A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk

Last December—three days before he went on trial for ‘publicly denigrating Turkishness’—I interviewed Orhan Pamuk. It was not and could never have been the usual sort of exchange, because we speak often: over the past three years, I have translated three of his books. We have known each other a lot longer than that. I grew up in Istanbul, on the campus of what was then Robert College and is now called Bogazici University; my father still teaches there. Pamuk attended Robert Academy, which in those days was on the same campus; I went to the sister school on the neighbouring hill. So the Istanbul that Pamuk describes in his books is the lost city of our youth.

We met at two in the afternoon in the apartment he has used as his office for the past ten years. It is located in Cihangir, on Susam Sokak, which means Sesame Street. Like all the other places where Pamuk spends his days, it is a temple to the book. In the middle of the front room there was a large desk piled high with them. Bookshelves lined the walls from ceiling to floor. There was one armchair between the desk and the window, another in the far corner, next to the large plateglass window; both were positioned so that the occupant could raise his eyes from the book to take in the sweeping view.

To the right was the Golden Horn, the silhouette of the old city and the humpbacked contours of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara. Were it not for the derelict apartments to the right, we would also have been able to see the first Bosphorus bridge. Directly ahead of us there was a mosque with two minarets and a dome crowned by a crescent. Between the minarets we could see the sprawling city on the Asian shore. Halfway across the Bosphorus, flecked as always with boats and ships of all sizes, were the dry docks that marked the path of the tunnel soon to link the two shores.

As I looked through the mosque’s two minarets, Pamuk told me how, when the mosque was lit up for evening prayers during the month of Ramadan, he could see right through its beautiful large arched windows to the sea. The haze rising from the Bosphorus gave it the dreamlike beauty of my memories. But this was my first day back in Istanbul, and on such days I always looked for what was new in the view. When I told him so, Pamuk pointed over at the Asian shore, where a gigantic Turkish flag flapped at the top of the tallest flagpole I had ever seen.

There was a cloud hanging over Pamuk that day. From the outside, the case against him made no sense at all. Inside Turkey, it was fraught with significance. Even the date—December 16, 2005—had an ominous resonance to some: Pamuk’s trial had been scheduled to begin exactly a year after the EU agreed to set a date for accession talks for Turkey, and on the day that Britain, Turkey’s strongest friend in Europe, handed over the EU presidency to Austria, Turkey’s most vocal opponent.

Why would Turkey want to play into its enemies’ hands? Most European observers thought it must have something to do with Islam. Though Turkey’s ruling party was officially pro-Europe, it was also overtly Islamist. Did this strange action against Pamuk signal a turn to the East?

This was not the question people were asking in Turkey. For them this was a struggle between what some call ‘tutelary democracy’ (in which the army holds the reins, stepping in whenever it sees ‘the nation’ straying from the righteous path) and something more in line with the social democracies of Europe.

It looked as if the democratizers were winning. The death penalty had been abolished. Some cultural rights had been accorded to Kurds. Turkey’s old penal code (based on Mussolini’s and designed to curb free expression of views deemed dangerous to the state) was to be replaced with a new code reflecting European norms. The EU was funding initiatives to teach judges and policemen what to do if they could not resort to torture, and the army seemed willing to lessen its role in politics. With the new freedoms had come an opening up of the public space, as previously silenced minorities began for the first time to participate in national debates. The burning question was not whether Turkey should face East or West, but whether it was now mature enough to allow for more diversity of opinion, stable enough to tolerate cultural difference—and confident enough to face up to its historical ghosts.

We in Europe like to shiver at the memory of the Siege of Vienna. Had the Habsburgs not been able to beat back the Ottoman army, would all of Europe have fallen into Muslim hands? In Turkey, they shiver at the memory of the Treaty of Sevres, when the victors of the First World War parcelled out what was left of the Ottoman Empire among themselves. Had Atatuerk not risen from the ashes to drive them out of Anatolia, might Turkey have become a European colony?

All countries beginning negotiations with the EU have seen a rise in anti-European and/or nationalist sentiment. In Turkey last year, the matter was complicated by the referenda in France and Holland and the rise of anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim sentiment in the same countries. It was further compounded by more general fears and anxieties about modernization, especially in the more traditional parts of Anatolia—which Pamuk himself explored in his novels The New Life and Snow, and which he has called the ‘Dostoevskian feelings of love and hate towards the West’.

But Turkey has a well-established Western-educated intelligentsia that, far from being cut off from the West, is fully conversant with European debates on Turkey. They were aware of the other obstacles that stood in Turkey’s way: the Kurdish issue, the Cyprus issue, human rights abuses and Turkey’s continuing refusal to accept that what happened to Anatolia’s Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide. By last year it seemed clear to some of them that Turkey was never going to get into Europe unless the taboo against discussing the fate of the Ottoman Armenians was resolved or debated with dignity.

