Customer Reviews

A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Venomously biased, full of distortions, mis-translation, and
mis-quoted sources. Unless you already know a lot about Turkey and
the Turkish language, stay away from this one. This book is a
deliberate attempt to mislead. It disguises a deep-rooted contempt of
Turkish culture and Turkish people behind a thin veneer of poisonous
jokes. Its mean-spirited political agenda is never stated clearly
- never out in the open, where the average reader might have enough
information to argue with Seal's reasoning. Instead, the bias sticks
like mud between the lines. This is an exercise in classic yellow
journalism, communicating emotional bias in place of facts and reason.

Seal quotes sources out of context for the specific purpose of
obscuring or reversing the original author's intent. For example, a
reference to the classic travel account, "On Horseback Through Asia
Minor," by Capt. Frederick Burnaby, directly reverses the
explicitly stated position of Burnaby. In 1876 Burnaby traveled
through Turkey to investigate the rumors of Turkish atrocities which
were current in Europe at that time. Burnaby found NO evidence to
support those rumors - instead, he was impressed with the fairness
of Turkish treatment of the Armenians, and he was unimpressed with the
cleanliness of the Armenians. Seal, the rumor-monger for a new age,
takes one line of Burnaby out of context, and uses it to support his
contention that the Turkish people are racist and unfair to Armenians
and Kurds - and always have been. I only happened to catch this
because I had just finished reading Burnaby myself - but it calls
into question the honesty of all Seal's other references. Be warned
that if you read this book, you will need to check every reference for
accuracy and context.

I have lived five years in Turkey as a
foreigner, and I speak Turkish - better than Seal, apparently. I
can attest that Seal's attempt to portray the Turkish people as racist
or ethnocentric is grossly unfair.

Seal claims to be fluent in
Turkish, but his writing is filled with mis-translations and
distortions. For example, he goes far out of his way, to a remote
village, looking for the most reactionary backwaters of Turkish
culture. During this excursion, he claims to be communicating with
his guide entirely in Turkish (unlikely). The guide, a man from
Istanbul (who almost certainly speaks good English) brings two
shotguns, to shoot "Kurds." In Turkish, the word for Kurdish
sounds very like the word for `wolf' - especially to foreign
ears. So of course the shotguns are for wolves. For an very
inexperienced Turkish speaker, it might be possible to make this
mistake, on first hearing, but for the misunderstanding to continue he
must be willing to believe the worst - that an educated man from
Istanbul might go out shooting Kurds in the country on the weekend.
Seal allows his "joke" to go on for almost four pages, and even
then does not clearly explain his mistake, thus leaving a residue of
suspicion, distrust, and ill-will.

He makes a routine practice of
changing the names of Turkish towns - improvising mis-translations
and using those in place of the honorable old names. He calls the
town of Gaziantep `Warrior Pistachio' - just to be funny. But,
while Gazi does mean something which might be translated as warrior,
Antep does NOT mean pistachio. Many pistachio's are called `Antep'
because that is where they come from, just as we might talk about
Washington apples, or Florida oranges. He calls a village hospital
`Blackberry General,' when in fact the name of the town does not
mean Blackberry, and the direct translation of "Hastanesi" is
simply `Hospital,' NOT `General.'

Seal says you have to be
suspicious of any language which does not have its own word for sex.
As always, his jokes are all at the expense of Turkey, always laughing
AT his subject. But consider this: how good can Seal's Turkish really
be if he doesn't even know any words for `sex?' There are probably
as many words in Turkish as in English. (I don't know exactly - I
haven't counted.)

Seal definitely has some political/racial axes
to grind (especially with regard to the Kurds) but, beyond that, what
he really seems to want most is for Turkey to devolve back a hundred
years, to return to the bad old days of the declining Ottoman Empire.
In this light, he resents and ridicules every advance the Republic of
Turkey has made in the direction of modernization, and he mocks
Ataturk - whose reforms prevent him from being able to effectively
look down his disdainfully Imperialist nose, and thereby consider
himself a real adventurer.

Seal travels around Turkey asking about
fezzes and Sultans, and congratulating himself on how he has struck a
nerve. He thinks upsetting people is a point for his side, but the
reality is that some of his questions and presumptions are as
inappropriate and offensive as a foreign tourist traveling around the
American South hoping to photograph smiling African-Americans picking
cotton by hand. If that same foreigner also interviewed KKK members
and visited the Arian Nation (while ridiculing all other views), and
then wrote about his experiences as the "REAL" America, what
would we think of that? That's what Seal has done with Turkey.

He
clearly despises his subject. Seal has carefully constructed an
emotionally charged image of Turkey as a country which usurps power,
and has no right even to exist. To this end, he painstakingly seeks
out all the lunatics, fundamentalists, and reactionaries, and points
out every Turkish transgression he can find, whether factually
grounded or not. If you have lived in Turkey, speak Turkish, and have
done some reading, you may want to read this for the purposes of
argument. Otherwise steer clear.

The best contemporary Turkish
travel book I know is sadly out of print, but you might find it [online]: "Journey to Kars," by Phillip Glazebrook. If you
can't find that, Mary Lee Settle's "Turkish Reflections" is also
very informative, and well researched.

