ISTANBUL — The momentous Turkish presidential election,
whose second round will take place Sunday, has more than just geopolitical
consequences; it is a watershed for culture as well. Since 2016, after a failed
coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government here has cracked down
on artists, writers, filmmakers and academics, who have experienced censorship,
job losses and a climate of fear.
اضافة اعلان
For novelist Burhan Sönmez, who is part of the country’s
ethnic Kurdish minority, the upheavals of the Erdogan years are only the latest
chapter in an ongoing struggle between Turkish power and Turkish art.
Born outside Ankara, Turkey, in 1965, where his first
language was Kurdish, he worked as a human rights lawyer but went into exile in
Britain after a police assault. He has written five novels, including the
prizewinning “Istanbul Istanbul”, “Labyrinth”, and “Stone and Shadow”, newly
out in English by Other Press. His novels delve into imprisonment and memory,
with echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jorge Luis Borges.
Sönmez now lives in Istanbul and Cambridge, and in 2021, he
was named president of PEN International, where he has been an outspoken
defender of freedom of expression in Turkey and elsewhere.
We spoke to Sönmez over video a few days after the first
round of the Turkish general election, in which Erdogan finished a half-point
shy of an absolute majority.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Istanbul has always been a city of arrivals. When did you
first come here?
During the military coup era, the 1980s. I was born and grew
up in a small village in central Turkey. It is in the middle of the
countryside, like a desert village, without electricity. I moved to Istanbul to
study law, and the next phase of my life began after I went to exile in
Britain. So now I can combine those different spaces — small village, big
Istanbul and then Europe. They all come together, and sometimes they separate.
Frequently, there is an indeterminacy of setting in your
novels, not only of geography but of time. You rarely use the obvious tells of
technology or current affairs that some authors use to ground a reader in time.
Particularly in my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I did not
state a specific year or period when the events take place. When people read
it, everyone feels that this is the story of their generation.
For better and for worse!
Yes. But, you know, only a naive writer would feel proud of
that. You would say, “OK, I am reflecting the feelings of different generations
in a single novel.” In fact, it comes from the society itself in Turkey. Every
generation has gone through the same suffering, the same problems, same
oppression, same pain. So it is not a literary talent, actually, to bring all
those times into a single story.
In “Istanbul, Istanbul,” the narrators are prisoners, held
without charge in underground cells, who tell one another stories. What their
stories sketch in aggregate is a kind of dream-state Istanbul, where freedom is
always abbreviated but with which freethinkers and artists remain hopelessly in
love.
This really started in the 1850s, when the first liberal
intellectuals were oppressed by the Ottoman sultan and went into European
exile. When we look at this history over time, 150 or 170 years, we see that,
with every decade, governments used the same methods of oppression against
writers, journalists, academics, intellectuals.
But the tradition of oppression also created a tradition of
resistance. And now look: After 20 years of the rule of Erdogan, still nearly
half of society is against him strongly. We have not finished. This is partly
our history of resistance.
Turkey, like America, has a strong political fault line
between the cities and the countryside. But your novels have crisscrossed from
Istanbul to rural Anatolia and back.
Especially in my last novel, “Stone and Shadow,” I wrote
about this, comparing the eastern, middle, and also the western part of Turkey
over the last 100 years.
What’s the difference between life in a small village in
rural Turkey and in Istanbul? You could say it’s the difference between living
in a small hut with a gas lamp and living on a street with flashing neon lights
— two different worlds, two different eras.
But you should understand: Istanbul is now also part of
rural Turkey. There has been a huge migration from the countryside. When I went
to study in Istanbul, the population was about 5 million. Now it’s 17 million.
It is not easy for a big city to create a new citizen, a new cultural spirit.
On that subject, one of the most disturbing themes of this
election has been the demonization around refugees. I wonder how it sounds to
you, as a former refugee yourself.
The sad thing for Turkey now: We have seen a new rise of
nationalism — in the color of racism, actually — against immigrants. There is
open racism against Syrians and Afghan people in Turkey. And every side, every
political platform, has different ways of legitimizing this.
Right-wingers say, “These people are underdeveloped Arabs.
This is a backward race.” From secular progressive people, you hear, “Oh,
they’re right-wing Islamist militants. They are here to support Erdogan and to
invade our country, to turn it into an Islamic republic.” In every case, racism
or hatred of immigrants is on the top of the agenda.
Nationalism now dominates almost every political movement.
Has there been a self-censorship of artists and writers in
Turkey over the last few years?Well, first, every year, more than 500 new Turkish novels
are being published. When I was at the university, the number of new novels
published in Turkish was about 15 or 20. That is an enormous difference.
With the young generation, I see that they are brave.
Despite all this oppression, this danger of going to prison or being
unemployed, young people are writing fearlessly. They are writing about Kurdish
issues, about women’s issues, about LGBT issues, about political crimes in
Turkey.
Hundreds of writers are like this: writing openly, and at
some point a bit dangerously, for themselves. This is something of which we
should be proud.
As president of PEN International, you have a particularly
close view of the state of free expression. Have things gotten any better in
Turkey since the crackdowns of 2016–17, when thousands of academics and
journalists were arrested or purged?
No, no, it is not better. In Turkey, we never got to
distinguish between bad and good. It was always bad or worse.
In Turkey, PEN International has been supporting writers in
prison. For myself, being a lawyer, I have the opportunity to go to prisons.
Anytime I go to Turkey, I use this advantage. I go and I see Selahattin
Demirtas, or Osman Kavala — so many people. It is sad to see great people are
still in prison.
But also it is great to see that we have solidarity. At the
end of my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I used an epigraph by a Persian Sufi from
the Middle Ages. He says, “Hell is not the place where we suffer, it’s the
place where no one hears us suffering.” I know that if I am arrested, I will
never be left alone.
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