BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Maya Jaggi
The Guardian
Saturday December 8, 2007
Last year’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has faced criminal charges
and even death threats in his native Turkey, yet he refuses to be
disillusioned about the country’s future
When Orhan Pamuk received his Nobel prize for literature last December,
he was praised for making Istanbul "an indispensable literary
territory, equal to Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg, Joyce’s Dublin or
Proust’s Paris". Yet it was while visiting New York in the 1980s that
Pamuk found his voice. Fuelled by a longing for his native city,
he had a kind of epiphany and came to a belated "fascination with
the wonders of Ottoman, Persian, Arab and Islamic culture".
His fiction recovers worlds largely ignored since Ataturk founded
the secular republic in 1923 on the ruins of a defeated empire. But
the recovery comes with a postmodern twist – Sufi poetry read through
the prism of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Although Pamuk sees
"the east-west divide" as, certainly for him, an illusion ("I can,
without any guilt, wander between the two worlds, and in both I am at
home"), it colours his fiction, and shapes his characters’ anxieties
about tradition and modernity, authenticity and imitation (copies and
doubles recur), shame and the seeds of nationalist pride. His novels
are "made from these dark materials".
For the past 200 years, he says, "an immense attempt has been made
to occidentalise Turkey. I believe in that, but once your culture
thinks of itself as weak, and tries to copy another, you sense that
the centre is some place else. Being non-western is the feeling that
you’re at the periphery.
History doesn’t count where you are. I had that feeling." Yet in
his Nobel lecture, "My Father’s Suitcase", Pamuk described how that
sense altered as he narrated his city. "Now Istanbul is the centre,"
he says. These ideas animate his first book since winning the Nobel,
Other Colours (Faber), translated by Maureen Freely. Shaped as a
sequence of autobiographical fragments, with musings on The Thousand
and One Nights and Tristram Shandy, barbershops and Bosphorus ferries,
its essays elegantly illuminate his life and times.
In August 2005, Pamuk was charged under Article 301 of the penal
code with "public denigration of Turkish identity", for saying in a
Swiss newspaper interview that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians
were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about
it." Though the case was dropped in January 2006, and Turkey’s
president, Abdullah Gul, has called for Article 301 to be amended,
discussion of the massacres of 1915-17 still holds risks. Yet Pamuk is
critical of moves abroad to enforce the recognition of what happened
as a genocide, as in a French assembly vote last year and the US bill
approved in October by a congressional committee, which prompted the
recall of Turkey’s ambassador to Washington.
"The issue is getting to be part of international politics, which I
am upset about," he says. "For me, this is first an issue of freedom
of speech in Turkey. We have to be able to talk about this, whatever
one’s opinion on it.
The French resolution only made things harder for the democrats
of Turkey.
And I don’t want to see Turkey’s relations with the west destroyed
because of the manipulation of this issue by various governmental
bodies."
Following threats from an ultra-nationalist accused of organising
the murder in January of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink
("Orhan Pamuk, be smart," he said outside court), Pamuk spent an extra
semester in New York, but declines to call it exile. "There were death
threats from semi-underground organisations," he says. "I’m stubborn –
I could have stayed. But I’m a fiction writer. I didn’t have peace
of mind." He has bodyguards, but sees the worst as over. "People
trashed intellectuals as betrayers of the country to get votes and
prestige for the army – and it didn’t work." In the July elections,
"all these conspiracies did not raise the [pro-army, nationalist]
secular vote, but made the ruling party (the moderate Islamist AKP,
which supports membership of the EU) even stronger".
He is uneasy about his case being wielded against Turkish aspirations
to join the EU. When speaking recently at London’s South Bank, he was
asked from the audience to explain the "paradox" that in the west
"we give you prizes while in Turkey they put you on trial". Pamuk
objected that not all his compatriots are hostile. His novels are
bestsellers at home. He feels himself to be among "a generation of
liberal … open-minded Turks – there are so many of us".
Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952, into an "upper-middle-class
westernised family", whose fortune had initially come from building
railways. His father was a construction engineer and aspiring poet,
given to absconding. Pamuk sees his elder brother Sevket (an economic
historian) as his "Freudian father – giving me instruction on how
to bow to authority. Now I’m grateful to my father for not being
authoritarian." Up until the age of 22, Orhan dreamed of being a
painter, and studied architecture, but he dropped out to go to
journalism school. At Istanbul University in the 1970s, he had
leftwing sympathies and, after the 1980 coup d’état that presaged
military rule by the Ataturk-inspired nationalists, agonised that
"so many prisoners were being tortured". But his impulse was to
"write beautiful fiction, not propaganda".
