Novel Mirrors Turkey's Torn Soul

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by M.J. Andersen

Providence Journal , RI
Oct 14 2005

IN ORHAN Pamuk's latest novel, Snow, events foretold in the local
paper have a way of coming true. In life, lately, it seems that
"events" from the novel continue in the real world.

Turkish officials recently charged Pamuk with insulting his country,
a charge that could land him in jail for three years. The author's
offense was to speak candidly about the Turkish slaughter of Armenians
around the time of World War I, and about the more recent slayings
of thousands of Kurds.

"Nobody but me dares to talk about it," Pamuk told a Swiss daily,
which published his remarks last February.

In Snow, outspokenness leads to surveillance, torture, banishment and
worse. The protagonist, Ka, is a Turkish poet exiled to Germany for
activism in his student days. The narrator, a novelist named Orhan,
traces what becomes of Ka after he returns to a provincial Turkish
city as a journalist, to explore reports of suicide among young women.

So much of the novel concerns the political struggle between
Turkey's secularists and Islamists that it almost reads as an act
of contemporary reportage. Pamuk's earlier novels, though equally
obsessed with Turkish identity, are safely set in remote times. With
Snow, the 52-year-old Pamuk addresses the current moment -- an act
of considerable courage.

The situation in Turkey is sensitive. For more than 40 years, Turkey
has been trying to join what is now the European Union. But some among
the 25 member nations have qualms. Turkey stands between Europe and
Asia, its identity an amalgam of secularist, modernizing tendencies,
rural customs, and, increasingly, Islamic fervor.

As part of its long campaign to join the E.U., Turkey has enacted
numerous suggested reforms: it abolished the death penalty, for
instance, and increased civilian control of the army.

Yet, since the September 11 attacks, Europeans have hesitated to
welcome a large Muslim nation (even a democracy) into the club.

Recent votes in France and the Netherlands against a proposed E.U.

constitution revealed misgivings about the E.U. enterprise as a
whole. (One of the E.U.'s functions is to bolster poorer areas with
aid; Turkey, with its large and fast-growing population, could turn
out to be a sponge.)

Nevertheless, last week, despite last-ditch resistance from Austria,
the E.U. agreed to begin talks that could formally end with Turkey's
admission.

The charges against Pamuk thus come at an awkward time. He is accused
under a revised penal code, which permits denigration of the "Turkish
identity" to be held a crime.

Naturally, this is the sort of maneuver that leaves Western champions
of free speech aghast. But more is at stake. For hundreds of years,
Europeans have held talented novelists in special esteem.

Turkey has rarely produced such figures. Yet Pamuk has gradually
established himself as a world-class author. To attack such a writer
for speaking out is not just undemocratic; it is the opposite of
European.

E.U. Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn called the timing of Pamuk's
case "provocative," and expressed concern that prosecutors were
interpreting their penal code in a way that violated the European
Convention of Human Rights -- thereby weakening Turkey's bid for E.U.

membership.

The clash in values symbolized by Turkey's quest to enter the E.U.

mirrors the larger one that afflicts the world. It is not just
a question of Islamic societies versus societies born of the
Enlightenment. It is where precisely to place God in the whole
business.

In Pamuk's novel, snow becomes a metaphor for God. Ka's inspiration
has run dry during his German exile. But during his brief stay in
the city of Kars, where God is a frequent and even urgent topic,
poem after poem comes to him.

Ka stands for the modern, educated reader as he enters the farcical
and ultimately tragic events of the novel. By the end, he embodies
the divided souls of many Turks. Snow's characters want a route out
of poverty and stagnation but without the immorality they associate
with the West.

Throughout Pamuk's work, internal contradictions take the form of
twoness. His fiction is stuffed with twin figures, who continually
blend and collide. Master and slave swap identities. In Snow, believers
fear their own unbelief, and atheists are stalked by the holy spirit.

No wonder Pamuk has landed in the thick of our discord. The same
unresolvable dualities haunt the global stage. One side yearns for
a sacred community; the other fears that God's authority will be
usurped by the power-hungry. The divide is as great in Kansas as it
is in Anatolia.

