AYSE PARLA
Sabancı University
Remembering across the border:
Postsocialist nostalgia among Turkish immigrants from
Bulgaria
A B S T R A C T
“Postsocialist nostalgia” among Turkish immigrant
women from Bulgaria is not just strategic
performance to negotiate the challenges that face
working women in Turkey but is also cross-cultural
analysis based on the migrants’ experiences of
distinct gender regimes on the two sides of the
border. I explore why the competition between
established residents and newcomers over scarce
resources becomes, in this instance, the ground for
negotiation over proper gender roles. I also suggest
that the migrants’ appeal to the communist legacy
posits an alternative to either “normalizing” or
“Orwellizing” communism and that it offers a more
nuanced understanding of the norms and practices
of gender and labor under communism, as
experienced by this particular group of minority
women. [Turkish migrants from Bulgaria, postsocialist
nostalgia, gender, honor, Turkey]
I
n 1989, following the 1984–89 assimilation campaign in Bulgaria that
targeted the country’s Muslim minorities, Emine, along with over
300,000 others, emigrated to Turkey with her husband and two-yearold
daughter. She took the first job she found, she told me with no
uncertain pride, the very day after their arduous three-day journey
across the Bulgarian–Turkish border. “With the dust of travel still on my
feet,” Emine said, she began to work as a cashier at a bakery. Each morning,
an elderly woman whom Emine recognized from the neighborhood would
purse her lips as Emine handed her her daily bread. Finally, one day, the
customer blurted out, “Well, I congratulate your husband.” “Why?” asked
Emine, and she was told, “For letting you work among men.” “I felt my head
boil, when she said that,” Emine said to me, her indignation over the encounter
undiminished, indeed, presumably nourished, in the 12-year gap
between the telling and the told. “I said to her, ‘Look here, aunt, I have no
problems with you. And I am earning my bread money here, OK? Don’t ever
say such things to me again.’” That was enough to keep her quiet, Emine recalled,
but soon another neighbor, this time a middle-aged man, informed
her, “The woman who is loyal to her husband stays at home, and prepares
his meals three times a day.” Emine told me how absurd such a statement
sounded to someone who had just arrived from a country where everyone
worked: “Only if you had something wrong with you did you not work in
Bulgaria.”
In narrating both encounters, Emine, who was granted Turkish citizenship
along with other “political” migrants who arrived in Turkey in 1989,
stressed the gendered aspects of the discrimination she faced in Turkey.1
Meanwhile, Sedanur, a 45-year-old migrant who engages in circular migration
along with an estimated 200,000 other labor migrants from Bulgaria
as a result of that country’s flailing economy since the fall of communism,
said she resented, above all, the condescension shown by locals toward the
kind of work she does: “Here [in Turkey] they treat me like an inferior human
being because I do cleaning. In Bulgaria, under komunizma, we knew
to respect our work, and to be respected for it, no matter what it might be.”
Indeed, whether they arrived with the 1989 migration and were granted citizenship
or whether they are part of the post-1990s economic migration
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 750–767, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01208.x
Remembering across the border American Ethnologist
and remain irregular,2
virtually all the Turkish immigrants
from Bulgaria I met over the course of three years of
fieldwork in 2001–02 and 2007–08 emphasized the intertwined
class- and gender-based marginalization they
suffered upon their arrival in Turkey, the country that,
ironically, figures as their “true” homeland within the Turkish
national cosmology. Expressions of marginalization
were almost invariably accompanied by reminiscences of
the communist ethos, wherein labor was held to constitute
a fundamental facet of one’s identity and dignity and gender
equality reigned at the workplace and at home.
Such positive recollections of communism, often called
“nostalgia” in scholarly and popular discourses, have baffled
many, including the more liberal-minded observers of
post-1989 developments in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union. If, as in Hannah Arendt’s (1973) view, the political
system completely colonized the lifeworld under totalitarianism,
how is it that the very victims of the system
do not display pure joy at its demise? More specifically,
how can Bulgaria’s Turkish minority remember with fondness
the regime that subjected them to various degrees of
discrimination, culminating in the assimilationist measures
of 1984–89? Infamously called the “rebirth campaign,” the
practices of repression directed against the Turkish minority
at that time included bans on speaking Turkish in public,
wearing what was considered traditional clothing and engaging
in Muslim religious rituals, and the forced change of
all Turkish names to Bulgarian ones (Amnesty International
1986; Helsinki Watch 1989).
The more simplistic explanations for the increasingly
popular and popularized phenomenon called “postcommunist
nostalgia” on the part of various postcommunist
subjects posit a resistant, indeed, recalcitrant, communist
legacy whose heirs lack the capacity to think beyond com-
munism.3
A recent assessment of public perceptions of the
contemporary situation in Bulgaria falls squarely within
the communism-as-impervious-legacy line of analysis. The
economist Georgy Ganev (2005) tries to account for what
he calls the “experience gap,” that is, the gap between, on
the one hand, the “positive objective experience” (such as
higher GDPs; increased industrial output, sales, and productivity;
jumps in foreign direct investment; decrease in
corruption; etc.) in Bulgaria, and, on the other hand, the
“negative changes in perceptions,” that is, the public perception
that the situation in Bulgaria is deteriorating. According
to Ganev, the gap occurs because, instead of what
he calls the “valiant” market price theory of value, people in
Bulgaria still subscribe to the Marxist labor theory of value,
which “continues to live in people’s minds,” blinding them,
as it were, to the empirically improved conditions of the
present. A similar perspective that places the emphasis on
the gendered aspects of the communist legacy posits that
“women in Bulgaria at the close of the twentieth century
are trapped in their past through the myths of equality and
emancipation and in their present through the poverty, passivity
and lack of awareness of their own specific interests”
(Kotzeva 1999:96).4
Such views exemplify a predominant tendency in the
literature on postsocialism: to depict the communist experience
as irredeemably totalitarian and oppressive, regardless
of the varieties across geography or the particularities of
the subject position of those who subscribe to the discourse
of emancipation. Former communist subjects who are nostalgic
for full employment, access to education, and social
security, and women, in particular, who construct a narrative
of autonomy about the pre-1989 era, are often considered
to be hopelessly tainted with Marxist ideals to the point
of not being able to discern where their true interest lies.
Some of the most progressive Western feminists, even those
who do not charge formerly communist subjects with false
consciousness, are nonetheless often loath to admit that
women made real gains under communism in terms of both
economic and social independence. Such positive legacies
of communism tend to get too swiftly dismissed under the
otherwise critical “double burden argument,” which asserts
that the rhetoric of gender equality under communism, in
fact, masked a double exploitation: The communist state
actually secured women’s labor through their incorporation
into the workforce while it continued to place the traditional
demands on them as mothers and wives.
What is at stake in probing such subtle elisions of
any positive recollections of the communist experience?
First, the systematic minimization of the substantial gains
that women made under communism may be viewed as
an enduring symptom of what Katherine Verdery (1996)
has called the “cognitive organization of the world” under
Cold War ideology. Without denying the intricacies of the
communist ideal of the woman-as-worker, I aim to contribute
to the still marginal debate on the enabling aspects
of the communist experience, offering a perspective that
goes against the hegemonic neoliberal discourse of capitalist
triumphalism. I try to convey the ambiguities of the
experiences of one particular minority group (Turkish) under
one particular communist regime (Bulgarian) with the
hope of pointing to an alternative to either “normalizing”
communism, as official communist ideologies have done,
or “Orwellizing” communism,5
as Cold War ideologies are
still wont to do. Second, and more specifically, I seek such
an alternative through an analysis of nostalgia that neither
takes fond reminiscences of communism at face value nor
reduces them to discursive strategies deployed to ease the
difficulties encountered in the present by merely retrojecting
dignity onto the communist past.
In their prescient critique of the transitology literature,
Michael Burawoy and Verdery (1999) challenge analyses
that account for the confusions and shortcomings of
the transition process as “socialist legacies.” Instead, they
invite analysis of the ways in which the past enters the
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present not as legacy but as novel adaptation. In this vein,
various scholars have gone on to question the usefulness
of viewing nostalgia as being primarily about the past and
have opted to view it as a “presentist” act, instead (Berdahl
1999, 2000; Ivy 1995; ¨Ozy¨urek 2006; Rosaldo 1989), that
is, not as a reflection on the past but, rather, as a strategy
that serves the present. This presentist focus has historicized
nostalgia (Litzinger 1998) and has thus paved the
way for innovative analyses of nostalgia in postcommunist
contexts as adaptation strategies to cope with the difficulties
wrought by the transition period (Berdahl 1999, 2000;
Grant 1995; Patico 2005). Some have even taken the presentist
focus further to question the adequacy of the very
designation nostalgia: The feeling of wistfulness connoted
by the term obscures the pragmatism of practices of remembering
(Pilbrow in press); when paired with the adjective
postsocialist, the term nostalgia delegitimizes—at best
domesticates—expressions of discontent regarding the injustices
of the current situation (Creed 1999); postcommunist
nostalgia is not an actually existing phenomenon at all
but simply a west German transference onto the east German
Other (Boyer 2006).6
Finally, in an impressive review
that catalogues and differentiates various practices that get
subsumed under the umbrella of nostalgia, Maya Nadkarni
and Olga Shevchenko (2004) challenge the notion of nostalgia
as an internally coherent body of cultural practices and
drive home the point that the meaning and logic of nostalgic
practices can only be deciphered by paying meticulous
attention to the specific social contexts in which those practices
are embedded as well as the internal variation within
those contexts.
