A New Perspective: Understanding Turkish and Syrian Society Through Literature

In light of the recent natural disasters that have ravaged parts of Turkey and Syria, here are two book recommendations to help readers learn more about these countries. 

On February 6, 2023, an earthquake ravaged southern and central Turkey, as well as northern and western Syria, killing at least 41,020 in Turkey and 5,800 in Syria, according to Al Jazeera. The UN reported that at least 1.5 million people were left homeless as a result of the disaster.

Turkish provinces – specifically Adana, Adiyaman, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kahramanmaras, Kilis, Malatya, Osmaniye and Sanliurfa – as well as areas such as Lattakia, Idlib, Hama and Aleppo, have been reduced to rubble. Families have been killed, cities destroyed, lives forever changed. The people of Turkey and Syria are grieving the unparalleled loss of family, friends, and parts of their country – their home.

We can gain a better understanding of their respective cultures and people through literature. Here are two books that successfully convey what Turkish and Syrian societies are like.

The Home That Was Our Country by Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek is a powerful memoir that chronicles her family’s history and their experiences during the Syrian Civil War, as well as the author’s difficulty to reconcile her American identity with her Syrian heritage. Malek skillfully weaves together personal anecdotes, family history, and political analysis to create a deeply moving account of a country in turmoil, and it is through the telling of her family’s history and personal upbringing that readers can better understand Syrian society.

In addition to Malek’s writing being both evocative and insightful, reading the book felt like a long, passionate and enthralling conversation with the author. Malek’s attention to detail and her descriptions of Damascus and other Syrian cities are particularly vivid; the author also uses her own family stories to convey the simultaneous beauty and complexity of Syrian culture.

For example, in the beginning of the memoir, the author briefly comments on the multifamily apartment buildings of Syria, which proved to be telling components of Syrian society. As the author describes, in the twenty years that Salma and her husband Ameen lived in the Tahaan, “the residents would come and go as life brought marriage, divorce, death, eviction, exile, and emigration. Unlike the solitary family unit that was the traditional Arabic household, a multifamily building brought people into intimate contact with strangers, many of whom became like family.”

Indeed, the stories that emanated from Salma and Ameen’s living in the Tahaan are ones to remember. One of the most poignant of these numerous relationships involved the “Picklers”, a large pious family of eight that, amazingly, all fit into one apartment. When the eldest daughter of the family was divorced by her husband, she was, per Syrian tradition, forced to return to live with her parents in the Tahan. Though interpretations of Islamic law vary, the daughter had already given birth to a baby boy and was expected to lose custody of him when he turned seven. Malek recalls, “…each happy birthday celebration in the building was overshadowed by the reality that he was one year closer to that age. As the day approached, the building’s women began to mourn with her, and when the boy was taken away, on his seventh birthday, their hearts broke with hers.”

Of course, there are more uplifting stories in the novel, though this particular example supports the notion that the prevalence of connection between people, regardless of whether they are related or not, is integral to current Syrian culture. In a time where Syria still suffers from a long-standing civil war and its most recent natural disaster, everyone is collectively grappling with the same losses. In fact, in a time where Syria is stricken with grief and unavoidable despair, this irreplaceable human connection proves to be the most valuable thing a person can have.

A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Faik Abasıyanık, originally published in the mid-nineteenth century, is a collection of short stories that offers a glimpse into the life of Istanbul during the early 20th century. 

The narratives in this collection are focused on the everyday lives of Istanbul’s working-class residents, and Abasıyanık uses his writing to explore themes of love, loss, and the human condition; they capture the nuances of human relationships, portraying the complexity of the human experience. Every story is told with the same characteristically elegant and charmingly straightforward tone of Abasıyanık – perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of the book, as the characters seemed sharp yet nonchalant in their analysis of the world around them.

Of the thirty-seven short stories in the book, the most intriguing story was the one after which the book was named: A Useless Man. Mansur Bey, the protagonist of the story, is not useless – just acutely depressed. For a guy who so eloquently describes the outside world, he lives in incredible fear of it, so much so that he hasn’t left his neighborhood in over seven years. One would think that his outlook on life would be glum and disparaging, but it is quite the opposite: Mansur Bey is sharp and witty in the way he thinks about others, and it’s clear that the only thing that inhibits him from leading a normal life is his emotional struggles.

The brief glimpse of his life that A Useless Man provides us with simply goes through the motions of this individual’s repetitive life. Mansur Bey interprets his quotidian experiences as meaningless, though it is the simplicity of the stories that cause readers to grow invested in the lives of ordinary people. In a way, this is a recurring pattern throughout the book: each chapter details the seemingly unspectacular life of a person, only for the stories to reveal entertaining surprises and intriguing ideas. For example, in the narrative A Useless Man, Mansur Bey ponders on the state of his life and, in a brief moment of panic-induced thinking, imagines what the rest of his life will look like until he makes a life-changing decision, something that readers can infer had always lingered in the back of this hopeless man’s mind, but never thought would actually transpire.

A Useless Man, as well as the rest of the selected stories, definitely fulfilled the intention of understanding Turkish society. Though the book does not contain stories with the wildest of plots and characters, the tone of Abasıyanık’s writing supports the simplest, most profound of stories.

There are countless books that can aid you in better understanding Turkish and Syrian society, though these two serve you well. If there is anything to retain from this article, it is that, even if you will never understand the emotional turmoil that people go through in difficult times, there will always be some form of literature that will help empathize with them. In addition to supporting people in Turkey and Syria through donations, the act of educating ourselves about these countries is just as important and integral to living in a more understanding world.