We have arrived at a historical moment in which tolerance seems beside
the point -- and novels can find no ending. What else is there to
do, then, but delay the aspirations of nations? What else but arrest
the novelists?

M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal's editorial board.

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As others see us

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faces trial next month for referring to his country's massacre of Armenians. He argues that the great European writers have revealed a continent in constant flux, in which modern Turkey has earned its place

Saturday October 29, 2005
The Guardian


The Turkish hero of my novel, Snow, spent the last 15 years of his life in Frankfurt. My hero, Ka, was a Turk and therefore no relation of Kafka's; they are related only in the literary sense. My Ka's real name was Kerim Alaku-o-lu, but he was not very fond of it, preferring the shorter version. He first went to Frankfurt in the 1980s as a political refugee but he was not particularly interested in politics. He was a poet who saw Turkish politics as someone else might see an accident - something he got mixed up in without ever willing it. It was in the hope that I might describe Ka's stay in Frankfurt without making too many mistakes that I went there in 2000. To better imagine the walk Ka made each morning from his home to the city library, I walked through the square in front of the station, down Kaiserstrasse, past the sex shops and the Turkish greengrocers, barbers and kebab restaurants of Münchenerstrasse as far as Clocktower Square. I roamed around the old, poor neighbourhoods where Frankfurt's Turks have made their homes, visiting their mosques, community associations, and coffeehouses.





I did the same thing when I visited Kars, the small city in the northeast of Turkey where most of my novel takes place. Because I knew very little about this city, I visited it many times before using it as my setting; during my stays there I met many people and made many friends; I explored the city street by street and shop by shop. I visited the most remote and forgotten neighbourhoods of this, Turkey's most remote and forgotten city, conversing with the unemployed men who spent their days in coffee houses, without even the hope of ever again finding jobs, conversing, too, with students, the plainclothes and uniformed policemen who followed me wherever I went, and the publishers of the newspaper whose circulation never rose above 250.
I am using this story as a way into the subject that I am coming to understand more clearly with each new day, and which is, in my view, central to the art of the novel: the question of the "other", the "stranger", the "enemy" that resides inside each of our heads, or rather, the question of how to transform it. What drew me to the streets of Frankfurt and Kars was the chance to write of others' lives as if they were my own. It is by doing this sort of research that novelists can begin to test the lines that mark off that "other" and in so doing alter the boundaries of our own identities. Others become "us" and we become "others". Certainly a novel can achieve both feats simultaneously. Even as it relates our own lives as if they were the lives of others, it offers us the chance to describe other people's lives as if they were our own.

The novelist will also know that thinking about this other whom everyone knows and believes to be his opposite will help to liberate him from the confines of his own persona. The history of the novel is the history of human liberation: by putting ourselves in others' shoes, by using our imaginations to free ourselves from our own identities, we are able to set ourselves free. So Defoe's great novel conjures up not just Robinson Crusoe but also his slave, Friday. As powerfully as Don Quixote conjures up a knight who lives in the world of books, it also conjures up his servant Sancho Panza. I enjoy reading Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's most brilliant novel, as a happily married man's attempt to imagine a woman who destroys her unhappy marriage, and then herself. Tolstoy's inspiration was another male novelist who, though he himself never married, found his way into the mind of the discontented Madame Bovary. In the greatest allegorical classic of all time, Moby-xxxx, Melville explores the fears gripping the America of his day - and particularly its fear of alien cultures - through the intermediary of the white whale.

Those of us who come to know the world through books cannot think of the American South without also thinking of the blacks in Faulkner's novels. In the same way, we might feel that a German novelist who wishes to speak to all of Germany, and who fails, explicitly or implicitly, to imagine the country's Turks along with the unease they cause, is somehow lacking. Likewise, a Turkish novelist who fails to imagine the Kurds and other minorities, and who neglects to illuminate the black-spots in his country's unspoken history, will, in my view, produce work that has a hole at its centre.

