In recent months, when the blog was still written in Italian, I had a couple of times to quote a passage from the book of Henry Laborit entitled "In praise of the escape". This is the famous passage:
<<The escape is often, when you are away from the coast, the only way to save the boat and crew. And moreover you will discover unknown shores sprout on the horizon of the waters calm returned. Unknown shores that will be forever ignored by those who have the illusory chance to follow the route of cargo and oil tankers, the route with no unexpected, tax by shipping companies. Perhaps you know that boat called "desire">>.
Well, it was a lawn in the campus of the Bosphorus University, a few days ago, but I realized that it seemed to me one of those unknown shores mentioned by Henry Laborit.
In these weeks I am meeting many people and my calendar is very dense. I'm preparing to shoot in the next 3-4 months here in Istanbul for a new movie. The person with whom I spent some enjoyable hours talking on that lawn, was one of the most amazing encounters that I have done in recent weeks. That's why I found this meeting unknown and unexpected, like a shore discovered after having fled with the boat far from the storm. And like all the unknown and unexpected shores, caused me to wonder, as if I were a Robinson Crusoe landed on an island in the lush. Perhaps less emphasis I should use to describe what has been a meeting between 2 people who have just chatted for a few hours on a lawn. But I was very impressed by the intellectual landscape that I had before my eyes.
Some time ago, one morning, I had been with the Bandista at the "Istanbul University". Leaving, around noon, I came across a scene that never forget. At the entrance of the university, a group of girls with the headscarf made the circle, alternately hid in order to lift the headscarf and wear a wig in substitution.
Wearing the headscarf in universities in Turkey is forbidden. Between February 22 and June 5 2008, in this time window, the ban was lifted by a law made by AKP, the majority Islamic party in Turkey. But then the Constitutional Court had reset the ban. First Western prejudice: the girls in Muslim countries are required to bring the veil. Turkey is all the opposite: the girls struggle to be able to wear it defying the laws of the State.
And so that a few weeks ago I decided that in the next movie that I'm working on, I should have liked to include a character of a girl with a headscarf. It is not the vouyerism that tickles me, it is not the West itching every time you talk about veil (indeed, I have terror of all who could look for this in the movie). The thing that really attracts me is another: the fight of a minority (?) against the criteria of the established society. Or better: the eternal struggle between what is legal and what is legitimate. I inquired on this issue and I really thought: what better example tells about this eternal struggle if not the debate on the headscarf in Turkey?
And so I contacted an association, Akder, where some girls are concerned to assist and coordinate the movement of students with the headscarf in Turkey. Through them I am doing some meetings in recent days to gather views, experience and outline a profile of the phenomenon in which then plant a story. And that is how this appointment came, several hours on a lawn chatting, a lawn that looked like a shore, however, unknown and unexpected.
This meeting was something magical. I think that what made it such was the mutual curiosity. Greed for quickly overcome the prejudices. It is no coincidence that most of what we did was tell us our lives. At the end of the story of her life, Mariam asked me: <<What do you think about my life?>>. I replied: <<But what do I think? I have no comment to make because it is your life>>. This question to me seemed a little weird, I must admit. But I must add that this question makes me understand the intelligence and confidence of that person in the world.
And so she asked me : <<Do you believe in God?>>. <<No, but neither I am convinced that god doesn't exist. I am agnostic. I think that I am not in a position to answer the question. Anyway, if god exists, is a first and last reason of being, far away from things of the world and at the same time present in all things, certainly not the friend of the satraps who need something called "god" to endorse their thirst for power>>.
But Mariam's answer to the question of god, was a revelation: <<I believe in God. But I must add that the right to attend Sociology revealed to me new thoughts, perhaps ideologies, marxism, feminism. The people here in Turkey think that we Muslims should never be doctors, professors and thinkers, just because eventually we end up following the dogmas of faith and not the path of reason. In fact, sometimes I have doubts. But I think that faith is this: getting lost, have questions, call everything into question, and then rediscover God in the end again and again>>: second prejudice destroyed.
It is during this conversation that I understood to be facing a shore unknown and unexpected. I was surprised, terribly. But I thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer: prejudice, dialogue, understanding. And if the prejudice is an instrument of social cohesion, then what we were doing was breaking down prejudice, to understand, first of all, but perhaps to imagine a common larger ground on which feel to be a society together. A common ground, like the grass on which we were seated.
But finally there is another prejudice that this meeting has brought me to break down: to think that Turkish girls who follow the Western style are socially closest to my way of life, in contrast to girls with the headscarf, that maybe when the bus is crowded make half step backward in order to even not to be touched by the elbow.
I must say that unlike in Mariam I found something that in the modern women is often humiliated and they themself are the first to mortify it. Mariam instead has naturally this other bearing. It will be something old, but it seems not alien to Western culture, certainly not foreign to me, like an ancient virtue: the grace. So, for paradox, on the lawn Mariam defended my principles much more than girls westernly dressed who walked to the avenue, in the Turkish Western sense, perhaps Kemalists, and paradoxically, from a far more nationalist and "machista" environment. Feminism and the veil: it is spoken. Strange combination, but here in Turkey is far from being out of place: third prejudice destroyed.
After a visit to the house-museum of Tevfik Fikret, a famous Turkish poet, the sleepless night behind in Kadıköy studios suggested me the farewell.
But I am now very eager to meet again Mariam and recreate still that atmosphere among us, like we had been two philosophers of the Caliphate of Cordoba, while elsewhere were raging the Crusades of the Middle Ages, discussing Aristotle from different angles but courtiers of the same court, citizens of the same society.
It was worth to put the ship on the run from the storm to get here.
