Middlesex won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2003 and is one of those books that stayed with me long after I finished. I won't go into details so as not to spoil but I will say I think many here would enjoy it. It's one of those books that has scenes that pops into my mind often and one event in particular - the Burning of Smyrna.

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The STRANGE thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. We'd run the searchlight up and down over them two or three times and they stopped it - Ernest Hemingway - On the Quay at Smyrna

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I've read a lot of history over the years but never knew the story of Smyrna before reading Middlesex. In part, I blame the American educational system for this lack of knowledge. Many in my country prefer it if the US education system focuses on the good parts of our history and ignore everything else. I've done my best to remedy this as I've grown older but we all have our blindspots.

The city of Smyrna was founded in the 10th century BC by Greek colonists who settled across the western edge of Anatolia. It didn't take long for this area to grow rich as it sat on the western edge of Asia, and its natural port attracted trade between east and west. Famous Greek names like Hippocrates, Galen, and Pythagoras grew up in the area and for millennia the area was as Greek as Athens. Of course back then the idea of nation-states or identity wasn't a thing and so over time many powers took Smyrna under its sway - first the Persians, then the Romans, the Byzantines, and finally the Ottomans. And through it all Greek heritage and identity remained.

The nation of Greece as we know it got its start in a war of independence against the Ottomans in 1822. During the five centuries of Ottoman rule, Orthodox Greek and Muslim Turk lived side by side and while intolerance of the other occurred, the fact of the large number of Turks in Athens and Greeks in Istanbul tell of at least a reluctant ability to live with one another. This willingness ebbed once Greece gained its independence. The persecution and deportations started in the lead up to World War One, turning even darker once it started.

The Ottomans were on the losing side of the Great War and the Greeks on the winners. The Allies presented the new Turkish government with a treaty demand that Smyrna and other historically Greek cities of western Anatolia would be made part of Greece. The Turks refused to sign so in the summer of 1919, the Greeks invaded.

The Greek army advanced out of Smyrna and at the beginning did well against the Turkish forces, bolstered by Allied money and the encouragement of their British and the French allies. But Greek atrocities and exhaustion caused by four years of war caused their allies support to wane leaving Greek alone to press their attack. The Turkish forces, weakened by division in the wake of disunity and war, retreated to the central highlands of Anatolia and the city of Ankara. There they reorganized and dug in, bolstered by arms and money from newly minted Soviet Union.

Books have been written on what happened next but Middlesex describes it like this:

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“I told you!” Desdemona cried at the top of her lungs. “I told you all this good luck would be bad! This is how they liberate us? Only the Greeks could be so stupid!”

By the morning after the waltz, you see, Desdemona’s forebodings had been borne out. The Megale Idea had come to an end. The Turks had captured Afyon. The Greek Army, beaten, was fleeing toward the sea. In retreat, it was setting fire to everything in its path. Desdemona and Lefty, in dawn’s light, stood on the mountainside and surveyed the devastation. Black smoke rose for miles across the valley. Every village, every field, every tree was aflame.

“We can’t stay here,” Lefty said. “The Turks will want revenge.”

“Since when did they need a reason?” - Middlesex

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Greeks from all over western Anatolia descended on Smyrna's port with its promised safety of British, French, and American warships. It is estimated that about 300,000 people lived in Smyrna before the war. Of these about half were Greek and another fifth were Armenian. Human nature separated the town into four different sectors - Greek, Armenian, Jewish, and Turk. Now the town swelled with more Greeks. For a time Allied ships picked up refugees and took them to safer shores before the decision was made to end the rescues.

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“Look at those poor wretches. Left to fend for themselves. When word gets out about the Greek commissioner’s leaving, it’s going to be pandemonium.”

“Will we be evacuating refugees, sir?”

“Our orders are to protect British property and citizens.”

“But, surely, sir, if the Turks arrive and there’s a massacre.

“There’s nothing we can do about it, Phillips.” - Middlesex

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The Turks claimed the fire was an act of nature though they made no attempt to put it out. Curiously, this 'natural' fire only affected the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city, razing both to the ground. Estimates of Greek refugees range from 80,000 to 400,000. The reports of death due to the fire vary from 10,000 to 125,000 though I suspect the later is closer to the real number. The Greek men who survived were forcibly deported to work camps in the the Anatolian interior where most died. It doesn't take much imagination to imagine what happened to the women.

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"The flames first registered to Desdemona as lights on the ships’ hulls. Orange brushstrokes flickered above the waterline of the U.S.S. Litchfield and the French steamer Pierre Loti. Then the water brightened, as though a school of phosphorescent fish had entered the harbor.

She sees not one fire but many. There are twenty orange dots on the hill above. And they have an unnatural persistence, these fires. As soon as the fire department puts out one blaze, another erupts somewhere else. They start in hay carts and trash bins; they follow kerosene trails down the center of streets; they turn corners; they enter bashed-in doorways. One fire penetrates Berberian’s bakery, making quick work of the bread racks and pastry carts. It bums through to the living quarters and climbs the front staircase where, halfway up, it meets Charles Berberian himself, who tries to smother it with a blanket. But the fire dodges him and races up into the house. From there it sweeps across an Oriental rug, marches out to the back porch, leaps nimbly up onto a laundry' line, and tightrope-walks across to the house behind. It climbs in the window and pauses, as if shocked by its good fortune: because everything in this house is just made to burn, too— the damask sofa with its long fringe, the mahogany end tables and chintz lampshades. The heat pulls down wallpaper in sheets; and this is happening not only in this apartment but in ten or fifteen others, then twenty or twenty-five, each house setting fire to its neighbor until entire blocks are burning. The smell of things burning that aren’t meant to burn wafts across the city: shoe polish, rat poison, toothpaste, piano strings, hernia trusses, baby cribs, Indian clubs. And hair and skin. By this time, hair and skin. On the quay, Lefty and Desdemona stand up along with everyone else, with people too stunned to react, or still half-asleep, or sick with typhus and cholera, or exhausted beyond caring. And then, suddenly, all the fires on the hillside form one great wall of fire stretching across the city and— it’s inevitable now— start moving down toward them. - Middlesex”

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I am reminded of this scene every time I hear something bad has happened in the world. I think of the young woman in this story -- looking to the fire building in east with the knowledge of all she's lost.

