Orhan Pamuk

[Joseph]

ORHAN PAMUK: "THE SADDEST THING IS THAT THERE IS NO SPEECH IN TURKEY"

Panorama.am
20:48 15/10/2007

In recent days, at the Harvard University bookstore, a meeting was
organized with Nobel Prize winner, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who is
quite well known to the Armenian community. As relayed by a Panorama.am
journalist in Boston, Pamuk noted the one-year anniversary of receiving
the Nobel Prize by publishing another book, "Other Colors," which is
a collection of essays and stories. The book presentation took place
in the hall of the Harvard church.

Pamuk, who read selections from the book, told the packed house how
he decided on a name for the book.

"It happened that chapters had names like 'White Fortress' and 'My
Name is Red,' and journalists asked me 'what other colors does the
book have?'" So, I decided to name the book 'Other Colors.' This is
more so my journal, a collection of my thoughts and reflections,"
the writer said.

After the readings, a question and answer session took place. Not
surprisingly, due to the recent passage of House Resolution No. 106
by the House committee on foreign relations, questions related to this
issue. To the auditorium full of Turkish students and Boston Armenians,
Pamuk said the following: "The French recognized the Genocide, and
so should the Americans.

But this isn't the final solution. The bad thing is that there is no
free speech in Turkey today. It is prohibited to talk about this in
Turkey today; people are living in fear. The solution of this issue
rests in the ability of people to freely discuss and look into the
question."

We remind that Pamuk, who lives in Europe, was one of the closest
associates of Hrant Dink, and is known in Turkey for his support of
Genocide recognition, as well as his outspokenness about Turkey's
position regarding the Kurds. Pamuk left Turkey earlier this year,
out of fear for his life. This happened after his being accused of
anti-Turkishness, even though he was later acquitted of the charges.

[Joseph]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,2224025,00.html

Between two worlds


Last year's Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has faced criminal charges and even death threats in his native Turkey, yet he refuses to be disillusioned about the country's future

Maya Jaggi
Saturday December 8, 2007
The Guardian

When Orhan Pamuk received his Nobel prize for literature last December, he was praised for making Istanbul "an indispensable literary territory, equal to Dostoevsky's St Petersburg, Joyce's Dublin or Proust's Paris". Yet it was while visiting New York in the 1980s that Pamuk found his voice. Fuelled by a longing for his native city, he had a kind of epiphany and came to a belated "fascination with the wonders of Ottoman, Persian, Arab and Islamic culture".
Article continues

His fiction recovers worlds largely ignored since Atatürk founded the secular republic in 1923 on the ruins of a defeated empire. But the recovery comes with a postmodern twist - Sufi poetry read through the prism of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Although Pamuk sees "the east-west divide" as, certainly for him, an illusion ("I can, without any guilt, wander between the two worlds, and in both I am at home"), it colours his fiction, and shapes his characters' anxieties about tradition and modernity, authenticity and imitation (copies and doubles recur), shame and the seeds of nationalist pride. His novels are "made from these dark materials".
For the past 200 years, he says, "an immense attempt has been made to occidentalise Turkey. I believe in that, but once your culture thinks of itself as weak, and tries to copy another, you sense that the centre is some place else. Being non-western is the feeling that you're at the periphery. History doesn't count where you are. I had that feeling." Yet in his Nobel lecture, "My Father's Suitcase", Pamuk described how that sense altered as he narrated his city. "Now Istanbul is the centre," he says. These ideas animate his first book since winning the Nobel, Other Colours (Faber), translated by Maureen Freely. Shaped as a sequence of autobiographical fragments, with musings on The Thousand and One Nights and Tristram Shandy, barbershops and Bosphorus ferries, its essays elegantly illuminate his life and times.

In August 2005, Pamuk was charged under Article 301 of the penal code with "public denigration of Turkish identity", for saying in a Swiss newspaper interview that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." Though the case was dropped in January 2006, and Turkey's president, Abdullah Gül, has called for Article 301 to be amended, discussion of the massacres of 1915-17 still holds risks. Yet Pamuk is critical of moves abroad to enforce the recognition of what happened as a genocide, as in a French assembly vote last year and the US bill approved in October by a congressional committee, which prompted the recall of Turkey's ambassador to Washington.

"The issue is getting to be part of international politics, which I am upset about," he says. "For me, this is first an issue of freedom of speech in Turkey. We have to be able to talk about this, whatever one's opinion on it. The French resolution only made things harder for the democrats of Turkey. And I don't want to see Turkey's relations with the west destroyed because of the manipulation of this issue by various governmental bodies."

