THE IMMIGRANTS ARE ALRIGHT
Süreyyya Evren
Are immigrants alright? Does Turkey feel like it is the (biological) father of Euro-Turkish immigrants who has lesbian European parents, just like in Lisa Cholodenko's controversial 2010 movie The Kids Are All Right? And does the Turkish view see Turks in Germany as (his) poor kids trapped in a 'lesbian' European family (European Union?) claiming to be the most modern, democratic, radical and most sustainable, consistent and efficient family/option at the same time?
Nowadays, we are reading accounts in Turkish newspapers about the 50th anniversary of the first Turkish immigrant-workers being sent to Germany. The related news-stories are full of numbers: how many million 'Turkish-Germans' are living in Germany today, what is the percentage of Turkish immigrants within all immigrants in Germany, and then, how many of them are unemployed, how many of them are leaving their education without a diploma... As you can imagine, the game of numbers and statistics begin with 'head count', but slowly tend to follow 'failures'... After some point all numbers are showing the things Turkish population in Germany cannot or couldn't do. The history is depicted as the history of a failed idea. Once, everyone accepts, it seemed like a good idea, but then proved terribly wrong. And now we have a 'nation of failure' within another nation. Yet, the Turkish perspective of seeing Turkish-Germans as a nation of failure is different than the recent Merkelian rejection of multiculturalism.
Merkel offered a conservative reordering of cultural ethnological liberalism (which was welcomed so wholeheartedly by Cameron and Sarkozy soon afterwards). They are all playing with cliché notions: good intentions (from both sides) failing because of wrong ideas, everyone just wants to love everybody but fails to do so (again, because of wrong ideas), all proving that we need a 'new' conservatism that poses like the most liberal path (because all other more liberal paths have eventually failed).
Cholodenko's movie, The Kids Are All Right was playing with various cliché notions too. It is a perfect example of the conservative synthesis of conservatism and radicalism. First, canonization of homosexuality is pictured as an ultra-modern peak of social progress. A lesbian family, two kids, a boy and a girl, both mothered by different parents. They are conceived by artificial insemination. A classical core family with two kids from both genders, a million times told love story of parents who met at the university, one of the parents working in a decent profession and the other is taking care of the kids perfectly, they are living in a nice house, they have their rituals, parents have a familiar sex life, kids argue occasionally as expected but do love each other, etc. etc. The only difference that makes this classical core family a radical core family is the gender of parents: they are both women... It is not fair to say that children lack a father figure, as one of the parents is depicted as playing this role quite good. So far so good. The movie shows us that homosexual couples are now not pioneers only for their own pleasure but also pioneers for the society by creating respected homosexual families. Then the movie takes its first strong conservative turn: we are first told that the children are not satisfied with two mothers although one of them playing the father figure quite well, they want a 'man' father -the real thing. And more strikingly -the parent who perfectly takes care of the kids and home (starred by Julianne Moore) finds out that she is also not satisfied with a lesbian relationship. She wants the real thing too -and the embarrassingly conservative, even macho scenes are added to show this and to reproduce stereotypes, where she says admiringly “hellooo” to the first penis she actually sees, and fulfil and approve the fantasies of all machismo that says there are no lesbians but there are women who haven't been fucked by real men! These parts of the movie, of course created anger on the side of world lesbians and should have created in everyone who would love to see this machismo at least swept under the carpet if not disappeared totally. But then, the movie doubles its conservatism; the biological errant father is rejected by the lesbian family which unites back after this crisis. They learn that classical (but updated) core family is the principle to rely on no matter what. They both reject going back to heterosexual ideals of happiness and love and the bisexual alternative of a less controlled commune life.
