As I climbed to my apartment on the fourth floor of my building on Sunday morning, lingering tear gas trapped overnight in the stairwell struck me full on. I was crying as I fumbled for my keys and lurched into my apartment; it seems I’d taken off my mask a little too early.
But the day was like any other. I worked. I was tired; I napped. Then I woke up and joined my friends in Gezi Park once more. On my way there I saw a beautiful sight: Protesters carrying trash bags and cleaning up the mess made during clashes the night before. There was something different in the air. The groups had become organized. They were vigilant about picking up trash, feeding hungry protesters and providing everyone with masks and ponchos. We sat in the grass and took in the cool night air, glad the rain had washed away any remaining gas.
Fast-forward four hours and a friend comes stumbling into the apartment where some of us are taking cover for the night (my street was once again a site of serious clashes). His face streaming with tears (no, not because he was sad), he tells us how he made it right outside Dolmabahçe Palace with a large group of protestors blocked by police when all of a sudden a bulldozer appears on the street to help them push the cops back. He said it was like a dragon at the head of a battle, rallying them to forge on. Maybe a bit heavy on the “Game of Thrones” rhetoric, but it was a glorious image in my mind. After gaining much ground, abruptly – either by provocateur or police doing – the backhoe caught on fire. Mayhem ensued. Protestors made a run for it as police started making arrests. A friend was caught, but she luckily escaped.
It sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? The constant barrage of intense updates and photos probably don’t help, either. Also, I tend to have a flair for exaggeration… Let me clear the air (if only I could do that in my stairwell!): I’m safe. I’m sound. I myself am not in any real danger. And I’m being careful – though it may not sound like it, I really, really am.
These incidences are mostly isolated in the Beşiktaş district (which, ok, is my hood) and around Taksim Square. There is so so so so much more of Istanbul. The city is not under attack. If you have plans to visit, you should still come here. I don’t need to leave. I can merely go to work, in an office building an hour away, and (for now) it’s like the protests don’t even exist outside the lines of ink on our daily paper.
There are a lot of misconceptions, both nationally and internationally, about these protests here in Turkey — what’s happening and what they mean.
Here are a few bullet points, so if you take anything away from this post, I hope it’s this stuff:
- This is not a “Turkish Spring.” Turkey is a democratic country. There are issues with the system here, worrisome issues. But these protests are not a nationwide revolution intent on overthrowing an oppressive totalitarian regime. These are people expressing discontent with a prime minister who has increasingly alienated himself from the public, and doesn’t seem to care. This is not civil war — the weapons here are tear gas, rubber bullets, batons and water cannons from the police side, and bits of pried up pavement from the protesters’.
- It started with an environmental sit-in to save Gezi Park. But when a pre-dawn raid involved the police setting fire to tents and using tear gas and pressurized water to disperse a peaceful crowd, people were outraged. In a way, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Thousands and thousands have since marched to Taksim Square and the Beşiktaş distrcit in Istanbul, as well as cities all over Turkey, to show solidarity in the face of excessive police brutality. Videos of police shoving people into metro stations then tossing in tear gas bombs, climbing onto the facades of houses to shoot gas canisters into open windows, dropping canisters from helicopters to land on the unprotected heads of protestors, brutally beating protesters and innocent bystanders alike and much, much more have only kept protesters coming back with a vengeance.
- So what was brewing? Discontent has grown against the prime minister because of the many projects that have been approved by the ruling AK Party without the consent of the people they directly affect, and without concern for green space and the environment. This includes: A third Bosporus bridge, a 30-mile canal for Bosporus traffic, an ill-approved mosque in Çamlıca, a luxury mall/apartment complex on the Bosporus, gentrification of historic ethnic neighborhoods like Tarlıbaşı, the demolition of the famous Emek cinema in Beyoğlu, the razing of some 2 million trees in untouched forestland to build the “world’s largest airport,” high-rise hotels that overshadow the historic silhouette of the Golden Horn, and, of course, the re-construction of army barracks that could house a shopping mall on top of what is now Gezi Park.
