Identity Crisis

Books discussed in this essay:
Istanbul: Memories and the City
by Orhan Pamuk
translated by Maureen Freely
Alfred A. Knopf (2005 )
320 pp. with 206 photographs, $36

Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
translated by Maureen Freely
Alfred A. Knopf (2005 )
426 pp., $38

The Economist likes to lace its clever commentary with acid. In its March 2005 survey of Turkey, it invoked Czar Nicholas I’s infamous diagnosis of the Ottoman Empire as “the sick man of Europe,” and then noted that, “Over the years many Turks have quoted this with perverse pride. They may have been sick, but at least they were part of Europe.”

Since its birth as a secular nation-state a century ago, Turkey has been caught in the intersecting shadows of imperial decline and Western nationalism, while roiled by questions of Islam’s place in national life. Turkey’s modern ills bespeak a much longer story. Six hundred years of Ottoman civilization fell after World War I, a buckling that prepared the way for General Mustafa Kemal, later apotheosized as “Atatürk” (father of the Turks), to initiate the vigorous reinvention of a fallen Islamic imperium as an ascendant secular nation-state. The Turkish patriotism that developed was intended as both a cure for a collective psyche wounded by its post-imperial diminishment and an equalizer for a people anxious to stand beside their advanced Western neighbours.

Today, Turkey is poised for entry talks with the European Union this October and both pulled toward and pushed away from political, military, economic, and cultural identifications with Asia, the Mediterranean, and the West. It remains troubled by its struggles with Greece over Cyprus and by the plaints of its Kurdish minority. Above all else, Turkish life is perpetually concerned with Islam’s standing. This is a democracy with a fissile fundamentalist element; its religious status is guarded by generals rarely shy of boasting their brawn in the name of constitutionally enshrined secularism. In short, modern Turkey is embedded at the axis of contemporary geopolitics.

As his recent books make clear, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most prominent contemporary writer, is himself deeply rooted in this dense and dark soil. This native commitment, however, has been severely tested of late. In a February interview, Pamuk openly criticized Turkey’s 1915 massacre of its Armenian minority, an event still fraught with controversy in Turkey. In the still-unfolding aftermath, Pamuk’s books have been removed from Turkish libraries and burned in political rallies; he has been sued for anti-state actions and pilloried in major newspapers. Security concerns have precluded a book tour. Critically renowned, translated into more than thirty languages, Pamuk is surpassing Salman Rushdie as the world’s pre-eminent Muslim writer. This, Pamuk is realizing, can be a burdensome achievement.

At the start of Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk admits that he must cut a peculiar figure for a cosmopolitan novelist. He has never left his native city. Our age, he observes, is “defined by mass migration and creative immigrants.... My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.” This searching memoir establishes Istanbul, with its Byzantine, Ottoman, European, Mediterranean, Turkish, Christian, and Islamic influences and inheritances, as providing a difficult and beguiling enough pluralism for Pamuk to write about home from home.

From boyhood through early life, with over 200 personal and historical prints accompanying his painterly prose, Pamuk comes into knowledge of self and world through his explorations of Istanbul’s criss-crossed cultural lineage. He meditates on the writings of its famous European visitors, among them a miserable Gustave Flaubert, who suffered through a case of syphilis while in town but also found ample matter to nurture his “interest in the strange, the frightening, the filthy, and the queer.” Pamuk also celebrates Istanbul’s idiosyncratic local voices, notably the ambitious Resat Ekrem Koçu, who, over the course of three decades, wrote over 5,000 pages of “the world’s first encyclopedia about a single city” but never got past the letter G.

Pamuk devotes much space to tracing out both his city’s and his own artistic lineage but is more concerned with sketching his education as a member of a down-at-the-heels bourgeois family. Though he recommends that “Istanbul’s greatest virtue is its people’s ability to see the city through both western and eastern eyes,” the biographical evidence and critiques on offer in this book suggest that the East/West gateway vision that the city affords comes at a cost. The Pamuks live among extended relatives in an expansive apartment building brimming with the depression and drama of genteel poverty. These people fit remarkably well into modern Istanbul, an “ageing and impoverished city buried under the ashes of a ruined empire.”