Yet a different strand of analysis has examined nostalgic
recollections in relation to relative subject positions, depicting
the ways in which individuals positioned variously in
the hierarchies of power were differentially constrained and
enabled under communist rule (Bloch 2005). Situating the
communist discourses on work and gender within broader
discourses of modernity, Lisa Rofel (1999) and Bloch (2005)
demonstrate both the disciplinary aspects of interpellating
women as workers of the new nation and the ways in which
such interpellation offered unprecedented opportunities to
them given their prior positions of stigmatization or exclusion.
In my own examination of nostalgia among Turkish
immigrants from Bulgaria, I draw on the presentist focus
in terms of its attention to the situated nature of the teller
and the telling, both of which are inevitably motivated by
the (adverse) conditions of the present. However, I am reluctant
to reduce nostalgic memory to negotiations in and
of the present only. To capture the enabling aspects of communism
for Turkish women who constituted an ethnic minority
in Bulgaria, I turn to the scholarship that has focused
on the gendered aspects of postsocialist nostalgia (Bloch
2005; Ghodsee 2004b; Rofel 1999) as well as scholarship that
has looked at the intersection of gender and minority status
(Bloch 2005; Grant 1995). In addition to examining the
ways in which gender and minority status bear on the production
of nostalgia, I consider the significance of yet another
category of difference, namely, migrancy. How does
it contribute to an understanding of what is called “postsocialist
nostalgia” when one attends to the recollections
of Turkish migrant women, who had a distinct experience
of communism not only as members of a minority group
but also as migrants who remember from the Turkish side
of the border, where they confront a very different gender
regime? I argue that a consideration of subjectivities constituted
at the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and migrancy
enable one to duly recognize that these immigrant
women engage in cross-cultural and comparative historical
analysis through their “nostalgic” reminiscences. Their ability
to make comparisons on the basis of their experience
of two diverse geographies, political ideologies, and gender
regimes bequeaths to the emic point of view the added
critical perspective of cross-cultural comparison and renders
these women more than mere nostalgic narrators reshaping
the past as best suits them. Finally, and more generally,
the immigrants’ analysis of competing understandings
of appropriate labor roles for women in contexts assumed
to be approximate reveals gender as the product
of varying historical consciousness and changing political
economies.7
The slippery referent of nostalgia
Back in Bulgaria, if someone did not have a job they
would either be scorned for laziness, or pitied for being
sick. And it wouldn’t matter if this person was a man
or a woman. [Nezihe, a 32-year-old woman pursuing a
graduate degree, immigrated in 1989]
I could not believe it when I came here. My neighbors
expected me to sit at home. They were astonished when
I said I was bored sitting at home, just three days after
immigrating. They said, “But you are a woman, why
would you have to work?” And I was in turn shocked
at their astonishment. I would not know what to do
with myself if I sat home like that. And for us, in Bulgaria,
not having a job indicated for us either a grave
health problem or a flaw of character. [Saniye, 37-yearold
state employee, immigrated in 1989]
I had a university diploma but I was cleaning houses
when I first got here. Still, I did my job proudly because
we learned in Bulgaria that all labor is worthy of respect.
[Hatice, 48-year-old woman working as a high
school teacher, immigrated in 1989]
My husband would never say to me, “Don’t work.” That
is not how things were in Bulgaria. Everyone worked,
and this made the relationship between husband and
wife more equal. I stand on my own feet, he respects
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Remembering across the border American Ethnologist
me for it. We both contribute to the household. We
share the duties. Of course I still get to make the coffee
and bring it to him. But in most things, we are used
to sharing tasks, not like here where the men expect to
be served all the time. [Sabriye, 40-year-old domestic
worker, has undertaken circular labor migration since
1995]
Coming back from work the other day, the bus was
packed as usual. But this guy sitting next to me, he tried
to take advantage of the crowd and started to press his
leg against mine. So finally I turn to him and say, in a
loud voice so everyone can hear, “Mister, it looks like
you want to sit on my lap?” He became all red, looked
down mumbling something and got up at the next stop.
Now, of course, such a man will not let his wife go to
work and take the bus every day. [Nurcan, 43-year-old
domestic worker, immigrated in 1998]
This neighbor who was just visiting . . . He came to vent
off steam because he was furious his wife had gone out
without his permission. Poor woman, no chance for her
but to be a housewife. [Ahmet, a 38-year-old man working
as a domestic helper, immigrated in 1999]
Over the course of 18 months of fieldwork I conducted
in Istanbul among Bulgarian Turkish immigrants in 2001
and 2002, with subsequent follow-up fieldwork in 2007–08,
I heard assertions concerning the better quality of life back
in Bulgaria that pointed to a general wistfulness for the way
things were “back there,” and, more specifically, wistfulness
for the way things were “back then.” This juxtaposition, or
the collusion, of the “back there” and the “back then” adds
to the more temporal notion of postcommunist nostalgia
a spatial layer that is constituted by the experience of geographical
displacement. My interlocutors were primarily
migrants who arrived with the more political (and politicized)
migration wave of 1989 as well as those who have
traveled back and forth between Bulgaria and Turkey as irregular
labor migrants since the late 1990s. Regardless of
certain differences that may exist among these two groups
in terms of occupational background, future goals, local reception,
and, certainly, legal status (Kaslı and Parla 2009),
I found a widely shared worldview among a particular cohort
of women who were above the age of 30 at the time
of fieldwork. This worldview is manifest both in general allusions
to a more favorable past in Bulgaria and in specific
references to gender roles, especially in the realm of
work. Norms about working outside of the home are conveyed
by the immigrants as embodying the most striking
gendered-related differences on the two sides of the border.
Virtually all of the immigrants I met expressed amazement
at the low level of women’s participation in the workforce
in Turkey, and they described the communist work
ethos as one that made a life without work unthinkable.8
Being without work in Bulgaria elicited only scorn or pity,
as Nezihe states above, voicing a normative criticism that
is quickly conjoined with another common criticism predicated
on personal grounds: “I just would not know what
to do with myself if I did not work,” in Saniye’s words. And
many women, like Sabriye, explicitly forge the link between
working and (more) gender equality, even as they jokingly
point to the persistence of certain gendered practices, such
as serving men coffee. A final recurrent theme, illustrated
in Nurcan’s humorously narrated anecdote concerning harassment
on the bus, is part of a larger appraisal of the double
standards of local men with regard to how they treat
their own wives versus other women. On this score, immigrant
men would often join in the discussion, just as Ahmet
did, affirming their support for their working wives
as equal contributors to the household and making jokes
about locals whom they saw as laughably—and tellingly—
conservative.
How is one to evaluate recurrent reiterations about
more gender equality, the greater freedom work provides to
women, and the dignity that accrues to being a worker under
and in the aftermath of a communist regime? On the
one hand, dismissing these assertions as mere holdovers
from the past deprives the speakers of any competence
with regard to assessing their own life trajectories. Intentionally
or not, such a dismissal also partakes in the logic
of Cold War ideology that, a priori, assumes life under
capitalism is better than life under communism. This assumption
perpetuates what Bloch aptly describes as the
“hegemonic discourse regarding socialist and late-socialist
societies [which] has turned to a neoliberal narrative of ‘liberatory’
economic reform” (2005:536). On the other hand,
do scholars not run the risk of romanticizing the communist
era if we take the expressions of a better past at face
value? In doing so, would we not be paying insufficient heed
to the “politics of memory” with its selective practices of remembering
and forgetting (Olick and Robbins 1998)?9
One
could wonder, for example, about the existence of restrictive
gender codes in Bulgaria, which the immigrant women
may have internalized or chosen not to remember and
which they, instead, project entirely onto members of the
local population, who tend to appear as stereotypes in their
accounts.10
Such selective practices of remembering associated
with nostalgia are taken up by various scholars. Indeed, the
very term nostalgia casts doubt on the past as an actual
referent. Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia as “a longing for
a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia
is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also
a romance with one’s own fantasy” (2001:xiii). Taking this
definition, one could argue that the communist past becomes
idealized, especially given that the conditions of the
present tend to be less favorable if not outright unbearable
for many. In the post-Soviet context, for example, Jennifer
Patico notes that teachers often recall how they were treated
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like tsars in the Soviet Union. This, in fact, was not the case,
Patico explains, but
the respect and deference they had been granted as educators
and as socializers of Soviet youth contrasted
starkly—at least in the minds of some teachers themselves,
and particularly in retrospect, in the nostalgic
light that has been cast by post-Soviet processes
of marketization—with the less attractive notion of
“working for a family,” being retained, as it were, as domestic
labor. [2005:486]
In her work on East Germany, Daphne Berdahl (1999,
2000) underscores the need to situate practices of ostalgie—
the term coined to designate the specific manifestation of
nostalgia in the German context—within the atmosphere of
disillusionment following reunification. Like Boym, Berdahl
emphasizes the allusion to and illusion of a lost homeland
inherent in nostalgia and suggests that practices of ostalgie
“can thus be an attempt to reclaim a kind of heimat (home
or homeland), albeit a romanticized and hazily glorified
one” (2000:137). Long ago, Kant pondered whether “homesickness”
(heimweh)—the term in use before being replaced
by the more medical nostalgia11
—was truly about homesickness
or merely about ephemeral time. In that spirit, one
may even ask whether postcommunist nostalgia is about
communism at all or whether it is simply a Proustian quest
for lost youth (Alexander Kiossev, personal communication,
June 2006; see also Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004).
