Violence from nowhere

I’m half Turkish and half French. This Turkish part is what inspires in me an all range of feelings. Turkey means fear, passion, curiosity, reluctance, fascination and frustration to me. That’s a beautiful country, an in-between country, between Europe and Asia, between modernism and tradition. This country makes the transition between the Christian world and the Muslim one, an aspect that is now the focus of passionate debates about Turkey’s future integration in the European Union. This is all I am about, fear and passion. My father left Turkey when he was twenty years old as lots of his fellow citizens did. France needed a cheap labor force and those people coming from East were the answer to this shortage. My father was a solution to an economic problem; he was an imported worker. Both sides were winners, my father had the plan to send money back home and French companies made benefits thanks to him. That was a nice deal, a beautiful consensus. But the consequences were not even thought about. The reality was that Turkish Muslim migrants from countryside villages were moving in a Western industrialized country with Christian traditions. This consensus did not work for long. Apart from the economic aspect, what about the people and their integration? What was meant to be a temporary wave of migration became permanent newly settled inhabitants of France. That’s how my father settled down in France. When he first arrived in the seventies, he was living what we could call the “French dream”. He had a job, money to send to his family in Turkey and he married a French woman who turned out to become my mother.

As I told previously, the consensus did not last long. I left home with my mother when I was eleven years old because this union between two countries, between my mother and my father did not work anymore. Just the same way as my father had fled his country twenty years later to live a better life, my mother and I were now escaping his violence. My two siblings had known him as a father who enjoys life. I remember seeing him like that until my sixth birthday. From then on, he was not the same man. First, he didn’t come on vacations with us anymore. What he was waiting for all year long was the month of September. At that time of the year he went back to who he really was, to his roots, to his past, to life. He moved back to Turkey for approximately two months each year. This was the only relief he was expecting. He was violent with my mother because something was wrong in his life. He was scary to me. His black eyes were frightening to my mother and to me. But it was not a random violence. With time I got to understand that this was all about culture differences and integration. He did not know why he felt so bad inside. He didn’t have the words to express his discomfort and uneasiness with me, with us and with his life. As he didn’t like where he was and who he was, he didn’t have the strength to give love.

But during my childhood I did not know what all this violence meant. That’s from that period of my life that I learnt that children have to be protected and taken care of. They feel with lots of sensitivity what adults do and suffer. The impact of anything is much stronger on them than on adults. The pain hurts in their souls and resonates in their heads. But they are powerless. That experience made me receptive to children and gave me the patience and sensitivity needed to understand them.

My father did not have that skill and that empathy toward us. He was facing another culture that he did not understand. As I was part of this culture, he could not understand me; he did not manage to understand his own children. We ate Nutella on bread; we ate chocolate and candies, pork and more generally Western food. My mother worked. We often ate dinner late because my siblings and I had practice for swimming at night, and “was it really necessary to do sport?”… He simply blamed us for being part of this French society and for not behaving in the Turkish way. He didn’t have enough control on us, and on his own life. We were becoming strangers to him. He felt rejected. As I was growing up, he often called me “my mum’s ally”. When I turned eight he wanted to go to Turkey with my siblings and me. It would have been the first time we would have met his family. I was totally terrorized by this idea. He almost took me with them. I don’t know how though, I ended up staying in France. As a child it’s hard to understand what’s going on. I just didn’t understand. But the facts and the images were there. Was there a way out? For me that was clear, my father had to die or to leave.

When I was eleven, my mother told me that we would be moving soon. “I have saved enough money, we’re going to live not too far from here, keep it for you now, your father must not know, we don’t know what his reaction will be”. One month later, I was living in an apartment with my mother in the suburbs. I was living with lots of other immigrants this time. They were from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Cameroon, Turkey and we were all living in blocks. I was simply happy, released…free at least. I was enjoying the life there; I had no fears anymore and soon had lots of friends among those communities. But the cycle of violence started again. Our car was stolen and burnt probably by some teenagers of our neighborhood. Few months later, a 16-year old teenager living in my block broke into our apartment. From that moment, I figured out what was the meaning of that violence. It was all about culture and integration once again. It was just like a cycle. But I was confused. I was half the peer of the members of those communities living in my block and half different from them. Obviously, this half part was not enough to live in peace with them. Those children “from the suburbs” are lost between their host country and their home country, they are somewhere in between. As they told me so many times: “when we go back there, they think we are rich and that we are different from them. And when we are here, we are told we are from there”. I heard the same from my father: “I don’t speak the same language as Turkish people because I don’t evolve with them anymore. But I don’t speak your language either.” My father was like those children, he was lost. He did not want to get older in France. I remember hearing him saying that he would move back to Turkey as soon as he was retired. For me the explanation of this cycle of violence is that individuals and communities feeling isolated or marginalized express their resentment through violence.

In spite of all the pain the word Turkey inspired in me, I was passionate about this country; I was more than looking forward to know its people, its customs and its language. Thus, I went to Turkey when I was fourteen with my father and my siblings. At last, I got to understand my father. I then took Turkish classes, and decided to go back there by myself two years later. It was the sign for my father that I respected him, and that I was willing to know who he was. Now he has a grandchild to whom he gives all his love. He wants to stay in France to see him growing up. He is cured. My mother, my siblings and me have spent lots of energy to get to know him and understand who he was. Those efforts have made is way back with us possible.