“Can you tell me where Istanbul ends, and the rural begins?” Cihan Uzuncarsili Baysal, a housing rights activist and Bilgi University law professor asks during a recent talk on urbanisation at Kadir Has University that overlooks the Golden Horn on Istanbul’s European side. The speaker notes how this ancient city on the Bosphorus stretches expansively in every direction, from the Marmara Sea to the Black Sea. “We can’t,” she says.
About a decade ago, then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expanded the city’s writ to the entire province, tripling Istanbul’s land area to more than 2,060 square miles, or about seven times the size of New York City.
Officials have since done their best to build out that space, with megaprojects like a third bridge across the Bosphorus, a second tunnel under the strait, and the world’s largest airport, in addition to a handful of billion-dollar commercial and residential projects scattered hither and yon.
Istanbul has of late been a bullet train of urbanisation, surging from 2 million people to 15 million in just over four decades. As in so many rising cities around the world, those shaping its future at hyper-speed seem less concerned about creating a nice place to live than fueling an economic locomotive. “What we are experiencing is global capital sucking the life out of our cities,” said Baysal, “through this insatiable greed for more accumulation.”
This idea that modern capitalism is a pox upon city life has gained ground in our age of lightning-fast urbanisation, but its literary history goes way back. Popular works have long depicted modern cities as cold, money-grubbing maws, filled with squalor and largely bereft of morality. The great Charles Dickens highlighted the wrenching poverty and decay of the fictional industrial city of Coketown in his 1854 novel Hard Times. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), William Dean Howells looked at urban expansion, a wave of migrants and self-made millionaires and delivered a sharp indictment of New York City's Gilded Age.
Few novels captured the urban corrosion of the Industrial Age like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), in which a kindhearted family of Lithuanian immigrants is torn apart by the pressures of Chicago's meatpacking district.
Such works of fiction were complemented by the "pestilential human rookeries" detailed in Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, from 1883, and the famed early 20th century photographs of Jacob Riis, showing the world the overcrowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side. All these works were largely anti-capitalist, and had a more or less overt socialist message. Some, like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), went so far as to depict a socialist utopia.
Today we're seeing a similar flowering of troubled-city creativity. Just over a decade ago, Alaa Al Aswany, a dentist by trade, gave the world The Yacoubian Building, a scathing portrayal of contemporary Cairo told through the inequality of a single downtown building. In 2013, the Pakistani-American novelist Mohsin Hamid published his winking 21st century novel of urbanisation, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.
Now we have A Strangeness in My Mind, from Nobel laureate and Istanbul native Orhan Pamuk. The novel depicts his hometown's modern-day coming-of-age, from 1968 to 2012: great waves of migrants populate new districts and conservatives from Anatolia and the Black Sea coast emerge to build a behemoth that, as Baysal might say, sucks the life out of its denizens.
Among the new arrivals is 12-year-old Mevlut Karatas, from a village in central Anatolia. Pamuk establishes the fish-out-of-water theme straightaway, quoting William Wordsworth's The Prelude in an epigraph: "I had melancholy thoughts ... a strangeness in my mind, a feeling that I was not for that hour, nor for that place." Mevlut initially lives with his father, Mustafa, a street vendor who moved to Istanbul years before with his brother, Hasan. The more ambitious Hasan finds greater success than his brother, and his sons Korkut and Suleyman later get rich in the construction business.
Mustafa remains a street vendor, as does his son – selling yoghurt, then chicken and rice, then ice cream, and throughout his life, boza, a malt drink made from wheat and corn that was popular in Ottoman times largely due to its low alcohol content. Mevlut’s first years in Istanbul are spent in the fictional neighbourhoods of Kultepe and Duttepe. But for most of the book he lives in Tarlabasi, a place of great upheaval in recent years.
