ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON, Irmak, Mahmut, and I—three secular Muslim Turks—took refuge in the cool, cavernous Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Morningside Heights. Our interest in the Gothic-Romanesque revival church architectural, mostly, we ambled through soaring galleries, admiring arches that shouldered the weight of the building and stained glass of biblical scenes that technicolored the daylight.
Irmak, a part-time librarian, captioned programs for public-access TV.
Mahmut, a psychiatrist, traveled the city visiting his patients at home, treatment courting uncertainty in public housing.
I, an English professor, avoided naming my profession because I was an oxymoron: “A Turkish guy teaching English? Only in America.”
After confessing our professional nuisances, we strolled to the Children’s Sculpture Garden. The Ring of Freedom with a miniature Noah’s ark next to a mermaid and a menagerie of statuettes—owls, monkeys, elephants—fenced the Peace Fountain that rose from the center. The winged archangel Michael, whom I’d known as Mikail in Turkish, stood atop the fountain on a giant crab over a pedestal twisted like a double helix of DNA. His right hand petted a giraffe. His left hand held a mighty sword above the upside-down body of Satan, whose horned head dangled from the crab’s claw.
We sat at the garden’s periphery on the amphitheater steps next to an old, bearded man in an all-white suit. Hearing our Turkish, he asked what language we spoke. He sipped a golden liquid from a transparent cup, yellowish stains on his pant legs and one of his cuffs.
Did we consider ourselves European? Having heard this question many times, we said we were Turkish. He told us he was a Vietnam vet who voted to make America great again.
I stopped listening for a moment and remembered how, as a recently naturalized citizen voting for the first time, I was despondent after the 2016 election.
He said he had fought next to both Black and “Indian” soldiers, “the former, not being real Americans, didn’t make good fighters, while the latter couldn’t carry their drink.”
What gave him license to confide his worst in us?
We sat and listened, unspeaking like the statues that surrounded us, glancing at one another from time to time but lacking the will to tell him off. Utmost respect for elders was a reflex of our upbringing; disengagement despite proximity is a city-dweller’s knee-jerk survival strategy; and perhaps we were at a loss for words in the face of such vitriol.
Yet the chorus of my conscience pressed: We lived in America, but what did that mean to us? We were in America, but were we of America?
We finally excused ourselves, relieved to walk away. At Irmak’s suggestion, we ducked into Casa Mexicana. I vented over drinks about our failure to speak up, our failure at being of America.
Irmak said she felt like this every time she subtitled the particularly sexist host of one of her shows. She fantasized about cursing him in subtitles one day.
Mahmut, ever the impassive therapist, said, “We could’ve left earlier if you’d expressed how bothered you were,” and added that I shouldn’t care so much about an old man who dwelled in the past and was probably off his meds.
We moved on to lighter topics. We were still so naïve that summer.
Later, shut in our homes watching things fall apart, George Floyd murdered on repeat on liquid-crystal screens that mirrored our aghast faces, we would come to know that we were now of America, for ill or good.
As I savored bitter tequila that night, I kept thinking about the old man, who must’ve seen the worst during the war. In my imagination, he sat by himself in the garden all the time; his feline eyes became beacons at night. Unlike the languorous archangel who focused on the giraffe that nuzzled against his bosom.
Serkan Görkemli is the author of Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (Kentucky) and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY). Originally from Türkiye, he is an associate professor of English at UConn.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
