A Turkish Armenian Romantic Is Cut Down Too Soon

A year ago I was in Turkey when a tragically grave event happened the significance, of which I was to slowly come to understand. A journalist was killed on the streets of Istanbul. His name was Hrant Dink. The man, his ideals, and some of his writings can be read here. I saw the news reports of his murder on television at work, but it really did not mean very much to me at the time. One of my colleagues who was a young teacher from Britain was a little concerned about any unrest that might possibly occur. He apparently knew who this journalist was who was cut down by a bullet outside his office.

Hrant Dink was one of the most prominent figures of the Armenian community in Turkey. His vision was as brilliant, correct, and beautiful as Martin Luther King's. Like Dr. King, he was gunned down by a fanatic. For decades Turkey has been dealing with demons both self-imposed and imposed from without. One of its' biggest demons is the controversy over the Armenian Genocide which occurred in 1915. The events are well documented from a number of sources, not just Armenians but from westerners, including American missionaries and even Arab eyewitnesses. This is an extremely thorny subject in Turkey which can get you prosecuted under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. Dink's belief in the Genocide is what got him murdered in the end.

Being American and with our lack of media coverage of many important figures outside our borders, I had never heard of Hrant Dink until his death. I was very familiar with the topic of the Armenian Genocide, however. Since 2003 when I first traveled to Turkey, I had developed a love and an identification with the Turkish people. I felt, how could it be possible that such nice, hospitable people could be some of the offspring of barbarous murderers? Many Turkish people are grappling with the issue too of what I now believe happened in their history. I do not blame the current generation for what happened, but I blame those in the current generation who cry out repeatedly that Turkey is always the innocent victim, that Turkish history is stainless and totally glorious, and that Turkey's only issues is the racism it is subjected to from outside. I have people whom I care about in Turkey, TURKISH people. I do NOT want Turkey to fall apart.

When Dink was killed, I received a text message from my Turkish boyfriend, "I sad because they killed Dink." (sic) At the time, I wondered, "Who the heck is Dink?" My knowledge of him began to grow on the day of his funeral. I had to cross one of Istanbul's main streets in the heart of the city on my way to work. That day, I saw something I had only witnessed on news reports on TV. There were hundreds of armed and shielded riot police, busloads of more and more were coming in, and personnel carriers with water cannon were all creeping down that wide street. Thankfully, Dink's funeral turned out peaceful, but the scars remain one year later.

Turkey is not a free society. There are unwritten codes of conduct that people know and adhere to even though places like Istanbul seem slightly more European than Middle Eastern.

One thing that will always live with me are the beggars I saw in the streets of Istanbul day after day. I gave them money whenever I could. When I did not, I feel terribly guilty and uncaring.

Though some try to cover up Turkey's problems, I have friends who talk in general terms about the difficulty of living that country. I feel so powerless and bad for them, and from my end I try to do what I can, but it is not enough for them, the beggars, the system that is keeping Turkey only half alive and looking more and more like another place with less and less of a bright future.

One year after the murder of Hrant Dink, Turkey is still reeling as this article on BBC News online shows.

Like my Turkish boyfriend wrote me in a recent e-mail, "You know Turkey now." I do.

Africa's Tragic Romantic: Bessie Head

"Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk"
----Bessie Head

It is my desire that this blog will never become stale in its' subject matter, and even though my blog has a theme, there is a world of Romance out there both past and present to be written about.

Ardent's latest blog entry got me to thinking about my very first international sojourn, as a Peace Corps volunteer in the African nation of Botswana. African nations south of the Sahara get such bad press. It is always about disease, war, poverty, or genocide. There is little mention of the good of the extraordinary. The most recent case of bad news are the elections in Kenya. It has hit home with one of my neighbors, because presently he is hosting a student in his home who is Kenyan.

Botswana is one of the richest countries in Africa because of its' diamond resources. It does not get much attention because the people are quiet and peaceful with their neighbors. Also there are not a conglomeration of tribes there, so no tribal problems. The Batswana are very tolerant. I used to silently laugh when some Batswana would tell me, "Botswana is not true Africa. You have to got to West Africa, to see true Africa."

