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Orhan Kemal, In Jail With Nazim Hikmet
(London, Saqi Books, 2010)
Reviewed by Jennifer Mackenzie
 Jennifer
Mackenzie is a poet, teacher and writer living in Damascus,
Syria. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa’s
Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her
poems have appeared in a dozen American literary journals,
including Fence, Verse, and Quarterly West. She has also
published numerous articles in Forward Magazine, Baladna
English, and What’s On, all based in Syria.
It is a rare work of non-fiction that makes the reader wish
to spend time in a Turkish prison. Yet moments of Orhan
Kemal’s memoir In Jail With Nazim Hikmet do just that.
Nazim Hikmet was and is considered to be the foremost
Turkish modernist poet of the twentieth century. As he was
also an unwaveringly vocal Communist, he was regarded as a
dangerous threat to Turkey’s political establishment, and
spent nearly 18 years in various Turkish prisons, where he
seems to have survived through sheer generosity. For three
and a half of those years, from 1939 to 1943, he was also
the cellmate and tutelary spirit of Mehmet Rasit Kemali, 12
years his junior, who was likewise imprisoned for Marxist
leanings. Indeed, it was in prison, in large part thanks to
Hikmet’s attentions, that Kemali emerged as the novelist
Orhan Kemal, as he chose to call himself. Under this
penname, Kemal rose to fame as one of Turkey’s greatest
novelists, in the course of his lifetime publishing 28
novels, 18 short story collections, and a number of film
scripts.
Kemal’s memoir sketches his formation as a man and writer
under Hikmet’s tutelage, as well as Hikmet’s own aesthetic
and personal development throughout this period. In 1938,
when he was sentenced to 28 years in prison, Hikmet had
published nine books of poetry and was already considered to
be the most important poet of his generation; just before he
was pardoned in 1950, he won – along with Pablo Picasso and
Pablo Neruda – the International Peace Prize. This longest
of his stints in prison also proved formative for Hikmet’s
writing, which evolved into the cinematic montage-style of
his masterwork, Human Landscapes Of My Country, an epic
based on the life experiences of many of Hikmet’s fellow
prisoners and their contemporaries.
In fact, it is one of the more interesting paradoxes of this
history – that is, the intersection of Turkish literature
and politics – that the same prisons which were intended to
suppress the production of unacceptable literatures
ultimately served as unorthodox conservatories for the
renovation of Turkish arts and letters. For besides setting
Kemal on his way to becoming an accomplished novelist,
Hikmet also mentored several other writers and artists, most
notably novelist Kemal Tahir and painter Ibrahim Balaban.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Hikmet’s own literary catalyst,
Vladamir Mayakovsky, also emerged from a revolutionary
background which shaped his emphasis on exuberant
destruction of old aesthetic as well as political forms.
Indeed, it is possible to credit the advent of Turkish
modernism to Hikmet’s exile in Moscow in the 1920s. As Kemal
records, Hikmet noticed one of Mayakovsky’s poems, with its
“smashed-up lines”, in a Moscow newspaper, was captivated by
the new style, and imported it to Turkey.
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In her lengthy introduction, Bengisu Rona, a
professor of Turkish literature at SOAS, University of
London, is particularly eager to articulate this history –
in her words, “the way politics shaped the literary canon
and the extent to which the literary works reflect political
developments in Turkey.” She carefully enumerates the
regional geopolitics of the first half of the twentieth
century, and the vicissitudes communism underwent in Turkey
during this time. From 1920, when Ataturk telegrammed Moscow
requesting armaments and pledging cooperation in light of
the two countries’ efforts, “to save the oppressed from
imperialist governments,” to 1952, when Turkey joined NATO,
the Turkish government’s policy towards communism alternated
between wary, pragmatic tolerance and strict suppression.
And as official policy swung back and forth between these
two poles, Kemal and Hikmet, among others, lived out the
consequences.