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The worst, he said, were the women with dead babies. You couldn't get the women to give up their dead babies. They'd have babies dead for six days. Wouldn't give them up. Nothing you could do about it. Had to take them away finally - Ernest Hemingway - On the Quay at Smyrna

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Greeks had lived on the land for three thousand years before the Burning of Smyrna and in a flash, nothing remained but the ashes. They left, never to return as the survivors scattered across the world. I can only imagine the pain a person might feel at this moment -- it must be a pain that stays with them the rest of their lives.

One of my ancestors was on the Mayflower when it landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. I remember being proud the first time I learned this, the feeling turning to shame when I delved further and learned the man was the first in the colony to take a Native American as a slave. My genealogy is littered with lines who were among the first to come to the America. It's a weird anomaly that I suspect happened because my ancestors moved to a small town in the Midwest soon after the American Revolution and never left. And small towns don't accept strangers kindly.

It's hard to describe life in a small Midwestern town to someone from the city. Even with everything I know, I still consider it to be an ideal world for a young kid to grow up. Class size is small so you are close to all your schoolmates. Holidays gatherings are spent at the town square. You see everyone you know at church each Sunday. Parents were gone to work from 7AM to 6PM meaning kids ruled the town most of the day. There's a sense of community in small towns I don't think you can find anywhere else.

I later learned the downsides. The smallness means there's always one or two families who own most of the land and run everything. Then there's the fact that everyone knows everyone else's business and conformity to the 'right way of doing things' is expected.

Small towns in America are an idyllic fantasy until you look close. They've always had problems but the movement of factory jobs overseas made everything worse. Instead of commutes into the big cities for good salaries, many found it harder and harder to find decent pay. Meanwhile housing prices increased the cost of living as the suburbanization of America continued. On top of this, the opioid crisis hit them the worst.

These days I feel a palpable anger when I visit my hometown. They know their families built the country and are looking for scapegoats. They don't understand market forces or economics or the fact that our local school system doesn't have a tax base necessary to graduate students truly prepared for the complexities of the modern world. Instead of embracing change, they cling to a belief in family, god, guns, and hatred of the other.

It didn't take me long as a child to realize I was different. My grades didn't show me to be especially smarter than the others but I knew I always saw things in a different way. I was lucky to get out when I did though it took me a long time to figure out the true nature of my differences. Books like Middlesex and sites like BCTS showed me a world I never knew existed:

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“Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp’s feet through the trousers of my legs. On the sidewalk I’ll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school. This continues for a few more steps. Calliope’s hair tickles the back of my throat. I feel her press tentatively on my chest—that old nervous habit of hers—to see if anything is happening there. The sick fluid of adolescent despair that runs through her veins overflows again into mine. - Middlesex”

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One of my first memories is of the US Bi-Centennial. I remember people marching down the streets and everyone waving flags. I remember the bands playing and the fireworks bursting. We were so united. I grew up with a belief in the best of America. Even when I learned we weren't perfect, I trusted men like Martin Luther King who reminded us, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I think of Barack Obama who said:

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To those — to those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

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I remember the hope I felt upon hearing victory speech and while Obama's tenure as president had its ups and downs -- June 26th, 2015 gave us a bit of both. That's the day Obergefell passed, legalizing gay marriage but that wasn't the only event that day. Ten days earlier, a white supremacist had entered a church in South Carolina, killing nine people including a reverend. June 26th was the day of the funeral and Obama had been asked to give the eulogy leading to to one of the most emotional speeches I've ever witnessed. That night, the colors of the LGBT rainbow draped the White House.

I remember at the time wondering if putting 'gay colors' on the nation's capital that Obama had pushed too far. For years, it had become common for every TV show to have a trans or gay character and I got scared because I knew my people. I could sense the the anger growing in their guts and knew it was only a matter of time before they reacted. Little did I know the response had already started. It happened when a man rode down a golden elevator on June 15th, 2015 - two days before the Reverend Pinckney and the other parishioners were killed.

Donald Trump is everything I hate in this world. He's a loud mouthed bigot - a dumb man who thinks he's smart - and a criminal grifter who lies with every breath. He is the perfect leader for those with hate in their hearts but I think the world would have forgiven the United States for electing him once. Doing it a second time after all his sins are plain to see is too much. It has led me to look at my country in a way I never expected as a child. It has made me wonder if leaders with hopeful messages like MLK and Obama were wrong.

Trump's election marks an abandonment of so many - the people of Ukraine - the people of the Middle East - immigrants - the people who look or act different -- and many, many more.

This week I've found myself staring at the horizon in a vain attempt at finding answers and keep thinking of Smyrna. If I squint I can see the dust clouds of the Turkish columns growing ever closer. This is the land of my ancestors but somehow I find myself an alien here with only tears to keep me company as I wait for the flames to begin.