Pamuk details how the district was dominated by well-to-do Greeks, Armenians, and Jews until the pogroms and deportations of the 1950s and 60s. Then came an influx of drifters, mobsters, migrants, and desperate gypsies and Kurds, and finally so-called progress, in the shape of a six-lane road dividing wealthy Taksim from poor Tarlabasi. “The new Tarlabasi Boulevard seemed to push them even farther out and down the social ladder,” Pamuk writes of Mevlut’s family. Drug dealers, prostitutes, and glue sniffers move in. Mevlut’s friend Ferhat tells him, “You can’t live in this area anymore unless you’ve got a gun.”
In recent years, a sizable chunk of this devastated Tarlabasi has been torn down, to be replaced by modern apartment blocks.
Due to forced evictions and its proximity to Taksim Square, the heart of contemporary Istanbul, Tarlabasi has become something of a rallying cry for Istanbul progressives and urbanists.
Many of the demonstrators that kickstarted the Gezi Park protests, which swept across Turkey in mid-2013, cited Tarlabasi and Sulukule, another recently remade central district, as motivation for their anti-government stance.
New arrivals to Istanbul are motivated by opportunity, and, in Strangeness, as in reality, most settle on the edge of the city in gecekondus, which is Turkish for "appeared overnight".
In these slums they build and occupy makeshift homes as quickly as possible; a vacant home could be bulldozed by the municipality, but an occupied one cannot be demolished without a warrant. Arrivals then appeal to (read: bribe) the local councilman to issue a document proving their claim. This could later become a deed, or it might be ignored, depending on the whim of the official. Mastering this system with money and muscle, organized gangs gain control of large swaths of the fast-growing city, gathering considerable power and influence.
In Pamuk’s book, as in the real world, the gangs are mostly led by religious conservatives from Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region. Hadji Hamit Vural, the novel’s most prominent construction magnate, is from Rize, just like Erdogan. He goes on Haj not once but twice, and builds the Great Mosque – “Hadji Hamit, your dome is too big and too ambitious,” a local warns – that makes Duttepe a municipality, with public services and a voice in the affairs of Istanbul. At one point a doorman tells Ferhat, “The Black Sea people are a mafia.”
The book refers only vaguely to Erdogan, emerging as Istanbul mayor in 1994, but Pamuk does mention the Justice and Development Party (AKP) by name. In the novel, Vural Holdings, Hadji Hamit’s construction firm, helps the AKP gain votes in the districts in which it holds sway, and in return gains insider information and lucrative contracts.
Here Pamuk alludes to the alleged corruption of Turkey’s real-world construction industry. In the mid-80s, in the book, Suleyman knows a second Bosphorus bridge will soon be built once the Vurals start buying up land in the vicinity. Later, the Vurals’ firm takes part in Istanbul’s so-called urban transformation, signing a deal with the municipality to build 16 highrises.
Down on the ground, Pamuk paints a bleak, almost Dickensian picture of life among the masses. Mevlut’s tiny home has a dirt floor, and packs of leering dogs roam the streets, beside slippery thieves. Nearly every character in the book is bent, in one way or another.
But poverty is not Pamuk's milieu. As detailed in his memoir, Istanbul, he was raised by a wealthy, somewhat eccentric extended family in a multi-level home in one of the city's smartest districts. When he describes the thoughts and feelings of working class characters, the reader can sense a certain remove, a lack of familiarity.
This can be unsettling, but it may not be entirely unintentional.
Strangeness is less a sweeping and ambitious literary work than an urban fable, a commentary on the capital-driven policies – the creeping greed and concrete, the profit-minded construction firms and vote-seeking officials – wreaking havoc on our cities and psyches, much like Hamid's Filthy Rich.
Both protagonists are defined by their approach to a corrupt, fast-rising megacity. Both, too, are poor male adolescents who move to the city to join their father and, at least initially, take up menial work.
Hamid describes his protagonist’s arrival in the city thusly: “Where once your clan was innumerable, not infinite but of a large number not readily known, now there are five of you …You and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilising bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.”
Pamuk highlights this cleavage with his choice of names. Due to a bout of stubbornness back in Anatolia, the surname of Mustafa, Mevlut’s father, is Karatas (Blackstone). Meanwhile the last name of Mustafa’s brother Hasan, and thus of Hasan’s sons Suleyman and Korkut, is Aktas (Whitestone).
