A Turkish woman takes umbrage at the misrepresentation of Turkey in Christopher Pike's novel The Secret of Ka. She posts a review on Amazon (and another one on LJ at bookfails) talking about her complaints with the book.

Then, a man claiming to be one of Christopher Pike's editors shows up to westsplain her own culture to her. Also he decides that she's been threatening to cut off the author's hands.

Arguments include:

1) It's okay for a major character to have an Indian name! He started off being Ahmed but readers liked this other name better. Also, Amesh sounds a lot like Ahmed. Same difference! ~~Although it turns out Ahmed isn't even a Turkish name and Turkish people will spell it Ahmet.~~
2) Turkish, Kurdish, Arab ... it's all a matter of perspective! Who's to say whether a Turkish person is Arab or not? (Not you because I know more about your own ethnic background than you do.)
3) But all those people he wrote about who dress strangely and have foreign names and address their grandfathers by unusual titles are supposed to be weird! We didn't misrepresent Turkish culture at all! It's just that all of those characters are supposed to be iconoclasts or hipsters or something. Yeah.
4) I totally saw a guy wearing a turban in Turkey once! Also, taxi drivers in London and New York wear turbans. (???)
5) All cultures even tangentially related to Islam and the Middle East are segregated, war-torn, and insanely conservative. It's illegal to swear and nobody sits near women and bloody wars are waged outside of the Hilton every night. :(
6) I'm just never going to address the fact that you're offended and feel that your culture was used like a dirty rag at all!
7) u mad :(

Ah, I remember well the Turkish capital, Istanbul, that desert city.

I nicked this from a mouse at wank_report (thank you mousey!)

ETA: A clever person on Amazon dug up proof that the "editor" Michael Brite is actually a sockpuppet of Christopher Pike himself. He seems to mostly use the account to leave worshipful reviews of his own books. Seriously:

Perhaps The Best Book I Have Ever Read
Christopher Pike's "Thirst" is a masterpiece. The book is not only a fantastic thriller, a mind boggling mystery, but a spiritual revelation. Alisa is a five thousand year old vampire who kills as casually as she makes love. Yet there remains deep within her a painful and yet abiding memory and love for a man she met when she was young, a man who may have been more than a man -- the mysterious Lord Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita, the equivalent of the Indian Bible. However, please do not get the idea this book is about religion. Pike's novel is totally free of dogma. He never says Krishna is God, and his heroine is never sure who Krishna truly is. Also, he is careful not to offend anyone's faith. But there is a heart breaking passage where two of the main characters debate the existence of God. They soon come to the conclusion that "God" is impossible to define or know, but whatever Krishna was, he was too powerful, and too beautiful, to disobey. And that leads to the crux of the story. The master vampire who has created Alisa must destroy all the vampires to gain salvation. Yet, ironically, Krishna has promised Alisa she will have his protection if she obeys him and never creates another vampire. It is the clash of these two contradictory vows that stands at the heart of this brilliant novel. Reading it, I felt I was given an insight into the mystery of life itself. Why, for every good impulse in the world, is there an opposing evil? Yet Pike tells this incredible morality play without preaching. In fact, I suspect most people who read the book will simply enjoy it because it is a kick-ass novel about the most intense character in all of modern fiction. I am trying to say "Thirst" is so much more than a vampire book. It is ultimately a timeless fable of how fear can change to hatred, and then to love, and finally mature into devotion. Pike has managed a small miracle by showing us that these emotion are not truly at odds with each other. For they all reside in every human heart, in the same way, perhaps, the divine does as well. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It changed my life forever.

ETA again: Christopher Pike has now made an impressively paranoid post on a website of his accusing the original Amazon reviewer (caligirl_08) of posting negative reviews under multiple aliases, as well as claiming that

bookfails is a "livejournal community sponsored by someone of Turkish background who has taken things much too far and is trying to rob fiction authors of their artistic license".

Dear Author has also caught wind of this (last item on the page).

But wait, there's more!

caligirl_08 (

bs_08 on

bookfails) tackles Pike's aforementioned sexy vampire novel, Thirst. It ... well, I'm just going to leave this here:

Initial post: Nov. 7, 2009 3:08 AM PST
Michael Brite says:
It says clearly in the book that Sita was an Aryan, a well known group who invaded India five thousand years ago. They were all blond and blue-eyed.

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sukeban
2010-09-26 08:44 pm UTC (link)

Re: Arabs. The editor points out that this is a mistake of the POV character. I'm assuming this Sara is an American or something, but gosh... there are tons of Americans who would assume Turkish people are Arabs, and so if that's the character's mistake it is a sensible thing to include.

