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 properly. Since 2016, after a failed coup in opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the federal government right here has cracked down on artists, writers, filmmakers and teachers, who’ve skilled censorship, job losses and a local weather of worry.
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 Different 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 Worldwide, the place he has been an outspoken defender of freedom of expression in Turkey and elsewhere.
I spoke to Sönmez over video a number of days after the primary spherical of the Turkish common election, by 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?
Through the military-coup period, the Nineteen Eighties. I used to be born and grew up in a small village in central Turkey. It’s in the course of the countryside, like a desert village, with out electrical energy. I moved to Istanbul to review legislation, and the following part of my life started after I went to exile in Britain. So now I can mix these totally different areas — small village, massive Istanbul after which Europe. All of them come collectively and typically they separate.
Steadily, there’s an indeterminacy of setting in your novels, not solely of geography however of time. You hardly ever use the apparent tells of expertise or present affairs that some authors use to floor a reader in time.
Significantly 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 era.
For higher and for worse!
Sure. However, you realize, solely a naïve author would really feel pleased with that. You’d say, “OK, I’m reflecting the emotions of various generations in a single novel.” In actual fact, it comes from the society itself in Turkey. Each era has gone by way of the identical struggling, the identical issues, similar oppression, similar ache. So it’s not a literary expertise, really, to deliver 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 form 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 within the 1850s, when the primary liberal intellectuals had been oppressed by the Ottoman sultan and went into European exile. After we have a look at this historical past over time, 150 or 170 years, we see that, with each decade, governments used the identical strategies of oppression in opposition to writers, journalists, teachers, intellectuals.
However the custom of oppression additionally created a practice of resistance. And now look: After 20 years of the rule of Erdogan, nonetheless almost half of society is in opposition to him strongly. We haven’t completed. That is partly our historical past of resistance.
Turkey, like America, has a powerful political fault line between the cities and the countryside. However your novels have crisscrossed from Istanbul to rural Anatolia and again.
Particularly in my final novel, “Stone and Shadow,” I wrote about this, evaluating the jap, center and in addition the western a part of Turkey during the last 100 years.
What’s the distinction between life in a small village in rural Turkey and in Istanbul? You might say it’s the distinction between residing in a small hut with a gasoline lamp and residing on a avenue with flashing neon lights. Two totally different worlds, two totally different eras.
However it is best to perceive: Istanbul is now additionally a part of rural Turkey. There was an enormous migration from the countryside. After 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, one of the vital disturbing 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 — within the coloration of racism, really — in opposition to immigrants. There’s open racism in opposition to Syrians and Afghan individuals in Turkey. And each facet, each political platform, has alternative ways of legitimizing this.
Proper-wingers say, “These individuals are underdeveloped Arabs. This can be a backward race.” From secular progressive individuals, you hear, “Oh, they’re right-wing Islamist militants. They’re right here to assist Erdogan, and to invade our nation, to show it into an Islamic republic.” In each case, racism or hatred of immigrants is on the highest of the agenda.
Nationalism now dominates nearly each political motion.
But 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 on the upheavals of the Erdogan years, when the amnesiac sees a torn poster of the president and confuses him for a sultan.
We all know the distinction between artwork and journalism. Journalism speaks instantly. Talking this totally different language of artwork, we really feel that we’re now not within the area of society, of politics. A political matter or a historic truth is only a coloration in my novel. That’s actual energy. After I write a novel, I really feel that I unite the previous and the longer term. As a result of the previous is a narrative and the longer term is a dream.
Has there been a self-censorship of artists and writers in Turkey over the previous few years?
Nicely, first, yearly greater than 500 new Turkish novels are being revealed. After I was on the college, the variety of new novels revealed in Turkish was about 15 or 20. That’s an unlimited distinction.
With the younger era, I see that they’re courageous. Regardless of all this oppression, this hazard of going to jail or being unemployed, younger individuals are writing fearlessly. They’re writing about Kurdish points, about ladies’s points, about L.G.B.T. points, about political crimes in Turkey.
A whole lot of writers are like this: writing brazenly, and in some unspecified time in the future a bit dangerously, for themselves. That is one thing of which we must be proud.
As president of PEN Worldwide, you could have a very shut view of the state of free expression. Have issues gotten any higher in Turkey because the crackdowns of 2016-2017, when hundreds of teachers and journalists had been arrested or purged?
No, no, it’s not higher. In Turkey, we by no means received to differentiate between unhealthy and good. It was all the time: unhealthy or worse.
In Turkey, PEN Worldwide has been supporting writers in jail. For myself, being a lawyer, I’ve the chance to go to prisons. Anytime I’m going to Turkey, I exploit this benefit. I’m going and I see Selahattin Demirtas, or Osman Kavala, so many individuals. It’s unhappy to see nice individuals are nonetheless in jail.
But additionally it’s nice to see that we’ve got solidarity. On the finish of my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I used an epigraph by a Persian Sufi from the Center Ages. He says, “Hell shouldn’t be the place the place we endure, it’s the place the place nobody hears us struggling.” 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 count on when Turks vote within the presidential runoff subsequent Sunday. …
No, it is best to ask. I believe we’ll win. I’m too optimistic in life, and really naïve.