Orhan Pamuk and the Turks

I like to tell my students that I wouldn't have moved to Turkey if Orhan Pamuk hadn't made me admire it from afar. I say this partly because it's true, but mostly because it shocks them, and that seems useful for my purposes. Their mouths drop open in disbelief, and they sit slackjawed while I tell them how The Black Book sold me on their city. With misty pictures of decaying opulence and narrow alleyways dotted with minarets, it made the word Bosporus name a strait that I needed to see. The scruffy, Diesel-clad Turks that I teach throw up their hands. Their ongoing perplexity at my decision to leave a good job in the US to teach at their Turkish university grows into something more. How could a novel by Orhan Pamuk make me think this was a good idea?

Their bafflement is partially but not wholly explained by the fact that few of them have read any novels by Orhan Pamuk. They are the products of the nation's best high schools, and Pamuk is Turkey's first Nobel Prize winner, but his name has rarely appeared on any syllabus they have received. That they might read him for fun is almost too ludicrous to mention. But I am less interested in his absence from their reading experience than I am in the reasons for it. When the Swedish Academy praised Pamuk as a discoverer of "new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures," it described a peacemaker who is a stranger here. The Turks I meet in Istanbul know Pamuk neither as a builder of bridges between cultures nor as a kind of literary genius. For most, he's a traitor, and for the rest, he's a bit of a sleaze.

The evidence of his misdeeds appears to Turks under the categories of His Perceived Effects on Readers More or Less Like Me. Turks refer frequently to the longstanding public-relations war they are waging—and losing badly—with the rest of the world, and Pamuk seems to be on the wrong side. My students explain the realities of Pamuk's domestic position in discussions that can best be called "heated." They are very pleasant people, my students; like their counterparts in American universities, their default mode is a geniality so great that it verges on apathy. But I have seen them fly into genuine rages at the Nobel Laureate who is not in the room, rages replete with fist-clenching, table-pounding, and explosive exits with doors that slam. These are things I've never witnessed in any American classroom, certainly not on the subject of a novelist.

In a small measure, it is exciting to see: Here, literature matters. And yet, to a larger degree, it is terrifying to see, and literature doesn't matter at all.

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Evidence that it matters: Orhan Pamuk is Public Enemy no. 1 to ultra-nationalist Turks, now that they have assassinated the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink. One of the men arrested in connection with Dink's murder used his perp walk as a podium from which to terrorize the Nobel Laureate in absentia. "Orhan Pamuk, be smart! Be smart!" he yelled. Few in Turkey have taken these as idle or isolated threats, as a broad consensus emerges that the nation's golden literary son cannot live in peace among the countrymen he claims to love.

A roiling culture war is underway, with serious consequences. In the wake of Dink's death, thousands of marchers thronged the streets of Istanbul to honor him on behalf of a multicultural Turkish identity: "We are all Hrant Dink," they proclaimed. "We are all Armenians."

These slogans articulated a pluralistic strain in Turkish culture that the West would love to hear more often, but it is wavering here. A recent poll showed that 86 percent of Turks objected to the slogan claiming a shared identity with Armenians; 67 percent objected to the one claiming a more specific identification with Dink. Charges have even been filed against the organizers of Dink's funeral, alleging that the slogan "We are all Armenians" is "racist" and "insulting" to Turks. And days after Dink's death, at a soccer match in Trabzon, rowdy fans carried signs celebrating the heroes of Turkish unity. The footballers carried banners that read, "We are all Turks! We are all Mustafa Kemal!"

No wonder Orhan Pamuk is afraid. Speculation abounds even in mainstream media that Dink's murder was the work of the "deep state" (i.e., a shadowy configuration of military and business elites), and the police chief of Istanbul has been arrested on charges related to the case. This leaves Pamuk an open target for both the criminals and the police. The London Guardian reports that he withdrew most of his money recently from the bank in Turkey before he left on a speaking tour of the US, and he has no return date in sight.

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Few Turks I talk to have finished a novel that Pamuk has written, but they all know about an interview he gave in 2005. In it, he told a Swiss newspaper that he believed the Turkish government massacred its Armenian population in 1915. He didn't use the word "genocide," but he acknowledged the reality of the event that the rest of the world knows by that name.

I never mention this when I talk to Turks about Pamuk, primarily because I hope to have a conversation about Pamuk as a writer of literature, and also because what he said about the genocide isn't controversial anyplace else in the world. Besides, I like to see how they will say it.

