Dueling infinities: "The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra" by Kenan Orhan

Disclaimer

One thing I'm not going to do with this post is pretend I know about Turkey. I'm not going to go Google a bunch of for-foreigner articles about what's going on there and make like I understand its political realities. I'm going to go with my current understanding and what's in the story itself and maybe a simple lookup or two just to make sure I know what the story is talking about. I hate when reviewers with no particular expertise in the area a story is set in gush about how authentically or unapologetically native the story is, as if they would know. 

What I know about Turkey off the top of my head: often thought of as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East; Istanbul was Constantinople; President is named Erdogan but pronounced Erdowan even though Donald Trump didn't know that; it's been thought to be more progressive and open than other majority-Muslim countries, but that seems to be changing, and now our government doesn't know how much of an ally they will be from here on out; doesn't like Iran, for which reason the U.S. still kind of gets along with them, etc. 

This story appears in a Best American Short Story anthology, and so I'm going into it thinking it's written by an author from Turkey who now lives in either the U.S. or Canada and that's all I need to know going in. 

Folding inwards

When something in nature is running out of room, one of its options is to fold inwards on itself to make more room to grow. That's what the RNA in our body does. Fatima the garbage collector doesn't have much room in the world. She lives in a tiny top-floor apartment of a building that dates back to the Ottoman era. Citizens of Istanbul are running out of room, too, as every day the government builds something new. Moreover, the government also keeps taking things away from Turks. There are continual new proclamations about things that are now banned, and people have no choice but to forget that they ever had such things. Even their memories are shrinking. 

The town sort of accommodates this shrinking by folding in on itself. The route that Fatima has to navigate as a garbage collector is "the thinnest alleys of Beyoglu," which she compares to a "maze." The streets of the town, squeezed by development, are starting to weave and twist in on themselves. Fatima is worried they may one day squeeze her into a block. 

Fatima thinks that there is more room to take advantage of than people are using. The garbage bins she collects from are overflowing, but not really full, she says, because, "People are very bad at the economy of space." Fatima will prove to be much better at space economy than her customers.

She eventually starts collecting musical instruments a composer has been throwing out, even though she's been warned not to take anything from the trash. If she starts, she'll soon end up a hoarder, which one of her colleagues defines as "an attachment at all to an object." The government seems to share this view, which is why it keeps outlawing one object after another, wanting people to "have no choice but to throw away half their lives."

Why is the government so opposed to people's things? Because the President wants to project a strong image, and things tend to show how weak humans are. After all, things have a tendency to end up in the trash, just like old people have a tendency to die. Things "remind us of the mortality of our own legacies." Things become trash, and  trash "announces decay and decay is the product of time, and time is the fear of all living things." Fatima wonders at one point if eyeglasses have been banned because "they made people look old, weak, the opposite of what a Turk should be."

Whatever space restrictions are going on in the country, Fatima seems to find a loophole. She discovers she has an attic with enough space to keep the musical instruments she finds. Later, the attic, which seemed tiny when she first discovered it, seems to have an infinite ability to keep expanding. She can not only put instruments in there, but musicians, whom the government has outlawed and--in a wonderful bit of satire--had thrown out in the trash. 

A king of infinite space

It's not much of a stretch to see the attic as a metaphor for the mind, what with the attic being at the top of the house and all. The attic is a place where you can store the memories of all the things that have been outlawed. The attic is the place where you can still have music and art and literature even when these things have been removed from the rest of the world. And there's almost infinite room in it to put new things. What is like that in the real world if not the mind?

There are some schools of thought that would have us believe that it's not events that make us unhappy; it's us that makes us unhappy. Happiness is in the mind, and we control the space of our minds. Even if we are beset with problems, those problems aren't what make us happy or sad, it's our minds that do this. The most extreme--and frankly, stupid--example of a story that pushes this idea was the 1997 movie Life is Beautiful, in which an Italian Jew managed to help his child survive a concentration camp by convincing him it's all a big game they must win. I know people loved this movie, and it won a lot of awards, but it's really an example of how a generally sound notion--the we have some agency over our own happiness--can become ridiculous when taken to extremes. You can't think your way through a concentration camp. You can't get through torture with a positive attitude, although there's a funny Key and Peele sketch about it.

"Waste Management Orchestra" isn't really dealing with the idea that we can think ourselves into happiness, but a near-cousin of this idea. It's the idea that when all possible political opposition to authority is taken away, there is still resistance possible within the landscape of our own minds. When everything in the political order is ugly and false, any kind of hanging on to beauty and truth is a form of resistance.

Fatima does seem to somewhat effectively counter the state through making more and more room for beauty and truth in her mind. She is continually amazed to find that, although the space seemed small, it never seems to fill up, and she fits more and more instruments and people into it. Moreover, the state's surveillance doesn't seem able to penetrate the attic. 

The state expands in return

But the state has a trick up its sleeve. It can expand nearly infinitely, too. It arrests Fatima for taking a tube of paint from the trash. The government doesn't know it's for the artists in the attic, but it doesn't matter. The paint is banned no matter what it's for. She gets sentenced to two years of prison. Now it doesn't matter how much beauty is going on in the attic, because she's not with the attic anymore.

The state simply kept expanding the number of things that were contraband until it came up with something to put her in prison for. Along the way, the number of things it outlawed became so huge, the police were eventually arresting (hilariously) the trees that lined the street. By the end, not only the people who hold onto the banned objects are in prison, but the objects, too. The state is able to expand so much, it is even imprisoning itself, as one guard puts the other in jail, then waits for another to jail her, on and on ad infinitum.  

I have no idea how good a send-up this story is of the Turkish government. I'm not even sure, as I go through the story, whether the Turkish government that's being satirized is more guilty of domestic surveillance run amok or for an ill-advised development program that erases the nation's history. It's probably both. Whatever the story is lampooning in the real world, it's criticizing the notion that intellectualized resistance can be effective. That's not to say that there isn't an intellectual component to resistance. It's not all barricades in the streets, but there has to be some real-world relationship between our intellectual resistance and the state. Fatima admits at one point that she's "not very cognizant of the goings-on" in her country, and while she does resist in small ways, she's complicit in forgetting everything the government has banned along the way. Her detachment from the real world is why the things in her attic stay in her attic.

The thing about infinity is that not infinities are equal. Some are more infinite than others. In the case of the state against the individual, the infinity of the creative mind is less infinite, less able to continue to sprawl into space, than the infinity of the state's ever-increasing power.