Sodom and Gomorrah on the Bosphorus: Emergence of Modern

Sodom and Gomorrah on the Bosphorus: Emergence of
Modern Gender Roles in Turkey
Murat Seçkin
Nationalism and nation building activities need heroes and
heroes are traditionally men by definition. The ideology of nation
building needs to define a new masculinity and this is what we
witness in the emergence of Turkish Republic at the beginning of the
twentieth century. As R. W. Conell asserts, “gender ... [is] historically
changing and politically fraught”i so we observe how gender roles
and relations are constructed in this historically significant period in
Turkey. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu’s novel Sodom and Gomorrah,
written in 1928, reflects the period of 1920-22 when Istanbul was
under Allied Armies’ occupation; and the war of independence was
organized and fought by a nationalist underground located in Ankara
to establish the indepent Turkish state. This period of history, the
Armistice, is known to the Turks as “one of the worst periods of
Turkish history”.ii The novel reflects the nationalistic ideology of the
new republic which still regarded Istanbul (as it was the capital of the
Ottoman Empire where the novel takes place) with suspicion.
I would like to discuss Sodom and Gomorrah to examine the
gender issues used as metaphors to expound problems of
westernization and modernization in Turkey. The society which is
creating itself as a modern nation-state defines its gender roles
according to its nationalistic ideology, and therefore Karaosmanoglu
deals with the questions of how the East and the West regard the East
and its gender issues. The new nation is an imagined one and so is its
national identity, as Benedict Anderson suggests.iii This imagined
community must create its enemy or “the Other”iv so that it can
establish itself as the politically, economically, and culturally
dominant factor in the new regime.
The author’s apparent
homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny, which are shared by the
new Republic, informs the emerging modern gender roles in the
Middle East at the start of the last century.
Murat Seçkin
The novel was originally addressed to a reading public who
fought the war and established the new republic in Ankara. Turkey
was then going through an accelerated program of westernization
since the nineteenth ccentury and its readers were eager to turn to the
West for cultural inspiration. The West was the inspiration but it was
also a source of anxiety for the readers since it came fraught with
new and confusing gender roles for the men and women. The author
makes a distinction between the “right way” of modernization
(nationalistic, authoritarian, anti-capitalistic, and above all
heterosexist) and the “wrong ways” of liberal modernity whose
symbol is Istanbul.
As the title of the novel suggests, we enter the world of the
Old Testament and Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherch du temp
perdu. On the one hand we have the story of Sodom and Gomorrah
(as interpreted by the Christian ideology that the Cities of the Plain
were punished for their sin of their male population for the same sex
desires) and on the other, what Karaosmanoglu sees in Proust’s novel
is a critique of an extremely decadent society at the end of the
nineteenth century Paris. The novel’s hero Necdet is presented as a
Western educated man (mainly in Germany and France) who seeks to
find his place in a nationalistic Turkish society that is emerging from
the ashes of a multilingual, multicultural, multiethnic Ottoman
Empire.v
The ideology of nation building needs to define a new
masculinity first. The Ottoman Empire was, in the eyes of the West,
the nexus of eastern masculinity; however, at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, due to repeated defeats in the wars with the West,
a new consciousness arose in the Empire to change the fate of
military setbacks. Being defeated in war is always a blow to the
masculine ego and the defeated regards the defeater from the
perspective of a less-than-manly position. This is, of course, one way
to rationalize the need for the reform movement; the conservative
asserts the need for change only when his manhood is endangered.
However, the state and the intellectuals were regarding the West with
“a secret fear and loathing” yet also with “an admiration and
something that comes close to love.”vi
Istanbul is shown from the beginning a city teeming with evil
individuals who are evil for the reason of their being foreign (both
the occupying army and those Levantines who have settled there for
commercial reasons) or for failing to be Muslim and Turkish. On the
one hand we have a new generations of Muslims who is fed up with
the economic crises at the beginning of the twentieth century look at
the capitalistic system more favorably; and on the other, the
inheritence of the Ottoman civil and military bureaucracy who
regards this profit oriented commercialism and war profiteering as
disgusting.vii
Men in Turkey, whatever culture and religion they belonged
to for centuries, learned to be men from the ideology of Islam that
shaped their lives. With the westernization of society, new models of
being a man came into play. One of the new models was the
establishment of the concept of Turkishness that informed the new
republic. This novel shows the confused years just before the
establishment of the new nation state Turkey.
