Nation of Strangers is available here
By Jim Aitken
For a number of years now Ece Temelkuran has been warning us about the advance of fascism. She has done so in her writing, her lectures, seminars and podcasts. And she reiterates her position in her latest book ‘Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding home in the 21st century, published by Canongate 2026.
She is a political exile from Erdogan’s Turkey. Working as a journalist there, she had been tipped off that the security services had her named for writing a critical piece on the government. She fled into exile, knowing exactly what would have happened to her had she stayed. She had heard about the 3 am knock on the door when you are at your most vulnerable, the snide comments, the interrogation, torture and the rest. She wanted to avoid all that, for sure.
She fled into political exile and joined the growing population of what she calls ‘the unhomed.’ This book is her testimony to being unhomed; to trying to survive anew in places that are not home, places of precarious sanctuary. ‘Nation of Strangers’ is a series of letters written over a three- year period, mostly from Hamburg and Berlin, addressed to the reader as ‘Dear Stranger.’
Temelkuran uses a perfect quotation from Breyten Breytenbach, a political exile from apartheid South Africa, to introduce her text:
One can replace, to all intents and purposes, the word ‘exile’ by refugee, misfit, outcast, outsider, expatriate, squatter, foreigner, clandestine, heretic, stranger, renegade, drifter, a displaced person, marginal one, the new poor, the economically weak, drop out. The irony is that if we were to add up all these individuals, we’d probably find ourselves constituting a new silent majority.
– From ‘The Long March from Hearth to Heart’
Breytenbach was a writer, poet and artist and this quotation is at the heart of Ece Temelkuran’s book. She uses it to explore her unhomed condition in foreign places. In the process she offers us as Dear Strangers a deep psychological understanding not only of her own situation but the situation of all those anonymous masses who have had to flee not only authoritarian regimes, but war, climate breakdown, famine and so many other untold miseries.
Ece tells us that scientists predict that by 2050 there will be 1,5 billion people in the world who will be homeless, and by 2070 there will be 3 billion. She writes of ‘mourning in the future tense,’ of ‘a brand -new melancholy’ and ‘functioning as a survival automaton.’ Crude phrases like ‘Stop the Boats’ and ‘Send them Back’ simply do not cover the ‘ache of losing home.’ This is where Temelkuran makes us think about what many of the mainstream politicians have all said about migrants. The thing they all fail to address is the fact that these migrants don’t want to be in other countries, and circumstances beyond their control has made them leave their homelands.
For Ece this is all the ‘blunt cruelty of the new world order’ where you find yourself ‘out in the cold with monsters.’ You begin to miss who you ‘had once been’ and you ‘no longer know how you feel, whether you feel at all.’ She probes deeper to discover that she became ‘an unfeeling automaton, a survival machine’ and inevitably she suffered a breakdown. Putting such pressure on yourself to survive can only last so long. The doctor recognised her symptoms immediately and told her to be kinder to herself, and care more for herself. And to talk, of course.
In many respects ‘Nation of Strangers’ should be seen as part of her healing process. The book has four main sections which pose overlapping questions – Who are you? Why did you leave? How will you survive here? When will you go home?
The text addresses these questions deftly by not only talking about her own situation but the situations of others she encounters along the way. As an internationally recognised writer, political thinker and lecturer she finds herself in demand. On one occasion she is in London, in a taxi, and she starts talking with Michael, the taxi driver who originally hailed from Eritrea. He remarks to her, ‘I am just normal people’ and this comment stays with her. Despite the dehumanising language directed at immigrants, these same immigrants remain stubbornly normal like most other people.
As she addresses gatherings across Europe, she finds so many of those organising such gatherings to be incredibly naïve politically. It is as if they think what has happened elsewhere cannot happen in their countries. With the arrival of Trump Mark 2 version such naivete must surely be banished, she muses.
She is granted a Fellowship at Berlin University, and then given a three-year residency permit. Thiis news is met with both joy and relief. She describes the moment the Immigration Officer told her the good news:
This time, the immigration officer, a fragile-looking lady, was unprecedently lovely. Being the bearer of the good news already made her smile as she went through the many ID cards to find mine. She was almost savouring the moment more than I was. She must have been exhausted from wearing the sulking face of the state every working day. After all, all that global politics, the big words of anti-immigration policies, and the volumes and volumes of immigration regulations, boil down to the two of us acting out the actual drama: the stranger and the officer. All day long, they have to look or turn their eyes away from all the unhomed faces that are frozen in a moment of hoping for good news and fearing the bad.
The insight given to this moment makes you realise all those innumerable other encounters that take place across our globe with innumerable other ‘normal people’ like the rest of us. It should also be mentioned that Temelkuran has written this book in English which is obviously not her first language. She tells us early on in the book that ‘ English seemed to me like a linguistic river where all the unhomed of the world, the unbelonging beasts, gathered to drink.’
And now being in Germany she attends classes in German. On her walks around the city of Berlin she comes across an amazing housing project called Refugio Berlin on Lenaustrasse. This block contains a nation of strangers who all come together to live together. It is multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural. There are also white Germans who choose to live there. There are communal kitchens and facilities for all. And it works even although there may be economic circumstances that may militate against this working. And, of course, why should it not work?
Temelkuran discovers that a similar Refugio operates in Johannesburg, and these examples certainly made you think of Grenfell Tower before it went up in flames. Only when the disaster at Grenfell did happen would we find out that the place itself had an international nation of strangers who lived together relatively harmoniously, something Farage, Jenrick and others would never dream of saying.
Ece is invited to speak at a ‘closed meeting’ in Davos to address the world’s elite, a ‘gathering of handpicked people – venture capitalists, bankers, tech-bros, primarily American’. She mistakenly thought she was asked to talk about fascism. Five minutes into her talk she could feel ‘this was hardly a friendly environment.’ She says she was ‘politely put into the solitary confinement of awkwardness.’ She continues that this happens when you tell such people that ‘fascism is ideologically and historically embedded in neoliberalism to neoliberalists.’
Being in the company of such people is chilling. She realises that to them ‘the world is a vast real estate opportunity to pick and choose from idly, and the masses are just, you know, disposables.’
Their sense of humanity she compares to ‘a brand-new, white iPhone – a radical departure from reality with its sanitised smoothness.’ Neoliberalisms most outrageous yet most popular lie, she goes on to say, is ‘that being poor is a choice – is so deeply ingrained in their thinking.’
Her unease at this three- day event is detected by someone like-minded to Ece but what he goes on to say to her about these elites is even more chilling. He tells her that they are driven not so much by money and power:
All these tech-bros know that the future will , and they know it will not be human, and it is just that they want to get there first. That’s it. To be the first. They do not know what is ahead, and they do know that they don’t. They are like adolescents setting the house on fire just to see how the flames will look. It is as simple as that.
Temelkuran goes on to realise that the neoliberal elites are ‘designing a future by ensuring there is no return to the familiar homes of humanity: good old democracy, human rights and the rule of law.’
She goes on to use an image from the film ‘Alien’ to explain further:
Like the chest-burster alien tearing through human flesh to get rid of the human body in that iconic movie Alien, finally, today, the neoliberal elite no longer need a human appearance to deceive the masses. They are powerful enough to stand naked.
This is where we are. The thought of a naked Trump, however, is macabre. For Ece Temelkuran we have to find our way anew. We have to come together and be in solidarity with the unhomed, with immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, political exiles. If we do not we could well be next to become unhomed.
While there are plenty good books to emerge each year, ‘Nation of Strangers’ must surely be the most prescient and vital book this year.