When in Istanbul, he walks to his office, overlooking the stretch
of water between Europe and Asia, from Pamuk Apartments, the modern
block his family built in the early 1950s. His first reaction to the
Nobel "was to say it would not change my life". But "it did – I’m more
social. And I’m working even harder." One benefit of winning the prize,
he says, is that "all the family made up": the publication of Pamuk’s
memoir, Istanbul (2003), temporarily "destroyed my relationship
with my mother", Shekure, who opposed his becoming a writer, and
also led to a breakdown in relations with Sevket, whose beatings he
had described. "Now we’re friendly," he says with a boyish grin. And
though he has lived alone since his marriage to the historian Aylin
Turegen ended in 2001, he says his ex-wife and teenage daughter Ruya
"remain my best friends".
His Istanbul, a "city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy", is
mostly taken from the 1950s and 60s, he says, "the troubled town that
turned inward, that learned from history not to aspire to much. It’s
the same for my characters; they feel second-rate, secondary to the
west." His early, untranslated novels, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982)
and The Quiet House (1983), were family sagas, modelled on Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.
But he turned to 17th-century Constantinople in The White Castle
(1985), a tale of confused identities between a Venetian Christian
slave and the Ottoman master who looked like him. Wherever "a
non-western culture wants to be occidentalised – or ‘globalised’
– the question of authenticity arises", Pamuk says. "It’s a social
inevitability, but you blame yourself; you live it personally." To
be a writer "is to acknowledge the secret wounds we carry inside us",
sharing our secret shame to "bring about our liberation".
Having attended an American school in Istanbul, he read the Sufi
classics "in a secular, metaphysical way. That paved the way to
relocating them in contemporary Istanbul’s labyrinthine streets." In
The Black Book (1990), a "Dadaist collage" of Proustian nostalgia,
Islamic allegory and detective fiction, a lawyer searches for his
missing wife in the months before the 1980 coup. The murder mystery
My Name is Red (1998) takes place in 16th-century Constantinople,
as the sultan’s court miniaturists are supplanted by post-Renaissance
notions of art. Faced with major cultural change, he says, there is a
"trauma of being forgotten". He likens it to the arrival of a Xerox
machine in a village of prestigious copyists. "The consequences are
my subject: the pain, fury, physical attacks on the machine."
A self-avowed "optimistic westerniser who stubbornly resists
disillusionment", Pamuk is troubled by what he sees as the costs of
westernisation. While tradition is resilient, he says, democracy may be
less so. In his most overtly political novel, Snow (2002), set in the
town of Kars on Turkey’s north-east border with Georgia and Armenia
in the 1990s, as civil war rages with secessionist Kurds, militant
secularists stage a coup against rising political Islamists. Pamuk
set himself the task of identifying with the "Islamists – the devil
in Turkey’s westernised media.
It’s taboo, but identifying with someone is not agreeing with them. At
the heart of fiction lies a unique human talent to identify with
the pain, pleasure, joy, boredom of others. Once you base your art
on that, you’re political." As he writes in an essay: "The history
of the novel is a history of human liberation. By putting ourselves
in another’s shoes, by using our imagination to shed our identities,
we are able to set ourselves free.
"Both the secularists and the political Islamists were upset,
but I survive," he shrugs. The novel, he says drily, made him
"headscarf professor" for a while, though he insists there is no
simple solution. "It’s been a problem for 50 years: people wearing
conservative dress can’t participate in official life, so that created
fertile ground for political Islamists and military-backed so-called
secularists to fight each other – which they love to do."
For all the conflicts over Turkish identity, Pamuk is convinced that
having a "single spirit" would be worse. "The economy is booming
and [that’s] hard to squeeze into one line of thought. Turkey
should develop tolerance – and I think that’s what’s going to
happen." Yet he sees the secular establishment as having "fuelled
anti-westernism with nationalist propaganda, forgetting that Ataturk
was an arch-occidentalist – it’s an obvious contradiction."
The Iraq war, which he opposed, has also "made life for liberal,
secular democrats in Islamic countries so much tougher".
Pamuk is finishing his eighth novel, Museum of Innocence. Set in
the 1970s, it "chronicles Istanbul’s bourgeois high society; the
problems of living a westernised life, and how much they’re embedded
in a tradition that is denied – especially in terms of sexual
morality". Modern nations, he has said, do their deepest thinking
about themselves "through novels". He has readers across the world,
but his greatest satisfaction is in being a "devoted writer, surviving
and making my books read in my own country.
That’s the hardest thing."
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