TURKEY’S MOST FAMOUS WRITER EVOKES HIS COUNTRY’S SCHIZOPHRENIC PAST AND ITS STRUGGLE WITH ISLAM’S PLACE IN DAY-TO-DAY LIFE.
by Randy Boyagoda
Walrus Magazine, Canada
April 18 2007
Identity Crisis
Books discussed in this essay:
Istanbul: Memories and the City
by Orhan Pamuk
translated by Maureen Freely
Alfred A. Knopf (2005 )
320 pp. with 206 photographs, $36
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
translated by Maureen Freely
Alfred A. Knopf (2005 )
426 pp., $38
The Economist likes to lace its clever commentary with acid. In its
March 2005 survey of Turkey, it invoked Czar Nicholas I’s infamous
diagnosis of the Ottoman Empire as "the sick man of Europe," and then
noted that, "Over the years many Turks have quoted this with perverse
pride. They may have been sick, but at least they were part of Europe."
Since its birth as a secular nation-state a century ago, Turkey has
been caught in the intersecting shadows of imperial decline and Western
nationalism, while roiled by questions of Islam’s place in national
life. Turkey’s modern ills bespeak a much longer story. Six hundred
years of Ottoman civilization fell after World War I, a buckling that
prepared the way for General Mustafa Kemal, later apotheosized as
"Ataturk" (father of the Turks), to initiate the vigorous reinvention
of a fallen Islamic imperium as an ascendant secular nation-state. The
Turkish patriotism that developed was intended as both a cure for
a collective psyche wounded by its post-imperial diminishment and
an equalizer for a people anxious to stand beside their advanced
Western neighbours.
Today, Turkey is poised for entry talks with the European Union
this October and both pulled toward and pushed away from political,
military, economic, and cultural identifications with Asia, the
Mediterranean, and the West. It remains troubled by its struggles
with Greece over Cyprus and by the plaints of its Kurdish minority.
Above all else, Turkish life is perpetually concerned with Islam’s
standing. This is a democracy with a fissile fundamentalist element;
its religious status is guarded by generals rarely shy of boasting
their brawn in the name of constitutionally enshrined secularism. In
short, modern Turkey is embedded at the axis of contemporary
geopolitics.
As his recent books make clear, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most prominent
contemporary writer, is himself deeply rooted in this dense and dark
soil. This native commitment, however, has been severely tested of
late. In a February interview, Pamuk openly criticized Turkey’s
1915 massacre of its Armenian minority, an event still fraught
with controversy in Turkey. In the still-unfolding aftermath,
Pamuk’s books have been removed from Turkish libraries and burned
in political rallies; he has been sued for anti-state actions and
pilloried in major newspapers. Security concerns have precluded a book
tour. Critically renowned, translated into more than thirty languages,
Pamuk is surpassing Salman Rushdie as the world’s pre-eminent Muslim
writer. This, Pamuk is realizing, can be a burdensome achievement.
At the start of Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk admits that
he must cut a peculiar figure for a cosmopolitan novelist. He has
never left his native city. Our age, he observes, is "defined by
mass migration and creative immigrants…. My imagination, however,
requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the
same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I
am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." This
searching memoir establishes Istanbul, with its Byzantine, Ottoman,
European, Mediterranean, Turkish, Christian, and Islamic influences and
inheritances, as providing a difficult and beguiling enough pluralism
for Pamuk to write about home from home.
>>From boyhood through early life, with over 200 personal and
historical prints accompanying his painterly prose, Pamuk comes into
knowledge of self and world through his explorations of Istanbul’s
criss-crossed cultural lineage. He meditates on the writings of its
famous European visitors, among them a miserable Gustave Flaubert, who
suffered through a case of syphilis while in town but also found ample
matter to nurture his "interest in the strange, the frightening, the
filthy, and the queer." Pamuk also celebrates Istanbul’s idiosyncratic
local voices, notably the ambitious Resat Ekrem Kocu, who, over the
course of three decades, wrote over 5,000 pages of "the world’s first
encyclopedia about a single city" but never got past the letter G.
Pamuk devotes much space to tracing out both his city’s and his own
artistic lineage but is more concerned with sketching his education as
a member of a down-at-the-heels bourgeois family. Though he recommends
that "Istanbul’s greatest virtue is its people’s ability to see the
city through both western and eastern eyes," the biographical evidence
and critiques on offer in this book suggest that the East/West gateway
vision that the city affords comes at a cost. The Pamuks live among
extended relatives in an expansive apartment building brimming with the
depression and drama of genteel poverty. These people fit remarkably
well into modern Istanbul, an "ageing and impoverished city buried
under the ashes of a ruined empire."