Following threats from an ultra-nationalist accused of organising the murder in January of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink ("Orhan Pamuk, be smart," he said outside court), Pamuk spent an extra semester in New York, but declines to call it exile. "There were death threats from semi-underground organisations," he says. "I'm stubborn - I could have stayed. But I'm a fiction writer. I didn't have peace of mind." He has bodyguards, but sees the worst as over. "People trashed intellectuals as betrayers of the country to get votes and prestige for the army - and it didn't work." In the July elections, "all these conspiracies did not raise the [pro-army, nationalist] secular vote, but made the ruling party (the moderate Islamist AKP, which supports membership of the EU) even stronger".

He is uneasy about his case being wielded against Turkish aspirations to join the EU. When speaking recently at London's South Bank, he was asked from the audience to explain the "paradox" that in the west "we give you prizes while in Turkey they put you on trial". Pamuk objected that not all his compatriots are hostile. His novels are bestsellers at home. He feels himself to be among "a generation of liberal ... open-minded Turks - there are so many of us".

Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952, into an "upper-middle-class westernised family", whose fortune had initially come from building railways. His father was a construction engineer and aspiring poet, given to absconding. Pamuk sees his elder brother Sevket (an economic historian) as his "Freudian father - giving me instruction on how to bow to authority. Now I'm grateful to my father for not being authoritarian." Up until the age of 22, Orhan dreamed of being a painter, and studied architecture, but he dropped out to go to journalism school. At Istanbul University in the 1970s, he had leftwing sympathies and, after the 1980 coup d'état that presaged military rule by the Atatürk-inspired nationalists, agonised that "so many prisoners were being tortured". But his impulse was to "write beautiful fiction, not propaganda".

When in Istanbul, he walks to his office, overlooking the stretch of water between Europe and Asia, from Pamuk Apartments, the modern block his family built in the early 1950s. His first reaction to the Nobel "was to say it would not change my life". But "it did - I'm more social. And I'm working even harder." One benefit of winning the prize, he says, is that "all the family made up": the publication of Pamuk's memoir, Istanbul (2003), temporarily "destroyed my relationship with my mother", Shekure, who opposed his becoming a writer, and also led to a breakdown in relations with Sevket, whose beatings he had described. "Now we're friendly," he says with a boyish grin. And though he has lived alone since his marriage to the historian Aylin Turegen ended in 2001, he says his ex-wife and teenage daughter Ruya "remain my best friends".

His Istanbul, a "city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy", is mostly taken from the 1950s and 60s, he says, "the troubled town that turned inward, that learned from history not to aspire to much. It's the same for my characters; they feel second-rate, secondary to the west." His early, untranslated novels, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982) and The Quiet House (1983), were family sagas, modelled on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Thomas Mann. But he turned to 17th-century Constantinople in The White Castle (1985), a tale of confused identities between a Venetian Christian slave and the Ottoman master who looked like him. Wherever "a non-western culture wants to be occidentalised - or 'globalised' - the question of authenticity arises", Pamuk says. "It's a social inevitability, but you blame yourself; you live it personally." To be a writer "is to acknowledge the secret wounds we carry inside us", sharing our secret shame to "bring about our liberation".

Having attended an American school in Istanbul, he read the Sufi classics "in a secular, metaphysical way. That paved the way to relocating them in contemporary Istanbul's labyrinthine streets." In The Black Book (1990), a "Dadaist collage" of Proustian nostalgia, Islamic allegory and detective fiction, a lawyer searches for his missing wife in the months before the 1980 coup. The murder mystery My Name is Red (1998) takes place in 16th-century Constantinople, as the sultan's court miniaturists are supplanted by post-Renaissance notions of art. Faced with major cultural change, he says, there is a "trauma of being forgotten". He likens it to the arrival of a Xerox machine in a village of prestigious copyists. "The consequences are my subject: the pain, fury, physical attacks on the machine."

A self-avowed "optimistic westerniser who stubbornly resists disillusionment", Pamuk is troubled by what he sees as the costs of westernisation. While tradition is resilient, he says, democracy may be less so. In his most overtly political novel, Snow (2002), set in the town of Kars on Turkey's north-east border with Georgia and Armenia in the 1990s, as civil war rages with secessionist Kurds, militant secularists stage a coup against rising political Islamists. Pamuk set himself the task of identifying with the "Islamists - the devil in Turkey's westernised media. It's taboo, but identifying with someone is not agreeing with them. At the heart of fiction lies a unique human talent to identify with the pain, pleasure, joy, boredom of others. Once you base your art on that, you're political." As he writes in an essay: "The history of the novel is a history of human liberation. By putting ourselves in another's shoes, by using our imagination to shed our identities, we are able to set ourselves free.