Contrary to what most people assume, a novelist's politics have nothing to do with the societies, parties and groups to which he might belong - or his dedication to any political cause. A novelist's politics rise from his imagination, from his ability to imagine himself as someone else. This power makes him not just a person who explores the human realities that have never been voiced before - it makes him the spokesman for those who cannot speak for themselves, whose anger is never heard, and whose words are suppressed. A novelist may (like me) have no real reason to take an interest in politics as a young man, or if he does, his motives may end up mattering very little. Today we do not read the greatest political novel of all time, Dostoevsky's The Devils, as the author originally intended - as a polemic attacking Russian westernisers and nihilists; we read it instead as a novel that reflects the Russia of its day, that reveals to us the great secret locked inside the Slavic soul. This is a secret that only a novel can explore. Obviously, we cannot hope to come to grips with themes this deep merely by reading newspapers and magazines, or by watching television. To understand what is unique about the histories of other nations and other peoples, to share in unique lives that trouble and shake us, terrifying us with their depths, and shocking us with their simplicity - these are truths we can glean only from the careful, patient reading of great novels.

Let me add that when Dostoevsky's devils begin to whisper into the reader's ear, telling him of a secret rooted in history, a secret born of pride and defeat, shame and anger, they are illuminating the shadows of Dostoevsky's history, too. Behind this recognition is a despairing writer who loves the west and despises it in equal measure, a man who cannot quite see himself as a westerner but is dazzled by the brilliance of western civilisation, who feels himself caught between the two worlds.

Here we come to the east-west question. Journalists are exceedingly fond of the term, but when I see the connotations it carries in some parts of the western press, I'm inclined to think it would be best not to speak of the east-west question at all. Because what it means most of the time is that the poor countries of the east should bow to everything the west and the US might happen to offer them. There is also a strong suggestion that the culture, the way of life, and the politics of places like the one where I was raised provoke tiresome questions, and an expectation that writers like me exist to offer solutions to the same tiresome questions.

But of course there is an east-west question, and it is not simply a malicious term invented and imposed by the west. The east-west question is about wealth and poverty, and about peace. In the 19th century, when the Ottoman empire began to feel itself overshadowed by an ever more dynamic west, suffering repeated defeats at the hands of European armies and seeing its own power slowly wane, there emerged a group of men who called themselves the Young Turks; like the elites that would follow in later generations, not excluding the last Ottoman sultans, they were dazzled by the superiority of the west, so they embarked on a programme of westernising reforms. The same logic lies at the heart of the modern Turkish republic and Kemal Atatürk's westernising reforms. Behind this same logic lies the conviction that Turkey's weakness and poverty stem from its traditions, its old culture, and the various ways it has organised religion. Coming as I do from a middle-class, westernised Istanbul family, I must admit that I, too, sometimes succumb to this belief, which is, though well-intended, a narrow and even simple-minded way of seeing things.

Westernisers dream of transforming and enriching their country and their culture by imitating the west. Because their ultimate aim is to create a country that is richer, happier, and more powerful, they can also be nativist, and - say what you will - powerfully nationalistic: certainly we can see these tendencies in the Young Turks and the westernisers of the young Turkish Republic. But as westward-looking movements, they remain deeply critical of certain basic characteristics of their country and culture: though they might not do so in the same spirit and the same style as western observers, they, too, see their culture as defective, sometimes even worthless. This gives rise to another very deep and confused emotion - shame - and I see shame reflected in some responses to my novels and to my own perceived relations with the west. When we in Turkey discuss the east-west question, when we talk of the tensions between tradition and modernity (which, to my mind, is what the east-west question is really all about), or when we prevaricate over our country's relations with Europe, the question of shame is always lurking between the lines.

When I try to understand this shame, I always try to link it with its opposite, pride. As we all know: wherever there is too much pride, and whenever people act too proudly, there is the shadow of the other's shame and humiliation. Wherever there is someone who feels deeply humiliated, we can expect to see a proud nationalism rising to the surface.

My novels are made from these dark materials, from this shame, this pride, this anger and this sense of defeat. Because I come from a nation that is knocking on Europe's door, I am only too aware of how easily these fragile emotions can, from time to time, take flame and rage unchecked.

