PAMUK A GREAT WRITER, A WORTHY NOBEL LAUREATE

The Jakarta Post, Indonesia
November 4, 2006 Saturday

Orhan Pamuk deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature; his books make
him a worthy laureate. But it is unfortunate that his success is now
being politicized.

Matt Moore and Karl Ritter wrote in The Jakarta Post (Oct. 13):
"With its selection, the Swedish academy stepped squarely into the
global clash of civilizations, honoring a Western-leaning Muslim
whose country lies on the strategic fault line between east and west
and whose people are increasingly unhappy with Europeans’ reluctance
to accept them as full members in the European Union." Did Moore and
Ritter take the effort to read any of Pamuk’s brilliantly constructed
books? From their article it does not seem so.

Why didn’t they write about the themes and literary qualities of
Pamuk’s books? Now it seems he is being condemned because he is not
Turkish enough (i.e. he is not a good Muslim, not a good Oriental).

Is Orhan Pamuk a European because he admires Dostoyevski? If one reads
a book written by Pamuk one will see that he does not choose between
east or west, between secularism or religion, between modernity or
tradition. Pamuk takes a close look at his surroundings and tries
to make sense of them by constructing a narrative with many layers
and voices.

As Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Review of Books
(Aug. 15, 2004): "Stories, Pamuk has hinted, create the world we
perceive: Instead of ‘I think, therefore I am’, a Pamuk character
might say, ‘I am because I narrate’".

Pamuk wants to show us that our world is not a black-and-white world,
and if we picture it as black and white, not only will it not make
sense to us but it can also become a rather unlivable place.

Pamuk is Dostoyevskian in the sense that he tries to go beyond simple
representations, his narrations are inhabited by subjects like the
honest thief, the tender murderer and the superstitious atheist;
people are never just this or that, they are both and neither.

In response to the bloody situation in Iraq, Pamuk says in an interview
with Alexander Star (The New York Times, Aug. 15, 2004): "In my books
I have always looked for a sort of harmony between the so- called east
and west. In short, what I wrote in my books for years was misquoted,
and used as a sort of apology for what had been done. And what had
been done was a cruel thing." And in response to 9/11 he writes
(The New York Review of Books, Nov. 15, 2001):"I am afraid that
self-satisfied and self-righteous Western nationalism will drive the
rest of the world into defiantly contending that two plus two equals
five, like Dostoyevski’s underground man, when he reacts against the
‘reasonable’ Western world.

"Nothing can fuel support for an ‘Islamist’ who throws nitric acid at
women’s faces so much as the West’s failure to understand the damned
of the world".

Pamuk’s position is subtle, for example his novel Now carries an
epigraph from Dostoyevski’s novel The Brothers Karamazov: "Well,
then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent.

Because the European enlightenment is more important than people."

This quote not only criticizes Turkey’s top-down modernization since
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), it also criticizes the way many
Europeans, for example the Somali-Dutch Ayaan Hirsi Ali, treat Muslims:
Modernization as such is more important than the lives of ordinary
people, but what is liberty without a life? Enlightenment cannot be
enforced, that is illiberal.

Pamuk infuriates Islamists and nationalists alike. Orhan Pamuk is
critical of Islamism, because it stifles freedom of thinking and
expression. Pamuk was also one of the first to speak up against the
Ayatollah Khomeini fatwa which ordered the murder of Salman Rushdie,
who was accused of blasphemy after publishing The Satanic Verses.

Pamuk was also recently one of the co-writers of an open letter to
the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, urging the release of scholar and
public intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo, who is being held for having
contacts with foreigners.

Pamuk is also critical of nationalists and for the same reasons. He
gave an interview to the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger (Feb. 6, 2005)
in which he said that "thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians
were killed". Pamuk is referring to the killings by Ottoman Empire
forces of Armenians during World War I.

Turkey does not deny the deaths, but denies that it was genocide,
i.e. according to a premeditated plan. Pamuk’s reference to 30,000
Kurdish deaths refers to those killed during the past two decades
in the conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists. In
Turkey, debate about this issue is stifled by stringent laws; therefore
Turkish history and identity are frozen.

Turkey should become a full member of the European Union soon, says
Pamuk. This must be possible because Turkey has long been a member
of NATO. It must be possible if the European Union stands for humanism.

But it becomes impossible if Europeans, out of fear of globalization,
deep- freeze an European identity as, for example, Christian.

But once again, Pamuk is no politician, nor is he an activist, he is
foremost a luminous artist. His books enlighten us on the difficulty of
forming an essential identity, to be someone; we are like the countries
we inhabit, i.e. complex and difficult to read. And Pamuk’s novel The
Black Book shows that to make sense of the world and ourselves the
reader has to become a writer. The clash of civilizations is simply
not an interesting narrative, it is far too colorless, and it is
about time to change that record.

Roy Voragen, Bandung The writer teaches philosophy at Parahyangan
Catholic University, Bandung, West Java, and can be contacted at
royvoragen@hotmail.com.