National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: Day to Day 4:00 AM EST NPR
October 11, 2005 Tuesday
Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s controversial Faulkner
ANCHORS: MADELEINE BRAND
REPORTERS: FRANK BROWNING
This is DAY TO DAY. I’m Madeleine Brand.
Turkey is trying to become part of the European Union, but Europe is
ambivalent and so for that matter are the citizens of Turkey. The
country’s bittersweet romance with the West permeates the work of
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. His books have been promoted on
billboards in Istanbul and translated into more than 30 languages.
Yet now he is being prosecuted for defaming Turkish honor. Frank
Browning went to Istanbul to talk with Orhan Pamuk and brought back
this report.
Mr. ORHAN PAMUK (Author): This is Orhan Pamuk. We are in Istanbul at
my office overlooking the entrance of Bosphorus. So many people come
here and visit me, and each time I’m embarrassed to have which I
sometimes call the best audio studio in the world.
FRANK BROWNING reporting:
It’s late morning. The eternal mist of the Bosphorus nearly burnt
away, the constant rumble of diesel-driven ferries echoing up the
slopes. Soon the muazzin will launch his call to prayer from the
mosque of Sangir(ph), built 450 years ago by Suleyman the
Magnificent. This ancient landscape forms the terrain of Orhan
Pamuk’s work.
Mr. PAMUK: From my desk, I can see inside the Topkapi Palace, various
buildings. I know all these buildings by heart. Next to it is Saint
Sophia.
BROWNING: Orhan Pamuk’s latest book is called “Istanbul.” It’s a love
letter to the great melancholic city, but now it’s no longer clear
that he will be able to continue living in Istanbul.
Ms. MAUREEN FREELY (Journalist and Novelist): He was declared a
traitor in a number of newspapers.
BROWNING: Journalist and novelist Maureen Freely has known Orhan
Pamuk since they were in high school in Istanbul.
Ms. FREELY: There were death threats. There were invitations on Web
sites for somebody to silence this person forever, that kind of
thing. And so he was forced to leave the country and he had to stay
more or less in hiding for several months.
BROWNING: Pamuk’s offense was an offhand, almost incidental remark
made last spring to a Swiss newspaper.
Mr. PAMUK: I just made a statement about one of our great taboos:
What happened to Ottoman Empire’s Armenians in 1915? This is a taboo
we still cannot discuss.
BROWNING: The next day, his reference to the most contentious issue
in Turkish history, the massacre of Armenians during World War I,
made headlines across the country. It also brought the denunciations
that eventually led a prosecutor to charge Pamuk with defaming
Turkish national honor. Again Maureen Freely, Pamuk’s friend and
translator.
Mr. FREELY: He can’t imagine living anywhere but Istanbul. So he’s
trying to stay and defend his right to stay and also defend his
country because the irony about this is that he’s a patriot.
BROWNING: Few believe Pamuk will go to prison, but the sentiments
beneath the case cut to the deeper themes he explores in his memoir.
The Istanbul of his childhood in the 1950s and ’60s was bathed in a
heavy atmosphere of melancholy.
Mr. PAMUK: From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my
world than I could see. Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul in a
house resembling ours there lived another Orhan, so much like me that
he could pass for my twin, even my double. I can’t remember where I
got this idea or how it came to me. It must have emerged from a web
of rumors, misunderstandings, illusions and fears, but in one of my
earliest memories, it is already clear how I’ve come to feel about my
ghostly other.
BROWNING: It’s a collective sadness born of the city’s history.
Mr. PAMUK: All the riches of Middle East and Balkans came to this
town and the Ottoman Empire fell apart. And this glorious empyreal
city went into ruins. I spent my childhood in that ruins and I wrote
about how beautiful it is, something to do with what the Japanese
call nobility of failure, the willing embrace of failure.
BROWNING: For a nation struggling to be a modern European partner and
a city determined to reclaim its metropolitan glamour, any talk of
failure these days, and worse of guilt, provokes jitters even among
liberal Western-orientated Turks like Tharia(ph), an independent tour
operator on a busy street near the ancient Hagia Sophia mosque.
Tharia credits Pamuk as a great writer, but…
THARIA: Mr. Pamuk, he say one million Armenian killed, Turkish people
killed them. And we didn’t like his word because at the moment we
want to be one hand. You understand what I mean? We feel we have to
be a legal nation at least at the moment especially.
BROWNING: Others like Ebrahem(ph), who runs a Turkish sauna in a
crowded cafe district near Taksim Square, told me in French that he
views Orhan Pamuk as a sort of tool of the Europeans.
EBRAHEM: (French spoken)
BROWNING: `Here in Turkey,’ he said, `there are a few left-wing
intellectuals who are very well organized and connected to the media
who operate more or less like the Masonic societies. Well, Orhan
Pamuk said we killed the Armenians because the Europeans, they wanted
someone who would say that the Turks killed the Armenians.
EBRAHEM: (French spoken)
BROWNING: Both Ebrahem and Tharia are torn by deep Turkish patriotism
and their yearning for a democratic Turkey that respects free speech
and human rights. Yet they’re also afraid that too much
European-style criticism could provoke internal separatists and the
hard-lines. These are the tensions that course Orhan Pamuk’s
melancholy prose.
Mr. PAMUK: This fight is going through the souls of all the people in
this country. It’s not a fight between good people and bad people.
It’s a fight between two spirits of the same person. And the
popularity of my books in just five years is due to the fact that
Turkey’s problems between east and west, between modernity and
traditional Islam turn out to be the…
(Soundbite of call to prayer)
BROWNING: Just then, the muazzin at the Sangir mosque(ph) sounds the
midday call to prayer.
(Soundbite of call to prayer)
BROWNING: Though neither Pamuk nor his family were ever religious,
he’s not opposed to religion. In fact, Islam’s imprint, he says,
persists on everything from art and science to war and politics, and
the dance between Islam and secularism generates the stuff of
literature. The history feeds the melancholy and the melancholy
nourishes the revenue of moods that fill his journals, his essays and
his novels.
Mr. PAMUK: If one writes honestly about one’s moods, I think, then
one knows about not oneself but all humanity, and that we are all
made up of so many moods which continuously deceive us.
BROWNING: Deceive us?
Mr. PAMUK: Mm-hmm. In, say, for three hours, a bit sad, and for
another four years, you’re OK. And in another five hours, I may be
angry. Getting down your sentiments is the essential reflex of an
inborn order, I think.
BROWNING: Orhan Pamuk hopes he’ll be able to continue penning down
and writing about those sentiments in his home in Istanbul. His
hearing on charges of defaming Turkish honor is set for December
16th. For DAY TO DAY, I’m Frank Browning.
BRAND: NPR’s DAY TO DAY continues. I’m Madeleine Brand.