A Film Called Smile

As I wrote in the previous post, I hear regularly from people in Turkey. Today when I checked my e-mail I had received a post for Facebook from a friend who is an American in Istanbul. His name is David, and he hired me in 2006 for an English teacher position at the language school where he was then the education manager. What he sent me today was especially moving. It is a Turkish short film called Gulumse or Smile. I hope he is not using this as bait to get me to come back there.

Smile is an uplifting film which I believe is set in the Turkish port city of Izmir, not Istanbul.

Smile brings back fond memories. It made me smile!

The Romance and Beauty of Turkish Commercials

There are some people who reside in Turkey who have to face up to the fact that I have no plans of returning there in the near future. My last sojourn to their nation exhausted me and terminated the love affair I once had with the country. Still I have some very fond memories of this bewildering nation which is a labyrinth of the good, the bad, and the ugly on so many levels, and for now, a mixture of east and west. Instead of dwelling on the negative there, these days I remember with gratitude the warm acts of kindness and hospitality I received from people I saw regularly on to the kindness and help of total strangers. If the Turks can ever get their system together and change some of their thinking, they could progress.

Not a week goes by when I do not get an e-mail from someone Turkish openly or subtly beckoning for me to come thither. I am sorry to let my friends and lover know that I have no plans to. I had my fill last year, and the thrill is just gone unless a miracle happens.

Anyway, on my last trip there in August through October of last year, I saw these two commercials which I found captivatingly creative. I think some Turkish commercials are far more intriguing and Romantic than their American counterparts. In the first commercial below, which is from a panty hose and tights company called Penti, I think the idea to have the patterns on some of the hose and tights metamorphose was very creative. I still own a pair of Penti black tights with a geometric pattern which I bought in Turkey in early 2007 when I was there for the fourth time teaching English at a language school.




This commercial is from a window company, I believe. Correct me if I am wrong...:) On seeing this it was the first time I ever experienced sand art.
Enjoy!

Quest For Romance Ended In Murder

Reports of honor killings, if they are reported, tend to come out of Middle Eastern nations. Two stories of young women of Kurdish heritage who were murdered in their quest for Romance and love appeared in the news last year. One was the case of Banaz Mahmood who was murdered in Britain. The other was of a teenaged Kurdish Yazidi girl named Doa (May 2, 2007 post) or Du'a or Doa'a depending on how some bloggers spell her name. On the blog where this girl's name is spelled Du'a is the actual video of her slaughter which some brutish person video taped on their cell phone. I watched a portion of if it, but was too afraid to finish it. So if you choose to watch, watch with extreme caution.

The average American is not familiar with the term "honor killings" since we have a culture where generally women's minds and bodies are not controlled to the extent which the minds and bodies of women are controlled in some cultures. Such cultures in which women are treated this way are more feudal, patriarchial, and tribal based. Honor killing is when a woman, and occasionally a man, is killed by family members or associates of the family. The reason for the instigation of the killing is when a family's status or honor is blemished by the actions or perceived actions of the family member. In some Middle Eastern cultures family members will kill a girl or woman if they believe she has lost her virginity outside marriage, committed adultery, is raped, wants to divorce a husband even if he is abusive, decides to adopt a more liberal lifestyle or seek a better education, or who just refuses to obey the dictates of what the male members of her family want. Sometimes such murders are encouraged by females in a family when another female member refuses to enter an arranged marriage which is seen as advantageous to the family's well-being. Men who are homosexual or who are accused of being so are sometimes killed. Nevertheless, the case of honor killings of females receives more attention.

Concern about honor killings has become a big issue in Turkey in recent years, perhaps because of its' bid for membership in the European Union. Turkey also has a growing number of feminists who want to bring attention to the problem which occurs more often in the country's eastern and southeastern sectors, regions which are predominately Kurdish. In recent years, Turkey has witnessed cases which are honor suicides. If a person commits an honor killing in Turkey they can be sentenced to life in prison, so some people who want to engage in this blood sport have tried to cut corners, so to speak. Cases of young Kurdish girls who are seemingly the victims of suicide or accidents have occurred. There was the case of a woman who came up pregnant while her husband was away in the military, so her family told her that in order for the family's honor to be cleansed, she should just commit suicide since no male member wanted to spend the rest of his life in jail. Also in Turkey there was the case of a woman who spoke out on a talk show about abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband. When she returned to her home in the eastern part of the country, her adolescent son was pushed up to shoot her because she had stained the family's good name by going on television to speak publicly of her plight. In December Turkish Daily News ran an article Natural Born Killers (and Victims) about a Turkish female producer who is trying to shed light on the problem of honor killings in her country.

