Kesin Dönüş
BY Deniz AĞraz
‘My homeland was my childhood; as I grew up, I became distanced from it; the more distant I became, the bigger it grew inside me.’
—Burhan Sönmez, Sins and Innocents
At fifteen, my great-grandfather Ibrahim left his village in Southwest Turkey to join the Ottoman Army. He fought in a series of wars in Europe, Anatolia and the Middle East. At some point in time, he was taken captive by the British Army in Palestine and shipped off to a prison camp in India, where he stayed for several years. When he finally returned to his village for good, he was already a middle-aged single man, the Ottoman Empire had been replaced with the Republic of Turkey, the elderly he had left behind were long buried, and all the children had grown into adults.
After his return, Ibrahim began to frequent the kahvehane, where the village men gathered to drink tea and play backgammon. His scanning of the women walking past the kahvehane and inquiring about them must have rubbed some of the villagers the wrong way, because he ended up with the nickname ‘Gadıncı’, meaning womaniser in the Isparta dialect.
Almost a century later, our family is still called ‘Gadıncı’ in the village. Until his death, my grandfather, who was Gadıncı Ibrahim’s youngest son, insisted that his father’s intentions were innocuous—he was only looking so intently because he had not been able to recognise anyone’s faces.
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I heard the story of Gadıncı Ibrahim in ‘97, while I was still a fresh-off-the-Boeing teenager in Harris Park. In the afternoons, I’d dawdle home from school to admire the sparkly saris behind the shop windows on the main street, which I had only seen in the Bollywood series I used to watch with my grandmother on TRT before we moved to Australia.
On my 14th birthday, I demanded that my parents gift me a sari. They didn’t, but Dad told me about his grandfather Gadıncı Ibrahim and his stories about India, in which long-haired women draped in colourful fabrics strolled down the narrow alleyways.
As Dad talked, my attention drifted away from the saris onto Ibrahim, who was kept against his will in a foreign land at such a young age. I bombarded Dad with questions: Was he scared? Did he have any friends? How quickly did he learn English? Most importantly, did Ibrahim use to daydream about rocking up to his village some day and surprising everyone?
I imagined him imagining his return, and the end of his imprisonment. No one had asked me if I wanted to move to Australia either.
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My first few years in Australia were saturated with fantasies of my return to the homeland. Before I fell asleep at night, I’d create different versions of the same scenario in my head: I’m back in my hometown, standing in front of my classmate Ayşe’s apartment. I call Ayşe’s name from the street, she steps out on the balcony to see who it is and runs downstairs. We hug each other, crying, and depending on the season we either walk to school or to the beach holding hands.
In another scenario, I’m at the village with my cousins during Ramazan Bayramı, wearing my oversized cargo pants purchased from Parramatta Westfield. We visit the elderly in their home and ask about Gadıncı Ibrahim as they feed us homemade börek and samsa.
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In the years that have followed, I have returned to Turkey numerous times, but none of the scenarios I had imagined as an angsty teenager have ever played out.
By the time I returned to Turkey for the first time in the summer of 2004, Ayşe had already left the city to study at a university in Ankara. Most of my cousins now had families, and the ones that didn’t were not interested in spending their break in the village, where wedding parties were the only source of fun.
One afternoon, I decided to take a stroll around the village to photograph the rose bushes and got lost on my way back to my grandparents’ house. I could not recognise the streets. The dirt roads were covered in asphalt. Most of the traditional timber framed houses that I remembered from my childhood were replaced with apartments, and in the place of the bakkal where I used to buy balloons was an internet café, filled with teenage boys playing World of Warcraft. A woman who watched me making circles around the alleyways from her balcony leaned over the railing and asked what I was looking for. When I introduced myself, she quickly ran downstairs, pulled me close to her bosom and wailed: ‘Oh, you grew up so much.’ As she wiped her tears and pulled me by my arms into her house, I took a step back and asked where she knew me from. I hadn’t recognised my father’s cousin.
That summer, I bonded with the distant relatives visiting from Germany, whom I used to make fun of as a kid for their Almancı ways.
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‘Almancı’ is a term used in Turkey to describe people who left their homes in rural Anatolia to work as guest workers in Germany throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s. At the time, both German and Turkish governments thought that these workers would be residing in Germany short-term, which turned out to be wrong because today there are about 3 million people with Turkish roots living in Germany.
In her collection of essays, Root & Branch, Turkish-Australian writer Eda Gunaydin writes about her visits to Germany and the Turkish-German immigrant experience. She mentions the derogatory term ‘Kanak’, given to the early Turkish guest-workers by Germans, which implied their permanent working-class positioning and unassimilable ways. This is something I hadn’t given a much thought about until reading Root & Branch, because I was too preoccupied with how they were perceived as returnees: Almancılar.
