“Resident Aliens”: Locating Turkish American Literature Beyond Hyphenated American Fiction

“Resident Aliens”: Locating Turkish American Literature Beyond Hyphenated American Fiction Elena Furlanetto ABSTRACT The notion of “Turkish-American Literature” has been employed to address the work of first- and second-generation migrants that went from Turkey to the United States, such as Shirin Devrim, Selma Ekrem, and Elif Batuman. This designation characterizes Turkish American literature as fiction written by Americans of Turkish descent and collocates it within the hyphenated canon of American literature. By laying emphasis on migration and life writing as the two essential features of binational writing, scholars of this field have denied the “Turkish American” status to works in English by Turkish authors who were neither born in the United States nor resided there permanently, but nevertheless succeeded in establishing a shared Turk- ish American literary universe without drawing from the repertoire of the American immigrant story. Their experience in the United States was often one of comings and goings, which led them to return to and settle in Istanbul. This article argues that the label of Turkish American literature can be extended beyond the sphere of immigrant life writing to works in English that do not qualify as what is generally understood as ethnic fiction. The texts examined in this article—Hadibe Edip’s autobiographical volume The Turkish Ordeal (1928), Güneli Gün’s On the Road to Baghdad (1991), and Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (2007)—qualify as Turkish American and are in fact of great relevance to American Studies because they engage in an intense dialogue with the United States on the level of form, content, and politics. For the time being, the notion of Turkish American literature—similar to that of transnational American Studies—seems to resist schematizations and remains the target of a fair deal of discussion.1 The authors of the call for papers of the Istanbul “Inaugural Workshop of Turkish American Studies” organized in June 2014 by the Association of American Studies of Turkey define Turkish Americans 1 As with other publications, I leave out the hyphen in Turkish American. My decision was due to the grammatical disparity proper to hyphenated binomials, implying that the subject defined by the term “Turkish American” is primarily American, and, in addition to that, also Turkish. As it will become clear in the course of this article, this condition does not apply to my understanding of “Turkish American” literature. Furthermore, an extensive clarification of the political implication in the hyphen has been provided in “The Politics of the Hyphen,” where the author explains that “the second entry of ‘hyphenated’ in the Oxford English Dictionary reads: ‘Applied to persons (or, by extension, their activities) born in one country but naturalized citizens of another, their nationality being designated by a hyphenated form, e. g. Anglo-Amer- ican, Irish-American; hence, to a person whose patriotic allegiance is assumed to be divided’” (Anon). This category, too, would be misleading when applied to my use of the term. The article also sheds light on the current scholarly debate on the hyphen. See “The Politics of the Hyphen” and Sarah Song’s “What does it mean to be an American?” 182 Elena Furlanetto as “immigrants from the Ottoman Empire and their descendants, as well as immigrants self-defined as Turkish from other parts of the world.” Herein Turkish scholar and co-organizer Gönül Pultar reiterates the centrality of the ethnic and biographical element, characterizing Turkish American literature as “fiction written by Americans of Turkish descent.”2 This definition would include the work of first- and second-generation migrants that went from Turkey to the United States such as Shirin Devrim, Selma Ekrem, Elif Batuman, and Güneli Gün. Yet, when discussing Gün’s novel On the Road to Baghdad, Pultar clarifies that On the Road to Baghdad is a work of fiction authored by a “hyphenated American writer,” that does not fall within the canons of American ethnic literature. Pultar prefers to regard On the Road to Baghdad as a “bicultural” novel: “neither purely as a work of American (ethnic or multicultural) fiction […] nor purely as a work of Turkish fiction” (“Travelling Biculturalism” 49). The exclusion ofBaghdad from the category of American migrant fiction depends on the fact that, for Pultar, this category needs to be understood as narrating the “engagement of American authors with their parents’ non-American culture” (48-49). A novel set in sixteenth- century Anatolia with an Ottoman girl as a protagonist, albeit written in English and published in the United States, has little in common with the immigrant suc- cess stories that compose the hyphenated canon of American literature, such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), or, more recently, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989). The emphasis on migration and life writing that would connote hyphenated