Kenan Orhan’s I Am My Country and other stories
Review by John RC Potter
Kenan Orhan’s inaugural collection of stories is indeed an impressive debut. He is a young Turkish-American writer and educator. When I read his collection of ten stories, I was reminded of that towering giant of Turkish letters, Orhan Pamuk. In particular, at least to this reader, both authors share a sense of “hüzün”, a difficult-to-translate Turkish word that conjures to mind a commingled sense of melancholy, memory, and longing: Pamuk for the city of Istanbul, Orhan for his ancestral country, Turkey. Kenan Orhan is viewing his country and writing about it from ‘across the pond’ where he lives in middle America, the state of Kansas. One cannot imagine two more different worlds, but both inhabit and obviously inspire the mind of the author. I share a kinship with the author. As a foreigner who has lived in Turkey for many years, I can understand and appreciate the complexity and richness of this country, with roots across the Atlantic in my native land. However, I am experiencing it from Turkey looking west to Canada, whilst Orhan is in the USA and imaginatively peering eastward to his ancestral homeland.
In this review, I will be examining three of the ten stories in the collection because I view them as key to the overall theme. In the first story in the collection, “The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra”, the reader is introduced to Selim who is described as a halfwit who “hoarded everything from the trash”. However, the story is actually about a trio of workers (two men and one woman, who is the narrator) whose challenging job is to collect garbage from the winding streets and adjacent nooks and crannies in Beyoğlu. However, there are treasures to be found in that garbage, in what others have discarded. This includes musical instruments, thus the reference to “orchestra” in the title of the story. The author paints a picture with words to describe the characters and setting of one of Istanbul’s oldest, historic, and centrally located municipalities, Beyoğlu. He writes, “Somewhere a faucet was loosing dribbles of water over the flagstones of the alley and in a mirror of the rivulets, the muezzin’s call to prayer slid over the grooves of the sky.” The story has an underlining political tone in reference to the citizens of Istanbul being faced with the banning of musical instruments and then eventually of books. Orhan writes with a keen eye and a decided wit, “Some didn’t want to burn them, trusting them instead to the cycle of nature, leaving them to decay in their gardens or in the gutters of Istanbul, flowing then in scraps to the Bosphorus and washing away in the sea. Frugal ones used their pages as toilet paper.”
This story has the feeling of a cautionary tale: “Mehmet had been saying for weeks now that things in the city had become dangerous...They had all seen people taken up by the police for having hidden things they should have discarded.” As the story progresses, there is a sense of a Dystopian world, where repression and fear overshadow daily life. By the end of the tale, the narrator has been taken to jail. Another female prisoner says: “Do not worry. It’s your first day but don’t worry, there are more criminals out in the city than there are in here. It’s safer in here than it is in the streets.” Although the story ends on a rather bleak note, it is clear the author’s intention is to warn the reader of the dangers inherent in our world if individual rights are taken for granted.
For this reader, I made a few connections between some of the stories and the traits of a fable; at least, in the overarching sense that the stories have a moral. Whether or not the author intended for some or all of the stories to be somewhat fable-like, there is definitely a sense of fatalism about the collection as a whole, and that the fates of the characters are somewhat predetermined or at least unmanageable. In the brilliantly depicted and allegorical story, “Three Parts in Which Emre Kills His Daughters”, what is first presented as a rather ordinary world inhabited by a quite ordinary man, is subverted as the somewhat chilling storyline proceeds. The author opens the story with the following: “Here is a man named Emre who lives in the Kasımpaşa neighbourhood of Istanbul in a small apartment with two bedrooms – one for him and his wife, Mirhiye, and the other for his three grown daughters: Adalet, Necla, and Ece.” Having lived in Turkey for a long time, it is indeed standard for a large family to live in a small apartment for financial and practical reasons. The large homes with spacious gardens and much privacy for all family members that is quite common in the West, are merely a dream for the majority of people in Turkey and particularly in Istanbul which is considered one of the most expensive places for a Turk to live.