What I am trying to do here is to speak of this shame as a whispered secret, as I first heard it in Dostoevsky's novels. For it is by sharing our secret shames that we bring about our liberation: this is what the art of the novel has taught me. It is by reading novels, stories and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled and hidden by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are.

We have all known the joy of reading novels: we have all known the thrill of going down the path that leads into someone else's world, and engaging with that world, and longing to change it, as we engross ourselves in the hero's culture, in his relationship with the objects that make up his world, in the words the author uses, in the decisions he makes and the things he notices as the story unfolds.

When we retire to a corner, when we lie down on a bed, when we stretch out on a divan with a novel in our hands, our imaginations travel back and forth between the world in that novel and the world in which we live. This novel in our hands might take us to another world we have never visited, never seen, and never known. Or it might take us into the hidden depths of a character who seems on the surface to resemble those we know best. Sometimes I try to conjure up, one by one, a multitude of readers hidden away in corners and nestled in their armchairs; I try also to imagine the geography of their everyday lives. Then, before my eyes, thousands, tens of thousands of readers will take shape, stretching far and wide across the streets of the city, and as they read, they dream the author's dreams, and imagine his heroes into being, and see his world. So now these readers, like the author himself, are trying to imagine the other; they, too, are putting themselves in another's place.

These are the times when we feel humility, compassion, tolerance, pity and love stirring in our hearts: for great literature speaks not to our powers of judgment, but to our ability to put ourselves in someone else's place. Modern societies, tribes and nations do their deepest thinking about themselves through reading novels; through reading novels, they are able to argue about who they are; so even if we have picked up a novel hoping only to divert ourselves, and relax, and escape the boredom of everyday life, we begin, without realising, to conjure up the collectivity, the nation, the society to which we belong.

This is also why novels give voice not just to a nation's pride and joy, but also to its anger, its vulnerabilities, and its shame. It is because they remind readers of their shame, their pride, and their tenuous place in the world that novelists still arouse such anger, and what a shame it is that we still see outbursts of intolerance - that we still see books burned, and novelists prosecuted.

I grew up in a house where everyone read novels. My father had a large library and when I was a child he would discuss the great novelists I mentioned earlier - Kafka, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy - the way other fathers discussed famous generals and saints. From an early age, these novelists were linked in my mind with the idea of Europe. But this is not just because I came from an Istanbul family that believed fervently in westernisation, and therefore longed, in its innocence, to believe itself and its country far more western than they really were ... it was also because the the novel was one of the greatest artistic achievements to come out of Europe.

The novel, like orchestral music and post-Renaissance painting, is in my opinion one of the cornerstones of European civilisation; it is what makes Europe what it is, the means by which Europe has created and made visible its nature.

I cannot think of Europe without novels. I am speaking now of the novel as a way of thinking, understanding and imagining, and also as a way of imagining oneself as someone else. In other parts of the world, children and young people first meet Europe in depth with their first ventures into novels: I was one of them. To pick up a novel and step inside Europe's borders, to enter a new continent, a new culture, a new civilisation - to learn, in the course of these explorations, to express oneself with new desire and new inspiration, and to believe, as a consequence, that one was part of Europe - this is how I remember feeling. Just to read a novel is to prove that Europe's borders, histories, and national distinctions are in constant flux. The old Europe described in the French, Russian and German novels in my father's library is, like the postwar Europe of my own childhood and the Europe of today, a place that is forever changing, and so, too, is our understanding of what Europe means.

