Books: A Week in Books

The Independent – United Kingdom; Sep 16, 2005
BOYD TONKIN

One sign of a mature, argumentative democracy is that it expects its
bright young talents to carp at their own culture. So when Zadie Smith
seems in a US interview to call England a ‘disgusting’ place, nearly
every deadline-chasing rentamouth assumes that she has done so ”
rather than suspect that snide and sleazy New York magazine has
stitched her up. Which it did. Anyway, if the writer had trashed her
own backyard, she would merely have upheld the great tradition of
reverse nationalism among the British intelligentsia that George
Orwell wryly noted 60 years ago. The pundits should be ” patriotically
” proud of that tradition, and pay more heed instead to a country
where an author may face up to three years in jail for the ‘public
denigration’ of national identity.

The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk ” by any standards, a giant of world
literature ” is due to answer that charge in an Istanbul court on 16
December. Prosecutors have deemed that an interview given by the
author of Snow and My Name is Red in Switzerland, in which he said
that ‘30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed’ in Turkey and
that ‘nobody but me dares to talk about it’, contravenes article 301/1
of the Turkish penal code. Under this provision, any such
‘denigration’ of the nation carries an extra punishment (a third more)
if published abroad.

As plenty of eminent voices have already said, the case against Pamuk
is an outrage and an absurdity. It should be dropped at once, as
should a similar, less reported charge against the Armenian-descended
editor, Hrant Dink. If these prosecutions go ahead, they will cast
another long shadow over the accession talks that Turkey begins with
the European Union on 3 October.

At the same time, it would be folly to join the anti-Turkish stampede
that Pamuk’s case seems to have triggered in western Europe. On
Turkey’s hard road to freedom, this may be more blip than
backlash. Almost everything in the state Atatnrk carved out of the
Ottoman wreckage remains up for grabs. A fine new book by the BBC’s
Chris Morris, The New Turkey (Granta, pounds 17.99), gives an expert
and colourful overview of this ferment. By pursuing Pamuk and Dink
now, the secular-nationalist old guard have shown their teeth ” but
liberal forces also have both bark and bite.

Look at the Armenian massacres of 1915, the last and deepest of
national taboos. The Turkish novelist Elif Shafak (whose The Flea
Palace was shortlisted, along with Pamuk’s Snow, for this year’s
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) tells me that Pamuk’s plight ‘has
left Turkey’s open-minded intellectuals in a very difficult
position’. They will defend him to the hilt against the legal
onslaught. Yet his claim to solitary courage in speaking out on the
Armenians has belittled all the silence-breaking work done by many
others.

‘There are journalists, columnists, activists in Turkey who have been
voicing this issue for years now,’ says Shafak, ‘but they are far less
known in the West.’ She points out that ‘1915 is being opened to
discussion in Turkey like never before,’ even to the extent of media
apologies to the Armenians. Then, this May, a conference on Armenian
history that 700 delegates had signed up to attend in Istanbul was
postponed at the last minute after threats from the justice
minister. Next Friday, the delayed congress will go ahead.

Shafak reports that, remarkably, the Turkish foreign minister has
offered to make an opening speech. It seems that the battle between
genuine pluralism and policed debate runs right up to the cabinet
table. Under-informed literati must not take Pamuk’s case ” stupid and
sickening as it is ” as conclusive proof. As Shafak says, ‘We need a
network. Otherwise, when and if we focus so much on individuals,
either to vilify or to glorify them, Turkish democracy does not
benefit’.