After My Name is Red and The White Castle, I swore I would never read any Orhan Pamuk's books ever again. I pretty much felt that I had had enough of "trapped between worlds" and "searching for one's identity", which seem to be present in all his works (or so I thought, since I have only read two of them). But when I saw Istanbul: Memories of a City and read the synopsis on its back cover, I said to myself, "Heck, I'll give it a try. It's not a fiction anyway." Well, the spirit of the book is not that different from that of the previous two I've read. But since it's a memoir, everything is much clearer compared to Pamuk's novels (at least that's what I think), which sometimes too full of symbolisms that they're hard to understand.
Speaking about Istanbul, this is what Lonely Planet's co-founder Tony Wheeler had to say, his impression upon visiting the city for the first time in 1972: "Istanbul was our first taste of the exotic east and even though most of the city, and almost all of its historic parts, lies on the European side, there was a distinctly different flavor from the purely European cities we had passed through." I reckon its inhabitants--excluding the nouveau riche coming to live in it from smaller towns--would cringe upon hearing such statement. Because if any, one thing that people of Istanbul wished to be was to be Western.
After the Ottoman Empire (or the "Khalifate", some people like to say) collapsed in the early twentieth century, replaced by the new Republic of Turkey, it was imperative for the Turkish to let go of the old traditions and embrace the new ones (it's a government policy, mind you), setting their eyes to the West as their main goal. If you're a member of the middle or upper class, like the Pamuks, you'd be more likely to embrace this sentiment whole-heartedly. To be modern was to be Western, end of the deal. Bearing that in mind, no wonder the Western's view on them and their city became very important for the people of Istanbul.
This feeling, this longing to be a part of the Western world, sometimes materialized in great fires. During Pamuk's childhood, in the fifties and the sixties, many old houses and mansions that once belonged to prominent Ottoman families burned to the ground. Oftentimes these fires were deliberate. The government that sought to modernize the city or those old families that wished to obtain insurance money since they're now broke eventually built new, modern, Western-style buildings on the spot. It's one of their ways to erase their history, their past.
Yet, no matter what they did, Istanbul could never be Western enough. How could it be, when remnants of old life scattered about it? And before they knew it--or whether they realized it or not--an odd feeling started creeping up on them. Pamuk called it hüzün, or melancholy. Hüzün isn't your typical kind of melancholia. It's a feeling shared by every inhabitant of the city, borne from a sense of loss that refuses to let go--just like the remains of old glory refuse to vanish completely; and yet, it is bore with pride, and with quiet submission.
I've never been to Istanbul--and if I have, I doubt I could feel any of the melancholy shared by its people, because hüzün can only be felt by those who have lived long enough in the city--but as I read the book, I could feel the gloominess run through the course of its narration: in Pamuk's journey through Istanbul, in the stories of his personal life living in Istanbul. Pamuk said that, despite it being hard to understand by outsiders, it was precisely Istanbul's melancholy--including the dismal ruins that made it not "Western" enough--that made him love the city so much.
Truth to be told, I think it's kind of romantic: looking around, seeing faces of different people all around you, and realizing that they all share the same feeling as you. At least, that's a lot healthier than being depressed over something that's too complex to say into words and then getting more depressed upon finding out that nobody--no one among the faces you see around you--shares this feeling. Pamuk's sorrow is a communal one that he shares with every single person who lives in Istanbul that only needs to be dealt with acceptance, while mine is a personal one that needs to be solved or else I'll go crazy.
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