And yet, although I agree with the importance of recognizing
the slipperiness of nostalgia’s referent, I argue against
the conclusion that it therefore has no referent at all. Memory
inevitably filters the past through the lens of the present.
However, I am also wary of too hastily leaping from, on
the one hand, being cognizant of the gap between the remembering
and the remembered to, on the other hand, dismissing
the materiality of the remembered altogether. But
before I elaborate my argument for taking seriously the nostalgic
utterances of immigrant women from Bulgaria, I need
to address yet another important caveat against taking positive
recollections concerning labor under communism at
face value, namely, the double-burden argument that I referred
to in the first section of this article.
Unpacking “the double burden”
Perhaps the most influential argument so far in the scholarly
literature on socialism and gender, the double-burden
argument contends that, under communism, the rhetoric
of gender equality, in fact, masked a double exploitation. By
seemingly ensuring women’s right to work, the state actually
secured women’s labor while continuing to place the
traditional demands on them as mothers and wives. Susan
Gal and Gail Kligman point out various communist regimes’
contradictory goals in the policies toward women across
Eastern Europe: “They wanted workers as well as mothers,
token leaders as well as obedient cadres” (2000:5). Farideh
Heyat (2002) demonstrates that women in Azerbaijan had
to meet the requirement to participate in the work force
and in public life at the same time they were expected to
accede to the call of their communities that they adhere to
the ideals of modesty and shame.12
For the Bulgarian context,
S¨ul¨us¸ (2007) notes that, although each of her interviewees
referred to the existence of gender equality when in
Bulgaria, they also admitted to undertaking the majority of
the household tasks, whether in Bulgaria or Turkey. On the
basis of her research with Moldavian domestic workers in
Turkey, Ayse Akalın (2006) even suggests the need for a different
term: only triple burden would adequately describe
the responsibilities shouldered by seasonal female workers,
which include a third job undertaken in the country of immigration
in addition to the double burden of work outside
and inside the home in Moldavia.
A key merit of the double-burden argument lies in its
critical distance from the rhetoric of state socialism, especially
the claim that state socialism emancipated women by
ensuring their participation in the labor force. Instead, its
aim is to expose the far more complex and contradictory
realities of everyday experience. In their seminal work on
the politics of gender during and after socialism, Gal and
Kligman (2000) offer a detailed assessment of the ways in
which socialism reconfigured the public–private distinction
and the extent to which gender roles were transformed in
the process. They acknowledge as a positive consequence
women’s reduced dependence on husbands and fathers,
because wage work established a direct relation to the state
not mediated through men. This led to a more autonomous
sense of self-worth for women, Gal and Kligman state, and
“despite discriminatory wages and excess of hours of labor,
many came to take seriously the communist ideal of equality
between men and women” (2000:53), sentiments that
were repeatedly articulated by my interlocutors.
Despite such positive aspects, however, Gal and Kligman
go on to note the various setbacks that undermined
this ideal, in addition to the problem of the double burden
already elaborated. Perhaps most importantly, the strategic
deployment of gender equality as an official discourse in the
public realm masked the less visible forms of inequality that
were reproduced in the private one.13
They also note that,
despite the ideal of equality, “the conditions of work, low
wages, and the magnitude of demands on [women] produced
a sense of victimization and perennial guilt at their
never being able to do enough of anything, especially mothering”
(Gal and Kligman 2000:53). Furthermore, they point
out that the image of competent mother and worker presented
by magazines went hand in hand with the omission
of sexualized beauty in the pursuit of femininity (Gal and
Kligman 2000:54). They suggest that even some of those aspects
hailed as positive had, in fact, negative consequences:
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Remembering across the border American Ethnologist
the generous child-care payments and maternity leaves,
for example, reinforced women’s subordinate position in
the labor force, feeding their image as less reliable workers
than men (Gal and Kligman 2000:49). Likewise, the legal
measures that rendered women more autonomous, such as
the relative ease of divorce and the guarantee of state support
for single women and children, reinforced the “extreme
fragility” of marital ties (Gal and Kligman 2000:54).14
Although a balanced assessment of the communist experience
is indispensable, one also needs to be vigilant, I
believe, with regard to what I identified at the outset of this
article as the subtle elisions of the substantial gains women
made under communism. Before discussing how generous
maternity leaves and child-care payments gave women the
image of unreliable workers and thus reinforced their subordinate
role, I find it important to delve more deeply into
the actual substance of these legal rights. In communist
Bulgaria, women had guaranteed maternity leave, which
began 45 days before the expected delivery date and could
be extended until the child was three years old, the first two
years being paid leave and the third year unpaid but with
the guarantee that the woman’s job would be held for her.
Returning to work before two years entitled a woman to her
prematernity wage and to 50 percent of the national minimum
wage for that portion of leave not used. In addition,
if the mother chose to return to work early, the father or one
of the grandparents could be appointed caregiver and receive
the unused portion of the maternity leave.15
I emphasize legal rights concerning maternity leave
and child support under communism in Bulgaria not only
because they exceeded the feminist achievements of some
of the most progressive Western capitalist societies but also
because of the stark contrast between the past experiences
and the current predicament of the particular group of migrant
women in question. Hatice, the high school teacher
who had defiantly insisted on the respect that should be
paid to all work, regardless of its nature, remembers the
sense of security that came from maternity leave and the
sense of freedom provided by subsequent free child care.
Nurg¨ul, a mother of two, has worked as a nanny in Turkey
since 2001 and “feel[s] her heart go stiff with sadness” each
time she lets herself think about not getting to see her
younger child grow up—he was only ten when she left him
behind in Bulgaria. Unlike Hatice, who immigrated in 1989
with her family, Nurg¨ul engages in circular labor migration,
along with thousands of others from Bulgaria who have become
labor migrants because of the scarcity of jobs in that
country. Like Nurg¨ul, most of these post-1990s migrants
leave their children, sometimes as young as two years old, to
be tended by kin. In Turkey, they take care of the children of
middle-class or upper-middle-class women, who, in turn,
rely on the migrant women to enable them to keep up with
their own careers, given that the current maternity leave in
Turkey is four months.
Similarly, despite its merits, particularly with regard to
calling attention to the invisible ways in which asymmetries
in the division of labor were reproduced, I find that the
double-burden argument itself has to be sufficiently qualified
to avoid replicating, even if in a feminist inflection, the
assumption of the superiority of the capitalist first world
over the communist second world. Kristen Ghodsee (2004a,
2004b, 2005), for example, both meticulously depicts the
institutionalized benefits and advantages the communist
regime provided for women in Bulgaria and offers a timely
critique of the unqualified importation of cultural feminism
to postsocialist contexts. She argues that a focus exclusively
on gender at the expense of class fails to address the local
histories, debates, and understandings of the “woman
question” in formerly communist societies. With the alleged
intention of “saving women”—to borrow from Lila AbuLughod’s
(2002) trenchant critique of a parallel discourse
deployed by U.S. liberal feminism about Afghan women—
such imported feminism hardly acknowledges any legacies
of socialism, or it does so only in negative ways:
Even the local NGOs funded primarily by western cash
sources assume that Bulgarian women are willing to
borrow or work to pay for basic needs that were once
provided by the socialist state. Under socialism these
needs once existed as the basic rights and entitlements
of the communist citizen. Indeed, one of the
most lauded achievements of the communist countries
was the high level of human development that
they achieved. This was particularly true for women.
In Bulgaria, women greatly benefited from generous
maternity leaves, free education, free health care, free
subsidized child care, communal kitchens and canteens,
communal laundries, subsidized food and transport,
subsidized holidays on the Black Sea. [Ghodsee
2004a:747]
Similarly, Bloch identifies the “discourse of oppressive
state power and the assumption of popular resistance to it”
(2005:536) in much of the scholarship on the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe. Indeed, the assumptions of total
oppression on the part of the communist state and either
thorough indoctrination of or resistance by its subjects
are also central to the representation of Turkish women
in Bulgaria by Turkish nationalist historiography, which
regards the communist period in Bulgaria as the most
sinister phase in that country’s oppression of the Turkish
minority, especially women. According to nationalist historiography,
one of the particularly insidious ways in which
communism sought to destroy what is seen as an essential
and invincible “Turkishness” was through the indoctrination
of children. Hapless children were left at the mercy
of the communist state because their mothers were forced
to work:
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In the day care centers and kindergartens that surrounded
Bulgaria like a spider’s web, history was taught
to babies in distorted ways, and hatred of Turks was
injected into children in a systematic way. Turks were
made to follow the same mandate as Bulgarians and
send their children to these cr`eches and kindergartens
so that Turkish children would be prevented from
learning their own language, religion, customs and
mores. [Konukman 1990:54, translation mine]
Another author bemoans the inability of the family, the
fortress of ethnic preservation, to withstand the attacks by
communists:
He [the Bulgarian], under the guise of ensuring mothers’
work, meticulously began to subject the Turkish population
to the regulation that children were to be given
to cr`eches and kindergartens. It has been observed that
their goal was to minimize the children’s contact with
their families and that by and large they succeeded.
