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The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would be less cheerful to witness a practice like this — how can you work “polyphony” and “unfinalizability”, as an artist, when you are not allowed to create Forsterian, “round characters”, one may ask. Instead, under laws that make it very hard for Turkish authors to compose “proper” let alone experimental pieces of fiction, what you get (in Bakhtin’s terminology) is a “synthesised” discourse where “mutual addressivity” and “mutual engagement” are but distant dreams.

Let’s be clear about this: This is not a intellectual exercise in literary theory. Turkish author Mehmet Güler has very recently received a prison sentence for producing propaganda for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in his novel Ölümden Zor Kararlar (“Decisions Harder Than Death”). For anyone familiar with Don Quixote, it was also ironic to see Güler’s photograph in Turkish Daily News; for the interview he is seated just behind a table in a cafe, decorated with windmills on its walls. So one may ask whether it is possible that he may be an incarnation of Cervantes or even, tragically, the knight of the sorrowful countenance? The Ottoman navy had crippled the left arm of Cervantes; the Turkish government is more civilised — it sentenced Güler to 15 months in prison.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Kurdistan Workers Party, the terrorist organisation Turkey is fighting against and for whom Güler is accused of propagating, is slowly fading from the Turkish political scene, increasingly losing its legitimacy as a political force in the country for the attacks they have organised against innocent Turkish soldiers who were tragic casulties of a conflict beyond their control (military service is compulsory in Turkey). In a recent televised interview, Chief of General Staff İlker Başbuğ clearly expressed how, after more than 30,000 fatalities, the fight against the PKK continues. But is this the right way to struggle against the PKK? By imprisoning polyphony, a novelist or a short story writer?

The 29-year-old journalist İrfan Aktan, who worked as a reporter at large for Newsweek’s Turkish edition, had been sentenced to 15 months in prison merely for using a quote from a PKK militant. Ferhat Tunç, a popular musician and political figure in Turkey, faces up to 15 years in prison for comments he made during a concert. When we compare these three cases, Tunç seems to have given the greatest offence — perhaps the legislators believe, à la Nietzsche, that music is the greatest art form. Perhaps journalistic reportage and fiction are not as effective. It is a matter of taste, of course.

Mehmet Güler is not the first author to face legal action for a character in a work of fiction. In 2006 the popular Turkish novelist Elif Şafak was tried for her novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, where she allegedly propagated the Armenian claims of genocide (she was later acquitted from the charges). I was also kindly invited to the prosecutor’s office a few years ago to explain the “rationale” behind my short story, “The Most Surprising Fantasies and Wishes of an Occidentalist”, where a fictitious admirer of the British Imperialism would be happy to see Turkey transformed into an exact copy of Britain. At times, this character finds himself wishing “with profound sorrow” that “those respectable members of the House of Lords with their constant and colorful wags and crowns on their heads” ruled the Turks. When I explained, in a scholarly rhetoric, that this narrator had a simply ironic function, the prosecutor, fed up with thousands of cases about books and articles and poems and booklets brought to him by anonymous persons, gave a sigh of relief and that was the end of that. For all this, I find fault with the current government, headed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rather than the prosecutors who are simply executing the legislation composed by the parliment.

The fault is always with the rulers and not with the millions of everymen in this country. Last year I served as a librarian in the Turkish Gendarmerie for my military service. The most popular book in this little library, a favorite among my fellow gendarmes, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. “Now, this is not very different from a solider’s life, is it?” a friend commented after reading the book. Perhaps it is a similar transcendence of the boundaries of the fiction form that leads the lawmakers to create legislation that charge novelists and poets. It should be illegal to prosecute poems. It should be illegal to imprison novelists. Or else, Cervantes will still be roaring at all this and the joke will be on us.

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Ahmad Rajabzadeh’s ‘Book Censorship’ is a guide to some of the stranger examples of literary repression in Iran. Azar Mahloujian takes a look

When I was young I dreamt of getting hold of a book called Chamedan (The Suitcase) by the Iranian writer Bozorg Alavi. It was published in Tehran 75 years ago, but later it was banned, together with the writer’s other books. When I read recently that the word “suitcase” was deleted from Herta Muller’s first book in Romania, I immediately understood why.

