Suzy Hansen on Turkey and an Istanbul neighborhood in the age of Erdoğan

Suzy Hansen on “From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

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Introduce Karagumruk to us. What made it the right place to explore the issues of migration, geopolitical turbulence, Istanbul’s history, and contemporary Turkish society?

Karagumruk is in Fatih, inland from Sultanahmet and right inside the old city walls. I actually first came to Karagumruk because I had friends who lived near there. So I went there one evening for dinner and they encouraged me to come in part because in recent years a lot of Syrian refugees had been coming into Turkey and Istanbul; they had also settled in Karagumruk. My friend said I had to go there and see the main street in Karagumruk as all of the shops have Arabic lettering, all of them have become Syrian. That was a little bit of an exaggeration. It was also a surprise to me because Karagumruk has a reputation as a bit of a forbidding place. Of course that kind of lore made its way to me as a foreigner in Istanbul. It was known as a nationalist place that was not very welcoming to foreigners. Even taxi cab drivers would joke that they didn’t like to go there, or for a long time hadn’t liked to go there. It was also a place known as being home to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), maybe home to the Gray Wolves in the 1970s and 80s. So it was a place that was a little forbidding. It was also close to very religious neighbourhoods in Fatih, associated sometimes with Islamic brotherhoods and various sects. So it wasn’t a place that you would typically go to as a foreigner or a journalist. But for organic reasons I ended up going there.

Within Karagumruk, the book particularly focuses on Professor Naci Şensoy Caddesi, which you use to tell the larger story of Turkey’s modern history and the history of migration of Syrians. How did that idea come to you?

2015 was a difficult time in Turkey. You can place the beginning of Erdogan’s authoritarian turn in many different years, but there were the Gezi Park protests and there were elections in 2015 in which Erdogan began allying with the MHP. There were also several things happening that were scary. ISIS was throughout the region at this time and of course there were Syrian refugees who were coming in because of the violence in Syria. That was creating a certain amount of tension and controversy. Why was Erdogan letting in all of these refugees? So I had thought about writing a magazine story just focusing on one neighbourhood, where I wrote about how Turks, Kurds and Syrians lived together. I knew that Turks had a snobbery or racism towards Arabs in general, that in terms of what they had learned in school about their history was that they were superior to the Arab world in some way, that they had turned towards the West. The idea of these refugees coming in sort of challenged their Turkish identity and, in some cases, the direction they thought their country was meant to go in. Many saw Erdogan welcoming them into the country as a political project that was meant to increase his votes, but also to turn Turkey into more of an Islamic country. All of these ideas were very present at that time.

I myself was also a bit confused about everything that was happening. There were so many events, so many changes. You sort of felt like the headlines were attacking you every day; that’s how fast the country was changing. And there was a lot of repression going on. So I thought maybe focusing on just one street, on just returning to a basic kind of reporting would be a better way of writing about how Turks are living through this moment in time.

Especially as a foreigner, you can get a little bit lost in your own life. I had been there for seven or eight years. You have to keep forcing yourself out to some place new. Karagumruk was only 25 minutes away from where I lived, but it was different from the place where I myself was living. So it seemed like a necessary thing to do. In the neighbourhood all I was doing was talking to shopkeepers, just sort of hanging out every day and interviewing them about how they felt about the refugees moving in, how they felt about the changes Erdogan was making to the system. While I was there, ISIS attacked the airport in Istanbul, which was a massive thing at that time. It suddenly struck me that I was spending time in this place where I could see these major national and geopolitical events playing out in the minds or perceptions of people on the street. I thought that could be a better way to talk about everything that was happening in Turkey at that time.