Seal sa Domhan Thoir: sojourn in the Eastern World

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

"And do you mean to tell me that they don't take drink at all?"

"No. They think that drinking is a mortal sin. It is against their

religion."

"God, that's hard. They must be very straight people."

"Oh yes they are."

"And tell me this if ye tell me no more: is it true what they say that Muslims have more than one wife?"

"Yes, sometimes they have more than one wife. Their religion allows them to have four."

"Four wives. That's awful, they must make right animals of themselves to even think of having four wives."

Same difference. Plus ca change. The sort of thing that has always made me aware of the fact that so many things, whether ideas of dirt and pollution or ideas of inward and outward, edible and inedible, sacred and secular, are just lines that are drawn in a way that is highly culture-bound and pretty arbitrary, if not gratuitous altogether. All cultures draw these lines, it's just that they draw them at slightly different places. Living a la turca for five years at an early age made me something akin to an anthropologist. It also sharpened my sense of self and gave me a distanced and sometimes jaundiced view of my own culture. Feeling myself at home in a language so entirely different to Irish paradoxically helped me focus more than ever on Irish. Being outside an English-speaking world for so long also made me aware of my other mother-language. This all came to me from learning Turkish.

The language that Suleyman Dede taught me was a Turkish that was colloquial, slightly old-fashioned, and basically Middle Anatolian, rather than the more precious language spoken in Istanbul. Just as in Gaeltacht Irish, this is a language which has a large stock of proverbs and formulaic phrases that are used to raise a laugh or to clinch an argument. Suleyman Dede's Turkish is located somewhere between the written language and the spoken, perhaps with more emphasis on the spoken. This is best illustrated by its marked reliance on context. Who says what and to whom is very important, perhaps more so than is the case with most Western languages, because of the very construction of the language, where a single word may have an autonomous function to an extent unknown to us. For instance, Irlandalilastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz, which means "are you one of those whom we could not turn into an Irish person?" Unlike the amazingly long words in German, which are really chains of words, this is one single word with the function and meaning of a whole sentence.

Nevertheless, in spite of the huge differences in syntax, I recognized something in the language that made me feel very much at home. Like the Gaeltacht Irish I had learned asa small child, the appropriate use of a key word from a well-known story or from a proverb can either clinch an argument or cause general hilarity. All one has to mention are the words ahu gozler or sirma sacli, 'almond eyes' or 'golden hair', and everyone knows you are referring to the apotropeaic over-praising of the dead, from the proverb "kor olur ahu gozlu olur; kel olur, sirma sacli olur," "when the blind man dies, they say that he had almond-like eyes; when the bald man dies, they say that he had golden hair." This is a good example of a Turkish proverb in that it contains the highly characteristic parallelism and balanced structure of two complementary clauses. Also the two verbs olur, 'to be', and olur, 'to die', have an alliterative and euphonic charm almost too strong to resist.