By Harry van Versendaal
When the Turkish soap opera “Noor” revealed to Samar that marriage can be an equal partnership between two loving people rather than a state of misery and repression, she switched off her TV and got herself a divorce lawyer.
“I liked using the subject of soap operas to speak of the important issue of women’s rights. Doing so cast a different light on the story; it was also a happier way to tell the story,” says Nina Maria Paschalidou. Her latest film, “Kismet,” is screening at this year’s Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (TDF) after making a well-reviewed debut at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November where it was nominated for the IDFA Best Mid-Length Documentary Award.
Fifty-four-year-old Samar, a Lebanese woman living for years in the United Arab Emirates, is not alone in finding inspiration in Turkish TV dramas. Samira, a victim of sexual harassment in Cairo during the recent Egyptian revolution, tells the camera how she found the courage, despite being pressured by her family to keep quiet, to take the perpetrators – army officers – to court after watching Fatmagul, a gang-rape victim in another Turkish drama series, fight for justice. She not only won her case, but also helped to stop the until-then mandatory “virginity tests” given to all females in police custody.
Paschalidou, a 40-year-old filmmaker, journalist and producer from Veria, a small town in northern Greece with a strong Ottoman imprint, became fascinated by how a medium that provokes much derision in the West has become a successful tool for female empowerment in the East.
“I was staying in Washington when a friend, who is from Turkey, showed me a Washington Post article on Turkish soap operas. I was intrigued and began to look into the subject,” says Paschalidou, founder of independent documentary and multimedia group Forest Troop.
Millions of viewers across the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans are hooked on TV dramas such as “Gumus,” which is broadcast across the Arab world as “Noor,” “What Is Fatmagul’s Fault?” “The Magnificent Century,” “Life Goes On,” and “Forbidden Love.” During a recent survey carried out in 16 Middle East countries, three out of four said they had seen at least one of about 70 Turkish shows that have been sold abroad since 2001.
“The impact went beyond all expectations. People started to name their children after the main characters, women started to divorce their husbands because of what they saw on TV, tourist operators offered site-specific tours,” Paschalidou says.
Bad signal
The success of these shows naturally did not go down well with conservatives in the Middle East. In Iran, where shows are watched via smuggled satellite dishes hidden on balconies, authorities said soaps were “destabilizing the institution of the family.” Saudi clerics went as far as to issue fatwas against people watching the shows.
Apart from being an unintended cultural export and a unique brand of soft power, Turkish dramas also raked in cash – tons of it. The value of soap opera exports skyrocketed from a million dollars in 2007 to 130 million in 2012 as the country sold 13,000 hours of programming, according to data from the country’s Tourism and Culture Ministry.
Part of their appeal, the director says, was thanks to the good-old American recipe. “It’s the drama, the passionate love affairs, the nasty vendettas – a recipe first sold by the Americans with ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ in the 1980s,” says Paschalidou.
But, like most observers, Paschalidou also sees culture-specific factors at play. “It was no coincidence that these shows struck a chord with audiences in the areas of the former Ottoman Empire. There was something exotic, yet at the same time quite familiar, to them. People in this part of the world have many shared memories, a common past, similar food,” she says.
They also have similar ambitions.
“Viewers in the Middle East see the Turkish woman as a model of the modern Muslim female. This is a bit who they would like to be, who they struggle to become,” Paschalidou says. They want greater freedom and more rights. And more wealth. “What all these shows have in common is their penchant to show off designer clothes, nice homes and luxury villas,” she says.
Interestingly, while women in Arab countries appear in the documentary to be inspired by the modern, feminist narrative, their Greek counterparts are looking in the other direction as Turkish series have triggered in many a nostalgia for pre-modern values and ideals such as tradition and family ties. “I like these shows because they have morals and the girls don’t take off their underwear all the time like they do here,” says one elderly Greek fan.
Greece’s stubborn recession, now in its seventh year, has hit most people hard and at the same time influenced Greeks’ collective self-understanding. “The crisis has been widely associated with the West and many things modern. As a result, we have dug out old memories and turned to the Eastern part of our identity,” Paschalidou says.
“Perhaps there is also this longing for true love, for the type of man who stands by his wife and looks after her needs – even if he is a bit of on the macho side,” she says.
To be continued
Closer to home, these programs have inflicted some collateral damage by exposing Turkey’s internal contradictions: The narrative of a modern, prosperous Turkey is being challenged by a conservative, intolerant backlash. Once the darling of liberal reformists, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who has criticized a historical soap based on the life of Suleiman the Magnificent, which depicts the sultan as a man in thrall to his favorite wife, as “an attempt to insult our past, to treat our history with disrespect” – has fed concerns among secularists about his increasingly authoritarian style of government.
