Upon my return home one afternoon I decided to grab a quick sandwich at the newly opened Subway on Green Lanes in Haringey. I noticed a recently added sign on the window that read ‘Halal’. This observation seemed to me to stand for not only religious consideration but cultural and ethnic integration in Today’s Multicultural London. It proved to stand for the Hybrid culture that has evolved in Haringey and other parts of London and the United Kingdom.
Hybridity had become a very commonly used word and metaphor in Cultural Studies. Hybridization is defined as “the ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombine with new forms in new practices” . Cultural Hybridity is a mixture between different cultures that are still apparent in themselves in the sense that the separate cultural forms intermingle and intercept to make new cultural forms. The contemporary cultural formation that will be examined in this essay is that of the Turkish Speaking Population in the London Borough of Haringey.
When considering the Turkish ‘speaking’ population, there are three groups being looked at: the Turkish-Cypriots, The Turks from mainland Turkey and the Kurdish population from mainland Turkey. Reasoning for immigration to the United Kingdom is different for each of these groups as well as the timing that migration took place. The first to arrive to England were the Turkish-Cypriots in the 1950s and 1960s, they are also, in many ways, better established than more recent Turkish speaking arrivals. Cyprus was a British Colony until 1960 and many Turkish-Cypriots came to England to escape ethnic tensions between Turkish and Greek Cypriots, which culminated in the Turkish invasion of the north of the island in 1974, while others came as economic migrants. The Turks came for various political and economic reasons, one being the Military coup on the Turkish Mainland by General Kenan Evren in 1980. The Kurdish population in Turkey are generally the most recent arrivals who have fled oppression and discrimination in Turkey. Most of them arrived in England as refugees. There has been much conflict amongst the Turkish and Kurdish population in Turkey, whereas restraint of the Kurdish language and culture by the Turkish State has resulted in most Turkish Kurds speaking Turkish. There will naturally be different identities amongst these separate but linked groups of people.
It is said that there are now more than 200,000 Turkish-speaking people in the UK, whereas most have settled in London. There are no exact figures as to how many Turkish speakers there are in Britain because their numbers aren’t nationally significant, ‘their communities aren’t classified in the censuses’. A very heavily Turkish-speaking concentration is in Haringey and other parts of North London like Enfield, Waltham Forest, Islington and Hackney. One can see that there are many push and pull factors as to why various Turkish-speaking communities have settled in London, both of economic and political issues that have brought them here.
Diaspora is the term that refers to ‘any people or ethnic population forced or induced to leave their traditional homelands, the dispersal of such people, and the ensuing developments in their culture.’ A Diaspora can be understood as occuring from a mixture of causes or effetcs, such as poverty, insecure land, or overpopulation, which are than combined with a variety of other factors involved in the immigration process. One can feel a Turkish Diaspora in Haringey, where forced migrants or economic migrants in the last four to five decades have established businesses, interconnected support groups and community centres within their communities. Throughout walking down Green Lanes in Haringey one can obviously see the presence of the Turkish community through Turkish Shops, cafes, markets, bakeries, and businesses that all carry the taste of Turkey. Some of the first generation of Turkish Speakers carry a sense of fundamentalism, under the generalized meaning of ‘strong adherence to any set of beliefs’
, where they are deeply rooted in the Turkey that they knew years ago. This follows the ideology of holding on to ones culture, even though they may move to a completely different culture. Thus, they tend to hold on tightly to their national culture in their new country of migration. This can be seen through what products are bought and sold in local shops in Haringey, where most of the products are imported from Turkey. They hold on to this idea of sticking to what they know in the sense of what they will consume in the sense of what is familiar and known. Chambers introduced the idea that the migrant or the diasporic community is central to many modern discussions on the effect of increased globalisation and the impact on human cultures and societies. This, of course, has always been the case and was first developed through the process of colonisation.
