Pamuk: A great writer, a worthy Nobel laureate

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sat, 11/04/2006 11:33 AM  |  Opinion

Roy Voragen, Bandung

Orhan Pamuk deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature; his books make him a worthy laureate. But it is unfortunate that his success is now being politicized.

Matt Moore and Karl Ritter wrote in The Jakarta Post (Oct. 13): ""With its selection, the Swedish academy stepped squarely into the global clash of civilizations, honoring a Western-leaning Muslim whose country lies on the strategic fault line between east and west and whose people are increasingly unhappy with Europeans' reluctance to accept them as full members in the European Union.""

Did Moore and Ritter take the effort to read any of Pamuk's brilliantly constructed books? From their article it does not seem so. Why didn't they write about the themes and literary qualities of Pamuk's books? Now it seems he is being condemned because he is not Turkish enough (i.e. he is not a good Muslim, not a good Oriental).

Is Orhan Pamuk a European because he admires Dostoyevski? If one reads a book written by Pamuk one will see that he does not choose between east or west, between secularism or religion, between modernity or tradition. Pamuk takes a close look at his surroundings and tries to make sense of them by constructing a narrative with many layers and voices.

As Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Review of Books (Aug. 15, 2004): ""Stories, Pamuk has hinted, create the world we perceive: Instead of 'I think, therefore I am', a Pamuk character might say, 'I am because I narrate'"".

Pamuk wants to show us that our world is not a black-and-white world, and if we picture it as black and white, not only will it not make sense to us but it can also become a rather unlivable place.

Pamuk is Dostoyevskian in the sense that he tries to go beyond simple representations, his narrations are inhabited by subjects like the honest thief, the tender murderer and the superstitious atheist; people are never just this or that, they are both and neither.

In response to the bloody situation in Iraq, Pamuk says in an interview with Alexander Star (The New York Times, Aug. 15, 2004): ""In my books I have always looked for a sort of harmony between the so-called east and west. In short, what I wrote in my books for years was misquoted, and used as a sort of apology for what had been done. And what had been done was a cruel thing.""

And in response to 9/11 he writes (The New York Review of Books, Nov. 15, 2001):""I am afraid that self-satisfied and self-righteous Western nationalism will drive the rest of the world into defiantly contending that two plus two equals five, like Dostoyevski's underground man, when he reacts against the 'reasonable' Western world.

""Nothing can fuel support for an 'Islamist' who throws nitric acid at women's faces so much as the West's failure to understand the damned of the world"".

Pamuk's position is subtle, for example his novel Now carries an epigraph from Dostoyevski's novel The Brothers Karamazov: ""Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people.""

This quote not only criticizes Turkey's top-down modernization since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), it also criticizes the way many Europeans, for example the Somali-Dutch Ayaan Hirsi Ali, treat Muslims: Modernization as such is more important than the lives of ordinary people, but what is liberty without a life? Enlightenment cannot be enforced, that is illiberal.

Pamuk infuriates Islamists and nationalists alike. Orhan Pamuk is critical of Islamism, because it stifles freedom of thinking and expression. Pamuk was also one of the first to speak up against the Ayatollah Khomeini fatwa which ordered the murder of Salman Rushdie, who was accused of blasphemy after publishing The Satanic Verses.

Pamuk was also recently one of the co-writers of an open letter to the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, urging the release of scholar and public intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo, who is being held for having contacts with foreigners.

Pamuk is also critical of nationalists and for the same reasons. He gave an interview to the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger (Feb. 6, 2005) in which he said that ""thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed"". Pamuk is referring to the killings by Ottoman Empire forces of Armenians during World War I.

Turkey does not deny the deaths, but denies that it was genocide, i.e. according to a premeditated plan. Pamuk's reference to 30,000 Kurdish deaths refers to those killed during the past two decades in the conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists. In Turkey, debate about this issue is stifled by stringent laws; therefore Turkish history and identity are frozen.

Turkey should become a full member of the European Union soon, says Pamuk. This must be possible because Turkey has long been a member of NATO. It must be possible if the European Union stands for humanism. But it becomes impossible if Europeans, out of fear of globalization, deep-freeze an European identity as, for example, Christian.

But once again, Pamuk is no politician, nor is he an activist, he is foremost a luminous artist. His books enlighten us on the difficulty of forming an essential identity, to be someone; we are like the countries we inhabit, i.e. complex and difficult to read. And Pamuk's novel The Black Book shows that to make sense of the world and ourselves the reader has to become a writer. The clash of civilizations is simply not an interesting narrative, it is far too colorless, and it is about time to change that record.

The writer teaches philosophy at Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung, West Java, and can be contacted at royvoragen@hotmail.com.

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