THE G20 AND THE E17
While the movers, shakers, makers, and breakers of the world’s twenty
richest nations convened in London last March, I went to Turkey, to a
different ingathering of nations. In Iznik, a sleepy lakeside town three
hours east of Istanbul, thirty-five citizens of seventeen countries
talked about finances, dined at long communal tables, and assembled,
like our counterparts in London, for a group photo. But no interpreters
were in evidence; none were needed, since our four days of talks and
tours, cabaret and chitchat were all in
la bela lingvo, Esperanto.
Yes, people still speak Esperanto, most of them part-time; they also
write, dream, have toothaches, and make love in it, like people who
speak any other language. They’ve been at it since 1887, when a Polish
Jewish oculist named L. L. Zamenhof published, in a Russian-language
pamphlet, an outline of his new “international language”: nine hundred
roots drawn from Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages, to be
inflected and combined according to sixteen grammatical rules. The
language took its name from Zamenhof’s pseudonym, Doktoro Esperanto,
meaning “one who hopes.” In photographs, Zamenhof looks like a
daydreaming Sigmund Freud, just another
mittel European Jewish doctor bent on healing something more imposing than the human body.
Esperanto is a strange animal, a utopian language movement. During
the first half of the twentieth century, it thrived as a movement
because it was a language, not a revolution, and it thrived as a
language because it moved with and adapted to its users, as long as they
kept its sixteen inviolable rules—
netuàsebla—untouchable.
(The closest thing to an amendment has been an informal seventeenth
rule, “Your spouse doesn’t like Esperanto.”) From its modest beginnings,
Esperanto has grown on the tongues of its speakers, for whom
nothing—nothing that one is determined to share with another—is beyond
translation. But for all its utopianism, the movement’s reality is that
Esperantists live in many worlds at once. They are global citizens, born
into clans, nations, and religions; they endorse the movement’s
political neutrality but belong to political parties. They are the
reason that, despite the predations of Hitler and Stalin, each of whom
thought Esperanto dangerously cosmopolitan (read: Jewish), Esperanto
survived to see its lexicon blossom into hundreds of thousands of words,
and it lives on and on, with new transfusions of energy from
media-savvy millennials in Vietnam, Brazil, and Nepal. These days
Esperantists are busy having meetings in Second Life (
Dua Vivo), translating Harry Potter, and minting coinages for things we learned to do just yesterday like Google (
gugli) and YouTube (
jutubumi).
Though Zamenhof defined an Esperantist as a person who uses the
language for any purpose, those who join clubs, carpool to the annual
congress, or board a plane to Turkey are the ones for whom Esperanto is
more than a language. Some, like Israeli Tom Yuval, use it to talk
through walls. Two years ago, while the Israeli government was busy
building a concrete barrier between Israelis and Palestinians, Tom,
along with an Italian and a Jordanian, convened in Amman the “First
Middle-Eastern Conference” of Esperantists. More than half of the
twenty-five attendees were Israelis; there were three Turks and a couple
of venturesome Europeans. That only a handful of Arabs attended, all
but one of them Jordanian, was disappointing to Tom but came as no
surprise.
What
was surprising was the revelation,
by Israeli Esperantist Doron Modan, that this was hardly the first
Middle-Eastern Conference. In fact, it was preceded by nearly
twenty-five years of encounters, from 1924 to 1948, between the
Palestina Esperanto-Ligo (PEL), a group of Jewish Esperantists in
British Palestine, and the Egipta Esperanto-Asocio (EEA), an assortment
of Arabs, Britons, and others who convened in Cairo. As Modan explained,
in May 1934 the first such conference, hosted by the PEL, took place
during a three-day “Oriental Fair” held in Tel Aviv, drawing more than
one hundred participants, including several Egyptians. It was during
this fair that Zamenhof Street, which remains in Tel Aviv to this day,
was solemnly dedicated to the memory of “Doktoro Esperanto.” During the
next decade, Jews and Arabs in Palestine collaborated on Esperanto
instructional materials, published both in Hebrew and Arabic. Meanwhile,
in Egypt, a Coptic Esperantist named Tadros Megalli had begun teaching
Esperanto to small groups of Egyptians and soldiers from Britain and New
Zealand, plus a class of young girls.