Seen from the Turkish perspective, this is a very Merkelian rejection. Turkey would see itself as the biological father of this Turkish nation within Germany (and within Europe in general). As a result of the embracing of the accusations of being the barbarian, and as a result of our own highly visible machismo, Turkey would imagine itself as the man who is still the real thing (not spoiled with 60s). And would easily associate Europe with a lesbian couple. But the problem with the errant biological father's life is reflected in Turkey's miserable life too. We feel pity for the father in the movie; because he couldn't manage to create a family of his own, he was so pathetic that he donated his sperms to a sperm bank, he grows organic food and he is close to nature(meaning away from culture), sympathetic but not well educated, makes some money, fucks around with nice women (but not respected women like the lesbian parents but just his employees mostly), enjoys having a penis you would like to taste once (just to get rid off soon afterwards). Then we feel the same pity for Turkey: for it couldn't manage to create a family of his own (it is still having crisis over crisis with indecisiveness, one day it sleeps in front of the gates of Europe begging to be accepted in and singing under the balcony or reading love poems -remember the father calling the lesbian family desperately asking to be accepted-, and the other day sails to become the Middle Eastern boy again, the ancient Ottoman male, drinking tea and smoking heavily with his Eastern mates, only enjoying company of his Putinite-Ahmedinecadlike friends). Turkey is more 'organic' just like the father, closer to the nature, similarly, Turkey was so pathetic that it donated his own people (sperm) as workers to a German industry system, Turkey maybe sympathetic and a good chat fellow, but not well educated and you cannot go too deep in a conversation (or a decent relation) with him.
So, when the European lesbian family passes through a (identity) crisis, the Turkish heterosexual option (fatherland) calls its children back to nationalism and asks their European parents to accept him into the family as the real thing. This option is both rejected in The Kids Are All Right and by Merkel. Additionally, Merkel rejects the other option too: accepting the father as a loose figure and floating to a bisexual utopia (which she calls multiculturalism)
And David Cameron's new, supposedly all-embracing concept Big Society, is not a bisexual one as well. Big Society is a marble society not a mosaic one.
Looking from the mosaic perspective, Turkish-Italian film director Ferzan Özpetek's Le Fate Ignoranti (2001) was offering a bisexual freedom zone, a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), using a term of Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson). The contemporary Merkel-Big Society line of arguments rejects these kind of TAZ options. They argue that multiculturalism was a failed TAZ. It is not sustainable, and it was not successful.
Multiculturalism has been criticized from various leftist perspectives as well, as we all know. But that's not the case here, and these criticisms are not the reason of the quite wide acceptance of these conservative arguments. The Merkel-Big Society position seemed convincing or at least as a position that has a point to many, because the multiculturalism was offered as a TAZ that is supposed to save everyone involved. A great orgasmic moment of different cultures, an orgy of salvation. So much burden on sex always creates stress and cross accusations. A feeling of failure is inevitable.
Pasolini's classical movie, Teorema (1968), maybe seen as the first seminal example of betting on the emancipating power of a bisexual element which enters into the heterosexual core family (the stable bourgeois society) and transforms everyone in the most liberating way. Ali Smith's novel The Accidental (2005) maybe mentioned as a similar scene -this time a women entering a family and destabilizing every one and opening new horizons. The alien element, the foreigner entering the core family in Smith's The Accidental was a woman of trespassing; she makes love routinely in a church with a teenage boy, creates havoc in a supermarket without any reason, commits offense intentionally whenever she faces a police officer or a warden, encroaches peoples lives unceremoniously, she damages cameras of other people, destroy or steal (disappear) their property and thus let them start from the beginning, let them experience the worst of their fears and start a new life. She does not lie to power when she faces one, admits and declares all her offenses knightly (but no one punishes her).
We can remember John Cameron Mitchell’s movie Shortbus (2006) together with Smith's novel: Shortbus also believes that the salvation will come through a brave moment of trespassing and it will be manifested in a real orgasm. A female sex therapist who cannot have an orgasm herself becomes regular in a club which functions like a bisexual/gay utopia or a TAZ, and as a result she manages to have an orgasm –pictured as reaching her freedom. Her unhappy husband reaches freedom thanks to the same utopian orgy club through trespassing sexual experiences. A spatial densification, an accumulation of freedom is seen in the utopian TAZ club of Shortbus. For instance, Özpetek's Le Fate Ignoranti (2001) was spreading the same formula to daily life, salvation was not unique to an escaping space but it was horizontally stretched to daily relations, apartments, kitchens, dinner tables, streets. But still, there was a trespassing hub -a kitchen where everything is possible.