The Shah’s censorship worked the same way, even though he was a monarch and Ceausescu claimed himself a socialist. The common denominator was their fear of literature, of words that might stir up and provoke their subjects to get rid of the authorities – or pack a suitcase and leave.

With dictators, words take on an extra charge. In the shah’s Iran the word “black night” symbolized repression and “high walls” meant prison. Words such as “blood,” “red” or “red rose” made the censor suspicious that they were agitating for revolution. Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Hamlet could not be performed at Iranian theatres as the king dies on stage!

Anyone who possessed books by Sartre or Brecht was likely to end up in Evin prison. But the censorship changes form with the times. What was forbidden under the Shah was politics, after the revolution the censorship remit was expanded to religion and sex.

Censorship is carried out in several stages. Direct censorship is done by the state – the censoring authority is under the control of the ministry for culture and Islamic guidance — while authors and publishers self-censor for political, moral and economic considerations. Despite that, everything, even a printed invitation card to a wedding, is inspected before publication. An already published book may be withdrawn from the market, even though it has been on the shelves for years and reprinted in several editions.

But how does it actually function? The writer is given a list of words, sentences and even pages of the manuscript that must be taken out. In the vocabulary of the censorship authorities this is called “negative censorship”. “Positive” censorship is when a few additional words or sentences are suggested to be added in order to make the text more moderate, or friendlier to the regime.

A full answer is found in Momayyezie (Book Censorship) written by the Iranian author Ahmad Rajabzadeh. I found this 600 page-goldmine at the International Library in Stockholm. It was published in Iran eight years ago and covers 1400 cases of censured books during a single year (1996). According to the book more than 75 per cent of the forbidden texts concerned the following subjects: Love, female beauty, gambling, religion.

A few examples of words that must be changed according to the censor’s suggestion can be revealing: comrade (“must be changed to ‘friend’ because Marxists use ‘comrade’,” wrote the censor), “tavern” to “café”, “in love” to “delighted”, “lover” to friend, “love-making” to “friendship”, “dance partner” to “conversation partner”, “pork” to “beef”, “wine” to “soft drink”.

Sometimes it is enough just to hint at wine. For example the poet Fereydoon Moshiri’s poem had the words, “fill the glass with glowing water” censored!

In the book we may read long lists of forbidden words and subjects. Among the censored words we find: discotheque, prostitution, rape, homosexuality, descriptions of venereal diseases. The words “That night my daughter had her first period” were crossed out of one manuscript by the censor. Another censor found the phrase “wedding night” to be offensive to society.

The sentence “She in her dress of red velvet and a white scarf was more beautiful than a red rose” was censored: a photograph of Gandhi was objected to. The censor wrote: “take away the photo, he is half naked.”

Sometimes their edits are absurd, of course kissing may not occur in literature in Iran, but in one novel the following sentence was crossed out: “He kissed his money!” “Dance” is another forbidden word; instead one should write “rhythmic movement.”

How are foreign books censored? Kafka’s Metamorphosis remarks on ten points, use of words such as: “wine”, “beer”, “embrace”, “fall in love” … The censor wrote: “Under prevailing conditions the book is not suitable for publication.”

But Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is forbidden for different reasons: “The book arouses thoughts of suicide in the face of adversity instead of resistance and patience … The individuals of the novel show bad and weak features of character.”

The first 5,500 copies of the Persian translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s Memoirs of my Melancholy Whores sold out in three weeks, but after a short notice in the fundamentalist paper Jomhuriye Eslami, permission to print a second run was withdrawn. The minister of culture made a public apology for the book having been published at all and promised to punish and to dismiss the official who had let it happen.

In the year 2008 the annual congress of International PEN highlighted the case of the Iranian writer Yaghoub Yadali, jailed for 41 days in jail because in his novel Adabe Bigharai (The Ritual of Restlessness) a married woman has a relationship with another man.

Censorship in Iran is now more extensive than ever before. Book Censorship exposes the fear and weakness of those in power. The censors forgot to censor that one.

Azar Mahloujian is a member of board of the Swedish PEN, he comes from an Iranian-Swedish background

Published originally in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter
Translated by John Meurling

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