Often honor killings are seem in the west as a problem mainly against women in Muslim communities, but in some rural Christian areas of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, there have been some rare cases. In India, some families have killed women in rages because of dowries which they felt were insufficient. The first honor killing I ever read about was against a prince in The Bible and all the men in his city. Prince Shechem ravished Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, but fell in love with her in the process and wanted to marry her, but in an act of deception, one night Dinah's brothers raided Shechem's city in retaliation for their sister's honor and killed all of the men. In 1997, Anita Diamant's The Red Tent was a best seller about this Biblical incident. In the New Testament, Jesus showed his belief in the rights of women when he stopped the stoning of a woman supposedly caught in the act of adultery .

The stories of Banaz and Doa are issues of human rights and ignorance. Cases like this are common in rural areas or where people are too unenlighten to see that some cultural practices and traditions should be left to die in the past.

In Iraq where Doa was killed for her quest for love and Romance, last year these words once came from the former and late president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein 30 years ago:

The most important thing about marriage is that the man must not let the woman feel downtrodden simply because she is a woman and he is a man.
----Interview with the Al-Mar'a magazine in 1978.

Lady With A Unicorn, by Raphael

I just wrote about the wonders of Dover Publications. With some of the samples they e-mailed me this week came a painting from their 120 Italian Renaissance Paintings CD-ROM and book called Lady With A Unicorn, by Raphael. Amazingly, last week Emma Alvarez posted a very interesting and informative article about unicorns on her blog entitled Unicorns, Symbols of Purity .

With unicorns mentioned in a number of cultures, literature, and even nines times in The Bible, did these mythical animals really trot and gallop here on earth?

Romance and Beauty Offered By Dover Publications

Amazon.com gets plenty of attention from many book lovers like myself, but Dover is a rare treasure that is probably overlooked.

I discovered Dover Publications a number of years ago after running across a copy of one Andrew Lang's colorful fairy tale books at the public library. Lang's fairy tale series is published by Dover, and after getting four of his books, I went on to purchase other books on the subject of Islamic art.

Dover publishs books on a wide range of subject matter. If you are particularly interested in the arts, literature, and just the plain Romantic, Dover provides items for plenty of escapism, craft, artistic, literary, and learning ideas. Since I ordered several items from them last summer, including the Braun and Schneider book on historical fashion on which my Monday post was about, Dover sends me weekly e-mails of samples from some of their book and CD-ROM collections.

Below is what I have recently received.

If you are an aficionado of the Romantic and the beautiful go to Dover and explore other interesting and inexpensive rarities.

From Erte's Theatrical Costumes

Nautical Vignettes

Pet Illustrations

Celtic Stencil Designs

Geometrical Patterns and Designs for Artists and Craftspeople

African Designs

Victorian Houses

Historic Textile Design

Mehndi Designs

Floral Ornament

Fashion of the 1930s

Murasaki of Japan

Long ago in the mists of time in feudal Japan a daughter was born to a provincial governor and his wife. They named her Murasaki Shikibu.

Not only was the governor an official, but he was also a scholar. The traits of the enjoyment of learning and curiosity was passed on to his daughter who from a young age showed a remarkable ability to grasp and understand literature and languages. This was a miracle and a source of pride and disappointment for Murasaki's father who once said to her, "If only you were a boy, how happy I should be!"

Murasaki's brother, unlike her, did not display her swiftness in learning. In ancient Japan, women were allowed to do some basic learning, but the realm of the classics which were in Chinese was the province of men. Being a man with an open mind and appreciating his daughter's singularity, Murasaki's father allowed her to sit in on her brother's private tutoring sessions.

When Murasaki came of age, she was married off to a distant relative. She bore him a daughter. In time, plague appeared in the land, and Murasaki's husband was carried off in the epidemic. Alone, except now for her daughter, Murasaki began to write a book. Since she was the daughter of a prominent man and quite a curiosity herself, she captured the attention of the empress. She was brought to court, where she became the special companion to the empress, even teaching her Chinese in secret. She is given the title of "lady."