Christian Molina’s The Diary of a Nymphomaniac (2008) was dedicated to deliver a similar message: sex saves, liberates, and sex only. A more feminist approach was applied here. At first, a young lady (the main protagonist, Valere, starred by Belen Fabra) who loves sex a lot is introduced to us; but after some affairs we see her suffering and unhappy. Her boyfriends are either not able to satisfy her never ending sex demands, they just get tired, or lose interest and eventually seen leaving her. She suspects that she is a nymphomaniac. She shares this fear with her grandmother, a kind of wise person figure in the movie. And the grandmother says the term nymphomaniac is a term coined by men who want to destroy the lives of women who go for what they want in life. But still, Valere decides that she misses a boyfriend who is also a romantic lover, not only a sex partner. Then she meets someone new, falls in love, instead of going directly to bed like she tends to do normally she prolongs the process, their love story develops, and they get married at the end. Everything evolves like a fairy tale. (Except the sex, because her husband ejaculates prematurely). Soon after the marriage, we see the fairy tale shaking. Extreme jealousy of the husband ends up ruining her professional life, which is followed by violence, outrageous repression, abnormal, scary, shocking scenes that led her leave home with fear and lose everything she had. She even comes very close to a suicide. And after this terrible try, she decides to become a voluntary courtesan in a luxury brothel. She fancies the pleasure life of a courtesan and finds it absolutely alluring at first. Soon again, the ugly face of brothels capture her, some painful experience (very similar to the ones we see in the British TV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, 2008) makes her run away with disappointment. At the end, she understands that her 'nymphomaniac' life was the best choice (as her grandmother already suggested): both marriage and prostitution are terrible alternatives, they look like opposite things but they are similar as Hitler and Stalin were. Sex, as an instrument of freedom and transformation, saves her life.
In a much more sophisticated way, Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love (2009) shows the life of a Russian immigrant in Italy, a Russian woman who married a rich Italian businessman, in a sense, a captive of a classical Italian family, frees herself and transforms all her life thanks to adultery -a special sex experience with a friend of his son. Sex makes her remember her roots in Russia, her old, Russian name, her pre-assimilation identity. As she makes love, the lost, suppressed Russian in her comes back to surface. Just like the strange, isolated family in Dogtooth: Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth (2009) is based on an authoritarian father who isolated all his family, his wife and three kids, and created an alternative reality for them. An ultimate control freak parent who doesn't let his kids learn anything he cannot control and makes them live in a bizarre household and a bizarre family realm. But at the end, one of his daughters rebels and halts the system -just after she had an uncontrolled sexual experience with an other woman. Wasn't Charlotte Roche’s popular novel Wetlands (2009) based on constantly asking a connected question: which sex life will rescue me?
I would like to argue that all these fantasies of salvation through sex are helpful to understand the fantasy of multiculturalism (a Shortbus kind orgy of cultures) that is declared dead recently.
Yet, there is another choice, which I feel myself more close to; not a salvation of the self through (homosexual, bisexual or orgasmic) sex, but the salvation of the sex itself. (Not salvation of cultures through cultural couplings but instead, salvation of the couplings/relations themselves). For this, the great example we still have is the classical masterpiece: Lady Chatterley’s Lover from D. H. Lawrence. Lady Chatterley was not instrumentalizing sex to transform her life, she was trying to save her sex life and only it, she was giving real value to her sex life. That was the real radical part, not the shocking usage of the f word. And seems like, it is still radical in that sense.
Lady Chatterley's Lover allows us to ask: why can't we enjoy and praise cultural couplings just because of the beauty of it.
Gerard Damiano's porn classic Deep Throat (1972), which also played an important role in ending censorship in UK like the Lady Chatterley's Lover, was based on a woman who aims to save her sex life. She is not looking for a clitoral orgasm to transform her social, professional etc life, but she works for a salvation of her sex life only. And as Linda Williams suggests in Screening Sex (2009) changed sex lives of a generation together with Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972).
That said, I mean noting the problem of burdening multiculturalism with too heavy missions, there was another problem within the concept that opened the path to Merkelian death announcements.
The subtle idea of multiculturalism was a belief in a non-Eurocentric Europe! And of course, there was a hidden absurdity in this idea. Claiming a non-Eurocentric Europe without going back to the origins of the term Europe and without discussing colonialism thoroughly and changing fundamental conceptions of world history was itself a dead end.
The problem has been named by Lewis-Wigen as the “myth of continents”. Europe is not a spatial term, it is an ideological structure, just like Asia (Lewis-Wigen 1997, Steadman 1970). The ideological powers instrumentalizing the notion of Europe are the main reasons behind the development and abuse (and myth producing) of such concepts. Among the decisive notions, one can point the “notion that the West is coincident with modernity and that the non-West can enter the modern world only to the extent that it emulates the norms established in Europe and northern North America” (Lewis-Wigen 1997: 7). Actually the concept of Europe is legitimate only from a Eurocentric perspective. When you leave Eurocentrism, the concept is useless. A multiculturalism based on the idea of Europe/West that is coincident with modernity was not really a base for an equal coupling or a horizontal orgy.
