YouSaid · the spoken record

Sami Kent

lines on the record: 35
first: 2024-07-10
most recent: 2024-07-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank you. But you know what? What I did appreciate also is that your identity is also like what you choose to give importance. And my Turkishness was also a project of mine, but that's because I wanted to make it a project of mine. I wanted to be as Turkish as I felt or as I wanted to, I wanted to be as Turkish as I could be, I think. And a way that I don't think feels inauthentic. It just feels like... A part of me and a part of me that I wanted to explore. And to be honest, I think we'll never quite be satisfied. I can never quite. I love going to Turkey. I love taking my son there. And inshallah, I'll be there writing the next book about it soon enough.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel at home in London on a street where there is still a pet shop at the end of my road and there is a bakal, you know, a grocer's where I speak Turkish with them and they give my son a free lollipop and we live near a Turkish bakery that he knows even at two years old when we pass, they will give him a free biscuit if he asks. You know, we have this kind of Turkish corner of London here and I feel very at home here. But We feel very at home when we go to Stambul or to other places in Turkey Know I feel both British and Turkish and kind of maybe for a while wasn't quite sure how do I put this? That is a kind of identity in its own right. And for a while, I did wonder whether I was trying to like deliberately make myself more Turkish, you know, that I kind of, when I moved to Turkey, I grew a terrible moustache, which comes and goes.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, I mean, you'll know in Turkey you're asked very early in conversation nervousness, you know, where you're from. And what I normally say is Londra like Blondon and people say No, absolutely not like you are, you know, this kind of logic of patrilineal bloodlines. Your father is Turkish, so you have to be Turkish. I've heard a lot of times, and so no one ends up saying, which is absurd because neither my dad nor I grew up there. But that's where our family is originally from. But the honest answer to that is Londra, London, but in a kind of British Turkish way and a kind of hybrid way that I've learnt to feel comfortable with.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, yeah. Yeah, and even you see this lots in Turkey, even just the threat of a prosecution, it just hangs over people. And you talk to people who say, you know, I don't know whether I can... Go and get married or go on holiday because I'm not sure what's going to happen when I get back. You know, it impacts people's lives just having this threat hanging over you. And well before you even end up in a court or in. And it's really quite a profound power that the state has over people to cow them, basically”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“never forget is Hyundai the mother saying I asked her how do you possibly explain this to your child this kind of powerlessness that you have and this injustice Because I don't know when you have children, you just want to make them feel safe and you want to make they kind of, I don't know, want to feel like you're in control. And she said, we just tell him there's been a mistake, and until it's sorted out, Baba can't come home, which in a kind of simplified, childish way, I think. summarizes the situation of a lot of people in Turkey. So that, I think, has really stayed with me working in Turkey. Just how valuable it is to have law, to have independent institutions, and how countries that do have those things should really, really strive to preserve them because when you don't have them, it can be very, very ugly.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the last chapter of my book follows particularly a family who's been caught up in this decay or deliberate destruction of the rule of law in Turkey, and who the father ends up in Silibi prison. And just to see how it affects people's lives as they're preparing their defences, as they're then sent to jail, as they don't know what's going to happen, whether he might be released or might not, and some of his colleagues might get released or might not. And at the heart of it, what I saw was a family, people, the person I was writing about, I interviewed his wife and who has a son who is a year older than my son, and I found it impossible not to see my own family reflected in this family, to be honest, and I found it incredibly moving to see them go through this and to see how it affects their lives. And the one thing I”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you don't have the rule of law, how capriciously and how callously people's lives are judged And the last chapter of my book is covers contemporary Turkey and is about one of the largest prisons in the world which was built in the last two decades in Turkey. and holds a huge number of political prisoners, journalists. of politicians, activists, judges, courts. And is kind of famous in Turkey called Silivery, and there's even a phrase slivery sorg, which means slivery is cold that people say if their friends have something controversial as a kind of warning in jest, you know, be careful. Don't push it because otherwise you'll be in slivery too.