Music, Fate and State: Turkey's Arabesk DebateAuthor(s): Martin StokesSource: Middle East Report, No. 160, Turkey in the Age of Glasnost (Sep. - Oct., 1989), pp. 27-30Published by: Middle East Research and Information ProjectStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3013448Accessed: 31/12/2009 05:17

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f

Music, Fate and

State: Turkey's

Arabesk Debate

Martin Stokes

In

a violent act of vengeance, the kind of crime of honor

which fills Turkish jails and the pages of the tabloids, a

lorry driver in Istanbul catches his wife and boss in

flagrante delicto, shoots them both and flees to his home

village. The police surround the village house. The man

surrenders and is taken away. He had left his village to find

work in Libya, but through a series of accidents and chance

encounters while being detained at the employment agency in

Istanbul, he found work in a haulage firm and eventually set

up his own business. Drunk and confused one evening, he was

seduced by his next-door neighbor, a single woman, who

eventually pressured him into marrying her. But the relation?

ship between the sophisticated urbanite and the villager

struggling to make his way in the big city is doomed from the

beginning. The telos of the drama is inexorable. Fate (kader)

impels the hero from rural poverty to urban peripherality, dishonor, violence and finally, not even granted the release of

death, incarceration. This outlines the plot of a Turkish film of the early 1980s

which featured the popular Arabesk singer Ferdi Tayfur, called Bende Ozledim ("I too yearned"). Hardly fiction, these films touch upon truths known and felt by their audiences, devotees and critics alike. The identification of the film stars

with their films is striking, at first sight confusing. Most

Arabesk stars use their own names unchanged in their films?

Ferdi Tayfur is invariably "Ferdi," Orhan Gencebay "Orhan," Ibrahim Tatlises "Ibrahim," Kuguk Emrah "Emrah" and so

on. Many replicate known details of the lives of the stars; stories of migration from the impoverished southeast, alien?

ation in the gecekondu (squatter towns) of the big city, and

the final discovery of musical talent. This leads perhaps to

some measure of material security, even fame, but offers no

protection from the fundamental dilemmas and questions of

identity that face the migrant in the city. Caught between two

conflicting systems of economic organization, legality, honor

and morality, how is he to define himself? How is he to find

his own language? Deprived of speech, the answer lies in music, more particu?

larly the Arabesk music which has enjoyed unrivalled popular? ity in Turkey since the late 1970s. Arabesk poses a number of

problems to the Turkish government and the urban intelligen? tsia alike. It presents a metaphor of the disintegration of state and person, and an abandonment to fate which is clearly at odds with both the dominant Kemalist ideology and (quite separately) Islamic orthodoxy.

It is, firstly, a music inextricably linked with the culture of the gecekondu, literally the "night settlements" which mush? roomed around Turkey's large industrial cities after the Men- deres government program of rural regeneration in the 1950s

produced a large rural labor surplus. By the 1970s these

squatter towns accounted for up to 60 percent of the popula? tion of cities such as Istanbul.

Sociological research projects celebrated the beneficial ef? fects of life in the squatter towns. The gecekondular not only provided an environment in which the migrant was able to

Martin Stokes is a research student at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford.

Middle East Report ? September-October 1989 27

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retain his links with his home village, but was able to partici?

pate increasingly in national cultural life, spending more time

reading the newspapers, attending the cinemas, participating in elections, getting an education and so on. Politicians

promised title deeds to gecekondu dwellers in return for their

votes at national and, more recently, municipal elections, thus

accelerating the process of assimilation and extending public

transport, water and refuse collecting services.1 "Aside from

low income, drab looking houses, and the lack of normal city facilities," Kemal Karpat wrote in 1976, "few squatter towns

show any symptoms of social or psychological disintegration, moral depravity and crime."2

Culture of Disintegration

But the political and economic disorders which led up to the

military coup of September 1980 dashed this rosy picture of a

healthily urbanizing society. The sociological construction of

the gecekondu as a beneficial environment of social change could no longer be sustained. It was at around this time that

Arabesk assumed its present form. The actual social and

economic disintegration of urban Turkish life in the late 1970s

and the perceived birth of Arabesk were thus inextricably linked. Both were explicable in terms of the unstable identity of the gecekondu.

