How to be a Bad Muslim and Other Essays by Mohamed Hassan

Author:Mohamed Hassan [Hassan, Mohamed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143776222
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

12

The curse of the Bosphorus Strait

WHEN I WAS LIVING IN ISTANBUL, I had this theory I kept annoying my friends with. It was an elaborate explanation as to why we strangers had been brought to this strange land, and what we were expected to do.

We were working for the Turkish broadcaster, but most of us were from far-flung places like Atlanta and Nairobi and Auckland. We were a community of expats suddenly thrown into an environment where no one from outside our office spoke English. None of us spoke a lick of Turkish.

I tried, desperately, to learn. I spent two hours a day on Duolingo piecing adjectives together in what felt like a giant jigsaw puzzle with no box to compare the final image to. It seemed that my cerebral cortex had thrown in the towel after learning English, which is hugely embarrassing whenever I meet journalists who know at least five languages. Being bilingual as a third-culture kid is no bragging right, and I had moved to a city that thought little of my forked tongue.

In Istanbul, the ancient stone moulds its arms over you as you sleep, and soon you are embroidered in its fabric. You ride the ferry between Asia and Europe and drink the salted Bosphorus air. You pour distilled tea over your bones after every meal and conversation to survive another icy January. You fight over fudged toll meters with bitter taxi drivers, the necessary antagonists streaming through the city’s arteries.

One tried to run me over once when I refused to pay double the fare while going to meet friends for breakfast. We screamed at each other in different languages until I hurled money on the dashboard and threw the door shut behind me. He slammed the gears into reverse and gassed it as I walked around his car to get to the restaurant. It was a Sunday morning.

I spent three years in a foreign country with no exit strategy, knowing enough local words not to starve. Like almost everyone I met, I’d arrived on a whim, through an unexpected email or phone call, a whiff of mystery caught in the afternoon air. I was looking for the next stage in my career as a journalist, that was true. But I was also looking for my own escape. I had spent most of my life living on an island, looking out to the rest of the world in yearning. It was time to swim out and seek fortune and adventure.

My unexpected call came in the form of an intrepid journalist I crossed paths with by accident or serendipity. I met Yasmine Ryan in 2016 when she walked into our office at Radio New Zealand one morning without any fanfare, picking up casual shifts in between flashier gigs abroad: Al Jazeera, The Independent, The New York Times, The World Press Institute. I had pored over her work and heard stories from my Tunisian friends about how she was one of the first foreign journalists to cover the uprising against Ben Ali in 2010–11, and how she didn’t cover it like a White reporter.

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