AGAINST SILENCE
Shelley Walia
The Hindu, India
Nov 5 2006
With Orhan Pamuk, the site of his creativity is also the location of
political protest.
LIKE a true postmodernist rebel, Orhan Pamuk, sits in his flat in the
majestic beauty of his Istanbul, a city known for its amalgamation
of East and West, poised on the crossroads of Asia and Europe. He
represents the interface between cultures, a diasporic persona in a
rigid Islamic society struggling with the pangs of shedding its dark
Ottoman past
Orhan Pamuk, infamous for his trial on account of his criticism
of the Armenian genocide, and now acquitted of criminal charges
of denigrating his country where it is taboo to speak against the
State, recently won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature for both the
undeniably high quality of his artistic achievement as well as his
awareness of the threat of terror and State injustice. Pamuk explains
that a mere desire to discuss Turkish politics spurred the State to
declare him anti-nationalist. In his trial he claimed that he loved
his country and would never do anything to insult it. "But what if
it is wrong?" he said. "Right or wrong, do people not have the right
to express their ideas peacefully?"
Lack of understanding
Pamuk does not find it necessary to put the blame squarely on Islam
for the crisis in his life: "It is neither Islam nor even poverty
itself that directly engenders support for terrorists whose ferocity
and ingenuity are unprecedented in human history; it is, rather, the
crushing humiliation that has infected Third World countries. And
for this the West has to be held responsible because it has failed
to comprehend the shame and the humiliation that has fallen upon the
poor nations. Hot-headed military operations and wars will only take
us away from the order of peace."
However, to say that Pamuk’s involvement with contemporary politics
is the reason behind the Nobel Prize is to ignore the literary value
and the throbbing romantic energy of his creative work As he says
in a recent interview, "Look, I’m a writer. I try to focus on these
issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point
of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering
of others… I think literature can approach these problems because
you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and
no one has the right to say what is right. That’s what makes writing
novels interesting. It’s what makes writing a political novel today
interesting."
Pamuk has spoken again. And this time against the French government
which issued an Act of Parliament that would consider any denial of
the massacre of the Kurds and Armenians as unlawful. This, according
to Pamuk, is an infringement of the fundamental right to freedom of
speech: "The French tradition of critical thinking influenced and
taught me a lot," he said. "This decision, however, is a prohibition
and didn’t suit
the libertarian nature of the French tradition."
Facing the past
He has, throughout his writing career, endeavoured to break the culture
of silence and oppression in his country, revoking the genocidal
record of Turkish history and the State’s assault on constitutional
freedom. For Pamuk, politics based on reason is essential for
challenging the status quo. Protest for him is intrinsic to civil
society; we live in a world that is constantly changing, and it is
by protest that the laws are changed.
The nature and function of a writer like Pamuk can be debated only if
his critical politics are related to his function and his position
in society. All radical work for the transformation of society so
as to put an end to oppression has to be carried on at the site of
his creative activity. Politics, as is often thought, does not only
operate in Pamuk’s writings, but is central to his larger concerns.
He has always stepped beyond the private, academic, or technical
terms to the "public sphere", and to the sphere of the citizen rather
than that of the narrow specialist. It is here that his intervention
becomes as political inside his creative work as real politics is
outside. As Vaclav Havel writes, "You do not become a `dissident’
just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career.
You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility,
combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast
out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict
with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends
with being branded an enemy of society." Such a form of commitment to
oneself, to memory and to humanity is visible in Pamuk’s novels and
his ideology that makes him the much-needed bridge between the West
and the East, between an ancient Islamic culture and the contemporary
dream of an economically prosperous nation.
Spaces of imagination
His sensational novel The Black Book concerns itself with the history
of Turkey and takes up the polemics on the idea of a nation and
Turkey’s identity within the context of its imperial past. Like The
White Castle, which was translated into English in 1985, My Name is
Red and Snow also juxtapose tradition and modernity, continuity and
change in a style that blends mystery, romance, and philosophical
puzzles with the tension between East and West, the encounters
between Europe and the turbulent Ottoman Empire, and the inherent
European aspiration of a Muslim nation: "A Turkish novelist who
fails to imagine the Kurds and other minorities, and who neglects to
illuminate the black spots in his country’s unspoken history, will,
in my view, produce work that has a hole in its centre."
Pamuk stresses that "the history of the novel is the history of
human liberation: by putting ourselves in other’s shoes, by using our
imagination to free ourselves from our own identities, we are able to
set ourselves free." He, therefore, has always tried to transcend the
political with all its inherent connections with religious and the
cultural histories of the land, and reach out to the more artistic
and aesthetic aspects of his existence. But that is not to say that
the political is ever absent. This aspect of his writings is evident
from his explanation: "But later, as I began to get known both inside
and outside of Turkey, people began to ask political questions and
demand political commentaries. Which I did because I sincerely felt
that the Turkish state was damaging democracy, human rights and the
country. So I did things outside of my books."
Modern landscapes
His most political novel, Kar (Snow, 2002) is a story about Ka’s
investigation into a mass suicide by girls who have been ordered not
to wear headscarves, a reminder of Ataturk’s ban of (on) headscarves.
Though Ka is killed, he regains his poetic creativity, which according
to Pamuk, is symbolic of human resistance and the need to share new
ideas with the world. As Margaret Atwood writes about this novel in
the New York Times Book Review: "The twists of fate, the plots that
double back on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede
as they’re approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense
of identity-loss, the protagonist in exile – these are vintage Pamuk,
but they’re also part of the modern literary landscape."
Pamuk elucidates in A New Life a poetic rendition of his theory of
fiction: "The challenge of a historical novel is not to render a
perfect imitation of the past, but to relate history with something
new, enrich and change it with imagination and sensuousness of
personal experience." Writing makes possible the vision of making
real a painless world. He has created literature out of despair
and neurosis. The past has to be remembered and any amount of
Westernisation cannot justify the forgetting of one’s history. "If
you try to repress memories, something always comes back," reiterates
Pamuk. "I’m what comes back."