Open Democracy, UK
Dec 1 2006
Exile at home: being Turkish, thinking European
Daria Vaisman
1 – 12 – 2006
The reception of Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel award in Turkey is charged with
the political tensions inside the country and in its relationship
with Europe, says Daria Vaisman.
Turkey’s extraordinary and still unfinished year has appeared often
to put it at the centre of international affairs. Sometimes it can
feel as if all the currents of the modern world – from nationalism to
freedom of speech, militarism to migration, religion to women’s
rights, terrorism to reconciliation with the past – flow through this
country.
This is at once a tribute to Turkey’s richness of experience and
potential, and a challenge to understanding – for modern Turks even
more than for their European and other neighbours. Many countries are
asking questions of Turkey, but it is the Turks above all who need to
find answers to their own predicament.
Daria Vaisman is Caucasus correspondent for the Christian Science
Monitor and a freelance writer based in Tbilisi and Moscow. She has
written for Slate, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Policy,
the New Republic and other publications
Also by Daria Vaisman in openDemocracy:
"Turkey’s restriction, Europe’s problem"
(29 September 2006)
Each big story in 2006 – from the Danish cartoon crisis to the
recurring Kurdish dispute, from the tense negotiations with the
European Union to the delicate visit of Pope Benedict XVI – has
reinforced the sense of a country in search of itself. This was true
perhaps above all in the circumstances around the award of the Nobel
literature prize to Orhan Pamuk on 12 October 2006.
Pamuk wrote (in his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City) of a
certain kind of exile: Those who take pleasure in the accidental
beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the
picturesque in ruins – invariably, we’re people who come from the
outside."
The formulation is suggestive. To be an exile in a foreign country is
one thing, but to be an exile on the street where you grew up takes
something else. Orhan Pamuk (as openDemocracy’s Anthony Barnett
noted) stayed – in the city, even the house, of his childhood – and
embraced the world from there.
Also in openDemocracy on Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul and Turkey’s writers:
Cem Õzdemir, "My mother’s city"
(12 February 2004)
Murat Belge, "Love me, or leave me?" The strange case of Orhan Pamuk"
(October 2005)
Hrant Dink, "The water finds its crack: an Armenian in Turkey"
(December 2005)
Orhan Pamuk (with Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie), "Freedom to
write"
(28 April 2006) – an audio feature from the PEN World Voices festival
in New York
Elif Shafak, "Turkey’s home truths"
(25 July 2006)
Hrant Dink, "Orhan Pamuk’s epic journey"
(16 October 2006)
Two worlds
Such is the strange experience of being Turkish nowadays: it is
possible to be an exile simply by staying put. A Turk is both an
artifact and victim of empire, able to feel connected to the great
Ottoman past yet aware of the impossibility of ever returning to it.
Modern Europe may view the ruins of Greece and Rome via a lens of
triumphalism as much as nostalgia; but in Turkey, Pamuk writes,
"ruins are reminders that the present city [Istanbul] is so poor and
confused that it can never again dream of rising to the same
heights."
Europe’s relationship to its own past is, as a result, less fraught
than Turkey’s. This is one reason why the tensions between the two
cultural and political worlds carry such an electric charge. Nowhere
was this more evident than in the decision by the lower house of the
French parliament (on the very day of Pamuk’s Nobel award) to propose
making it illegal to deny that a genocide of Armenians occurred in
Turkey during the first world war.
At the time, the connection between the legislation and Turkey’s
future choices – between EU membership and a more middle-eastern (and
Islamic) state – may seemed little more than coincidence. But the
symbolic import of the legislation is profound: "Europe" is here
asking Turkey to swallow both its humiliation, and its sense of being
a victim of a double standard, in order to join the European club.
Will this be needed for the Turks to make their country’s ruins into
"museums of history" (Pamuk) and surrender hope for their return?
Pamuk himself is at the centre of the controversy. It was he who he
told the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeige in February 2005 that "30,000
Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody
but me dares to talk about it" (comments which made Pamuk the most
prominent target of the notorious "insult law" cases, in which
individuals have been charged with "denigrating Turkishness").