In Palestine with his student, Nassif Isaac, to attend a PEL congress
in April 1944, Megalli visited a couple of Jewish agricultural
settlements, and his post-congress effusions in the Arabic-language
magazine
Asyut were worthy of a Jewish
Agency newsreel: “We truly admired the magnificent labors undertaken by
the Jews, who created, from the rocks and desert soil, fecund and
fruit-bearing earth.” An invitation to PEL members to attend the first
Egyptian national congress, an eight-day extravaganza to include visits
to both mosques and synagogues and a train trip to the pyramids,
elicited one hundred ten enthusiastic pledges. A failure to obtain visas
for PEL members spurred one Jewish Esperantist to propose a new
umbrella organization, the Near-Eastern Esperanto League (PROEL), to be
based in Cairo. A counterproposal emerged, from another Jewish member of
PEL: a series of coordinated, joint ventures for the EEA and the PEL,
including a shared headquarters, which would alternate between Tel Aviv
and Cairo; a committee to entreat the Universal Esperanto Association to
hold an upcoming annual congress in the Near East; and a
collaboratively edited bulletin. As Jews, they were building a Jewish
state, but as Esperantists, they saw themselves as Near-Easterners.
But two weeks before the liberation of Buchenwald, when the PEL next
convened in Jerusalem, neither the Egyptians nor the local Arabs
attended. Between the end of World War II and 1948, Modan found only
occasional gestures of goodwill and sporadic visits between EEA and PEL
members. When the grapeshot of scattered Arab-Jewish conflicts became
artillery rounds, relations between the PEL and EEA ceased and their
fortunes diverged. The PEL, now the Esperanto League of Israel (ELI),
licked its wounds and welcomed a new influx of Esperantists from among
the Jewish refugees. But the war of 1948-9 put paid to Esperanto in
Egypt, and by 1951, with most of its foreign membership having
dispersed, the EEA lapsed. Nassif Isaac, photographed in 1944 on a
Jerusalem street, arm in arm with his Egyptian mentor and Jewish
samideanoj—literally,
“same-ideaniks,” what Esperantists affectionately call one another—went
on to write books about spiritualism and reincarnation. He himself
became a revenant, year after year, the sole Arab delegate to the
Universal Congress.
The road from Istanbul to Iznik winds past highrises, sport stadiums
and blacktops, bumps up against the ferry port at the Sea of Marmara and
resumes, on the far shore, in countryside. We drive past olive groves
and fields of anemones studded with beehives; the tangy honeycombs of
Turkish bees, busier at their labors than all but Chinese bees, taste
like the bees went out for curry the night before.
On the bus, I’m sitting with conference organizer Murat Ozdizdar, a
compact, smooth-shaven high school chemistry teacher in his midforties.
In an olive-green Timberland fleece, he looks game and prepared, like a
hiker heading into the backwoods. Murat and I have met before, at an
Esperanto conference in Hanoi. Since then he’s traveled overland in
Nepal and Cambodia, and he itemizes on his fingers (in euros), the
fantastic economies he discovered there. When he visited America, the
generosity of American acquaintances—the in-laws of a cousin’s friend,
the friends of a cousin’s in-laws—proved a perfect complement (in
dollars) for his own stunning feats of thrift. Murat, with an eye to the
future of the Turkish movement, has in tow three of his star chemistry
students. After a two-week crash course in Esperanto with a teacher
flown in from Serbia, they will soon be up and running. But not yet: now
they’re chatting in Turkish, sprawled over comic books, dozing over
their iPods. From time to time, Ringo Starr begins to sing “In the
towowown where I was born” and someone answers a cell phone. Also on the
bus are Branko, a Serbian actor and Esperanto broadcaster, formerly in
aeronautics (“times were OK on earth, but not so good in the sky”) and
Adrian, an affable, worldly, retired public health professor from
Maastricht who tells me his mother was Anne Frank’s third-grade teacher.
“Was she unusual?” I ask, and he shrugs, as if to say,
no man is a hero to his valet.
Adrian now runs a B&B called Esperanto Domo; Esperantists stay
gratis. When we arrive in Iznik, he peers at a city map, swiftly decodes
the iconic beer steins ringing the lake, and heads lakeward.
Iznik, famed for brilliant floral tiles that line the walls of the
harem in Topkapi Palace, is an unlikely site for a ceramics industry.
It’s located on a fault line thirty minutes from the site of an
earthquake that killed an estimated forty thousand people ten years ago
and remains, as a Turkish conferee put it, “seismologically
interesting.” In fact, Murat’s nose for a bargain has sniffed out a
dormitory for seismologists, where shared rooms go for twelve euros
(sixteen dollars) per night. There is no registration table, no written
program, no
solena malfermo (official opening) at which the Esperanto anthem, Zamenhof’s hymn “
La Espero,”
is customarily sung. There are also no nametags, that standby of
Esperanto gatherings, but within hours people have improvised them from
luggage tags.
