Literary Imaginations and (Stereo) Typing Difference: A Reply
To the Editor,

To the Editor,

I would like to address some issues around the Literary Feature that Generation published in its October 16th issue (Outsiders: A Study), which both the Anonymous Reader’s letter and its rebuttal by the Literary Editor (issue of October 23rd) sought to address, albeit unsuccessfully.

First, it might be useful to underline the lexical definition of a “satire,” the artistic format your magazine’s Literary Editor Marina Blitshteyn assigns to the piece in question. According to the Britannica, a satire is an “artistic form in which human or individual vices, folly, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to bring about improvement.” This leaves one with having to speculate on whose vices and follies the feature aimed at deriding on the one hand, and what kind of improvement it sought to underscore, on the other. While Blitshteyn claims that Outsiders: A Study “was intended to satirize the problem, and shed light on the perception of international or immigrant students on campus,” Marina Wright’s piece appears to almost contradict such a claim in its satirization of the phenomenon itself, i.e., being Turk and smoker, rather than the perception of this same phenomenon, i.e., domestic frustrations of Turkish ‘lounging’ and use of dorm space and time. This is evident, to one degree or another, in the parts of the text that are not marked off with quotation marks, with the latter assumed to be narrative voices other than the author’s incorporated into the feature. If one takes the former as the author’s means to foreground or comment on perceptions she may have heard from other students sharing the dorms with the “Turkey Boys,” one should be surprised to see how the author, at times, went beyond the frustrations vented off by the ‘insiders’ in the story (domestic US students) to provide a political context that confirms an overall sense of incomprehension and discomfort at interpreting, and more importantly cohabitating with, difference in the shape and form the “Turkey Boys” happened to represent for Wright. This is manifested, for example, in the opening of the piece, where the boys are nameless (the pronoun “they”), to be immediately framed as the “Turkey Boys,” with capitalized B. In both cases, are we not confronted yet again with another representation of others, in this case by the writer herself, as a block that can only exist as mute, where differentiation is impossibility? And how does this singular muteness of the Turks fit with the multiplicity of voices of the girls and boys and the author commenting on Turkish ‘follies’? But above all, how can one read the conclusion of the piece, “Yes, what the hell” (stress in original) in response to a complaint of failing to locate the “shit” that is Turkey on the map, but as complicity on the part of the writer with the simplistic depiction of difference as annoying deviation that even Microsoft Word cannot tolerate?

By no stretch of literary imagination can one argue that Wright’s piece targeted the question of perception of outsiders rather than the caricature that these foreigners are made to represent (and in this regard, Arhcana Jayakumar’s graphic worsened the problem by suggesting, through Turkish flag, that a cigarette can serve as a collective ethnic signifier for the Turks). What the piece does instead is to provide vehicle to common stereotyping mechanisms against those who come to be labeled as different due to one attribute or another. The image of the ‘lounging’ young Turks almost immediately invokes the reduction of other ‘others,’ in particular the earlier Italian-Americans and the contemporary African-Americans, to entities of public non-industriousness, hanging around the same corner that has defined racial and social tensions throughout the history of contact between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ whether the latter meant true outsiders or unincorporated insiders. Even “outsider” for Mariana Wright seems to come in different shades, with some more acceptable than others – German, French, Italian and Spanish are instances of difference that could make sense to her and some of her readers, but Turkish? Being Turk seems to signify the following: 1) numbers are not important (“twenty of them,” but maybe “not precisely twenty”); what matters is that one Turk is pro forma representative of all other Turks (the muted quality overcoming quantity); 2) the condition of being in one’s elements (relaxing, smoking without worrying about cancer, etc.) is exoticized as an object of envy manifested in the offense taken by the watchers; 3) sharing dorm space and time while smoking is transgression against how sharing should be more observant of who owns what (“our lawn, our school, and our country”), an effect of what separates insiders from outsiders; 4) difference as such is mystery that is worthy of study, even when the latter may mean caricature rather than serious examination of what constitutes difference and how it plays out. Here, the enigma is not only linguistic (the resentment at using one’s own native language for communication, which is, by the way, a very basic human right), but extends to the area of mass psychology, with the Boys joyfully committing themselves to suicidal chain smoking, and to endless hours of laziness and purposelessness; and most significantly, 5) being an incomprehensible outsider is an annoying deviation from what the writer and her co-authors may have presumed to be an implicit standard – to be an insider, and if this is not that possible, to become a tolerated outsider.

In this sense, the Boys are the caricatures or the follies of a singularized public function, smoking instead of the street corner. Beyond the surface self-legitimation of using satire as form of expression, it is all too easy, as history and popular culture have shown in the US and elsewhere, to slip into bigotry and stereotyping, where humor is means to revive forms of othering that have been put in check through claims of sensitivity and political correctness towards others. Humor shouldn’t be necessarily dismissed, for it remains an important form of social commentary. What should not be accepted, however, is using humor as technique of bigoted stereotyping, which in itself reflects the limits of tolerance of a specific culture towards its outsiders. And here the question is not simply a matter of knowledge about others, but primarily the placing of those others along our own hierarchy of tolerance and comprehension of difference.

While it is possible for one to appreciate different writing genres and approaches in a student publication like Generation, one has to be cautious not to justify cultural and ethnic overgeneralizations simply by having chosen one format of expression over another. I believe that it is the responsibility of Generation and the rest of the UB community to be conscious of not slipping into stereotyping especially those who demand more “study” (in the serious sense of the word). For stereotyping seems to be the natural outcome of placing one’s self “an extra space away from the foreigners.”

Fatih Bulut
President of Turkish GSA