The picture of social and individual decay, the gecekondu and Arabesk is compounded in the concept of "dolmuq cul?

ture." The dolmuq (literally "stuffed") are privately-owned cars for hire, mostly 1950s-vintage Chevrolets or DeSotos,

travelling established routes within a city, or small minibuses

connecting nodal points at the edge of the city proper with the

outlying gecekondu. When I began to look at Turkish music

late in 1986, people laughingly told me that if I was interested

in Arabesk, I should take a trip on a dolmus. to the Arabesk

semtleri (districts)?that is, the gecekondular of Istanbul.

The dolmuq are indeed gaudy temples of Arabesk culture.

Glossy stickers proclaim lines and slogans from recent

Arabesk hit songs. Other icons of Arabesk culture to be found

in the dolmuq?pictures of singers, the little boy with a huge

glistening tear running down his rosy cheek, the little girl

praying in front of a representation of Mecca?decorate cafes

and other public places with little sense of contradiction

alongside pictures of Ataturk, the Bosphorus bridge and the Turkish flag.

Istanbul's central dolmuq station, Topkapi garage, is at a

point midway between the gecekondu and the old city. Close

to the famous brothels of Sulukule and surrounded by grave?

yards conspicuous with their tall cypress trees, this area

occupies a prominent place in the urban Turkish imagination. It is a twilight zone spatially, socially and morally. Within the

walls lie monuments to Ottoman Turkish civilization; without

lies the ephemeral junk of modern Turkey's trash culture.

Within, the palaces and mosques; without, the beer houses

and brothels. Within, order and the living; without, chaos and

the dead. It is easy to see the way in which Topkapi garage and the

dolmuq driver represent the perceptual borders and confused

identity of the gecekondu dweller, the social and spiritual "state" {hal) described by Arabesk. Indeed, a number of films

depict the protagonist of the Arabesk drama as a driver, and

many scenes in a number of films are set unambiguously at

Topkapi garage. Many migrants to the city may well in fact

invest in a vehicle and work as dolmuq drivers.3 Such is the

identification of dolmuq driving and Arabesk that Ferdi

Tayfur was BP's obvious choice for their Turkish motor oil

commercials in 1987.

Opponents of Arabesk use such terms as "cancer" and

"epidemic" to describe the phenomenon, and extend the

language of social pathology to the individual. Researcher

Faruk Guglu claims that "of 681 cases of suicide in Ankara, 28

can be directly attributed to the effects of Arabesk culture."4 Orthodox sociologists in Turkey see Arabesk as arising out of

an impasse in the social and economic development of the

country. In a recent meeting discussing "the roots of Arabesk

culture," Emre Kongar, one of Turkey's leading sociologists, situated Arabesk in the gap between "feudal-urban" and "industrial" culture.5 By implication, the industrial transfor? mation of Turkish society will eventually solve the Arabesk

problem. The Turkish intelligentsia essentially sees Arabesk as a

problem of culture. Kongar's determinism is not really typical, since most see Arabesk as a threat about which something both should and can be done. The manipulability of culture is

implicit in the philosophy of Ziya Gokalp, the ideologue who

provided the intellectual groundwork of Turkish nationalism in the early years of the republic. Urban Ottoman culture was a product of Eastern "civilization" (medeniyet), but the real

basis of Turkish "culture" (hars) lay in the customs, music,

language and literature of rural Anatolia. It was essential that the national reconstruction of Turkey under the umbrella of "Western civilization" be accompanied by a parallel re?

construction of rural Turkish culture. Stripping away the accumulated junk of Ottoman civilization would reveal an

28 Middle East Report ? September-October 1989

essential core of Turkishness underneath. In this way, the inevitable process of development in Turkey would not com?

promise its cultural roots.