Thus, we saw during those days [of the 1989 immigration]
that little children who arrived in Turkey could
barely speak Turkish. [Togrol 1991:69, translation mine,
italics added]
The indexical relationship between the loss of language
and the loss of authentic culture and ethnicity is another
topic worthy of inquiry. The questions I pose here, however,
are of a different sort. When my interlocutors refer to the
equality of men and women in the workplace and at home,
are they merely continuing to mouth party propaganda? Or
when they view having access to free child care as allowing
them a certain freedom, are they still so entrenched in
a distorted vision of the past that they are unable to assess
how the state conspired against them? In what ways can one
go beyond the view of communist indoctrination to further
probe the admittedly nebulous boundary between the lived
and the remembered?
I aim to challenge the stated certainties of both Turkish
nationalist historiography and the double-burden argument,
and, following in Bloch’s (2005) footsteps, attempt
instead to capture some of the “ambiguities of lived lives
under socialism.” In doing so, I am heeding the prescient
call by Maria Todorova (2002) to find alternatives to the
discourse of official state socialism, on the one hand, and
the “no less inadequate but still surviving cold-war models
and assessments,” on the other hand, as well as the importance
of pluralizing what has often been depicted as a
monolithic experience in most Cold War literature. I thus
try to move beyond the view that the communist imperative
to work was experienced as just another burden and the
view that it meant total emancipation. Instead, I try to point
to the multifaceted nature of socialism as experienced by a
particular group and cohort of minority women. By highlighting
their narratives, I also stress the impact of minority
status, gender, and age on how communism might have
been differently perceived and experienced by different social
groups.
Historicizing nostalgia
Selective practices of remembering, exacerbated by the biases
of the historiography on the Turkish minority, render
difficult a thorough assessment of that minority’s situation
in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian nationalist view of history, as
Daniel Bates points out, posits “collective, unmitigated oppression
during centuries of foreign tyranny, the so-called
Turkish yoke” (1994:204). “The Turkish yoke” refers to the
period prior to 1878, when what is Bulgarian territory today
was under the reign of the Ottoman Empire.16
Bulgarian
nationalism may also be characterized by a refusal to
entertain the question of ethnicity as relevant for the period
after the founding of the Bulgarian nation in 1878, and
during the “rebirth campaign,” from 1884 to 1889, this refusal
was accompanied by the claim that members of the
Turkish minority were, in fact, forcibly converted Bulgarians
(Ekici 2004; Eminov 1997; Poulton 1997). In turn, Turkish
nationalist historiography puts forward the suffering of the
Turkish minority and their persecution by the Bulgarians
from 1878 onward, a pattern that peaked once communists
came to power. This latter interpretation fits snugly with
the pervasive legacy of Cold-War rhetoric in Turkey that
has presented communism as the archenemy of Turkish
national and political culture for decades. Further, Turkish
national historiography assumes a homogeneous minority
population that was always oriented toward and yearned
for the Turkish homeland, resisted integration, and preserved
its ethnic distinctiveness at all costs (Konukman
1990; Simsir 1986; Togrol 1991). The task of reconstructing
the history of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria is made more
difficult by variation in official policy toward the Turkish minority
during different periods. Moreover, the subjective experience
of the minority population varied as well, depending
on whether one lived in the southern or northern part
of the country, whether one lived in exclusively Turkish or
mixed villages, and whether one became a party member.17
Given this complexity, I attempt below an admittedly partial
historical overview, gathered from sources that seek to
evade the biases of the two opposing views and that focus
in particular on the predicament of minority women.
The Ottoman conquest of the region now known as
Bulgaria was complete by the end of the 14th century
(Inalcık 1993). Because of the policy of settling Muslim
Turkish-speaking populations from Anatolia in the newly
conquered territories, the Muslim population in the southern
part of that area grew to equal the Christian population
in the north, at least according to one diplomatic source
(see Simsir 1986:3). The demographics changed quite dramatically,
however, when large numbers of Muslims fled
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the territories gradually lost by the Ottoman Empire, first,
following the Russian–Ottoman Wars of 1877–88 and the
founding of the modern Bulgarian state in 1878 and, then,
following the Balkan Wars of 1912 (see H¨opken 1997 for
various estimates of the numbers involved). In addition to
those fleeing the wars, many Muslim elites and administrators
also emigrated when they lost their titles (Bates 1994).
There was thus a “marked decline in numbers of Turkish
speakers within the first two decades of independence, such
that the Turkish element ceased to predominate in most urban
centers, leaving the bulk of the remaining Moslem population
both relatively poor and rural” (Bates 1994:205).
The presence of the Muslim minority in Bulgaria was
further reduced as land and property that belonged to Muslims
were confiscated. Ottoman buildings were destroyed
or taken over, mosques were demolished, and various place
names were changed, either replaced by their previous Bulgarian
ones or given new ones altogether (Crampton 1990).
Furthermore,
minority schools were not completely integrated into
the national school system until the Socialist era,
funding was limited and dependent on local charitable
trusts, and most of the schools were supervised
by a fairly conservative religious hierarchy. As a
consequence, the non-Slavic populations were further
marginalized, female education was severely restricted,
and the attendant cultural and educational gulf greatly
limited minority group participation in the national
economy except as farmers or laborers. [Bates 1994:205,
italics added]
Wolfgang H¨opken draws a similar portrait of the isolation
of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria in the post-Balkan
and pre-WWII years: “Up to the Second World War, the
Turkish community lived as a closed ethnic and religious
group, mainly agrarian with only about 15 per cent living
in urban centers. By all social criteria the community was
under-developed: illiteracy was almost the norm, reaching
in the 1930s 81 percent among men and 91 percent
among women” (1997:56). State policy, which, according to
H¨opken, was characterized by a general principle of noninterference
in religious and ethnic matters until the 1930s,
changed after the fascist coup d’etat of 1934, and more
aggressive, interventionist measures were implemented.
Under the new regime, Turkish newspapers and schools declined
even further, and Turkish parliamentarians were altogether
eliminated and mayors taken out of office (H¨opken
1997:63).
The communist government that came to power in
1944 initially reversed the discriminatory practices of the
previous fascist government (Bates 1994:206). The new government
also undertook various initiatives to promote cultural
minority rights and development. For the Turkish minority,
these included a nationwide literacy campaign and
educational incentives, among them the establishment of
Turkish institutes for training teachers and libraries for the
Turkish public, the publication of daily newspapers in Turkish,
radio broadcasts in Turkish, and the establishment
of Turkish theater groups and folklore ensembles (Bates
1994:206–207). Thus, “for the first time since independence,
Bulgaria’s minorities came to have nationally visible intellectual
leaders outside of the religious establishment”
(Bates 1994:207).18
In addition to the educational incentives and incentives
for literary and artistic output, the early years of communism
were marked by the collectivization of the land.
This meant the elimination of family farms and private enterprises
and the resulting integration of Turks with Bulgarians
in industry, service jobs, and agricultural collectives.
There was much resistance to collectivization in Turkishdominated
areas, which seems to have played a major role
in the mass migration of around 150,000 people to Turkey
in 1950–51 (Eminov 1997). But, for those who did end up
staying, the socialist policies of integration, and particularly
collectivization, resulted in unprecedented intergroup socializing
and de facto acculturation: “By 1970, most adult
urban or town-dwelling women worked in large labor battalions;
most non-rural housing was intentionally integrated
and large numbers of Muslim men and women had
been recruited to the BCP [Bulgarian Communist Party] and
its subsidiaries” (Bates 1994:210).
This is not to say that what is dubbed the “Golden Age”
of communism—lasting about two decades from the 1940s
to the mid-1960s—had a benign face only. In addition to
the mass migration—often called “expulsion” by Turks—of
around 150,000 Turks who resisted the collectivization of
land, there is evidence of discrimination against minorities.
In 1958, for example, a plenum of the Central Committee of
the Bulgarian Communist Party “restricted the use of Turkish
language, prohibited Pomaks, gypsies and Tatars from
studying Turkish; and ordered that children of BulgarianTurkish
mixed marriages be registered as ‘Bulgarian’” (Bates
1994:207). More generally, the seemingly positive developments
of the “Golden Age” have been interpreted by some
as disguises for the sinister ones to follow; for example,
the state’s provision of cultural institutions for the Turks
was accompanied by the liquidation of autonomous ones
(Neuburger 1997).