“Turkey’s efforts to promote a modern, Western face cannot disguise its huge shortcomings in the area of women’s rights,” Paschalidou says.
Despite a series of legal reforms over the past few years, Turkey did poorly in the World Economic Forum’s 2013 Gender Gap Index. A recent survey found that a third of marriages in Turkey’s eastern and southeastern provinces involved very young brides, many of them under the age of 15. In “Life Goes On” a young girl from Anatolia is married off to an abusive 70-year-old. The girl escapes her yoke, but in reality such happy endings are less common.
“Reality is not always like in the series. A girl who has been forced into marrying at an early age in Turkey will not have the support of her family if she decides to break up,” the director says.
“These series present an idealized image that Turkish society is mature enough to solve its problems, which is not always the case,” she says.
But the effort is there, and it is a genuine effort Paschalidou believes. The shows are mainly written by female scriptwriters who nudge the narratives into more feminist paths, and even attempt to involve their audience. When the final court scene of “What Is Fatmagul’s Fault? was filmed, the extras cast to carry banners and shout slogans in support of Fatmagul were real-life victims of sexual abuse.
“What really impressed me was that Turkish actresses are fully conscious of what it is that they are doing,” she says. Many of them have taken the effort outside the TV studio by participating in a campaign to stop domestic violence against women.
“It’s not just a marketing strategy. Some of them genuinely believe they can help.”
Rekindling family history can trigger empathy for refugees, study shows
Published January 17, 2018 news & comment Leave a CommentTags: Asia Minor, Greece, refugees, survey, turkey, versendaal
By Harry van Versendaal
Descendants of refugees are more likely to back measures in support of incoming asylum-seekers if they are reminded of their forefathers’ experience, according to a new study which suggests that leveraging past experience can be an effective way of increasing empathy and reducing out-group discrimination.
“Our study shows that perspective-taking, in other words making someone see the world through the eyes of an out-group, actually does work and that it works better – and more cheaply – when we are able to harness history and family background,” said Elias Dinas, political scientist at the European University Institute (EUI) currently on leave from Oxford University, who conducted the survey with Vasiliki Fouka of Stanford University.
The survey was carried out in Greece’s northern Macedonia region, which received the largest numbers of Greek Orthodox refugees from Asia Minor after the defeat of Greek troops in August 1922 and the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. About 1.3 million displaced people resettled in Greece at the time, amounting to nearly 25 percent of the country’s 5 million population.
The study was based on a sample of 1,928 people, of whom 927 were found to have a forced relocation background.
The researchers arrived at the conclusion that descendants of Asia Minor refugees were overall more likely to display positive attitudes toward today’s refugees from war-torn Syria, than non-descendants were.
More specifically, when researchers mentioned the parallels between the two historical events, Greek refugee descendants were up to 8 percent more likely than other Greeks to support more binding measures, such as donating money to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) or contacting their local MP to take action to help refugees.
Furthermore, when prompted with the similarity between 1923 and the current situation, Asia Minor descendants were 8 percent more likely to admit that refugees had left their countries to escape war than to claim that they had traveled to Europe in search of economic opportunity or to milk the continent’s welfare states.
The mention of the Asia Minor catastrophe, as it is known in Greece, was found to trigger no measurable effect among respondents without a refugee background.
Another key finding was that out-group bias among people who did not directly have a family background of forced relocation dropped as the share of 1923 refugees in their community increased.
More than 1.5 million refugees have streamed into Europe since 2015 fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Asia. The influx has angered sections of society and galvanized the far-right – Greece’s neo-fascist Golden Dawn party has 18 lawmakers in the 300-seat Parliament – a trend that has left policy makers scrambling to find remedies.
The findings of the survey suggest that intervention campaigns that highlight Europe’s tormented past could have a significant impact on public opinion, not only regarding descendants of forced migrants, but their neighbors too.
“We know that Europe’s population is already the product of extensive refugee flows. We use this fact to see how a very subtle and cheap intervention could help in fostering perspective-taking,” Fouka said, adding that the study found effects of similar magnitude to those reported by expensive large-scale interventions.
The idea is that governments and other institutions that want to fight xenophobia and promote integration schemes such as the incorporation of refugee children in Greek schools could build on these findings and invest in cultivating perspective-taking by reminding people that their ancestors also experienced similar challenges.
“This, we think, is a cost-effective way of mitigating the problem,” Dinas said, adding that researchers were investigating whether the conclusions could be utilized in communities outside Greece.
“It is possible that we would get the same results if instead of targeting the descendants of 1923 refugees, we targeted those of Finnish refugees from the USSR after the end of the Second World War or Sudeten Germans,” said Dinas in reference to the 3 million ethnic Germans expelled from then-Czechoslovakia after the war.