Lady Murasaki continues to write her book which is about a prince named Genji, getting ideas for the plot from her surroundings. She also keeps a diary which is a vivid description of life at the Japanese court and also expresses her distaste for what she sees as a vapid existence of nobles intriguing, backbiting, and focusing mainly on the silly and trivial. She writes one day in her diary, "Pretty and coy, shrinking from sight, unsociable, fond of old tales, conceited, so wrapped up in poetry that other people hardly exist, spitefully looking down on the whole world-such is the unpleasant opinion that people have of me. Yet when they come to know me they say that I am strangely gentle, quite unlike what they had been led to believe. I know that people look down on me like some old outcast, but I have become accustomed to all this, and tell myself, 'My nature is as it is."Despite her indifference and dislike of court life she becomes a reluctant celebrity when her novel, The Tale of Genji, is discovered. It is presented as a serial and read orally. Lady Murasaki writes this in her diary, "His Excellency saw The Tale of Genji laying about in the Empress's apartments. He made his usual stupid jibes, and then handed me a poem written on a piece of paper to which he had attached a branch of plum-blossom: 'What with these ardent tales of love, little can I think that men have passed you by, as they might this plum-tree's sour fruit.' And so I replied, 'If no man has tasted, who can say if the fruit is sour, or if the writer of these tales herself has known such love?'' Is the novel's hero, Prince Genji, Lady Murasaki's alter ego?

Unlike most at court who live only for the moment, Lady Murasaki knows winds of change are moving inside Japan. The decadent lifestyle of the court will eventually be swept away by the samurai who will install a military dictatorship ruled by a shogun.

At age 50, Lady Murasaki asks to retire from the court, leaving it for the peace and serenity of a convent. Finally, she is at peace.

This is my personal rendition of the life of Lady Murasaki (973-1025?) She is believed to have written the first modern novel, The Tale of Genji. Both Genji and the Diary of Lady Murasaki can be purchased on Amazon.com. The quotes listed in my tale are from Lady Murasaki's diary.

In 2001, Liza Dalby, an anthropologist and the only westerner to have been trained as a geisha, wrote the novel The Tale of Murasaki which is a fictionalized account of the life of Murasaki Shikibu.

Ideas for the writing style in this post were inspired by entries in the blogs The Victorian Era and Emma Alvarez Site, Hans Christian Anderson, The Brothers Grimm, and The Thousand and One Nights.

Flowers In Africa

This is bougainvillea which was a flower both Africans and expats planted at their homes when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana. Africainement, a blogger in Senegal, posted some unusual and beautiful flowers native to various African countries on her blog last week. You can see them here. Africa is known for its fauna (animal life), but its' flora (plant life) is overlooked.

Well, it is too delightful and Romantic looking for me to overlook:)

The Romance of Historical Fashion

When I was a child I would spend hours looking in the historical fashion section of our Britannica and Collier encyclopedias. I am fascinated by historical costumes from ancient times on up to the early 20th century. My favorite period of historical dress was during the Empire and Regency periods of the late 18th and early 19th centuries when women let go of so much tight corseting and put on dresses and gowns inspired by the ancient Romans and Greeks. The high Empire waist line from that time is currently back in style again, and I love it.

In the last 4 decades, fashion has basically been recycled over and over. This was not the case through the centuries. Braun and Schneider's historical fashion plates published in the late 1880s attested to diversity of fashion throughout the ages. Last year I bought Dover's edition of Braun and Schneider's work called Historic Costume in Pictures which can be seen here. All 125 plates which were published from 1861 until 1880 can be seen online. A prelude to all of the costumes are the ladies dancing above, these Turkish Ottoman ladies and an ancient Egyptian ruler and his servants.

Enjoy!

Excerpt From The Africans: A Triple Heritage

Yesterday in my post Ali A. Mazrui: Intellectual and Romantic, I mentioned his documentary The Africans: A Triple Heritage. On YouTube I was able to locate an excerpt from the 9 hour documentary where Dr. Mazrui explains why Africa has failed to advance technologically. I am sure there have been many changes since 1986 when this series was produced, but Africa still lags behind many places.

Shirley Chisholm: The Forgotten Presidential Candidate

We Americans are not very good about recalling events and people from very far in the past. Many young Americans tend to see anything prior to the 1980s as nearly prehistoric, so when the name Shirley Chisholm is mentioned a blank is probably drawn. I remember her well because she was the first serious African American candidate to run for president. This was before Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton who both lacked even the appeal she had over 35 years ago. In 2005 the year when she died the documentary Chisholm 72: Unbought and Unbossed premiered on PBS.

Like Barack Obama, Shirley Chisholm came from an exotic background. Her mother was from Barbados and her father was from Guyana.

Though many Americans may have forgotten her, a little over two years ago one of my Turkish students named Musa proved he had not. A man in his 50s, he told me that he was a great admirer of Shirley Chisholm. I was very moved to hear this.