OPINION — On the eve of our most American holiday, let me wish all a hearty appetite as they carve their Roman chicken, Ethiopian rooster, chick of India, peacock, India, peru, or turkey.
Sitting down to Thanksgiving Day, I’ll offer gratitude for the privilege to have seen the world as it is—and learn a few of its languages. Over decades at CIA and abroad, I experienced peoples envious of our last Thursday in November but concerned we may be squandering the bounty and ideals we are celebrating this day. So, before my first bite, allow me to reflect on our favorite flightless bird’s international migration.
Overseas, both local friends and foreign foes accepted our Thanksgiving invitations. Most were anthropologically curious about this tradition, some were undoubtedly working (if you know what I mean), and a few were aware of Native American and Pilgrim lore. Others had seen Hollywood movies, Macy’s parade floats, and Butterball and football commercialization. Guests were evenly split on the acquired tastes of cranberry sauce, stuffing, and family recipe side dishes and desserts.
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Those around our table appreciated the importance of the holiday to Americans of all feathers, communally offering thanks for the bounty found in the “New World.” They in fact, wished aloud that their own lands had similar holidays, where their indigenous people, immigrants, and fellow citizens of differing faith and ethnicity shared grace.
The Wampanoag and European colonists shared that first neyhom (turkey) some 400 years ago, in what is today Plymouth, MA. A couple hundred years later, Benjamin Franklin (who would have made a great case officer) characterized the turkey as “a true original Native of America…a Bird of Courage.” Though apocryphal that he nominated it as our national bird, he did write that the turkey is “much more respectable” than the bald eagle, “a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly… [H]e is too lazy to fish for himself.”
As colonists in North America began monetizing the native game bird, British subjects back home dubbed it the turkey cock (Turkey-coq), as wholesale exports of the product traveled via the Ottoman Empire, whose founder was a Turkoman. Our English-speaking forerunners later shortened it to turkey.
The French named it the chick of India (poule de l’Inde) and later shortened it to dinde. They either shared a knack for bad geography with their cousins across the Channel or wrongly assumed the exotic bird had to come from the east. Our Dutch ancestors flew in the same direction, calling it the Calcutta hen (kalkoen). Headed in the wrong direction, former French and Dutch colonies and trading partners in the Far East still refer to the bird as a French hen or Dutch hen.
Spanish conquistadors also encountered the peacock (pavo), as they christened it, linking the bird to the symbol of Persia. The seafaring Portugese were geographically closer than their colonial rivals, labeling it a peru, as they found a close cousin to our turkey in the landmass that is now home to Peru. Latin Americans, though, regionally have continued to use terms derived from mesoamerican languages; e.g., guajolote and chimpipe.
Middle Easterners, too, seemed to have assumed the gobbler originated from somewhere east of their poultry butchers. Depending on the region, the turkey could be known as an Ethiopian rooster (dik habashi), perhaps out of confusion with the guinea fowl of West Africa; or, in a reference to the edge of the Byzantine Empire, a Roman chicken (dijaj rumi). Thankfully, Palestinians and Israelis agreed on one thing, calling the turkey a rooster of India (tarnegol hodu in Hebrew and dik hindi in local Arabic).
Sorry to say, but the Russians may have demonstrated solid geo-historical knowledge for once, calling it the Native American (indeyka). But Russophiles might say this word stemmed from confusion set off by Christopher Columbus’ lack of a global positioning system and the misnamed West Indies. A Chinese invitee once explained that his compatriots simply use a transliterated form of the word turkey, making me cluck about age-old intellectual property rights violation. And, perhaps appropriately, Iranians went with the Farsi word for chameleon (buqalamun).
Finally, Ottoman Turks themselves opted for the Indian (hindi), which modern-day Turks continue to use. Fun fact, in a nod to the colors on its flag, modern Turkey designated the redwing (kizil adrickusu), as its national bird.
The scientific nomenclature of the bird, Meleagris gallopavo, is also a real etymological turkey. Greek goddess Artemis turned the sisters of an enemy, Meleager, into guinea fowl (meleagris). And in 1758, Carl Linneaus, a Swedish naturalist, stuffed in the Latin terms for rooster (gallo) and peacock (pavo) when classifying the turkey.
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Though unable to migrate under its own speed, the ground bird’s peregrinations taught me a few lessons:
First, practice what we preach. In his 1863 proclamation establishing a day of Thanksgiving, President Abraham Lincoln exhorted us “to heal the wounds of the nation….” Like the 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg he was memorializing, we all came from somewhere else, endured economic hardship, tyranny, slavery, and natural and man-made deprivations, but must strive for “full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”
Words matter. Ironically, our Turkish friends hatched an apt saying, which no good intelligence office should refute: “One who only speaks one language is one person, but one who speaks two languages is two people.” We need to make learning foreign languages great again, as Google Translate can’t host a Thanksgiving dinner in Arabic, Turkish, French, etc., nor experience the world as it is.
Globalization. Look no further than the globetrotting turkey. Though perhaps a bit scrawnier, the North American bird was available in the three continents on which I served. More importantly, the symbolism of our Thanksgiving centerpiece — our common purpose and gratitude – transcended borders. Let’s not allow fissures in our Union to squander this soft power – the turkey’s real meaning.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
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