Getting kids to eat in Turkish and American households: Your food is crying behind you…and “the starving Armenians”

Posted on April 14, 2012 by lizcameron

Lately, I have been writing a set of posts about my early exposure to Islam – or anything remotely related to it (click here for a link to all posts of mine on that topic).

I am trying to get back in touch with how I came to learn about Islam – even if it was biased learning.

This is part of my effort to examine the potentially deep-seated views I may hold about M., his family, or his nation of birth, in my sub-textual reality or as the hard-core Freudian psychoanalysts might perhaps say, my id.

And it was this dredging effort, this effort to remember, that led me to turn to M. one day and ask, “canım, what did your mother say to you to get you to eat all of your food as a child?”

Of course my M., who was apparently the perfect child (which he annoyingly points out when we see screaming children throwing a tantrum in public or being too loud), explains that he never ever had a problem with this other than the times that he had pneumonia (you can read more about his childhood illness and the oxygen cure here).

During those bleak days, he told me, his mother would encourage him by saying in the sweetest of maternal voices, “canım, eat your food please, or it will go crying behind you!”  Hmmm.  I thought, “crying behind you.”

A bit of further explanation left no etymological data for analysis, and neither did a Google search.  Was this rooted in some historic challenge to food availability?  Unclear.  Probably just the non-culture bound efforts of yet another mother attempting to get her kid to eat – one of millions around the world.

As I was engaged in my googling effort, M. turned to me and asked the obvious follow-up question to mine – “what about you, canım sweetheart, what did your mom say to you?”  I sighed, put my laptop aside, and said “she told me to eat my New England boiled dinner without complaint and to remember the starving Armenians.”  M. sat up, eyes wide – “no kidding!”

Nope, no kidding.

M continued, with a look of shock: “And what did  you think about that – I mean – did you understand this was about the Armenian genocide?”

Sighing as I squinched my brain into looking-back mode, I said “honestly, no, I just had the sense that people were hungry, that there was some kind of a tragic emergency – akin to what was happening with the droughts in East Africa at that time, I suppose.  I had no idea about the hotly-contested matter of whether or not there was genocide or not. It wasn’t until I met you and you explained the controversy when we saw that Armenian genocide poster in the Armenian district here that I put it all together.”

I was referring to the massive memorial billboard about the some-say alleged atrocities committed during the Ottoman empire that M. and I had seen in the Armenian neighborhood where we do our weekly shopping for Turkish staples for our home (e.g. white cheese, really good olives, Tamek sour cherry jam, etc.)  M. got out of the car, looked at it, and hoped that he would still be welcome in the neighborhood he has been visiting for years where he delights in shared Turkish language conversation with the Armenian owners of the shop we frequent.

"Buy Liberty Bonds. Give them 2 1-2 milli...

Image via Wikipedia

At the mention of this, the Armenian genocide,  Zenne, the nervous nellie puppet crawls into a teacup and plugs her ears, but not before saying, “I am very nervous, m’lady, about you even mentioning this g-word on a Turkish-American blog.”

So, in order to honor Zenne, and to stem the potential fallout from the Turkish blog censors, I’ll leave it at that, and just ask you – what did your parents say to get you to eat your food as a child? 🙂

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On (Turkish?) teaching tactics: Roses grow where a teacher hits? Hocanın vurduğu yerde gül biter

Posted on April 13, 2012 by lizcameron

Cape Cod Tea Rose Pale Pink

A pale pink tea rose from my Granny's garden...a much nicer image than the Turkish proverb brings to mind...

Lately, dear readers, when I am not in the midst of a TSA “special” line, I have written much about the fact that I have been grading papers – a lot of papers.

As you may have gathered, it is a process I don’t love that much anymore. The heady and idealistic days of the joy of providing feedback have shifted into foggy, dark nights of a crumpled forehead and a pounding headache.

Hacivad Bey, the learned elder puppet statesman, reminds me to get back in touch with this passionate teacher side of me – that burnout nears if I embrace the pounding headache. I am too tired to respond, really. Karagöz is adamant that I should instill the practice of beating my students – and this student in particular – in order for her/him to regain his/her sense and sense of respect for me. I sigh.

And in part, that crumpling-brow-furrowed-foggy-mind with the grading is present because of the significant push-back I get from my students on a regular basis. As in, sometimes quite “in-your-face” and over the top push-back. As in, last week I had to ask a student to leave the classroom due to her/his disrespect. The issue that led this student over the edge was a test – or rather – the idea of having to take one.

Kenne, the Karagöz puppet best known as the Queen of Manners and Ladylike Behavior Even in the Classroom faints at the mention of this experience of mine. She awakes upon the cacophonous fanning of the chorus of little dancing ladies, who are all waving their rose-scented handkerchiefs over her in a hullaballoo of tissue-fabric-fed-frenzy akin to a fan…and she says “a lady has no place teaching this in the classroom, you should be at home with your husband. Why work in conditions such as this?”