Whether they were erratic decisions or symptoms of a
grander scheme of homogenization, the repression of autonomous
ethnic expression became systematic after the
1960s. All instruction and publications in Turkish were eliminated.
The repressive measures culminated in the infamous
assimilation campaign of 1984–89, officially labeled
the “rebirth” or “revival” process (vazroditelen protses).19
The campaign included the prohibition of Turkish language
in public spaces, with accompanying fines for those who violated
the law; bans on Islamic rituals and practices such
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as burial rituals, fasting during Ramadan (Eminov 1997:59),
and circumcision (Poulton 1997:14); outlawing of traditional
clothes, such as the s¸alvar worn by women (Eminov
1997:41); and forcible name changes, by which Turks were
coerced to sign petitions asking that their names be converted
from Turkish to Bulgarian ones (Elchinova 2005; see
also the report by Amnesty International 1986). These measures
were supported by racist theories proclaiming that
all residents of Bulgaria were of one common racial stock
and that the Muslim minorities who had “reverted” to their
Bulgarian identities had been Bulgarians all along but had
been forced to convert to Islam by the Ottomans. As Minister
of Internal Affairs Dimitur Stojanov infamously declared
in 1985, “There are no Turks in Bulgaria” (Eminov 1990:209).
Some hold that the assimilation campaign was the logical
culmination of the communist party’s systematic, already
existing plan to ultimately eradicate Turkish identity
altogether and create a homogeneous nation-state. Others
view the events of 1984–89 as symptomatic of a new “ethnicized”
turn in the history of Bulgarian nationalism, and
even as an aberration, the result of corruption among certain
party officials and not reflective of either the sentiment
of the Bulgarian population at large or of the communist
party in general. Bates writes that his interviews with Turkish
political leaders, teachers, artists, and journalists in Bulgaria
in the early 1990s
almost inevitably elicited expressions of pride at how
Turkish literature, journalism, and performing arts had
flourished from 1952 until 1965. . . . Even journalists apparently
found the overall dominance of the Party an
acceptable price to pay for the right to publish in Turkish
in a national forum. Today, most Turkish teachers
in Bulgaria who are trained in language and literature
received their education in Party-run institutions during
this period. This shared experience, however doctrinaire
in substance, was undoubtedly instrumental
in strengthening a sense of shared community. [Bates
1994:207]20
I stress the views presented above both because I too encountered
similar sentiments, even among those who had
chosen to migrate to Turkey in 1989, and because they go
against the grain of the standard Turkish nationalist narrative.
The latter assumes that communism was perceived
and experienced only as a malicious force, which unveiled
its “true” face during the assimilation campaign of 1984–89.
To point to alternative perceptions is not to whitewash the
communist regime or to suggest that the Turkish minority
partakes in its idealization. Rather, in the spirit of Todorova,
it is to insist on a more nuanced understanding of the ambiguities
of the communist period as experienced and perceived
by various groups positioned in different hierarchies
of power within the social rubric.
To gain this understanding requires historical contextualization.
Ethnic discrimination against the Turkish minority
in Bulgaria had already begun following the founding
of the Bulgarian nation-state in 1878. In fact, the repression
during the fascist regime right before the advent of communism
had become so severe that the initial policies, at least,
of communism offered a respite. Furthermore, the experience
of communism for members of the Turkish minority
also included opportunities extended to them in the name
of education, health, and welfare, following a period of severe
isolation and deprivation. For women especially, educational
opportunities and the requirement to work marked
a radical break with the past, when the norm had been virtually
no education and no prospects of a career besides
work in the fields. Among the immigrant women I met,
those who were between the ages of 30 and 50 emphasized
two points of contrast between themselves and their
mothers. First, although coming from rural backgrounds,
they had had access to at least eight years of schooling in
the standardized communist system, whereas their mothers
had had only a few years at the Turkish religious schools
and often could not read. Second, unlike their mothers, who
had primarily taken care of children and also made unpaid
contributions to the family agricultural work, many daughters
were enabled by the standardized system to go on to
pursue higher degrees and, therefore, get jobs in health care
and education. The latter are often dismissed by the doubleburden
argument as lower-pay and lower-prestige jobs, but
they are held by these women and their communities in
high esteem. The day care centers and kindergartens, figuring
as the hotbeds of pernicious communist propaganda
in the accounts of Turkish nationalists, were seen by many
women as resources that afforded them some autonomy.
“Why should I lie?” Emine felt she could confide in me,
several encounters after she told me about the disapproval
she had been subjected to at the bakery. “We really had
it good under komunizma. Yes there was always a certain
amount of discrimination against us, but we never worried
about a roof to stay under or our stomachs going hungry or
our children’s schools. Not to mention the quality of education.”
The preemptive preamble “why should I lie” reflects
anxiety over a source of social disapproval other than the
one related to being a working woman: that of saying something
positive about communism. Saniye, who was bewildered
at the expectation that she would stay at home, prides
herself on the exceptional education she received growing
up in a village near Razgrad. But, she said, she soon learned
that her positive evaluations of the communist system were
best left unexpressed. “If it was so good over there, why did
you bother to come?” she was asked by a neighbor, who
would rather have listened to narratives of deprivation and
suffering of ethnic kin “welcomed generously by the motherland,”
as official rhetoric has it (see Konukman 1990). One
tacit prerequisite to social acceptance is to acquiesce to the
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image of the persecuted “ethnic kin,” or soydas¸, and neither
the working woman nor the immigrant who speaks favorably
of communism tallies well with that image. The terms
of national belonging for immigrant women, then, become
particularly precarious, for these women not only defy local
norms by insisting on working outside of the home at all
costs but they also legitimize their insistence in terms of the
legacy of their communist past.
The constitution of subjects
In her seminal study of gender, work, and communism in
China, Lisa Rofel (1999) urges scholars to take seriously the
claims of a particular cohort of women who insisted they
had been liberated by Mao’s communist regime. The generation
of women she describes entered factory work at a
time when labor outside the home was seen as a stain on the
honor of the woman and her family, and when women who
worked in the few factories in existence were considered to
be “broken shoes,” “a term for prostitutes and other shameless
women who appeared openly on the streets” (Rofel
1993:37). The new Marxist discourse on work, however, suddenly
enabled these women to transform themselves from
“broken shoes” into “revolutionary, ‘liberated’ women who
would be the vanguard of a progressive urban class” (Rofel
1999:74). By embracing the new subject positions presented
to them by the Marxist discourse, these women could thus
switch the terms of pride and shame to their advantage.
Similarly, in her analysis of Evenk women’s nostalgia
for residential schools in central Siberia under
Soviet rule, Bloch insists on the need to challenge the dichotomy
of state as oppressor and indigenous communities
as oppressed. Although the prevailing view tends to paint
mandatory residential schooling as an attack on indigenous
Siberian systems of knowledge, Bloch also acknowledges
the ways in which the Soviet system presented Evenk
women with an alternative to living in herding groups and
access to basic education and extensive social mobility, including
the opportunity to thrive in academic and professional
settings, as well as a sense of pride in being positioned
as “agents of historical transformation who were in
the vanguard striving towards a new and modern society”
(2005:556).
Neither Rofel’s nor Bloch’s intention is to romanticize
the life experiences of women under communism. Rather,
they situate the communist discourses on work and gender
within the broader historical framework of the prevalent
discourses of modernity and ideas about women’s place in
the new modern nation. Raising the status of women and
strengthening the nation were seen as inseparable projects,
and “in a Marxist framework, this meant constructing a
sense of womanhood in relation to a category called ‘work,’
where household workshops were devalued as petit bourgeois
labor, privatized and opposed to the state, and factory
work, which produced surplus value for the state, came to
be valorized” (Rofel 1999:236).
The communist party’s initiatives in Bulgaria were thus
part of a project of modernization to “remake women,”
borrowing Abu-Lughod’s (1998) framing of women’s iconic
role within the modern nation-state in Middle Eastern
contexts. In particular, as H¨opken notes, “the integration
of women into work brigades was seriously at odds with
their traditional role. In fact it was deliberately used to
shake up conservative behavior within the Turkish community”
(1997:66). The mass deveiling of women too went
hand in hand with a “campaign of ridicule”: On the basis
of reports in the newspaper Yeni Is¸ık, the party newspaper
published by the Turkish minority, Neuburger writes
that “large-scale Communist Party projects deployed ‘commissions
on lifestyle’ into the Turkish populated areas to
‘overcome religious fanaticism and family conservatism,’
offering night classes to teach Turkish women about the
‘culture and behavior of the modern person’” (1997:5).
However, to acknowledge the party projects as yet another
instance of modernization, and to concede the paternalistic
contours of this project, does not unequivocally yield
the conclusion that communism was experienced solely as
an imposition or a (double) burden by minority women.
