Exiled Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran offers a series of letters to those who, for whatever reason, are displaced
Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century (Canongate Books) by Ece Temelkuran
In a radical shake-up of asylum policy, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced in March that anyone granted refugee status in the UK would no longer be given the right to settle permanently in the country. The government was, she said, “changing an age-old assumption of what it means to be a refugee – moving from a permanent to a temporary status”. It was a message to the thousands of people who attempt to reach the UK to find security, among the millions displaced worldwide each year. And the message was: don’t expect to find a home here.
Though by different means, Turkish author and journalist Ece Temelkuran was also forced to leave her home, exiled by the Erdogan regime in 2016. Her latest book, Nation of Strangers, is in part an address to others who find themselves in circumstances of displacement. Yet it is also a broader treatise, a handbook for an epoch in which millions of us can expect to become “unhomed” – be it through climate change, housing crises, political upheaval or war, with no guarantee of finding home again. In this sense, it is also a eulogy for a world of certainties that is to many now becoming unrecognisable. As Temelkuran writes, “It is as if we are mourning, not for what we have already lost, but for what we know we eventually will.”
A series of letters addressed to a putative “stranger” and penned over the course of three years, the book traces Temelkuran’s experiences of being “unhomed” across different cities (primarily in Germany where she is seeking residency) and her encounters with the myriad fellow strangers and “settled folk” whom she meets. Her lyrical dispatches are arranged chronologically in four sections, each titled with one of the inevitable questions that follow the unhomed: Why are you here? Why did you leave? How will you survive here? When will you go home?
Temelkuran documents her own personal grappling with these questions and that of those she meets – on streets or in immigration office queues or art projects – often finding shared experiences and shared answers. In doing so, she explores the everyday survival strategies of the stranger: the need to put one’s heart on ice, to smile the right smile, to “carve off the parts that don’t fit the space she is given in her new land”. She thereby also holds a mirror to the societies where many of the world’s unhomed find themselves – societies that demand a narrative of victim or survivor or brave exile (in Temelkuran’s case, the “intellectual damsel in distress running away from barbarians”) in order to affirm their own stories of democracy and freedom. Temelkuran rejects and often ridicules these narratives while poignantly capturing their exhausting toll on the individual.
Despite the context of the author’s exile, her audience is not limited to those who have become physically homeless. Her definition of the stranger – including the misfit, the outcast, the squatter, the new poor, the clandestine, the dropout – is broad enough to constitute what South African poet Breyten Breytenbach described as “the silent majority”. It also includes the soon-to-be-unhomed, those who will imminently find themselves “locked out in the cold, alone with the beasts”, many of whom may still be too comfortable or wilfully blind to notice their homes crumbling around them.
In this sense – and arguably its greatest value lies therein – the book is also both a warning and an invitation. It is a warning about the forces that are now shaping our world – fascists, neoliberals, tech bros. It is these “powerful people” who are, while many of us look on paralysed, “designing a future by ensuring there is no return to the familiar home of humanity: good old democracy, human rights and the rule of law”. Once a home has been lost, Temelkuran knows, there is no returning.
It is for this reason that she also issues her invitation: a solicitation to fellow strangers to build a new home, together, as a bulwark against the rising tides of precarity and indifference. It is in this project that the skills learned by the stranger, acquired through hardship and alienation, will be key. As she concludes, it is in such a home that, “we, the strangers – or those who have been or will be unhomed through our apocalypses – will maintain that defence line by holding each other with care and trust even when faced with the overwhelming cruelty of our times.”
