Crossing Bridges

After months of hearing about it, chastised by my Turkish friends for not seeing it, I finally had a chance to watch Fatih Akin’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul yesterday. To my friends, I say thank you, for giving me such an enduring gift. Despite the fact that it was mostly in Turkish, a language I’m only beginning to understand, this is a film in which communication isn’t linked to language. The Turkish word for language is ‘dil’ which, in Urdu, means ‘heart’; Crossing the Bridge appeals to the language of the heart: music. This is its resonance. It is universal. I recommend it to anyone, anywhere in the world. If you can get your hands on it, pick it up. Watch it, or rather, feel it. This is Istanbul, and to a larger extent, Turkey. To my friends around the world, if you’re wondering what my world looks like, well, this is it. The Istanbul I know is the Istanbul of Crossing the Bridge (in a couple of scenes, you can actually see my apartment building). The music is the music I love, from Aynur singing a traditional Kurdish song in a hamam to Ceza belting out his unique and transcendent form of hip hop.

It reminded me how much of Turkey’s history, and by historical association, Persian history is rooted in music. Even in the 20^th-century when Kemalism tried to reduce Turkishness to a single identity, its music belied a deeper, more varied reality: the people who occupy the geographical zone now known as Turkey express their identity through music. Crossing the Bridge shows, in vivid detail and powerful sequences, that musical styles even in a limited area like Beyoglu district, where I live are fantastically diverse. Turkey’s multiculturalism comes out in its music. Hence, the Kurdish style, the Black Sea coast style, Arabesque, the Anatolian styles…these are all Turkish but the identities they express are not the singular vision of the Kemalists. Being Turk can mean many different things; it is a fluid state. And the re-shaping of Turkey’s identity continues into the 21^st-century with bands like Baba Zula, Mercan Dede and Ceza who borrow from the west and in the crucible of their imaginations create something wholly new.

So maybe in some ways being multiple is better than the certainty of any single identity. That certainty is too easily corrupted into a form of racist nationalism. Multiple identities may be confusing but they provide us with the empathy and necessary displacement required to appreciate the value of other cultures. Being in a constant state of flux gives me the humility to embrace the beauty of an uncertain state of mind and to map the contours of self-awareness on multiple planes. It gives me safe passage across any bridge.

*

My journeys have started again, after a month and a half in Istanbul in which I relocated apartments, found a new ney teacher who has taught me the sacrifices I will need to make to master this elusive instrument, and almost fell in love…dunno yet…it’s too new. She is a compelling soul, a passionate being. But I’m in a vulnerable state – tired of brief encounters based on sex that ultimately leave me feeling as if I’ve satisfied only the basest of human drives. I’m looking for more and I’d rather like to avoid tumbling headlong into an intricate emotional web with the first woman I meet who excites more in me than just my libido only to find out later that I was wrong. Too much pain. Too messy. She deserves better. Besides, I’m on the road again, foiled by the life I’ve chosen at a time when our relationship was just beginning to develop into something meaningful. And now, here, a universe away, I have to forget about her and focus my energies on the task at hand.

Where is here? I’ll get to that.

I landed in Dubai – a nation feverishly crossing its own bridges – after midnight two days ago and set out by taxi for my friend’s apartment in the Jumeira district. Emirates screwed me with a 26-hour layover in Dubai, which I only discovered after checking my itinerary a day before my flight. The agent who sold me the ticket told me at the time that the layover was only 2 hours and when I called their office to complain they told me: “Sorry, your ticket doesn’t include accommodations. Besides, all hotels are full in Dubai. Conference.” Fortunately, I was able to contact my friend who lives in Dubai. He’s in Afghanistan right now working on a documentary but he was able to contact his house mates and coordinate a place for me to crash the night. The ride to their house took me directly through the Burj, the equivalent of Dubai’s downtown core and the heart of the modernization program that has become the singular obsession of the monarchy.

Driving down the Burj is a little like catapulting through a movie screen into Blade Runner: it’s an other-worldly place, existing neither in the past, present or future. It’s as if time doesn’t exist there in the usual sense; the minutes are on pause, awaiting a signal from the monarchy to start ticking again once the construction phase comes to an end. Entire districts of skyscrapers are under construction, like a new Babylon rising suddenly out of the desert.

But as my hosts would tell me later, Dubai lacks a soul. Like most designer cities, it is a place where the glitter and glamour of modernity blind out the past. In the process of transforming Dubai, its rulers are erasing its history and a place without a history is place lacking depth. I would find that out for myself later, spending a day walking around the city, searching for some remnant of what Dubai must have been like before the construction began. Granted, I only had a day but my hosts, who’ve lived in Dubai for two years, told me I’d seen everything there is to see: the Burj, the Marina, and the Emirates Mall, the largest in the world, the one with the indoor ski hill.

City under construction

The Future - the tallest building in the world (still in the works)

Designer City I

Designer City II

Designer City III

The Burj

I would like to go back someday. Spend more time hunting for history. It must exist. In a region with such a rich culture, the past can’t simply be glossed over. But work calls, which brings me to my present location – Islamabad. Arrived here yesterday and proceeded to pass out at my guesthouse. Woke up in the late afternoon and spent the evening re-acquainting myself with the Pakistani capital – another designer city searching for a soul. But that’s another story. Off to Peshawar in a few days to meet my fixer. Then…well, that will have to wait.