Bridge of Faith

I believe there are very few cultural gaps that cannot be bridged.  As the sole actress and sole mime on this Dekeyser & Friends fellowship, I have quickly become the resident non-verbal communicator with the Turkish world around us.  Somehow my speech seems to be clearer, my hand gestures more precise, and, honestly, I imagine my self consciousness is much less than the other fellows’ when it comes to doing what it takes to get my point across.  Most of my conversations turn into at least a small game of charades when I ‘talk’ with our new Turkish family.  The fact that I mix languages more heartily than a tossed salad and have absolutely no regard for lack of grammar and non-sensical non-sequetors really doesn’t phase me.  In the end, if my point has gotten across, I’m a happy camper.  Laugh at me all you want, but I’m a communicator.  Take away language and I’ll still find a way to communicate.

Spending time with my closest Turkish friend on this fellowship has been the ultimate test of non-verbal communication.  How do you get to know someone – their history, their values and their plans for the future – when you share just enough words to fill up two pages of a pocket notebook?  “We figure it out,” I tell people who ask wonderingly.  Cem, our D&F watchdog and Turkish keeper here in Istanbul, still breaks into an enormous grin every time he catches me mixing languages and hand signals with bodily noises and inquisitive glances.  “Sen go, go go,” he giggles, mimicking me waving emphatically and pointing.  But does my Turkish friend understand?  In the end, he does.

Bridging language is one thing, but bridging cultural tendencies has proved to be another.  Turkey, for all its efforts to be a part of ‘modern’ Europe, still has some fundamental differences separating it from its Western neighbors.  Many people jump straight to the fact that it’s a Muslim country to explain Turkey’s fundamental values in many things.  Indeed, half of its largest city and nearly all of the country actually lie in Asia, and the Arab influences are plentiful.  However, there are as many mini skirts in Istanbul as burkas, and the country prides itself on being a melting pot for Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims.

Women wear jeans and hold jobs, but females often defer to males for daily decisions.  Children play video games when their parents are talking to them, but it’s still tradition to kiss an elder’s hand and touch it to your forehead as a sign of respect.  Municipal trash barrels line the streets of Istanbul’s busy shopping districts, but countless Turks still throw wrappers onto the ground.  Men pull overloaded rickshaws alongside SUVs and sports cars and sharing a cup of tea is still the preferred way to give your attention to someone.

Recently, I tried to have a fairly complicated conversation with my Turkish friend, who shares very little of my language.  How important is it to wear a condom during sex?

Any American who’s been through scare-tactic sex ed will tell you that it’s very important.  STDs can be spread through any number of bodily fluids and the last thing any aspiring young person wants is to get pregnant.  The Turks , however, have a rather different view of the matter:  As long as the man is able to keep himself under control (ie. keep his bodily fluids to himself) there’s no problem with unsafe sex.  The girl won’t get pregnant and STDs are a laughable matter.

That’s the first thing that got me: his laughing.  As someone passionate about keeping women safe during sex, the fact that this friend laughed at my warnings of creepy crawlers ‘down there’ really got to me.  Sure, our communication wasn’t perfect during this conversation, but it was good enough for him to know that my view of ’safe sex’ wasn’t the same as his.  I got mad.  He got confused, and we parted ways.

It wasn’t until a few days later that we were able to clarify things.  I was padding around the dance studio in my stocking feet when my friend joined the ranks of Turks who chide me for this practice.  “You’ll get sick,” he insisted.  “No, I won’t,” I assured him, remembering our costume mistress’ consternated look and threats of never having children because of this same habit.  “Every time I walk around with cold feet, I get sick,” he insisted.  And then it struck me: The bridge.

I reminded him of our earlier conversation about safe sex.  But this time, instead of just insisting that I was right and he was wrong, I put it in context.  “In America,” I explained, “we’re taught in school and by our parents that you always have to wear condoms during sex.  They scare us.  They tell us if we don’t, we’ll get sick.  But, in Turkey, it’s no big deal.  Eine,” I segwayed, using the Turkish word that means same.  “In Turkey you learn that walking around without shoes, you’ll get sick.  But, in America, it’s no big deal.”