Emre is a man not in control of his life, let alone his family. He buries himself in books, to escape the harsh realities of life. Emre is a lost soul whose wife and daughters attempt to create better lives than the man of the house. Ece, the youngest daughter, is politically and socially motivated. It is quite natural for her, then, to participate in the environmental protests at Gezi Park. Unfortunately, she is one of the victims of the violence that occurs as a result of that historic episode in Istanbul’s recent history. Thus, Emre loses his youngest daughter due to violence outside the home, and his inability to foresee the danger and prevent his daughter from participating in the protests. He loses his second daughter, Necla, also to violence, but this time within the home. Necla marries a mercurial and short-tempered man, and not long after the marriage, domestic abuse begins. Domestic abuse is an issue of much concern in this country; thus the story turns attention to that social issue. The domestic abuse in the story culminates eventually in Necla’s husband murdering her. Emre’s mind becomes more unraveled, and he continually confuses his remaining eldest daughter, Adalet, with the deceased youngest daughter, Ece. In an attempt to maintain her own sanity, Adalet moves out of the house after her mother is arrested for her actions at a protest. Now totally alone, Emre observes “Now in his apartment there are only three empty beds shaved thinner each day by the passage of time, and a man guessing stations of the sun by the light of the windows.”
The pivotal story and the one the author chose as the title for the collection is “I Am My Country”. It is the most personal story in the collection and could wonder if it is autobiographical, although the narrator is a young girl. At the start of the story, the narrator refers to a taxi ride from the airport and sees “the silhouettes of domes and minarets, of high-rises and palace towers, of castle spires and suspension bridges, all like paper on the horizon.” The reader views Istanbul at that hour through the eyes of the young narrator, who recollects that “We’ll speak the private language we share that none of my classmates back home, or the saleslady at Macy’s, or the bagger at the supermarket understand, the language only my family seems to know.” This is a young person living between two realities, two cultures, two countries, two languages, and perhaps, two solitudes. It could well be what a young Kenan Orhan thought as a child when he came from his home in the USA as a child to Turkey to visit relatives.
Later as a young woman the narrator tells us that when working in the library at college, she explored her family’s ancestral past. She states, “I passed the time teaching myself about Turkey. Reading about Istanbul was like reading about myself. Reading about Turks was like fortifying my own Turkishness.” The story continues with the young girl growing up, and continuing to return to Turkey for visits even when she is a mother with children in Kansas. She reminisces, “We used to go to Turkey every summer. But after the 1980 coup, we never went back.” The narrator does not bother to teach her sons Turkish; she seemingly turns her back on her Turkish heritage and instead totally embraces her life in America. The story poignantly ends with the narrator’s observation: “Our children are riding on my husband’s back across the blue carpet. My mother sits at the table. Pictures in gold frames cover the mantel and side tables. Kansas is a land of vegetables, without fruit; Turkey is just a part of the brain – unrevisited.” Although the narrator may think Turkey is not revisited even in the brain, it is apparent that the author, Kenan Orhan, revisits his ‘memleket’ (homeland) creatively and imaginatively throughout the pages of these beautifully written stories in his impressive collection. I would not be at all surprised if in the future another Orhan is added to the pantheon of great Turkish writers alongside Orhan Kemal and Orhan Pamuk – that being, Kenan Orhan.
‘I Am My Country and other stories’, Kenan Orhan (April 25, 2023), Random House, 240 pages, ISBN-13-978-0593449462), Amazon.com
John RC Potter is an international educator from Canada, living in Istanbul. He has experienced a revolution (Indonesia), air strikes (Israel), earthquakes (Turkey), boredom (UAE), and blinding snow blizzards (Canada), the last being the subject of his story, “Snowbound in the House of God” (Memoirist, May 2023). His poems and stories have been published in a range of magazines and journals, most recently in Blank Spaces, (“In Search of Alice Munro”, June 2023), Literary Yard (“She Got What She Deserved”, June 2023) & Freedom Fiction (“The Mystery of the Dead-as-a-Doornail Author”, July 2023). It was recently announced that "She Got What She Deserved" has been named as one of the Top 100 Projects in the 7th Annual Launch Pad Prose Competition.