I was in Botswana when apartheid was running its' course in neighboring South Africa. In fact, depending on where I was, I sometimes lived as close as 15 miles from the South African border. As a non-white person I went to South Africa only once, because the climate there was very tense and even some British friends of mine who went were harassed by white South African soldiers.

There were a number of people both black and white whom the Batswana like to talk about when I was there. One of them was a person they held in high regard, the writer, Bessie Head. Bessie Head is one of Africa's greatest authors, dying at age 49 just when she was about to come into her own and get the recognition she deserved. Her life was short, difficult, lonely, and tragic. Nevertheless, out of her hardship, she birthed writing of get power and sometimes disturbing beauty.

Bessie Head was the daughter of a white South mother of patrician background and a black South African father who was a stable hand to her mother's family. The relationship was totally illicit because it broke apartheid laws which applied more to white women and black men than to white men and black women. According to my Batswana students and friends who related Head's story to me, when Bessie Head's white grandparents learned that their daughter was pregnant by their black stable hand, they had her committed to an insane asylum. There Bessie Head was born in 1937. Life was tough from the beginning. Of course, her mother's family did not want her, and neither did her father's family. Therefore, Bessie was placed in an orphanage where she grew up.

Having showed strong intelligence, Bessie went to school to become a teacher. Later she married a journalist and had a son, but she eventually became a divorcee.

Unable to tolerate life under apartheid, Bessie Head went to neighboring Botswana where she became a refugee. Even in Botswana life was hard, and Head lived in extreme poverty. She ended up in the village of Serowe, one of Botswana's most famous villages one reason of which is because it is the home of Botswana's first president, Sir Seretse Khama, another person common on the lips of many Batswana. In Botswana, Head found her calling and began writing. Also in the process she became an alcoholic and died of hepatitis in 1986.

Bessie Head's work is hard to classify under one genre. Unlike many African writer's her work is not very political. Her novels tend to be semi-autobiographical, with Biblical and classical imagery. She was also influenced by D. H. Lawrence.

Here can be seen an online project by students at the University of Botswana (which was spic and span and new when I visited it) concerning Bessie Head.

Kenize Mourad: A Romantic Heritage Discovered

From time to time here I will continue to compose posts about books that have made a profound impression on me. In her bestselling memoir on books, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi wrote about the freeing power of books in an oppressive society. Books can free us and change our lives.

A few years back before a planned trip to Turkey I decided to read Regards from the Dead Princess: Novel of A Life (1989) which I had taken off the shelf several times at our public library over a two year period, but had not pushed myself to reading. One day I finally decided to check it out it and read it. Once I got it home, I devoured the novel.

The author of Regards from the Dead Princess is Kenize Mourad. Kenize Mourad is a French journalist and writer with an extraordinarily Romantic background that she learned about when she was 20. She discovered that she is the daughter of an Ottoman princess named Selma who was the granddaughter of the last Sultan of Turkey, Murad V. Mourad's father was an Indian rajah. Regards is Kenize Mourad's fictionalized effort to sort out her background. It must have been earth moving to find out as an adult that one is descended from royalty and one of the longest ruling familys in world history, the Ottoman or Osmanli family who ruled Turkish for 500 years.

Mourad's mother Selma grew up in Ortakoy Palace in Istanbul. She is pampered and spoiled by family and servants. Her mother is a princess, and her father is her mother's second husband, a magnificently handsome man which Selma's mother picks for his manly beauty. Inside this insulated environment, Selma is unaware that her country is in turmoil. She hears of a man whom everyone is hoping will be Turkey's saviour, a general named Mustafa Kemal. People call him "the Golden Rose," because unlike most Turks he has blonde hair. Selma dreams that one day she will marry Mustafa Kemal who will become known to world history as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern day Turkey. Little does she know that in a very short time once he assumes power, in order to drag Turkey into the modern world and the west, Mustafa Kemal will erase from his country most links the Turks have with their Ottoman past. He sends Selma and her family into exile. Selma and her mother go to Lebanon. Her father decides to seek his fortune alone and becomes a drifter and adventurer cutting all ties to Selma and her mother.