However, I have one vision of Europe that is constant. Let me begin by saying that Europe is a very delicate, very sensitive question for a Turk. Here we are, knocking on your door, and asking to come in, full of high hopes and good intentions, but also feeling rather anxious and fearing rejection. I feel such things as keenly as other Turks, and what we all feel is very much akin to the "silent shame" I was describing earlier. As Turkey knocks on Europe's door, as we wait and wait and Europe makes us promises, and then forgets us, only to raise the bar - and as Europe examines the full implications of Turkey's bid to become a full member, we've seen a lamentable hardening of anti-Turkish sentiment in certain parts of Europe, at least among some politicians. In the recent German elections, when certain politicians took a political line against Turks and Turkey, I found their style just as dangerous as the political style adopted by certain politicians in my own country. It is one thing to criticise the deficiencies of the Turkish state vis à vis democracy, or to find fault with its economy; it is quite another to denigrate all of Turkish culture, or those of Turkish descent in Germany whose lives are among the most difficult and impoverished in the country. As for Turks in Turkey - when they hear themselves judged so cruelly, they are reminded yet again that they are knocking on a door and waiting to be let in, and of course they feel unwelcome.

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The most cruel irony of all is that the fanning of nationalist anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe has provoked the coarsest nationalist backlash inside Turkey. Those who believe in the European Union must see at once that the real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism. Either we have peace, or we have nationalism. I think that the ideal of peace sits at the heart of the European Union and I believe that the chance of peace that Turkey has offered Europe will not, in the end, be spurned.

We've arrived at a point where we must choose between the power of a novelist's imagination and the sort of nationalism that condones burning his books. Over the past few years, I have spoken a great deal about Turkey and its EU bid, and often I've been met with grimaces and suspicious questions. So let me answer them here and now. The most important thing that Turkey and the Turkish people have to offer Europe and Germany is, without a doubt, peace; it is the security and strength that will come from a Muslim country's desire to join Europe, and this peaceful desire's ratification. The great novelists I read as a child and a young man did not define Europe by its Christian faith but by its individuals. It was because they described Europe through heroes who were struggling to free themselves, express their creativity and make their dreams come true, that their novels spoke to my heart. Europe has gained the respect of the non-western world for the ideals it has done so much to nurture: liberty, equality and fraternity. If Europe's soul is enlightenment, equality and democracy, if it is to be a union predicated on peace, then Turkey has a place in it. A Europe defining itself on narrow Christian terms will, like a Turkey that tries to derive its strength only from its religion, be an inward-looking place divorced from reality, and more bound to the past than to the future.

Having grown up in a westernised secular family in the European part of Istanbul, it is not at all difficult for me - or people like me - to believe in the European Union. Don't forget, since childhood, my football team, Fenerbahçe, has been playing in the European Cup. There are millions of Turks like me, who believe heart and soul in the European Union. But what is more important is that most of today's conservative and Muslim Turks, and their political representatives, want to see Turkey in the European Union, helping to plan Europe's future, dreaming it into being and helping to build it.

Coming as it does after centuries of war and conflict, this gesture of friendship cannot be taken lightly, and to reject it outright would be cause for huge regret. Just as I cannot imagine a Turkey without a European prospect, I cannot believe in a Europe without a Turkish prospect. Between the ages of seven and 22, my dream was to become an artist, and so I would go out into the streets of Istanbul to paint city views. I now think that I wanted the same thing from painting as I did from writing: what drew me to art and literature was to leave behind this boring, dreary, hope-shattering world we all know so well, and to escape into a second world that was deeper, richer and more diverse. To achieve this other magic realm, whether I expressed myself in lines and colours as I did in my early life, or in words, I've had to spend long hours by myself in a room every day, imagining every nuance. But the consoling world I have been constructing for 30 years is most certainly made from the same materials as the world we all know - from what I've been able to see of the streets and interiors of Istanbul, Kars and Frankfurt.

Since my novel Snow was published, every time I've set foot in the streets of Frankfurt I've felt the ghost of Ka, the hero with whom I have more than a little in common, and I feel as if I am truly seeing the city as I have come to understand it, as if I have somehow touched its heart. Mallarmé spoke the truth when he said that "everything in the world exists to be put into a book". The book best equipped to absorb everything in the world - without doubt - is the novel. The imagination - the ability to convey meaning to others - is humanity's greatest power, and for many centuries it has found its truest voice in novels.

· This article is adapted from a speech given by Orhan Pamuk in Frankfurt last weekend, upon accepting the 2005 Friedenspreis, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade

· Translated by Maureen Freely