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From the earliest days of the Republic, literary writers who
challenged Turkey’s official ideology could expect to spend
time in prison. Despite the privations that they suffered
behind bars, they were able to form societies of support
that helped them grow as writers while also helping them to
survive materially. Though today’s literary writers are
unlikely to spend time behind bars, they do not always feel
better off.
In 1938, while doing his military service, a young Turkish
poet named Raşit was charged with inciting mutiny and
spreading propaganda on behalf of a foreign state. The
evidence against him was slim but, in a court that regarded
Communism as the single most important threat to national
security, not unusually so. Among his belongings, the
authorities had discovered an assortment of newspaper
cuttings about Marxism, a book by Maxim Gorky, and a handful
of poems dedicated to Nâzım Hikmet, who was not just
Turkey’s first and foremost modern poet but also its most
famous Communist.
Raşit was dispatched to a prison in the city
of Bursa to serve out a five-year sentence. The winter of
1939–40 found him assigned to the prison register office.
One morning, the registrar walked in to say, “You’re in
luck. Your master’s coming.” When Raşit protested, saying,
“I don’t have a master, or anyone else who fits that
description,” the registrar thrust a document into his hand:
“Look at this, then. Nâzım Hikmet. Don’t you reckon he’s
your master?” (Orhan Kemal in Jail with Nâzım Hikmet).
Though Bursa Prison was a broad church, mixing its political
prisoners with thieves, drug dealers, murderers, and
bandits, every inmate knew of the great Nâzım Hikmet. Those
who had come to know him personally in other prisons painted
a picture of a man so much larger than life that he could
stun a crying baby to silence just by picking him up. So
Raşit was not prepared for the bright-eyed, open-faced man
who walked through the door, clicking his heels together
like a soldier as he introduced himself. As he scanned the
room, his face lit up at the sight of each familiar face.
“And you’re here as well, Vasfı? What happened to your
appeal? . . . Then what next, Remzi? So you got thirty years
then? What on earth for?”
He was assigned to one of the isolation cells usually
reserved for men caught gambling, thieving, or knifing a
fellow inmate (though in this case it would have been an
acknowledgment by the prison authorities that he was a
distinguished man of letters who should not be obliged to
live communally with common criminals). Raşit was on hand to
help Nâzım settle into his new quarters. After Raşit had
cooked them both a meal of eggs and Turkish sausage on his
charcoal brazier—and refused to let his guest pay for his
share—Nâzım asked if he would mind being his roommate. “I
can’t stand being alone! You can’t even imagine. . . . I
can’t write a single word. I just go mad.”
It wasn’t long before Nâzım, having already decided to tutor
Raşit in French and current affairs, asked to hear a few of
his poems. Raşit began with the one of which he was most
proud. He had not reached the end of the first stanza when
Nâzım said, “That’s enough, brother, that’s enough . . .
let’s go on to another one, please” He did as he was told,
but he had hardly begun the poem when Nâzım cried, “Awful!”
Feeling very small, Raşit embarked on a third poem, only to
be told, “Ghastly!”
“All right, brother,” Nâzım said then, “but why all this
verbiage and—excuse the expression— mumbo jumbo? Why do you
write things you don’t sincerely feel? Look, you’re a
sensible person. Don’t you realize you’re maligning yourself
when you write about what you feel in a way that you’d never
feel, that you’re making a mockery of it like that?” Having
launched into a long lecture about “active realism” that
Raşit, in his humiliation, could barely understand, Nâzım
again stunned his new friend, this time by asking if he
would like to hear him read.
“I pulled myself together,” Raşit later recalled. “We were
facing each other, eye to eye. He added: ‘But you’re not
going to be just polite about them. You’ll also criticise
me—mercilessly!’”
Thus began one of the most touching friendships in Turkish
letters, which Raşit later recounted in a short memoir
entitled Nâzım Hikmet’le üç buçuk’yil (Three and a half
years in prison with Nâzım Hikmet). Though he wrote it in
1947, the book was not published until 1965. By then Raşit
had become the famous (though forever struggling) novelist
Orhan Kemal (the pen name by which he is known in Turkey),
much loved for his stark tales about the poor and
downtrodden. Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63) had been dead for two
years, having spent more than thirteen years of his life in
prison and his final twelve years in exile in the Soviet
Union.
Though it would continue to be dangerous (and, at times,
illegal) to own a volume of Nâzım Hikmet’s poetry, death
would not silence him, and neither would it lessen the
stature of Orhan Kemal (1914–70). To this day, they are
loved even by those compatriots who do not share their
politics— admired not just for their words, but for the sort
of men they were, and for the code by which they lived.
Nowhere is their generosity of spirit more beautifully
described than in Orhan Kemal’s jewel of a memoir, now
beautifully translated into English by Bengisu Rona.
