Hello fellow Bloggers,

I hope you all are having a decent time in these busy days. Today I am going to talk about, I assume like many of you, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. What we discussed in class about whether the book was anti-American or not, pursued me to think if the book was anti-American because while reading the book, I never thought of the book as an anti-American book. Rather, I saw the struggle and confusion of a man trying to get used to a new place and culture. That might just be since I am not American and was not affected or insulted by the anti-American message in the book to the extent an American or perhaps a Canadian would be. I’m not saying there weren’t moments I was shocked by some challenging ideas. For instance, Changez’s initial feelings about 9/11 shocked me, and I required a moment or two to digest what he was feeling towards a terrorist attack that killed thousands of people. However, I think all of these are features that help us understand the struggle, conundrum and the confusion Changez faces while moving to the US and more importantly while he unconsciously ‘Americanizes’. We discussed, in class, that what we took from the book depended on how/from which lens we read the book. The reason why I did not think the book wasn’t anti-American but rather gave an insight to why one might end up becoming an anti-American, thus, pointed out what in American society causes anti-Americanization, is most likely  because I read the book with great empathy towards Changez. That might be because I am experiencing, like some of you,  a similar but also in many ways different, transition in my life and there were a lot of  instances where I could relate experiences of Changez to my life; but overall, seeing how different people from different backgrounds interpreted the book differently, and how the book allowed it to be interpreted differently was really interesting and in a sense eye-opening. 

Hey fellow bloggers,

Today, just like most of you, I’m going to talk about poetry. I must admit, I’ve never been a big fan of western poetry or poetry written in English. For some reason, I can not find the magic I find in Turkish poetry. That being said, I noticed some similarities both Turkish and English poetry movements on Tuesday’s lecture when we were introduced to language poetry.

But First let me briefly introduce you to the history of Turkish poetry. Poetry was the first form of written literature in the Ottoman Empire. It was written in a very sophisticated language and was limited only to the palace as the general public at the time barely knew how to write and read. The poems were also restricted to some forms and rules concerning syllable choice and count.

With western influence, secularization and increasing literacy (around 19th century), new movements started to form taking poetry outside the palace. What really managed to do that was the Birinci Yeni (First New Movement) or Garip Akimi (Weird Movement) which started with a book called Garip (Weird) written by 3 different poets around mid 20th century. The essential idea was to challenge the classic sensuality and formalism of poetry. The main concern of the poems was about the issues normal people faced. With this movement, traditional poems were highly challenged and forms of the poems started to change significantly.

Right after this came the Ikinci Yeni (Second New Movement) or in a less common term Civil Poetry. This took the first movement to another level with abstract forms, language, and meaning. Some poems are made out of completely innovative page-use and some are made out of jibberish words. What really shocked me was the poem we read on Tuesday. The poem about the flamingo dance, that was described as sounds because that was exactly what Ikinci Yeni did. Many of my favorite poems (that are a part of Ikinci Yeni) convey their message indirectly by the use of words that sound like something else or by a color that is associated with a feeling etc.

What is also amazing that both poetry movements -language poetry and Ikinci Yeni- were used for political purposes. Many poets at the time chose to join the Ikinci Yeni movement to be able to write freely about whatever they wanted. Thus, for some, it was a way of avoiding censorship. I do not yet have enough knowledge or experience with language poetry to make a comparison. However, from what I learnt, I can easily say that both movements seem to be very similar.

The founders of the Birinci Yeni (First New Movement)

Hey fellow bloggers,

In today’s blog I want to talk about Butler’s chapter “Survivability, Vulnerability and Affect”. More than just being about war, Butler talks about the cause of main issues of the world throughout history. Before reading Butler, I separated the history of international or to be more accurate intersocietal conflicts in to 3. The first era consisting of conflicts between relatively small scale societies in the ancient world. The second era following the popularization of religion, conflicts are mostly based on religious identity and between larger societies. Finally, the era following the French Revolution brought up conflicts due to nationalism.

After reading Butler, I realized what changed throughout human history in terms of causes of conflicts were forms of identity but the idea of identity stayed the same. Whether this was while defending your village against a group of nomad attackers, or joining a crusade in the name of capturing holy sites for your religion or travelling half of the world just to fight a world war your proud nation is in, it was all because people wanted to serve the identity they belonged to. The problem with humans is that we are not able to see both sides of the conflict, being restricted to our identity. Butler indicates that the need for empathy is critical when thinking of conflict with the quote “the death of ungrievable lives will surely cause enormous outrage on the part of those who understand that their lives are not considered to be lives in any full and meaningful sense”. She further explains “Those we kill are not quite human, and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear national or religious similarity to our own.” Reading these from Butler, pushed me to redefine identity and it’s historical significance as well as how empathy can solve problems caused by identity conflicts.

Today I would like to talk about how what Dr. Luger said in class today (26^th November 2015) inspired me to come to realizations about genres and how they developed over time. When she said, “The genre of high school essays is a transitional genre to academic writing.” realized that this was a man made genre (high school 5-paragraph essays) with a particular purpose. This pushed me in to thinking about other genres such as horror, science fiction and romance and how they were formed.

According to my chain of thought science fiction, could be a product of human curiosity and creativity. Similarly, horror’s creators might be the human addiction to adrenaline the urge to get scared. Finally, romance is a result of human emotions. High School Essays, if you think in the same way, is a product of education as it is, in a sense, a way of entering the language of Academia.

Ultimately, Academic writing is designed in a way to communicate in a very specific and effective way. This relatively younger genre, indicates the evolution of genres in correlation with the advancement of human discovery. It is interesting to realize things like these that make the process of learning much more interesting.I just wanted to share my thoughts inspired by todays lecture as I had to miss the field trip last thursday.

