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During Kurban Bayram we went to visit
family in Kayseri and also spent an afternoon exploring a tekke in a
place called Hacıbektaş. Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli (b. circa 1248)
was a wandering dervish, most probably a Turk from Khorassan (Iran and
Afghanistan). According to tradition he left his homeland, was
transformed into a dove, and landed in Nevşehir where he founded the
tekke we visited. The place is well looked after – the
founder’s turbe is there and the whole place is now a museum that
falls under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture. I understand
that festivals and conferences are held there about once a year and the
local man in charge told us they were in the process of developing a
website. You can certainly find the same or much better
information in a guidebook, so why am I writing about it here? I'm
writing about it because the whole experience left me unsettled.
It took me a few days but I finally figured out why. It upset me
for the same reason it upsets me that our kids are learning about
"folklore" in school under the direction of the Milli Eğtim.
I don't like it at all and if you catch me at a moment
when I'm sitting in a bar drinking rakı and thinking about the
current influx of western capitalism in its ever-so seductive forms in
conjunction with this you can be sure I'll be ready to talk about it in
a very impassioned way for about an hour, non-stop.
Allow me to elaborate. For a
variety of complex reasons I am the kind of person who appreciates
culture in general. I have always marveled at the plurality
of human culture. When I was a hippie I immersed myself in
everything connected with it and explored every last aspect. When
I lived in Australia, I hobnobbed a while with the consulate and
university crowd in Canberra until I fled the stupid pretentiousness of
it all and went to live in a rented house on a 600-acre sheep station
named "Packwood." While there I learned as
much as I could about aboriginal culture and also that of the whites who
had settled in the outback. I learned how to chop wood,
grow herbs, and make candles. I had a baby at home there on
the sheep station with a midwife. I visited the beach where the
sea met the forest and touched kangaroos. I bought plums when
they were in season and put up jars and jars of plum jam. I
learned how to start fires and cook using a woodstove. Once I
killed a big, black and highly poisonous snake that had invaded our
backyard with a shovel. I brought lunch to the men up at the
shed whenever it was shearing season and watched the shearing
process. (It's really something. One man will reach out and
grapple with a sheep, get it down, straddle it between his legs, and
shear it. When he's done he lets it get up, pats it on the
butt to set it off running, and then grabs another one. The smell
of lanolin still sends me back to those days.) I went out
into the night in pouring rain to rescue baby lambs that had been
rejected by their mothers and nursed them back to health. I joined
the Country Women's Association and learned how to spin wool. Back
in California I threw myself into yet another culture, that of academia,
and became quite good at it. I learned how to wear fashionable,
conservative clothes, to argue a point extremely well, and to write
publishable papers that were first presented at scholarly conferences.
(Interesting, all that, when you think about it. The same woman
who once laid down on the floor, stoned, right in the middle of a Procul
Harum concert, and who had spun wool and nursed baby lambs, later
learned how to peer out over her reading glasses at an audience of a
couple of hundred or so and effectively field questions, even
critical ones.) Still later, in France I threw myself
into the incredibly refined and aesthetically gorgeous high culture of
Paris and learned the names of wines, books, writers, and how to
find my way around all the arrondisements that count. I also
delved into the lesser mysteries of the French countryside
where I discovered the joys of wine-tasting in obscure wineries,
cheeses (there are more than 400, each revealing "a pasture of a
differente green, under a different sky," according to Italo
Calvino), and breads (northern and southern France have their own
names for the different breads and each loaf carries a distinctive mark
showing what bakery it came from.) Since coming to Turkey I
have spent most of my waking moments trying to learn new things and
figure it all out. As was the case in France, while I appreciate
many aspects of Osmanlı culture -- imperial, high culture, I am equally
drawn to Anadolu culture, the indigenous culture of the people, low
culture. The politics of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture doesn't
interest me very much -- I dislike politics because I find the dynamic
of all politics to be very like what small boys do when they
compete with each other to see who can pee furthest – I am fascinated
by culture. Anyway . . .
In the case of Hacıbektas it disturbed
me to realize that what had once been a vital, thriving place was now
frozen into that mode of existence we term “museum.” I would
have preferred to see it had continued to be the site of a community of
persons engaged in daily spiritual struggle, as is the case with other
tekkes I’ve visited, one of which still occupies its original
buildings. And the reason I object to one aspect of the school
curriculum being termed “folklore” is the same. Both are
indications that the living history of a people has become flattened,
reduced, rendered ineffectual, harmless, meaningless. Take halk
music, for example. Regular readers already know how much I love
this music. The music comes from a long, long tradition of people giving
voice to all the myriad events of daily life. In a description of
the lives of the original nomadic Turks Yaşar Kemal tells us
“hundreds of poets and singers of epic songs wandered the Çukorva
plain.”That music is something that comes from flesh and blood, from
experience, from life, just as did the making of carpets and kilims,and
the bombé willow cages that were once made for kekliks. The moment
something like halk music or traditional handcrafts is grouped under a
rubric like “folklore” it means that the spontaneity and naturalness
have been largely eliminated from them and their inherent power has been
effectively neutralized. Much the same thing happened with the
hippie movement of the sixties. By the time money-grubbing
“weekend hippies” and Madison Avenue advertising execs got through
with the psychedelic movement any consciousness-raising effect it had
was finished. In the case of transforming places like the Hacıbektas
tekke into a museum and establishing folklore as an academic branch the
same thing happens. What emerges is a state of affairs that
results in the wholesale objectification of a people’s once-living
history, thereby stripping it of the power it once had.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t preserve and protect and value
structures like that at the Hacıbektaş tekke and all those traditional
things that are now classed under the heading of “folklore.”
To the contrary – it’s a good thing to cherish them. What I am
saying is that we must beware lest our processes of conservation result
in killing them. In the interests of that dubious animal
called “progress,” we have objectified all these things so that they
are distanced from the subjects who once made them, the people.
The people now view their own history from a distance. Not only
are they no longer immersed in that history, they no longer have the
sense that they are, even now, makers of history, of culture.
This, in my opinion, is too bad |
