A STORM OVER ISTANBUL
The Irish Times
October 14, 2006 Saturday
Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel prize has angered Turkish nationalists, who say
he has sold his country out, writes Nicholas Birch.
Towards the end of Istanbul, the part-autobiography and part-memoir
that came out in English last year, Orhan Pamuk describes his horror
of spring days when the sun "brings every ugly thing in the city into
relief". His first reaction is to try to escape what he calls "this
hybrid, lettered hell" by conjuring up "a pure and shining moment
when the city was ‘at peace with itself’, when it was ‘a beautiful
whole’. But as my reason asserts itself, I remember that I love this
city not for any purity but precisely for the lamentable want of it."
A similar struggle between attraction and repulsion has characterised
the first Turkish reactions to Thursday’s news that he had been
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Except that, in this case,
it remains to be seen whether love will win out over something darker.
Among fellow artists, reactions were overwhelmingly positive. "I am
as happy as if I won it myself," commented film director Nuri Bilge
Ceylan, winner of the 2003 Cannes Grand Prize. The doyen of Turkish
novelists, Yasar Kemal, himself once tipped for the Nobel Prize,
sent Pamuk an e-mail congratulating him for "this award that you
thoroughly deserved . . . I have no doubt you will continue to stand
behind what you believe."
In a country that often seems to fall through international cracks,
many other authors picked up on Orhan Pamuk’s comment that his
victory was above all a victory for all Turkish writers. The author
of best-selling detective novels, Ahmet Umit, spoke for many when
he described it as a "fantastic opportunity for Turkey and Turkish
literature to be better known by the world". In Turkey’s mainstream
media, meanwhile, generosity was in much shorter supply.
"Should we be pleased or sad?" asked Fatih Altayli, the chief editor
of Sabah, one of Turkey’s two most influential newspapers, in the
headline of his Friday column. Unlike the magnificently fork-tongued
contributions of other equally prominent journalists, what Altayli
wrote next at least had the merit of being relatively straightforward.
In the circumstances, he concluded, the best reaction to Pamuk’s
victory was pride. And yet, "we can’t quite see Pamuk as ‘one of us’.
Quite the opposite; we see him as someone who ‘sells us out’ and . .
. can’t even stand behind what he says."
The same impulse to blacken Pamuk’s name was equally in evidence
up the road in Hurriyet, Sabah’s biggest competitor. Chief editor
Ertugrul Ozkok wrote at length in his column about the difficulties
his editorial team had when choosing their seemingly banal headline,
"Nobel to a Turk".
"We all know that this headline will probably not satisfy anybody’s
‘Turkish side’," Ozkok simpered, alluding to the conviction of
nationalists the world over that they hold a monopoly on patriotism.
On one level, all this ill-disguised bile has a very clear source:
Orhan Pamuk’s statement to a Swiss magazine last year that 30,000 Kurds
and one million Armenians had been killed in Turkey. Published in Das
Magazin last February, the remarks were a reference to the war Turkey
has been fighting against Kurdish separatists since 1984 and to what
is widely seen internationally as the 20th century’s first genocide:
the deaths in 1915 of at least 600,000 Ottoman Armenians.
In Turkey, though, despite the liberalising tendencies of the last
few years, free discussion of either issue remains at best difficult.
Within hours, Pamuk had become the country’s most hated man.
While an ultra-nationalist lawyer hauled him to court on charges of
"insulting Turkishness", one local official even went as far as to
issue orders for all copies of Pamuk’s books to be collected and
burnt. His superior countermanded the order a few days later, but he
needn’t have bothered: no books were found.
"They might have more luck if they opened public libraries round here,"
local student Nilay Aksu commented acidly.
Orhan Pamuk’s sin wasn’t just to break nationalist taboos. In a
country which sometimes feels positively Sicilian in its insistence
that dirty washing be kept in-family, he broke the taboo abroad.
That, to a nationalist, can mean only one thing: opportunism.
"This prize was not given because of Pamuk’s books, it was given
because . . . he belittled our national values," Kemal Kerincsiz,
the lawyer who took the writer to court last year, told AP on Thursday.
THE SAME POINT was put more mildly by Sabah’s cartoonist, Salih
Memecan. "Works that won Orhan Pamuk the Nobel," read his Friday
cartoon, above a sketch of the grinning novelist standing in front of
two shelves of books. On the upper one, his seven novels. On the lower
one, a grey tome with "Turkish Penal Code article 301" – the article
used to bring him to trial last December – inscribed on its spine.
"It’s tragic, really," comments Elif Shafak, another novelist brought
to book under article 301. "This is a huge honour both for Pamuk and
the country, and yet so many people are so politicised they forget
about literature entirely."
IN FACT, THE hostility of some parts of Turkish society to Orhan Pamuk
goes back well beyond last year. While books such as The White Castle
and My Name is Red – both set in Ottoman times – largely went down
well here, Snow angered many with its bleak, burlesque portrait of a
contemporary Turkey peopled with religious and secularist fanatics,
separatists and police informers.
For secularists, Pamuk’s greatest crime is his critical attitude
towards the authoritarian secular legacy of Turkey’s Republican
fathers. As he writes in Istanbul, while the public manifestations
of the new Republic’s modernising zeal were occasionally lit with
"the flame of idealism", "in private life, nothing came to fill the
spiritual void".
"Orhan Pamuk’s problem is with his own people and history," Ozdemir
Ince, prize-winning poet and secularist, wrote last year. "Shoulder
to shoulder with religious extremists, he wants to settle accounts
with this Republic’s revolutionary past."
Ultimately, though, mistrust of the new Nobel Prize winner seems to
go beyond political differences. Many see it as simple jealousy on
the part of a parochial-minded intelligentsia. Others present it as
just the latest evidence of how much damage the authoritarian military
coup of 1980 did to Turkish society.
Recent criticisms levelled at Pamuk by the poet and philosopher Hilmi
Yavuz point to another possibility. Writing in the moderate Islamist
daily Zaman, Yavuz argues that the year Pamuk spent in the United
States after the publication of his second novel changed him for
the worse.
"He must have been promised a great future in America if he wrote
novels in a particular Orientalist format, like Salman Rushdie or
VS Naipaul," he wrote, referring to Pamuk’s literary agent. "Look at
Turkey and Turkish history as a westerner does. That was the idea."
Somehow, it’s an argument that contains all the paradoxes of modern
Turkey, a country where westernisation has played such a vital role
for so long that the opinion of the West has taken on an almost
deadly significance.
It’s a painful hesitancy that Pamuk celebrates. As he puts it in
Istanbul, the city’s greatest virtue is "its people’s ability to see
the city through both Western and Eastern eyes . . . Western observers
love to identify the things that make Istanbul exotic, non-Western,
whereas the Westernisers amongst us register all the same things as
obstacles to be erased from the face of the city."