Wiki Friday: criminalized colour schemes, bonsai kittens, and more

Where to even begin. I guess with hello. It's nice to be back. Nice to be writing a Wiki Friday.

Today is the first day my daughter is in daycare. She's barely there for a few hours, but wow, the spaciousness I feel in this toddler-free home. Even with a head cold I can imagine, for the first time in a while, completing the writing process involved in a Wiki Friday. 

Composing Wiki Fridays is, believe it or not, one of my great joys. I haven't read Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, but I think I get the gist. Most day to day activities, these days anyway, ask us to think quickly, to give opinions quickly, to react quickly. Thinking slowly, deliberately, while living with a smart phone strapped to one's hand, seems nigh impossible. Pausing from reacting, to pursue my own line of inquiry, is a true refreshment to my mind and spirit. Let us begin.

Red, yellow, green – a criminalized colour scheme

The book Gardens of Water, by Alan Drew, had been sitting on my shelf for years. I knew the novel was set near Istanbul after the devastating 1999 earthquake, but I guess I hadn't read it through to the end. It's quite gripping, and really goes deep with the perspectives of different characters, from a Kurdish teenage girl to an American father who can't resist proselytization. In one plot point, a Kurdish boy in Eastern Turkey is shot by the Turkish military because he appears to be wearing red, yellow, and green, which make up the colours of the Kurdish flag, above. 

Folks on the internet debate whether this colour scheme, or the flag itself, is technically illegal or banned in Turkey, but suffice it to say, the colours have been dangerous for many. I am personally drawn toward red, yellow, and green, in art and nature, and as a result have been thinking about these colours together a lot. As we go into fall in the northern hemisphere, we will see them everywhere, in berries, leaves, dried grasses, and vegetation made lush by rain. Perhaps more on this another time.

Grapes

This search was generated by the fact that I couldn't picture grapes vines having flowers. But as with all fruits, they do flower. The flowers are just small.

While scanning the Wikipedia pages, I learned that Concord grapes are named so because they come from the city in Massachusetts. They were cultivated from wild grapes there by farmer Ephraim Wales Bull. I only tried Concord grapes as an adult, and my first response was, "Oh, this is 'grape flavour'". And indeed it is! Concord grapes spawned an entire industry of grape-flavoured products, from candy to soft drinks.

Bonsai kittens

I tentatively brought up 'kittens in jars' to David. Did he remember this urban legend that was floating around when we were kids? It was an urban legend, right? No one was actually growing kittens in jars to stunt their growth, surely. David looked at me with bemusement. He had never heard of such a thing.

Wikipedia confirms that this was a big hoax around the year 2000. An MIT student created a website that described the "lost art" of bonsai kittens, and the internet, particularly animal rights people on the internet, went nuts. Somehow the hoax even reached me.

Tolkien

Good old J.R.R.

We're watching the news Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power series, or, as I call it, 'Ring TV'.

Maya will be home soon, so I'm just going to share some quick little zingers:

Tolkien worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, on Germanic words starting with W.

We have his mother, Mabel, to thank somewhat, for she homeschooled him, including in botany and Latin.

He was bitten by a large baboon spider as a child.

He served in World War I and it is understood that Mordor is based on scenes from the trenches.

He was very into Beowulf.

In a letter, he said that the purpose of life is to know God and be moved to thanks.

He may have been the first to use the term 'phonoaesthetics', regarding the relative beauty and pleasantness of certain words or sounds within words.

Until next time.

Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy

This 2015 book comes from Ece Temelkuran, an author and journalist who has already written serious books about controversial issues in Turkey, and who was fired from a newspaper for being critical of President Erdogan and the AKP.

I read it because I want to know more about what is happening in Turkey, and I know that immersive learning experiences (books, documentaries, travel) serve me better than headlines and articles. Temelkuran divides the book into "yesterday" "today" and "tomorrow", in other words, spans a huge amount about the past, present, and prospective future of Turkey. Here are just a few pieces I pulled. Bold and brackets are my own.

