Memed, My Hawk

Okay, honesty time.  I haven't completed this novel yet.  There are a few factors playing into this, the biggest one being that I have been very crunched for time as our big Thanksgiving get together draws ever nearer.  What I have read of the novel I have loved, and I had kind of hoped to write a paper on it, but that might have to wait until our final paper.  It's sad to read about these Turkish people being so depressed in their own home, but I love the relationships that we are seeing building in this novel.  There is something beautiful about the way that the characters interact, and from what was said during our class discussion I am sure that it only gets better as the novel moves on.  

So I hope the have this novel done in time to (maybe) use it for my final paper, but for now I'm still plugging along through it.  I'll add to this post once I am finished.  

Turkish Films

 I knew I was behind in my blogging, but I kept having this nagging feeling that there was something else as well.  It finally hit me tonight, I missed the Turkish films blog.  Sincerest apologies.  

I really enjoyed seeing the clips about Turkey, but to be honest I didn't learn much that was new to me.  I was already aware of the headscarf debate and the issue of honor killing from research that I had done in another class.  It was a nice refresher course for these two topics, and I really think that they fit the purpose of the class, but it was just my own personal situation where I had already been exposed to the material and consequently spent the duration of the time thinking, "I know this already."  Even so I was able to appreciate the very powerful visuals that these two films presented.  

I was trying very hard to enjoy our discussion, but I am just greatly uncomfortable discussing honor killing.  I know it is an important topic of discussion for our class, but I was hesitant to get involved in our class conversation.  I made the discussion to talk about honor killing in my religion class, and was surprised at myself when I got so choked up over the topic that I had to pretend the presentation was over before I had shared all of my information.  I don't know, it just is one of those things that makes me go really quiet...

I did have an interesting thought when we were discussing the headscarf issue though.  I remember back in elementary school the girls in my class went through this obsession with wearing headscarves, not like the ones we saw in the film but those little triangular ones that only cover the top of the head.  I think I had about twenty of them, and I remember my friends and I being very proud of wearing them around school.  However, they were banned after about a month because the school was afraid that we might be hiding weapons under them.  We were outraged, but this was just a silly fashion statement.  The women in Turkey are being told not  to wear their headscarves which serve as a representation os themselves, their beliefs, their modesty, their devotion.  My own headscarf "problem" is nothing compared to the horrible humiliation and punishment that these woman face by attempting to wear theirs.  Making these connections helped me realize that I can try to sympathize with these woman, but I will never truly know what is going on there or what the woman in Turkey are up against.  Having your teacher ask "can you please take your headscarf off?" is very different from having it ripped from your head.

Turkish Short Stories and Dr. Mirzeler

I have to be honest, the short stories that were assigned to us to read for Tuesday made very little sense to me.  Maybe it was that I don't know much about Turkish culture yet, but the stories just came off as strange and confusing to me.  I don't have too much to say about them right now because I was waiting for our class discussion to see what everyone else thought about them and how they would be interpreted.  Hopefully we will be able to discuss them during our next class session, but we could not have had a better reason not to discuss on Tuesday.  Hearing from Doctor Mirzeler was wonderful.  

I really enjoyed our visit from Doctor Mirzeler, he is a truly interesting speaker!  I was very appreciative that he provided some background information for us while we read Memed, My Hawk, and he spoke so artfully of his homeland that as I went to continue reading the novel I felt like I could better envision the scenery of the story.  It was interesting to hear his opinions on the issues dealt with in the movies we watched, a lot of his own experiences with these issues backed up the ideas that we had discussed after watching the movies.

Of course the most powerful part of his visit was his account of his own family's experience with honor killing.  Even I, who have no siblings, could feel the choking horror of being told to kill a sister.  The thought is sad, and I am thankful that he was not forced to go through with the crime.  I was impressed that he was so willing to talk to us about it and was fascinated that he brought up the point that there is such extreme social pressure to commit an honor killing, something which we were also able to see in the films we viewed.  It was a great honor to have these accounts brought to our class, and I wish we could have had some more time with Doctor Mirzeler.

Paradise Now

When I watch a movie, I like to try to put myself into one of the character's shoes.  I think that this is the best way to understand the message of the film, to just put yourself in there and get the emotion of the characters into your own soul.  However, as I watched Paradise Now I was having trouble placing myself in the position of any of the characters because I simply could not imagine what I would be feeling in their place.  Would I be angry about giving up my life, or would I feel honored that I had been chosen to go forth and make a stand for my country?  Would I be able to keep this secret from my family?  Probably not.  The emotion in this film was so raw, it was difficult to understand the characters' true intentions.  It was very powerful for me just to realize that I did not have the capacity to understand what was going through the minds of these characters, and  to realize that they are representations of real people who sacrifice their lives.  The end of the film had me sitting in complete shock (I'm pretty sure my heart stopped beating for a minute)  as I took in everything that the story had to offer.  

I thought it was interesting to see a face given to the people who participate in these suicide bombings, and see just how dedicated and sincere about their actions they really are.  Although I don't believe I could ever be driven to something as drastic as killing myself and others to promote my cause, it does make me feel a little lame thinking that the things I am truly passionate about, many that have no significance to anyone other than me, I would not be willing to go to these lengths to defend.  It's an eye opener to just how passionate these suicide bombers are when it comes to their cause.  