- There are also a ton of social policies that have people shaking their heads (and fists) in irony and frustration. The AKP — whose power comes from the representation of a once-repressed, conservative majority within the country whose right to religious freedom was severely strangled by the national secularist regime — has recently been introducing greater conservative “family-value” policies. These include: restrictions on alcohol sales and advertisement, prohibitions against PDA on public transport, a call by the PM for women to have “at lest 3 children” and a past attempt to limit abortion rights. To say that Turkey is an Islamist state that is being put under Sharia Law, as I have read on a few sites, is just inaccurate and reactionary. But these religious policies are certainly concerning for a republic built on secularism.
- There are many marginalized and especially unrecognized religious and ethnic minorities in Turkey. Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, Circasians, Greeks, Syriacs, Roma, the list goes on. The recent naming of the 3rd Bosporus Bridge after Yavuz Sultan Selim (the Grim) has, with good reason, upset Turkey’s large Alevi community, whose forefathers were massacred under his rule.
- There was the canceling of the May 1 Labor Day rally in Taksim this year. The rally holds a great significance to the Turkish people and this was another instance of the government stepping in and refusing the right of Turks to peaceably assemble.
- This is not a campaign organized by the political opposition parties. Sure, they have their own people rallying and protesting, but they are not the only ones out there. If this protest has done anything amazing in my eyes, it has bridged ideological gaps I never would have thought possible here in Turkey. From nationalists to anti-capitalist Muslims to anarchist to Galatasaray soccer fans to Fenerbahçe soccer fans to environmentalists to old women in headscarves to expats who hate living here — each of these groups have their own reasons for dissatisfaction with the PM Erdoğan, but they are coming together to say one thing: They want to be heard.
- And then there is the issue of the lack of coverage in the Turkish media. Only on the sixth day, once protests grew increasingly violent (at the initiation of the police), did other news channels besides Halk TV and perhaps Samanyolu start broadcasting live footage, though it was only short clips of protesters and no displays of the brutal aggression from the police. In fact, when I arrived home Saturday night from Gezi Park to see tear gas bombings in my neighborhood, I turned on CNN Türk only to find a segment on penguins. It’s no wonder — Turkey is ranked toward the bottom in press freedom and has almost 50 journalists in jail.
Some good resources to learn more:
Foreign Policy: Why Turks are fighting to take back
The Economist: Resentment against Erdoğan explodes
Fellow expat friend Noah Blaser for Today’s Zamanoh, and here are my posts from Friday and Saturday.
Let me know if you there’s anything you’d like me to add and, once more, Save Gezi Park!
-Tas
Have the Republicans reached peak batshit insane yet?
you know what makes SANE PEOPLE even more sad than teens who live at home and can’t find work even though they are still in high school? Grown adults who can’t afford to feed their teens because the minimum wage just isn’t enough.
postgradlife: I've been tear-gassed four times this month
A bit excessive, don’t you think?
tear gas in Taksim Square (photo from: occupygezipics.tumblr.com)It’s 5:03 a.m. and the sound of banging pots and pans outside my window has grown familiar. It’s nice even, with the call to prayer going off in the background. It was only a few hours ago…
this is so beautiful im crey
EVERYONE FUCKING SIGN IT WE HAVE ENOUGH BLOGS ON TUMBLR AND/OR ITS THE MOST CLEVER THING I’VE EVER SEEN
this is pretty great.
adventurerscelebrationgathering:
Tell ‘em.
I dedicate this little number to all those who like to say Disney princesses are nothing but passive, submissive, and horrible role models.
sorry, but I fucking love Disney. I CAN’T HELP WHO I AM.
Gareth Dale
the list: here
Many people have already found my feature in Seventeen Magazine, so I am really excited to finally talk about this after hiding it for two months!
As of May 20th, I am the first Hijabi to be featured in Seventeen magazine. I’m really humbled and honored to announced that I’m working with Gucci, Beyonce for her campaign, Chime for Change and Seventeen Magazine to unite and strengthen the voices speaking out for girls and women around the world.I would like to thank everyone who has constantly shown support, but more importantly thank God for all the opportunities, people and happiness He has bestowed upon me. Without Him, I wouldn’t be where I am today because He was able to help me become a better poet with my second family, my poetry slam team and my wonderful coach who helped me find my voice and believing in me. Thank you to my parents and siblings, as well as my friends for supporting me in everything I do. Thank you to Kevin Coval for Louder Than a Bomb, because if I had never competed, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Alhumdulillah, I really thank God for helping me by letting others see the best in me and hiding my flaws.
