowed-foggy-mind with the grading is present because of the significant push-back I get from my students on a regular basis. As in, sometimes quite “in-your-face” and over the top push-back. As in, last week I had to ask a student to leave the classroom due to her/his disrespect. The issue that led this student over the edge was a test – or rather – the idea of having to take one.

Kenne, the Karagöz puppet best known as the Queen of Manners and Ladylike Behavior Even in the Classroom faints at the mention of this experience of mine. She awakes upon the cacophonous fanning of the chorus of little dancing ladies, who are all waving their rose-scented handkerchiefs over her in a hullaballoo of tissue-fabric-fed-frenzy akin to a fan…and she says “a lady has no place teaching this in the classroom, you should be at home with your husband. Why work in conditions such as this?”

I have a reputation for being a demanding professor – expecting the best possible work from my students – and yet at the same time doing my best to meet them toe to toe in order to support them along the way. For some, it is too much, I suppose, but I have my standards and feel strongly that our profession – a profession made up mostly of women – needs to be better at gate-keeping – but I digress.

Generally, my philosophy about teaching is summed up by Bertrand Russell‘s quote: “No [person] can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value.”

Perhaps this emblem of my teaching philosophy is why my reaction to today’s post’s title – a famous Turkish proverb about teachers hitting students for their own good and for the good of the learning process – left me a bit speechless when I saw it. I was googling around to relate my own thinking about teaching to potential Turkish perspectives on teaching, and found this one. I am sure that many pedagogical approaches worldwide are similar, but as this is a blog about Turkish-American life in great part, that’s where I am heading in my mind today. While I grew up hearing about the teachers that beat my grandfather and grandmother, with a ruler, on the palms of the hand (seems counter-productive to the writing effort, if you ask me), I was surprised when M. first told me of the French nuns who beat him for his messy papers as a child.

Of course, what those nuns apparently did not seem to care about was the fact that the messiness of the papers was related to M.’s metabolic disorder that causes him to sweat excessively on his hands (and feet), with rivulets of sweat pouring down his pen onto his paper…the poor tyke. As a result, we could not be more diametrically opposed, M. and I. I love-love-love school – and M. hate-hate-hates it. It’s not that he does not read, or reason, or engage in treks of intellectual curiosity, it’s just that he had a terrible time in school with those nuns and all of that sweat. There was no mercy, and the roses bloomed on M.’s hands.

While I will have little mercy in the way of upholding standards and expectations, I aim for the production of rose blooms of another sort.

Esma, the hippie puppet tells me “keep the faith in the face of burnout, m’lady!”

And I do.

Related articles
Tagged , , , , , , ,
← Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 217 other followers