The stories that have left a mark on me are those about real life, says the Guardian’s correspondent in Turkey. So it’s essential to speak the language

I remember, on one of my first visits to Istanbul, chatting with an acquaintance about his work with imprisoned journalists. He was trying to explain how polarised political opinion is in Turkey. “Let me put it this way: in Turkey the only time you’ll ever collectively piss off a leftist, an Islamist and a secularist is if you kick a cat,” he said.

Before I moved to Istanbul last November from Beirut, where I was based for three-and-a-half years, I spent weeks getting the necessary paperwork together for my two cats: international rabies tests, cat passports, health certificates and expensive immunisations. I arrived at Atatürk airport and nervously took the pet carriers over to the customs officer. He gave me a strange look.

Kareem Shaheen

“What do you want from me?” he asked.



“Don’t you want to see the papers for these cats? I have them all,” I said.



He waved me through with a shrug, and the rifle-toting security guard stooped to play with the cats before letting us through to a rainy Istanbul morning.



Istanbul is the city of cats: walk down the street and you’ll see little cat houses built by locals and dry cat food left on the pavement. I’m currying favour with my neighbourhood by paying a monthly contribution towards food dispensed to pretty much all the local cats by an elderly woman across the street.



It was perhaps unsurprising, then, that the first language school I signed up for was called KediCat – kedi being Turkish for cat. When I lived in Lebanon, I had been vaguely irritated as an Arab (I’m Egyptian) by foreign correspondents who never bothered to learn the language. So I figured I ought to put my money where my mouth is.

Turkish is an extremely enjoyable language to learn, not least because when it comes to vocabulary I have a massive headstart – something like 4,000 words are actually borrowed from Arabic. But I also enjoy taking an analytical approach to learning, and trying to identify how language affects the way people think. It’s a form of amateur etymology. (I might have become an etymologist but, as a high school student, I never figured out how they made money on a day-to-day basis.)

On beginning my language tuition, I was immediately struck by the lack of the verb “to have” in Turkish. Instead, something either exists or it doesn’t. If, for example, you want to say “I don’t have time”, you would use “zamanım yok”, which literally translates to “my time doesn’t exist”. Perhaps this is why Turkey has such a well-developed existentialist movement.



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In Turkish, it also means that you don’t have an illness, you instead become the illness. So “I have diarrhoea” becomes “ishalim” – literally “I am diarrhoea”, a concept that has resulted in much amusement.

There are other interesting language differences. Turkish doesn’t have gender-specific pronouns. The letter “o” can mean he, she or it. I wonder if that has an impact on gender identity and politics. On the one hand, you no longer create assumptions, at least through language, that certain jobs are the province of either men or women. But can you have a debate on fluid gender identities, for example, without having the words for it?



Because Arabic isn’t a language that places much emphasis on vowels, I’ve also had some pronunciation issues. What, for instance, is the distinction between “oldu” and “öldü”? The first is the past tense of “to be” and the second is the past tense of “to die.” The difference between being and dying is the difference between o and u and ö and ü.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boats on the Golden Horn in Istanbul at sunset. Photograph: Dmytro Kosmenko/Getty Images/iStockphoto

There is of course a broader point to be made about studying a language. It’s easy to stay in your comfort zone with liberal friends and opine about the end of the world and the collapse of the post-cold war order. But when I think about the stories that have left a mark on me, they have often been about real life: tales of the people who have borne the impact of these global forces.

At my old newspaper in Lebanon, my colleagues gave me the unfortunate title of suicide bombing correspondent because I covered the large number of terrorist attacks in Lebanon over 2013-14 linked to the war in Syria. I was sent to the scene not to cover the breaking news, but to write observational pieces.

You start noticing things. Bare trees that have had their leaves burned off, shattered glass that crunches under your feet, streaks of blood that paint the pavements, the blackened, mangled frame of the bombed car. The images leave an indelible mark. I can recall with clarity the weeping of children at a nearby orphanage, or the chants for revenge at a funeral.

In Turkey, the first big stories I covered were similarly bloody. The first was the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Ankara, the second the New Year’s Eve attack on the Reina nightclub. I froze when I saw the news alert: my fiancee and I had talked about celebrating the new year there. As I stood in the cold of an Istanbul winter night near the nightclub, I saw two men collapse in bloodcurdling sobs when they heard that their relative hadn’t made it out.

How do you write about these things when the horrors seem to never stop? I used to joke that whisky and cigarettes were cheaper than any therapist. But it was obvious all along. In Lebanon, people went about their lives after every bombing. In Turkey, they carry on in the same way. Survival and resilience are the basic stuff of life. If you can talk to people, you can all get through it together: empathise, build relationships, and get to the heart of their stories.

So I’m learning Turkish. Because I want to tell better stories. And because by telling stories, we can all help heal each other.