{"id":107521,"date":"2017-02-07T14:00:44","date_gmt":"2017-02-07T19:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107521"},"modified":"2017-02-07T14:03:19","modified_gmt":"2017-02-07T19:03:19","slug":"the-alley-cats-of-istanbul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/07\/the-alley-cats-of-istanbul\/","title":{"rendered":"The Alley Cats of Istanbul"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Still from Kedi<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

If you love something, you let it go. Cat people understand this intuitively. You never quite possess a cat, and the sooner you acknowledge that, the better. Cats will chase the tinfoil ball, if they are in the mood, but they will almost certainly not bring it back. We forgive them for this because there is no other option.<\/p>\n

I have no trouble linking cats to the divine. Chris Marker\u2019s transcendent short film of a sleeping cat<\/a> is nothing if not an image of Nirvana, pure being, whatever you want to call it. The look in a cat\u2019s eye guides us toward an idea of freedom, as Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss suggested. Having spent a lifetime studying the structures of ancient societies, the French anthropologist understood well the prison cell into which technological man had locked himself. Only at rare moments, L\u00e9vi-Strauss posits near the end of Tristes Tropiques<\/em>, do we see beyond this cell. One of those is \u201cin the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

To watch films of cats (or even merely videos of them) may not carry the same \u201cserenity\u201d as an exchanged glance\u2014and yet it can be, I propose, a road to a better place. Don\u2019t believe me? Go see Kedi<\/em><\/a>, opening February 10 in New York. Directed by Ceyda Torun, an LA-based filmmaker who grew up in Istanbul, it\u2019s a feature-length documentary that profiles, if that\u2019s the right word, seven alley cats in Istanbul. Why Istanbul? Hundreds of thousands of cats roam its streets, a feral run in the stocking fabric of the age-old Turkish metropolis. The cats are said to have arrived centuries ago, as rat catchers on European boats. But the Ottoman sewers gave them plenty of vermin to feast on, too, and since that time they\u2019ve been a fixture, especially in the cat-obsessed neighborhood of Cihangir, where much of Kedi<\/em> takes place. Stray cats are as everyday a phenomenon for some Istanbullus as rats are for New Yorkers. Unlike New York\u2019s rats, though, they have featured positively in state visits. I\u2019m referring to an incident (confirmed by the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>) in which President Obama, strolling through the Hagia Sophia with President Erdogan eight years ago, stopped to stroke one of the feline inhabitants of the world-famous mosque.<\/p>\n

Whether the alley cats of Istanbul will be around much longer is apparently an open question. Torun, the director, has noted in an interview<\/a> that they now make do with far less green space than they enjoyed during her seventies childhood, and the film refers several times, albeit vaguely, to the threat of mass cat removal. And yet government proposals to relocate the city\u2019s strays to specially designated \u201chabitat parks\u201d have met with spirited resistance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from Kedi<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Modernizers no doubt see free-roaming cats as the sort of backward quirk standing in the way of EU membership. But to their supporters, the cats are objects of fierce affection.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe love of animals is a different kind of love,\u201d as one devotee in Kedi<\/em> puts it. And the love of an animal that is not a pet\u2014that sleeps elsewhere and comes and goes of its own accord\u2014is different, too. To be sure, the charmed observers in Kedi<\/em> project personality traits onto the cats, as people always have. One woman explains that her favorite stray cat is an image of classic femininity, the type you see in movies. Erotic notes creep in, too: another woman has a regular feline caller who\u2019s a rough, alpha type. Of all the toms who come to the glass door to her terrace, he\u2019s the only one who sits in profile; he\u2019s more persistent than the others, she notes approvingly, and sometimes, he spends the night. A man introduces us to a female cat whose nickname is Psychopath. We see her hunched in attack mode, making ungodly noises to keep rivals at bay. Even so, you do wonder if this caf\u00e9 regular has simply chosen to view her, rather ungenerously, as the archetypal crazy female. But he watches Psychopath bully her male companions with pure delight. \u201cShe does what she wants,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s very important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from Kedi<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Unowned cats present themselves most openly when they want to be fed. They don\u2019t treat it as begging, really. It\u2019s the price of admission to the cat show. This failure to genuflect, even if it\u2019s a matter mostly of appearances, is essential. \u201cDogs think people are gods, but cats don\u2019t,\u201d a wise cat person declares in voice-over. \u201cThey know better.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his seminal essay \u201cWhy Look At Animals?<\/a>,\u201d the late John Berger examines how in earlier eras, in rural places in particular, the \u201cparallel lives\u201d of animals suggested answers to essential questions: Where do we come from? Which character traits do we value? He compared this intimate, intertwined relationship with its successor, which arrived with the industrial age. Animals, he wrote, had been \u201cemptied of experience and secrets.\u201d They exist now not as parallel lives at all, but as subjects, mirrors, and resources. There\u2019s a desperation behind our micromanaged treatment of pets and livestock; it\u2019s maybe the ultimate indicator of our loneliness as a species. Even beloved pets are \u201cpart of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit,\u201d Berger wrote, and as such inevitably become \u201ccreatures of their owner\u2019s way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Kedi<\/em>, this nostalgia for animal autonomy dovetails with vague longings for old Istanbul. Both seem a little wilder and more graceful than the present. One cat in the film arrives every day at a fancy sandwich shop for a meal of Emmental cheese and smoked turkey. He never comes in; he\u2019s too polite for that. But he\u2019ll make his desires known by pawing furiously at the window, as though treading water to save his life. The employees are supremely charmed by this. \u201cBeneath that aristocratic appearance there is still a street kid,\u201d one of them observes.<\/p>\n

A twenty-first-century city planner no doubt prefers a cat with its papers in order and a predictable roof over its head. The cats that make a home of the streets, squeezing through holes in the walls and huddling under caf\u00e9 tables, introduce an anxiously chaotic element into the urban space. They mate, defecate, and sometimes kill one another as they please.<\/p>\n

Twelve years ago, I lived for a year in Athens, Greece, where the downtown was full of stray dogs. I never felt any real inclination to watch them. Stray cats are hardly the same thing. Their presence, I would argue, is more civilizing than the alternative. They go as low as they need to for survival\u2014that\u2019s the street kid in them. But they have the other persona, too, and they scamper up trees and awnings and inhabit eaves and terra-cotta rooftops in a way that no other terrestrial creature does. A man in the film compares them to the superheroes he loved as a kid: the nine lives, the air of assuredness, the agility. \u201cIf only we could land on all fours,\u201d he laments. \u201cWe land on two, and they snap like twigs.\u201d The cats have adapted to the vertical orientation of the city in a way that the brittle humans who built it haven\u2019t. Istanbul is lucky to be able to watch and admire them, for however long as they agree to keep letting them go.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from Kedi<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Darrell Hartman is editor and cofounder of the website<\/em> Jungles in Paris. His writing has appeared in<\/em> Granta,<\/em> Guernica, and\u00a0the<\/em> Wall Street Journal, among others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Ceyda Torun\u2019s \u201cKedi,\u201d Istanbul\u2019s vast stray-cat population becomes a prism through which to glimpse the hopes and dreams of the city at 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