What J. M. Blaut calls “geographical diffusionism” (where progress is seen as “flowing endlessly out of the center (Europe) toward the otherwise sterile periphery”) is still the main platform in this assumption. Blaut calls this “the colonizer’s model of the world” (Blaut 1993: 2, 10). Blaut describes Eurocentric diffusionism as a theory “about the way cultural processes tend to move over the surface of the world as a whole. They tend to flow out of the European sector and toward the non-European sector. This is the natural, normal, logical, and ethical flow of culture, of innovation, of human casuality. Europe, eternally, is Inside. Non-Europe is Outside. Europe is the source of most diffusions; non-Europe is the recipient.” (Blaut 1993: 1) As “the world history thus far has been, basically, the history of Inside, Outside has been, basically, irrelevant.” (Blaut 1993: 5)
Constructed, contingent and often imposed political-geographical units like states and continents, in time, became reified as natural and fundamental building blocks of global geography (Lewis-Wigen 1997: 8), but it is still even more irritating that these units are used with the same credit while forming alternative 'emancipating' schemes.
The European continent is assumed as an entity. And the West as a cultural entity. This is one of the main difficulties you face when you try to cancel Eurocentrism: it is not a “sort of prejudice, an ‘attitude’ and therefore something that can be “eliminated from modern enlightened thought in the same way we eliminate other relic attitudes such as racism, sexism and religious bigotry.” (Blaut 1993: 9) Eurocentrism lies in the very logic of Western scholarship.
In fact, this kind of a historiography is highly Hegelian in sharing the belief that “the emancipating subjects happen to be historically and geographically located in the nineteenth century and in Western Europe.” (Larrain 1994: 23) And it is a perspective that “constructs Europe as the centre and the non-European ‘other’ as peripheral and inferior.” (Larrain 1994: 142) Blaut calls ‘eurocentric diffusionism’ the ‘colonizer’s model of the world’ because of the crucial role this model plays in the legitimization of colonialism. The main idea asserts that “Europe was more advanced and more progressive than all other regions prior to 1492, prior, that is, to the beginning of the period of colonialism, the period in which Europe and non-Europe came into intense interaction.” (Blaut 1993: 2) This is crucial because when someone believes “this to be the case, [...] then it must follow that the economic and social modernization of Europe is fundamentally a result of Europe’s internal qualities, not of interaction with the societies of Africa, Asia, and America after 1492.” (Blaut 1993: 2) That point is crucial still today, both while we are discussing multiculturalism or the death of multiculturalism: are our values results of global cultural interactions or not?
Blaut argues that “not only European colonialism initiated the development of Europe (and the underdevelopment of non-Europe) in 1492, but that since then the wealth obtained from non-Europe, through colonialism in its very forms, including neo-colonial forms, has been a necessary and very important basis for the continued development of Europe and the continued power of Europe’s elite. For this reason, the development of a body of Eurocentric beliefs, justifying and assisting Europe’s colonial activities, has been, and still is, of very great importance.” (Blaut 1993: 10) And this is why Blaut exactly calls it the ‘colonizer’s model of the world’. So where does 'our multiculturalism' stand in this picture?
With Europe, Blaut refers to the continent of Europe and to regions dominated by European culture elsewhere, regions like the United States and Canada. (Blaut 1993: 43) Nevertheless, Lewis and Wigen show the arbitrary nature of continental geographical imagination in geological, cultural, historical, political, even faunal and floral terms and thus warn about the myth of continents. (Lewis–Wigen 1997) For example, the difficulty of making up a convenient barrier between Europe and Asia was first solved imagining a division that stretches Don, Volga, Kama and Ob rivers. But in the eighteenth-century, a Swedish military officer, Philipp-Johann von Strahlenberg argued that the Ural Mountains should form the barrier between Europe and Asia. “Von Strahlenberg’s proposal was enthusiastically seconded by Russian intellectuals associated with Peter the Great’s Westernization program, particularly Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev, in large part because of its ideological convenience. In highlighting the Ural divide, Russian Westernizers could at once emphasize the European nature of the historical Russian core while consigning Siberia to the position of an alien Asian realm suitable for colonial rule and exploitation.” (Lewis-Wigen 1997: 27) Even dividing Europe and Asia along a North-South rather than an East-West axis was convention. “In fact, by scientific criteria, [...] in physical terms, Siberia has much more in common with the far north of Europe [...] than with Oman or Cambodia” (Lewis-Wigen 1997: 31)
So when multiculturalism was replaced by a Merkelian “multiculturalism didn’t work, lets go back to one Europe, one culture, many integrations” motto, the absurdity of a non-Eurocentric Europe became double-absurd. Probably because today the idea of a Eurocentric Europe is only defendable through a double-absurd strategy, it cannot be defended directly.
