Part 2 - Tatli Jady

Turkey

I am a product of a nomadic childhood. Now, my family didn’t belong to a sect or religion that prevented us from setting roots in any particular place for an extended period of time. Rather, my father worked for an international company that would send our family to different parts of the world for years at a time until we finally settled in Canada. I am a child of what Randolph Bourne coined in the early 20th century as transnationalism. In fact, thinking back to my childhood, by the age of eleven, I lived in four different countries, on two different continents, surrounded by four distinct cultures with by two different religions, and spoke five different languages. Out of this assortment I believe two main ideologies stand out as dominant influences; the Eastern European culture ideology and the Western North American culture ideology. I suppose I am what Adorno would call a by-pseudo-individual.

Tatli Jady

I was born in Prague. However, when I turned six months old our family was transferred to Turkey, and for the next six years we lived at the Czech consulate in Istanbul. On the weekends we often traveled around the country, and during the week, my sister and I attended kinder garden and school respectively at the Russian embassy.

For a great part of the day at school, I took in Russian stories read to us by our teachers that due to the Cold War were often infused with communist propaganda and revolved around the triumph of the poor working class hero over the bourgeois elite. In the afternoons however, I looked forward to watching my favorite cartoon on television, Tatli Jady (Maya The Honey Bee), a popular animated series out of Japan dubbed into Turkish.

Maya was a cute, inquisitive, and adventurous bee that through her friendly demeanor made friends everywhere she went. The moral of her stories taught to respect others, and that if one treats others with kindness, everyone will like and respect them in return. Much like many children my age I soaked in each episode and idealized Maya. Living in a foreign country, where it was often unsafe for non-Turkish kids to play outside for the fear of being kidnapped, I wanted to be free like her, to venture outside and have friends like she did. At one point I insisted that my mother made me a set of black wings out of construction paper, and proudly paraded with them around the consulate taking on the Maya role.



At this stage I consumed the show for strictly my own pleasure and without questioning its message or validity. The fact that the bee was a female character and I was a male did not affect the mimicking of my idol, nor did the fact that she was an animated bee matter to me. The half-hour long animated adventures taught me many positive things such as empathy for others, benevolence, and curiosity that I believe stayed with me well into my adult years.

What allowed these texts to penetrate deeply into my psyche was what Patricia Morrison and Howard Gardner call an “unclear fantasy-reality distinction” (Morrison and Gardner) in children, where for preschoolers and young elementary school children, there is an unclear demarcation between fantasy and reality. “Virtually anything is possible in the imagination of a child in this age range; a sponge can become a rock, bears can talk, and the wind can pick the child up and take him or her away.” (Morrison and Gardner) It is what allows children immerse themselves into media such as cartoons, and to accept their texts at face value.

Aside from the moral values, the cartoon also inadvertently taught me two other important lessons that I utilized throughout my lifetime. The first was the power of the medium of television to teach, as before long I began to speak Turkish. Learning the language allowed me to interact with kids from adjacent buildings. I began to make friends, and under the supervision of the consulate security personal was allowed to play with them behind our building. The second lesson involved culture, and I learned how these media texts are often the glue that binds individuals in a society. Perhaps a positive aspect of standardization and ‘cultural homogeneity’ (Adorno and Horkheimer), as believed by Adorno, was that it helped build bridges across cultures. Being a popular cartoon for my age group at the time, Tatli Jady was often the topic of discussion during play and thus a common ground that existed between me and my newly found friends from a vary different culture. The standardization and syndication of its plot made this union possible. It is maybe this positive association to the medium of television and cartoons that has transpired into my love of animation in my adult years.