"Both the secularists and the political Islamists were upset, but I survive," he shrugs. The novel, he says drily, made him "headscarf professor" for a while, though he insists there is no simple solution. "It's been a problem for 50 years: people wearing conservative dress can't participate in official life, so that created fertile ground for political Islamists and military-backed so-called secularists to fight each other - which they love to do."

For all the conflicts over Turkish identity, Pamuk is convinced that having a "single spirit" would be worse. "The economy is booming and [that's] hard to squeeze into one line of thought. Turkey should develop tolerance - and I think that's what's going to happen." Yet he sees the secular establishment as having "fuelled anti-westernism with nationalist propaganda, forgetting that Atatürk was an arch-occidentalist - it's an obvious contradiction." The Iraq war, which he opposed, has also "made life for liberal, secular democrats in Islamic countries so much tougher".

Pamuk is finishing his eighth novel, Museum of Innocence. Set in the 1970s, it "chronicles Istanbul's bourgeois high society; the problems of living a westernised life, and how much they're embedded in a tradition that is denied - especially in terms of sexual morality". Modern nations, he has said, do their deepest thinking about themselves "through novels". He has readers across the world, but his greatest satisfaction is in being a "devoted writer, surviving and making my books read in my own country. That's the hardest thing."

[Joseph]

Orhan Pamuk to be tried for insulting "Turkishness"

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=94503

Pamuk to face the nation, decides top appeals court

Thursday, January 24, 2008

ISTANBUL – Turkish Daily News

The country's top appeals court decided Tuesday that six people who filed a complaint against novelist Orhan Pamuk had a case because the author had made statements against the whole nation.

Nobel laureate novelist Pamuk, in an interview with a Swiss magazine, had said: “We killed a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds. No one in Turkey has the courage to say this. I do.” Charges were brought against Pamuk for insulting Turkishness based on the controversial Article 301 of the penal code for his statement, but an Istanbul court had dropped the case because of the Interior Ministry's failure to approve of the trial.

Afterward, six people filed a complaint against Pamuk, accusing him of condemning the whole nation with his statements, and demanded compensation.

An Istanbul court had rejected the complaint, arguing that those who lodged the complaint could not represent the entire nation.

The court decision went to the Supreme Court of Appeals, which annulled the court decision. The appeals court said: “The judiciary decides the limits of individual rights that include physical, emotional and social values, occupational pride, honor, freedom, spiritual rights, health and citizenship. When assessed from this angle, citizenship is seen as a right that must be protected and the statement directed at the whole nation gives individuals the right to file such complaints.”

The decision allows every Turkish citizen to file complaints against individuals who make statements they deem insulting to the nation.

[Joseph]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2008/03/talking-about-o.html

Talking about Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul


I'm staying in Istanbul with my American friend Gloria Fisk, a literature professor who is working on a book about the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk and his reception at home and abroad. Last year she explored the ways her college students read the Nobel Prize-winning novelist in an article for n+1 magazine. Here we talk about her perceptions so far:

Q: How has Orhan Pamuk’s work shaped your ideas about Turkey?
Gloria Fisk: I read "The Black Book" years ago, and it created this really vivid image of the city that I always wanted to come visit. I started paying attention to Turkish culture and politics.... [Pamuk's 1994 novel] had these really beautiful images of the city and the characters were really lively. To me it was ... evocative and real. But now I realize that most Turkish readers hate that book and think that that was the beginning of his downfall, and consider readers like me who got sucked into it Orientalist dupes.

Q: In Turkey, Pamuk is not universally adored?
GF: He’s universally hated.

Q: Really?
GF: I’m being a little flip. That’s an exaggeration, but he alienates most Turkish readers, for one reason or another.

Q: Pamuk made people angry by making public comments about the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918, right?
GF: He alienated the ultra-nationalists with that. What didn’t happen was the sort of rallying around him that you might expect from intellectuals and progressives.

