orhan pamuk's media blitz
Update: here is a fantastic piece by Maureen Freely, translator of Snow, that provides the best account of the whole affair I've seen in the English-language press thus far. And props to Pamuk for the quote in which he gives credit to several of the pioneers who have been pushing scholarly discussion of the Armenian issue in Turkey for years, and his mention of the Hrant Dink case.
Orhan Pamuk is all over the media this week, both in Turkey and abroad. My favorite thing so far is this interview in Der Speigel (via crooked timber), which is striking in large part because the interviewer keeps trying to paint a picture of Turkey as a horribly repressive place and Pamuk as a helpess victim of the state's machinery, and Pamuk keeps refusing to cooperate. At one point, the interviewer asks him if he was "fleeing" when he moved to New York for a short period because of threats from extreme nationalists, and Pamuk (rolling his eyes, I imagine) says, "You tend to over-dramatize things."
Pamuk sticks to the line he's been taking lately of firmly stating his support for EU membership (and the government's pursuit thereof) while criticizing continuing human rights shortcomings and the flawed penal code that has allowed him to be charged with a crime for his statements about the Armenian genocide. And although he states his annoyance that PM Erdoğan has not been more supportive, he also clearly lays the blame for the legal case on the old nationalist/militart/Kemalist elite, rather than on the AKP. On NTV (a Turkish television news channel) on Friday, he was arguing, "The AKP is not the threat to democracy--the army is." The limited support extended to the AKP by a lot of secular and left-wing intellectuals stems from a similar judgment of the alternatives--even those who dislike the AKP's social conservatism and Islamist orientation believe that the progress towards democratization & EU membership under the party's leadership put progressive goals more firmly in reach than a return to the old guard would ever do.
There was decent overview in the Daily Star (Beirut) earlier this week. And finally, Rushdie wrote an op-ed piece in the Times which has gotten a lot of play on literary blogs of late. But Rushdie makes what I think are some problematic misjudgements of Turkish politics--conflating too easily Pamuk's persecutors (who, as he points out at the start, are ultranationalists) and Islamists, and implying that it's the Turkish government itself that's going after Pamuk--which, as I have written previously, is at best a simplification , and more likely serious misinterpretation of the situation.
Although Rushdie is squarely on the mark with much of his critique, I think he's also a bit unfair to Soli Özel, who was not minimizing the problem, but rather pointing out that a) though still flawed, the rights situation in Turkey has dramatically improved, and b) EU engagement and the carrot of EU membership have been crucial to that process. Rushdie is certainly right that Turkey's not ready for EU membership yet, and that an end to these violations of freedom of expression must be an absolute condition for membership. But the very skeptical attitude he strikes plays into the hands of the very people who are going after Pamuk, Hrant Dink, and other outspoken intellectuals and rights advocate--especially the cheap shot at the end implying that British support for Turkey shows willingness to "sacrifice Turkish secularism" by pandering to Islamists. The successive Kemalist military juntas who ruled Turkey for so many years were pretty devoted upholding Turkish secularism, all right--and if they still ran the country, Pamuk would be in jail now. And there would have been no Armenian genocide conference last month, let alone government opposition to the courts' attempt to stop it. (By the way, the complete lack of mention of the Armenian conference or the Hrant Dink case in all of these articles is starting to get annoying. Given the amount of press coverage that resulted, I don't think you can really call the topic of the Armenian genocide a true taboo anymore--controversial, yes, but not taboo.)
Pamuk says this all better than I could, anyway, in the Der Speigel interview, when he makes it clear that, angry as he is about recent events, he also thinks the country has changed so much that his last work of fiction, Snow, can be considered a "historical novel" of sorts. I'll end with a particularly nice response on his part to one of the interviewer's leading questions:
Orhan Pamuk is all over the media this week, both in Turkey and abroad. My favorite thing so far is this interview in Der Speigel (via crooked timber), which is striking in large part because the interviewer keeps trying to paint a picture of Turkey as a horribly repressive place and Pamuk as a helpess victim of the state's machinery, and Pamuk keeps refusing to cooperate. At one point, the interviewer asks him if he was "fleeing" when he moved to New York for a short period because of threats from extreme nationalists, and Pamuk (rolling his eyes, I imagine) says, "You tend to over-dramatize things."
Pamuk sticks to the line he's been taking lately of firmly stating his support for EU membership (and the government's pursuit thereof) while criticizing continuing human rights shortcomings and the flawed penal code that has allowed him to be charged with a crime for his statements about the Armenian genocide. And although he states his annoyance that PM Erdoğan has not been more supportive, he also clearly lays the blame for the legal case on the old nationalist/militart/Kemalist elite, rather than on the AKP. On NTV (a Turkish television news channel) on Friday, he was arguing, "The AKP is not the threat to democracy--the army is." The limited support extended to the AKP by a lot of secular and left-wing intellectuals stems from a similar judgment of the alternatives--even those who dislike the AKP's social conservatism and Islamist orientation believe that the progress towards democratization & EU membership under the party's leadership put progressive goals more firmly in reach than a return to the old guard would ever do.
There was decent overview in the Daily Star (Beirut) earlier this week. And finally, Rushdie wrote an op-ed piece in the Times which has gotten a lot of play on literary blogs of late. But Rushdie makes what I think are some problematic misjudgements of Turkish politics--conflating too easily Pamuk's persecutors (who, as he points out at the start, are ultranationalists) and Islamists, and implying that it's the Turkish government itself that's going after Pamuk--which, as I have written previously, is at best a simplification , and more likely serious misinterpretation of the situation.
Although Rushdie is squarely on the mark with much of his critique, I think he's also a bit unfair to Soli Özel, who was not minimizing the problem, but rather pointing out that a) though still flawed, the rights situation in Turkey has dramatically improved, and b) EU engagement and the carrot of EU membership have been crucial to that process. Rushdie is certainly right that Turkey's not ready for EU membership yet, and that an end to these violations of freedom of expression must be an absolute condition for membership. But the very skeptical attitude he strikes plays into the hands of the very people who are going after Pamuk, Hrant Dink, and other outspoken intellectuals and rights advocate--especially the cheap shot at the end implying that British support for Turkey shows willingness to "sacrifice Turkish secularism" by pandering to Islamists. The successive Kemalist military juntas who ruled Turkey for so many years were pretty devoted upholding Turkish secularism, all right--and if they still ran the country, Pamuk would be in jail now. And there would have been no Armenian genocide conference last month, let alone government opposition to the courts' attempt to stop it. (By the way, the complete lack of mention of the Armenian conference or the Hrant Dink case in all of these articles is starting to get annoying. Given the amount of press coverage that resulted, I don't think you can really call the topic of the Armenian genocide a true taboo anymore--controversial, yes, but not taboo.)
Pamuk says this all better than I could, anyway, in the Der Speigel interview, when he makes it clear that, angry as he is about recent events, he also thinks the country has changed so much that his last work of fiction, Snow, can be considered a "historical novel" of sorts. I'll end with a particularly nice response on his part to one of the interviewer's leading questions:
SPIEGEL: So you don't expect to be sent to prison?Amen to that.
Pamuk: Absolutely not.
SPIEGEL: Isn't having been in prison at least once a sort of badge of honor for a Turkish author?
Pamuk: Wouldn't it be an even greater honor to be the first Turkish writer who had never been there? Isn't that much better? Better for Turkey and better for the author?
posted by kitabet at 4:54 AM
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