BesondersWeg

I’ve written at great length elsewhere about how living in a foreign country is a yo-yo for your emotions.

Evidently this also applies to your scholarly pretensions, as I started crying this weekend while reading Esra Özyürek’s Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. It’s a pretty fabulous anthropological study of 1990s Turkey and the ways that Turks across the ideological spectrum try to stake claim to the legacy of the early republic. 

But for the record, here’s what made me cry: a series of excerpts from a museum guest book during an exhibit about the founding of the Turkish Republic. Most of the entries were addressed to Atatürk himself, as if the visitors were at a site of pilgrimage and not a museum exhibit.

This one resonated particularly given current events:

“Dear Atam:

I sometimes wonder whether this nation deserves the gift of the republic. Tomorrow we will celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the republic. I hope there will be many other seventy-five years. But I observe many unbalanced situations. What we have is only the name of the republic. They always told us that the republic is self-government of the people. Do these people govern themselves in the best possible way? Which of the rulers think about the people? Which of the ruled seek their rights? Will we ever be able to be a world-class state or a state of law? I wish you could be here to get rid of all the wrongs. I wish we could get together to suppress all of these things. Anyway, I thank you a thousand times. What if you never existed? Today we would either be a colony or like Iran. I am so glad that you were born. I am so glad that you are still alive. You will be alive as long as people like me are around.”

Çok teşekkürler, Atatürk. Çok teşekkürler.