Understandably, therefore, Kemal is equally keen to avoid
articulating this angle of political history in his memoir,
being acutely aware of the risks this would pose to his
freedom. As a child, he spent years in exile in Syria and
Lebanon after his father misread the political climate and
founded first one and then another opposition party. Later
on, Kemal’s association with Nazim Hikmet bracketed his own
experiences of prison. To begin with, though he had never
met Hikmet personally, one of the charges on which Kemal was
convicted in 1938 was a statement by a library clerk in the
town where Kemal was stationed that Kemal, “said he admired
Nazim Hikmet and that his works were valuable and should be
stored in the library.” Nearly 30 years after his release,
and three years after Hikmet’s death (in exile in Moscow),
Kemal was again arrested for allegedly, “believing in
revolutionary socialism, that is communism”, and forming an
illegal cell, “to engage in communist propaganda.”1
One major piece of evidence that was held against him was
the publication of Three and a Half Years With Nazim Hikmet,
as his memoir was titled in Turkish. This time, Kemal
successfully defended himself in court, saying the book was
a personal story, not “a eulogy for communism,” and he was
released a month after his arrest.
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Kemal’s text focuses on his personal and
artistic connection with the older poet: his apprenticeship
to his “master”, as he called him. Throughout his early
twenties, Kemal wrote poetry prolifically in a derivative
style imitating Hikmet, whose popularity had led to his
being charged with inciting mutiny in the army and the navy
on the grounds that conscripts were reading his poetry.
Kemal was also charged with inciting mutiny, in the sense
that he was completing his obligatory military service when
he was reported to be an admirer of Hikmet’s work.
However, as he himself describes, when he meets Hikmet in
person during his second year in Bursa Prison, he is shocked
to find that his idol is not a statuesque, Parnassian
personage, but an ordinary man with bright blue eyes and a
smile like a child’s. Hikmet immediately takes the bookish
Kemal under his wing, and works methodically to shatter his
reliance on clichés. “All right, brother,” he tells Kemal
when he finally shares one of his own early poems. “But why
all this verbiage and – excuse the expression – mumbo jumbo?
Why do you write things you don’t really, sincerely feel?”
While Kemal’s first reaction is to feel “shattered” by the
criticism, he ultimately owes Hikmet a huge debt for
teaching him his craft. Besides insisting that Kemal learn
French, Hikmet strongly encourages him to abandon poetry for
prose, precisely because, having fewer preconceptions about
how it should sound, he has a much better chance of doing
something original in it. Most fundamentally, Kemal credits
Hikmet with teaching him how to see poetically. And in order
to train this capacity in himself, Kemal makes Hikmet his
primary subject of observation – Hikmet’s occasional
objections notwithstanding. At one point, the poet chastises
Kemal, while, “forcing himself not to laugh: ‘Look, at least
you could do it without telling me, so that I can behave
normally. Otherwise I shan’t even be able to move.’”
But Hikmet also employs, with far greater fluency and reach
during this period, the same method of sustained observation
and transcription of others’ stories to redefine his own
process of poetic composition. Besides tutoring any prisoner
who showed artistic aptitude, he invites many of his fellow
inmates to sit for lengthy portrait-painting sessions. As he
paints – whistling through his teeth, as Kemal recalls – he
also collects their life histories, which he then uses to
compose his masterpiece, Human Landscapes of My Country. In
aesthetic terms, the “psychological effect” he is seeking to
capture in his amateur portraits leads him to seek a new
formal imperative – a kind of documentary montage – in his
poetry.
This innovation seems so radical to Hikmet that he
eventually declares that he has, “stopped being a poet” and
become “something else”. From his early twenties, in good
Marxist form, he is in love with all facets of
industrialisation, from trains to cinematography, as the
material means of delivering production to the people. Once
in prison for the long term, Hikmet, then in his late
thirties, is exposed to a motley cross-section of Turkish
society. There he realises that, as editor Rona puts it,
“[their] life stories were a critical element in the
emergence of modern Turkey from the wreckage of the Ottoman
Empire,”2 – in other words, prime material for the kind of
history he wants to produce. And because he believes that
the writer is “accountable to the working masses”, he also
read the drafts of his poems to the other prisoners,
altering any parts they found false or confusing. Once,
after Hikmet shares one section of poem with its subject,
the man replies, “Master, what you’ve written is far closer
to the truth than what I told you.”