The volume includes a long essay that sets the memoir in
historical context, outlining the two writers’ careers and
explaining (though never condoning) the mind-set that led to
the persecution and prosecution of writers at odds with
state ideology. During the early years of the Turkish
Republic, as he struggled to pull together the shattered
fragments of the Ottoman Empire to create a unified
nation-state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s success depended on
his manufacturing (and, if necesssary, enforcing) consent
among intellectuals, religious conservatives, and the
diverse Muslim ethnic groups that now made up most of
Anatolia. If ever he met with dissent that threatened to
weaken the Republican project, he was quick not just to
suppress it but to be seen as suppressing it decisively.
Always suspicious of Turkey’s Communists, he was
nevertheless willing to enter into alliances with the Soviet
Union if he judged them advantageous, and when these
alliances were in place, the curbs on left-wing expression
would lessen. But by 1938 Atatürk was on his deathbed, and
those who succeeded him were less flexible.
For most of the next half-century—until the emergence of the
Kurdish separatist movement and the rise of political Islam
in the 1980s—it was leftist intellectuals whom the Turkish
state viewed as the most dangerous threat to national
security, and it was prepared to use the harshest measures
to stamp out any party or movement that might be taking its
orders from Moscow. Turkey’s first penal code, taken from
Mussolini’s Italy, contained several articles prohibiting
organizations and propaganda seeking to destroy or weaken
nationalist feeling. These were deployed aggressively
against the left-wing intelligentsia in general and
left-leaning literary writers in particular, though almost
always it was literary writers’ political statements that
led to their prosecution. Many thousands of leftists and
alleged leftists were imprisoned in the aftermath of the
1971 coup; many more were imprisoned after the coup on
September 12, 1980. There was even a time, following the
1980 coup, when the penalties for writing an essay urging
the Turkish people to take up arms against the state were
more severe than those applied to those who actually took up
arms against the state. Leftleaning journalists would often
find themselves prosecuted for a host of articles
simultaneously; for these they were sometimes given
consecutive sentences that, added together, would have taken
several lifetimes to serve out.
Though there were periodic amnesties, leftist writers often
found life outside prison more difficult than life inside.
After their release, they were often sent into exile in
remote parts of the country, particularly in the early years
of the Republic, though the practice was still in place in
the 1970s. When they were at last able to return home, many
would find themselves barred from secure employment. Often
the only recourse was to work as freelancers in publishing,
but even if they were as famous and prolific as Orhan Kemal
(who ended up publishing twenty-eight novels, eighteen
short-story collections, two plays, and two memoirs, as well
as writing many film scripts) they were unable to earn a
living wage. As is so often the case in the face of
sustained persecution and harrassment, Turkey’s left-wing
writers survived by helping one another.
This may explain why—even today, when, strictly speaking, it
is no longer accurate—the joke in Turkish literary circles
is that you are not a “true” writer until you have spent
some time in prison. What is at stake here is not an
aesthetic but an ethos, and in Orhan Kemal’s portrayal of
Nâzım Hikmet we see its roots. Though his own origins were
rather grand, Hikmet saw himself as a people’s writer.
Though politically an internationalist who believed in the
struggle as defined by Marx, he was a fervent patriot and
endlessly enthusiastic about the potential of “our people.”
One of his most famous poems is a wish (still unfulfilled)
that he be buried under a tree in Anatolia. In another
much-loved poem, he offers a set of instructions to those
who find themselves in prison:
There may not be happiness but it is your binding duty to
resist the enemy, and live one extra day. Inside, one part
of you may live completely alone like a stone at the bottom
of a well. But the other part of you must so involve
yourself in the whirl of the world, that inside you shudder
when outside a leaf trembles on the ground forty days away.
(Beyond the Walls)
It is the same struggle to sustain hope against the odds
that we witness in Orhan Kemal’s memoir, and in the letters
that Hikmet writes to him after his release (also translated
by Rona and included in the volume). No matter how bad
things are, Hikmet refuses to bow to his oppressors. He is
the one who goes to the prison authorities to speak on
behalf of prisoners too frightened or too shy to ask for
dispensations. He tutors not just the poets in the prison
but the would-be painters. Lacking the means to support his
wife and child or to pay for his upkeep in prison, he sets
up a weaving business. He is painstaking about paying all
those involved in the business fairly, and in his letters to
friends on the outside, he devotes much space to chiding and
cajoling them into doing a better job of selling their
wares. He is an ardent listener, passionately interested in
the stories told to him by his fellow prisoners, many of
whom will go on to be immortalized in his poems. But
throughout all this, he retains the wayward exuberance of a
child. When his wife comes to visit, he flaps his arms in
excitement as he speaks, while she, the dignified and
long-suffering wife of a great poet, sits silent and
composed. When his mother comes to visit, she listens
respectfully to his poems, but because she knows herself to
be the better painter, she is scathing about his art, and he
receives her criticism with a bowed head. When Raşit gives
him a rabbit, he is so fiercely affectionate that the rabbit
almost dies of fright. And when Raşit becomes Orhan Kemal
and sends him his latest book, his mentor begins by offering
yet another punctilious writing lesson, outlining the
novel’s strengths, listing its shortcomings, and expressing
horror at the dreadful photograph chosen to appear as the
author’s picture in the book. There follows yet another
lecture about the eroding effects of despair on literature:
“Beware, my son, protect yourself from this, be even more
bitter and sad, but let your joy and hope shine through.
