Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa
Feb 15 2008
When East is West
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has faced criminal charges and even death
threats in his native Turkey, yet he refuses to be disillusioned
about the country’s future, he tells Maya Jaggi
hen Orhan Pamuk received his Nobel prize for literature in December
2006, he was praised for making Istanbul `an indispensable literary
territory, equal to Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg, Joyce’s Dublin or
Proust’s Paris’. Yet it was while visiting New York in the 1980s that
Pamuk found his voice.
Fuelled by a longing for his native city, he had a kind of epiphany
and came to a belated `fascination with the wonders of Ottoman,
Persian, Arab and Islamic culture’.
His fiction recovers worlds largely ignored since Ataturk founded the
secular republic in 1923 on the ruins of a defeated empire. But the
recovery comes with a postmodern twist — Sufi poetry read through
the prism of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Although Pamuk sees
`the East-West divide’ as, certainly for him, an illusion, it colours
his fiction and shapes his characters’ anxieties about tradition and
modernity, authenticity and imitation (copies and doubles recur),
shame and the seeds of nationalist pride. His novels are `made from
these dark materials’.
For the past 200 years, he says, `an immense attempt has been made to
occidentalise Turkey. I believe in that, but once your culture thinks
of itself as weak and tries to copy another, you sense that the
centre is some place else. Being non-Western is the feeling that
you’re at the periphery.’ Yet in his Nobel lecture, My Father’s
Suitcase, Pamuk described how that sense altered as he narrated his
city. `Now Istanbul is the centre,’ he says.
These ideas animate his first book since winning the Nobel, Other
Colours (Faber), translated by Maureen Freely. Shaped as a sequence
of autobiographical fragments, with musings on The Thousand and One
Nights and Tristram Shandy, barbershops and Bosphorus ferries, its
essays elegantly illuminate his life and times.
In August 2005, Pamuk was charged under Article 301 of the penal code
with `public denigration of Turkish identity’ for saying in a Swiss
newspaper interview that `30 000 Kurds and a million Armenians were
killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it’.
Though the case was dropped in January 2006, and Turkey’s president,
Abdullah Gul, has called for Article 301 to be amended, discussion of
the massacres of 1915-1917 still holds risks.
Yet Pamuk is critical of moves abroad to enforce the recognition of
what happened as a genocide, as in a French assembly vote last year
and the United States Bill approved in October by a congressional
committee, which prompted the recall of Turkey’s ambassador to
Washington.
`The issue is getting to be part of international politics, which I
am upset about,’ he says. `For me, this is first an issue of freedom
of speech in Turkey. We have to be able to talk about this, whatever
one’s opinion on it. The French resolution only made things harder
for the democrats of Turkey. And I don’t want to see Turkey’s
relations with the West destroyed because of the manipulation of this
issue by various governmental bodies.’
After threats from an ultra-nationalist accused of organising the
murder in January of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink,
Pamuk spent an extra semester in New York, but declines to call it
exile. `There were death threats from semi-underground
organisations,’ he says. `I’m stubborn — I could have stayed. But
I’m a fiction writer. I didn’t have peace of mind.’
He has bodyguards, but sees the worst as over. `People trashed
intellectuals as betrayers of the country to get votes and prestige
for the army — and it didn’t work.’ In the July elections, `all
these conspiracies did not raise the [pro-army, nationalist] secular
vote, but made the ruling party [the moderate Islamist AKP, which
supports membership of the European Union] even stronger’.
Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 into an `upper-middle-class
Westernised family’ whose fortune had initially come from building
railways. His father was a construction engineer and aspiring poet,
given to absconding. Pamuk sees his elder brother Sevket (an economic
historian) as his `Freudian father — giving me instruction on how to
bow to authority.’
Up until the age of 22, Orhan dreamed of being a painter and studied
architecture, but he dropped out to go to journalism school. At
Istanbul University in the 1970s he had leftwing sympathies and,
after the 1980 coup d’état that presaged military rule by the
Ataturk-inspired nationalists, agonised that `so many prisoners were
being tortured’. But his impulse was to `write beautiful fiction, not
propaganda’.
When in Istanbul, he walks to his office, overlooking the stretch of
water between Europe and Asia, from Pamuk Apartments, the modern
block his family built in the early 1950s. His first reaction to the
Nobel `was to say it would not change my life’. But `it did — I’m
more social. And I’m working even harder.’ One benefit of winning the
prize, he says, is that `all the family made up’: the publication of
Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul (2003), temporarily `destroyed my
relationship with my mother’, Shekure, who opposed his becoming a
writer, and also led to a breakdown in relations with Sevket, whose
beatings he had described. `Now we’re friendly,’ he says with a
boyish grin. And though he has lived alone since his marriage to the
historian Aylin Turegen ended in 2001, he says his ex-wife and
teenage daughter Ruya `remain my best friends’.
His Istanbul, a `city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy’, is
mostly taken from the 1950s and 1960s, he says, `the troubled town
that turned inward, that learned from history not to aspire to much.
It’s the same for my characters; they feel second-rate, secondary to
the West.’ His early, untranslated novels, Cevdet Bey and His Sons
(1982) and The Quiet House (1983), were family sagas, modelled on
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.
But he turned to 17th-century Constantinople in The White Castle
(1985), a tale of confused identities between a Venetian Christian
slave and the Ottoman master who looked like him. Wherever `a
non-Western culture wants to be occidentalised — or `globalised’ —
the question of authenticity arises’, Pamuk says. `It’s a social
inevitability, but you blame yourself; you live it personally.’ To be
a writer `is to acknowledge the secret wounds we carry inside us’,
sharing our secret shame to `bring about our liberation’.
At the heart of fiction lies a unique human talent to identify with
the pain, pleasure, joy, boredom of others. Once you base your art on
that, you’re political. As he writes in an essay: `The history of the
novel is a history of human liberation. By putting ourselves in
another’s shoes, by using our imagination to shed our identities, we
are able to set ourselves free.’ — © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2008