The issue is in stores all over the world, on itunes, amazon and kindle. Please make sure to buy a copy to show your support, it would mean so much! If you are unable to buy the magazine, here is a high-res scan of this article. There are videos of my poetry on youtube, you can search by typing in “ainee fatima”
I will be posting a video of my trip and photoshoot in a couple of days, make sure you look out for it. Thank you again to everyone for supporting me in everything I do, I wouldn’t be here without your support.
Saudi Arabia Isn’t Having a Feminist Revolution
When it comes to women’s rights, Saudi Arabia takes baby steps to a whole new level of infancy. (In utero steps? Spermy steps?) Sure, the King Khalid Charitable Foundation launched the country’s first ever anti-domestic-violence ad last month, but women are still unable to defend themselves against those same domestic-violence cases in court. In 2013.
One other huge breakthrough that I’m sure would have Susan B. Anthony setting off streamers in her grave is new legislation that allows women to ride bicycles. Granted, they still have to be supervised by men—but bicycles! Think of the endless freedoms that come with finally being able to cycle around Riyadh, a city not built with cyclists in mind whatsoever!
Oh, also, girls in private schools are now allowed to play sports, but girls in state schools still can’t. So, much like in other parts of the world, the amount of rights a person gets depends entirely on their wealth.
Despite these forward-thinking changes, Saudi Arabia was still ranked 131 out of 134 countries for gender parity in the 2012 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report. So recent, optimistic reports of Saudi Arabia going through a “feminist revolution” seem a little off the mark.
I spoke to Nouf Alhimiary, a 20-year-old photographer from Jeddah, about the challenges she faced when trying to put on an art exhibition about Saudi women in a country where basically every minutely inflammatory art piece gets banned from public display.
VICE: Hey, Nouf. How come you were only allowed to display half of your exhibition?
Nouf Alhimiary:You know that thing where you take a picture of your outfit every day and post it on Instagram or Twitter? I thought it was interesting that a lot my Saudi friends do that when they’re out of the country, but can’t do it here because they have to wear the exact same thing every day: the abaya. I wanted to create a parody of that by photographing women wearing the same thing in different places. I wanted to call it What She Wore/ What She Wore Underneath. The plan was to take pictures of all these women in the abaya, take pictures of whatever they were wearing underneath, and then display both pictures together.But you weren’t allowed to do that?
The curator for the Mostly Visible show told me I couldn’t do it because the government would have rejected it. In Saudi Arabia, the government has to look at every art project that’s going to be exhibited to decide whether or not it can be displayed. The curator told me that if I included pictures of women outside their houses not wearing the abaya, they wouldn’t display it.So what did you do?
I settled for What She Wore, which I actually like because it makes you ask, “Why do all these women look like they’re wearing a uniform?” But even though I only displayed pictures of women in the abaya, a lot of people at the exhibition came up to me and asked, “Why are you trying to change women?”
yes, vicemag deserves reblogging once in a while. they can be truly awesome and truly awful.
![The Cartography of Bullshit by Siddhartha Mitter @africasacountry.com
Some key, pointed criticisms from this well-written post:
… We are left with a shiny color-coded “fascinating map” on the Washington Post site that sends a strong message of Western, Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, assorted with a mystifying portrayal of the rest of the world, and accompanied by near-gibberish interpretations – all based on a methodological process that fails pretty much every standard of social-science design and data hygiene. In other words, pseudo-analysis that ends up, whether by design or by accident, playing into an ideological agenda.
This week, [The Washington Post’s Max] Fisher proposed to his readers what he titled “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries.”
A cursory glance at this distribution of results would suggest something deeply suspect about the exercise … Although the results don’t pass the sniff test in the first place, I took a look at the data as well, in an effort to identify the exact problems at play. It turns out that the entire exercise is a methodological disaster.
For one thing, the values for each country are indeed from different years, some in the past decade, others as old as 1990. As Fisher put it coyly, “we’re assuming the results are static, which might not be the case.”
To take an example of the weakness of the data, it would appear that in Iran in 2000, only 0.9 percent of respondents “mentioned” an objection to having a homosexual neighbor, whereas in 2007, 92.4 percent mentioned it.
