How To Lose a Country by Ece Temelkuran
Tibor Fischer
My favourite entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature is for ‘realism’. With uncharacteristic candour for an academic publication, realism is defined as a term that is ‘more or less meaningless’.
Reading Ece Temelkuran’s book, I couldn’t help thinking how the word ‘populism’ is so bandied about these days that it barely means more than ‘I dislike you’, particularly when used by the Left.
Temelkuran is a Turkish novelist and journalist, and so lots of her reflections on the subject feature President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his very firm grip on power and just about everything else in Turkey. I have great sympathy for Turkish intellectuals, who typically discuss the prospect of imprisonment or exile with the sort of resignation we reserve for filing tax returns.
Temelkuran uses the word ‘progressive’ approvingly and, given the character of the non-turkish material here, I’d guess she is of a Left-wing mindset. So this is almost exclusively an investigation of Right-wing populism, or at least the familiar bugbears of the Left. Do we need another book about Donald Trump’s ego and how Nigel Farage isn’t the most admirable man in British politics? Especially since Temelkuran already has more than two million Twitter followers.
Using her experience in Turkey, Temelkuran argues that ‘it’ can happen anywhere. ‘It’ being a dictatorial takeover
by the populists. Anything can happen anywhere, but the political fabric and recent histories of Britain and the US are very different to Turkey. Comparing the ‘shock’ felt by her British friends in reaction to Brexit, to the shock felt by her friends in Istanbul at the attempted military coup is stretching it a bit.
Temelkuran describes herself as a ‘political columnist’ in the book and therein lies one of the problems. Plus, it’s tricky writing about major events that you’ve been involved in. Do you make it a personal history or step back and recount the big picture? She tries to do both.
This book was written in English and Temelkuran’s prose is clear and lively. She seems to be not only bilingual, but bicultural; like Slavoj Žižek, she’s a fan of mixing up cultural extremes, and so we get Gary Lineker, Paris Hilton and
Gladiator facing off against Albert Camus and Bakhtin’s ‘carnival’.
The shortcoming of the book is that its seven chapters read like a series of op-ed pieces stuck together. The Turkish anecdotes and vignettes are strong, but the reader is constantly forced to jump around from year to year and country to country. Temelkuran does signpost diligently, but it’s still wearing.
I suspect that if you know something about Turkey’s recent political history, you won’t find much new here, and if you don’t, you won’t be able to follow the story, as it’s frequently interrupted by tirades against Trump, Steve Bannon, Farage, Michael Gove and Viktor Orbán.
To her credit, Temelkuran also ushers in Hugo Chávez, but then doesn’t quite know what to do with a Left-wing populist. Someone should tell her