Tag Archives: culture shock

Turkish women and their hair: A visit to the guzelik salonu

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This is me no more - I am going back to silver, much to the chagrin of Safiye Rakkas, the vainglorious dancing girl and Kenne, the Queen of Manners and Maintenance of Ladylike Behavior. The little chorus of dancing girls are in Switzerland and Karagöz is dancing a jig at my (for Turkey) oppositional move.

This is me no more – I am going back to silver, much to the chagrin of Safiye Rakkas, the vainglorious dancing girl and Kenne, the Queen of Manners and Maintenance of Ladylike Behavior. The little chorus of dancing girls are in Switzerland and Karagöz is dancing a jig at my (for Turkey) oppositional move.

We Karagöz puppets take over while m’lady rest. She a right mess! Don’t tell her we say. We sneak jumpy jumpy iPhone toy, find her drafts from summer. She too perfectionist. We hit “publish” while she sleep, We blame Karagöz trickster – it work every time!

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Today, our beloved dog went for a visit to the canine guzelik salonu for a nail trim – he won’t let us get anywhere near them.

And it made me think – it’s been a while since I have made my own visit to a human guzelik salonu, a.k.a. beauty salon.

That’s because I am growing out my silver hair, as the most empowered women I know refer to it. No more hair dye. Just me as is.

Safiye Rakkase, the vainglorious dancing girl puppet sniffs and turns her head in an exaggerated angle as she haughtily exits the house. Kenne, much to her horror, stands, straightens her crisp, linen apron, and follows her out the door.

As the Queen of Manners and Maintenance of Ladylike Behavior, Kenne is somewhat mortified to actually *agree* with a dancing girl, of all things, but “principles,” she pronounces with perfect diction and a balanced dictionary on her head, “are principles.”

It wasn’t always this way, you know, the dying of my locks. Aside from a teenaged dalliance with the infamous manic panic dyes in all shades of the rainbow, it has been me and my early silver strands.

And then I went to Istanbul with M.

And his family was horrified.

Just.

Horrified.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that they turned their heads back and forth, up and down, much like my dog trying to sniff a mouse out of a hole, wondering what on earth that grey hair was doing on my head.

“In Turkey, Liz,” they would say in succinct and serious sentences, “we dye our hair.”

I heard this refrain over, and over again each day. I even heard it from M.’s elderly aunt, who herself is silver-headed. Go figure. Sometimes there was a variation along the lines of “you are too young to let your hair go.” No stranger to bucking tradition when it came to my hair, I paid it no heed during that first year’s visit, nor the second, but the third, that’s when I broke down. Not that I broke down on the idea of moving away from my silver gilding, if you will, but rather I got so sick of the familial protest that I let them have their way with my hair.

$300 later, I walked out of the snooty salon with my sister-in-law, raven haired once more. Five years on, I have done endless battle with the hairdressers in the States – begging to grow out my silver – and each time being convinced that a non-permanent dye would “blend it in.” Although there are plenty of silver-haired foxettes out there, it seems the hairdressers just can’t get the idea that we WANT our silver.

Thankfully, Billie Jean, my hair savior right here in Provincetown, “got” me right away, and I am back on the path to grey – with all of those layers of dyed locks shorn in favor of what one friend called “middle-aged short.” We’ll see how this goes down in Turkey, but for now, Karagöz is dancing his oppositional dance, and Hacivad Bey is smiling too.

The Karagöz puppets reflect on the culture shock of seclusion

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And here we are, chilling out in our hotel room, looking out at the Carribbean Sea from the Tulum playa…only I can see the band of Karagoz puppets hanging upside down, like bats, from the top of the doorway. That is how my puppets sleep, when they do. (photo by Liz Cameron)

We awoke in Tulum, Mexico, after our long trip and long stop at La Carretta in Miami, for too much delicious Cuban food.

And soon enough, there we were, in the hotel, bellies full of good Mexican breakfast, and it was quiet – save for the sound of crashing waves – make that the sound of *constantly* crashing waves – just outside of the door of our hotel room. And yet the Karagoz puppets were sound asleep, hanging upside-down like bats, as per usual, on the top of our doorway.

It’s too bad that you can’t see them in this silhouette of our feet – but of course – those puppets are (sort of) imaginary after all. (If you have no earthly idea what I am on about, read here).

And so there we were, me, my beloved M., and a whole troupe of Karagoz shadow puppets who were sleeping like bats before waking to confusion, in Tulum, Mexico. They had briefly become aware at dawn – when it looked like this out of the window (see photo below) and then had lapsed into sleep again.

Tomatillo sauce, tortilla chips, fried eggs and crema…heaven. (From Simply recipes, at this link).

M., who was looking happy and relaxed, not to exclude his ear-to-ear grin after a delicious and very spicy breakfast of chilaquiles (click here for link to recipe), turned to me and asked the following: “how do you like it here?”

Pausing to look around me, all I could hear were the puppets for a moment or two.

“It’s – so quiet!” Esma the hippie puppet remarked, sighing with contentment as she entered the lotus position for meditation before doing some hot yoga.

“The sand, it’s so soft!” cried the little chorus of dancing ladies, who were already lounging in the powdery soft remains of an ancient coral reef.

Tulum playa (photo by Liz Cameron)

“It’s – quite loud, these waves! But quite dramatically soothing” Hacivad Bey the learned Sufi elder noted quietly as he made yet another mental note about the joy of duality in everyday life.

“It’s the perfect place to read!” announced Yehuda Rebbe, the wise and learned man, already breaking out his Kindle to choose the book of the hour.

All we heard from Karagoz himself was something along the lines of “It’s perfect for swinging in the trees!” as he disappeared into the palm fronds for at least 24 hours.