Whether or not to read this book shold be determined by the type of information you are pursuing. When I travel around a country (and my wife and I have spent about 1 month traveling around Turkey) I like to do so with at least three books: 1. a good travel guide (in our case we use only the Lonely Planet guides, they are the bible for travelers), 2. a good comprehensive history and 3. a good lighthearted read of the people, history, culture, etc.

'A Fez of the Heart' falls into the latter. It is a very enjoyable book about the travels of an young man returning to Turkey and getting educated in its recent (post WWI) history. The education is comical and caused both my wife and I to laugh out loud. The plot pertaining to seeking out anything to do with a fez is a clever cover to explain the author's presence and wanderings.

This book should not be read as a cultural barometer nor a factual history of Turkey. It is a pleasant and humorous read that left me with the desire to get to better undersand elements of Turkey's recent past.

If that is what you are looking for you will not do any better than 'A Fez of the Heart'.

Being a native of Turkey, I found Seal's book not only carrying strong Orientalist motives, but also uninformed or misinformed in many occasions. The book being built on the 'Fez' theme sounds interesting first, but it is not meant to be simply a travel book and attempts to analyze complicated cultural and historical issues of the Turkish society. Unfortunately, the writer lacks the academic (or seems to lack any strong background for that matter) to be able to draw educated conclusions. I often felt that the writer had a views in mind and was trying confirm them with his observations in that direction. His characters were extremely uncommon and seemed deliberately selected, if not fabricated.

This book isn't quite history; it's more of a travelogue. The travelogue's attempts to describe Turkey viewed through fez-colored glasses falls a little short, but the historical aspects of Seal's wanderings are on-key. The delvings into Western newspaper correspondents he presents are fascinating, if blatantly discriminatory (we'll not forget this was in the 1920s, and said correspondents were imperial Brits who still believed in Piltdown Man). Seal spends a good deal of time in rural Turkey, running into strange individuals and quietly mocking them in imitable fashion (we here at History House have come to recognize dry wit ubiquitous to British travel writers). To be frank, he made us long for the apparently unavailable 1839 book Character and Costume in Turkey and Italy, by Thomas Allom, which was written at the transitional moment between the turban and the fez and filled with all manner of dress idiosyncrasies. He tries to make it all heartwarming in the end, but the fact of the matter is that he searches Turkey all over for a damn fez and never really finds one. Instead he scratches his head over the Turkish dichotomy of Islamism versus Europeanism, which is a phenomenon that many modern Turkish politicians, and Turks themselves, seem to be trying to straddle. Go figure. [HistoryHouse.com]

This is poor sociology. I recommend Mary Lee Settle's ``Turkish Reflections'' instead.

Although this book is humorous and informative at times, I had to stop reading it midway through because I found it to be offensive. I have been living in Istanbul for four months, and although I have not seen as much of Turkey as Jeremy Seal, I have been studying the Turkish language and culture. I am regularly a student at Stanford University, but this year I am studying at Boğaziçi Universitesi in Istanbul.

There is one particular instance from this book that I would like to draw attention to. While travelling in Turkey, the author visits Cappadocia, where he meets a caretaker for one of the Byzantine churches. He then goes into an anectode about how Islam-which forbids pictoral depictions in art-was responsible for destroying some of that regions spectacular Byzantine church art. Although I am not a scholar on Byzantine history, I know that during the 8th Century, a movement called iconoclasm was supported and endorsed by a few of the Byzantine emporers. This movement called for the abolition of pictoral depiction in chuch art, and led to the destruction of many fine works in Cappadocia. Seal puts the blame for the destruction of Byzantine Christian art squarely on Turkish Muslims, and uses it as a vehicle again to criticize Turkish people and their religion. Although I too am critical of Turkey and the Islamic religion, I see Seal as manupulating historical facts in order to create an impression of Turks and Muslims as intolerant and destructive. As I read A Fez of the Heart, I quickly became tired because of its one-sided hackneyed message about fundamentalist Islam and its inherently negative attitude towards Turkish culture and society. Be careful when reading this book and do not take the historical facts that Seal presents as the truth. It does not give justice to the complex issues in modern Turkey and both the richness and the problems of the Turkish nation.

Brits are much more tolerable when they are making fun of themselves. When I finished reading this book, I felt that the author's main objective was to make fun of Turkish people. The book is full of manipulated historical references and mistranslations. Either J. Seal doesn't know Turkish as much as he claims or he deliberately mistranslated words just to be funny. "Menemen" doesn't mean "Omelet" and "Antep" does not mean "Pistachio".

Go to Turkey see the difference between what is written in this book and in the real Turkish world.

This is fiction, not travel writing! Turkey is a very nice place to which this book does not do justice.

I find that some of the reviews posted by fellow readers are too harsh. JS did not set out to write the great historical or sociological masterpiece on Turkey. Rather, he uses the fez as an instrument through which he analyzes the complexity of Turkish society, in a light-hearted yet educative manner. My only disappointment with the book is JS' subtle suggestion that deep down inside, Turkey is more "eastern" than "western". In reality, I find Turkey to be unique among nations in this part of the world. While eastern attitudes may still be the norm in places like Konya, Kayseri and Erzurum, and western attitudes prevail in cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Antalya, the bottom line is that Turks are Turks which is what makes them, the country and certainly, JS' book so interesting.