He seemed to get it.  “Cultural differences,” I articulated, and he laughed.  But this time he wasn’t laughing at me.  He was laughing at our situation.  At the reality that Turkey and America are worlds apart, and, no matter how much we, as people, are the same, we, as people who have been reared by different cultures, are very different.  Sometimes we have to make concessions that we don’t understand and adopt mothers’ warnings and scientific reasoning that doesn’t make sense to us.  But if it’s important to the other person, and if the other person is important to us, then, well, it’s just important.

A Had A Dream; A Wonderful Dream, Papa…

When I was around eight years old, I was in my first community theatre production: Gypsy. I fell in love during that show.  With the singing and the dancing and, of course, the play of acting, but I also fell in love with the lifestyle.  Ironically enough, it wasn’t the lifestyle I was living that captured my heart, but the acted, nomadic lifestyle of Rose and Louise and their mother.

I remember laying in bed one night during that time, telling my own mother that I wanted to be Louise.  My poor mother.  What do you do with a child who, at the age of eight, is already so in love with something that she can’t find the place where that passion ends and the passion of her own life begins?  What she did was to tell me how hard life like that truly was: full of suffering and loneliness and isolation.  Little did she know, her only daughter already saw the poetry in such things, and this explanation probably only helped to solidify the longing I felt for an existence on the road.

Like all things, life is in the details.  A wallet carrying four different currencies, a passport full of stamps in foreign scripts, the ability to speak fragments – sometimes more – of so many of the languages I come in contact with; all of these things are romantic details of the life I lead.

Weddings and babies are missed, and holidays are spent wishing the well-wishes I dole out were returned with more familiar enthusiasm.  But these things bring only brief moments of sadness.  The small ping I feel, shaped like my mother’s embrace, when I realise a nomad has no home, is dwarfed by the presence of other nomads.  Like a honing beacon in the ocean, one ping means little, but many pings clustered together mean the presence of something great.

It’s been such a long time I’ve spent trying to understand my existence as a gypsy.  It’s never before been clear to me.  Perhaps because my mother told my mailable brain that the existence was a lonely one, I’ve always believed that my life would be like that.  Fire of Anatolia has dispelled the belief in me that the nomadic life must be that way.  People will generally say that it’s very easy to feel alone in such a large group, but I disagree.  There is always a bus to lull me to sleep or a dance to be danced, shoulder to should with 100 others, all high on the very same love of the stage.  In these moments, even isolated by language and culture, I know that the stage is my home and these Turkish gypsies are my family.

Untitled Frustration Part II

“I’ve never seen anyone so happy who’s just lost all their luggage,” said Gülin at our first rehearsal in Belgium.  Why fret when there’s nothing I can do to help it, I thought, and I felt proud of my optimism.

I joked that now I would be without clothes and money when my credit card was refused in Belgium.  (Suspected fraud, I assumed, even though I had taken precautions to see that this didn’t happen.)

But my shell of positivity finally cracked last night when a second US company proved themselves incompetent and my ATM card was “retained for security purposes,” never to be seen again at a Turkish machine.

My jaw hinged open, my eyes began to swell, and, in conjunction with a personal foreign-language argument, the events of the past week finally got the better of me.  Now I seem to be stuck in the cyclical pit of negativity I preach against, and am hostilly awaiting the inspiration necessary to pull myself out.

The laundromat closed when I make a special trip there.  Three brimming trash barrels blocking my path down the sidewalk.  Being disconnected from the customer service rep who seemed – finally – able to help me get some of this sorted out.  My luck seems to be tumbling faster than shit down the icy, frozen-over hill of hell that I now reside on.

Untitled Frustration

My life seems to have a constant soundtrack to it these days, almost always courtesy of Fire of Anatolia and Troya.  Tonight it’s one of the oriental songs that’s swaying endlessly through my head to the rhythm of my arms going up, up, down, down; up, up, down, down; 1-2-1-2; 1-2-1-2; over and over again.