Q: Or the secularists?
GF: Definitely not. Many of the most extreme nationalists are also secularists. Because the Turkish republic has secularist foundations, any threat to the nation is perceived as a threat to secularism, too. And any recognition of the Armenian genocide can be understood as a threat to the nation. Pamuk alienated hardline secularists by speaking to a foreign journalist about this shameful event that happened during the formative years of the republic.

Carolyn Kellogg

Q: So when he spoke up about the Armenian genocide, he alienated the extreme nationalists. Why wasn’t there more support from the progressives and intellectuals who’d raised the issue before?
GF: Part of it was that there was a perception that he was grandstanding about it. Part of it is just because he’s a kind of divisive figure. If you talk to 100 people, you’ll hear 100 reasons why they weren’t on his side.

Q: He got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. Did that change things?
GF: There was a really interesting poll in the newspaper Millyet asking people if they were happy that he’d won the prize. It’s Turkey’s first Nobel Prize (not just for literature, for anything at all) – you’d think, in such a nationalistic country, that it would be an occasion for celebration. But only 26% said they were happy; 36% said they weren’t happy. Because it’s perceived as confirmation that the West will give someone a prize if they shame Turkey.

Q: Shame is a strong word.
GF: It’s a pretty strong idea. There’s a perception that the country will literally fall apart if the shameful parts of Turkish history are exposed.

Q: As a Western admirer of Pamuk’s work, has this changed how you read him?
GF: I’m kind of an ambivalent admirer myself. But I find myself rallying to his defense all the time, because he has so few defenders here, and so many attackers.

Q: What Pamuk books would you recommend to people who are interested in Pamuk but aren’t interested in becoming Orientalist dupes?
GF: I don’t necessarily agree with the description of “Orientalist dupes,” although I do see the argument. I would recommend “The Black Book;” it’s kind of a stylized and very place-driven mystery. Also, “Snow,” which I think is his most ambitious and is my favorite. Or “Istanbul,” which is a book of autobiographical essays. I think everyone should visit Istanbul, and they should read "Istanbul” before they come.

Carolyn Kellogg

photo of Istanbul and the Bosphorus at twilight by Carolyn Kellogg

[Joseph]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/from-public-enemy-to-turkeys-national-hero-962731.html

From public enemy to Turkey's national hero


Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was persecuted in Turkey. Now he is a global ambassador for his homeland. Boyd Tonkin meets him

Thursday, 16 October 2008


The route that takes an enemy of the state on to the global stage as a national icon can be as short as the flight from Istanbul to Frankfurt. This week, Turkey is enjoying its status as "country of honour" at the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair. The programme, backed by the government in Ankara, began with an address by a writer who knows that parts of his country's armed forces once plotted to assassinate him. Orhan Pamuk may have won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, but in that year he also survived a prosecution for "insulting Turkish identity", under the infamous but now reformed Article 301 of the penal code, after he spoke abroad about the Armenian massacres of the First World War.


Pamuk's role at the head of the 300 writers and 100 publishers who are showcasing the multi-cultural "colours" of his country's life and arts at the book world's annual marketplace highlights the Turkish paradox: a country where state and government often pull fiercely in opposite directions. Pamuk's swing from ostracised zero to poster-boy hero is another odd outcome of the stand-off between the elected, soft-Islamic government and the "deep state" – with its strongholds in the army and courts.

In recent months, Turkey has been riveted and outraged by revelations from the so-called "Ergenekon" scandal: the latest evidence of the army's chronic itch to meddle in politics and society in order to protect the secular nationalism of the state founded by Ataturk in the ruins of the Ottoman empire. As for the justice system, in July the supreme court avoided by one vote a calamitous decision to ban the ruling AKP party, which has Islamist roots, for violating the constitution. Indeed, six judges out of 11 voted to outlaw a movement that won 47 per cent of the vote and a crushing majority in the 2007 elections – but seven was the majority required.

The Ergenekon exposés and shocks, such as the murder of a Turkish- Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink in 2007, have given Pamuk and other free-thinking writers a local boost after years of being treated as unpatriotic whipping-boys by vindictive courts and their tabloid allies. "I think the bad times are over for me now," Pamuk told me in his flat overlooking the Bosphorus in central Istanbul. When his new novel, The Museum Of Innocence, appeared, he says, "for the first time, the Turkish media gave me a sweet reception". Now, the culture ministry has sanctioned a Frankfurt Book Fair pitch celebrating the diversity of Turkey's cultural heritage – Kurdish, Jewish, Armenian, gypsy and Anatolian Muslim. A committee chaired by the radical publisher Muge Sokmen has shaped the "country of honour" jamboree. For Pamuk, the AKP government's long-held desire to join the EU means it knows it has to put on a pluralist face "in order to be more attractive, to appear more European".