There are a vast number of books written, films and TV series produced in Turkey depicting the Almancılar as a group of backward, uneducated, cashed-up Turks who visit their villages in summertime and build chateau-like houses to flaunt their wealth. Turkish-speaking corners of the internet are full of hateful comments against Almancıs, with the most popular one being something along the lines of: ‘They are just garbage collectors in Europe, but they come here and act like pashas.’
As a child, whenever my Turkish-German cousins came to stay with us in summer, I’d get frustrated with them due to language barriers and their peculiar, old-fashioned ways. Only after experiencing immigration myself, I came to realise that their peculiar ways were the result of being raised by parents who had left their villages in the 1970s, and role-modelled these outdated modes of being.
Many of these Almancı amcas and teyzes originated from the bottom of society. They had moved to Germany temporarily and returned home permanently—kesin dönüş—with having enough savings for an economically secure life as the end goal of their circular migration. In a country where they experienced racism on a daily basis, the familiarity of traditions and the nostalgia of the homeland had become shelters.
As they worked to conserve what they knew and pass this knowledge onto the next generation, Turkey was in the process of reinventing itself. When I returned to Turkey for the first time in 2004, I found it hard to update myself too. I was still listening to Mustafa Sandal’s ‘araba’ and making jokes about ‘Susurluk scandal’ when talking about corruption in the country. Until then, my past was a film inside my head that I could rewind and fast-forward as I liked. I could pause it and zero in on small details: like how much grandad had gifted me one bayram after I had kissed his hand, or the exact location of the kids’ literature on the shelves at my uncle’s bookshop.
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Nostalgia is a bitch. It makes you split good memories from the bad ones, as if shelling peas for soup and throwing away the pods. But it's the only thing that holds your hand and connects you with a past that no longer exists when you are mourning what you left behind. The present, however, is an even bigger bitch, because it has the power to slap you across the face and yell that you’ve been living in a strange little world inside your head for too long.
I must have really enjoyed being abused by the present, because over the years I have returned to Turkey again and again. I even thought that one of my returns was a permanent one, because on my last visit I had fallen in love. After trying to keep the long-distance relationship alive for a year, I bought myself a one-way ticket for the first time. The relationship crumbled within three months, but I remained in Istanbul, working on and off as an English teacher while trying to get odd jobs in arts institutions.
At the language school, which had hired me on the condition that I would introduce myself to the students as ‘Denise from Australia’, I wasn’t allowed to speak any Turkish. The school marketed itself as ‘only having overseas hires, teaching real English’ while employing dozens of poor soul returnees like myself. Istanbul was expensive, and we needed the money, so the decision was an obvious one.
For the next four years, I performed a fake identity to hundreds of students, some of whom were powerful public figures. In class, they repeatedly asked me about my experiences about living in Istanbul as a foreigner, my favourite Turkish dish or whether I’d be interested in learning the language. Once, I had to come clean to an ex-student, who had declared his undying love for me—Denise from Australia—after weeks of online stalking. We met at a random bar in Taksim, where I explained, in fluent Turkish, that Denise from Australia had never existed. This was only one of a few incidents that took a toll on my mental health and tainted my kesin dönüş.
I could never really return fully there and start a new life, so I chose to return to Sydney, where being a wog out from the Western suburbs was trending.
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As a first-and-a-half generation immigrant who has only ever written stories of immigration, I am by equal turns obsessed and frustrated with what publishers categorise as ‘diaspora literature.’ Some days, I walk into a bookstore only to buy fiction oversaturated with themes of departure, journeys home, marginalisation, and the ambivalence of homeland. This often happens on the weekends, after devouring an eggs Benedict with bacon at some hipster café and taking a stroll around Glebe Market where I look at second-hand clothing stalls.
I don’t know if it’s the guilt of acting ‘too assimilated’ on those days that forces me to dive deep into the stories of fictional characters who are hindered by unrealistic ideas of home that prevent them from fully enjoying the present moment. I find it nauseating yet pleasurable when a character returns to their homeland only to realise that it only existed in their imagination.
Books such as Negar Djavadi’s Disoriental or Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai act as reminders of my own pain and my unbelonging. I fetishize my pain and enjoy experiencing it with others, which isn’t so strange when you consider the fact that I am after all, a Turk.
Arabesk is a genre of music in Turkey which was popular from 1960s through to 1990s. Back then, a lot of Arabesk singers sang about longing, suffering or melancholy.
When I was a kid, Müslüm Gürses was a big name in Arabesk music. He was called ‘Müslüm Baba’ by his devoted fans—or Müslüm fanatics—who were mostly young men who had migrated into big cities from villages to work in construction sites or drive minibuses. At his concerts, these fans would stand in front of the stage and slash their wrists with razor blades as Müslüm Baba performed his songs about ‘brokenness.’