Well, yeah, except that it's the wrong ethnicity, wrong language, wrong *language family*, and even wrong script.

Having one guy in Turkey wearing a turban is a lot different from having them all do it.

There's a difference between, say, a Sikh turban, the small turban some imams or those who claim descendance from Mohammed wear, and so on. But it doesn't matter, because the traditional Turkish headgear between the 1800s and 1925 was the fez, and nowadays the old-man hat of choice is the hacı takkesi. It's like having a cowboy character with a bowler or a Tyrolese hat.

Not that Turks dress that exotically, anyway.

The editor there is taking a professional tone. What, should he apologize for not being Turkish while attempting to (politely) address her concerns?

Well, apologising for glaring mistakes in the setting and shoddy research work would be nice, yes.

but I also am not sensing any kind of level of real expertise on her part, just the kind of superficial knowledge of Turkey one might have from a little learning and Googling.

That's exactly what makes the mistakes worse. It's the kind of stupidity that could have been avoided if they spent five minutes googling.

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	bienegold 2010-09-26 09:36 pm UTC (link)
	Thank you so much for this comment. I couldn't get my words properly wrangled. (Reply to this)(Parent)

ruslan
2010-09-26 10:01 pm UTC (link)

There are problematic and poorly researched ideas in the book and defending it is just douchey no matter how polite and professional you think he's being.

Getting Istanbul wrong was still stupid no matter who did it.

The problem with the Arab thing is that Sara's father (who I'm guessing from context lives there/works there/is a professor of Turkish literature/a grown-ass man/in general somebody who should know better) also refers to Turkey as an Arab country and they say this in front of Turkish people like Amesh without anybody bothering to correct them.

I'm sure at least one guy in Turkey has a turban for some reason, and that some Turkish people have unusual names, and that at least one woman has been in Turkey wearing a niqab, but if there are fifteen different unlikely incidences that pass largely without comment, the net sum is an inaccurate portrayal of the country.

I don't see any particular reason to doubt that she's a Turkish woman who lived in Istanbul at some point and currently lives in San Diego. Hell, she could have immigrated six months ago, we don't know that. Although I don't see why we have to scrutinize her background. She identifies with Turkey and feels personally slighted, and she obviously knows what she's talking about far more than the editor and the author do. She doesn't need to prove she has some kind of advanced Turkish cred to be right.

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alexa
2010-09-27 01:46 am UTC (link)

The problem with the Arab thing is that Sara's father...also refers to Turkey as an Arab country and they say this in front of Turkish people like Amesh without anybody bothering to correct them.

This, plus all the other mistakes that the commenter pointed out further down her list (getting the word for "grandfather" wrong, deserts in Istanbul, almost none of the "Turkish" characters having names that are actually Turkish) makes me think it was likely more than a mistake by the PoV character.

Also, isn't this YA fiction? I'm not saying you should talk down to a younger audience, but isn't the device of an unreliable narrator a little advanced, if you're not going to bother to correct or make clear the errors? Since many non-Turkish children wont know the capital of Turkey, wouldn't having the main character make an intentional mistake for the sake of characterization go right over their heads?

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thebratqueen
2010-09-27 05:14 pm UTC (link)

I think regardless of the target audience, the onus is on the author to make it clear that errors like this are because of flawed character POV instead of research fail. For example, if he'd gotten the "grandfather" right, and clarified the distance to a desert location, and used a Turkish name for the guy, it'd be easier to trust that any other mistakes were on purpose. But when the story is riddled with mistakes that have nothing to do with a character's POV the trust isn't there and it's not the reader's fault for not getting it.

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	sandglass 2010-09-27 02:00 am UTC (link)
	And it's not like it's one isolated event. One guy wearing a turban, or turbans being presented as something you might see normally without the other problems is kinda understandable, but getting that wrong on top of everything else, within 25 pages of the beginning? Why the fuck are people defending that? (Reply to this)(Parent)

eleutheria
2010-09-26 10:03 pm UTC (link)

Completely OT, but thank you so much for the Flickr links! I never would have thought of looking there and I've just spent the last hour or so looking through pictures of Turkey. Since I can't travel due to disability, that site is a neat way to see some of what I can't. Very cool!

On topic, this is a great comment, and you're right. I also think that there are ways to show that the viewpoint character is ignorant without acting like Wikipedia/lecturing in the narrative.

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sukeban
2010-09-26 11:07 pm UTC (link)

If the main character is the daughter of a professor of Turkish Literature (as I think I've read somewhere in this wank, I just don't remember where), she has the best of excuses to not be so mind-boggingly ignorant as to mix up Turks and Arabs. Which would be like mixing up Irish people with Italians or Mexicans because they're all Catholic, so they must be the same, don't they?

