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COPYRIGHT 2003 Irish American Cultural Institute
WHEN I was a very small child, farmed out to my Aunt May in the West Kerry Gaeltacht, (1) one of our great joys was listening to wondertales in which the hero had to make a perilous journey to an Domhan Thoir, 'the Eastern World', usually to bring back some pearl or other without price. Whether a princess or "the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun," whether a feather from a golden bird or the water of eternal life from the "well that is at the world's end," these marvels all came from an Domhan Thoir. It was as if coming from Ireland--the Western World or the Hesperides--our own apples were considered ordinary or garden or commonplace. On the principle that too much West is East, the source and site of all marvels and wonders was its opposite, the Eastern World. It has always seemed obvious to me that J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World was called such to emphasize an ironic interplay with the Eastern World of the Gaeltacht storytellers. Little did I know at the time that this very same Eastern World would play host to me for a very important and influential tire years of my young adult life. It is a place in which I have kept a foothold ever since.
Years ago an applied linguist informed me that it would be hard to come across two languages that were phonetically more alike and morphologically more different than Turkish and Irish. This underlined my own deepest suspicions, though I would never have been able to put it so precisely. I had a real struggle to learn Turkish, my first non-Indo-European language, and even today my fluency depends greatly on how recently we have spent some time in the country. But there was a time when linguistically I used to pass for an Alamanli, a Turk who had grown up in Germany. I remember once in Ankara, in the bazaar area of Cikrikcilar Yokusu, I demurred from such an appelation, saying that I was actually an out-and-out gavur, or heathen, only to find that the material I was buying suddenly doubled in price. That was the last time I looked a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak.
I distinctly remember the very first sentence I made in Turkish. I went to Turkey with my husband Dogan in October 1974 when I was six months pregnant with my first child. We traveled on the Orient Express. This was not the pampered, refurbished train of luxury tourism, but a higgledy-piggledy, mish-mash collection of run-down wagons which started off at various European cities like Paris and Munich and joined up in Belgrade before chugging its way slowly through the Balkans to the final destination of Sirkeci Station in Istanbul. As a train it was very rudimentary. It had no restaurant car, no opportunity for getting food of any sort, and if it hadn't been for the yolluk, or travel provisions, including two cooked chickens and bosnak boreghi, a Bosnian-style pastry, given to us by my sister-in-law in Zurich, we would have been in a bad way.
At Belgrade I was left looking after the luggage while my husband went off to organize a couchette or wagon-lit for the rest of the journey. The carriage in which I was stranded was shunted back and forth umpteen times, sometimes an alarming distance away. Some Turkish workers spoke to me, asking what was up. I could recognize it was Turkish, but otherwise did not understand a word. But necessity being the mother, etc., I came out with "kocam yakinda gelecegim diyerek, gitti gelmedi," or "saying he would come back soon, my husband went away and hasn't come back yet." The Turkish sentence has an economy of words and an elegance which are due to the language being agglutinative, using participles, gerundives, and gerunds where an Indo-European language would use subjunctives and relative clauses. Kocam yakinda gelecegim diyerek, gitti gelmedi. This sentence drew forth a torrent of Turkish. Little did they realize how much I was at a loss. It would take at least five years of living in Turkey before I could make a sentence like that again with a similar insouciance.
During those five years I was open to many sorts of literary influences which I will discuss later, but first I want to talk about how I learned the spoken language, colloquial Turkish. The person who had the greatest influence on me and who was actually my chief motivator in learning Turkish was my father-in-law, Suleyman Leflef. He was a great character, a genuine "original." He had been the only male left at home when the new surname law was promulgated in the 1920s, and when he went to register a name for the family under the law, he just took the ending -oghullari, 'sons of', off the long-standing family nickname, and so their surname became Leflef. When his older brothers came back from military service, they were very annoyed with him, saying "why didn't you take the chance to give us a heroic name like Safkan ('pure blood') or Ozturk ('real Turk') or Demirel ('iron hand') or something like that," just as everyone else had done. He demurred saying that the name they had had for hundreds of years was good enough for him and should be good enough for them.
A former military officer, my father-in-law had never really enjoyed his years in the army. It was by default that he had ended up studying at Harbiye, the military academy still situated in his time in the famous Selimiye barracks on the Asian banks of the Bosporus, where Florence Nightingale had worked during the Crimean War. He had wanted to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, but did not have the necessary mathematics to be accepted, so instead he trained at the military academy. I once saw his graduation diploma, where he got top marks only in marksmanship and horsemanship. My father-in-law was only a yuzbashi, or centurion, when he was cashiered for having two wives.
Being Muslims, Turks are allowed up to four wives by their religion. Since the reforms in Turkey brought about by Kemal...
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