What a treat it was to in Santa Fe where I spent six weeks back in Fall 2014. The simplicity of the women writers’ house, the rural, peaceful setting of the neighborhood reminded me that most life changing experiences and decisions require a radical move from one’s habitual environment (e.g., from Cyprus to Santa Fe!) After six weeks, I remember flying back to San Francisco, how it suddenly felt chaotic and young after New Mexico! I felt blessed to be back to WISC in March 2018, even with better hopes and plans for the future. Thank you Jordan Young, the Program Manager, for the interview and the warm welcome. Thank you Jude Deason for hosting me in your lovely studio! The full interview link was online [but no longer there] so I decided to post it here.
J. Young: What are you working on in Taos?
I’m actually at the final stages of my book on Syrian women refugee lives. Doing my best to capture the voices of nine women from different parts of Syria who are now displaced in four countries, that is, Germany, Canada, Turkey, and Greece. I began the interviews almost two years ago. I have a book contract with a deadline of May 15, 2018.
JY: What brought you to this project?
I have been engaged in women’s life writing since 2003 through my PhD expertise area. I have been recording and writing creative non-fiction based on women’s lives for years. With the conflict in Syria, Turkey received 3 million refugees. This was impossible to ignore for me as Turkish woman writer, researcher, and activist. I thought I could contribute with my prior experience of writing life-stories, compose a biographical work. I reached out to Syrian women from very different backgrounds and recorded their life stories.
JY: Why?
In order to challenge the stereotype of refugee women. The stereotype would be someone poor, uneducated, needy, conservative, and religious. Covered and conservative women who are considered repressed or secondary citizens. All stereotypes are detrimental and mislead us, yet we all have them.
The media representations of refugee women are fragmented. I write full biographies of people whereas the media focuses on their refugee status, and not that they had lives before and after. I ask questions about their childhood, favorite recipes, families, and other personal stories. At the end, you get a full human and being a refugee is just one chapter in their lives.
JY: How do you approach telling someone else’s story?
All of my project participants are in transition and have changed countries and cities. After the recordings of approximately 12-15 hours, what happens is that I send follow-up questions through email or WhatsApp. We are constantly in touch. I keep getting updates on their lives—last week I got some exciting news from one participant and thus added paragraphs into her story.
In Istanbul where I started interviewing, women didn’t live in refugee camps whenever they had the means to rent flats even if located in shanty town areas. Plus, the Turkish government made it almost impossible to go inside the camps and conduct interviews. Whenever I talk about the process of the book in the West, people assume that the Syrian women stay in camps. That is not always true.
My approach and methodology can be called narrative inquiry, which is a ubiquitous practice with some postmodern strands. Life story is a portal through which I enter women’s worlds but the process of narrating forms a relational aspect and demands ethical responsibilities. I highly recommend the works of Clandinin and Huber for people who are interested in digging more on narrative inquiry.
JY: How did you create comfortable rapport with the nine women? Are you a biographer or a witness?
One NGO in Istanbul and friends helped me connect initially, and I wrote all the potential participants emails. I must have sent 15 letters maximum, introducing myself and the project. In return, they wrote me back whether or when they could be available. The two Syrian women made it all the way to Toronto, and I got connected to them by a Turkish sociologist Secil Erdogan Ertorer who is teaching at the Sociology Department at York. My former PhD committee member and a wonderful Canadian feminist professor Meg Luxton mentioned her name due to Ertorer’s work areas. See, it’s all about people trusting your work and good intentions, they want to help you throughout the process.
As for creating rapport, I’m a good listener. I’m originally from Turkey, I grew up there. It was never out on the table, but many times the women I interviewed said “you know” or “you understand this” so in some way, they assumed that we shared commonalities such as religion, food, culture, etc. which we did. Unlike most people who approached them regardless of how well they meant, talking to me did not require opening a lot of parentheses or explanations. Especially when I posed questions on gender and sexuality, men-women interactions in the society, they said: “Well, it’s similar to Turkey…” meaning the patriarchy, the double-standards etc…
Even though we didn’t speak the same language, we shared many cultural experiences and I think that helped build trust.
JY: How does your Women’s Studies background inform your creative writing?
I have the feminist lenses all the time. It means that the women’s authentic voice comes first. Secondly, even though I am being or playing the writer, I need to have their confirmation. Whatever I write, before it goes out anywhere, it goes to the subjects themselves first. They have full control until the manuscript goes to the publishing house. I’m not taking advantage of their voices, which is a common concern in feminism so much so that it paralyses several life story projects or ethnographic work in general. It is good to be oversensitive but not to the extent that it will block the writer or the researcher due to fear of staining the voice, or not capturing authenticity. I don’t let this happen, I prefer to be criticized instead.
Each storytelling journey has been an empowering journey too. That’s based on the women’s feedback. At the end of the two years, I end the interviews with the question “How did you feel about this?” With no exception, the women expressed feeling much better. They feel relieved and more complete, which is very rewarding for me.
JY: How does your creative writing inform your women’s studies?
I don’t know if it has a powerful effect, but I’d like to make academic language or jargon more accessible, more approachable, more mainstream both on campus and at conferences. I try not to use exclusive language to insert my power as a writer or as a teacher. I have decided to separate creative non-fiction writing as a genre and my career as a professor a while ago.
JY: How does theory inform your writing?
There are a lot of fancy feminists, who are missing the connections that they are part of, or consciously deny them. They focus on differences rather than shared values as women or some get way too abstract in their approach to women’s issues. I’m more interested in fluidity - being open to change and being in transition - and I have really liked that since I was introduced to postmodernist theories or experiments in the 1990s at college and in literature. There should be room for many different ways of thinking about being a woman. I owe the title “womanhoods” to a Syrian feminist activist when I visited her in Stockholm in December 2016. I hope my publisher McFarland will keep the concept even if the title may have other changes. It indeed captures the diversity and evades generalization on women.