Moreover, the menu of traits available in the survey for respondents to tolerate or not tolerate varied by country. Thus, Iranians were asked about Zoroastrians; Puerto Ricans, about Spiritists; Tanzanians, about witchdoctors; Peruvians, inexplicably, about “Jews, Arabs, Asians, gypsies, etc.” (A124_33).
But the biggest problem, of course, is that “race” is impossible to operationalize in a cross-national comparison.
But the problem here isn’t the “finding” that the Anglo-Saxon West is more tolerant. The problem is the pseudo-analysis. The specialty of foreign-affairs blogging is explaining to a supposedly uninformed public the complexities of the outside world. Because blogging isn’t reporting, nor is it subject to much editing (let alone peer review), posts like Fisher’s are particularly vulnerable to their author’s blind spots and risk endogenizing, instead of detecting and flushing out, the bullshit in their source material. What is presented as education is very likely to turn out, in reality, obfuscation.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/48a69af20b9ba60cd63d6bde3b585cfd/tumblr_mn2j93lQVA1qiddpyo1_500.png)
The Cartography of Bullshit by Siddhartha Mitter @africasacountry.com
Some key, pointed criticisms from this well-written post:
… We are left with a shiny color-coded “fascinating map” on the Washington Post site that sends a strong message of Western, Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, assorted with a mystifying portrayal of the rest of the world, and accompanied by near-gibberish interpretations – all based on a methodological process that fails pretty much every standard of social-science design and data hygiene. In other words, pseudo-analysis that ends up, whether by design or by accident, playing into an ideological agenda.
This week, [The Washington Post’s Max] Fisher proposed to his readers what he titled “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries.”
- A cursory glance at this distribution of results would suggest something deeply suspect about the exercise … Although the results don’t pass the sniff test in the first place, I took a look at the data as well, in an effort to identify the exact problems at play. It turns out that the entire exercise is a methodological disaster.
- For one thing, the values for each country are indeed from different years, some in the past decade, others as old as 1990. As Fisher put it coyly, “we’re assuming the results are static, which might not be the case.”
- To take an example of the weakness of the data, it would appear that in Iran in 2000, only 0.9 percent of respondents “mentioned” an objection to having a homosexual neighbor, whereas in 2007, 92.4 percent mentioned it.
- Moreover, the menu of traits available in the survey for respondents to tolerate or not tolerate varied by country. Thus, Iranians were asked about Zoroastrians; Puerto Ricans, about Spiritists; Tanzanians, about witchdoctors; Peruvians, inexplicably, about “Jews, Arabs, Asians, gypsies, etc.” (A124_33).
- But the biggest problem, of course, is that “race” is impossible to operationalize in a cross-national comparison.
But the problem here isn’t the “finding” that the Anglo-Saxon West is more tolerant. The problem is the pseudo-analysis. The specialty of foreign-affairs blogging is explaining to a supposedly uninformed public the complexities of the outside world. Because blogging isn’t reporting, nor is it subject to much editing (let alone peer review), posts like Fisher’s are particularly vulnerable to their author’s blind spots and risk endogenizing, instead of detecting and flushing out, the bullshit in their source material. What is presented as education is very likely to turn out, in reality, obfuscation.
Disney quietly backtracks, won't reboot Merida from "Brave"
- In related news, Disney no longer thinks the public is a bunch of idiots.
waiting for the backtrack on this one:
Ann Brashares (via onlinecounsellingcollege) from
“Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood.”
My, isn’t it awkward that you just fuckin recycled a nearly 40 year old article to shit on this latest generation?
Recession. Student debt. Etc. Lots of people smarter than me have already had some excellent commentary on this (here and here and here not to mention all the great Tumblr commentary).
But I do want to say:
Of all the images you could have picked, you chose one of a teenage girl taking a selfie.
Because of course, girls who have been taught nothing else by their elders except that their appearance is what matters are the reason we are all lazy and narcissistic.
Fuck off. You fucking made us. You raised me and my sister and my female cousin and millions and millions of girls to be self-conscious and obsessed with making ourselves look pleasing to men. You taught us that that was our only worth. And now you shit on us for it.
FUCK OFF, TIME.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
(Source: boobsbirdsbotany)
SOMEONE HAS FINALLY PUT MY FEELING INTO AN INTELLIGENT POST.
(Source: riotfemme)