I have a reputation for being a demanding professor – expecting the best possible work from my students – and yet at the same time doing my best to meet them toe to toe in order to support them along the way. For some, it is too much, I suppose, but I have my standards and feel strongly that our profession – a profession made up mostly of women – needs to be better at gate-keeping – but I digress.

Generally, my philosophy about teaching is summed up by Bertrand Russell‘s quote: “No [person] can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value.”

Perhaps this emblem of my teaching philosophy is why my reaction to today’s post’s title – a famous Turkish proverb about teachers hitting students for their own good and for the good of the learning process – left me a bit speechless when I saw it. I was googling around to relate my own thinking about teaching to potential Turkish perspectives on teaching, and found this one. I am sure that many pedagogical approaches worldwide are similar, but as this is a blog about Turkish-American life in great part, that’s where I am heading in my mind today. While I grew up hearing about the teachers that beat my grandfather and grandmother, with a ruler, on the palms of the hand (seems counter-productive to the writing effort, if you ask me), I was surprised when M. first told me of the French nuns who beat him for his messy papers as a child.

Of course, what those nuns apparently did not seem to care about was the fact that the messiness of the papers was related to M.’s metabolic disorder that causes him to sweat excessively on his hands (and feet), with rivulets of sweat pouring down his pen onto his paper…the poor tyke. As a result, we could not be more diametrically opposed, M. and I. I love-love-love school – and M. hate-hate-hates it. It’s not that he does not read, or reason, or engage in treks of intellectual curiosity, it’s just that he had a terrible time in school with those nuns and all of that sweat. There was no mercy, and the roses bloomed on M.’s hands.

While I will have little mercy in the way of upholding standards and expectations, I aim for the production of rose blooms of another sort.

Esma, the hippie puppet tells me “keep the faith in the face of burnout, m’lady!”

And I do.

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On post 9/11 travel

Posted on April 12, 2012 by lizcameron

When I last left you, I was whirling back through time and space  pondering the presence of angels – or melekler – in the middle of the Haghia Sofya in Istanbul.

Today, I wished for those melekler to make their presence known today, but did not feel the swish of their wings in any palpable way.  This is, perhaps, because I was captive to the air travel industry in America – an industry and a mental and physical space that could use a few more melekler, if you ask me.

Kenne, the Queen of Manners and the Maintenance of Ladylike Behavior tells me that yes, indeed, the depravities of the TSA experience certainly call for at least one melek to be devoted to the cause.  She is still horrified at the images that the TSA lackeys see when one is scanned.  I remind her that she is a puppet made out of wax paper, and they really can’t see much of what is under her clothing, because she is a figment of flatness…she sniffs her disapproval.  She isn’t sure of anything anymore.

But here I am, Kenne or no Kenne, the overly-anxious yet justifiably paranoid wife of a Turkish-American man, the melekler have helped me to become attuned to the sideways glances followed by subtle hand signals and unexplained numerical codes written on boarding passes made by TSA lackeys upon seeing my husband’s country of birth on his U.S. passport.  These are the glances, hand signals and numerical codes that precede the “randomly selected” questions that are posed to M.  I am now used to watching M.’s gentle and gracious external demeanor as he is walked through the questions we now know by heart.

Karagöz, that trickster of a puppet, the namesake of the whole puppet troupe, is usually bound and gagged by his fellow puppets in these moments, for fear that he will engage in some excited utterance that will incur the wrath of the TSA lackeys.  So far, he has been thwarted.

Sometimes, now, such as this morning, the puppets and I are convinced that I am now sometimes “randomly” selected for the TSA special as well.

I say this, and the entire Karagöz puppet troupe concurs, as I (we, they remind me), were subjected to 2 special “extra” searches today.  Who knows.

In any case, as the overly-anxious yet justifiably paranoid wife of a Turkish-American man, I take this lens I have been given, the joy of seeing the world through a cross-cultural mirror,  and use it to observe the goings-on around me during my traveling moments.

And today, in my 4 a.m. sleepiness as I trudged across the cement-polished floor in my stocking feet, dragging my belongings along behind me, I was not disappointed as I saw several scarf-bedecked Muslim women getting the extra wanding and puff-machine treatment in the “special” aisle I had just come through.  The new version of “driving while Black” in America.

So there I was, waiting for the plane to load, trying not to think all about this as I was squeezed in between two businesspeople of corpulent proportions, the puppets politely indicating their protest with not-so-subtle jabs, I willed myself away into the world of my iPhone and found this image about the infamous, inimitable and I suppose I must admit, somewhat necessary TSA despite all of my whinging.  I cannot attest to the veracity of the facts therein, but wanted to share it with you, care of the scintillating blog Life of Refinement.

Let’s see what happens on the way home.  The Karagöz puppets sigh and shake their heads.

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