[ad_1]
Turkey’s crucial presidential election, the second round of which will be held on Sunday, will not only have geopolitical consequences; it is also a place for culture. Since 2016, after the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government here has cracked down on artists, writers, filmmakers and academics, who have faced censorship, job losses and a climate of fear.
For novelist Burhan Sönmez, who is part of the country’s ethnic Kurdish minority, the upheavals of the Erdogan years are just the latest chapter in the ongoing struggle between Turkish power and Turkish art.
Born outside Ankara in 1965, his first language was Kurdish, he worked as a human rights lawyer but was exiled in England after a police raid. He has written five novels, including the award-winning “Istanbul Istanbul,” “Labyrinth” and “Stone and Shadow,” which was recently released in English by Other Press. These novels explore prison and memory, with echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jorge Luis Borges.
Sönmez currently lives in Istanbul and Cambridge, and in 2021 he was named president of PEN International, where he is a defender of freedom of expression in Turkey and elsewhere.
I spoke with Sönmez via video a few days after the first round of the Turkish general election, in which Erdogan finished half a point shy of an absolute majority. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Istanbul is always a city of arrival. When did you first come here?
During the military coup era, the 1980s. I was born and raised in a small village in central Turkey. It is in the middle of the countryside, like a deserted village, without electricity. I moved to Istanbul to study law, and the next phase of my life began after I was exiled in England. So now I can combine these different places – the small village, the big Istanbul and Europe. They all come together and sometimes they separate.
Often, there is indeterminacy setting in your novel, not only geography but time. You rarely use that clearly informs technology or current affairs that some authors use to read the reader at the time.
Especially in my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I didn’t mention the year, or the specific period, when it happened. When people read it, everyone feels that this is the story of a generation.
For better and worse!
yes already. But, you know, only a naive writer would be proud. You will say, “Okay, I’m portraying the feelings of different generations in one novel.” In fact, it comes from its own society in Turkey. Every generation has experienced the same suffering, the same problems, the same oppression, the same pain. So it’s not a literary talent, really, to bring all those moments together into one story.
In “Istanbul, Istanbul,” the narrator is a prisoner, held without charge in an underground cell, who tells the story. What these stories aggregate is the Istanbul of a dream country, where freedom is always abbreviated but freethinkers and artists keep loving.
It really started in the 1850s, when the first liberal intellectuals were oppressed by the Ottoman sultans and went into European exile. When we look at this history over time, 150 or 170 years, we see that, every decade, the government uses the same method of oppression against writers, journalists, academics, intellectuals.
But the tradition of oppression also breeds a tradition of resistance. And now look: After 20 years of Erdogan’s rule, almost half of the public is still against him. We’re not done yet. This is part of the history of our resistance.
Turkey, like America, has a strong political fault line between urban and rural areas. But your novel has crisscrossed from Istanbul to rural Anatolia and back.
Especially in my last novel, “Stone and Shadow,” I wrote about this, comparing the east, the center and also the west of Turkey in the last 100 years.
What is the difference between living in a small village in the Turkish countryside and in Istanbul? You can tell it’s the difference between living in a small shack with gas lights and living on the street with flashing neon lights. Two different worlds, two different eras.
But you should know: Istanbul is now also part of the Turkish countryside. There has been a lot of migration from rural areas. When I studied in Istanbul, the population was about five million. Now there are 17 million. It is not easy for a big city to create new citizens, new cultural spirit.
On that subject, one of the most troubling themes of this election is the demonization of refugees. I wonder how it sounds to you, as a former refugee yourself.
Sadly for Turkey today, we have seen a new resurgence of nationalism – tinged with racism, actually – against immigrants. There is open racism against Syrians and Afghans in Turkey. And each side, each political platform, has a different way of legitimizing this.
The right-wing people say, “These people are Arabs who are less advanced. They are a backward race.” From secular progressives, you hear, “Oh, they are right-wing Islamic militants. They are here to support Erdogan, and attack our country, to make it an Islamic republic. In each case, racism or hatred of immigrants is at the top of the agenda.
Nationalism now dominates almost all political movements.
But there is a rare lightness and freedom to the characterization of these political themes. “Labyrinth,” the story of a musician who lost his memory after jumping into the Bosphorus, barely hints at the upheavals of Erdogan’s year, when an amnesiac sees a collapsed poster of the president and confuses it for the sultan.
We know the difference between art and journalism. Journalism speaks directly. Using this different artistic language, we feel that we are no longer in the field of society, politics. Political matters or historical facts are just colors in my novels. That’s real power. When I write a novel, I feel like I’m uniting the past and the future. Because the past is a story and the future is a dream.
Has there been censorship of artists and writers in Turkey in the past few years?
Well, first of all, every year more than 500 new Turkish novels are published. When I was at university, the number of new novels published in Turkish was about 15 or 20. The difference was huge.
With the younger generation, I see that they are brave. Despite all this oppression, the danger of going to prison or becoming unemployed, young people write without fear. He writes about Kurdish issues, about women, about LGBT, about political crimes in Turkey.
Hundreds of writers are like this: they write openly, and at some point quite dangerously, for themselves. This is something we should be proud of.
As president of PEN International, you have a very close view of the state of freedom of expression. Has it gotten better in Turkey since the crackdowns of 2016-2017, when thousands of academics and journalists were arrested or purged?
No, no, no better. In Turkey, we never distinguish between the bad and the good. It’s always: bad or worse.
In Turkey, PEN International has supported writers in prison. For me, being a lawyer, I have the opportunity to go to jail. Whenever I go to Turkey, I use this advantage. I went and I saw Selahattin Demirtas, or Osman Kavala, many people. Sad to see great people still in prison.
But it’s also good 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 said, “Hell is not a place where we suffer, but a place where no one hears us suffer.” I knew that if I was caught, I would not be left alone.
I probably don’t ask what they want when Turkey votes in the presidential runoff next Sunday. …
No, you have to ask. I think we will win. I am very optimistic in life, and very naive.
[ad_2]
Source link