Performance Control

Thus, in the 1930s, the government instigated a program of

collecting Turkish music with the initial assistance and advice of Bela Bartok, the Hungarian composer and ethnomusicolo-

gist. It continues today, now in the hands of the Turkish

Radio and Television (TRT). The lera Denetimi ("Perfor? mance Control") of the TRT Folk Music Department weeds

out those songs which betray the influence of Ottoman art

music, in particular through the use of the modal constructs known as makam; they are neither notated nor performed. The TRT archive is intended as a fund of purely Turkish melodic and poetic elements which will eventually be recom? bined according to Western compositional techniques. The result will be a music which remains faithful to the core cultural values of traditional Anatolian folk music and at the same time will ultimately allow Turkish music to participate without compromise in a European arena.

It goes without saying that Arabesk stands in direct opposi? tion to this official Kemalist conception of culture which

considers folk (halk) music to be simple, unaffected, direct,

sung in "pure Turkish," and employing essentially diatonic

(i.e. relatively simple) melodic constructions. Arabesk, in

contrast, is contrived, circumlocutory, couched in highly Arabicized Turkish, and based upon complex and chromatic

modes ambiguously related to the makam of Ottoman art

music. The singers and performers of Turkish halk music are

the uneducated, simple but honest peasantry of Anatolia. The

singers and performers of Arabesk include gypsies, homosex?

uals, transvestites, transsexuals and young children?the

ambiguously sexed and socially marginalized denizens of an urban demi-monde.

Arabesk is, furthermore, unquestionably foreign. Egypt pro? duced a distinct form of popular music in the late 1920s which,

partially as a result of the powerful broadcasting frequency of

the Egyptian radio station in the 1930s and the immense

popularity of Egyptian films from this period onward, reached wide audiences in Turkey. The prodigious output of Muham?

mad 'Abd al-Wahhab was particularly notable. Translations of his songs by Askin Glizya?lan, sung by Hafiz Burhan

Sesyilmaz, became the most popular records in Turkey during this period.

In 1948, Egyptian films and the performance of Egyptian film music in Arabic were banned in Turkey. This had the

immediate effect of creating an industry around the transla?

tion and imitation of Egyptian film music, but geared towards a Turkish audience and addressing itself to Turkish social

concerns. What had been neither fully understood nor entirely appropriated, rapidly became assimilated with indigenous conceptions of drama and music. What had been intended as a death blow turned out to be the kiss of life. Moreover, the new

music was fuelled by a continual input of the latest fashions in

Arab music. Most influential were the songs of the Lebanese

singer Ferid al-Atrache; the powerful dance rhythms, the domination of the voice over the ensemble and the use of large choruses of violins in the orchestra engaged in a dialogue with the voice provided the main stylistic elements of the popular urban music that came to be known as Arabesk in Turkey.

So Arabesk poses a threat not just in terms of what it

represents and depicts but, quite simply, for what it is?an alien cultural artifact. Kemalist intellectuals have little doubt about the dangers posed by Arabesk, and what measures are

necessary. Elsewhere on Turkey's political spectrum, Muslim intellectuals have even less doubt. Music as a whole falls into the juridical category of mubah?neither specifically ap?

proved nor forbidden but merely tolerated by Islam. Arabesk,

though, is associated with the pleasures of the meyhane and the brothel.6 It further espouses an attitude that goes beyond the Turkish Muslim orthodox belief in fate into fatalism

(kadercilik). In the orthodox version, a person has freedom of

choice, although God knows exactly what that choice will be. The fatalism of Arabesk asserts that a person is trapped by fate just as he or she is trapped by society. These lyrics from

"Bagri yanik" by Muslum Glirses curse fate in the strongest available rhetoric.

In this my youth you, fate, have thrown me into troubles Without mercy, you, fate, have inflamed my breast You are treacherous, you are felek. tyrannical, fate, fate.

Ozal and the Nightclub Queen

The attitude of the military regime in the years following the 1980 coup was quite unambiguous. The TRT permitted nei?

ther the broadcast of Arabesk music nor the showing of Arabesk films. Arabesk was not so much repressed as, like the

gecekondu itself, simply ignored. Against this, the highly equivocal attitude of Prime Minis?

ter Turgut Ozal's Motherland Party is particularly striking. Early in 1988, the prime minister appeared in close and

apparently friendly conversation with Arabesk star Orhan

Gencebay at the society engagement of Glil?ah Kocyigit (daughter of film star Hiilya) and Selim Soydan. For the music press, "Prime Ministerial Support for Arabesk" became front page news of almost scandalous significance.7 Subse?

quently, the Motherland Party adopted one of the most

popular Arabesk songs of 1987-88, Seni Sevmeyen Olsun

("May those who do not love you die") as its slogan for the 1988 election campaign. The tabloid press widely reported Ozal's attendance at a series of Arabesk concerts. The TRT

attempted to remain aloof, but backed down eventually early in 1989 when the prime minister's wife, Semra Ozal, insisted

upon the presence of transsexual Arabesk star Blilent Ersoy at a televised official party. The 1988 return of the flamboyantly dressed nightclub queen from what effectively amounted to exile in West Germany (she had been banned from giving stage performances in Turkey) was an event of profound resonance in itself.

For Ozal's center-left critics, the Motherland Party's per-

Middle East Report ? September-October 1989 29

ceived assimilation of Arabesk is analogous to the well known

involvement of the Ozal family in Istanbul's soccer politics.

Turgut himself is a keen supporter of Fenerbahge, his wife of

Be?iktas, but this did not stop him carrying out a major

publicity coup when he attended the quarter-final of the

European Cup-Winners Cup at Cologne on March 17 to-watch

the major Istanbul team, Galatasaray, tie with Monaco and

advance to the semi-finals.

For other critics, Ozal's approval of Arabesk goes beyond the mere courting of the popular vote. A principal requirement of political parties standing for elections in Turkey is that

they are "Atatlirkist," that is, committed to the politics of

modernization and secularism. Yet the Motherland Party has

presided over the reinstatement of religious instruction in

school curricula. In January 1986, a top Motherland Party

official, Mehmet Kegeciler, endorsed the "democratic right" of women to wear modest ("Islamic") headgear, directly chal?

lenging the "hat law" of the Ataturk era.8 The party's equivo? cal response to the ongoing "turban debate," along with a

series of exposes of its involvement in Saudi-financed Islamist

projects, have convinced Ozal's secular, liberal critics of his

insufficient commitment to "Ataturkism" and prompted wor?

ries that the military might intervene to check the apparently inevitable slide towards "religious reaction."9

Some would explain the link between the Motherland

Party, religious reaction and Arabesk in the following terms.

Arabesk inculcates the quintessential but double-edged vir?

tues of stoicism, passivity and the acceptance of fate. Ozal's

free market politics have benefited a wealthy minority at the

expense of an increasingly impoverished and alienated major?

ity, precisely the situation described in Arabesk. But instead

of enabling the displaced workforce of the gecekondu to take

effective political action by focusing on the exploitation, Arabesk presents political and economic power as an ontologi? cal fact of human existence.

Turning the Arabesk star into a hero is nothing more than a

small measure of compensation for a situation of ruthless

exploitation. Many Turks see fatalism (kadercilik) as the

most essential of traditional Islamic values. They are not

surprised that the most rapid beneficiaries of Ozal's free-

market reforms have been the urban representatives of irtica.

To put it crudely: this Islamically-cloaked nouveau-riche

promotes an ideology of passivity in order to facilitate the

exploitation of their work force. The knot constructed from

these strands is tied even tighter by the idea, often pointed out

to me by Turkish musicians arid musicologists, that Arabesk

takes its inspiration from not only Arab popular music, but

also from the cantillation of the Koran, the call to prayer and

the Turkish mystical poetry perhaps best represented by the

Mevlid-i gerifof Slileyman Qelebi, commemorating the birth

of the Prophet. So there is some irony in recent attempts to "reform"

Arabesk. The First Music Congress, organized by Minister of

Culture and Tourism, Mustafa Tinaz Titiz, endorsed the

notion of "Acisiz Arabesk" ("Arabesk without Pain"). The

state extended sponsorship to the new, approved Arabesk, in

the form of a collaboration between veteran Arabesk star

Hakki Bulut and light music composer Esin Engin, called

"Sevenler Kiskanir" ("Those who love are jealous"). Turkish

composer Attila Ozdemiroglu points out that "the Govern?

ment is starting a fight against a situation of its own mak?

ing."10 Not only does the present attempt to reform Arabesk

appear hypocritical and cynical, but its chances of success are

generally considered to be slim. Hakki Bulut himself repre? sents an older generation of Arabesk singers who have been

superceded by the recent vogue for child stars (following the

remarkable success of Kliglik ("Little") Emrah and more

recently Kliglik Ceylan). For him, the whole exercise appears to be nothing more than a bid to boost his flagging popular?

ity.11 The results lack bite, as the lyrics of "Sevenler Kiskanir"

demonstrate very clearly:

I am jealous of the wind The wind and the shadow I am jealous of the earth you walk on And the white pearl that adorns your neck

Jealousy is in the nature of love Those who really love feel it in their hearts I am even jealous of my three-year-old brother When it comes to you

You are the most beautiful rose among roses You are the pearl of all God's creatures Let no eyes see you Because I am jealous of them.

Arabesk provides a focus for an aesthetic of music which

pervades the vocabulary of both "official" folk music and

urban art music. In their separate ways, each type obsessively

explores the alienation, separation and the "burning" which

supposedly underpins the performance of Turkish music in

general. Not surprisingly, the devotees of Arabesk seldom

distinguish it from folk and art music at all, even though TRT

experts explicitly deny links between Arabesk, art and folk

music. All music tells the same story, and this story is

essentially one of fate, and the disintegration of society and

individual. For these reasons alone, continued state pressure

upon popular culture is unlikely to produce the desired results.

"Arabesk without pain" would simply cease to be Arabesk. ?

Footnotes

1 Alternatively, when no political capital is to be gained from such a gesture, the state will bulldoze a gecekondu to the ground with little or no provision for its inhabitants. On July 24,-1987 the mayor of Izmir, Burhan Ozfatura, ordered the destruction of the gecekondu of Kurucesme, in the Buca district of Izmir. This attracted a great deal of unwanted publicity when a certain Abdiilhadi Giine? from Kars (in the east of the country) took his young daughter as a hostage on top of his gecekondu home and threatened to throw her off the roof if the bulldozers came near. His protest was unsuccessful. (See Cumhuriyet, July 27, 1987, p. 1.) 2 Kemal Karpat, The Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Ur-

banization (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 24. Also see Nephan Saran, "Squatter Settle? ment (Gecekondu) Problems in Istanbul," in P. Benedict and E. Tiimertekin and F. Mansur, eds., Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), pp. 327-361. 3 A similar cult of the vehicle has been noted by Mark Duffield among migrant workers in Sudan. See Maiurno: A Study of Rural Capitalism in the Sudan (London: Ithaca Press, 1981), pp. 111-121. 4 Milliyet, July 13, 1987. 5 Hafta Sonu, February 29, 1989.

6 Meyhane (cafes selling alcohol) were originally the shops from which non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire were permitted to buy wine. 7 Muzik Magazin, January 1988. 8 Nokta, January 18, 1987. 9 Erkan Akin and Omer Karasapan, "The Rabita Affair," Middle East Report, #153 (July-August 1988). 10 Dateline, March 25, 1989. 11 Hafta Sonu, March 7, 1989.

30 Middle East Report ? September-October 1989