In the process of incorporating and elaborating these
perspectives in his poems, he invents a new form of
semi-collective epic. Whereas in European literatures, “the
lives of ordinary people … had been relegated to prose,”
they were, says poet Edward Hirsch, “essentially unclaimed
in Turkish literature at Hikmet’s time.” Thus, Hirsh argues
in his introduction to Human Landscapes, “[Hikmet’s] use of
such material places Landscapes at the source of modern
Turkish fiction as well.”3 Nor do the boundaries of Hikmet’s
imagination stop at the borders of Turkey; Kemal describes
how, before and during the Second World War, the prisoners
in Bursa huddle around a single radio, taking in the news.
Hikmet, besides battling with the pro-German camp, lives
this history vicariously, and incorporates the imagined
thoughts of German, English and Russian soldiers and
civilians into his epic.
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For all the retrospective grandeur heaped on the power of
the imagination by editors and anthologies, both Kemal and
Hikmet remain clear-eyed about the losses their sentences
entail. Their discussions of Balzac, Freud, Stendal and Zola
take place in an atmosphere of steady brutality and petty
cruelty. Drug-dealing, murder, and other crimes make up a
regular part of the degradation of the prisoners’
environment. Hikmet’s equanimity with regard to this is, as
usual, remarkable from his first appearance. Kemal describes
how, in his first encounter with Hikmet, the newly arrived
prisoner is greeting old friends in the prison when he is
approached by one “Mad Remzi”. This prisoner, “a 24-year-old
man standing with large bare feet on the freezing cold
concrete floor,” has been relegated to the most destitute
ward, where all the woodwork has been burned for heating,
and where he has gone mad. Hikmet greets him warmly and
listens to his mumblings, commiserating with him over his
new sentence of 30 more years for killing a fellow prisoner
over seven lira. “Of course you’re human. Why do you curse
yourself?” Hikmet exclaims.
As Kemal observes later on, Hikmet, “had an unbounded
affection for the human race. So much so that he made it
into a ‘religion.’” At least once, this unflappable empathy
saves his life. When a gypsy who has been hired to kill him
is impressed with his kindness, he decides to forego the
killing and – addressing him warmly as “my older brother” –
to let him in on the plot instead. In another near-miss, it
is Kemal who discovers that three murderers are planning to
kill Hikmet simply so they will be remembered for something
after their own deaths. “Look at us, what do we do? We go
and take out some schmuck and then get thrown in jail
forever,” Kemal overhears them saying. “But if you murder
this guy, then all the newspapers in the world will write
about you. Then your name will go down in history.”4
Tellingly, when Kemal informs Hikmet, the latter simply
laughs; and, later, when the murderers are themselves
killed, “it was Nazim who was the most sorry for them.” In
his writing during and after his prison term, Hikmet keeps
level sight of the humanity deformed inside an inhuman
social architecture. In one poem, written after his release,
he says of his deepest, personal, “impotent grief” that it
is, “as if … [I] were back in prison/and they were making
the peasant guards/beat the peasants again.”5
In the context of this monotony, steady daily work and study
form a provisional bulwark against despair. Both writers
work diligently, a practice that stays with them after their
respective releases from prison. While in Bursa, Hikmet
translates Tolstoy’s War and Peace for the Turkish Ministry
of Education. He even buys a typewriter – “a 1913 vintage
typewriter weighing half a ton”, as he describes it in a
letter, in order to be able to work faster. The machine is,
he adds, “the only production tool I can forgive myself
possessing on this earth.” His immersion in Tolstoy also
feeds into his poetry, which sometimes reads like a Russian
novel broken up into lines. And when his wife writes to
complain that she might not be able to afford wood to heat
her house during the approaching winter, Hikmet desperately
organises a weaving cooperative to produce cloth and market
it as far as Istanbul. In this, too, his generosity is
evident: he sets aside a share of the profits for Kemal, and
another for his former cellmate and novelist Kemal Tahir.