His early life, having developed amid pervasive gloom, Pamuk identifies
melancholy-in its distinctively Turkish form, huzun-as the defining
feature of the city and its citizenry. His accompanying descriptions
of twentieth-century Istanbul in its dusky richness provide many
wistful moments. Pamuk finds huzun in "the walls of old apartment
buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down
wooden mansions;" in "seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with
moss and mussels;" in "the broken see-saws in empty parks;" and in
"the chiaroscuro of twilight" that spreads over Istanbul’s dim streets
and seeps into its crumbling buildings.
Beyond his melancholic poetics, Pamuk also explores huzun’s ugly
origin in the Faustian pact that Turkish elites have kept for decades
with the military that regulates the nation’s westward secularism. In
the memoir’s most punishing moments, Pamuk rebukes his family and
their comfortable counterparts for their self-serving support of the
"secular fury of Ataturk’s new Republic." Assuming that "to move
away from religion was to be modern and western," these Istanbullus
were poised for material success and bourgeois refinement in the new,
European-minded nation. Surveying his family’s resultant diminishments,
Pamuk regards this gambit as no great cause for boasting. Not only
has the ruling class condoned forty years of military interventions
aimed at the country’s impoverished religious majority, but for those
well-heeled, enlightened citizens apparently benefiting from the
generals’ putsch, "nothing came to fill the spiritual void. Cleansed
of religion, home became as empty as the city’s ruined yalis [mansions]
and as gloomy as the fern-darkened gardens surrounding them."
Depictions of the spiritual alienation, cultural smugness, military
might, and class divisions that infuse this desolate cityscape compel
us to renounce romance for more exacting considerations. How are
we to receive beauty born of a civilization that remains in turmoil
because of its schizophrenic history and contemporary makeup?
While Istanbul falls short of a sustained treatment of this question,
Pamuk’s latest masterpiece, Snow, leaves Istanbul to address it with
atomized intensity. This novel responds to Turkey’s continued effort
to pound a modern Western patina onto its post-imperial, God-haunted
landscape by detailing the many lives blunted and broken for patriotism
and progress. Taut and compulsively readable, Snow also recounts the
unexpected poetry and love cultivated beneath contemporary life’s
grim harrows of fundamentalism and nationalism.
Snow’s protagonist is Ka, a poet in political exile who returns to
his native Istanbul from Frankfurt to attend his mother’s funeral. A
spate of suicides by Muslim schoolgirls has broken out as a result
of state-mandated prohibitions against wearing head scarves in school.
Ostensibly seeking to write about the situation, Ka travels to Kars,
a depressed town near the former Soviet border where young women
have been taking their lives in particularly large numbers rather
than baring their heads. With "Suicide is Blasphemy" signs dotting
the landscape and citizens accepting a surveillance society and
prefabricated news, the setting encapsulates greater Turkey’s uneasy
position as a civilizational switching point. The local newspaper is
called the Border City Gazette; Kars’ architecture and culture owe
much to six centuries of competing traversals by Ottoman, Russian,
and British imperial armies; and its population is made up of
Persian, Greek, Circassian, Armenian, and other tribes, migrants,
and refugees that have settled and resettled in its environs. This
deep and multifarious history, having been summarily reinvented
as strictly Turkish in the name of patriotic purification by the
descending national army during the 1920s, bequeaths universal
"destitution, depression, and decay" to Kars’ modern-day residents,
along with a contemporary social order as thick and confusing as the
city’s genealogy.
Arriving just as the town becomes isolated by a snowstorm that goes
on for days, Ka is quickly embroiled in Kars’ chaotic politics. The
players include Islamic terrorists, Muslim feminists, student radicals,
Turkish nationalists, Kurdish insurgents, unbowed socialists,
secret police, neighbourhood power brokers, newspaper editors,
state bureaucrats, municipal election candidates, and the omnipresent
army, not to mention the leaders of a revolutionary theatre company,
who stage a nationalistic, anti-Islamist play that turns out to be a
pretext for a coup. These parties seize on each other like a clutch of
cockroach dervishes, competing to manipulate Ka into their intrigues
and machinations.
As he gets swept up in the crisis engulfing Kars, Ka attempts to revive
his faltering poetic abilities, and to kindle a romance with Ipek,
a recently divorced former classmate. The novel’s ensuing interplay
between the public and the personal reveals that its protagonist
moves so naturally and willingly between political commitments,
private desires, and artistic achievements because, in this world,
where convenient divisions of East and West have been outmoded since
the fall of Constantinople, love and betrayal and brutality and beauty
can be similarly indistinguishable.
