Migration from Village to City
The migration to the city of people who lived in villages and small towns is another strange human story that deserves to be examined.
It was a place where everyone knew one another. These were people who had built a shared culture, taken on common troubles, and learned to share both sorrow and joy. A funeral belonged to the whole village. No one needed an invitation to attend a wedding. Loneliness was something without a name, because often a person could not even be alone.
But it was no paradise. There was scarcity. There were blood feuds. There was the burden borne by those who had no land. A woman’s voice often did not reach beyond the walls of her home. A sick child was taken not to a doctor but to a folk healer. It was not that these people experienced no upheaval; the upheaval had no name. Pain was dissolved in solidarity. But to dissolve pain is not the same as to heal it.
Then the land ceased to be enough. As inheritance was divided, the fields grew smaller. The machine arrived and began doing alone the work of ten people. Roads grew longer, cities drew closer. Industry gathered in a handful of cities, and a single piece of news came from them: there was work. Some left because they were hungry. Some left to educate their children. Some did not leave — they were forced to migrate.
At the Edge of the City
The city was not ready to receive these people. Nor were these people ready for the city. The city did not take them to its heart; it pushed them to its margins. A thin yet impassable line was drawn between those at its heart and those left at its edges. The newcomers became the city’s stepchildren.
They lost the closeness of the village, its shared joy and shared sorrow. In their place, they took on the anxieties of the city. There was no self-sufficiency in this whirlpool; bread now came not from the soil but from the payroll and the bills. It was there that anxiety about tomorrow rose powerfully. That uprising brought these people face to face, for the first time, with the names of the psychological upheavals they were living through.
Women carried most of the burden. The man went to work; the woman was left alone with the home, the children, and a language she did not understand. Labour that had been visible in the village courtyard became invisible in the apartment. No one called it work. Yet without that work, no household could stand.
No bridge was built between city dwellers who seemed to possess everything and people who had nothing yet wanted everything. Where no bridge was built, a misty tension formed. The newcomers felt they belonged neither to the village nor to the city. They were left suspended between two worlds.
Generations Between Two Worlds
The second generation of these people emerged as a new version of that suspended culture. A strange culture was born from the mingling of village and city. This generation started life at minus ten; its peer in the city’s heart started at plus ten. Yet they wanted the same life. To reach it, some worked very hard, some sought the winding paths of the law, some became involved in illegal work, and some remained rooted to the spot. Ghettos formed. Those who escaped the ghetto, those condemned to it, and the in-between neighbourhoods where the two mingled.
In time, these guests began to dominate the city’s demographic structure. The city’s old owners either built neighbourhoods closed in upon themselves or withdrew beyond the city into new living spaces enclosed by walls. Thus some cities turned into enormous villages.
The story did not end there. The city began to grind these people down, and they began to call the city to account. And not only to call it to account: they also worked in its bakeries, set up its stalls, changed its music, and entered its kitchens. There was exchange, and there was hostility. Yet people who had once been close could no longer make it to one another’s funerals and weddings. Shared sorrow and shared joy scattered. Families grew smaller, broke apart, and became lonely.
Then came the third generation. As this generation took its place in the city’s economy, art, positions, and offices, the city changed. A sound known as arabesk emerged. To dismiss it as degeneration is the easy way out. Arabesk was the language of the state of suspension itself: a form that resembled neither the village folk song nor fitted within the city symphony, but filled the gap between the two. Like everything that is belittled, it was born first in the street and then became the voice of the whole country.
And so the city ceased to be the city it once was, and the village ceased to be the village it once was.
The Return to a Changed Village
The fourth generation looked back. It longed for a village where it had never been born. This longing rested less on memory than on what had been told: the courtyard described by a grandfather, the well water never tasted. Technology and transport made this longing possible. Those who could fit their work into a computer could now move their home to a village as well. The road grew shorter, the internet reached the village, the vessels were joined, and the water rose to the same level on both sides.
But the returnees did not find the village of the stories. Land prices rose with the returnees’ demand; young people who had remained could no longer afford a home in their own village. Some villages came to consist of restored stone houses, weekend visitors, and shutters that stayed closed. The returnee thought they were buying village life; those who had remained saw their own life turned into a stage set. The two sides met on the same street and did not recognise one another.
Longing for the village has now replaced longing for the city. But neither the village that is longed for nor the city that was fled stands still.
Today, the village is no longer the old village, nor the city the old city. A new order, a new age, and a strange understanding of life prevail.