We see a catalogue of different gender roles for men, both
foreign and local. The foreigners are mainly British and French
officers whose ‘abnormalities’ are obviously overstressed. Major
Will is rumoured to be the second in command to the British Police
Forces is presented as a man with animal traits: he is said to be ‘pink
like a new-born pig’ (16) and ‘has huge and soft hands, like white
bear’s paws’ (101). The character is created as a man that would look
abhorent to the Turkish readers. Being like a pig is naturally the most
disgusting animal for a Muslim reader. He is also a womanizer. Then
there is Jackson Read who is created to be too beautiful; he is a
heterosexual, yet he is likened to Dorian Gray. And worst of them all
we see Marlow who is a homosexual.
Our problematic hero Necdet struggles through the streets and
salons of Istanbul in his quest for becoming a new Turkish man. To
show this quest the author makes him meet the representatives of the
British occupying forces, Levantine and non-Muslim men and
women, and Turkish people who have degenarated into monsters due
to their advanced levels of westernization. The book, like Proust’s, is
constructed around large gatherings which illustrate the horrors of
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enemy invasion, the corruption of foreign soliders, the collaboration
non-Muslim locals with the enemy, and worst of all, degeneration of
Turkish people.
In the middle of the book, a rich and enigmatic British army
major throws a party in his mansion on the Bosphorus. He also has a
Turkish aristocrat aide-de-camp (son of a financially ruined family
due to the war with England) who has become a servant to Will. This
is what has happened to Turkish masculinity, Karaosmanoglu seems
to be saying, a mere servant to the occupying forces. It is corrupted
by imitative westernization, evil capitalism, and military defeat
caused by the first two. He looks back to a Ottoman past with
yearning where none of these evils invaded the habitus of individuals
as well as the public arena, yet he, himself is extremely muddled due
to his western education which has stripped the vestiges of his
Ottoman past.
Our hero Necdet’s confusion arises from his insecurity of his
masculinity. He seem to have the right impulses of a Turkish man:
basically he hates the foreigners, foreign armies that occupy his
homeland, and their non-Muslim collaborators. These traits he has
inherited from his Ottoman ancestors. Yet he is a westernized man
himself; even though he hates foreigners, he limits this hatred to the
Anglo-Saxon cultures. He is described as someone who has sown his
wild oats when he was abroad. As a true Ottoman gentleman, he has
“experienced all the sensual pleasures of European life while he was
there and even had a few mistresses.”viii He is a man and he has done
what he is entitled to do. But the possibility of his fiancée Leyla to
have a sensual life of her own will create a major blow to his male
ego. He is learning the new prerequites to be a nationalist as well. In
a drunken state Necdet leaves a party after having spats with Leyla
and her liberal ways with foreign officers; he then stumbles into a bar
in Pera and watches his surroundings like a good racist. The bar
teems with the non-Muslim Ottomans and all Necdet does is to crane
his neck, observe the horrifying scene and analyse it. He sees a
conclave of evil forces having fun at the expense of the newly
emerging Turkish nation. They are all depicted with the prejudice of
what the nationalists see as the cause of the fall of the Ottoman
Empire. He sees drunk Greek shop assistants joke and scuffle around
in a vulgar mannerix; on a table opposite him there is an Armenian
man who “carries the large and round spectacles on an olive skinned,
heavy eyebrowed, unrefined primitive face as if it is the only sign of
elegance and civilization.” This man is not only Armenian (therefore,
‘unrefined and primitive’) but a man of business, a capitalist who
‘might be figuring out the easiest and darkest ways of making a
financial swindle.”x The worst of all, of course, is the way women
behave; they are shown to be all after one thing and that is to capture
the eye of an officer of the occupying armies. A man may be driven
into insanity when his country is occupied by foreign armies and
when he sees certain evil elements of his country, due to their racial,
religious, economic, cultural, and gender formations, feel happy
about this. Necdet’s feelings of emasculation escalate and he has no
way out but drinking himself senseless. What Necdet observes, of
course, through the ideology of the new Republic that non-Muslim
groups are not only racially inferior but also their greed clashes with
the anti-capitalistic, corporatist economic system that is being
promoted by the Ankara goverment. The foreigners and their local
accomplices not only bring about ‘immorality’ but a new capitalistic
system which finds adherents even among the Muslim bourgeoisie.
Leyla’s father, for instance, gives parties in his house to foreign
dignitaries so that he can better his chances in trade relations. He is
less than careful in his protection of his daughter’s ‘honour’ due to
his interest in commercial gain.
