When I was in my early twenties, one breezy afternoon in Istanbul, I discovered a word that brightened my day but then darkened my mood almost simultaneously.
I encountered that curious word between the pages of a book and admired it for some time without daring to approach it. This used to happen often to me back in those days. As I journeyed inside the immense landscape of literature, I would try to read everything from political philosophy to poetry to cookbooks with utmost reverence as if they were letters from God. Every now and then, I would come across strange creatures of words appearing suddenly in my path, like starfish brought in by the waves and washed up on the shore after some terrible storm. Were they dead or were they still alive? I would gingerly hold them in my palm and try to hear the beating of their hearts. Some of these forgotten words would come from Arabic or Persian or Armenian or Ladino or Kurdish or Greek…. But on that particular day, the word I stopped to admire was from French: “Flâneur.”
Flâneur: How fascinating was this term, meaning a “stroller” or “saunterer” of the streets. An urban explorer. A connoisseur of the cityscape. A flâneur was someone who could wander away without a care, roaming the labyrinth of a vast metropolis, turning this way or that, making decisions on a whim. He was a keen observer of modern life and its endless contradictions.
The French poet Charles Baudelaire described the character eloquently. A flâneur was not only a casual wanderer but also a passionate spectator of urban life. He could be a dandy, but not necessarily. An aesthete perhaps. But surely an open-minded individual! Yet the main reason why I loved the word immediately was because I loved Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. Benjamin explored the concept in his remarkable book The Arcades Project.
“Baudelaire’s genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical genius. For the first time, with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyric poetry…. The flâneur still stands on the threshold—of the metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at home.”
So I read these lines and I was bowled over. I was convinced that Walter Benjamin was talking about people like me. After all, had I not always felt on the threshold? The limbo. The purgatory. That inbetweendom— the space between East and West, faith and doubt, written culture and oral culture…. I had always felt not quite at home anywhere. I was both from this city and from elsewhere. Insider and outsider. Always “the Other”. I did my best to keep up with the rhythm of the society around me, but the truth was, everyday I felt like a fish lowered into a tank to acclimatize, only to fail and fail. The more I thought about it the more I was convinced that Benjamin was addressing me. I loved literature! I was a writer, or at least trying to be one. The melancholy that Benjamin attributed to Baudelaire, I had that too, and aplenty!
So on that day in Istanbul, in my youthful vanity, I decided I was a natural flâneur (I was not yet aware of the coinage of the term flaneuse). Therefore, I would travel every inch of the urban space down to its hidden alleys and ruins, meandering the serpentine streets of what remained of Augusta Antonina, Byzantium, New Rome, Constantinople or Istanbul. This city had so many names and I would discover them all! It shouldn’t be that hard, I thought. I loved walking anyway. I never wore high heels. I had never owned a pair of fancy shoes, perfectly comfortable in my flat boots. I was ready to walk the entire city, just like my favourite poets and philosophers had advised. I would stroll and march until late hours, which would give me the chance to observe how the city changed from day to night.
With all these glorious thoughts, off I went. Every day that week I walked for hours and hours. One evening, after sunset, there I was again, down the Taksim Square towards the narrow lanes behind Galata Tower. The smells of cat pee and uncollected garbage and fried eggplants wafting from some basement I couldn’t see... The flâneur in me kept making mental notes. Then, an icy feeling down my spine. Footsteps in the dark. Two men approached from the opposite side. The expressions on their faces, a mixture of amusement, aggressiveness and hostility. They slowed down, whispered something lewd and turned around, following me. I began running and I did not stop even when I had reached the main road again.
I went home, trembling. I was upset at Istanbul, upset at patriarchy, upset at myself, but most of all, I was upset at Baudelaire! How grandiose of him to glorify the concept of the urban flâneur, when he was not a young woman strolling the streets of Istanbul.
These days the memory came back to me while reading Wanderlust: A History of Walking by writer, historian and public intellectual Rebecca Solnit. She eloquently reminds us that “walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked.” She then adds wisely: “Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.”
It is not only women, of course. A disabled writer or a young mother/father writer pushing a stroller along broken cobblestones or any writer who because of their race or ethnicity looks a little bit “different” within a system of inequalities…. might have a much harder time travelling the nooks of urban space. In too many parts of the world there are too many obstacles. Too many glass walls.
This does not mean that we cannot peregrinate from place to place. It only means that it will be harder for some than others but still we can and we must. Let us never stop encouraging ourselves and each other from journeys, both inward and outward.
Cities belong to everyone.
I have always believed that writers need to be two things all their lives: we need to be good readers and we need to be good listeners. But more and more, I am convinced that we must also be “good nomads”.
Writers need to walk the earth.
I love your writings and story telling
Absolutely exquisite. I could visualise you as a flàneur, up and about and around. I've read Rebecca Solnit's book and could understand the reference of the urban nomad. And as you were describing going around the city, morning to night, the first thought which came up in my mind was-how fortunate you are to be in this safe city and then you almost run into those two men you described. Perhaps there will be a day, when urban nomads and flàneurs shall be gender irrelevant.