"Suicide Sisters
The day after participating in the excellent conference ‘Writing Turkey’ at Middlesex University, I read the Sunday Times magazine and wondering if anything had changed in the last 200 years? I had talked about contemporary Turkey but it was David Barchard’s talk on the 19th Century Roots of Turcophobia that was the more relevant on Sunday. David had talked about the infamous Bulgarian massacre of 1876, one of many atrocities by both sides, this incident hardened British opinion against the Turk and led to much of the immortalisation, deification and identification of the Turks as the Gods of Barbarism and Depravity.
The Sunday Times magazine article transposed a picture of bathing bikinied beauties lounging somewhere on a warm Mediterranean beach with a screaming banner, ‘WHERE BEAST MEETS WEST’. The only thing missing was a tabloid style exclamation mark. The article heralded by the banner was about Turkey’s ‘deadly east-west social divide’ and how just ‘miles further inland a mere glance at a man will mean death’. The article then turns out to be not about honour killings as one might predict but about high levels of female suicide in South-Eastern Turkey. "
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