介绍： Divided land: Fault-lines upon fault-lines
The country’s youth are divided in their politics but united in passion
From The Economist 20161112

Audio:

0:00



Erdogan, keeping up with the Kemalists
Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey. By Kaya Genc. I.B. Tauris; 230 pages; £12.99. To be ...

介绍： Divided land: Fault-lines upon fault-lines
The country’s youth are divided in their politics but united in passion
From The Economist 20161112

Audio:

0:00



Erdogan, keeping up with the Kemalists
Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey. By Kaya Genc. I.B. Tauris; 230 pages; £12.99. To be published in America in December.

Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. By Ece Temelkuran. Translated by Zeynep Beler. Zed Books; 296 pages; $19.95 and £12.99.

ISTANBUL is an achingly beautiful city, bridging past and future, loss and longing. The Turkish word most closely associated with it is huzun, a melancholic and paralysing nostalgia. But more than nostalgia is needed to render the way both city and country have begun to come apart in recent years as the social fabric holding them together has frayed.

In strikingly different ways, two books, one by Kaya Genc, a novelist and essayist, and the other by Ece Temelkuran, a journalist, rise to this challenge and chronicle the changes that have convulsed Turkey since the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came to power.

Turkey has always been divided, frequently violently so. But under Mr Erdogan, the slide into angry polarisation has been especially traumatic. The president has set about rewriting the country’s foundation myths. For nearly a century, the national story has been that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in the wake of the first world war and the demise of the Ottoman empire, dragged a backwards Turkey towards Western-facing nationalism and secularism. Mr Erdogan begs to differ. He tells his countrymen that Turkey has always been a pious and conservative country, and that he intends to drag it back from the excesses of Kemalism.

It is difficult to keep pace with Turkey these days. Both “Under the Shadow” and “Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy” were written after the Gezi Park protests in 2013, when opposition to Mr Erdogan exploded onto the streets of Istanbul and other cities. The books were finished before the failed coup in July, although published afterwards. And it is striking that despite their otherwise astute analyses of Turkey’s divisions, both writers only hint at the fissure between religious conservatives that would play a role in the coup and its aftermath. Mr Erdogan blames Fethullah Gulen, a cleric based in America, for the coup, which Mr Erdogan has since used as an excuse for a wide-ranging crackdown. No one (the authors here are no exception) saw this coming.


Ms Temelkuran, at times playful, but more often polemical, surveys the wasteland of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when Turkey suffered three military coups, and she excoriates the current administration for dragging the country back to the brink of collapse. This is personal for her, having been fired as a journalist for her criticisms of the government. But anger at times blunts her analysis and it robs her of political traction. She misreads the reasons for the president’s success, suggesting that he had won on grandiose promises to mend Turkey’s view of its past, rather than on prosaic promises of stability and growth. And she hints obliquely at conspiracies (“the economy was flourishing with money suddenly pouring into the country from some obscure source”). She risks demonising as irrational or unethical all those who support the president. This is grist to Mr Erdogan’s cynical mill. He makes a lot of his electoral mileage championing ordinary people against urban elites.

Whereas Ms Temelkuran seethes on the front line of Turkey’s culture war, Mr Genc is a cartographer of the battlefield. “Under the Shadow” is built around a series of interviews with youthful students, activists, businesspeople and artists, “divided in politics but united in their passion”. Mr Genc is refreshingly balanced; he gives as much attention to a man who came of political age listening to Mr Erdogan vow to vanquish the Gezi protests as he does to another who had helped spark the protests. If the book has a shortcoming it is that the author is too generous towards his subjects, allowing his own voice too little room. Mr Genc is a subtle guide to the wrenching changes Turkey is undergoing, and his personal testimony is rich in historical and cultural detail. More of his insights would have been welcome; he has announced himself here as a voice to be listened to as Turkey struggles to come to terms with itself.

Copyright © 2015-2016 Share2China.com | Powered by Flask and MongoDB