The Turkish writer and political thinker Ece Temelkuran left her native country in 2016, when imprisonment of critics of the regime of president Recep Erdoğan had become a daily occurrence and she had grown weary of “very detailed rape and death threats”.
Nation of Strangers is the Berlin-based writer’s attempt to understand how being unhomed has affected every aspect of her life, like living “non-stop ... in a movie you have been thrown into, constantly feeling unreal, faking something for the benefit of the settled-down folk”. It’s also something of a manifesto for her fellow unhomed, whether physical refugees fleeing persecution and poverty, or exiles of the mind, including many inhabitants of the so-called free West, where fascism remains on the rise: “These times are orphaning all that is humane.”
Temelkuran explains what she has lost in beautiful prose, capturing the regal majesty of Istanbul, “a city so magnificent that it has the might to make you forgive her in mute awe at sunset after devouring you during the day”, a feat even more impressive considering she started to write in English only when she left her homeland.
She describes the misery of waiting in endless queues of equally hope-deprived outsiders for visas that never arrive, the West’s well-meaning but ethically bankrupt attempts to “fill the moral vacuum that neoliberalism has created”, the heroism of a Syrian refugee who wades through crashing waves to help a mother and her small children into a smuggler’s boat, and bizarrely, getting lost in Barcelona’s back streets with Brian Eno.
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As Israel invades Gaza in the wake of the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, 2023, Temelkuran again finds herself advised to remain silent so as not to endanger her chances of residency, her subsequent anger searing itself across the page. She isn’t afraid to ask some uncomfortable questions of her readers, and what we might do to survive: “How will you navigate the darkening waters of our time?”
While just a few years ago, Temelkuran’s arguments may have been dismissed as overly pessimistic, given the second coming of Trump and the continued rise of the “techno-feudal lords” and their “bottomless moral abyss”, her pronouncements now appear eerily prescient. Her response? To create the nation of strangers of the book’s title and hold each other up through the most trying of times.
