This portrait of everyday life in an Istanbul neighbourhood buffeted by change has far wider relevance
T
hankfully, the attack left only black eyes and bloodied faces. It was in Karagümrük, a tough neighbourhood in Istanbul’s old city, once known for mafia types and Turks on the hard right. But, as Suzy Hansen explains, it had been transformed by an influx of Syrian refugees – until the locals apparently decided they’d had enough, and came for them with sticks, baseball bats and knives for carving doner kebab.
So begins From Life Itself, in which Hansen traces a story that illuminates a politics of mass migration and nationalist backlash that has resonances far beyond Turkey. It is a more ambitious book than that, too. An American who lived in Istanbul and visited Karagümrük for more than a decade – during which Turkey’s enfeebled democracy came under ever more sustained assault – she hoped to convey “how ordinary people experience authoritarianism in the 21st century – how our era feels”.
The first third nonetheless outlines a more or less conventional history of Turkey: from the grand modernising, secularising programmes of its early years to the emergence of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan nearly a century later, his rule in so many ways a repudiation of the country’s founding project.
