Go West Young Turk: Personal Encounters with Kemalism

"My patient is suffering from an inferiority complex. His psychic structure is in danger of disintegration. What has to be done is to save him from this and, little by little, to rid him of this unconscious desire." --Frantz Fanon "We shall adopt hats along with all other works of Western civilization." --Kemal Ataturk "He always has his eyes on Europe, and always dreams of escaping there ... We are like strangers to ourselves." --Ale Ahmad I. PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS As I write these words upon my return from a visit to Istanbul, I remember so clearly, at the age of seven, my father informing my family and me of the news that we would be leaving Jordan to live in the United States. Immediately I started to envision my future life. I imagined myself dressed in white sneakers and white socks, white shorts, and a white shirt. I imagined a sparkling new bicycle, and my family and I living in a big house with a green yard and lots of trees. I remind you that I was seven years old, but I understood, although unaware of the origins of this dream, that I was about to be transformed--color, accent, and all--into the image that I had just begun to see on my next-door neighbor's television set. Excited by the news, all I knew was that I, along with my family, was moving West. Indeed, I had already begun practicing my new self before I even landed in New Jersey, frantically trying to learn my first English words and putting on clothes that I believed would best fit my new-found identity. Dressed in this new clothing, and with the few English words I had learned, I looked into a mirror and tried to act "like an American." In New Jersey I continued down this path in full force, trying to remove my "Arabness" in every conceivable way, even at the expense of keeping my family distant from my friends. When the phone rang when I was suspecting a call, for instance, I would run in a frantic effort to get to the phone before my father or mother, because I feared that they would pick it up first and, with their "thick Arab accents," demonstrate to my friends and others how Arab we really were. I would plead with each of my parents to speak more like an "American." Even my school lunch bag was a point of contention between my mother and me, because I would request that she leave out any food looking Middle Eastern. I found creative ways to make myself feel and look white-American, especially through music and partying. Loading my car with the best hi-fi stereo equipment available, courtesy of Samman's Electronics, I would pack my car with friends and jam down the streets of Jersey to the powerful rhythms of great rock and roll bands like Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Pink Floyd. The music I heard in my home, like Umm Kulthum and Farid al-Atrash, never made it into my car. Of that I made sure. It was not until I entered college that I began rethinking this warped "assimilation" route, my research becoming the vehicle through which I would make sense of it all. At first my search was unsystematic and confusing. I did not yet have the right questions or tools to penetrate this unconscious desire to repress my Arabness. At times, I turned to a crude form of multicultural identity politics. But that felt awkward and unreal, like a museum representation of natives dressed in colorful clothing chanting to tunes that seemed distant and unreal to my life--in many ways replicating the Orientalist representations that made me want to shed my "Arabness" in the first place. Thankfully that project quickly faded away, and in its place I began pursuing more serious intellectual pursuits. I began reading people like Immanuel Wallerstein and Edward Said, who were arguing that the world is in fact politically, economically, and culturally stratified, with race constituting the very epicenter of the stratification. Racism and underdevelopment, Orientalism and its residual "Other," the "West" and the "rest," the rise of Europe and the decline of southern civilizations were, I was beginning to learn, all a product of modernity, of a "specific manifestation of a basic process by which our historical system has been organized: a process of keeping people out while keeping people in" (Wallerstein, 1991: 83). …