How do you get upset in a foreign tongue?  It’s one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had: feeling that my logic is correct and his is wrong, and not being able to argue my point.  Up, up, down, down.  Over and over again, but I never seem to make it onto the stage.

I want to be a dancer.  I’ve even “dreamplanned” it out.  But what about your legs, he asks.  And my dream is punctured and begins to shrivel before my eyes as I try to re-inflate it with an uncertain straw and the determination of a five year old trying to tie her shoes.

Oftentimes, writing out the hurt helps me to feel cleansed.  Tonight, though, I find solace only in an empty elevator that goes up, down, up, down.  Tonight I just want to go to sleep, acutely aware of reality and that things will probably still be dirty in the morning.

Giving Thanks

Factual blog entries often leave a bad taste in my mouth: dry and unsavory.  However, today’s events on Thanksgiving Day 2009 warrant some telling, so here goes.

Our day begins last night as Meagan, my Canadian roommate, empties the entire contents of her two 50 lb suitcases onto the beds and the floor and spends the next three hours packing for our four day trip to Belgium with Fire of Anatolia.  I revel in the only up-side to severely under-packing for this trip: I have no choices of what to bring, so I just bring whatever I have that will be sufficiently warm.  Done.

Somewhere between 1 and 2 am, Abi (my English roommate), Meagan and myself switch off the lights with our alarms set for 5:15 am.  The dudes that jackhammer next door at all hours seem to have the night off, but, luckily for us, the karaoke across the street jumps into swing minutes later.  With self-inflicted blindfolds tied, we nap til morning.

Leaving four of our 13 fellows in Istanbul because of visa issues, the remaining 9 of us board a bus for the Istanbul airport.  I’ve got bread, butter, jelly and a knife stolen from the hotel in my bag.  I reflect on the world we live in: the fact that people are people and yet some can’t cross an invisible line to dance the Yakamos with the rest of us because of politics.  I hope Shubhangi will post a blog on this with her thoughts.  I miss her already. Meagan and I take turns imagining what wry comments she’d come up with next, were she here with us now.

At the airport, the line for passport checks is immense and spontaneous applause erupts three times when additional windows are opened.  An over-sized, overweight airline employee yelling “Casablanca! Casablanca!” sits on my lap in jest as we wait for the bus that will shuttle us to our plane, at a staggering 2 mph.  Again: spontaneous applause when we finally reach the plane.

I had imagined spending Thanksgiving on an airplane and saying grace over a tiny plastic cup of water and some peanuts at least.  Today’s airline is Pegasus though, a budget carrier, and the only food they have is for sale at a ridiculously marked-up price.  We hit turbulence landing in Brussels and I give thanks I’ve made it in one piece.

After celebrating the fact that Belgium has BNP Paribas (a foreign bank that doesn’t charge me ATM fees for withdrawls) I discover my luggage has been lost by the airline.  Murphy’s law: the first time I don’t pack my medications in my carry-on is the first time this happens.  I have enough to get me roughly through the next two days and I start a “Don’t Let Hannah Go Naked” fund, to which fellows donate clothes.  I finally have “Thanksgiving dinner” at the Holiday Inn Express.  I say grace, imagine my uncle in the Macy’s parade and miss my mom’s pie.

I’ve gained two dances here in Hasselt: an oriental number (on my weak side, but my brain finally obliged and reversed things since it was at last really necessary – amazing what is possible with a little shove) and the infamous Horse Dance.  That is, if I don’t screw it up.  With Meagan as my recurring roommate and Horse tutor and Sulleman Hocam (literally “my teacher” and a term of respect) on my side, I swear that I will get this number down and not get booted from the number for failure to get it right, which has already been threatened me.