“It’s quite interesting,” Mercan Bey, our resident spice trader from the Arabian peninsula reported upon returning from the Cabanas Tulum Hotel kitchen, “they use a lot of different spices here – and what is this, how do you say, ‘cilantro?’ It looks to me like fresh coriander.”

“It’s – tough to be without the internet!” declared the Write-a-matrix, cracking her workaholic whip for good measure. Hacıyatmaz just kept rocking’ and rollin’ upon hearing this comment from his nemesis – and proceeded to roll right over her, where he stayed for the whole trip, and where she almost immediately stopped protesting. It was the quietest puppet battle yet amongst my mental gang of puppet characters. I let it peter out and just listened to those waves.

Safiye Rakkase, the vainglorious dancing puppet, was ignoring it all, plugged in, instead, to the world of the iPod and Turkish pop music.

I did not hear, but saw Tiryaki, the resident addict puppet, slink off in the direction of the pot smoke on our neighbor’s terrace to see if he could score anything to smoke since he was low on the Opium stash (I heard him mutter that he “had to go through the TSA, man, can’t risk it,”). Kenne, the Queen of Manners and Ladylike Behavior (or some such, I started to forget in my Mexican mellowness) and her handmaiden, Zenne, who is a nervous Nellie, like a bowl of jelly, looked on in disgust after Tiryaki – reminding me how glad they are that I gave up the green stuff back in 1987. It didn’t even qualify as a puppet battle, I thought to myself.

After listening to all of those puppets, I just reflected on the calm that had descended since seeing the sunrise that morning, and I breathed deep and felt the calm as I turned to M. and told him – “it’s heaven here. “Thank you – you are one in a million to bring us here!”

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Introducing Saf and Dobra: On a love-hate relationship with Türkiye

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Sometimes I feel like this troupe of explorers when I am observing my husband struggle with his clearly conflicting emotions about his country of origin (image thanks to U Wisconsin Alumni at this link)

Today I met two new puppets, Saf and Dobra.  Saf is an idealist, myopic in her micro moment, focused on her love of her homeland.  Dobra, on the other hand, is more like Karagoz- an outspoken agent provocateur who stands up loudly and proudly when it comes to what her homeland can include and/or does horribly.  This is the story of why I think they showed up today.

“In Turkey, human life has no value.”

Of course, this is not a blanket statement, as I see it.  But, I have been hearing M. say this more and more recently.

And it alarms me.  It is not the only way he feels about Turkey, of course, but it alarms me.

It seems to come from some deep place.

Most recently, it has related to the deaths of young Kurdish smugglers and Turkish military conscripts alike – but has also related to what we believe is the indiscriminate use and/or testing of major psychotropic medications (and the concomitant major side effects that last forever) on young people without any regulation whatsoever.

But it is more than that too.  It relates to family expectations, cultural traditions and the dark (in the metaphorical sense) underbelly of Turkish ways that are about things more subtle and less obscene than what we often hear about or talk about here at slowly-by-slowly re: M.’s country of birth.  Those topics generally include culture-driven ways of relating, the incessant red tape of everyday life, the embrace of U.S. values and products that lead to a recherche du temps perdu and on a more positive note, more enduring cultural traditions that are not very controversial.

This is a different reality than what I will classify as the mixed feelings of malaise that some Turkish American expats (and indeed some Turks in Turkey) I know feel in response to what is widely viewed as the AKP (current ruling party) intentions to move from a Kemalist-style secularism towards a lifestyle such as that lived in the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Those other, deeper, darker and more terrible things, such as the fear about the end of true secularism, are generally grouped as follows, in no particular order:  decreasing identity of the nation as a secular state due to incrementalism on the part of the AKP, so called “honor killings” of young women in relation to sexual activity and/or sexual assault, debates about whether the Armenian genocide should be named as such or just what it was that leads people to debate the use of that term in the first place, debates about whether the treatment of Kurdish people can be classified as ethnic (and other) oppression or not and the prevalence of intimate partner violence – especially violence against women in Turkey.   Without getting more specific, as I am afraid the  Turkish censors will be after me and my readers will run like scared fish into a bait ball, suffice it to say that M. has mixed love-hate feelings about his country of origin as well as this, his country of choice.  It seems more than fair – and obvious – to say that we could make a quite similar list about the United States – and this is the subject of much discussion in our home. By now, Dobra is jumping up and down, yelling at me to make a post each about each of these things I have mentioned – just to watch my language so the censors don’t get me so that I can keep using my voice.

No large nation-place is ideal.  Sometimes I think that Saf is ingenue-puppet who longs for an idealized Turkish quiet life in Anatolia.  While I know more about reality than that ingenue-puppet, who came to introduce herself to me today (her name means naive, pure, clean, etc.), she is still a part of the puppet troupe that is helping me figure out this aspect of my cross-cultural roadtrip called this Turkish-American marriage.  She tells me, “take care, m’lady, not to write about these deep dark things, they will give people the wrong idea of Türkiye .”

English: Map of the number of Turkish people i...

All my life I have sought out a different type of life with what at times might be referred to as a vengeance.  I have tried to learn and grow my brain beyond the myopia that is rampant in the U.S. My career is central to this effort.  Now, here I am with a very different partner who is also a Turkish American – and I find that he has very strong negative feelings about his home country that range in the love-sad-hate-love spectrum depending on the topic.  This has challenged me a lot and made me more of a critical thinker.  I am not quite clear enough to write more on it, but wanted to plant these first seeds now, since Saf came to introduce herself, shyly, today and as Dobra blew in like a hurricane, to yell her introductions from across the room.

Today, they named themselves, at least, so that is a start.  So, while Saf will continue to wax lyrical about all things Türkiye that have come into her life, we’ll see how Dobra manages this.

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