Spotlight
Against silence
SHELLEY WALIA
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With Orhan Pamuk, the site of his creativity is also the location of political protest.
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PHOTO: AFP
Orhan Pamuk: The novel as a liberating force.
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."
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