Eyeballs

My host in Bursa, Turkey, held a sheaf of papers, pointing to one sentence in particular, imploring me to explain its meaning.

The pages were hundreds of Albert Einstein quotations he had found online and printed out. The one he couldn't understand read

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18."

It was no surprise Emre couldn't understand this obtuse passage. A jovial, friendly guy, within five minutes of meeting him I had learned his opinions on a variety of ethnicities: Germans (no good), Indians (dirty), Arabs (crazy and dirty), and Russians (no good, but slightly better than Germans). I didn't fully understand Einstein's words either, but I am beginning to agree with them.

Traveling southward through Turkey I've encountered a steady gradation of prejudices. Turks deride the Arabs, Arabs detest the Kurds, and Kurds can't tolerate the Yazidis. Yazidis practice an obscure branch of Islam that deifies a peacock angel, which I think is pretty cool.

Everywhere I go, I'm fed variations on the same line: "Listen, you're not from around here, so let me clue you in: those X's are all Y's."

Actually, as I'm realizing, it's precisely my detachment which grants me a clear perspective. I'm not free of bias, but I have no basis for prejudice in this foreign land. I had never met a Kurd or a Yazidi until I came to Turkey. Hate is learned through prolonged contact. Alienation and xenophobia are only distant cousins, a belief confirmed, in view, by the extreme alienation inherent in my current situation.

I haven't seen another foreigner, much less another American, in more than a week. Everywhere I am pursued by the eyeball and the double-take. At times it's infuriating and I feel like grabbing the next gawker and screaming, "What are you looking at!?"

But then I remind myself that I am far from innocent, that in fact my primary vocation these days is gawking.

But sometimes it's so severe that I just have to laugh. Like the time in Nusaybin I paid a couple of kids 10 lira to take me to the bus station in their pedal-driven fruit cart. They rode me five kilometers through their town like a big fish they'd just caught, whistling to all their friends and shouting, "Look! An American tourist!"

They probably would have taken me for just that privilege.

Behind the gawker's gaze, in my experience, exists only congeniality, even empathy for a traveler obviously ill at ease. It's a strange and detestable quality of human beings that they can only learn to hate those with which they have something in common.