My version of listening to Müslüm Baba sing is reading Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return: ‘I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.’ It’s something I go back to read repeatedly, to satisfy my masochism.
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My last visit to Turkey was only a few months prior to writing this essay. Before that was in 2013, when I was still considering kesin dönüş. Back then, I regularly followed the Turkish news and attended anti-government protests in Sydney. After the ruling party, AKP, won the 2014 presidential elections, I decided that living in Turkey was not going to be an option. Everybody over there said that they wanted to be here.
After this, I began to delay visiting, because I could not bear the idea of being there only temporarily. I had always been that woman who cried at the international departures terminal, as if she were at a loved one’s funeral. Later, I didn’t want to visit because of the distance I put between myself and the idea of a homeland, believing that Turkey was a figment of my imagination.
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In 2023, powerful earthquakes shook Southeast Turkey in April of this year. Sitting on my comfortable couch in Sydney, the sight of apartment blocks turned into dust with its residents still inside triggered panic attacks. The lump in my throat become the reminder that I could never severe my ties with Turkey, even if I wanted to.
For days, I checked Live Earthquake Radar obsessively and tried in vain to contact people that I hadn’t spoken to in more than a decade.
For some Turkish citizens, the earthquake came to symbolise much more than just a natural disaster. What was buried under the rubble was a country that was ruled by greed and political alienation. So, it was difficult for my non-Turkish partner to understand what I meant when I yelled ‘there is no country left to return to’, in between sobs.
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My last visit coincided with the 2023 presidential elections. The possibility of change and being able to witness it was the only thing that motivated me to be there.
As an overseas resident I only had the option of voting in Istanbul, Ankara or at the airport before boarding an international plane, so I cast my vote at the Sydney Turkish consulate before leaving, and flew to Cyprus to vote in the run-off election. After election results were declared, I watched my mother and her friend cry, as the AKP supporters celebrated the win by shooting guns in the air.
When news outlets began to report that a large number of Turkish immigrants in Europe voted in favour of AKP, the supporters of the opposition turned their anger towards the Almancı. I was getting a haircut when the hairdresser, who was upset with the election result, asked what I thought about Turkish citizens in diaspora being able to vote during the elections. I told her about my trips to the consulate and Cyprus. Still holding my hair in her fist, she replied: ‘You have no right to do so.’
And I concluded that she was right.
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In Antalya, my parents – who made their kesin dönüş over ten years ago – and I spent a lot of time sitting in their courtyard, drinking tea, and talking about our early years in Sydney. We laughed as we reminisced about the time when mum wrapped a bedsheet around me because she could not afford to buy me the sari that I desperately wanted. Only as I’m typing this do I realise how ironic the situation was, because we were reminiscing about our lives in Australia.
At my parents’ place, I was looking at the old photo album when I came across a black and white picture of an old man holding a new a newborn, who turned out to be Gadıncı Ibrahim. I asked dad, whose name also is Ibrahim, if he remembered any other stories about his grandfather’s time in India.
Gadıncı used to work at the teahouse in the prisoner camp. I come from a country where people drink tea obsessively and drink it only black, but since I was a kid, I’ve always added milk to it. My habit is so unusual to some that multiple Turkish friends have made fun of me for being too assimilated, and I was even once jokingly called ‘Queen Victoria’ by the owner of the teahouse I frequented in Istanbul. Yet, they don’t know that most people in my father’s family also drink tea with milk. Dad and I chatted extensively over this and I realised that it is a habit Gadıncı Ibrahim must have inherited from his time in India, and passed it down to his descendants.
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Since my return to Sydney, two things have been bothering me:
How to teach my mother tongue to my hypothetical children.
Which country my body should go to when I die.
Also, I became obsessed with watching flight activities in real-time on the internet. Whenever I feel like it, I look at the flights flying over my parents’ place. I check the flight number, their origin and destination, and wonder if they can hear it.
Sometimes I look for the flights flying over my home in Pyrmont. I stare at the screen and look at the tiny plane until I can hear it and imagine all those people inside, returning somewhere. But of course, I think more about the ones like myself, who are stuck in the vicious cycle of taking plush koalas home and bringing back dozens of evil-eye beads in their suitcases.
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Deniz Ağraz is a Turkish-Australian writer and educator. Having arrived in Australia from Turkey as a teenager in the late 90s, Deniz’s writing regularly draws on the experiences of migrants. Her writing has appeared in Meniscus, ABC, diaCRITICS and elsewhere. Her short story ‘Golden Bracelet’ won the 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Award in fiction.