If you go to a Middle Eastern Esperanto congress expecting panels on
Turkish-Israeli tensions, Iranian armaments, or civilian casualties in
Gaza, you will be disappointed. As far as programming goes, Esperanto
conferences operate much like high school student councils, where the
agenda is invariably the student council itself. Here the agenda,
scrawled in the lobby on a whiteboard, revolves around the movement and,
as a secondary matter, the language. There are talks on the “
E-movado”
(Esperanto movement) in Israel, Turkey, and, as the conference opener,
Iran. The latter will be delivered by Nader, a voluble pediatric
cardiologist from Tehran, who is busy setting up his PowerPoint
presentation.
I knew Nader only through correspondence. Before the conference, I
had sent out a call for Esperanto poems for a session I was preparing;
within ten minutes Nader had e-mailed me the manuscript of an entire
volume of original Esperanto poems by Iranians, edited by himself. Among
dozens of odes to springtime, friends, and lovers, Nader’s own 2003
poem “The Blackened Gull” stood out. The gull, begrimed with naphtha
from oilfields burned in Operation Desert Storm, bears witness to:
Ligo inter àstatoj,
Plene armitaj soldatoj,
Bombo-riàcaj Virkatoj,
Malfeliàcaj atakatoj.
A league among states,
Heavily armed soldiers,
Bomb-brimming Tomcats
Dreadful attacks.
I was surprised to find verse about my own toxic, belligerent
country; except for satires about fascism, Esperanto poetry generally
falls into line with the movement’s revered tradition of political
neutrality. Did it make a difference that this was a gull, not an Iraqi,
croaking defiance—and in Esperanto? Perhaps not. But perhaps, yes; now,
as his bullet points flash on the screen, Nader makes no mention of
Tomcats, or Desert Storm, nor of all the things we Americans talk about
when we talk about Iran: nuclear arsenals, antisemitism, smiles and guns
for Hezbollah. Instead, it showed Iranian Esperantists, young and old,
men and women—some headscarved, some not—dancing at a Norouz party,
trekking in Azerbaijan, and teaching the
lingvo de paco
(language of peace) to Afghan refugees. Next, Gabi, a hip, black-clad
Israeli wearing clunky pewter beads shaped in stars of David, crosses,
and crescents, gives a brief update about the activities of the Tel
Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa clubs. As in Iran, so in Israel: dancing,
trekking, teaching.
Next, a lecture on
landnomoj (names of
countries), apparently, a landmine of a topic. The lecturer is Anna
Lowenstein, an Esperantic household name. She’s a slim, no-nonsense
Briton who lives near Rome with her husband, Renato Corsetti, President
Emeritus of the Universal Esperanto Association and yes, they speak
Esperanto all the time. Anna founded the first feminist journal in
Esperanto,
Sekso kaj Egaleco (Sex and
Equality), wrote two Esperanto-language historical novels, and sits on
the Academy, which issues nonbinding opinions on language questions. (An
Academy member once explained to me that all this happens at the second
of their two annual meetings; at the first, they decide when to hold
the second meeting.)
Anna promises to dispel, for once and all, the confusion around
country names. One only needs to understand the rationale, she insists.
Countries based on nationalities are formed from the name of the people.
“
Italoj live in
Italujo,” we repeat after her, using the “container” suffix,
ujo
for the place containing Italians. But, she goes on, the names of
certain countries, especially multiethnic ones, are the basis for naming
their citizens. Instead of naming the country after the people, one
names the citizens after the country using the “member” suffix,
ano:
Israelo, Israelanoj.
What Anna doesn’t say is that the “rationale” has all the rationality
of Europe’s borders since 1887, which have shaped and reshaped
themselves around empires, nations, colonies, and treaties. To
complicate matters, there’s a tomayto-tomahto factor caused by a
tendency to drop the
ujo ending for the more internationalized
io. Anna advises us to avoid this, since it leads to confusion when the root itself ends in “i.” “A Burundian,” she continues—
“But why not ask the Burundians?” demands Agnes tartly; she’s a
gravel-voiced, Flemish-speaking Belgian and, during breaks on the dorm
patio, the lone smoker in the group. “For example, Esperanto for
Flanders is
Flandrio—but that’s a Romanization; a more natural, Germanic ending would be
Flandren. So why should the Academy dictate to the Burundians what to call themselves?”
“We’re not doing that,” replies Miguel, a full-time Esperanto teacher from Spain with an accent sharp as
aguardiente.
“Anyway, why should the international language honor tribal practices?