Six years after Kemal’s release, Hikmet is still sending him
dividends, along with cloth samples to peddle, and arranging
for the purchase and delivery of a rubber sheet following
the birth of Kemal’s second child.
Most luminously, Kemal’s memoir is a tribute to the ways in
which his friendship with Hikmet forms a lifeline for both
writers during and after their prison terms. As Hikmet
writes to Kemal in 1946, “For a man in prison a good friend,
a good comrade, an excellent brother and a creative person
is half of freedom.” Three years earlier, on the eve of his
release, Kemal also struggles to articulate his ambivalence
at leaving Hikmet behind. Just before leaving the prison, he
writes several poems for his teacher. In one, anticipating
the moment of his arrival home in two days time, he writes,
“At that moment … kissing my beloved on her cheeks/you’ll
look at me with your joyful eyes/from within me.”
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Kemal’s memoir, published three years after
Hikmet’s death in Moscow, also bears witness to the
exigencies of his life during and after prison. While in
Bursa Prison, Kemal takes copious notes, hoping to write an
extensive memoir. But most of these are lost; the pages that
are preserved are appended to the main body of the memoir,
along with two very short stories that Kemal titled
separately. The tone of these notes is sometimes more
emotionally vivid and specific than the memoir itself, which
often descends into slightly vaguer or generalising language
in recounting memories.
Besides the pressures to elide politics from his text, Kemal
was also under constant pressure to support his family. Once
he moved to Istanbul in 1951, he became one of the few
Turkish writers of his generation to make a living solely
from his literary output. His memoir, therefore, bears
traces of somewhat hurried composition. He often forgets the
names of people he mentions, leaving it to the editor to
supply a footnote. And while each chapter is organised
around a particular idea or relationship, there is also a
fair amount of jumpy or meandering recollection.
Structurally, the book is really a pastiche of various
materials in which the memoir itself makes up only half the
content, and is sandwiched between editor Rona’s historical
overview, the remains of Kemal’s notes and Hikmet’s letters
to Kemal. Towards the end of his memoir, Kemal regrets his
lapses of memory after nearly a quarter of a century,
adding, “I am very well aware that I have not been able to
write about Nazim Hikmet as he deserves.” Still,
collectively these materials offer a lively set of glimpses
into the lives of two major writers and a brief but winning
introduction to Hikmet’s lessons on, “how to look at the
world”. In retrospect, it was this gift that Kemal valued
most highly, because, as he wrote in a letter, “The crucial
thing is to know how to look. Only if you know how to look
can you see what you should see. It is this which Nazim has
taught me.”6
In trying to represent the worldview – or really, views –
contained in Bursa Prison in the forties, both writers
learned new strategies of composition, even as they
struggled to survive day-to-day. The unflinching realism of
Kemal’s subsequent novels, with their focus on the
challenges faced by the urban poor, are a testament to this
education. Likewise, in its candid portrayal of both
writers’ efforts to remain human and committed to humanity,
Kemal’s memoir succeeds admirably. As Hikmet wrote to his
protégé in 1949, “whether an individual is in the grip of
hope or hopelessness is a matter which concerns only that
individual. But … a writer who offers no hope has no right
to be a writer.” By reflecting something of Hikmet’s quest
for a mode of seeing that incorporates individual
perspectives into collective progress, Kemal’s memoir
justifies his mentor’s belief that reality is, as Hikmet
insists, “sad, anguished, bitter, twilit, abhorrent,
abominable, contemptible, vile … but not without hope.”
1. Orhan Kemal, In Jail With Nazim Hikmet (London, Saqi
Books, 2010), p. 53.
2. Ibid, p. 12.
3. Nazim Hikmet, Human Landscapes From My Country (New York,
Persea Books, 2002), p. xii.
4. Orhan Kemal, “In Jail With Nazim Hikmet” (London, Saqi
Books, 2010) p. 111.
5. Nazim Hikmet, Poems (New York, Persea Books, 2009), p.
123.
6. Kemal, In Jail With Nazim Hikmet (London, Saqi Books,
2010), p. 38.
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