His early life, having developed amid pervasive gloom, Pamuk identifies melancholy—in its distinctively Turkish form, hüzün—as the defining feature of the city and its citizenry. His accompanying descriptions of twentieth-century Istanbul in its dusky richness provide many wistful moments. Pamuk finds hüzün in “the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions;” in “seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels;” in “the broken see-saws in empty parks;” and in “the chiaroscuro of twilight” that spreads over Istanbul’s dim streets and seeps into its crumbling buildings.

Beyond his melancholic poetics, Pamuk also explores hüzün’s ugly origin in the Faustian pact that Turkish elites have kept for decades with the military that regulates the nation’s westward secularism. In the memoir’s most punishing moments, Pamuk rebukes his family and their comfortable counterparts for their self-serving support of the “secular fury of Atatürk’s new Republic.” Assuming that “to move away from religion was to be modern and western,” these Istanbullus were poised for material success and bourgeois refinement in the new, European-minded nation. Surveying his family’s resultant diminishments, Pamuk regards this gambit as no great cause for boasting. Not only has the ruling class condoned forty years of military interventions aimed at the country’s impoverished religious majority, but for those well-heeled, enlightened citizens apparently benefiting from the generals’ putsch, “nothing came to fill the spiritual void. Cleansed of religion, home became as empty as the city’s ruined yalis [mansions] and as gloomy as the fern-darkened gardens surrounding them.”

Depictions of the spiritual alienation, cultural smugness, military might, and class divisions that infuse this desolate cityscape compel us to renounce romance for more exacting considerations. How are we to receive beauty born of a civilization that remains in turmoil because of its schizophrenic history and contemporary makeup?

While Istanbul falls short of a sustained treatment of this question, Pamuk’s latest masterpiece, Snow, leaves Istanbul to address it with atomized intensity. This novel responds to Turkey’s continued effort to pound a modern Western patina onto its post-imperial, God-haunted landscape by detailing the many lives blunted and broken for patriotism and progress. Taut and compulsively readable, Snow also recounts the unexpected poetry and love cultivated beneath contemporary life’s grim harrows of fundamentalism and nationalism.

Snow’s protagonist is Ka, a poet in political exile who returns to his native Istanbul from Frankfurt to attend his mother’s funeral. A spate of suicides by Muslim schoolgirls has broken out as a result of state-mandated prohibitions against wearing head scarves in school. Ostensibly seeking to write about the situation, Ka travels to Kars, a depressed town near the former Soviet border where young women have been taking their lives in particularly large numbers rather than baring their heads. With “Suicide is Blasphemy” signs dotting the landscape and citizens accepting a surveillance society and prefabricated news, the setting encapsulates greater Turkey’s uneasy position as a civilizational switching point. The local newspaper is called the Border City Gazette; Kars’ architecture and culture owe much to six centuries of competing traversals by Ottoman, Russian, and British imperial armies; and its population is made up of Persian, Greek, Circassian, Armenian, and other tribes, migrants, and refugees that have settled and resettled in its environs. This deep and multifarious history, having been summarily reinvented as strictly Turkish in the name of patriotic purification by the descending national army during the 1920s, bequeaths universal “destitution, depression, and decay” to Kars’ modern-day residents, along with a contemporary social order as thick and confusing as the city’s genealogy.

Arriving just as the town becomes isolated by a snowstorm that goes on for days, Ka is quickly embroiled in Kars’ chaotic politics. The players include Islamic terrorists, Muslim feminists, student radicals, Turkish nationalists, Kurdish insurgents, unbowed socialists, secret police, neighbourhood power brokers, newspaper editors, state bureaucrats, municipal election candidates, and the omnipresent army, not to mention the leaders of a revolutionary theatre company, who stage a nationalistic, anti-Islamist play that turns out to be a pretext for a coup. These parties seize on each other like a clutch of cockroach dervishes, competing to manipulate Ka into their intrigues and machinations.