Barış

In todays post, I want to go back to my literature review and talk about something I realized and learned. We had 3 articles as a group for our presentations and all of them were concerned with the idea of strategic forgetting in a micro level. The 4^th article we found took the same issue about strategic forgetting to the macro level and it’s arguments were a game changer, contradicting with all three articles and how they approached strategic forgetting. It did not necessarily prove the other three wrong, we still thought strategic forgetting could be beneficial in micro level, however, it just brought another dimension to the issue and showed us how strategic forgetting could lead to terrifying causes in a macro level.

When I went home thinking about and questioning my methods of thinking, I realized that I never actually thought of how the issue I was thinking about affected people in a micro way and how it was different than the macro dimension. Soon after that I started thinking about some issues I analyzed recently and figured out my opinions actually change or at least became more understanding as I could now see how other people/societies were affected, that I just never saw before.

Since then I started re-evaluating my opinions, especially about recent political events that occurred in my hometown, Istanbul. After seeing the changes in my opinions just by a single method of thinking, I understood the importance of critical approaches and began researching more deeply.

Thinking how a single article we found by chance (if one of us found another article before Maria did, this wouldn’t have happened) shaped the way I thought, I was very impressed by coincidence but more importantly I realized the significance of research and research assignments.

Barış Uzel

Reading Persepolis for the first time was quite a shock for me. I was reading a graphic memoir that talked about what I have been through for the past year; not as a child but as an adolescent. It was the spring of 2013 and our lives were normal other than basic restrictions of the oppressive Islamist government. However, after deciding to attend a peaceful protest in Gezi Park, my whole life changed. Before I got there the protest started facing police brutality and was not just peaceful anymore; the police who used blank cartridge guns and tear gas canons were attacking people brutally. As a response, people read books to the police, they even shared their food with them for the sake of keeping the protest peaceful which was of course not possible once it was spread to the whole country.

The following week was finals week in my school. Every morning we would take our exams and join the protest as a community even though things got more and more violent everyday. The school environment was just like the first chapter of Persepolis, no one understood what was going on, no one knew the scale of it and no one could get reliable information as social media was the only source.

I wasn’t of course, the only one attending the protests in our house. My mom went out to houses where the battle was most intense and served as a medic to help out the wounded. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, learned where a doctor was needed and drove her around the city. I would watch them come home exhausted, and hear their horrifying stories.

I was 17 at the time, not being a child like Marji; my mom would not stop me from going to the protests but after people started dying she became more precautious and limited my time in the protests. Nonetheless, like Marji and many more, that did not stop me from attending the protests. I just had to do it secretly now. Plus, my mom was attending too; her life to me was as equal as my life to her. At least that was what I thought at the time.

After the protests everyone was really hopeful that things would change, however, things only got worse and worse. Through the use of excellent PR, the protest gained a terrible reputation within the country. Suddenly people were divided into two, the ones who supported the protests (people who wanted the government down) and the ones who were against it (pro-government). People who supported the government were mostly Radical Islamists as the ruling party is a Radical Islamist party. Looking just like Satrapi’s drawings, Radical Islamists also reported on people who attended the protests which was also happening on 1980’s Iran as told by Satrapi.

Radical Islamists fighting against protesters siding with the police

Reading it once more, after moving to Canada was even more personal for me. I could relate the experience and the emotions of the last chapter as well. Not being wanted by the power in your country, thus, living under stress and hate all the time is an unbearable experience. Knowing things were not going to get better in the short run, my parents were determined to sent me abroad so that I could spend the rest of my youth and the early academic years of my life without being under oppression.

“The Woman in Red” one of the symbols of the resistance

The similarities of present day Turkey and 1980’s Iran got me thinking on how ideologies spread. The first signs of the Radical Islamist Movement in Turkey were seen around the mid nineties, approximately 15 years after the Iranian revolution, when Radical Islamists burned down a hotel (Madımak Massacre) full of intellectual thinkers many of who did not survive. It would take a great amount of time for an ideology to gain so many followers. Hence, if we take that into consideration, Radical Islam might have started to become popular in Turkey, just a few years after the Iranian Revolution, as Iranian Revolution might have encouraged the pre-existing Radical Islamists to start propaganda. It is almost impossible to make 100% certain statements in such topics, nevertheless, it is safe to say that, one way or another, the Radical Islamists in Turkey were effected by The Iranian Islamic Revolution.

A caricature representing the Madımak Massacre

Barış Uzel

Moving over 9,500 kilometers in order to study in Canada had a massive impact on my life. One of the many was the effect caused by the sudden change of my involvement in various interpretive communities. I realized that I had lost connection or reduced my communication with many of my interpretive communities after reading Farhat Shazad’s article on the role of interpretive communities in learning and remembering. This sudden change of my interpretive communities, however, did not only had negative outcomes

First of all, my relationship with my family had huge changes over the past month. Weekly phone calls replaced everyday conversations causing a natural change of the content of conversations. Instead of talking about events, politics, or other people, our conversation became more focus on our lives, which in a sense limits me remembering the past and learning about the current conflicts and in my country.

It might sound terrible at first; however, this actually had a positive impact on my psychology. Coming from a country in the verge of a civil war, not knowing how our president is using the war he started to gain votes or how people are being attacked while defending peace, clears my mind. I feel like my brain is now open to new knowledge instead of being busy worrying about the desperation of Turkish politics.

This, of course, was not only caused by one of my interpretive communities. I don’t hear President Erdoğan’s speech from the TV neither do I listen to what he did from the taxi driver I just hop on to. Most of my interpretive communities that I heard about the corrupt politics in my country do not exist anymore. Therefore, instead of worrying about the present and the future, I acquire knew knowledge from the interpretive communities that replaced the past ones.

Barış Uzel