As a young woman, Selma discovers that she can rather relate to the French community in Lebanon. Still there is the aching feeling that she is an outsider. Her mother retreats further into herself and her memories. Though they are losing their wealth fast, she is determined that Selma makes a good marriage. First she looks to European nobility. When hopes there fade, she turns to a Muslim rajah in India. During this time, Selma lives with the hope that her beloved handsome father will return. He writes occasionally, promising to see her, but he never keeps his promises and never sees his daughter again. Feeling rejected and the emptiness of the exile, Selma suffers a nervous breakdown. She eventually recovers and goes on to India to marry a man she has never seen before.

Her Indian husband is handsome and kind, but for years Selma had lived freely, going out to parties and socializing in western dress in Beirut. Though her mother lived the life of a recluse, she allows Selma to have a degree of freedom. In her husband's house, Selma is put in purdah. Though her husband is kind and patient, she is sexually frigid. She tries with all her power to adjust to being in this restrictive world. She learns about the poverty and squalor of so many people who live near by and dreams of helping the poor. In her own way she tries, but she is so terribly unhappy and restricted that her husband agrees to let her go to Paris on a vacation. Selma does not tell him she is finally pregnant because she knows he might not let her go and breathe if he knows her secret.

In Paris the Nazis are near and they finally occupy Paris. Selma meets an American business man who falls in love with her. She decides to never return to her husband. But under the occupation it becomes a struggle for survival, and Selma has her baby one day. She dies nearly alone with only the baby and an aging black eunuch who had become her surrogate father.

Being only a few days old when her mother died, Kenize Mourad, of course, does not remember her beautiful, auburn haired mother. However, after writing Regards, she later had the opportunity to meet her Indian father, and writes about him in the second half of her family's life story, The Garden of Badalpur, which has apparently not been translated into English.

Regards From the Dead Princess is a magnificent portrait of several cultures, and a tragic tale of a young woman who is never really able to find her place in the world.

A Romantic Revolutionary

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on this date in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. Next Monday, on the 21st, will be the official national holiday in celebration of his birthday.

Dr. King was a Romantic revolutionary because his vision to bring about change nonviolently was very unique to history. Few leaders in the history of the world have tried to initiate change without violence, but Dr. King was unique in this aspect. His ideas to elevate the existence of African-Americans and to usher in change was inspired by his admiration of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent struggle to free India from British rule and by, of course, the teachings of Jesus Christ.

I was 6 years old when Dr. King was assassinated, and I remember exactly where I was in our house the night we heard the news on the radio. When Dr. King was cut down, he was only 39. Along with playing his jazz albums, my father played over and over Dr. King's I Have A Dream speech when I was a girl. The words of this powerful speech became engrained in my memory. There was a period when I could almost recite the entire speech by heart.

My maternal grandfather's stepfather was related to the King family. When she was a girl my cousin Maxine, the daughter of one of my grandfather's half sisters, was invited and stayed for several weeks with Dr. King's widow Coretta and their children. My first year as an undergraduate, I attended Spelman College in Atlanta, which is the sister college to Morehouse College, which Dr. King attended. At the time, his younger son Dexter was a student at Morehouse, and he would come over to our school to attend classes. I passed him a few times on the sidewalk. As for getting very close to Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, my family and I have visited his grave and The King Center which is in Atlanta.

Dr. King's vision probably looks very naive and unsophisticated to many today who seem to understand only trying to bring about change violently, but I feel that if the human race is to survive, we had better get over our bloodthirsty tendencies and remember and emulate the ways of Dr. King.

A moving tribute to Dr. King can be seen on YouTube here. The song in the video is called Black Butterfly and is sung by Deniece Williams.

Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the price he might have to pay, just the way I believe Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated a few weeks ago understood too.

Mexican Romantic: Alejandro Fernandez

Like many singers I love, I just happened upon Alejandro Fernandez by hearing one of his songs I liked on a CD I bought of Grammy Award Winning Latin singers.

Alejandro Fernandez is one of Mexico's most popular singers. He began his career singing mostly ranchera and mariachi music like his father Vicente Fernandez, another singer famous throughout Latin America. Alejandro has the nickname "El Potrillo" which means "the little colt." His father Vicente, is called "El Gran Garanon" meaning "the great stallion."

In the last several years, Alejandro Fernandez has changed his style to Romantic pop ballads, always sung in Spanish. He has partnered with singers like Gloria Estefan, Placido Domingo, Marc Anthony, and more recently with Beyonce.

At 36, Fernandez has been married twice and twice divorced. He has five children. He says of his music and himself, "“Romanticism is something that will never die. I’m super, ultra passionate."
I think of Alejandro Fernandez as a kind of Mexican Elvis, but sans (without) the moves. The following video is one of my favorite songs by him and is from his first acting effort Zapata: El sueno de un heroe; translated into English, "Zapata: The Dream of a Hero."

Aphrodite and Apollo Post Moderne

This is slightly old news, but 41 year old Halle Berry's wish has come true; she is now pregnant by her French Canadian boyfriend, model Gabriel Aubry. They are reputed to have met at a Versace fashion show. Halle says that Aubry, 31, was initially rather shy, but he obviously overcame his impediment.

After two failed marriages to black men, Halle Berry stopped seeking marriage and instead found someone she says she is happy with, who has shown her real love, and has given her her wish, a baby. Personally I believe for a number of reasons that it is best to have kids inside the context of marriage. Still because people are imperfect, with even a married father around, there is no guarantee raising children will go smoothly. It all has to do with having a level head, and a lot of men and women in this day and time don't even bother to have any balance in their outlook on life. Seems those who should have never gone the route of producing kids are the first ones to plunge in having them. The most blatant current public example of this is Britney Spears. In my most recent sojourn in Turkey, the family I worked briefly for as a live-in English tutor showed horrible parenting skills, this in a country which still holds on to traditional marriage and family. Some people are just not cut out to be parents even in such places too.

Hopefully, with her age, Halle will display some common sense and skill. But wisdom does not always come with age. But for the child's sake, I hope she does. It is said that older parents tend to be better than those who are young. Older parents don't take things for granted where having a child later in life is concerned. To older parents, a longed for child which finally appears on the scene is a blessing.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched a YouTube video of a Christian Lebanese woman whose parents had been married for over 30 years and had remained childless. When they had gave up hope, her mom became pregnant. When she was born, her mother was 55 and her dad was 60! I bet they were wonderful parents. This was in the days before fertility treatments, and being in one of the Bible lands, I am not surprised. Remember Abraham and Sarah or Elizabeth and Zachariah, both elderly Biblical couples who had a child when all hope was lost?

Halle Berry is the product of an African-American father and an English mother. With their good looks Berry's and Aubry's child may be very attractive. African-American, English, and French.

In their beauty, I think of Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry as a post modern Aphrodite and Apollo. Here are more photos of them.

The Romance of Women in Western Art

Sometime last summer I discovered and saved to my YouTube favorites the following video, Women in Art. For the art lover and Romantic, it is a spectacular compilation of female artistic forms in western art over the last five centuries. As I have mentioned before, I minored in art (drawing & painting) when I was an undergraduate. Emma Alvarez whose blog I have listed under my Blogs With Class section presented the video on her site several months ago, I believe. Her comments about it can be read here. So here is Women in Art along with Bach's Sarabande from Suite for Solo Cello No. 1.




A companion to Women in Art is this also beautiful and breathtaking video also called Women in Art with Romantic imagery of women by a number of 19th century European artists like William Adolphe Bouguereau and the Pre-Raphaelites.