As he gets swept up in the crisis engulfing Kars, Ka attempts to revive his faltering poetic abilities, and to kindle a romance with Ipek, a recently divorced former classmate. The novel’s ensuing interplay between the public and the personal reveals that its protagonist moves so naturally and willingly between political commitments, private desires, and artistic achievements because, in this world, where convenient divisions of East and West have been outmoded since the fall of Constantinople, love and betrayal and brutality and beauty can be similarly indistinguishable.

This is how poetry is born in the age of war and terror. At the start of an astonishing sequence, Ka feels “a surge of joy” while standing beside Sunay, the actor-cum-coup leader, on a bridge overlooking darkened Kars in the midst of revolution. Enraptured by his vista of “the beautiful snow-covered city with its empty old mansions,” Ka is also “enjoying this proximity to real power.” As Sunay issues orders via walkie-talkie, Ka notices “the wretched shantytown” across the frozen river, where the poor are easy marks for Islamic radicalization and, therefore, obviously justified targets for Kemalist tanks. He listens to Sunay reflect on his love for Kars and to his clever Hegelian justification for the coup, then witnesses a condensed version of twenty-first-century nationalism at work:



This passage, Pamuk at his best, matches sangfroid intelligence with pointillist imagery; arranging together religion, poverty, and military efficiency, punctuated by an ignorant, cheerful dog barking before a burned-out building and playing with corpses-to-be. It is a visceral imprint of the indiscriminate and senseless butchery found far too widely today. And how does it move Ka, its proximate witness? He follows Sunay back to his headquarters and writes a poem that we never see.

Snow makes for difficult reading because it challenges our expectations of the artist mixed up in the loud, hard world. Here, we want to condemn Ka as a conscienceless aesthete because he blissfully poeticizes alongside a would-be tyrant at work. At other times, we want him to cut through the conflict and chaos by writing poetry that sets an assured cast of heroes, villains, and victims. But Pamuk thwarts our desire for clarity. By emphasizing Ka’s ability to hold manifold and contradictory sympathies in suspended orbit, and then veiling the verse that this inspires him to write, Pamuk prevents both poet and poetry from being subjected to moralizing litmus tests and ideological sniffing. More generally, his characterizations are correlative to Turkey’s prismatic complexity, which, the novel makes clear, results from the raw and unceasing interplay between its Islamic pathologies and westernizing pressures. As a result, neither Ka nor Sunay, nor any of the other major characters, not even the terrorist leader, Blue, is drawn so flat as to be a steady marker of right and wrong, or good and evil, or honour and shame, as each tries to beat the others to claiming a singular and stable identity for Turkey.

Eventually, Snow’s whorl of themes and characters tighten around the issue of whether a central character will remove her head covering at the climax of Sunay’s next patriotic production. Because Ka is so immersed in Kars’ familial, romantic, and political crises, his services are variously demanded. He only wants to take the beautiful Ipek back to Frankfurt with him, but this proves contingent upon his securing a resolution amenable to everyone involved in the wider chaos. As the novel reaches its climax, Pamuk summons a melancholic fatedness that recalls Dostoevsky, and we accordingly sense that Ka’s task, demanded by all sides and frustrated by each, will prove impossible. Ka faces too many passionate and calculating men equipped by both East and West with guns and principles, who exercise power over a variegated population too exhausted by unremitting tumult to do anything other than applaud the last Turk standing.

Religion, politics, art, and the private life bind together in Pamuk with a force that the West can only recall today by reading Dante and Chaucer, which is precisely what makes Snow so immediate and important. But the postmodern sleight-of-hand that closes Snow discourages sterile intercultural insights into Islamic themes and the wider gyre of Turkish culture. As the novel closes, one of the characters addresses Western readers, assaulting what sympathetic relations we may have forged:

“If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.”

This vouchsafing of imaginative uncertainty is precisely what is needed in a world crowded by righteous men outfitted with destructive, absolutist presumptions about each other. While enlivening our curiosity, Pamuk’s books make a difficult virtue out of an unsettling necessity: they leave us grateful to be denied absolute knowledge of those faraway peoples, places, and problems that have become our unexpected intimates through the haphazard ways of near-history.