On censorhip and language available for the political imagination

After the military coup of 1980, hundred of Turkish words were prohibited. Banned from state TV, these words were gradually dropped from use in social life as well. They include [and this is only a section of the list]: 

active 

answer 

compromise 

coordination 

critical 

describe 

determine 

experience 

experimental 

free 

imagine 

life 

masterpiece 

memory 

movement 

opportunity 

peace 

recall 

relation 

religious 

revolution 

spiritual 

story 

structural 

vacation 

verse 

whole 

Some of these words were replaced with their Ottoman, Arabic or Persian counterparts that had been used prior to the Republic. These words, however, either had no equivalent in the imaginations of Turkish-speaking people or were hazy at best. That was the start of the Turkish speakers’ pitfalls in communicating with one another. Then there were some words that were banned completely, one of which had a profound effect on Turkey’s history: 

Resistance! 

[...] 

Those who forget words surely also forget their meanings and the actions they imply. 

The Gezi protests of 2013 and "security"versus "trust"

For two weeks, the surge of adrenaline was enormous. For those “misfits” who were looking for a country to emigrate to before the protests, Turkey became the only place to be with the uprising. And as for those who were already there, they frequently told each other that they felt guilty even for sleeping for a few hours, as if they were missing out on the action. The Turkish diaspora, with a million voices, cried on social media: “Wish we were there!” Although there were deaths, people lost their eyes and hundreds were injured, thousands of people were still enthusiastic to join the “resistance”. For many, the reason was somehow the pure happiness of solidarity and the thrill of seeing oneself being strong before the cruelty of those in power. 

In the countries where such movements took place, what people emphasized and wanted to be emphasized was this: we are all vastly different from one another, but we all trust each other in wanting freedom, equality and justice. We may have ethnic and religious differences, but we trust one another’s conscience, sense of justice and humanity. During these movements, photographs showing coexisting dissimilarities were the most celebrated and exalted images… no one would think of someone as being crazy for “trusting people”. Because, for weeks, everyone trusted that others were the same as them, or, even if they were different, that they were good people. They chose to believe and trust. They defeated not only their fear of the authorities but that of one another’s differences. We cut down the briars and took a breath of fresh air. That feeling of refreshment was the reason why, despite all the pepper gas sprayed by the police, everyone felt as though they had just taken a deep, expansive breath. Nothing reeks worse than fear. To top it all, we learned that security and trust are inversely correlated. The feeling of trust grew in sprit of the fact that the police attacks obliterated the feeling of security.

[...] 

In a way, it was like returning the feeling of security that had been sold to us and exchanging it for the feeling of trust. And everyone was gracious enough to say, “Keep the change!”

[…] 

we know that the system is well versed in creating a need and then selling it to us. It succeeds in selling us a false feeling of security to compensate for the insecurity it fosters in us, as though it wasn’t the very thing making us rivals and thus turning against one another. We, the world, are tired of this schizophrenic situation. We want to trust. We want to trade in the security farce for the feeling of trust.

On what western Turks learned about Kurds

We were a people made diseased. For as people who were children in the 1980s and 1990s, every evening when we sat down to dinner, we would see news broadcasts from south-eastern Turkey showing the bodies of the Kurdish militants caught in the mountains. In newscaster speak, we would be informed that “terrorists apprehended in their caves were captured dead” and we would go on eating. These people never had faces and there was no other news concerning the region. 

[...] 

I remember that one night after such a news broadcast, my father, who had taught at a primary school in the Kurdish region when he was young, told the following story from the 1960s at the dinner table: 

“When I first went there, I saw that the kids didn’t speak Turkish. We weren’t told. No one told us that the people there were Kurds, that they spoke Kurdish. I wrote to the capital and asked for book recommendations for teaching Turkish to the kids. In turn they called me to the capital. ‘You were deceived, there are no people called Kurds, Kurdish does not exist,’ they said to me.” 

On Kurds and the decade ahead 

The young people sitting across from me [students of Mersin University, an institution favoured by Kurds from south-eastern and eastern Anatolia] were born in the late 1990s. Children growing up during the bloodiest times of civil war, mostly of provincial families forced to relocate to the cities in the mass migration brought on by war. They grew up in the shadows of bombs, fires, poverty, the harassment flights of warplanes and automatic weapons. They set out on life five steps behind in the godforsaken villages of godforsaken provinces. Nearly every one can identify the model of a warplane by its sound. 

It’s almost a miracle that they are here as students rather than up in the mountains as guerillas. Perhaps that’s why they study, read and exist with guerilla-like discipline. They are growing up as the children of a suppressed – and, more importantly, organized – people. Whereas their peers in the West have different opportunities for experience, they take life as seriously as only an organized individual car, as a matter of life and death.  

[...] 

The Kurdish people are an organized society. 

[...] 

