THE COLOUR OF BLOOD IS SNOW
Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata
HardNews Magazine, India
Dec 4 2006
The trial of Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Laureate for Literature this year,
was also a trial of his native Turkey, a country unwilling to face
its hoary past
Orhan Pamuk’s trial was, to the larger world, also a trial of the
progressiveness of the entire nation of Turkey. Did Pamuk become a
Nobel Laureate at the expense of exposing his own country’s culture
of silence and oppression, genocidal record and state assault on
constitutional freedom to the whole world?
The most famous author from Turkey and Literature Nobel Laureate for
2006 spoke in February 2005 to the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger about
the Turkish genocide of Armenians. He has met with unmitigated hatred
ever since. His books were burned at a nationalist demonstration in
Bilecik; a district administrator ordered them to be removed from
libraries; and his photo was ripped apart at a rally in Isparta
province. Hurriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper, called Pamuk an
"abject creature". He was initially forced to flee Turkey because of
the hate campaign being waged against him. But, then, there was an
international outcry, with Amnesty International, PEN (the worldwide
association of writers) and a collection of renowned authors (including
Gabriel García Marquez, John Updike, Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie and
Umberto Eco) denouncing Turkey’s actions to curtail Pamuk’s right to
free speech. Pamuk was able to return to his country, possibly because
of this international outcry, as Turkey was afraid muzzling Pamuk would
undermine its chances for becoming a member of the European Union (EU).
Somehow, the trial of Pamuk has become more symbolic than the literary
oeuvre of a man who brought to light the traditionalist core of a
society covered over with a thin layer of ill-seated modernity.
Many commentators have stressed on the politics of the Nobel-Pamuk
being among the first writers to be put on trial for mentioning
the Armenian massacres of 1915, etc. Although Pamuk’s literary
excellence is indubitable, his trial got more attention than what he
does best-writing.
Pamuk’s writings focus on the religiosity and backwardness of
Turkey and its Ottoman roots, mixed with a harking back to lost
Islamic glory. They speak, too, of Ataturk’s legacy-without his elan
and vision-that tries to disown its past of the Kurd and Armenian
massacres, but is keen to be seen as a forward-looking nation-state
built on the remnants of a decadent empire. One gets most of this in
his eight novels, the most notable being My Name Is Red, The Black
Book, The New Life, The White Castle and Istanbul.
In his explosive comments published early last year, Pamuk was
quoted as saying, "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians
were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about
it." This was a not-so-oblique reference to the conflict between the
Ottoman Armenians and the Empire’s armed forces during World War I,
as well as the hostilities ongoing since the mid-1980s between the
Turkish Republic and Kurdish separatists. For his remarks on the
alleged genocide of Kurds and Armenians in Anatolia between 1915 and
1917, he was charged by Turkish state prosecutors with "insulting
Turkishness"-a new offence, which carries a prison sentence of up
to three years as penalty. Pamuk’s trial opened on 16th December,
2005, and was rescheduled for 7th February, 2006-it posed a serious
question about the secular democratic credentials of Turkey pending
its entry into the European Union (EU). In <Snow> and <Istanbul>, too,
Pamuk punched a hole into the fragile nationalist pride by disclosing
Turkey’s hoary past. The lure of gaining access to the EU seemed to
act for him, as the Turkish government did not want to undermine its
human rights record; charges of insulting Turkishness against Pamuk
were dropped over a technicality earlier this year.
Pamuk has touched the raw nerves of the secular right-wing of Turkey.
Not that Turkey disputes the deaths of ethnic Armenians in the
conflicts that saw the Ottoman Empire fall. But it takes care to
stress that the killings were never part of a genocidal campaign,
arguing that many ethnic Turks also lost their lives during that
period. It also repudiates claims that its efforts to contain Kurdish
separatist uprisings can be classed as genocide. No two issues are
more loaded-political or divisive-and using any of them as fuel in
the anti-EU campaign is deemed risible in Turkey.
Apart from its past, Turkey, in more ways than one, is the brand
ambassador of the success of a Western-style secular Muslim state and
is, as such, considered a foil to radical Islam. Pamuk, in his novels,
writes about the crisis of identity that originates from living in a
Westernised fashion in a society that is essentially non-Western in
its ethos. He admits that, following the occidental, secular reforms
introduced by Kemal Ataturk, Turkish culture was divided into two:
the modern culture influenced by Europe and the Ottoman Islamic
heritage. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, all the cultural and
material wealth of the Middle East flew towards Istanbul. Turkey has
a highly-educated secular elite class. The founders of the modern
Republic of Turkey, Pamuk says, "naively" thought that a shortcut to
modernity-to Europe-would be to forget about the past; they crudely
suppressed Ottoman Islamic cultural history. "I write modern, some say
post-modern, avant-garde-inspired novels, which is a Western form, but
they carry that suppressed Ottoman culture, Islamic culture," he says.
Do present-day Turks see themselves as the grieving heirs of what
was once a world empire? In his novel, My Name Is Red, Pamuk paints
a picture of Istanbul the way it was at the height of Ottoman power.
The Ottoman period is, for most Europeans and Americans-and perhaps
for many Turks as well-a poorly-understood time. The Ottoman Turks
were the last of the great Eastern invaders-a group including the Huns,
the Arabs and the Mongols that swept into Europe. The images that have
trickled down are of moustachioed janissaries, pillaging in the name
of Islam, contrasted with the perceived opulent licentiousness of the
harem-images that have become synonymous with Islam in much-popular
thought. A murder mystery and love story, My Name Is Red is set among
the artistic intrigues of the Islamic miniaturists of the Ottoman court
in 16th-century Istanbul. It is a rich and complex work, narrated by
a range of voices that explores the tension between East and West,
Islam and Christianity.
Pamuk, therefore, serves as the much-needed bridge between the West
and the East, between an ancient Islamic culture and the contemporary
dream of an economically prosperous nation. His memoir, Istanbul,
for instance, chronicles the pervasive sadness and anger that attended
the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the wholesale cultural imitation of
the West. Snow is a tryst between tradition and modernity, the East
with the West, and the cultural encounters between Europe and the
turbulent Ottoman Empire, which underlined the European aspiration of
a Muslim nation. At some point in history, Istanbul was the centre
of both Islam and Christianity, and Pamuk’s work is often about the
melting of the two.
Pamuk is looked upon as the West’s mouthpiece in the Islamic world,
which believes that it is this dubious distinction that earned him
the Nobel. In 1989, when the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini was
haunting Rushdie, Pamuk had the guts to rise up in Rushdie’s defence.
To do so, from a Muslim country, called for courage. His refusal to
accept the Turkish government’s award of ‘state artist’, in protest
against its repressive role in the treatment of his fellow writers and
the Kurdish freedom fighters in December 1998, is, again, a comment
on his political conviction.
A purveyor of the theme of clashes between civilisations and the role
of Islam, Pamuk’s works give us an understanding of the origins of
these clashes and the rise of political Islam.
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