The first time a student alludes to these unmentionable events in class, another will typically change the subject. It will be said that there are a multitude of other reasons to dislike and distrust Orhan Pamuk: His sentences are too long; his books are just too hard; he peppers his modern Turkish with Ottoman words; he talked too much about his father in his speech to the Swedish Academy; he smiles too much when he appears on television; he wrote a novel in which a girl wears a headscarf.

"Isn't it bad for us if American readers find out from this book that some Turkish women wear headscarves?" asked a worried boy, who had told me he learned his excellent American English by chatting on the Megadeth fansite. "Won't they think we're…like Iran?"

"That is exactly what Orhan Pamuk wants," chimed a girl with bright blue mascara and aspirations to become a psychologist. "When he says we committed genocide, he's obviously just saying it because he knows that's what the West really wants to believe about us."

In this scenario, Pamuk's opportunism makes him a willing accessory to the forces that conspire against Turkey. "That's the only possible explanation," the psychology major continued. "Because he's an educated person, and every educated person knows it's a fact that the genocide didn't happen." She acknowledges that most historians in the world disagree with her, but she sees no apparent contradiction.

My students are the children of the secular elites, the demographic equivalents of the students I taught at Princeton. Wealthy, tousled, likable, and pragmatic, they represent the fondest hopes of their nation, and they in turn hope fervently to fulfill them. They enrolled in this prestigious private university with dreams of the prominent places they will inhabit in the global economy. They conduct all their coursework in English, even reading Pamuk in translation. And the university helps them see a world outside of Turkey by embracing American culture in ways that are large and small. Most of the faculty have taught in the US, and the only décor in the school cafeteria is a set of vintage Coca-Cola posters that establish an ancestry of ladies in ruffly dresses to precede the tank-topped youth that giggle over Coke on posters on the streets. The stone entryway harbors a large inscription from George Bernard Shaw: "Every great truth begins as a blasphemy."

But this transnational attitude gets an uneven application. My students relish blasphemies against organized religion, although most of them are religious, and they complain about the government in a way that is de rigueur. But they will not accept the slightest suggestion of a blemish on the Republic. They see it as their bulwark against fundamentalism, which always threatens the secularism that separates Turkey from most of the Middle East. With great frequency and anxiety, they tell me of polls in which the majority of Turks claim that their Islamic identity supersedes their identity as Turks. This gives rise to the fear of a religious government "like they have in Iran," as my students say in the hushed tones that Americans reserve for terrorists and other bogeymen. They entrust the military as their best hope against this disaster and nationalism as the ideology that makes the military work. Their proximity to war-torn nations and repressive regimes naturally renders this threat more palpable, inspiring Turks on both sides of the culture wars to take desperate measures to ensure that the divisions among them won't tear them apart.

That's why my students' love for Western culture and its attendant freedoms doesn't make them ready to live without the protection of Article 301, which makes it a crime to "insult Turkishness." They believe that "Turkishness" is simply too fragile. "One of the things I really like about Americans," one of them told me, "is the strong sense of national identity that you have. Even though Americans come from all over the world, you all know what you mean when you say you're American. That's what we need here: a clear idea of what we mean when we say that we're Turkish."

Turkey is in good company there, of course. It sees itself as the product of a fallen empire; out of the decadence of the Ottomans emerges the golden age of the Republic, whose honor must rise above question. This is often asserted tautologically, as when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently argued that persuasive evidence of Armenian claims must be false, for, as he put it, "There can hardly be another nation as blameless as the Turkish nation."

The assertion of an impossibly perfect innocence provides a welcome refuge for Turks who perceive a hostile cabal swelling in the world around them. It includes among its newest members the American Congress—which is considering a nonbinding resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide—as well as the Swedish Academy and the global literary culture for which it strives. In this context, the Nobel Prize becomes an expression of the solipsism by which the West rewards its own, whether they are born at home or abroad. Pamuk's honors "came as no surprise," shrugged the nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz. "We were expecting it. This prize was not given because of Pamuk's books, it was given because of his words, because of his Armenian genocide claims. … It was given because he belittled our national values, for his recognition of the genocide." With a grandiosity that is almost as striking as his paranoia, he predicted that another Turkish novelist who has "insulted" the nation will win the Nobel in 2008. "Believe me," he continued, "the next prize will be given to Elif Shafak."

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