A group of Turkish scholars, some in US and European universities, and others in Turkey’s more westward-looking universities, had already decided that the time had come to hold a conference in Turkey that might bring to an end the ban on open public discussion of the issue. The conference was to have been held at Bogazici University. Though it is now owned and run by the Turkish state, it was for its first hundred years an American-owned institution providing tuition in English for the city’s elites. It has long been a stronghold of secularism. Since the founding of the Republic in 1923, its graduates have played a key role in building bridges between Turkey and the West. Those behind the Armenian conference may have seen themselves in the same light. Even at Bogazici, the questions that gave rise to the conference were still hugely divisive. But at least people were talking about it. Fiery though their arguments were, they were doing what people in a secular democracy are meant to do.

Enter Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most celebrated novelist. Born in 1952, he has dominated the literary scene in Turkey for the past twenty-five years. But it was only with the publication of his third novel, The White Castle, in 1990 that he became available in English. It attracted a small but dedicated following that grew with the publication of The Black Book in 1995 and The New Life in 1997. In 2003 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his sixth novel, My Name is Red. Though he had by then won several prestigious European prizes, it was this book that won him a place in the literary pantheon. His two most recent books, Snow and Istanbul: Memories of a City, have confirmed that place and brought him admiring readers throughout the world.

But the better he has done in the outside world, the more controversial he has become at home. This is partly due to a powerful ambivalence about Turks who do well in the West, but also due to Pamuk’s controversial and widely covered views on human rights, the Kurds and Turkey’s power elites. His high profile in Europe and the United States meant that he could sometimes say things that might land a lesser-known writer in deep trouble. But whenever he was interviewed in the West, journalists were inclined to dramatize the political context, especially after 9/11. Sooner or later, these pieces would end up in rather dubious translations in the Turkish media. The increasingly nationalist right-wing press would go on to quote from them out of context and accuse him of making Turkey look bad abroad. It was in their interest, too, to present Pamuk as an anomaly and a lone voice. This was hardly true: as Pamuk himself had pointed out on numerous occasions, there was a long tradition of dissent in Turkey—a tradition for which many writers, journalists and scholars have had to pay with lengthy prison sentences, and sometimes even death.

But in recent years, there had been a gradual easing of sanctions and many in the intelligentsia had seized the moment. It was in the same spirit that Pamuk made his infamous remark to a Swiss journalist who interviewed him in Istanbul in February last year. The conversation turned to Turkey’s EU bid and its attitude to freedom of expression. Knowing that there was soon to be a conference on the Ottoman Armenians, he remarked that ‘thirty-thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands’ and went on to suggest that the time had come to break the silence.

Either this was the last straw for Turkey’s nationalists—a looseknit coalition dominated by old-guard secularists but also drawing support from fringe Islamist groups, the far left and the fascist right— or it was the opportunity they had been waiting for. Their supporters in the nationalist press went mad the next day, with some columnists going so far as to brand Pamuk a traitor and to invite ‘civil society’ to take steps to silence him. This translated into death threats that may or may not have been linked to fascist-nationalist paramilitaries. During this time Pamuk stayed abroad for a few months, returning from New York when the hate campaign seemed to be dying down. Then, last summer, he was called in for questioning by two public prosecutors. One decided that there was no case to be made, and the other charged him under Article 301 of the new penal code for ‘publicly denigrating Turkish identity’.

The news caused a furore in Europe, and it quickly became clear that it had done huge and perhaps irreparable damage to Turkey’s dreams of joining the EU. This was just as the nationalist lawyers and prosecutors behind the prosecution had hoped. Though the tabloid press and its nameless, faceless sponsors scared many of his potential allies into silence, the nationalists had a less pronounced effect on public opinion. The majority of Turks still wanted the country in the EU. Moderate voices still insisted that EU membership was the only rational way forward. But as the debate raged on, so too did the hate campaign against Pamuk. Running in parallel were other vicious campaigns against the organizers of the Armenian conference, which finally took place last September after several efforts on the part of the judiciary to shut it down. Perhaps because its organizers opened up public discussion of the Armenian question, they too were subjected to hate mail, death threats and a disinformation campaign. Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist who had played a role in the conference, was also tried under Article 301; shortly after he was given a suspended sentence, five other journalists who’d written columns criticizing the courts for trying to close down the conference were charged under the same article for insulting the judiciary. By then several publishers and scholars had also been charged for insulting the state, or the army, or Turkishness itself. According to some sources, the overall tally of Article 301 cases was more than sixty.