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since working in Turkey quite a lot, and I still go back and forth, I really, really, I think, come to appreciate the rule of law and how beautiful it is as a concept and how important it is and how fundamental it is to have independent institutions. The rule of law, the idea that everyone is accountable to this one thing no matter who you are, is actually like a really deeply egalitarian prospect. In places where it doesn't exist or it's being Deliberately eroded. I think you see it in two ways one, which is that people at the top. are not held accountable in Turkey though what they should be for kind of deep failures of the state, whether that is how they respond to emergencies or the kind of corruption that everyone in Turkey knows about. but also the thing that I saw most and I think that I wrote about in the book was how”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thought didn't necessarily change my view of Turkey, but really changed, I think, the way I view politics in a lot of places, including in the UK, is I think when I was younger, I was really moved, you know, I was a kind of, I think it's quite common, a kind of teenage Marxist, and it was all, you know, economics and material base and the superstructure. And that's basically how I saw politics. That's what moved things and that's what was important about whether people became poorer, richer was basically the kind of deciding question about things.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think another thing that I've noticed is that my family, I kind of, to be honest, thought that they were a bit prejudiced about the current government when they first came in and that their opposition to Erdogan and the Akbari and what they were doing in Turkey was mostly kind of based on basically snobbery that he was a kind of uneducated Islamist and wasn't the kind of person who should be leading Turkey. And I thought he was probably doing something that is historically necessary and to accept that actually they could feel something in the bow, in their bones or smell it in the air that I could not and that that's a kind of humbling experience that to recognize that if you're half in and half out you are still only half in and there is only so much that you pick up on. I think I almost put this in the book, but there's one other thing that I”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one thing I always find amazing about Turkey is how hopeful people still are that even I think you noticed perhaps you do the same that Western journalists will Writer often away and people there actually have far more hopes for particularly Turkish democracy. and the idea that they will endure past whatever thing they're living through, I always find that quite amazing and quite humbling.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly more painful, it's certainly more bittersweet. I remember going to Marash off to the earthquake last year and finding it, to be honest, impossible to work as in just so affected by it, finding myself unable to ask people the kind of questions you're normally supposed to ask about, you know, what do you think and what are you going to do? I just held people's hands and kind of. And said Ketchmashen, and then I went home, about back to a stumble, and I called my mum and I cried, you know, you're more exposed to it when there's a political sham trial You filled with shame in a way that you weren't before when it was just this place that you kind of loved and could kind of pick up and leave really in a way. Shame and anger, I think you feel that much more.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think if I remember correctly some minister said, you know, the world will remember Ronaldo Messi, Mohammed Ali, and Naim Sullaman Older, which might be a surprise to the rest of the sporting world, but that is how he is seen in Turkey. I remember going to see that film with my Halla, my aunt in Istanbul at the cinema. And it was just, you know, it was in floods of tears at the end, you know, it really speaks to something larger than live character, definitely.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and their fixer and translator at the end of the night, gets them in the bus and is supposed to count twelve Bulgarian weightlifters, and counts eleven, and realizes that Naum Schulamanov is missing, and the next day or that week the Bulgarian I think was Vice Consul of Australia holds a press conference, lays out Naum Shalamonov's things, including a toy kangaroo and his world championship trophy, and says, we believe that Naum Shulimanov has been the victim of a political kidnapping. To me, that's a story. And you go from there into Hunim or Naum was. I think of myself as someone who is not necessarily a historian, but as someone who is a storyteller and learnt that from a dad who was a storyteller and from a country that is full of stories. And so the thing that mostly pushed me into picking what would make it into the book was that.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it starts just to give you a sense of it. He's nineteen and it's 1986 and the Melbourne World Championships weightlifting. And I'm sure you know about, but just to fill you in, he's representing Bulgaria as Naum Schulamanov and is already well on the way to being the greatest weightlifter the world has ever seen. And he wins gold, as he always does, and Bulgaria also wins bronze and silver as they always do And that night they were celebrating in a restaurant Melbourne”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it's this kind of rich and bewildering place that is so much more alive and human than this kind of very surface look at these two incredibly important figures, yes, Erdogan and Ataturk, and these cleavages that do exist, yes, between the religious and the secular, but it's really only your part of it. And so a lot of the stories follow those themes that I was talking about, but partly what I... Chose was it was always like is this a great story and do I want to share it and is there Like would I read this so the story of Naim, for example that I mentioned”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What turkey is and who it's for, whether that is curds in the southeast or Islamists who didn't agree with this vision or far leftists, but also, you know, I chose the stories that I