Golden Horn, Galata Tower, Kadıköy Istanbul (photo Dursun Bayrak).
Looking for love and her father’s past, a Turkish American journalist haunts the streets of Istanbul before and after Covid.
The sticky summer air sank into my skin as seagulls dove into the wavy blue waters of the Bosphorus Strait, the waterway that separates the European and Anatolian sides of Istanbul. My cousin and I sat on the hard wooden benches of the vapur (ferry boat) as it drifted along. I hadn’t been here in over ten years, nor had I ever been to Turkey without my dad, my baba. I’d asked him to come, but he declined. He insisted that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with me and my cousin, who also grew up abroad, as we roamed the streets of Istanbul. But I knew that was just another excuse for avoiding Turkey.
On that windy summer day in Istanbul on the vapur, I spotted an old man reading a pro-government newspaper, a middle-aged teyze (an auntie) wearing a pink headscarf covered in yellow flowers, and a young blonde woman glued to her smartphone. As a queer person who grew up in America, I was used to being able to easily find my people. But since I’d arrived in Istanbul, I hadn’t seen a gay club, let alone a rainbow flag on someone’s coat. Maybe queer people were hiding in plain sight, or maybe I just didn’t know where to go.
Maybe if I fell in queer love with someone here, I could experience the cultural reconnection that I was hoping for — that Baba had, in subtle ways, let me know he’d never give me. I grew up knowing some Turkish, but took it upon myself to finally learn it for real as an adult. I found a teacher in Minneapolis, and he became my friend and the first Turkish man whom I didn’t feel afraid of.
Over time, I gained access to Turkish language and culture, something I didn’t feel I had as a kid. Even though these days my baba and I speak Tinglish — a mixture of Turkish and English — and he’d slowly started opening up more in his native language the more my Turkish improved, his Istanbul still felt like something buried deep in memory. If I cared to discover more about the country he left behind, that was on me.
Read the full essay on The Markaz Review: https://themarkaz.org/beautiful-ghosts-or-well-always-have-istanbul/