As it did for the factory workers in China and the residential
school students in Siberia, I would argue, the communist
regime’s interpellation of minority Turkish women in
Bulgaria as agents of modernity opened up unprecedented
opportunities for them within that system as citizens and
workers of the socialist state. Such opportunities must have
been all the more welcome given that minority women previously
had scarce access to education let alone careers,
notwithstanding Abu-Lughod’s caveat that “becoming a citizen
or worker is itself making oneself subject in new ways—
not just to family and community but also to the state and
economy. . . . To attend modern educational institutions is
to be interpellated into new discourses about the training
of minds and characters and new practices of disciplining
bodies” (1998:13).
Gendered subjectivities in communism are an axis of
difference shared by Turkish women in Bulgaria and the
Chinese factory workers; and gendered and ethnic subjectivities
are axes of difference shared by the Turkish women
in Bulgaria and the Evenk women in Russia. There is yet a
third, different dimension to the experience of the women
who people this article. Unlike the narratives of former factory
workers in China or elderly Evenk women in Siberia,
the narratives of the Turkish women I spoke to are marked
not just by a temporal but also by a spatial disjuncture. In
the next section, I examine how the added experience of
migration and the experiences of different gender regimes
on the two sides of the border affect practices of remembering.
I argue that the cross-cultural perspective afforded by
migration enables my interlocutors to critically assess the
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differences between the two regimes in terms of appropriate
labor roles for women and, more generally, in terms of
restrictive gender codes.21
Honor, shame, and unruly migrants
Ayg¨ul immigrated in 1989 with her husband and her then
three-year-old daughter. Her first job was as a cashier at
a small grocery store. In addition to her usual tasks, she
also regularly gave the floors a good cleaning. This was not
a part of her job description, she emphasized—replicating
the trope of cleanliness prevalent among the immigrants as
a marker of distinction—but she felt compelled to do it to
keep the place presentable. She would take off her socks,
fold her trousers up to her knees, put on a pair of slippers,
and mop. Until, that is, her boss had his sister caution
Ayg¨ul that exposing bare feet to the customers was shameful.
Ayg¨ul told me that she quit that very day and would not
agree to return, despite her boss’s pleas and offer of a raise.
“Not everything can be bought,” were her departing words.
Another story of bold exit was narrated by Melike, who arrived
in Turkey in 1989 with her husband and two daughters:
“One day, the boss at the factory my daughter and I
worked for approached me and said my daughter should
wear longer shirts because you could see her back when she
bent over. We quit.”
The anxieties provoked by the exposure of bare flesh
and the spirit of defiance on the part of the migrants that results
in immediate action offer glimpses into the differences
between the kinds of acts and strategies generated and tolerated
by the gender regimes on the two sides of the border.
Indeed, the Bulgarian Turkish immigrant men I have spoken
to also commented on the difference in attitudes: “They
say of us, ‘They even let their women work,’” said Seyhan,
who has worked at a restaurant and then at a gas station
since the start of his circular migration in 1997, from which
he earns less than a fifth of what his wife is able to make
working as a live-in nanny. Immigrants counter the insinuation
that their zeal for work results from greed by positing
work as an indispensable aspect of identity. Recall how
Saniye, who had graduated from university at the time of
her arrival, and who went on to pursue an M.A. degree, marveled
at her new neighbors’ lack of comprehension of her
eagerness to find work: “Not having a job indicated for us either
a grave health problem or a flaw of character.” Another
common response, one that was more confrontational than
the espousal of the socialist notion of the virtue of work
in the face of allegations of gender impropriety, can be seen
in Emine’s taunt: “So, they [the local neighbors] complain
that they still live on rent. If the women did not sit around
all day and worked like we do, they, too, could afford to buy
their own houses.”
Emine’s remarks are important in addressing another
central question: whether the perceived greed of immigrants,
in fact, stems from their actual higher standard of
living. First, one needs to take into account the distinction
between the 1989 migrants and the post-1990s labor
migrants, which I allude to in the first section of this article.
Whereas the former were granted citizenship as “ethnic
kin” fleeing communist repression, the post-1990s migrants,
perceived as a source of cheap labor and subjected
to changing visa regimes, engage in irregular labor migration,
and reside or work in Turkey with or without permits
and, for the most part, without citizenship (see Kaslı and
Parla 2009). Furthermore, the 1989 immigrants have settled
in Turkey, whereas most of the post-1990s circular migrants
see Turkey as a temporary place of residence, where they
earn money to secure a better future back in Bulgaria.22
Already, the differences in legal status as well as in settlement
plans point to lower standards of living among the
post-1990s migrants, who may be said to constitute part of
the global cheap labor force. Mostly employed in domestic
work, they earn salaries that range from $500 to $1,000
a month, work without any job security or health or retirement
plan, and send remittances to Bulgaria. Just as there
are differences between the 1989 and the post-1990s immigrants,
there are also differences among the settled 1989 immigrants.
Among them, some have excelled in white collar
professions, such as medicine or law, whereas others continue
to reside in the decrepit migrant settlements that had
been commissioned by the government upon their arrival
in 1989. As the board member of the most established migrant
association in Istanbul states, the immigrants from
Bulgaria are not, on the whole, part of the wealthy elite.23
They tend to occupy the middle or lower-middle rungs of
the socioeconomic ladder, with some individuals accumulating
further symbolic capital through their professions as
lawyers, doctors, or academics.
Despite this relative heterogeneity in terms of the various
forms of capital possessed by the immigrants from
Bulgaria, however, the following two points are of special
relevance in terms of the dynamics between locals and immigrants.
First, regardless of economic status, virtually all
of the 1989 migrants are homeowners, something that all
Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria perceive as a fundamental
requirement for a decent existence. Immigrants thus
stand out from locals as people who own property, a distinction
that they, in turn, attribute to their hard work and perseverance.
Second, this much noted difference of property
ownership between locals and immigrants is highlighted by
both parties through reference to working women: Whereas
the locals articulate women’s employment as the consequence
of ambition and greed, the immigrants invert it as a
source of pride that they relate back to their socialist legacy.
In their study of the impact of modern management
practices on factory workers in Bursa, a major industrial
center in Turkey, Theo Nichols and Nadi Sugur found
that the key difference that distinguishes immigrants and
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long-time residents is whether wives work: “In just under
half of the households of Turkish workers who have one
other earner the person concerned is a spouse. In the case
of the muhacir (immigrants), this rises to over two-thirds”
(2004:50).24
In squatter settlements (gecekondu) in Istanbul,
the foremost reason for a woman not working outside of
the home has been identified as the husband’s withholding
of permission (Kumbetoglu 2001; see also C¸ınar 1991).
A detailed study of domestic workers in the capital, Ankara,
demonstrates the difficulty of obtaining permission from
husbands and the perils of even asking for permission, an
act that, by itself, can trigger physical violence (Ozyegin
2001).
It is important to note that the scholarship that I refer
to here in reviewing norms of work outside of the family
in Turkey primarily focuses, sometimes implicitly, on
lower- and lower-middle-class women. The justification for
sustaining this focus here is twofold: First, the relatively unfettered
pursuit of individual careers on the part of women
remains the preserve of the economically and socially privileged,
enabled for the most part through the paid labor
of other women (Kandiyoti 1988a; Toktas and Cindoglu
2006). Second, virtually all of the immigrant women I discuss
come from rural villages in Bulgaria and have settled
in lower- to lower-middle-class neighborhoods in Turkey, so
my focus on local working-class women reasonably corresponds
both to the migrant women’s backgrounds in terms
of social position and to their own point of comparison.
When women with little social and economic capital
engage in paid work, and they often do so out of material
necessity, they delicately find their way amidst a complex
web of social restrictions and seek the least compromising
alternatives. Some forms of paid work that do not
expose women to the public gaze are considered more acceptable,
such as garment work performed in the home
(Kumbetoglu 1994; White 2004), cleaning the apartments
in the same building one lives in as a doorkeeper (Ozyegin
2001), or working as a domestic in a private space (Bora
2005; Ozyegin 2001). In fact, the patriarchal control over the
labor of local women structures the domestic labor market
in a particular way, such that Turkish domestic workers
predominantly choose to live in their own homes, and
live-in caretaker positions, which necessitate more intimate
relations with employer family members and more flexible
hours, are left to the international migrants (Akalın 2007).
Even if a great number of women engage in profitmaking
activities at home or work inside the private spaces
of others, it is also the case that 31 percent of formally
recorded employees in the textile industry in 2000 were
women (Nichols and Sugur 2004:46), and 51 percent of
women textile workers in Bursa, for example, earned as
much or more than their husbands (Ecevit 1991). If a
woman must work at a factory, she can still find ways to
minimize her public visibility. Work in all-women’s departments
in large, anonymous companies is preferred, for example,
to work in small companies and helps one avoid the
“company girl” image, which implies promiscuity (Ecevit
1991). The day shift is preferable to the night shift, and if
one must work the night shift, then being escorted to and
from work by a husband or a male relative is critical to ward
off gossip (Nichols and Sugur 2004).
The Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria fit uneasily into
this moral economy of gender and labor for various reasons.
