From Life Alone by Suzy Hansen review – Turkey in the years of Erdoğan | Books

TFortunately, the attack left only black eyes and bloodied faces. It was in Karagümrük, a tough neighborhood in the old city of Istanbul, once known for mafia types and the Turkish hard right. But, as Suzy Hansen explains, it was changed by the influx of Syrian refugees – until the locals decided enough was enough, and brought sticks, baseball bats and kebab knives.

This begins with From Life Alone, in which Hansen follows a story that examines the politics of mass immigration and internationalism at its most extreme. I’m sorry. It’s a more demanding book than that, too. An American who has lived in Istanbul and traveled to Karagümrük for more than a decade – where Turkey’s fragile democracy has been subjected to repeated attacks – hopes to describe “how ordinary people face tyranny in the 21st century – how our time feels”.

The first third part describes the history of Turkey: from the modern, attractive features of its early years to the beginning of the Turkish state. Recep Tayyip Erdogan almost a century later, his authority in many ways rejected the work of founding the country.

As the work of a journalist familiar with the country in which he grew up, From Life Alone is lovingly written and well observed. Hansen has a good eye, for example, for the light of Istanbul, “the beauty of pink and gold”. He is attentive to some of its history that cannot be appreciated: especially the large part of internal migration, of ordinary people who arrive in the city “full of bags of yogurt or tomatoes from their village”, and the construction that followed later.

Where the book comes to life is when the story reaches Hansen’s time in Turkey, specifically about Karagümrük and its people: Hüseyin, Erdoğan’s market owner; İsmail, the old provincial head, saddened by the loss of Istanbul; Ebru, a real estate agent who wants to improve the neighborhood; Tarik, a young Syrian learns the rules of the road the hard way.

Hansen is right to say that, for all of Europe’s anger over refugees over the past decade, no country has taken in more people than Turkey, which has taken in three million Syrians since its neighbor’s civil war began. In Karagümrük, which used to be a place of Turkish patriotism, street signs begin to appear in Arabic letters. However, this was not just a matter of conflict and anger. Hüseyin helped the newcomers fill out forms and understand bills. President Erdoğan, at first, spoke about welcoming the Syrian people as part of the Islamic family.

But there he was Disgusting conditions and situations, and Hansen captures well the subtle ways in which local prejudices begin to manifest: complaints that Arabs smell like cooking oil; that they walk in the wrong way; that they are dangerous for Turkish women. Here it seems that the book enters the Karagümrük genre and the nativist politics known outside of it.

Sometimes the interest is lost: writing about the closure of the independent institutions of Turkey – and adding to his previous writings – Hansen takes us to the university in Ankara, which is expected to be a canal project in Istanbul, and represents a protesting architect who is working after the devastating earthquake of 2023. All are important stories, but they do not affect the daily life in Karagümrük.

But perhaps this points to a shocking truth: that the scale of Erdoğan’s attack is so amazing – from the courts, to higher education, to the digital world – that it is impossible to understand its extent in one place. And that democracy can be elected and, like the characters in Karagümrük, the majority of people just sit back and carry on.