did, because to me Turkey is a place of stories. It's like that's how I learnt Turkey. My bubba would tell us stories about how he was there in Taksim Square in nineteen seventy seven when there was shooting at a rally that killed dozens, or that he was the candidate for Eurovision and if only Turkey hadn't pulled out in political protest he would have been a kind of a famous Turkish musician. Or any number of these things is how I learned Turkey. It was what it was for me. And I knew as a child, but also when I started working there,”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Ottoman ashes of the Ottoman Empire that was something that was seen as conservative and religious and backward into something resolutely modern. And it's about who that affected, what it did. And as you said, I look at Turkey kind of half in and half out. So a lot of the stories are really about”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and a million lira was more or less a pound. And I remember thinking I'm a millionaire holding. and my dad would look at this and look at me and have a very different reaction and said You look just like him meaning Atatuk, the founder of Turkey, which really isn't true. Like I really don't, and I especially didn't when I was seven, but my family is an incredibly, if not in influence, but in enthusiasm. They're really of that part of Turkey, a really enthusiastic Kemalists, Republican, secular, westernizers. That's their kind of people. And so a lot of the stories are about that project to try and transform Turkey in the 1920s, thirties and onwards from a kind of”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so as you say, like it's a history of Turkey, but it is also a kind of, you know, the book is called The Endless Country, but the second part is a personal journey into Turkey's first hundred years. And it is a personal version of the history of Turkey's Years it's not and doesn't pretend to be a kind of linear coherent narrative of that time. And just to first go into the kind of personal aspect of it, which I think also links all the stories or most of the stories in some way. I mentioned my dad at the beginning, and these kind of holidays that we took. I remember very clearly from when I was a boy seeing these when we went on holiday or to Istanbul to visit a family and seeing these Purple million lira notes with Atk's face on them, and because Turkey had kind of rampant inflation at the time.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walk in the streets. This is kind of the 80s, early 90s. You couldn't pay for meals at restaurants. Police would just wave him through at checkpoints. And what I noticed when I was reading the kind of newspaper coverage of that time. This sense that it has touched on what you were talking about that people were really happy that he had won, but also that the sense that Ozal, the Prime Minister at the time, said that it was an advert for Turkey that he'd put them on the map, and that there were newspapers saying, look, he's had allowed into the offices of Coca-Cola or of Adidas. And there's this sense that Look He's been accepted by these kind of big Western brands and that that was like deeply meaningful. And that was part of the reason why Naim was such a star.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But at the same time, yeah, as you say, has this desire also to kind of imitate the West in some way. And a lot of the opposition to that hat law was in fact because they thought this is just imitation. It's not authentic. And there are other chapters in the book, for example, the amazing story of Naim Suleimanolu, who was a weightlifter, probably the strongest man the world has ever seen. And I don't say that by any exaggeration, I think that is true. Ini was about 4'11 and weighed 50 kilos and could lift something like 160. I can go into the story in a bit more detail, but he became turkey's first ever gold medalist in the Olympics outside of wrestling and was such a huge star. Levers of fame could barely”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“rebellion against this and they end up kidnapping some police officers and in the end Ankara sends a warship to Rise to the Black Sea coast and supposedly fires on the hills to end this rebellion and this is remembered in a song Atma Humidia Atma Atma don't fire Hermidia which is the name of the ship don't fire don't fire will wear our hats and we'll pay our taxes and a lot you know so I interview some of the kind of family members of people who are involved in that Her story and part of that does touch on this issue about especially then Turkey has just emerged out of, he's just become independent. It feels very threatened by this sense that outside powers are trying to kind of dismember it, sometimes with very good reason.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I can kind of, you know, if I explain the form of the book, as you said, it looks different. A kind of story, a real story, a historical story from each decade of turkeys first hundred years and kind of those stories in a way kind of speak to bigger themes. And a number of them do touch on that. There's one about this when Turkey introduced in the 1920s a rule, a law that if you wore a hat, it had to be a Western style hat so that the faz was essentially outlawed. And because everyone or every man in that time wore a hat, it was basically a kind of mandatory hat wearing. And the hat that was chosen, the Shapka, was the European style hat because this was a mark of civilization. And the story I tell is of a village near Rise in the northeast Black Sea coast where there was a”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Secularism, modernism, but especially Westernizing, you know, kind of what the West meant to them was really quite something profound. My Baba name, or my dad's mom would always say if they went somewhere nice, this place is so nice. It's not like turkey at all. And so there's a kind of my dad going to Turkey kind of exposed this logic that was like, why rather than imitating the West, why wouldn't you just go there yourself?”