Beyond Recovery? : Accounts of a Student “Activist” Through Democratic Backsliding, Day 8
For the last year, I’ve lived in New Haven, Istanbul, Paris, and Washington, D.C. The last time I lived outside of Istanbul, I didn’t yet think of Turkish politics as anything other than a large, imposing creature that had nothing to do with me as it also had no effect on anything that makes me a person. Nevertheless, the very simple premise of this blog was to investigate all the ways living under electoral authoritarianism has affected me.
Yet, in the past year, being allowed a comfortable distance from everything that cluttered my mind led me to a few half-decent conclusions:
The country where I live doesn’t have to be a constant burden.
The Republic of Turkey doesn’t allow her inhabitants to be concerned with anything but herself. Yet, this same rule hasn’t applied to the other countries I’ve lived in, albeit for a limited period, whether it be as a foreigner in France or as a returning local in the United States. I could confront more metaphysical, less protruding anxieties such as our collectively impending mortality or whether I’m truly happy with myself when I’m no longer performing for a quasi-invisible audience. Part of me would like to chalk this up to being overcome with pretension in Paris or the nostalgia of being back in the United States where I grew up. Yet, all my best delusions crumbled the moment I got out of Istanbul Airport and slipped into the back of a taxi and into a comfortable pattern of eye-rolling and mumbling to myself as I heard the President speak on the radio. Here, I lacked any semblance of the distance between politics and personal experience, for better or for worse.
Experiencing a country that had captured me for so long through Twitter was an odd, disorienting experience. New actors would emerge and strike such a unified chord for the people I knew that it became nearly impossible to give a name to such phenomena. One example of this is the increasing amount of political capital actors can now gain by proudly announcing their racism toward refugees and the consequences of how that capital has been cashed in.
For years, anti-refugee sentiment had a looming presence in Turkish politics. Turkey is indeed home to over 3.6 million Syrian refugees and over 4 million refugees overall, making Turkey the world’s largest host of refugees. Fear-mongering against these refugees had been used to either deflect from or aggravate a variety of policy positions, from poor economic conditions and lack of job security for Turkish residents to European skepticism and myths that foreign powers sabotage Turkey, wishing to see the country fail. These sparks of discourse found an organized presence in the emergence of the Victory Party, led by the infamous Ümit Özdağ.
Following the news cycle from abroad, it’s hard to immediately tell the difference between this new political force and the usual spark-ups and wind-downs of xenophobia I’d become accustomed to. It isn’t until the 24th of April, the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, when Ümit Özdağ tweets a photo of Talat Pasha, the architect of the Genocide, saying, “Our nation is grateful for you”. This comes after the year prior, Özdağ threatened Garo Paylan, an Armenian MP of the pro-Kurdish HDP, for his proposed bill asking for the Armenian Genocide to be recognized. Özdağ responded to this proposal by publicly threatening Paylan, saying, “If you’re not happy, get out. When the time comes, you will also live through the Talat Pasha experience.”
What’s even more startling for me and my friends in Turkey is to see the number of people in our everyday lives showing support for this platform. It seems like for those three months, all they could do was try to rationalize public discourse while being met by people responding, “Well, then I guess I am a racist”. I became most fearful when one of my friends tweeted about 3 Syrian refugee children aged 15, 13, and 11 being driven into work and exploited for their labor. While the facts themselves were startling, what terrified me was the angry mob on Twitter, threatening and spewing hate at him for daring to even state the exploitation of refugees as fact. The mob included a decent amount of people he and I knew personally, and the distance between ourselves and violent hatred in the public sphere, as well as any hope for peaceful confrontation, was gone.
In the midst of all of this, I was doing my semester abroad, and my Turkish friends would groan in protest whenever I ranted about something new that was going horribly wrong in Turkish politics. Whether it be raging anti-refugee sentiment or the soaring cost of living, I was constantly making blue-pill, red-pill decisions about whether I wished to be sheltered from everything awaiting me in Turkey. Nevertheless, the ability to make that choice for myself without the constant presence of the things that had to occupy my mind in Istanbul, as if it were an ever-tightening noose around my neck, was refreshing.
Home is a complicated thing to have. Home is also a complicated thing to not have.
Last summer, in my home state of Connecticut, I somehow felt both things to be true in my case. Working for a local election campaign in New Haven, I had to code-switch between two worlds that felt equally ill-fitting, as if they were hand-me-downs from different worlds, for people who could easily be mistaken for me, at least under minimal scrutiny. On the phone, for instance, I had to signal that I was both well-educated and passably white but also comfort white, middle-class liberals with the fact that I was the child of immigrants and certainly not a Yalie. The compromise between the two resulted in me going by my affectionately ambiguous nickname “Liz”, as it distracted from my last name which was hard to pronounce and even harder to spell.
It was hard to justify the visceral connection I felt to Connecticut. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was the only simple answer I’ve ever had to the question “Where are you from?”. In my return, I half-heartedly expected some sort of grand revelation that this simple answer would be the right one. That there truly was some mystical and undeniable bond, wrapped in a twist of fate to finally bring closure to my questions of belonging. In the end, I was left mostly with sincere sympathy for a state that had given me much to love — but certainly not closure.
I am not as numb as I think — and maybe I never was.
Since 2016, it seems like everyone I know has been parroting political doomsday cultists’ annual declaration that “This is it, this is the last exit. Otherwise, we’re all eternally screwed.” Regardless of whether these declarations had any merit, 6 years later, I’m still waiting for any of these supposedly near-catastrophic events to make me feel something.
Not to say that the tragedies or political losses over this time have not fazed or upset me at all. Of course, they have. I have just been able to regulate my reactions to these events intellectually or through sheer desensitization. I haven’t had a burst of raw emotion. Mostly, I hadn’t cried.
Upon telling my boyfriend this, I’m met with the question, “Even when Trump was elected?” and I have to inform him that yes, I didn’t even cry when Trump was elected. When he asks me why, I find I don’t really have an answer. It’s not because I wasn’t incredibly upset and frustrated, because I was. I remember yelling at the projector in my classroom during Model UN practice about how Hillary won the popular vote and the electoral college was stupid, and the Republicans were stealing the election just like they did in 2000. But not a single tear was shed.
I guess maybe it’s the fact that I had never discounted the possibility of Trump being elected, despite hand-painting an “I’m With Her” shirt the night before to wear to school for Election Day. I stuffed it in my backpack instead when they called Michigan for Trump that morning.
All that being said, by this year, I had given up all hope that any major global or political event would make me completely lose my capacity for emotional regulation. That is, until I stood in front of the Supreme Court building protesting and found out Roe v. Wade was overturned. I heard cheering from the anti-abortion crowd who had also been there protesting for the past weeks and had seen them literally pop bottles of champagne when I started crying uncontrollably. I wasn’t thinking about anything, only sobbing.
I still can’t quite name what precisely caused this shift, but it certainly caught me off guard. The simple -and most disappointing- answer is that being there and witnessing this decision felt different. For one, I can’t imagine having the same reaction if I had found out about the decision via CNN news alert. If that had been the case, I could imagine my reaction being more like how I had responded to Trump’s election. I would have been cussing out Thomas and Kavanaugh for being rapists, the Trump-appointed justices for lying about Roe being “settled law”, and ranting about how Thomas should have been impeached.
One thing that strikes me about this emotional outburst is the fact that seconds after noticing the line of journalists point their cameras towards me, the people I had been protesting with were telling me not to let them see me cry in an unnecessarily army general-like fashion. I chalked it up to them, foreseeing, as I did, the “Crying women react to Dobbs decision” covers.
Then, I saw one activist who had just given an impassioned, tearful speech reprimanded for talking on the phone while crying, likely to someone who had called her to see how she was feeling. “This isn’t the time”, she was told.
I’m not quite sure if my lack of such bursts of emotion is actually caused by my proclivity to growingly cynical and concerningly desensitized reactions, or if this is something we gradually default to. Our individual and collective performances of political engagement demand that we provide immediate yet eloquent reactions to every development. The thing is, I don’t want to hear someone give a detailed, fact-filled, punchy account while pressing down a genuine emotional reaction. I don’t want that to be something anyone demands of me. And you shouldn’t either.
I don’t think I lost my ability to feel as much as I’ve lost my ability to give myself the space to think and feel sincerely, without worrying about being palatable. I think I’d like to find it again.