This is how poetry is born in the age of war and terror. At the start
of an astonishing sequence, Ka feels "a surge of joy" while standing
beside Sunay, the actor-cum-coup leader, on a bridge overlooking
darkened Kars in the midst of revolution. Enraptured by his vista of
"the beautiful snow-covered city with its empty old mansions," Ka is
also "enjoying this proximity to real power." As Sunay issues orders
via walkie-talkie, Ka notices "the wretched shantytown" across the
frozen river, where the poor are easy marks for Islamic radicalization
and, therefore, obviously justified targets for Kemalist tanks. He
listens to Sunay reflect on his love for Kars and to his clever
Hegelian justification for the coup, then witnesses a condensed
version of twenty-first-century nationalism at work:
The entire valley rattled with explosions. Ka deduced from this that
the machine gun atop the tank was now in use…. [A] shanty door
opened and two people came out, their hands in the air. Ka could see
tongues of flame licking at the broken windowpanes. All the while,
[a] dog barked happily, darting back and forth, his tail wagging as he
went over to join the people crouching on the ground. Ka saw someone
running in the distance, and then he heard the soldiers open fire. The
man in the distance fell to the ground, and all noise stopped.
This passage, Pamuk at his best, matches sangfroid intelligence
with pointillist imagery; arranging together religion, poverty, and
military efficiency, punctuated by an ignorant, cheerful dog barking
before a burned-out building and playing with corpses-to-be. It is a
visceral imprint of the indiscriminate and senseless butchery found
far too widely today. And how does it move Ka, its proximate witness?
He follows Sunay back to his headquarters and writes a poem that we
never see.
Snow makes for difficult reading because it challenges our expectations
of the artist mixed up in the loud, hard world. Here, we want
to condemn Ka as a conscienceless aesthete because he blissfully
poeticizes alongside a would-be tyrant at work. At other times, we want
him to cut through the conflict and chaos by writing poetry that sets
an assured cast of heroes, villains, and victims. But Pamuk thwarts
our desire for clarity. By emphasizing Ka’s ability to hold manifold
and contradictory sympathies in suspended orbit, and then veiling the
verse that this inspires him to write, Pamuk prevents both poet and
poetry from being subjected to moralizing litmus tests and ideological
sniffing. More generally, his characterizations are correlative to
Turkey’s prismatic complexity, which, the novel makes clear, results
from the raw and unceasing interplay between its Islamic pathologies
and westernizing pressures. As a result, neither Ka nor Sunay, nor
any of the other major characters, not even the terrorist leader,
Blue, is drawn so flat as to be a steady marker of right and wrong,
or good and evil, or honour and shame, as each tries to beat the
others to claiming a singular and stable identity for Turkey.
Eventually, Snow’s whorl of themes and characters tighten around the
issue of whether a central character will remove her head covering
at the climax of Sunay’s next patriotic production. Because Ka is
so immersed in Kars’ familial, romantic, and political crises, his
services are variously demanded. He only wants to take the beautiful
Ipek back to Frankfurt with him, but this proves contingent upon
his securing a resolution amenable to everyone involved in the wider
chaos. As the novel reaches its climax, Pamuk summons a melancholic
fatedness that recalls Dostoevsky, and we accordingly sense that
Ka’s task, demanded by all sides and frustrated by each, will prove
impossible. Ka faces too many passionate and calculating men equipped
by both East and West with guns and principles, who exercise power
over a variegated population too exhausted by unremitting tumult to
do anything other than applaud the last Turk standing.
Religion, politics, art, and the private life bind together in
Pamuk with a force that the West can only recall today by reading
Dante and Chaucer, which is precisely what makes Snow so immediate
and important. But the postmodern sleight-of-hand that closes Snow
discourages sterile intercultural insights into Islamic themes and
the wider gyre of Turkish culture. As the novel closes, one of the
characters addresses Western readers, assaulting what sympathetic
relations we may have forged:
"If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they
need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that
they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would
put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little
room for doubt in their minds."
This vouchsafing of imaginative uncertainty is precisely what is needed
in a world crowded by righteous men outfitted with destructive,
absolutist presumptions about each other. While enlivening our
curiosity, Pamuk’s books make a difficult virtue out of an unsettling
necessity: they leave us grateful to be denied absolute knowledge
of those faraway peoples, places, and problems that have become our
unexpected intimates through the haphazard ways of near-history.
Randy Boyagoda has been shortlisted for the 2005 Journey Prize for
his short story "Rice and Curry Yacht Club." His essay "Cities In A
Raw Young Century" appeared in the April 2005 issue of The Walrus.
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