No nation’s calling itself by a natural name; language is a cultural
convention.” The night before, he had directed me to his website to
listen to his Esperanto poem about a shamed samurai recited to the
accompaniment of shakuhachi flutes. “It’s crucial for academics like you
to get the word out about the movement,” he’d said urgently. “Chomsky,
you remember, says it isn’t really a language.” And he’d winced; between
him and Chomsky, it was personal.
At the end of the morning session, Renato raises the question of
where the third annual Middle Eastern Conference should be held; not
every country in the region is as welcoming as Turkey. Egypt would be
great, he says, but the Iranians will not be able to get visas. Kuwait
would be great, too, but here the Israelis would be odd man out. So,
Tunisia? Not exactly a thriving movement, but it could be done on the
cheap and Renato knows someone there in a Berber village; he knows
someone everywhere. Murmurs of enthusiasm from the Turks, the Iranians,
the lone American (me), and the Israelis, who will head for Jerusalem in
a few days to prepare for Passover. It’s resolved:
next year in Tunisia.
Avishai Margalit recently asked what became of the third member of
the revolutionary trinity of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Well, not to
worry, the runt of the litter is being fed on royal jelly here in
Esperantujo. And if you’ve followed the language all the way to
Esperantujo,
it’s because you were looking for something. It’s not the ideals of
Esperanto that compel Esperantists; it’s the idealism, a reason to keep
faith, against all evidence, with our species. During conferences like
this one, dislocated, sped-up, and twenty-four-sevened, they’re
positively exuberant; just speaking the language, with its railroad-flat
compounds and exotic adverbs, makes them tipsy with pleasure, as
familiar with one another as college roommates, army buddies, colleagues
denied tenure the same day. They’re all multilingual and multicultural;
some are multiethnic and most are multinational. When you ask where
they’re from, they draw invisible maps with a finger on the table then
trace their trajectory. Dora Patel from Copenhagen turns out to be a Jew
raised in Saint Albans, England. An Israeli computer scientist name
Giovanni turns out to be a Turinese Catholic who married a Jew
forty-three years ago against the protest of his in-laws. Both Miguel
and a German named Albert say their surnames are
judadevena—of
Jewish origin; Albert, in fact, speaks English with a Scottish brogue,
the residue of a sojourn in Aberdeen. (Esperantists use the word
àskoda duso—a “Scottish shower” for a shower that alternately runs cold and scalds.)
For some, like Cemal, a light-eyed, lanky Turk with a dancer’s grace,
it’s clear that Esperanto pushed open a heavy door. At twenty, while
working in an electronics factory, he taught himself Esperanto from a
book and promptly signed on with
Pasporta Servo,
the registry of those willing to host Esperantists for up to three
nights, free of charge. Thirty years and hundreds of
guests—“friends”—later, he’s traveled to New York, Detroit, Europe,
Iran, Israel, and is aiming next for South America; he has a passion for
the history of Argentina. He tells me he’s divorced, making a gesture
more universal than Esperanto: two index fingers paralleled, then skewed
apart. He sees his ten-year-old son on the other side of Istanbul
regularly, he says, but not how regularly. When the fizzy talk about
hosting and guesting washes down, there’s an air of sadness about him.
We pass a graveyard and I ask him if Turks visit cemeteries. “Well,” he
answers, “it depends on the Imam. If the Imam says go, they’ll go,
otherwise . . . ” his voice trails off. “But me, I like to go in the
winter.” He pauses. “To clear the snow off the names.”
On the way back from Bursa, a city famed for mausoleums, mosques, and
Fiat factories, we stop and pile out at an obelisk defaced with the
logo of a football team. Outside, the Turks all seem slightly
embarrassed, even the teens, who are speaking Turkish with a tall man in
an oversized gray sweater and a shaved head. He looks like Kojak on the
weekend, and it turns out he’s an actor. Well, he says, switching from
Turkish to Esperanto, he acts part-time and he also does voiceovers, but
he’s actually a clown who performs in shows, in hospitals, on the
street. “In a big country like America,” he says, gesturing toward me,
“there’s so much work a person can specialize. But Turkish clowns, well,
we have to do it all.” I teach the three chemistry students, who speak a
smooth, slangless English, the phrase
take a chill pill;
in exchange, they fill me in on their favorite English author (Dan
Brown), what websites are blocked in Turkey (Richard Dawkins, for his
atheism), and in what situations you have to wash twice before entering a
mosque (if you curse or fart). They want to know, since I’m a professor
at Princeton, what kind of SAT scores will get them in. At lunch, over
the local specialty of kebabs smothered in tomato sauce and melted
butter, I ask them each what the kid next to him will be doing in ten
years. Sly, mischievous smiles break out on all three faces and they all
seem to be looking for tea leaves in one another’s eyes. “Him?” says
Turhan, pointing to slender, serious Altan. “Working for NASA.” Altan
points to heavy-lidded Serkan: “Business. Big business.” And Serkan
slowly surveys Turhan, who forgot to pack jeans and has been wearing
rolled-up versions of his school uniform since we left the city. “He’ll
be a presenter on television.” Then, to guffaws, “a weatherman.”
