Section:GDN 1J PaGe:11 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 11:12 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
Wednesday 24 July 2019 The Guardian •11
▲ Andrzej Krauze
on migrants
With rescue operations down to a trickle
and some EU member states refusing
to take refugees, the summer is bleak in
the MediterraneanI
have never been an exile in the strict sense of
the word. I left Turkey voluntarily – mostly for
professional reasons – in 2011, long before the
crackdown on academics began. The country
was still being described as “partly free” by the
Freedom House Democracy Index, though the
early signs of the regime’s authoritarian slide
were already clearly evident.
The rest is history. Or a suspenseful horror fl ick
with many twists. While I was enjoying the peace of a
Swedish university town where the front page of the
bestselling regional newspaper Sydsvenskan reported
the “tragic story” of an undergraduate student who
fi led a police compl aint about a local hairdresser who
over-trimmed her split ends , Turkey was rocked by
countrywide protest movements, an increasing police
clampdown, mass purges and a failed coup , all topped
off by half a dozen elections and a change of regime from
a parliamentary to a (super-) presidential system.
I thus joined the ranks of the newly founded
“Whats App diaspora”, a small yet growing group
of Turkish citizens in various countries who were
communicating with each other through presumably
secure encrypted applications and expressing
their discontent by retweeting the hashtag du jour.
When at some point during Istanbul’s Gezi Park
protests in 2013 I managed to attract the wrath of the
ruling AKP party’s troll army through my social mediaM
y life story
might be
summed up
like this : I’ve
travelled
from one of
the worst
countries
in the world for women to one of
the best countries. I am an Afghan
refugee in Norway. Adaptation is
a process, and comparing these
two countries would be totally
unfair but I would like to share my
insights into what it feels like to
be an independent woman in both
countries.
As I write , I fi nd myself on the
shores of the Skagerrak strait in
southern Norway. I’m on a typical
cabin holiday, sitting by the water
and feeling the fresh breeze playing
with my curly, crazy hair at six in the
morning. If I were in Afghanistan,
this could only be a dream – not
just because Afghanistan is
landlocked, but because it is not
safe enough for a woman to feel theIn Norway, I
discovered
what it meant
to be a truly
independent
woman
Hasina
Shirzad
6 am breeze by herself without the
company of a man.
In 2014, I was a student at Kabul
university and employed part-time.
I decided to refresh my English, so
I enrolled in a 6 am class at a nearby
coaching centre. A taxi driver would
drop me off at the classes, but one
day in December he apologised to
me, saying that he couldn’t defrost
his taxi that early in the morning, so
I decided to go by myself.
A week later a man attacked
me in the street – it felt like he was
going to kidnap me, but his aim was
only to harass. I ran after him, and
he was eventually caught by private
security guards who were working
at a nearby house. In Afghan
culture, disrespecting a woman is
not acceptable. After that, I had to
abandon my class – without getting
the diploma.
I come from a liberal and
educated family in Afghanistan.
Nothing was more important
for them than my becoming
an independent woman. This
was especially the case for my
mother, who was also educated
and independent. I believed that
I was independent enough until I
landed in Norway. In Afghanistan,
a women being independent
means she can educate herself
well enough to be able to work and
pay her own bills. She takes care of
so-called female household tasks
and children, as well as working
outside the home. I was trained
to be an independent woman in
Afghanistan, but it turns out that
independence in Norway means
something utterly diff erent.
After I got my residence permit,
I was taken to an empty room in
Oslo. I had hardly ever shopped
for furniture before, and I did not
even know how to measure up
for curtain s or how to use a drill.
In Afghanistan, all the heavy jobs
were s upposedly men’s tasks: from
garden ing, grocery and furniture
shopping to fi xing things, technical
matters and painting. In addition,
men had to provide for their
entire family, as most women in
employment– including m e – were
hardly willing to split household
expenses equally with the man of
the household.
After a while, I found out that
there is no gender for household
tasks in Norway. I met Norwegian
women who had built their own
cabins or parts of houses. They
could paint, do carpent ry, cut
grass and still carry out the main
responsibilities of raising a child- and they split the household
expenses with their partners. And
of course, most Norwegian men can
cook and parent a child, too.