Ayse Erkmen’s mega project Shipping Ships (2001) also offers a valuable discussion of getting trapped when free, being free when trapped (in Europe). It is an interesting work on reaching the ‘centre’. In this work, three ships leave three harbours (Shingu, Venice, Istanbul), three different countries (Japan, Italy, Turkey) to reach Frankfurt. There is another ship on each ship. That’s why these are shipping ships. The ships on board are like second (third etc) generation immigrants. A ship, that thinks it will sail to the unknown sea, instead finds itself imprisoned on the deck of another ship. The ship on board both experiences the immensity of the blue sea and being a prisoner of another ship. The ship on board is migrating without consent. And besides, imprisoning this ship on board is an extra burden for the ship that is actually sailing. Three ships coming from three routes dissolve in one harbour. Ships shipping ships are at the end slaves of Frankfurt -and in service of the artist. The surface of freedom is slippery in this case. Yet, the total picture of the art work cannot be seen from Frankfurt. The routes, movements, relations of these three ships cannot be fully seen from any spot in Frankfurt. At the very movement??? Frankfurt captures these immigrants they get lost (they can’t really be seen).
Köken Ergun's video Tanklove (2008) shows another absurd scene. Tanks travelling in a superbly calm Western European city are just absurd for the viewer. But that’s not a striking absurd. Not an absurd as seen in the times ofJarry and Picasso. Absurd has no subversive power - which could be called the 'millennium absurd'.
Immigrating Immigrants were carrying an immigrant on their backs, someone who will be assimilated. Immigrants in Europe thus cannot be seen from any soil in Europe. Only from above, from the god-writer’s position. Who also hears and feels everything. Because it is mostly based on talks. Basically all this crisis of multiculturalism-immigration-integration is a scene of 'new absurdism' a 'millennium absurdism'. It is a state where being absurd is not a cultural subversive method at all anymore but it still works in a strange way, because it lets you to spy on the system, as the system totally works on absurd grounds.
The anti-colonialist aspect of Jarry's absurd is lost today. The 'millennium absurd' is not an attack on the political system or the art system. Best seen in ZZZ generation writers like Noah Cicero, (and especially his novel on the Iraq war: The Human War, 2007), the new absurd functions without shocking (because absurd has no shocking power today).
Ergun's tanks in a calm European city do not threat the European system –wouldn’t shock anyone. Moreover, they are spies – carrying us into the realm of tanks that roll out visibly but not shockingly.
Turkey’s obsession for Europe has long roots. Getting Rome back. Turkey always wanted to be European. But from being a European, we mostly understood invading Europe. Taking Europe. So thus becoming 'the' European. The real European without any suspicion. The unsuccessful attempts in getting Vienna were the unsuccessful attempts to get Europeanized. If Turks had Vienna, it wouldn’t be the end of Western civilization, but it would be the end of East! (At least according to an Eastern phantasma.)
New integration policies are mostly similarly double-absurd. You have to be integrated – but you shouldn’t be assimilated. Merkel's politics sounds very Ottoman: becoming 'the' real European and invading the idea of Europe...
What we lack are politics fostering multicultural orgies just for the fun of it - not for a better life! That would unfold double-absurd strategies of a Merkelian-Ottoman invasion of the 'fortress of Europe' - it can be defended only by accepting that it doesn't have to exist anymore!
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Blaut, J. M. (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World (New York-London, The Guilford Press)
Larraine, Jorge (1994) Ideology & Cultural Identity, Modernity and the Third World Presence, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Lewis, M. W. and Wigen, K. E. (1997) The Myth of Continents, A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, University of California Press)
Steadman, John M. (1970) The Myth of Asia, Macmillan.