By some miracle, on the final morning of the conference, Murat has scrounged up some loaves and fishes: four boxes of
maizflakoj
(cornflakes) and three liters of milk. While others crunch away, Murat
and Cemal are explaining to two Poles, Tadeusz and Marta, how to catch a
bus to the ferry. “You get on the bus,” Murat says, “and when it’s full
it leaves.” “But when does it leave?” asks Tadeusz. Cemal, like a good
doubles partner, swings at this one. “You get on the bus,” he says, “and
when it’s full it leaves.” Tadeusz shrugs, tosses it to Marta, who
asks, “But
when does it leave?” Cemal looks across to Murat, as if to say: your ball.
The final talk, given by a professor of philology from Parma, is on
stereotypes of Turks. It’s a PowerPoint parade of Italian insults,
translated into Esperanto—to smoke like a Turk, think like a Turk, curse
like a Turk; the Italians cry, when all falls into chaos, “
Mamma, i turchi!”
(Mama, it’s the Turks!). I feel as I did at an Episcopalian wedding I
attended once, where an antisemitic joke was told, to raucous laughter,
by the bride’s golf-pro uncle. (“What is the Jewish housewife’s
favorite wine?—
Taaaake me to Miaaami!”) It
stung like soap in my eye, exactly as these insults do now, as if—what?
As if we Esperantists had all, as Hamlet put it, “turned Turks”? As if,
after years of touring what the Ottomans had rigged up or bitten away in
their forays to Vienna, Budapest, Rhodes, and Jerusalem, the world had
been remapped with Istanbul’s tulip-ringed palaces and azure mosques at
its center and radiating out, Murat’s patience, Cemal’s sad kindness,
and the gentle wisecracks of the student chemists. Between slides,
Renato asks if anyone has heard of “Turk’s Head” contests, but no one
has.
A week later, back in Princeton, I find an article from the May 9, 1854,
New York Daily Times.
It’s a gossipy dispatch from Paris by one “Dick Tinto,” who describes a
peculiar diversion: “In all the public dancing gardens at Paris, is a
contrivance to test strength of arm. It consists of a wooden head of a
man, covered with thick cloth and mounted upon a spring; upon being
struck by the fist, it descends to a point proportionate to the force
employed, and a finger moving along a graduated scale, marks the degree
attained. This head has represented of late years, and perhaps from time
immemorial, the head of a Turk, and the number of blows the Mussulmans
have received in his person is quite incredible.”
Obama has been following me, but he’s overshot the mark, standing
erect before the Turkish Parliament in Ankara. We’re watching a
big-screen TV on a ferry back to Istanbul—me, Cemal, Renato, Anna,
Tadeusz, and Marta. Obama mouths the words while a female voice utters
them in Turkish and Cemal translates into Esperanto. He’s talking, Cemal
begins, about Turkish issues—normalizing relations between Turkey and
Armenia (no
G-word, at least not in this
third-hand translation), reopening the Eastern Orthodox Halki Seminary,
the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), lifting the ban on Kurdish
broadcasting.
No, not just about Turkey; he’s talking about everything, everything
we haven’t been discussing the past three days: Iran’s nuclear
potential, America’s role in Iraq, Al Qaeda; he’s talking about
reunification (Cyprus) and a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine).
This is my president, I think,
this is now,
and by some strange global turn of only a few degrees, people all over
the boat glance up from their tiny glasses of tea to watch and listen.
“The work is never over,” Obama concludes, and the Esperantists exchange
a knowing glance which seems to say:
we could have told you that. Tadeusz observes wryly, “He was getting more applause at the beginning.” When we disembark and say
àgis la revido—till
next time—Cemal warns me that by ten the next morning, when Obama lands
in Istanbul, all roads to the airport will be closed.
At 6:30 am, standing with my bags at the elevator, I step aside for
the snipers in blotted camouflage who file up a spiral staircase to the
rooftop garden. They’re dragging rifles, ammo, and iron stanchions on
which they’ll position their sights to give Obama cover for his visit to
the Blue Mosque. They’ll aim between the minarets, where just last
night, gulls looped through rays of floodlight, patches of moonlight,
and the darkness in between.
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