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my Turkish family, he grew up, my baba grew up in a very Kamalist, very attatukist family. They kind of really adhered to the Republican values of Turkey and the values of its founder attitude.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. He, um, Know it's put in context 1970s Turkey was a place where there were kind of daily pitched battles between left and right kind of students. It was a place where a treasury in need of seventy cents it was kind of an economy permanently in crisis, a politics that just wasn't working. And then, as I say in the book, there were also much more like personal reasons why he wanted to come to the UK mostly because he once saw an English girl in Istanbul and he thought it was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And he was like, I suppose I should go to the UK then. And they came, my Turkish family kind of a relatively well-off middle class Turkish family. That option was open to him that he could go study abroad.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As for whether he's read the book, he's not a huge reader, but Baba, I think he's read the first chapter and broke down in tears, and that was kind of enough for him. But basically for my dad, if it's not John Lecarre, he won't read it.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I was doing was in a way removing that step between me and Turkey, but also putting down that wall that I mentioned that we were suddenly kind of more exposed to what Turkey was again. And if painful things happen in Turkey, we felt we were more exposed all of a sudden. He's really proud, I think, of actually the journey that I've made with my kind of Turkishness. It takes a lot of pleasure out of it, partly because he really regrets his early relationship with Turkey once he left. And he misses it, as I think a lot of people will recognize. He never, ever would regret, he never ever regrets coming to the UK. Turkey is in a way his home and will always be a part of him. And I think he takes great joy in the fact that I have now a relationship to it that is independent of him.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and he would play Turkish music and the piano every morning and these kind of like mournful songs that I found really really beautiful and when I started to go In a way what it was was me kind of discovering turkey for myself. And whenever we would go, my dad would be the person who would, you know, translate for us and order ten thousand dishes for us and would be this hugely enthusiastic guide through Turkish life.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You couldn't really hear its noise as much as you could if you lived there. He left is like a deeply frustrated man with what 1970s turkey was. And I think how it failed to live up to the ideals that his family had for it. And so for years, for my dad, it was a kind of place to forget and a place to be ashamed of. Kind of on the surface, that was the case. Deep down, he was still like a deeply proud Turk and would take my mum there to kind of early 1980s bodroom where no one would allow her to pay for anything because she was a guest of this country, which is kind of unimaginable now if you know what Bodrum looks like. In 2024. So he wanted to forget it mostly, but it was always this kind of big part of our lives at the same time, and we would go back.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I say in the book my dad left in the late 70s, as millions of Turks did, you know, not just The UK, but to the Netherlands or to Germany, and And I think a lot of people recognize that story, at least the shape of that story. As I wrote in the book, part of what my dad was doing was kind of This war between us and Turkey, so it kind of hurt less.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it would have been when the Moldova won the mayoral elections. So what's that 2019? Is it 10? So around then when things started to move people in Turkey started having different conversations about what was happening and I knew that there were these elections coming up in 2023 and also this of the Turkish Republic that might throw up some interesting questions.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was impossible to ignore what was happening in Turkey, not least because, you know, at one point it was the country that jailed most journalists in the world as a place that I had known and loved but also was kind of professionally a kind of fascinating place to work. And so quite a few years ago now when the politics of Turkey was moving in quite interesting ways, And I thought I had always wanted to go and if I didn't go then I never would so So I moved without much of a plan.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, thanks for having me. So, Turkey's always been a huge part of my life. It's kind of my first memories in Turkey being thrown off a boat in the Aegean Sea when I was like three years old. It's a place I used to go every year and was a kind of big part of our lives, even if we didn't grow up there. But as you said, we had this kind of slightly in-out relationship with it. My dad and my bubba, as I call him. He didn't teach us Turkish much beyond the phrases for ordering food or Abusing football referees. But I'd always been interested, it always been a part of my life and I'd always loved it as much as I'd loved or known anywhere. And then I became a journalist as I grew older.”
2024-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · Why Turkey is a Country of Endless Curiosity, with Sami Kent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT