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The momentous Turkish presidential election, whose second spherical will happen on Sunday, has extra than simply geopolitical penalties; it’s a watershed for tradition as nicely. Since 2016, after a failed coup towards President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the authorities right here has cracked down on artists, writers, filmmakers and teachers, who’ve skilled censorship, job losses and a local weather of concern.
For the novelist Burhan Sönmez, who’s a part of the nation’s ethnic Kurdish minority, the upheavals of the Erdogan years are solely the newest chapter in an ongoing battle between Turkish energy and Turkish artwork.
Born outdoors Ankara in 1965, the place his first language was Kurdish, he labored as a human rights lawyer however went into exile in Britain after a police assault. He has written 5 novels, together with the prizewinning “Istanbul Istanbul,” “Labyrinth” and “Stone and Shadow,” newly out in English by Other Press. His novels delve into imprisonment and reminiscence, 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, the place he has been an outspoken defender of freedom of expression in Turkey and elsewhere.
I spoke to Sönmez over video just a few days after the first spherical of the Turkish common election, in which Erdogan completed a half-point shy of an absolute majority. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Istanbul has all the time been a metropolis of arrivals. When did you first come right here?
During the military-coup period, the Eighties. I used to be born and grew up in a small village in central Turkey. It’s in the center of the countryside, like a desert village, with out electrical energy. I moved to Istanbul to review legislation, and the subsequent part of my life started after I went to exile in Britain. So now I can mix these totally different areas — small village, huge Istanbul and then Europe. They all come collectively and generally they separate.
Frequently, there’s an indeterminacy of setting in your novels, not solely of geography however of time. You not often use the apparent tells of expertise or present affairs that some authors use to floor a reader in time.
Particularly in my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I didn’t state a selected 12 months, or interval, when the occasions happen. When individuals learn it, everybody feels that that is the story of their technology.
For higher and for worse!
Yes. But, you already know, solely a naïve author would really feel pleased with that. You would say, “OK, I am reflecting the feelings of different generations in a single novel.” In reality, it comes from the society itself in Turkey. Every technology has gone by means of the similar struggling, the similar issues, similar oppression, similar ache. So it isn’t a literary expertise, really, to convey all these occasions right into a single story.
In “Istanbul, Istanbul,” the narrators are prisoners, held with out cost in underground cells, who inform each other tales. What their tales sketch in mixture is a type of dream-state Istanbul, the place freedom is all the time abbreviated however with which freethinkers and artists stay hopelessly in love.
This actually began in the 1850s, when the first liberal intellectuals have been oppressed by the Ottoman sultan and went into European exile. When we have a look at this historical past over time, 150 or 170 years, we see that, with each decade, governments used the similar strategies of oppression towards writers, journalists, teachers, intellectuals.
But the custom of oppression additionally created a convention of resistance. And now look: After 20 years of the rule of Erdogan, nonetheless almost half of society is towards him strongly. We haven’t completed. This is partly our historical past of resistance.
Turkey, like America, has a robust political fault line between the cities and the countryside. But your novels have crisscrossed from Istanbul to rural Anatolia and again.
Especially in my final novel, “Stone and Shadow,” I wrote about this, evaluating the japanese, center and additionally the western a part of Turkey over the final 100 years.
What’s the distinction between life in a small village in rural Turkey and in Istanbul? You may say it’s the distinction between dwelling in a small hut with a fuel lamp and dwelling on a road with flashing neon lights. Two totally different worlds, two totally different eras.
But you must perceive: Istanbul is now additionally a part of rural Turkey. There has been an enormous migration from the countryside. When I went to review in Istanbul, the inhabitants was about 5 million. Now it’s 17 million. It’s not simple for a giant metropolis to create a brand new citizen, a brand new cultural spirit.
On that topic, certainly one of the most annoying themes of this election has been the demonization round refugees. I’m wondering the way it sounds to you, as a former refugee your self.
The unhappy factor for Turkey now, we’ve seen a brand new rise of nationalism — in the colour of racism, really — towards immigrants. There’s open racism towards Syrians and Afghan individuals in Turkey. And each aspect, each political platform, has alternative ways of legitimizing this.
Right-wingers say, “These people are underdeveloped Arabs. This is a backward race.” From secular progressive individuals, 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 each case, racism or hatred of immigrants is on the high of the agenda.
Nationalism now dominates virtually each political motion.
Yet there’s a uncommon lightness and freedom to your characterization of those political themes. “Labyrinth,” the story of a musician who loses his reminiscence after leaping into the Bosporus, barely hints at the upheavals of the Erdogan years, when the amnesiac sees a torn poster of the president and confuses him for a sultan.
We know the distinction between artwork and journalism. Journalism speaks immediately. Speaking this totally different language of artwork, we really feel that we’re not in the subject of society, of politics. A political matter or a historic reality is only a colour in my novel. That is actual energy. When I write a novel, I really feel that I unite the previous and the future. Because the previous is a narrative and the future is a dream.
Has there been a self-censorship of artists and writers in Turkey over the previous couple of years?
Well, first, yearly greater than 500 new Turkish novels are being printed. When I used to be at the college, the variety of new novels printed in Turkish was about 15 or 20. That’s an unlimited distinction.
With the younger technology, I see that they’re courageous. Despite all this oppression, this hazard of going to jail or being unemployed, younger individuals are writing fearlessly. They are writing about Kurdish points, about girls’s points, about L.G.B.T. points, about political crimes in Turkey.
Hundreds of writers are like this: writing brazenly, and sooner or later a bit dangerously, for themselves. This is one thing of which we must be proud.
As president of PEN International, you could have a very shut view of the state of free expression. Have issues gotten any higher in Turkey since the crackdowns of 2016-2017, when hundreds of teachers and journalists have been arrested or purged?
No, no, it’s not higher. In Turkey, we by no means obtained to differentiate between unhealthy and good. It was all the time: unhealthy or worse.
In Turkey, PEN International has been supporting writers in jail. For myself, being a lawyer, I’ve the alternative to go to prisons. Anytime I’m going to Turkey, I take advantage of this benefit. I’m going and I see Selahattin Demirtas, or Osman Kavala, so many individuals. It is unhappy to see nice individuals are nonetheless in jail.
But additionally it’s nice to see that we have now solidarity. At the finish 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 do know that if I’m arrested, I’ll by no means be left alone.
I most likely shouldn’t ask you what you anticipate when Turks vote in the presidential runoff subsequent Sunday. …
No, you must ask. I feel we’ll win. I’m too optimistic in life, and very naïve.
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