In the 1980s’ Turkey, in the midst of the breakdown of all political organizations, the political organization of the Kurds was born…The Kurds brought up an educated generation in addition to the one they gave up to the war. It’s a generation in step with the world, which has had to explain its issues to the world, with the discipline of an organization that is open to the world without forgetting where it came from. 

[...]

I’m talking about a political movement that also has legitimacy and renown in terms of international dynamics. It’s possible now to follow YPG militants fighting against ISIS, especially the Kurdish militant women, in the international press. Even the Turkish TV channels broadcast their news with the organization’s name rather than saying “terrorists” as they used to in the past. An ironic twist of fate: the “Kurdish terrorists” against whom we defended our borders now defend the borders of Turkey against ISIS. 

[...] 

In light of all this, my prediction is that the next decade in Turkey and its surroundings will be the decade of the Kurds. It will be so not only politically but also culturally.

[...] 

Don’t forget that this is the political power of an armed organization that has fought against the second largest army of NATO for thirty years.

So I guess I'm learning Kurdish

En route to a village where everyone speaks Kurdish but me

I actually came for Arabic

Many moons ago, my friend Melodee sent me by mail an article about bilingual Arabic-Turkish speakers in southeastern Turkey. Sweet, I thought. I've always wanted to go back to that cultural hot spot, and now I can go with the exciting mission of learning Arabic via Turkish. The bilingual Turks can guide me through the daunting underground caves of Arabic, using our shared Turkish as a headlamp.

Şanlıurfa? Sure.

I arrived in Turkey in November with this idea about Arabic in the southeast and also a vision of working in some position that connected to my values–spending time outside, learning and teaching in a human way, and sharing ideas about how to live. By fate, such a position was presented... in Şanlıurfa.

Şanlıurfa, unlike Antakya further south, is not really the city for learning Arabic. Yes, there are Arabic speakers, especially now in the form of displaced people from the conflict in Syria, but the city is primarily Kurdish. I am told that Şanlıurfa is 80% Kurdish, and I believe that means that 80% of people speak Kurdish as a first language.

For instance, many of the people I work with now speak Kurdish as a first language, and Turkish as a close or far second. Turkish ability seems to vary with education, access to Turkish media, and communication with non-Kurdish speakers. These are also the people teaching me Kurdish, using our common second language of Turkish to explain things.

Learning Kurdish via Turkish is probably a huge mistake

Reason 1: The languages are not from the same family. 

Turkish is Turkic. Kurdish is Indo-European. There are some overlapping words, but not that many, based on what I have heard.

Note: Of the two major dialects of Kurdish, I am learning Kurmanji, the northern, versus Sorani, the southern.

Reason 2: The Turkish alphabet sucks at describing Kurdish sounds. 

I began writing Kurdish words with my own made-up transliteration system. Now with the thought that it may be useful in the future, I'm trying to use what Kurdish speakers use in Turkey–the standard Turkish alphabet.

Although no expert after a mere week, I can already tell that letters are missing or inadequate for the sounds of Kurdish. The throaty ‘kh’ that’s similar to Arabic is one thing, as well as a vowel between Turkish ‘e’ and ‘a’.

Kurdish stuff seems to always be political in Turkey, and the inadequate alphabet is no exception. Only last year did the government legalize the use of letters Q, W, and X, [I know–there's a potential satirical Sesame Street episode here] which are used for transliterating Kurdish, but which don’t otherwise exist in Turkish.

See the alphabet issue in this strongly-titled article by a journalist who maintains a devoted blog on Kurdish matters. You can also see the same article written in Turkish and written in Kurdish. [Note to self: Potential learning/self-educating materials].

Kurdish–my long lost cousin?

Learning issues aside, one cool thing about this language is that it feels eerily familiar, like a long lost cousin that shows up with features and mannerisms I know intimately, but wouldn’t notice until someone pointed them out.

Because it is an Indo-European language, and there are so many other Indo-European languages swilling around in my brain in varying quantities (English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Hindi, Farsi...) every Kurdish word sounds like a possible cognate.

na (no)
du (two)
bra (brother)

Today a woman taught me ba for ‘wind’. It stuck easily. A list of cognates online points out that ba is a cognate for vent (‘wind’ in French). More from the list:

ster (star)
mer (mari in French) (man)
merane (manly)
nu (new)
brusk (blitz in German) (storm)

As my friend Alaina said, it makes the world seem even more like one big family.