An informed reader will note that Turkey’s modern, urban elite are called White Turks, while Black Turks are those seen as backward, retaining a village sensibility.
Mevlut’s marriage underscores this yawning family division. One night, he snatches his bride-to-be from her village home, with Suleyman driving the getaway car. But Mevlut soon notices that the girl beside him is not the lovely young one to whom he had been writing love letters for years, but rather her less pretty older sister, Rayiha.
He realises he has been betrayed, most likely by Suleyman – who later courts Samiha, the prettier sister. Mevlut feels a loneliness, a “strange silence”, but decides to neither scream at his cousin nor return for Samiha.
Many a tale has shown how our fast-growing, materialistic urban societies, with social stratification in close proximity, contrast sharply with the rough equality of rural areas, which foster a sense of togetherness.
In the city it is every man for himself. As Chicago sunders his family, Jurgis, the protagonist of Sinclair's The Jungle, is driven to drinking, prostitutes, and crime, before making a decent living working for a corrupt politician.
Today our urban heroes are even more dark, troubled, and alone. Think of Tony Soprano and Walter White.
Once his daughters marry and move away, the new Istanbul closes in on Mevlut. “The city was no longer an enormous, familiar home but a faithless space in which anyone who got the chance added more concrete, more streets, courtyards, walls, pavements, and shops.”
Yet Pamuk finds a flash of light in the encroaching darkness. Mevlut is hapless – losing his cart, getting mugged – and a bit of a loser. Yet despite never attaining the wealth of so many of his fellow new urbanists, he lives more happily than they do, with very little. His wife dotes on him and he is close to his daughters, who both find good husbands.
Unlike the urban strivers around him, who tend to bully and battle and compromise their morals to get ahead, Mevlut hews to the more provincial traditions of honesty and integrity. At one point, Rayiha asks him what’s wrong. “No matter what I do, I feel completely alone in this world.”
In a place that weeds out integrity, goodness feeds loneliness. Strangeness suggests the city forces us to choose: either turn venal and make a good, if unhappy living, or hold on to your morality, stay poor and lonely but find happiness. Mevlut is a symbol of what we're losing in this age of urbanisation, and a sliver of hope that our humanity can survive.
A novelist of identity and loss, Pamuk tends to wax nostalgic about the urban past. In his novel The Museum of Innocence, a middle-aged Istanbul man bemoans a lost love, collecting, almost fetishising objects that remind him of her (these fictional objects are today displayed in a real-life Museum of Innocence, in the city's Cukurcuma district). In his memoir Istanbul, he describes huzun – Istanbullus' sense of "deep spiritual loss" in being surrounded by the crumbling ruins of a great empire.
His latest work adds a corollary sadness. Just as longtime residents carry with them the loss of a great civilisation, new arrivals face the reality of moving to a place befouled and being prodded to sully themselves.
It may be going too far to see Mevlut as a stand-in for the author, whose deep appreciation for Old World values and Istanbul’s faded glories has, perhaps, made him ever more lonely as his hometown has been homogenised.
As today’s cities are transformed into corrupt, ever-expanding construction sites, by all means we should make like Mevlut, and endeavour to hold on to our honesty, our integrity and compassion, and fight for the little guy. But there is little reason to believe that this age of urbanisation will be more devastating to our humanity than the last (our environment is a separate issue).
If literature is any guide, the urban wasteland killed the hero more than a century-and-a-half ago. Yet we have managed to survive, even prosper.
Take it from Hamid, who toward the end of Filthy Rich writes, perhaps half in jest: "You are pricked by a lingering optimism, and you marvel at the resilience and potential of those around you, particularly the youth in this city, in this, the era of cities, bound by its airport and fibre optic cables to every great metropolis, collectively forming, even if tenuously, a change-scented urban archipelago spanning not just rising Asia but the entire planet."
David Lepeska is a freelance writer who contributes to The New York Times, Financial Times and Monocle, and previously served as The National’s Qatar correspondent. He lives in Istanbul.