In Norway, an independent
woman is self-governing in all
matters. I’m adapting to that
new meaning of independence ,
and it feels much better to live
this way. We should teach the
younger generation that the road
to genuine independence depends
on learning that women can do
whatever men do.
activism, I even received death threats – so for three
months I went around with a special alarm , a little
keyring-like red button that I had to hide from my then
three-year-old son.
All these years spent outside Turkey have taught me
two things. First, the meaning of being in exile. I still
wouldn’t describe myself as an exile, for this would be
adding insult to the injury of hundreds of thousands
who have had to fl ee their homes, often leaving their
loved ones behind, simply to avoid spending the rest
of their lives behind bars. I was among the lucky ones.
The threats to my life stopped overnight when the news
spread that my son was terminally ill. I could go in and
out of Turkey to visit my family as I wasn’t part of the
“ Academics for Peace ” group – the name given to more
than 2,000 signatories of a petition that demanded a
peaceful resolution to the decades-long confl ict between
the state and Kurdish PKK militants. And my activism on
behalf of my colleagues, friends and other victims of our
autocracy didn’t cause me much trouble.
But I now knew how it felt to be in exile. Not only
vicariously, through the experiences of acquaintances
who were stripped of their basic rights and freedoms, but
also through my own sense of loss and nostalgia. Turkey
was not my home any more. It had morphed into what
was emphatically called the “New Turkey”, under quasi-
fascist one-man rule. Finally, I could grasp the deeper
meaning of a line in James Baldwin ’s novel Giovanni’s
Room : “You don’t have a home until you leave it and
then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”P
erhaps more importantly, looking at
things from a distance has enabled me to
formulate my own theory of democracy
in Turkey. Democracy in Turkey is like
dew. I wasn’t aware, until I’d done some
research, that dew forms mostly on
clear nights when exposed surfaces lose
heat to the sky by radiation. Then these
surfaces cool the surrounding air, and with suffi cient
humidity, the temperature falls below the “dew point” ,
with vapour condensing out of the air on to the surfaces.
This is pretty much the story of Turkey’s experiments
with democracy. A lot of factors need to converge for
even a semblance of democracy to occur: clear nights,
the right temperature, suffi cient humidity. When it
all comes together, we have a relatively free political
environment like little oases of water droplets. If we are
lucky enough, droplets proliferate, merge and become
resilient. Perhaps the Gezi Park protest s were such a
moment. Or the fi rst term of the AKP, when the party
needed the support of various segments of society and
the European Union to survive the military juggernaut.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot for democracy to materialise,
but not much for it to be dispersed. A simple blow, either
by the military or an elected strongman such as Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, is enough to break up the painstakingly
formed droplets. And democracy evaporates.
I see the recent victory of the opposition candidate
Ekrem İmamoğlu in the re run of Istanbul’s municipal
election as such a moment. The night was clear: the
military neutralised, the PKK defeated and the Gülenists
accused of being behind the 2016 coup attempt
banished. The temperature was right: the economy was
not doing well and the crisis with the US over Russian
S-400 missiles was simmering. And propitious humidity
levels were reached when the opposition formed a
coalition indirectly involving the Kurds and managed to
nominate a charismatic, unifying fi gure to run against
the AKP’s tedious candidate. The political surface was
fully exposed to air when Erdoğan ordered a re run of the
election. On the morning of 25 June , the whole of Turkey
was covered with dew.
The challenge ahead is huge. It is not too diffi cult for
Erdoğan to shake things up and get rid of the droplets
before they merge into a pond. And after all, politics is
not thermodynamics. Rules can be bent or altered. If
we want the water droplets to stabilise and spread, we
must protect them. If we want to have our home back- “those things, those places, those people which [we]
would always, helplessly, and in whatever bitterness
of spirit, love above all else”, as Baldwin wrote – we
must reclaim it. ▲ PHOTOGRAPH: ZAVE SMITH/GETTY
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