First, they explicitly defy the local norm about gender
and work and uphold a different one. Like Emine in the
opening vignette, who underscored the speed with which
she began work by seizing the first opportunity that came
her way, all of my other interlocutors recalled their desire to
find work as soon as possible after their arrival. Their hurry
was prompted by monetary need. Nonetheless, once again,
financial motives should be thought of in conjunction with
the “durable dispositions” of these women that render life
without work unthinkable. Emine also noted proudly the
number of jobs she managed to juggle, especially during the
first few years after her family’s immigration. In addition to
working at the local bakery during the day, Emine was soon
cleaning an office in the evenings and catering for an art
gallery several times a month.
The immigrant women I met paid little heed to the
kinds of negotiations in which their working neighbors so
carefully seemed to traffic. Many made it a point of pride
to take jobs considered unsuitable for women, such as 28year-old
Saniye, who proudly told me she had worked at a
gas station when she was barely 20 and that she had also
enrolled at the university. Nurcan, who was 20 at the time
of her arrival, was bothered by the inquisitive looks and
the harassment she was subjected to walking back home
from the bus station after working late hours, but she never
thought to enlist male company because she found such dependence
absurd. And, of course, in the case of the post-
1990s labor migrants, who are often women on their own,
such escort is unlikely to be available anyway. Finally, few of
the immigrant women felt the need to affirm their modesty
through what Terence Turner has called the “social skin.”
Sixteen-year-old Ipek’s fashion choices, consisting primarily
of form-fitting blouses and short skirts, were enthusiastically
supported by her family, who lived in a working-class
neighborhood in Sultanbeyli, located on the outskirts of
Istanbul.
Within the hegemonic moral economy of gender and
work in Turkey, as men “who even let their women work,”
immigrant men fall short of the masculine ideal. Recall the
words of 38-year-old Ahmet, who arrived in Istanbul in
1999 and, in a much coveted arrangement, found a position
together with his wife in a villa: “This neighbor who
was just visiting . . . He came to vent off steam because he
was furious his wife had gone out without his permission.
Poor woman, no chance for her but to be a housewife.”
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American Ethnologist Volume 36 Number 4 November 2009
Twenty-eight-year-old Seyhan said, “I am good friends with
the guys at work. So they can take it when I tease them. I
tell them, ‘You don’t let your wives work because you are
jealous. You don’t trust them. I don’t mind my wife going
to work, even overnight, because I trust her.’” Besides revealing
differences in attitude toward women’s work, these
remarks are significant in terms of the immigrants’ ways of
coping with the local construction of hegemonic masculinity.
The emphasis on trust and lack of jealousy may also be a
way of negotiating the perceived challenges to their honor,
potentially compromised by having working wives whose
chastity may be suspect.
Indeed, the “honor–shame” model, which posits sexual
honor (namus) as an index of personal and group prestige
and men’s honor as proportionally linked to women’s
chastity, dominated academic understandings of social and
sexual relations in the Middle East and the Mediterranean
for decades (Peristiany 1966). Various excellent critiques
have considered the ways in which the honor–shame model
obscured other relevant factors in the construction of honor
beyond sexual propriety (Herzfeld 1987; Wikan 1984); the
model’s assignment of honor exclusively to the realm of
men, when, in fact, women strive for honor as well (AbuLughod
1986); and the more fundamental problem of accepting
a trope such as honor as iconic of a region (AbuLughod
1989; Herzfeld 1984). When I suggest, therefore,
that dominant notions of honor and modesty in Turkey
posit a different ideal of womanhood than the one posited
by the socialist ideal of the woman worker–citizen in Bulgaria,
I am referring neither to a cultural or religious essence
nor to that catch-all word tradition. Rather, I am referring
to honor as the complex array of institutional structures
that include the various “ideological state apparatuses,”
such as the law, medicine, education, and the family, and
their discursive practices, which often and conveniently get
labeled “tradition” and thus naturalize relations of power
as well as occlude, in Dicle Kogacıoglu’s words, “the ways
in which an institution’s own acts may be participating
in the perpetuation of this allegedly timeless ‘tradition’”
(2004:121).
Indeed, as the first wave of critical feminist analysis
in Turkey has argued, the concern with women’s honor
was reproduced by the Turkish modernizing project itself.
The Turkish modernizing elite, who took it on themselves
to emancipate Turkish women, granted women
legal rights and fashioned the image of the public, modern
woman, while simultaneously reaffirming the importance
of women’s virtue and chastity. Women who entered
the public sphere thus had to either downplay
their female sexuality to the point of invisibility or contain
it within the boundaries dictated by men (Arat 1997;
Durakbasa 1998; Kandiyoti 1988b; Sirman 2000). The post-
1980s second-wave feminist movement in Turkey, through
its insistence on politicizing the personal, publicly articulated
and protested for the first time the preoccupation
with virginity and the chaste–unchaste distinction that permeated
cultural attitudes toward women’s bodies and sexuality
and was reflected well in the Turkish Penal Code
(see Altınay 2002; Savran 2004).25
Building on this body of
work, recent critical scholarship on gender and honor has
been especially careful not to reproduce the dichotomies
of the traditional–modern and has variously depicted the
ways in which the concern with honor is perpetuated by
the “modern” institutions and neoliberal policies of the
nation-state. Examples include the state’s routine intrusions
into women’s bodies via virginity examinations (Parla
2001),26
the reproduction of the concern with women’s
honor by judicial authorities who simultaneously decry the
honor crime as an obsolete and barbaric tradition (Belge
2008; Kogacıoglu 2004), Islamist and secularist renditions
of female modesty that define and delimit an acceptable
gendered presence in post-1990s Istanbul marked by
market-driven gentrification (Potuoglu-Cook 2006), and the
manufacturing of women’s sexuality as an issue of public
concern precisely through the republican and liberal
expansion of women’s rights (Miller 2007). This literature
is also careful not to attribute the persistence of the
honor construct to “incomplete modernization” and, instead,
documents the ways in which it is precisely the increasing
pervasiveness and solidification of neoliberal discourses
and practices that incorporate the concern with
honor into the personal and political realms, even if in modified
ways.27
Certain acts pertaining to honor are singled out
as breaches of human and women’s rights, whereas others
that permeate the fabric of everyday life are glossed over.
Hence, the insistence of Ceren Belge (2008) on viewing the
infamous honor killings, for example, as an extreme point
in the continuum of naturalized patriarchal practices rather
than as examples of barbaric and obsolete tradition. Furthermore,
as ¨Oyk¨u Potuoglu-Cook’s (2006) eloquent articulation
of the neoliberal gentrification of belly dancing reveals,
questions of sexual honor can be bracketed by the
privilege of class: The wealthy elite and the upwardly mobile
professional youth indulge in belly dancing for leisure
although the sexuality of the professional working belly
dancer continues to be suspect in the public eye and closely
monitored by the state.
Conclusion
Studies of ethnicity, gender, and nationalism have noted
how women are seen as the bearers and carriers of tradition
and authenticity (Alonso 1994; Yuval-Davies and Anthias
1989). Not surprisingly, then, immigrant difference too becomes
particularly marked in terms of the perceived and actual
behavior of immigrant women. The perceived failure of
immigrants to live up to the nationalist designation soydas¸,
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Remembering across the border American Ethnologist
which suggests sameness, becomes articulated through
the difference of their women. Unlike many of their local
counterparts, Bulgarian Turkish immigrant women contribute
as much income to the household as men, and in
the case of the post-1990s migrants, are often the primary
breadwinners because of the composition of the domesticwork
sector. This demographic difference, the result of the
feminization of migration in the 1990s as well as the immigrants’
attitudes toward work, gives rise to and becomes the
ground for struggles over proper gender roles, often waged
over competing interpretations and appropriations of the
immigrants’ communist past. A common local explanation
for the immigrants’ zeal for work is their greed, as expressed
in the phrase, “They even let their women work.” What is
significant for the purposes of this discussion is that a more
universal response on the part of older residents, who begrudge
the competition posed by newcomers for scarce resources,
acquires specificity as a denunciation expressed in
terms of an appeal to gender propriety.
In response, immigrant women defend their practices
by their own norms about work through an appeal to the
communist ethos in Bulgaria, which stands in contrast to
the hegemonic construct of honor in Turkey. Thus, the nostalgic
utterances by immigrant women capture something
of the difference in the pervasive attitudes toward women,
honor, and work in the two societies. Admittedly, women
do tend to idealize the communist commitment to gender
equality in Bulgaria and to stereotype gender inequality
in Turkey. If language is not an exclusively referential tool
but is social activity performed in relation to an audience
(Garfinkel 1987; Goffman 1959), and if particular utterances
become meaningful to the extent that they are construed
as social action (Schieffelin et al. 1998), then the discourse
of work as a fundamental fact of one’s identity and dignity
is a resource of communism that immigrant women draw
on to manage their uneasy reception in Turkey. As such, it
is a product of the contestations between locals and immigrants
over proper gender roles.