Tonight’s rehearsal will begin around 10pm.  We plan on a long night; longer than the UAE which ended at 2:50 in the morning.  Wearing Meagan’s pants and sports bra, Abi’s top, and Yasmine’s shoes I am ready to set out into the Belgian night and practice the horse dance until it kills me.  Even if I don’t make it on stage for that one though, I’m pretty sure I’ll still feel happy.  I finally got the shot I wanted.  Oh, and today we got official Fire of Anatolia passport covers.  Which sort of makes my life.

…With A Smile

*A note on this entry: The Dekeyser & Friends project I’m on is all about inspiration.  I hope this blog entry, and many others that I attempt to write as honestly as possible, are never construed as “anti-inspirational” or worse: depressing.  From sadness comes growth, and from growth comes inspiration.  I’ll get there someday.  Happy reading.

First: Thoughts From The Night Of

Trying to make sense of life in Turkey is, well, like trying to make sense of life in Turkey: sort of impossible.  In America, you work hard and you get rewarded.  At least that’s more or less how my life has played out thus far.  Perhaps I’ve just been fortunate and have always worked hard at things I would have succeeded at anyway.  But the spirit is there.

In Turkey, or in the Land of Mustafa Erdoğan, you work hard and, well, you just work hard.  Reward comes if you prove yourself.  The hours you sweat- Wait. Let me get real here.  The hours I’ve sweat in my pajamas, going over and over choreography, mean nothing.  The hours I’ve spent grabbing every passing dancer, and saying, “Watch. Tell me what’s wrong,” and then correcting, mean nothing.  The hours I’ve spent in pain, dancing through pain, stretching out pain, icing down pain, all in the hopes of dancing better tomorrow, mean nothing.  Because, in the end, I’m just not good enough.  For an American – for this American – this is very hard to grasp.

In the Land of Mustafa Erdoğan you are not allowed to cry.  No matter how much it hurts to know I’ve worked harder at this than, perhaps, anything before in my life, and yet still am not good enough.  I’m not allowed to cry.  And more than that, I’m asked to smile.  I’m told to smile.  I’m expected to smile and I do.  Even though I’m breaking inside, I smile in the studio and wonder if I’ll have the courage to work just as hard, if not harder, tomorrow.

Second: Thoughts From The Day After

At first, the let-down pushed me toward more work: “I’m not good enough now.  But if I work hard, I will be.”  But now this let-down is leading me to doubt myself: “I worked hard because I wasn’t good enough before.  But I’m still not good enough.  If this much hard work can’t get me there, maybe I’ll never be there.”

“Have I been working hard, but not working smart?  Not training with the right people?  How did the error that was uncovered two days ago go all that time without notice?  Have my teachers been ignoring my problems because I’m beyond repair?”  And with a flick of a finger, I’m transported back to where I was before I began this dance training; before I began mime school; when I felt like just a clumsy, over-sized girl.

Trying to make sense of life in the Land of Mustafa Erdoğan is like tying to make sense of life in the land of Mustafa Erdoğan: There are often no answers, even for an American who always seeks them.

*****

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Ramona in Istanbul

Traveling, I both love and loathe visiting churches.  On the one hand, churches can impress a feeling – especially on the weary traveler – of utter stillness and peace.  On the other hand, breathtaking churches almost always make travel guides’ ‘Must See’ lists, and after visiting four or five in one city I start to feel less and less asthmatic about them.

Today was my first day exploring Istanbul, and a friend took me to Saint Anthony’s church in Beyoğlu.  I wear a tiny silver pendant of the same name whenever I travel, and it is one of my most prized possessions.  A gift from my best friend, Saint Anthony is the patron saint of travelers and lost souls.

Inside the church today I felt the stillness I have come to associate with foreign religious spaces.  I listened to the resonance of its apse and the breath of its nave.  Like a child biting into a marshmallow, I savored the clink of my coin falling into a tin box, and I chose my slender candle carefully.

Lighting a candle for my grandmother in the foreign churches I visit is as familiar as the sun falling through the stained glass.  The tradition started when I was living abroad in Austria and she passed away, too far for me to bid her goodbye.  She was the woman who taught me, through her blood, to travel and to think for myself.  Because of this, the tradition has always felt like a fitting tribute.