Although Pamuk’s case was eventually dismissed on a technicality,
other writers – among them Hrant Dink, Elif Shafak, and Murat Belge –
have since been tried under the same law.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, echoed the opinion of many
Turks when he suggested that the timing of the French legislation was
not accidental. It was "unfortunate", he said, "that the first time
Turkey receives a Nobel prize comes with the legislation. The issue
would not have appeared so political had the French not voted on the
legislation the same day the award was given."
For Turkey, this is nothing less than hypocrisy. Europe, Turks say,
demands that the country agree to a freedom of expression which the
European Union itself does not uphold. Turkey is blocked from joining
the EU because of restrictions on freedom of speech if which Europe
itself is guilty.
"We are told to be tolerant of ideas that we don’t like, and it’s
very ironic that we are hearing the contrary from a European
country", said Muge Sokmen of Metis Press (which publishes Elif
Shafak). "Freedom of expression is not a political thing", says
Sokmen. "It is a means to control Turkey with the message they
themselves do not want to be controlled."
>From the Turkish perspective, then, the French law is another form of
condescension – more EU-mandated hoops – much like a country club
with ever-changing, arbitrary, rules designed to deny membership for
every reason but for those stated.
In Turkey, the question of genocide presses a nerve. The combination
of the French law, the Nobel award and Orhan Pamuk’s track-record on
the Armenian issue put him at the centre of the controversy. For all
Turks (the religious, the secular strong-armed military; the liberal,
secular Istanbullu), Pamuk’s prize was double-edged.
The victory of a Turkish writer, writing in Turkish, is cause for
celebration. Turks chafe at the suggestion that Pamuk’s literary
merits were not enough to win him the Nobel; Pamuk is an exquisite
writer, many say, and to see his award as laced with politics (and
anti-Turkey politics at that) is a further insult.
Yet even for his admirers the event was tinged with regret. Pamuk
made himself famous, some say, only by virtue of his comments on
genocide. Several expressed the thought that Pamuk had spoken out on
the fate of the Armenians to achieve international fame.
For those on the conservative side, things are far clearer. Kemal
Kerincsiz, the Turkish nationalist lawyer who helped bring criminal
charges against Pamuk, said that Pamuk had not won the Nobel for his
work, but "because he belittled our national values…As a Turkish
citizen I am ashamed." For both sides if in different ways, suspicion
remains that no matter his literary skill, Pamuk’s prize is Europe’s
way of making a political statement.
The inside outsider
There is no way to resolve this contradiction – yet. If and when it
can be, the route will start and finish in Turkey itself. This is the
deeper significance of Pamuk for Turkey in 2006. As much as there is
Pamuk the political figure or social gadfly, there is the literary
Pamuk, who brought the bestseller to Turkey, selling hundreds of
thousands of copies of his books in a country with a notably small
reading public. His work is sold at shops and on street corners. He
may have rejected the much-coveted position of Turkey’s "state
artist" in 1998 on political grounds, but that is what he has
effectively become.
During his insult-law trial, Pamuk was accused by his critics of a
fetishising orientalism – of seeking to exoticise Turkey to the west,
of selling it (and himself) to the foreigner. It is an accusation
that has been levelled in comparable circumstances (Milan Kundera,
Salman Rushdie and Azar Nafisi are among the targets).
In these cases, the provocation is what is seen as the arrogance of
self-imposed exile. But Orhan Pamuk chose another path: that of an
insider’s outsider – someone who belongs and is attuned to a single,
unique place while retaining the inner distance that enables its
transformation into universal meaning, and thus opens the way to its
renewed self-discovery.
It is in this sense that Orhan Pamuk is emblematic of Turkey’s
convulsive 2006. The Nobel award and all that surrounded it may be a
sign of where Europe wants to see Turkey, but more importantly it is
a sign of where Turkey is coming to see itself. Pamuk, in his
self-imposed exile, committed himself to staying on to continue the
conversation. In doing so, he offers a truth that will outlast the
disputes and tensions of the political year.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress