Born cosmopolitan, the author of a recent book on Turkey called Angry Nation believes joining the EU may have been a mistake. THEO PANAYIDES meets him
Reading through my notes, I’m worried that Kerem Oktem will sound a bit abrasive, even a bit of a scold. When you read a line like “I actually think it was a mistake of the European Union to let the Republic of Cyprus in without having resolved the [Cyprus] problem”, the temptation is to bristle and think: ‘What do you know about it?’ Actually hearing him say it, however, is much more convivial – partly because it’s a sunny day and we’re sitting on the terrace of the Aeriko Restaurant in the Old Town of Nicosia, partly because Kerem is youthful-looking and a fluent, easy talker, and partly because he’s not a politician but an academic. He’s not looking to score points, he just likes Big Ideas. He has no interest in party politics; “but I like to talk about things”.
The setting helps, somehow. Sitting in a cramped room might’ve made things oppressive, but the airy sweep of the large open balcony at the Aeriko – facing north, appropriately, so we get a panoramic view of occupied Nicosia – matches the sweep of Kerem’s ideas and the voluble gush of his personal style. I’m already sitting at a table when he bustles in, an unassuming figure in loose shirt and sunglasses. He’s 42 this year (born in 1969), but the only clues are the flecks of grey in his mop of wavy hair. The face is round with a rather hawkish nose, the facial hair – beard and moustache – thin and scraggly, the speaking style relaxed and enthusiastic. He could easily pass for a PhD student, and admits with a chuckle that his lifestyle still “has a kind of student aspect to it”. He laughs out loud – and shakes his head – when I ask if he’s married. Rather incredibly, he still lives with flatmates, sharing a house with two other people.
This is in Oxford, where he’s lived for the past 10 years. Kerem is a Research Fellow at St. Antony’s College, mainly at the European Studies Centre – and he also has a new book out, a history of modern Turkey called Angry Nation: Turkey Since 1989. That’s why he was recently in Cyprus, for a book launch and roundtable session at the University of Nicosia. Mostly, however, he’s an academic – the kind of lifelong academic who uses words like “conjunctures” (“We have to distinguish between short-term conjunctures and long-term processes”) and once co-wrote a book called In the Long Shadow of Europe: Greeks and Turks in the Era of Post-Nationalism. “Academia was always, I think, what I wanted to do,” he confirms. “I like to read, and think, and discuss. I’m a very political person – but, like, academically political.”
There are other reasons why he might have been drawn to the life of the mind. Academia, after all, is a kind of bubble, unaffiliated with any particular nation – and nationalism is one of Kerem’s main bugbears, maybe because he himself was always somewhere in between (when he looks at recent Turkish history, he says, he does so “both as an insider and as an outsider”). He was born in Germany of Turkish parents, only going back to Turkey at the age of 14 – and my mind (I admit) instantly goes to the immigrant stereotype, but it wasn’t like that at all. His dad was a doctor, his mother an Art historian; the family were “upper middle-class” – and indeed, in a sly reversal of how most Cypriots think of immigrants, Kerem was raised partly by a (Polish-born) German woman while his mother worked.
The family never planned to stay long in Germany (he also has an older sister, 10 years his senior). They only moved because Dad had “found an interesting job”, but kept delaying their return to Turkey – doubtless because the 70s were a time of political violence, culminating in the military coup of 1980. “My father was a Communist,” recalls Kerem, “my mother was a very critical mind, left-wing liberal – so I think that’s really the kind of political formation I got at home, a certain understanding of a shared humanity.” Raw power, what Kerem calls “hegemonic stories”, was something to be criticised. “A mixture of socialist values at home – of course, socialists of a bourgeois family – and this [Polish-German] lady with the refugee background, who herself was very working-class,” he recalls, summing up his childhood environment. “I think it’s those cultural, let’s say, traditions that have shaped me.”
Going back to Turkey was something of a culture shock. He passed exams and enrolled in the German high school (a rough equivalent to our own English School in Nicosia), being what he calls “a very brainy child” – but Istanbul was sleepy, and teenage life was “limited”. He studied hard, watched Dallas on TV (two channels only, black-and-white till the mid 80s, just like in Cyprus) and read a lot of books. But post-coup Turkey was also more regulated than his German childhood, even though the Generals had already handed back some of their power to a democratic government under Turgut Ozal. School uniforms seemed to get stricter with each passing year. The Drama Society found that many of the plays they wanted to stage were forbidden. Above all, “Turkey was still imagined as a completely homogeneous mass where everyone’s Turkish – and obviously, coming from the outside, I felt that this was not the case”. Once again, he was somewhere in between.
These years (the only time he’s ever spent living in Turkey) were important for Kerem Oktem – not just because he found himself, but because he almost didn’t. There were times, he admits looking back, when he definitely felt the lure of nationalism. “I remember times,” he says, “when I thought it’s a nice thing when young people march. Now I think it’s a fascist thing, I think it has no place in liberal democracy.” He was recently in Athens on March 25, he adds, “and I ran into this massive march of schoolchildren, all in uniforms, and kind of marching like soldiers. And I just freaked out when I saw that, because it reminded me of my early teenage years. I hate that. I really hate that!”
The waiter comes to take his order, but Kerem would rather talk than eat. I note that he speaks in Greek, albeit brokenly – a result of frequent visits to Greece in the past 15 years (he also visits Turkey every couple of months, and has a house in Istanbul). And what of Cyprus? He’s been coming here more often, he replies, visiting good friends from Oxford. The first time was in 2005, after the referendum.
He pauses, as if opening a new chapter. “My position before the referendum was that I wouldn’t want to visit the north,” he says carefully, “because I thought it was basically an illegal occupation. But I changed my position after the referendum, and I thought that – even though of course there are issues with the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’, it’s a proxy state of sorts, and so on – I think the Turkish Cypriots, [especially] in the time before the referendum, the big demonstrations – we had 80,000 people demonstrating, just a few metres down the road from here – I think they’ve claimed back their place in History. And that’s why I started to visit the north, and now also the south of course.”
“I really do believe that the people who are worst off in the whole, kind of, deal on Cyprus are the Turkish Cypriots,” he goes on, getting animated. “Because they’re kind of caught in this double bind, between a Turkey which is increasingly less interested in keeping them… and the Greek Cypriots who, I believe, have not really questioned how they want to live together with the Turkish Cypriots.”
Increasingly, they don’t, I point out.
“I think the island is too small to be divided,” he says firmly – but admits it “boils down to the fact that nationalism in the Republic is ethnic-based”. Turks and Greeks live in “two completely different national narratives… whereas a more inclusive Cypriot project of citizenship, where people are proud of being from this island and living together, would of course be a massive step forward”. That’s why he thinks admitting Cyprus to the EU was a mistake – because it’s muddled the idea of Cypriot-ness even further, leaving our side with few incentives to “leave [our] comfort zone” and the Turkish Cypriots as the only ones still “clinging to the idea of their Cypriot identity”.
In the end, of course, it comes down to a very simple difference. Like the EU (and like the title of his aforementioned book), Kerem is a post-nationalist, whereas many people in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus are nationalist. “Even today, in Greece, a Turk or a Muslim is not considered a full Greek,” he notes – not because Greeks hate Turks and Muslims, necessarily, but because the idea of Greek-ness is so bound up in ethnicity and religion. Needless to say, this makes no sense in a globalised world – and it’s pretty dodgy anyway, since defining oneself by ethno-religious group invariably means denying the uglier side of one’s national history. “All societies are built on myths,” says Kerem wryly. “You try to forget about the things you don’t want to remember.” Besides, people are so different: they have different interests, musical tastes, sexual orientations. Can the monolithic idea of Nation-hood really survive in a modern society?
Kerem Oktem makes a lot of sense. So why are so many people still attached to the old ideas? One answer is that it’s just a matter of time before post-nationalism becomes the norm. Another is that nationalism is more tenacious than it looks, filling a need to belong that’s part of human nature – though Kerem points out that India, for instance, is a successful democracy that doesn’t define itself by religion or ethnicity (the US is another example, though it tends to replace nationalism with a fervent American patriotism that’s much the same thing). Surely it’s enough to share some common values – “freedom”, “democracy”, stuff like that – and live in the same community, working and playing together. Isn’t it?
There’s another possible answer: that Kerem himself is atypical, a born cosmopolitan who’s always been slightly detached from the things that anchor other people. “As a child I always lived with the perspective that I’ll be leaving eventually,” he explains, adding that “I also have my reservations when it comes to settling down”. He was a Turkish child in Germany and a German child in Turkey. Nowadays he lives the life of an Oxford academic – “with High Tables, and dressing up every now and then” – spends much time talking to people half his age and listens to music, his great passion (choral music, Italian opera, Turkish folk, rembetiko). It’s a wonderfully free, unhindered life. Even family, an often-heavy anchor – especially in our part of the world – isn’t so pronounced in his daily life: a late child (his mum was already in her 40s when she had him), he’d lost both parents by his early 30s. Kerem Oktem’s life doesn’t make what he says and writes any more or less valid, of course. But maybe it explains why he says and writes it.
The waiter comes back, and this time Kerem does decide to eat something. We’ve been talking for two hours – or he’s been talking, in his fluent easy way, and I’ve been listening. He thinks about the menu, and finally settles on psito and a horiatiki. I gather my notes and look out at the view. The sun still beats down on the Old Town, on the stone roofs and laundry lines, the jutting minarets on the Turkish side and the hidden monstrosity of the Green Line – the grotesque, arbitrary point where one Angry Nation gives way to another.
