The colour of blood is snow

The trial of Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Laureate for Literature this year, was also a trial of his native Turkey, a country unwilling to face its hoary past

Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata

Orhan Pamuk’s trial was, to the larger world, also a trial of the progressiveness of the entire nation of Turkey. Did Pamuk become a Nobel Laureate at the expense of exposing his own country’s culture of silence and oppression, genocidal record and state assault on constitutional freedom to the whole world?

The most famous author from Turkey and Literature Nobel Laureate for 2006 spoke in February 2005 to the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger about the Turkish genocide of Armenians. He has met with unmitigated hatred ever since. His books were burned at a nationalist demonstration in Bilecik; a district administrator ordered them to be removed from libraries; and his photo was ripped apart at a rally in Isparta province. Hürriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper, called Pamuk an “abject creature”. He was initially forced to flee Turkey because of the hate campaign being waged against him. But, then, there was an international outcry, with Amnesty International, PEN (the worldwide association of writers) and a collection of renowned authors (including Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike, Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco) denouncing Turkey’s actions to curtail Pamuk’s right to free speech. Pamuk was able to return to his country, possibly because of this international outcry, as Turkey was afraid muzzling Pamuk would undermine its chances for becoming a member of the European Union (EU).

Somehow, the trial of Pamuk has become more symbolic than the literary oeuvre of a man who brought to light the traditionalist core of a society covered over with a thin layer of ill-seated modernity. Many commentators have stressed on the politics of the Nobel—Pamuk being among the first writers to be put on trial for mentioning the Armenian massacres of 1915, etc. Although Pamuk’s literary excellence is indubitable, his trial got more attention than what he does best—writing.

Pamuk’s writings focus on the religiosity and backwardness of Turkey and its Ottoman roots, mixed with a harking back to lost Islamic glory. They speak, too, of Ataturk’s legacy—without his élan and vision—that tries to disown its past of the Kurd and Armenian massacres, but is keen to be seen as a forward-looking nation-state built on the remnants of a decadent empire. One gets most of this in his eight novels, the most notable being My Name Is Red, The Black Book, The New Life, The White Castle and Istanbul.

In his explosive comments published early last year, Pamuk was quoted as saying, “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” This was a not-so-oblique reference to the conflict between the Ottoman Armenians and the Empire’s armed forces during World War I, as well as the hostilities ongoing since the mid-1980s between the Turkish Republic and Kurdish separatists. For his remarks on the alleged genocide of Kurds and Armenians in Anatolia between 1915 and 1917, he was charged by Turkish state prosecutors with “insulting Turkishness”—a new offence, which carries a prison sentence of up to three years as penalty. Pamuk’s trial opened on 16th December, 2005, and was rescheduled for 7th February, 2006—it posed a serious question about the secular democratic credentials of Turkey pending its entry into the European Union (EU). In <Snow> and <Istanbul>, too, Pamuk punched a hole into the fragile nationalist pride by disclosing Turkey’s hoary past. The lure of gaining access to the EU seemed to act for him, as the Turkish government did not want to undermine its human rights record; charges of insulting Turkishness against Pamuk were dropped over a technicality earlier this year.

Pamuk has touched the raw nerves of the secular right-wing of Turkey. Not that Turkey disputes the deaths of ethnic Armenians in the conflicts that saw the Ottoman Empire fall. But it takes care to stress that the killings were never part of a genocidal campaign, arguing that many ethnic Turks also lost their lives during that period. It also repudiates claims that its efforts to contain Kurdish separatist uprisings can be classed as genocide. No two issues are more loaded—political or divisive—and using any of them as fuel in the anti-EU campaign is deemed risible in Turkey.

Apart from its past, Turkey, in more ways than one, is the brand ambassador of the success of a Western-style secular Muslim state and is, as such, considered a foil to radical Islam. Pamuk, in his novels, writes about the crisis of identity that originates from living in a Westernised fashion in a society that is essentially non-Western in its ethos. He admits that, following the occidental, secular reforms introduced by Kemal Ataturk, Turkish culture was divided into two: the modern culture influenced by Europe and the Ottoman Islamic heritage. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, all the cultural and material wealth of the Middle East flew towards Istanbul. Turkey has a highly-educated secular elite class. The founders of the modern Republic of Turkey, Pamuk says, “naively” thought that a shortcut to modernity—to Europe—would be to forget about the past; they crudely suppressed Ottoman Islamic cultural history. “I write modern, some say post-modern, avant-garde-inspired novels, which is a Western form, but they carry that suppressed Ottoman culture, Islamic culture,” he says.

Do present-day Turks see themselves as the grieving heirs of what was once a world empire? In his novel, My Name Is Red, Pamuk paints a picture of Istanbul the way it was at the height of Ottoman power. The Ottoman period is, for most Europeans and Americans—and perhaps for many Turks as well—a poorly-understood time. The Ottoman Turks were the last of the great Eastern invaders—a group including the Huns, the Arabs and the Mongols that swept into Europe. The images that have trickled down are of moustachioed janissaries, pillaging in the name of Islam, contrasted with the perceived opulent licentiousness of the harem—images that have become synonymous with Islam in much-popular thought. A murder mystery and love story, My Name Is Red is set among the artistic intrigues of the Islamic miniaturists of the Ottoman court in 16th-century Istanbul. It is a rich and complex work, narrated by a range of voices that explores the tension between East and West, Islam and Christianity.

Pamuk, therefore, serves as the much-needed bridge between the West and the East, between an ancient Islamic culture and the contemporary dream of an economically prosperous nation. His memoir, Istanbul, for instance, chronicles the pervasive sadness and anger that attended the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the wholesale cultural imitation of the West. Snow is a tryst between tradition and modernity, the East with the West, and the cultural encounters between Europe and the turbulent Ottoman Empire, which underlined the European aspiration of a Muslim nation. At some point in history, Istanbul was the centre of both Islam and Christianity, and Pamuk’s work is often about the melting of the two.

Pamuk is looked upon as the West’s mouthpiece in the Islamic world, which believes that it is this dubious distinction that earned him the Nobel. In 1989, when the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini was haunting Rushdie, Pamuk had the guts to rise up in Rushdie’s defence. To do so, from a Muslim country, called for courage. His refusal to accept the Turkish government’s award of ‘state artist’, in protest against its repressive role in the treatment of his fellow writers and the Kurdish freedom fighters in December 1998, is, again, a comment on his political conviction.

A purveyor of the theme of clashes between civilisations and the role of Islam, Pamuk’s works give us an understanding of the origins of these clashes and the rise of political Islam.