The Age, Australia
Oct 14 2006

Fighting words from Turkey’s Nobel author

LAST year – not long after Orhan Pamuk was tried for insulting
Turkishness – an Istanbul newspaper ran an article entitled Who is
Maureen Freely? Their answer was that I was more than just Orhan’s
friend and translator: I was a shadowy master-agent whose sole
purpose in life was to win my client a Nobel prize.

It was part of a much larger hate campaign in the right-wing press,
just one lie among thousands. The campaign was so vicious that I was
sure that – even if it wanted to honour Turkey’s foremost writer –
the Nobel Academy, which shies away from controversy and does not
wish to take instruction from shadowy master-agents, would want to
wash its hands of the whole thing.

So though I’ve often used the N word when writing about Pamuk’s work,
I was probably the most surprised person in the world when the
academy awarded him the 2006 prize for literature. I was just
finishing a fiction seminar at the University of Warwick when he rang
me with the news and I’m afraid I screamed. He was calm and courteous
as I, too, tried to be on a series of radio programs afterwards. But
I am troubled that almost every interview began with the same
question. Did I see this prize as political?

No, I don’t. Orhan Pamuk has been on the world stage for 15 years
now. He is a hugely innovative literary writer whose books owe as
much to the great 19th-century novelists as they do to the modernist
traditions.

His subject is the clash of civilisations, or rather, the strange and
subtle interweavings of contradictory cultures in Turkey past and
present. In his historical novels – The White Castle and My Name is
Red – he presents dark metaphors that illuminate the contradictions
of contemporary life. In his contemporary novels, he pierces the
silences enforced by state ideology to expose the truth about power
and its masters.

But like all important writers in Turkey, he has often been asked to
speak on matters of political principle. He has spoken most
consistently and eloquently on free expression.

For many years, his high profile in the West allowed him more freedom
than most. That ended in February 2005 when he told a Swiss
journalist that though a million Armenians had been killed in the
country of his birth, no one talked about it. The firestorm in the
Turkish press was so fierce that he briefly left the country.

And then there was the lawsuit, which seemed to come at such an
awkward time for Turkey. Here it was, trying to join the EU. But here
it was, prosecuting yet another writer for his words. It wasn’t doing
itself any favours, was it?

The story has moved on – as many as 80 writers, scholars, artists,
and activists have been prosecuted for insulting state, the
judiciary, or Turkishness itself; 45 more cases are set to go to
trial before year’s end.

The ultranationalist lawyers who brought the case against Pamuk hope
to to trample democratic debate. Here they have not (yet) succeeded.
The intelligentsia is putting up a good fight. But it has come at a
cost for those who are known in the West, and especially for Orhan.
His life story eclipsed the stories in his books.

My hope is that this will change now. The Nobel has gone not to the
man and not to his politics but to his words, his characters, and his
ideas. Born into a culture that had (recently) clipped its Eastern
roots, and that was struggling to define itself as Western, he has
(like all of us who grew up in Istanbul) grappled with double
identities all his life. What might have seemed a curse to a young
man is the source from which his imagination feeds.

He has taken both sides of his clashing heritage and made them whole.
Though he is often praised for making Turkey "visible", his greater
achievement is to make the West see what it looks like from the
outside.

Now that he has won the prize of prizes, will he be allowed to shed
his political persona and go back to his desk? It’s too early to
tell. He is still a controversial figure in Turkey. He will, no
doubt, continue to challenge its official history when he thinks it
right to do so, just as he will continue to challenge Islamophobia
and ultranationalism in the West. But now, at last, his books will
come first.

GUARDIAN

Author Maureen Freely was born in the US but grew up in Istanbul. Her
translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow was published in 2004. She is a
senior lecturer in the Warwick writing program in the Department of
English at the University of Warwick.