{"id":15109,"date":"2010-08-20T10:12:42","date_gmt":"2010-08-20T09:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=15109"},"modified":"2017-01-09T14:54:03","modified_gmt":"2017-01-09T14:54:03","slug":"turkey-literature-free-speech-pkk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=15109","title":{"rendered":"Turkey: Stranger than fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Turkish government’s battle with the PKK threatens to stifle art itself, says Kaya Gen\u00e7<\/strong>
\n
\nWhen novelists and poets are brought to the offices of public prosecutors and later to criminal courts (it is always a sad sight), I imagine the spectre of Miguel de Cervantes<\/a> roaring with laughter at the sort of transcendence created by his beloved art form, the novel. Along with Don Quixote himself, we were (a class of Turkish undergraduate students taking a course about Don Quixote) confused in the second book of Don Quixote<\/a> where the protagonist had been informed of the existence of \u201ca novel about Don Quixote\u201d. Now, almost four centuries after the publication of perhaps the first \u201cproper\u201d novel, it is even more confusing to witness an author being tried for propagating terror in a novel, through a character, in a book universally catalogued under the category of \u201cfiction\u201d.<\/p>\n

The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin<\/a> would be less cheerful to witness a practice like this — how can you work \u201cpolyphony\u201d and \u201cunfinalizability\u201d<\/a>, as an artist, when you are not allowed to create Forsterian, \u201cround characters\u201d, one may ask. Instead, under laws that make it very hard for Turkish authors to compose \u201cproper\u201d let alone experimental pieces of fiction, what you get (in Bakhtin\u2019s terminology) is a \u201csynthesised\u201d discourse where \u201cmutual addressivity\u201d and \u201cmutual engagement\u201d are but distant dreams.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be clear about this: This is not a intellectual exercise in literary theory. Turkish author Mehmet G\u00fcler has very recently received a prison sentence<\/a> for producing propaganda for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in his novel \u00d6l\u00fcmden Zor Kararlar (\u201cDecisions Harder Than Death\u201d). For anyone familiar with Don Quixote, it was also ironic to see G\u00fcler\u2019s 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 G\u00fcler to 15 months in prison.<\/p>\n

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Kurdistan Workers Party, the terrorist organisation Turkey is fighting against and for whom G\u00fcler 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 \u0130lker Ba\u015fbu\u011f 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?<\/p>\n

The 29-year-old journalist \u0130rfan Aktan<\/a>, who worked as a reporter at large for Newsweek\u2019s Turkish edition, had been sentenced to 15 months in prison merely for using a quote from a PKK militant. Ferhat Tun\u00e7<\/a>, 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, Tun\u00e7 seems to have given the greatest offence — perhaps the legislators believe, \u00e0 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.<\/p>\n

Mehmet G\u00fcler is not the first author to face legal action for a character in a work of fiction. In 2006 the popular Turkish novelist Elif \u015eafak<\/a> 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\u2019s office a few years ago to explain the \u201crationale\u201d behind my short story, \u201cThe Most Surprising Fantasies and Wishes of an Occidentalist\u201d, 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 Erdo\u011fan rather than the prosecutors who are simply executing the legislation composed by the parliment.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich<\/a>. \u201cNow, this is not very different from a solider\u2019s life, is it?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Turkish government’s battle with the PKK threatens to stifle art itself, says Kaya Gen\u00e7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[581],"tags":[986,2970,746,1735,7355],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15109"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79327,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15109\/revisions\/79327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}