I have no idea if my grandmother, a minister’s wife who was often weary of being one, felt that the churches she saw in her travels were beautiful or not.  I wonder if she would have laughed at my lighting a candle for her today.  She very well may have.

Truth Be Told

We only ever want to share the good things.  Somehow human nature has programmed us to hide our secrets deep inside.  But there are so many bad things that pass through.  Not because we’re bad, but because we’re beautifully fallible and if we were immune to negativity, to pessimism and greed and anger, we would never have the chance to grow.

To grow.  We also like to end our stories that way: sharing the happy morals.  Even if sometimes the moral isn’t so clear-cut.

The fellows have seen the stage.  And with the glow of the lights came the heat of envy.  Why you and not me, many of us wondered.  Why me and not you, more seldom heard.  The hard work of one is not always equal to the hard work of another.  And as much as we’d like to think that team building brings harmony, most of us are just humans who crave praise and reward in the end.

I fell victim.  I grew cold and hot at the very same moment and cried by myself in the corner of the desert.  Then I cried harder to think of my own smallness and my wish to be bigger and stronger inside.

This story doesn’t end happily because it hasn’t yet ended.  Because my morning rehearsals in my pajamas are still fueled by fear.  Because we haven’t seen the next stage yet, and already I’m preparing myself for more anger and jealousy inside.  I tell this story as honestly as I can, knowing that I may never be able to be to be 100% honest.

*****

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Sometimes It Isn’t So Easy

Scene: I have just called reception to get Shubhangi’s room number at our hotel in Abu Dhabi: 1523. I dial “1-5-2-3″ and get the hotel’s room service. The following ensues:

Me: Hello. I’m trying to reach room 1523.
Room Service (RS): Yes. You just dial it and then the number.
Me: Excuse me? I don’t understand.
RS: You just dial it and then the number.
Me: What do I dial?
RS: It. And then the number: 1523.
Me: Dial what?
RS: You dial it and then the room number you’re trying to reach.
Me: Wait. I dial it? But I just dialed it.
RS: No. You dial it and then the number.
Me: Yes, but what do I dial?
RS: You dial it.
Me: But I just dialed it and I got you!
RS: No, no, no! Dial it. It. It!
Me: What’s it?!
RS: Dial it!
Me: What-
RS: It! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, it!
Me: Eight! Oh my…
RS: Okay? Dial it and then the number.
Me: Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.

And, so the moral of the story is: It isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

How Do You Measure

At the risk of sounding like the lyrics to RENT, how do you measure your life when you’re a dancer on the road?  In items lost in foreign cities?  In hours spent sleeping on buses and airplanes?  In loads of laundry scrubbed and hung in hotel bathrooms?  I’m learning to get very good at doing laundry in hotel bathrooms.

One of the head choreographers with Fire of Anatolia says he doesn’t have a home anymore.  He lives his life out of one bright orange rolling suitcase and countless packs of cigarettes smoked.  Cigarettes are cheap in Turkey and wherever they call him to go, he goes. I’ve lived for more than a year out of oversized Tupperware bins.  It’s worth it to invest in good bins.

I’ve decided that my Christmas wish this year is new luggage.  (Did you catch that segway?)  For all the traveling I do, I have pretty crap luggage, and, thanks to my travels in Turkey with my hike pack, my one good piece of luggage now has a completely broken clasp.  Good thing both my big traveling bags are from L.L. Bean.  They’re going to be sorry they sold to me come December.

In this business, you are who you are because there’s no room to be what you own.  Unless you want to check that ego before you board.  The same 100 people have seen you in the same three pairs of sweats more times than they’d care to count, let alone more times than you’d care to count.  You’re not how you dance because you dance like 100 other people and your job is to not stand out.  In this business, you’re not allowed to cry or to date or to swim on show days.  In this business you’ve got to learn to just be.