That’s it. I repeat once more, I congratulate you and
Turkish literature. Young and old, I clutch you to my
bosom.”
In this age of irony, it is hard to imagine a writer
offering up such undoctored sentiments, even if that writer
comes out of the literary tradition that Nâzım Hikmet and
Orhan Kemal helped forge. The spirit of resistance remains
strong among the many fine journalists whose principles
oblige them to challenge state ideology. But among today’s
literary writers, the center has not held. Most acknowledge
their debt to the the great mid-century fiction writers of
the leftist tradition— Sabahattin Ali, Aziz Nesin, Kemal
Tahir, and Yaşar Kemal, to name just a few—and some (like
Latife Tekin) are happy to see themselves as continuing that
tradition. But today’s novelists are less likely to see
themselves as writing for the people, let alone the
struggle, and more likely to resist the idea that their work
only has worth to the extent that it serves the national
project (however they define it). They speak instead of the
primacy of the imagination, the need for a distinct and
authentic voice, and the importance of writing about the
world as they themselves see it, unimpeded by ideology.
Sadly, there are many in the state apparatus who are as
suspicious of today’s most successful literary novelists as
their predecessors were of Nâzım Hikmet. They do not like
writers breaking with the official ideology or airing their
independent opinions abroad. In Turkey’s penal code of 2004,
ostensibly brought into line with European social democratic
norms, there are up to twenty articles that curb free
speech, the most famous of which is Article 301, which made
it a crime to insult “Turkishness,” along with the Turkish
Republic, parliament, the government, and judicial
organs—and the army and police for good measure. Since its
introduction, only a few of the hundreds of prosecutions
have led to prison sentences, and in no case has a
well-known writer of fiction been jailed. However, the
much-publicized prosecutions of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak
did succeed in giving prosecutors a platform on the evening
news, while portraying the defendants as traitors. After
persistent criticism of this clause, some minor amendments
were introduced in 2008, replacing the word “Turkishness” by
“the Turkish nation” and reducing the maximum penalty from
three to two years’ imprisonment. None of the critics of
Article 301 has been impressed by the changes.
Kemal Kerinçsiz, the ultranationalist lawyer who launched
both the Pamuk and Shafak prosecutions, also launched
several against the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink;
following a sustained hate campaign in the ultranationalist
press, Dink was gunned down in front of his office in
January 2007. His assassin is behind bars, though his fate
is still unclear: his trial is expected to go on for years.
Also behind bars is Kerinçsiz himself. In early 2008 he
(along with many others) was charged with belonging to a
state-sponsored ultranationalist terrorist organization
charged with aiming to soften up the country for a coup. It
is alleged that this organization had a hit list, and that
Orhan Pamuk was to have to have been its next target. This
trial, too, is expected to go on for a decade.
In the meantime, Pamuk lives under police protection when in
Turkey. Though he can come and go as he likes, and though he
is free to speak his mind, he is wise enough to exercise
extreme caution, for he knows (as do all other leading
writers who have been targeted by ultranationalists in
recent years) that a single unconsidered sentence in an
interview with a journalist anywhere in the world could lead
to a renewed hate campaign.
For a political journalist or a human rights activist, such
risks, however undeserved, might still be said to be “part
of the job.” For literary writers wishing to free themselves
of all political ideologies—nationalist and
internationalist; left, right, and center—the question is
more complex. Where to find the space to work, safe from the
glare of publicity? How to explore ideas openly if one’s
every word is subject to hostile scrutiny? How to reclaim
the capricious sense of play without which the imagination
cannot function? During the three-and-a-half years Nâzım
Hikmet shared a cell with Orhan Kemal, the two men were
able, despite the many hardships, to create a space, and a
tradition, that allowed them to hold Turkish literature to
their hearts. To read of their friendship now is to
understand how much harder it is for Turkey’s literary
writers, for all their fame and all their freedom, to find
such spaces today.
University of Warwick |