Afro-Turks and Faces of the Throne
A note from a layover in Istanbul.
Afro-Turks in Istanbul.
I had a layover in Istanbul. I want to tell you what I found.
There is a museum inside Istanbul Airport. It is called Treasures of Türkiye: Faces of the Throne. Three hundred and sixteen objects pulled from twenty-nine museums across the country, arranged to tell twelve thousand years of history through rule and ruler. Göbeklitepe. Çatalhöyük. Hittite. Urartian. Phrygian. Lydian. Roman. Byzantine. Seljuk. Ottoman. Republic. The Kadesh Treaty is in there. King Midas is in there. The talismanic kaftans the sultans wore into battle are in there, under glass, still holding their prayers.
It is beautiful. It is also a decision.
There is no room in it for the Africans or Afro-Turks in Istanbul.
No room for the one point three million people of African descent brought into the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Most of them into houses, to cook, clean, and raise other people’s children. Some of them into the cotton fields of the Aegean. No room for the ones who came from Kenya through the slave market at Rethymno and ended up in Ayvalık after the population exchange of 1923. No room for a woman named Kemale who named her son Mustafa, after the father of the republic she loved. No room for the Calf Festival that community held every spring. No room for the godyas, the women who ran it.
The exhibition is called Faces of the Throne. Our people were not on the throne. They were in the kitchen and the field and the port and the ordinary daily life of the country, which is a different thing from history as far as museums are concerned.
I am not going to pretend the museum lied. Every museum chooses. Every archive selects. But walk through Faces of the Throne and count the Black faces and you get zero. Then walk out into Istanbul and count the Black people and you get somewhere between fifty and two hundred thousand.
Two counts. One country. One museum telling that country’s story.
I went looking for the count that wasn’t there.
The diaspora is in Tarlabaşı. Dolapdere. Kumkapı. Kurtuluş. Newer African community life runs south of the airport through Esenyurt and Bağcılar, working-class, growing.
And in Firuzağa, in Beyoğlu, a short walk off Taksim, there is a place called Kara Lounge.
Senegambian on paper. Thiebou Yap, rice and meat, food I recognized before I could name it. In practice it is the anchor of Black Istanbul. Black women’s collectives meet there. Diaspora events happen there. A woman named Raycene Nevils Karakeci, born in Detroit, helped build it into what it is.
Kara means black in Turkish.
My cousin’s name is Kara. Nobody who named her had ever thought about Turkey. But I walked out of a museum with no Black faces in it, went looking for Black Istanbul, and found it in a room carrying my cousin’s name on the door. The word for us was already here. In a language my family does not speak, in a city we were erased from, on a building where we gather anyway.
It felt like every diaspora room I have ever walked into, in any city, anywhere. Like my body understanding it did not have to explain itself. Like women at a table in the back who did not turn around when I came in but knew, the way we always know, that another one had arrived.
I did not stay long. Short layover. Plane to catch. But this is the part that matters:
The museum at the airport had no room for us. A restaurant in Beyoğlu had a room specifically for us.
Both of those are Istanbul. The country decides which one goes under glass. We decide which one stays alive.
All day I have been carrying a sentence written by a man named Mustafa Olpak.
Afro-Turkish. Born in Ayvalık in 1953. Stonemason by trade. Writer by refusal. His grandparents were enslaved. His parents learned not to talk about it. He was the one who went looking.
He wrote: The first generation experiences. The second denies. And the third researches.
He wrote that in Turkish, about his own family, in a country that had spent a hundred years pretending his family did not exist. He founded the first Afro-Turkish cultural association in 2006. He brought the Calf Festival back. He died in 2016. They still hold it every year in İzmir.
Here is why that sentence has been sitting in my chest since this morning.
I have been the third generation for years without knowing there was a name for it. My grandmother experienced. My mother declined to dwell. I am the one going back to Portland Parish with an attorney, a title search, and a manuscript. I am the one writing about the graves in New Eden, the water in Swift River, the sister archives being kept by women I have not met yet.
A stonemason in Ayvalık named my work before I got here.
The third generation is the one that goes looking. Every diaspora has one. We are all trying to find what the first generation could not say out loud and the second could not carry alone.
I did not come to Istanbul for this. I was passing through. The country handed it to me anyway, through what the museum would not show and through a restaurant that had to become its own museum to make up for it.
I am on my way to Vienna now.
I am going to keep asking the same question everywhere I land. Which room is the diaspora being kept in? Who is doing the third-generation work? Where is the festival being brought back by women whose grandmothers used to hold it? Where is the godya now?
The map is bigger than the museum will admit. It always has been. The work is to keep adding to it.
A small invitation.
Where does the diaspora live in your city, and who is keeping the record? A restaurant. A church. A hair salon. A women’s collective. One elder with a notebook. Tell me the place and tell me the keeper. I want the list to grow.
I read every reply.
If you are new here.
Land & Legacy is where I write about land, lineage, and what we are still trying to claim. Some of these come from Jamaica. One came from a museum in Chicago. This one came from an airport. All of them are pieces of the same map.
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Glad you are here.
Nikki