This movie said a lot about not only the ongoing fights between Israel and Palestine, but about the people that live there and just how human they are; in many ways their way of life and their families are just like ours.  The modern scenery in the movie, much of which I found comparable to scenery here in the US, made me realize that the struggles of these people are just as possible for Americans should we meet the same pressure as was faced by the people portrayed in this film.

Short Stories

I enjoyed our class discussion about the Arabic short stories that I picked out for all of us.  I was a little afraid of how everyone would receive them, but it seemed that almost everyone found some kind of pleasure in them, whether it was for their content or not.  I chose the first story, "The Lawsuit", because I thought that for such a small story it spoke volumes about how relationships work in the Middle East, and I was happy to see that others were making these same connections.  I really wanted us to have a piece of literature that was not so direct in the way it presented Middle Eastern culture, that we could spend some time analyzing and making connections over, and I think this story really accomplished that.  I felt that this was the first time we had analyzed anything for its context in literature, and that really made my day.  I really liked the point that was made about the narrator being unreliable, it made me view the events of  the story and the emotions of the characters in a whole different light.

As for the second story, "A Long Term Plan", while I think that it had less merit to the class as far as furthering our purpose of learning about the Middle East, but I enjoyed seeing people's reactions to the character in this story.  Some of you were so angry at this character!  It was fun to discuss this story solely because I liked seeing the reactions people had to the protagonist.  I also think that this story had a lot do do not just with the Middle East but with all of humanity, and the eternal struggle that we all must overcome and that sometimes feels so fruitless.  Something about the last lines of this story is just so powerful, isn't it?  

"Why, then, had this miracle taken place?  It doesn't make sense.  It doesn't make sense, O Lord." 

Gold Dust

First of all, I want to thank everyone for participating in reading this book that our group assigned.  I was very nervous about how everyone would receive it, and I could see that there were some in the class who enjoyed the text and others who were not so keen on it.  That's fine, good even because it benefits discussion in our class.  I appreciate that everyone had an opinion on the novel, and am glad that in this class we are free to express these opinions.

Now for my own opinion on the novel.  At first I was not sure where the story was going.  I had read part of a novel by this same author before this, and was aware that he uses the desert setting in an interpretive way, and often represents human spiritualism through animals.  Because of this prior knowledge, I was looking for religious symbolism in the novel.  I was able to make a connection between the devotion that Ukhyyad felt toward the piebald and the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins, wrath, gluttony, envy, lust, sloth, greed, and pride.  I felt that all of these sins were represented in the relationship between boy and camel, and in the end did just what they could be expected to do; they dismantled an otherwise good and prosperous life.  The relationship that Ukhyyad had with his camel was certainly out of the norm to our audience, but I believe that to the Middle Eastern reader it would have ben steeped in in religious meaning.  

I also came to appreciate that the novel was a desert setting with nomadic people.  It was more difficult to understand the characters because of the less modern society in this novel, but I liked this aspect of the story because it was a side of Middle Eastern culture that I had not experienced before.  I really ended up enjoying this novel more than what I had originally planned, and am glad that we assigned it to the class, even though it was clear that not everyone enjoyed it as much as I did.  

Children's Books

On Thursday we were assigned to read the two children's books, "The Day of Ahmed's Secret" and "Sami and the Time of the Troubles."  The first read through of these stories, I was impressed with them.  I thought the first story, on top of being very cute, was a good example of the way that children of the Middle East celebrate the same self-accomplishments that young children here in the US would feel proud of.  The second story was a bit darker and held a little more weight for me.  The perspective of a young child being caught in the middle of a war was somewhat startling.  However, what really contributed the stories was being able to see the pictures that went with them.  

For "The Day of Ahmed's Secret",  I found the illustrations of everyday life in a Middle Eastern big city to be intriguing.  I thought that in many ways the illustrations were a good mix of modern Middle East and the traditional and more culture focused Middle East.  We held  discussion in class about the stereotypical images that we saw within the drawings, my own opinion is that these images were not that startling.  I think sometimes we confuse what is stereotypical and what is cultural, it's a pretty fine line.  So we need to be aware that sometimes, the things that we see that we deem as stereotypical, a word which is synonymous with "bad", it's possible that we are actually seeing the truth.

"Sami and the Time of the Troubles" had a much darker theme running through it, and after seeing the artwork I thought that it was absolutely beautiful.  It retained the language of a children's story while still telling a tragic tale about a boy whose home and life were being torn apart by a war.  The most striking part to me was the picture of the two boys playing guns, as though they were preparing themselves to fight this war in the future.  The conversation that was brought up by this book was intriguing and made me feel very sad.  Also, I think the entire class was able to agree that this was a better representation of modern life in the Middle East.

Although these two novels were somewhat heavy subject material, I don't believe that they were inappropriate for children because they relate to issues that Middle Eastern children are facing.  Children's books do not have to be light and fluffy to convey a relevant message to their target audience, and their audience does not have to be strictly children.  We have children's books here in America that deal with divorce, death, being an outcast, many topics that would not normally be considered "child friendly."  A good point came up during our class discussion, that children understand more than we think they do, and  just might perceive things more clearly than adults can through their carefully monitored social lenses.