Adventures in Turkish Journalism

Session I

I had reached a new low. The heights of the literary profession had never seemed more distant, unreachable. In fact, I lived in an attic. It was a hot and unbearable Istanbul summer. I woke every morning and sometimes every afternoon caked in sweat under the wooden roof on the top floor of a residential building in the modernistic environs of Besiktas, a neighborhood synonymous with football, beer, and anarchy. 

I was living rent-free with my girlfriend from Ankara, in the home of her aunt and uncle, the artistic director of a modern dance company funded by the corrupt state and an English rock star, respectively—not the most typical of Turkish families. 

I tried to meditate, drink, smoke, and pray my anxieties away. It worked only when my eyes were firmly shut. When I opened them, I scanned my empty inbox. 

I had sent unreturned pitches to every newspaper and magazine under the burning sun since first arriving in Turkey the winter before, green from Brooklyn, wearing my heart on my sleeve. 

I pitched desperately, like a bad poet. I was striking out. The game was not over. It felt like it would never begin.

 

Session II

I heard back about a story. I would explore a survey of expatriate literature for a shamelessly pro-government, B-film equivalent of a newspaper, the head of state’s new international media pet project, an English-language Turkish broadsheet infamous for its bigoted corporate policy, its far-right propagandizing, its bastardized, sixth-grade-level English, left sorely unedited and wildly inaccurate. 

The fear and loathing of its frequently infantile language are only surpassed by the publication’s chief mandate: censorship. Its very institution is that of obscuring facts in the name of strongman authoritarianism. They often block stories outright, in the style of Turkish media’s routine media blackouts, all in the face of even its most loyal and perfunctorily celebrated in-house writers. 

Without the slightest trace of editorial integrity, its editors do not edit. They censor and employ subordinates to pay thoughtless, uncritical lip service to the incarcerating doublespeak of the political overhaul that came after the 2016 coup attempt. 

The paper has a long blacklist of names, which includes everyone from the country’s most famous national writer, Orhan Pamuk, to those as benign as the geologist Celâl Şengör. In a variety of passive-aggressive gestures, its team of censors assumes the guise of editors, defending asinine, anachronistic, homophobic bigotries as “corporate policy.” 

Referring to alcohol, drugs, sex, and even revealing factual aspects of Turkey’s multiethnic history in mere culture writing is a liability known to cost jobs. And there is no fact-checking department. 

It is truly a post-apocalyptic form of media. Imagine reportage from a world barely inhabited after a global collapse. Muted by a lingering, doomsday climate of political fear, civic space has been overshadowed by the blockage of free assembly and the silencing of free speech. The public, like its publications, is confined to mere commerce, mediation between private holdings, and a kind of state-chaperoned revelry. 

But I had to work and could not afford to uphold my political conscience. I traded my pride for a reprieve from total financial dependency, from the dire straits of the inexperienced foreign correspondence freelancer with no independent wealth to my name whatsoever. I was rooted in a modest upbringing, as the class-conscious grandson of immigrant New Yorkers up from the Jewish sweatshop, raised by the nobility of multigenerational workers.

 

Session III

I was and remain a radical leftist, committed to a world that secures universal rights and gender equity, freedom of expression and social justice, oppositional pluralism and wealth distribution, religious tolerance and ecological rights, indigenous resistance and internationalist solidarity, creative sustainability and cultural diversity. 

 

One day I walked into the swanky Pera Palace Hotel, following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Papa Hemingway, John Dos Passos and Knut Hamsun, to meet the American novelist and veteran Elliot Ackerman. 

 

He was a decorated combat veteran, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had worked in the White House. He met with a member of Al-Qaeda in the city of Gaziantep, the embattled Turkish east at the doorway to Syria, and wrote about it rivetingly. 

 

When asked about his recent piece for The New Yorker covering the June 2016 attack at Ataturk Airport, among epic political histories profiling Turkey’s President Erdoğan, he downplayed the prestige of the magazine that is the pinnacle of literary success for most people, including me. He said he was a novelist foremost. His publisher Knopf sent me a proof of his second novel, Dark at the Crossing, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. 

 

I remembered what Hemingway said to writers about journalism, himself a seasoned war reporter on the fronts of the Spanish Civil War, witnessing the plight of refugees in Thrace during the 1923 Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey. It is good experience at first, he warned, but not for long. It is easy to get mixed up in it and forget the true art and honesty of the craft of writing itself.

 

Session IV

I soon moved to a “village on the Bosphorus” on the Asian side of Istanbul in an out-of-the-way district and continued to send freelance pitches. In the meantime, I drafted a travelogue after an excursion to Greece, with photo essays and oral history interviews to research a novel that I had planned to write long before moving to Istanbul. 

 

I lived cheaply and sublet my rental in Brooklyn for side income and wrote for boutique magazines with names like Kinfolk, 212, The Carton, Tohu, or Art Unlimited, but mostly there were stories I wanted to do that no one would take. 

 

I researched the world of post-Ottoman interfaith society in my neighborhood, with its church, synagogue, and mosque charmingly side by side across from a tea garden under a plane tree at the shorefront park. The culture section of the pro-government rag ate it up. 

 

I held out for another year, pitching and pitching, exasperated, unanswered. Finally, I caved. I asked to become a regular contributing writer to the newspaper that represented everything that was wrong with Turkey and much of the world. They accepted. I would produce two stories a week.

 

Final Session

For the next five years I did not miss one week. I also started writing for many of the most widely read art magazines in the world. After I critiqued the newspaper I was working for in a piece for the International Center for Journalists, they let me go. I could only surmise the coincidence. 

 

I let go, too, not only of an outlet to write for (and importantly, to be paid for writing) but of my constant self-loathing. I was not proud of working for them. I was not being true to my soul. 

 

Colleagues at The New York Times and The Nation encouraged me all along. But it is only now, when I look back and meet with complimentary readers from my field, that I realize the benefits of having stepped outside my comfort zone.

 

People were not only amused and enlightened by my pieces for that newspaper. I was an individual with a voice, crying out among the unheard, struggling to write about contemporary art in Turkey as a matter of free expression. I did my time. 

 

Now, untethered from the incorporation of government censorship, I am working harder than ever toward an end that I have never cared less to define. My path and I are part of one organic, mystifying presence of interdependent wholeness with the natural world. And when I rest, my dreams rise and fall.