states.
Turkey’s inequality problem is multifaceted: The wealthiest 20 percent’s share of Turkey’s total GDP in 2013 was 46.6 percent; this fell to 45.9 last year - a change of 0.7 percent. On the other hand, the poorest 20 percent’s share of the GDP increased by 0.1 percent up to 6.2.
In other words: people are moving out of hunger in Turkey while others are joining the ranks of the poor. There is an acute income inequality problem, but it often goes hand in hand with middle classes increasing their shares of the GDP.
The debate over poverty and inequality polarises the Turkish press. Some argue that the economy is healthy, while others say the country is in dire shape. In the hands of Turkish columnists, statistics about poverty are figures used to for political expediency. For an in-depth look at the lives of Turkey’s poor, a more nuanced perspective is needed.
In the past, the task of examining the lives of the poor has fallen on the shoulders of novelists — of great writers like Yasar Kemal. Kemal, who died at 92 earlier this year, was a great observer of the urban poor. Over the course of 70 years, and through more than 20 novels, he detailed the lives of villagers who had migrated from distant Anatolian cities to the heart of Istanbul.
In books such as ‘The Birds Have Also Gone’, his observations meticulously examine how the elite of Istanbul reacted to cohabiting with workers who wore mud-covered shoes and spoke in what they considered to be an ugly version of Turkish. As Kemal understood, Turkish elites have viewed the urban poor as the cause of Turkey’s problems. Today, their ordeal is ignored; back then, they were antagonised.
For decades, Turkey’s poor were characterised as backwards, conservative, religious-minded people who represented the worst of the society. Last year, in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, I saw a fur-coated lady who, upon noticing a poor person on the street, leaned forward to ask why he was begging instead of looking for a job. The lack of empathy with the poor, in such cases, is immense.
In his new novel, ‘A Strangeness in my Mind’, Turkey’s greatest living novelist, Orhan Pamuk, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, explores inequality. His protagonist, Mevlut, a member of the rural poor, migrates to Istanbul where he struggles to make ends meet. The son of a yogurt seller, Mevlut resembles countless poor people who have migrated to the suburbs of Istanbul over the past five decades.
Spanning 50 years of Mevlut’s life, the novel offers a detailed picture of poverty in Turkey. We learn about the ‘hemsehri’ system, whereby a poor migrant from a small village comes to Istanbul, starts working, and invites his fellow countryman to live in his neighbourhood and work in his workplace. Soon, people from his village dominate that field of work, and the migrant starts to exert influence in the mahalle (district) where he lives.
This year’s upcoming snap elections on November 1seem to offer the perfect opportunity to discuss Turkey’s problems with poverty and inequality. But it is unlikely we will hear those words or the names of the unemployed coal miners. Politicians will instead debate such lofty concepts as ‘nation’, ‘land’ and ‘freedom’.
This article originally appeared as: ‘Poverty in Orhan Pamuk’s Turkey’.
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com
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