However, I have argued against reducing such statements
to mere strategy. Instead, I have tried to point to the
ways in which immigrants, who hold a privileged standpoint
for cross-cultural comparisons, actually analyze the
distinctiveness of the gender regimes on the two sides of
the border. In doing so, I have tried to tread the fine line
between, on the one hand, uncovering immigrants’ coping
strategies in the face of present difficulties through recourse
to the past and, on the other hand, avoiding the
reduction of positive recollections only to strategic distortions
of memory. I argue that immigrant women’s “nostalgic”
reminiscences convey both their negotiation with
the different gender norms encountered in Turkey and
their comparatively positive experiences under socialism in
Bulgaria.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Research and writing for this article were
funded by grants from the Social Science Research Council (Middle
East and North Africa program), the Wenner-Gren Foundation
(grant no. 6684), the AAUW, and the Scientific and Technological
Council of Turkey (T ¨UB˙ITAK), and by fellowships from the Centre
of Advanced Study in Sofia,the International Center for Advanced
Studies (ICAS) at New York University (NYU), an Annette B.
Weiner Fellowship, and an NYU Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. My
thanks go to the Association of Feminist Anthropology for awarding
an early version of this article the 2004 Sylvia Forman Paper
Prize. I have benefited much from the feedback of the group of
NYU ICAS fellows (2003–04) to whom the rudiments of this article
were presented. In particular, the comments of Marilyn Young,
Allen Hunter, Molly Nolan, and Tomas Mastnak proved to be enduring.
Many thanks to Bambi Schieffelin, Susan Rogers, Fred Myers,
Jessica Catellino, Ken George, and Ceren Ozgul for their insights
and encouragement, Alexander Kiossev for amicable challenges,
and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical input. I am indebted
to Maria Todorova for the original inspiration and to Donald
Donham for the final guidance. My deepest gratitude is to Lila AbuLughod
for her indispensable criticisms and support for each new
draft.
1. According to the Settlement Law of 1934, which, with some
revisions, is still in effect, those immigrants deemed to be “of
Turkish stock” are automatically granted citizenship. However,
the unconditional acceptance of the 1989 migrants into Turkey
was predicated not just on their soydas¸ (ethnic kin) status but
also on their flight from state—and, significantly, communist—
persecution. Hence, the designation “political” that is often used to
refer to them. Post-1990s migrants from Bulgaria, meanwhile, are
not automatically granted citizenship although they too qualify as
soydas¸. See Danıs and Parla 2009 for an analysis of how the Turkish
state’s privileging of migrants “of Turkish stock” has not been
consistent but, rather, contingent on particular sociohistorical conjunctures
as well as the needs of the labor market.
2. See Parla 2007 and Danıs and Parla 2009 for the ways in which
the seemingly neat analytic distinction between political migrant
and economic migrant is more complex in terms of the actual experiences
of the Turkish migrants from Bulgaria.
3. Alternatively, as Alexia Bloch (2005) demonstrates, neoliberal
or conservative perspectives view postcommunist nostalgia as a
form of “internal colonization,” in which the privileges that were
extended to a certain few under communism resulted in their ability
or willingness to “forget” the oppression and humiliation that
they themselves had had to endure.
4. For a similar, if sharper, expression of the same view, see
Daskalova 2001, which glosses emancipation as “manipulated
emancipation.”
5. I owe this phrase to Alexander Kiossev.
6. Some scholars are also critical of the term postsocialism. For
an incisive criticism of the ways in which the term obscures wider
processes of globalization in the Eastern European region, see Leyla
Keough’s (2006) analysis of the transnational labor experiences of
Moldovan women.
7. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for articulating
this fundamental point.
8. Such convictions were not limited to migrants who settled in
Istanbul, the most expensive city in Turkey, and therefore presumably
the one that exerted the most pressure on the entire family
to work. In Edirne, a city close to the Bulgarian border that has a
significant population of Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria, Ayse
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American Ethnologist Volume 36 Number 4 November 2009
Nur S¨ul¨us¸ (2007) recorded similar sentiments regarding the role of
work in women’s lives. The 15 immigrant women she interviewed
repeatedly underscored the significance of work, both for providing
them financial security and independence and as an indispensable
aspect of their identity. They also compared the situations
of women in Turkey and in Bulgaria, and the latter invariably
fared better in their assessments of career prospects and gender
relations.
9. As work on memory and narrative in general has variously
shown, there is an inevitable disjuncture between the lived and
the remembered, or between the telling and the told. For the Turkish
context, in particular, Leyla Neyzi has been systematically and
compellingly exploring this disjuncture through her work with oral
histories that go against the grain of official nationalist historiography;
see, for example, Neyzi 2002 and 2004.
10. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for highlighting how
immigrants may stereotype locals and Ayfer Bartu Candan for alerting
me to the danger of reproducing that particular emic perspective
in my own analysis.
11. See Boym 2001 and Boyer 2006 for the interesting genealogy
of the term.
12. Heyat (2002) suggests that women’s return to traditional
roles since the breakdown of communist rule is in part a reaction
to what the community perceived as the defeminization of women
by the Soviet system (see also Tohidi 2000).
13. An assertion whose legacy can be traced, of course, to
second-wave feminism’s insistence on politicizing the personal.
14. Less immediately relevant for this specific argument but certainly
important in terms of the political implications of nostalgic
practice, Gal and Kligman also caution that “the assertion of
women’s advantageous position in communism continues as an
aspect of public discourse, one that—we argue—serves to delegitimate
women’s political activity in postcommunism” (2000:8).
15. See Ghodsee 2005 for a detailed account of state-provided
benefits for women under communism in Bulgaria.
16. Mary Neuburger, however, claims there were also alternative
representations in this same period reflecting level of local culture
and coexistence–interaction: “common views of Bulgarian nationalism
since 1878 as ‘virtually equated with anti-Turkish sentiment,’
belie the complexity of both the elite project of cultural construction
of the Bulgarian nation and inter-ethnic relations at the local
level” (1997:2).
17. For two minority-member life narratives that are diametrically
opposed in terms of the individuals’ identification with Bulgaria
and with communism, see Parla 2006.
18. These efforts were intended, in H¨opken’s view, “to hasten the
emergence of a socialist Turkish intellectual elite” (1997:64).
19. See Elchinova 2005 for a detailed account of the significance
of the term revival.
20. Bates even posits that, “to a great extent, the Moslem population
had accepted socialist ideology and goals, but now the government
and Party lost their legitimacy. Even today, few other than
intellectuals and those active in the UDF [Union of Democratic
Forces] or its successor opposition parties criticize communist social
policy; they reject it as a moral authority because of its corruption
of an ideal” (1994:211).
21. I owe my inspiration here to Lynne Haney (1999), who has
argued that the protests of mothers to the proposed liberal restructuring
of the welfare system in Hungary were not mere expressions
of dissent but were actually a comparative analysis of different historical
regimes in Hungary.
22. Members of both groups can vote in Bulgaria because they
all hold Bulgarian passports, with the 1989 immigrants having dual
citizenship and the post-1990s migrants having only Bulgarian citizenship.
In fact, various migrant organizations in Turkey organize
bus transport free of charge to facilitate voting. Furthermore, the
Turkish state also encourages voting by granting the irregular migrants
free but temporary residency permits in return for voting
in the Bulgarian elections, thus instrumentalizing migrant irregularity
to extend its own transnational political power (Kaslı and
Parla 2009). In addition to voting practices, the differences between
the two groups of migrants in terms of legal status and settlement
strategies are important with regard to the question of whether nostalgia
for communism is part of a desire to return “home.” The
post-1990s migrants who engage in circular migration have not really
left Bulgaria permanently. As for the 1989 immigrants who have
settled in Turkey, physical “returns” did happen among the elderly
after retirement. It remains to be seen whether Bulgaria’s EU membership
will have an impact on people’s future plans for return, although
so far it has not seemed to affect the generation of women I
refer to here.
23. Interview with A.G., Cemberlitas Balkan Turks Solidarity Association,
February 2008.
24. Nichols and Sugur also asked men what they think about
their wives working. Typical responses included “Women shouldn’t
work. If women work, there will be no peace in the house” and
“Women’s place is in the home. A woman’s main duty is to look after
the children, do the washing and serve her husband” (Nichols
and Sugur 2004:50–51).
25. Until 1990, for example, the penal code stipulated reduction
of sentence against a man convicted of rape if the raped woman
was a sex worker.
26. As late as 1999, such tests were routinely performed by stateappointed
doctors on women who infringed on “public morality
and rules of modesty.” In particular, the tests were done on political
detainees, women suspected of prostitution, and girls in state
orphanages, dormitories, and high schools. The practice continued
sporadically even after 1999.
27. Kogacıoglu writes.
We all know that if we don’t act “properly” with regard to
honor, something might happen. No matter how we might
trivialize the significance honor has in our lives, we still adjust
our behavior accordingly. Despite all the differences and
inequalities between us, honor plays a major role in many of
the choices we make, from how we sit and stand to which
parts of the city we travel, to which mode of transportation
we choose, to when we make love. We live in Turkey under
a regime where women’s bodies are disciplined through the
construct of honor and where women discipline themselves
through this construct. [2007, translation mine].
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accepted June 11, 2009
final version submitted April 17, 2009
Ayse Parla
Sabancı University
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Orhanlı, Tuzla 34956
Istanbul, Turkey
ayseparla@sabanciuniv.edu
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