If we go back to the ball of Will, we see that the greatest
crime he has committed is his transformation of the mansion: once
the house of an aristocratic Muslim Ottoman family, it has become
the temple of orgies for the foreign enemy.His party starts early and
both the locals and the the members of the Occupation Army and
their wives mingle with the visiting American billionaires. The Turks
are regarded by the foreigners as zoo animals and the former are
busy to inspect the mansion and its luxurious oriental wonders they
never imagined existed in the Orient (103). When the guests tour the
house they come across Will’s bedroom which was the mesdjid of the
mansion until the Muslim owners had to leave. Then comes the
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sacriligious part. Major Will’s bedroom lights are turned on and we
see that he has transformed the room into
a bedroom filled with erotic pictures and statues.For instance,
the mihrab there is a statue of a couple, as large as two ten year
old children, kissing on the lips and coiling around each other’s
bodies. From a distance, these give the impression that it is a
work of art but at close inspection one saw how these plaster of
paris statues were made for lecherous purposes. There were
also wall to wall pornografic paintings.xi
We see the Muslim temple blasphemed by a Christian
marauder.These shocking details are lovingly admired by all who
visit the room. The visitors and their exclamations help to create the
shocking scene for there appears to be the ideal decadent atmosphere
where the author expects God’s wrath to strike it down any minute as
it happened in the Bible.
The party progresses with wild abandon. This “Babylonian
gathering”xii turns into an orgy of scandals where two “Sodomite
girls[sic]” are captured “entwined as one.” People realize that Will,
Fanny Moore and Nermin have dissapeared and they find them in his
bedroom: two women making love, naked on his bed and Will is
watching them from behind a curtain. Such “outrageous” incident is
laughed over by the guests.xiii Moore is a lesbian American journalist
who seduces the American educated young woman Nermin. This
debauchery is then ogled by the decadent British. Moore’s lesbianism
is understandable to Necdet because she is American and therefore
bad, but this is unacceptable for a Turkish woman. Yet Nermin has
been educated by these “abnormal” American at a school founded
and ran by missionaries.
Another shocking character in the novel is Captain Marlow; he
represents the homosexual masculinity and is presented in an ideal
man of Sodom. We see all the western/Christian prejudices about
homosexuality played on him. He comes to the East to have sex with
eastern men, following the tradition of Lord Byron. Marlow says he
has come to Istanbul “with the dream to be ravished by half-wild
handsome faced Turks.”xiv He is, at first accosted by Muslim woman
Azize who falls in love with him and tries to lure him by turning
herself into an Aziyade figure of Pierre Loti’s eponymous novel.xv Of
course, Marlow ignores her and yet visits her because he has a sexual
interest on her husband Atif. He is a professional gambler and a
bisexual man. His gender role is explained by his marginal status in
society and his shady business interests. But even he regards Marlow
with disdain for he is a homosexual man (and obviously Atif does not
regard himself as one) and a foreigner and makes him shave of his
moustache. This emasculation reduces the English man to a
feminized position in his eyes and puts himself in a superior position.
All these anomalies present a major blow to the newly developing
consciousness of Necdet. As the Turkish Army approaches Istanbul,
he focuses on the new patriarchal system which will make a new
man of him: a man who abandons his beloved Leyla and her wanton
sexuality and he will become a monogamous, loyal husband, and
civil servant helping the corporatist state to run smoothly.
Murat Seçkin
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i Masculinities. London, 1995
iii ‘Mütareke.’ Hilmi Ziya Ülken in Mütareke. Ed. H:N: Pepeyi.
Istanbul, 1938. Cited in Turk Romaninda Isgal Istanbulu (Occupied
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i Imagined Communities. London, 1983.
iii
i Edward Said. Orientalism. New York, 1994.
iv
v Azade Seyhan. Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish
Novel in a Comparative Context,.6. New York, 2008.
v Halil Berktay. ‘Taklitçi Türk Irkçılığı’ (‘Imitative Turkish Racism’).
vi
Taraf: 12.08.2010. 2.
vvii Ayşe Saraçgil. Bukalemun Erkek (Chameleon Man). Trans.
Sevim Aktaş. Istanbul, 2005, p.180.
v Sodom 37
viii
i Sodom 40-41
ix
x Sodom 41
x Sodom 110
xi
x Sodom 115
xii
x Sodom 121
xiii
x Sodom 189
xiv
x Aziyade. She, together with Karaosmanoglu, fails to see the
xv
homosexual subtext of Loti’s novel. However, Roland Barthes refers
to it is ‘a little sodomitic epic’ in the preface he wrote for the Italian
translation. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/loti_p,2.htm.