Pamuk, like many of Istanbul's most liberal and cosmopolitan artists, is not as worried as outsiders about how deep the AKP's pluralism really runs. For them, the real threat still lurks among the hard-line secular chauvinists in the army and judiciary who have for decades banned and jailed authors and journalists. Perihan Magden, an outspoken popular columnist, thinks readers see her as a "national xxxxx" as well as a successful novelist.

She also suffered an Article 301 prosecution in 2005 for defending the right of a conscientious objector to refuse military service. "I don't see a fundamentalist threat in my country," she says. "I don't think the AKP has a hidden agenda. They're not hiding in the closet ready to jump out at us." Even if they merely follow the old maxim of "my enemy's enemy is my friend", Turkey's frankest authors clearly distrust behind-the-scenes ultra-secularists more than upfront, vote-chasing Islamic politicians. "I'm not pro-AKP," adds Magden. "I'd never vote for them. But as long as they are democratic, I support them."

Elif Shafak, a best-selling novelist indicted and then cleared in court for the Armenian themes of her novel The Bastard Of Istanbul, recently joined other writers for lunch with Turkey's AKP president, Abdullah Gul. Often treated with suspicion in Europe as a crypto-Islamist, he is controversial at home as well, not least because his wife wears that most emotive of Turkish garments, the headscarf. For Shafak, this dialogue "is symbolic, but in this country, symbols are important". Her writing aims to build cultural bridges and to show the gulf between Muslim and non-religious Turkey may not run as deep as outsiders imagine. In ordinary homes and in the streets, "They manage to co-exist," she says. "I feel that's healthy – but the elite draw the boundaries more clearly. Real life is more fluid."

For Frankfurt organiser Muge Sokmen, whose publishing company Metis is still "harassed" by cases under Article 301 even after its terms were tightened up in April, the fair should at last allow observers to see a hybrid Turkey. Above all, she wants to tell the story of a people more creatively mixed up than foreign headlines ever admit. "The outside world presents Turkey as either black or white. Our colours are never seen". This week, Orhan Pamuk is opening the paintbox.

Dissident Turks: Writers who fell foul of the law

Perihan Magden

A columnist for Rakidal newspaper and Aktuel magazine, Magden, 48, has published poetry and novels, including The Companion, Messenger Boy Murders and Two Girls. In 2006, she was prosecuted but acquitted for defending a conscientious objector who refused military service. Last year, Magden received a suspended sentence for "defaming" a provincial governor.

Elif Shafak

The columnist and writer was born to a diplomatic family in 1971 and has published seven novels, including The Flea Palace and The Bastard Of Istanbul, whose discussion of Turkish-Armenian history provoked a court case in 2006 that led to her acquittal on an Article 301 charge. Her new book is a memoir of surviving post-natal depression.

[bell-the-cat]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...ro-962731.html

If there is ever a world shortage of toilet paper, it's good to know the Independent will always be there to provide a workable substitute. Doesn't matter to them that the life of the average Turrk risks being ground down under the oppression of Islam - as long as a few writers are happy that's OK. If those same writers were to start to criticise Islam, they would really know oppression (for a short time period, until they know death).

[Steph]

If there is ever a world shortage of toilet paper, it's good to know the Independent will always be there to provide a workable substitute. Doesn't matter to them that the life of the average Turrk risks being ground down under the oppression of Islam - as long as a few writers are happy that's OK. If those same writers were to start to criticise Islam, they would really know oppression (for a short time period, until they know death).

It was probably better as a broadsheet then.

[bell-the-cat]

It was probably better as a broadsheet then.

Was the Independent ever a broadsheet?

[Gavur]

If there is ever a world shortage of toilet paper, it's good to know the Independent will always be there to provide a workable substitute. Doesn't matter to them that the life of the average Turrk risks being ground down under the oppression of Islam - as long as a few writers are happy that's OK. If those same writers were to start to criticise Islam, they would really know oppression (for a short time period, until they know death).

Sounds like the same old problem in Turkey;shortage of toilet paper. Does't the award-winning Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk work for The Independent ?

[Steph]

Sounds like the same old problem in Turkey;shortage of toilet paper. Does't the award-winning Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk work for The Independent ?

Indeed he does, although what was originally a quite good left-of-centre newspaper seems to have lost it's way in recent years, excepting a handful of contributors.