American literature thus seems to deny the Turkish American status to works in English by Turkish authors who were neither born in the United States by Turk- ish parents nor resided there permanently. Notable examples of this last category are Elif Shafak, the most visible and celebrated Turkish author writing in Eng- lish, and Halide Edip, whose work in English highlighted the cultural affinities between Turkey and America. Their experience in the United States was one of comings and goings as well as circular mobility, which eventually brought them back to Turkey. America, however, became the lens through which they read and imagined their home country, and they established shared literary spaces and privileged connections between Turkey and America without drawing from the repertoire of tropes that characterize the American immigrant story. This article argues that the label of Turkish American literature can be extended beyond the sphere of immigrant life writing to literary works in English that do not produce what Rebecca Walkowitz calls the “ethnic bildungsroman[e]” (531), or what is generally understood as ethnic fiction: namely, fiction that relates the experience of first- or second-generation migrants caught in the attempt to delicately balance two cultural traditions on U.S. territory (531). I argue that the texts examined in this article can be addressed as Turkish American and are, in fact, of great relevance to American Studies because they engage in an intense cultural dialogue with the United States on the levels of 2 Quoted from personal email correspondence with the workshop co-organizer Gönül Pultar. “Resident Aliens” 183 form, content, and politics. On the level of form, these texts are written in English, published in the United States or England, directed to an international or specifically American (as in Edip’s case) readership, and construct a bilateral, almost exclusive connection between Turkey and the United States, a privileged dialogue bound to take place in the shared literary dimension these texts seek to establish. On the level of content, American settings, subplots, and characters complicate the Turkish plots of these books. On the level of politics, what brings these Turk- ish American texts together is the reaction against the nationalist narratives of Kemalism—the dominant ideology in Turkey from 1923 up until the 1980s—and the derived notion of Turkey as an “exceptionalist” state. The alternative these authors offer to the monocultural discourses of Kemalism is a model of cultural di- versity that coalesces Ottoman cosmopolitanism and American multiculturalism. The political critique that permeates the Turkish American literature explored in this article is expressed through a project of cultural archeology that aims to bring the repressed imperial legacy of Turkey to the surface. Literary works by Edip, Gün, and Shafak present predominantly Turkish settings and concerns, but are at the same time written for the American and international market. To assert the transnational status of Turkish American literature independently from family lineage and migration background, I re- sort to Walkowitz’s essay “The Location of Literature,” in which she breaks the connection between a writer’s biography and the conceptualization of his or her work. According to Walkowitz, “it is no longer principally a matter of distin- guishing immigrant from nonimmigrant authors,” as the conceptualization of a text should not derive from the author’s biography but from the text’s potential to circulate in more than one literary system, or, in the case of Turkish American literature, to be framed in a specifically binational perspective (532). Walkowitz provides examples of writers that hardly fit in an orthodox understanding of Brit- ish or American ethnic fiction but should nonetheless be considered as exemplars of British or American literature. These “misfits” are cosmopolitan individuals whose experience on British or American soil, however impermanent, has re- sulted in permanently transnational or bicultural texts (529). By the same token, migration needs not be exclusively interpreted as a “single journey,” as it can also resemble a “circular movement” that contemplates the possibility of returns and further relocations (531). In her examination of Turkish-German literature—a larger and more established field of studies—Heike Henderson clarifies that Turkish-German authors place the emphasis on the country of destination, Germany, which also corre- sponds to their idea of Heimat,3 as “they all claim Germany as their home” (239). This happens less frequently in what I here term ‘Turkish American’ literature. As the case of Istanbulite author Elif Shafak shows, these writers’ elected na- tional affiliation is always debatable: by no means do they insist on positioning themselves and their work in the United States or draw attention to its American quality. The plots of their literary texts take place almost entirely on Turkish (or Ottoman) soil.

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