JY: What can you say about the #METOO movement?
I’m a big fan! But I’m also aware of the criticism but I don’t care, there are people who will always criticize every move because it’s in their nature or they are very pessimistic in general. I’m very happy that so many stories came out. I don’t think it is pretentious at all, and by the way, it is becoming really an international movement due to social media. One of my Syrian participants who lives in Istanbul is 25, and she joined the #MeToo Movement on Facebook and wrote a bunch of things in English. Her mother saw it on Facebook, woke her up in the middle of the night, and asked her to delete it because it would shame her family. She refused to take it down. Her father got involved in the conversation the next day and the movement talk is on their table for the family to deal with. It’s amazing!
I’m following Turkish media, and the Turkish feminists wondered why #MeToo Movement didn’t catch on as fast or widely as it did in North America. We put the blame on culture and society: geographical difference.
JY: Can you name three inspiring women?
I recently read Gloria Steinem’s memoirs, and I felt privileged to get the book at Hedgebrook where she wrote it. It was a signed copy! I connected her surprisingly well since my life has been on the road too, and I don’t drive either. I even read a passage from the book to a taxi driver who took me from the farm (Hedgebrook) to the ferry terminal on my way to Seattle. The passage was about taxi drivers, which needs a whole other interview when combined with uber drivers whom I had to interact with in the Bay Area. Talk about #MeToo Movement!
Virginia Woolf was inspiring during my college years, the whole Bloomsbury group was attractive to me. Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration for Woolf’s protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, was another figure I pursued in text: her letters, memoirs, and travels, some 12 years ago. I have been very inspired by women travelers since I was 19 because solo traveling has been an act of rebellion and freedom for me. It still is, and depending on how it is practiced, it can be a very feminist act. I always encourage my female students to travel solo at every opportunity. Unlike in Europe or North America, we don’t raise many women travelers in the Middle East, less so when it comes to keeping or publishing travel journals.
I find women writers like Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood who steadily and consciously bolstered their fiction with feminism over decades.
JY: What are you reading right now?
I usually read like 2 or 3 things simultaneously. I’m reading a German novelist named Jenny Erpenbeck Go, Went, Gone thanks to the family who is hosting me in Taos. Because of my current work, they knew I’d be interested in it and gave it as a present. I am also reading books about inter-cultural and comparative theology. This is one area that I’m trying hard to direct my academic studies. I’m really surprised with the different reflections and practices of Islam. I realize that with the amount of material I collected for the current book on Syrian refugees, I can write another book selectively focusing on spiritual transformations (either rejections or deeper devotions) that the women have been going through as a result of displacement and war. Can you imagine that in only two years or less, among the small sample of women I interviewed, some stopped practicing Islam, one covered her hair, two of them became more religious than ever, and increased practicing etc.? It was amazing to witness so I am planning to get another graduate degree in near future where I can dedicate more time into this phenomenon. Also with increasing number of Muslim refugees from Syria and other countries, Europe and North America will need to be engaged seriously in Islam in the coming years. As women who grew up in Muslim societies, we need to be more vocal about the alternative ways of spiritual living, and present our daily lives realistically. Decontextualized Rumi poetry with its diluted New Age versions for example is not helpful in talking about Islam. I am reading a lot about these matters.
JY: Do you consider yourself an activist?
I think so, yeah. In different ways: for me, writing is an activism, connecting women to other women is also activism. Not jumping on the bandwagon of contemporary society such as not using social media is activism! Buying used clothes or goods, recycling, riding a bicycle or using public transportation etc… I am a huge proponent of the simple sounding “personal is political” motto of feminism. It captures a lot! People can constantly make ‘mini-revolutions’ in their daily lives and thus are activists.
JY: How does teaching fit into your life?
I gave a break to full-time teaching because it was very demanding and taking me away from writing in the way I wanted to. I came to a point after several years of teaching where I felt burned out. I arrived in WISC in 2014 and that was an immediate fresh breath: it feels very different to be a full time writer. However, I’m also a people-person, and I like meeting new people, exchanging ideas with them. I wouldn’t mind teaching part-time or offering workshops as I did in Athens.
JY: Can you say something about your international identity?
I feel comfortable in most places. I’ve travelled a lot. I don’t feel unsafe or freaked out when I am in a completely new environment where I can’t speak a word of the local language, for example. I’m calm in that fluid global identity that was formed over the years so I don’t need a fixed address or house 24/7. However, I feel more at home if there is ocean or sea nearby due to … probably my background or happiest memories. Even when I am surrounded by the most stunning landscapes such as in New Mexico or Switzerland, I begin to miss the sight and the scent of the ocean after a few weeks. I don’t do well in cold climates either. These are my only weaknesses when I’d like to believe that I have a fluid global identity! On a more serious level, I’d like to mention Şirin Tekeli, a prominent feminist figure in Turkey whom we lost last summer (June 13, 2017), who told me once that I shouldn’t feel upset or guilty about leaving my country of origin. She advised the same to other young feminists such as Pinar Selek who has been in exile in France for years. Tekeli said that the nations are actually crumbling, people can contribute to causes in which they believe in and get connected through very different means in today’s world. Last summer when I realized that the feeling of homesickness left me a while ago, it was very liberating. I can’t even point how or when it happened. I remember her words often and how significant it is to cross that threshold for a woman or anyone for that matter.
JY: Thank you so much.
OE: You’re welcome. Very good questions.
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