OTOH, an ignorant POV character having a culture shock with competent show-don't-tell storytelling would be fine, too. It's just unchallenged and unnoticed mistakes that get me... or they would, if I even knew the author. I'm too old for Goosebumps and YA lit, and I'm not American, so we don't even get all the novels published in the USA -_-;

FWIW, the only novels I've read set in Turkey are Robert Graves' Count Belisarius (historical) and Jason Goodwin's The Janissary Tree and The Snake Stone (historical murder mysteries). I really should get some Orhan Pamuk, but I tend to like either genre fiction or non-fiction, so I'm not terribly motivated.

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	snarkhunter 2010-09-27 01:42 pm UTC (link)
	You're never too old for YA lit. And Goosebumps was RL Stine, which isn't really relevant. :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

ruslan
2010-09-27 06:21 pm UTC (link)

(I said that because the reviewer just mentioned her father parenthetically as somebody who should know better, and I paraphrased it as being somebody who lives there/works there/studies Turkish culture/something like that.

I looked it up and he's a businessman who's been living there working on a project for some time. I think he's an architect or in construction or something. You would think that somebody who lives and works with Turkish people every day would have figured out they're not Arabs at some point.)

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	chikane 2010-09-26 10:15 pm UTC (link)
	Thank you for the comment. It's like having a cowboy character with a bowler or a Tyrolese hat. For some reason, I don't see anyone going to defend an author who'd pull that mistake. Wonder why. (Reply to this)(Parent)

sgaana
2010-09-27 03:04 am UTC (link)

I actually agree with your comment otherwise, but this stuck out to me:

It's like having a cowboy character with a bowler or a Tyrolese hat.

Er.... Bat Masterson wants a word with you....

(While not a "cowboy" in the purest technical sense, Masterson is one of the famous gunslinger figures of the Old West. The bowler was... just a hat, and people wore them in the Old West. No, really. They had all kinds of accents besides a Texas drawl, too, because they were immigrants who frequently headed directly West -- John Cleese's sheriff is one of the great details in the movie "Silverado".)

Otherwise, though... I'm in complete agreement that all of the mistakes add up into something incredibly sloppy, and I actually think it's WORSE because it's a YA book. The POV character being ignorant would be fine with me, because plenty of Americans are that ignorant about Turkey. But it would only be fine with me if the point of her being ignorant was so that she could have her ignorance corrected through the course of the book, and thus the readers would learn something, imagine that.

And the point really OUGHT to be that neither the editor nor the author should need to be Turkish to care about getting some very basic details about another country correct.

It makes me wonder if I'm just being hopelessly naive in thinking that people who write YA books should make even more of a point than usual to be educating those who will read the books, as well as entertaining them. (*sigh* Probably, yes.)

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ealusaid
2010-09-28 07:08 pm UTC (link)

The bowler was... just a hat, and people wore them in the Old West

*digresses*

Also, not everyone who wore a cowboy hat wore a Stetson! Even now you've got a reasonable chance of telling which region a cowboy is from based on his hat, and back in the day you could place someone rather more accurately based on their hat, rope, chaps, and saddle, since to my knowledge there was no "Ranch Hand Fashion Monthly" going around in the 1880s.

(It's almost like John Wayne movies aren't perfect illustrations of life in the Old West.)

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sgaana
2010-09-28 08:48 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, not least because Stetsons were actually relatively expensive. Which doesn't mean that a cowboy or other Western figure might not have considered it worth paying for, but there were many cheaper alternatives.

"Contrary to popular belief, it was the bowler and not the cowboy hat that was the most popular in the American West, prompting Lucius Beebe to call it "the hat that won the West."" - quote from Wikipedia, but footnoted to a 1957 article by Beebe in "The Deseret News":

"A few years ago a writer was engaged in preparing for book publication a pictorial history of the Old West. He examined literally thousands upon thousands of contemporary illustrations, especially photographs, and after a time he became haunted by what at first seemed a recurrent and indefinable but ever present anachronism. At length it dawned upon him that a formidably large proportion of the population of the Old West, the Wild West, the West of everybody but Frederic Remington and his imitators were wearing derby hats and not Stetsons."

(Came across that when trying to look up my vague sense that the "ten gallon" style made by Stetson is actually from later, but I wasn't sure what "later" might be. I was going to reply to you that you can also in some cases make a guess as to time period, by the hat style. Which is not to refute the idea that "the cowboy hat" became popular and widespread -- it had a lot of practical features, it became popular for a reason. Just that, as you and I are both agreeing, that doesn't mean other types of hats weren't found in the Old West, or even "typical" of the Old West.)

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