If I will never see the world again by Ahmet Altan were a novel, it would be heralded as the Darkness at noonof our time, a landmark in the fiction of imprisonment and dictatorship worthy of Arthur Koestler. But it is a memoir instead, all the more devastating by its spare prose and the knowledge that writers like Altan, arrested on charges of sending “subliminal messages” to enemies of the Turkish government when he appeared on television the evening before the 2016 attempted coup against President Recep Erdogan, are oppressed not during the Stalin purges of decades past but in our day and time. Worse, this systematic muzzling of educated and successful professionals is happening in a country with a prestigious past, a country of remarkable accomplishments that governed a large part of the world under the Ottoman Empire and created artworks of stunning beauty such as the Greek Orthodox Christian cathedral turned museum Hagia Sofia, the historic Sultan Ahmed Mosque or Blue Mosque and the former residence of Ottoman sultans Topkapi Palace. This magnificent country has also gifted us the literature of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Sabahattin Ali, Elis Shafak and Orhan Pamuk and made groundbreaking discoveries through leading scientists of our time like Ali Erdemir and Aykut Barka.
While we can hope that Koestler’s tale, so removed in time, does not apply to us, we cannot shrug off Altan’s memoir as easily. We are all involved, even if only through our failure to demand the release of political prisoners caught in Erdogan’s purges following the failed coup. At a time where the leader of the Free World is playing golf, tweeting about himself, reneging on past commitments and allowing Turkey to massacre the Kurds without even attempting to bargain for, say, the upholding of basic human rights in exchange for his imprimatur, the lost opportunity is staggering – to save Altan himself but also the other Turks caught in Erdogan’s net, such as army officers jailed because they all attended the War College the same year and one of their classmates had accused them. They had not been among the plotters, but among the officers who had replaced those arrested. They had joined the military before they had even become men. Their sense of identity had collapsed.
The book is harrowing in the quiet beauty of Altan’s writing mixed with the callousness of those thrust suddenly in positions of power: the judge deciding on a possible life sentence who coldly cuts short lawyers’ arguments, indifferent to the defendant’s plight, but then gets upset because he has missed the five o’clock shuttle home, or the doctor who refuses that the police officer remove Altan’s handcuffs when he arrives for an X-ray although she knows that the handcuffs, engineered to tighten when the prisoner moves, are leaving deep purple bruises on the wrists of the then-sixty-eight-year old.
The book starts with Altan’s arrest in his apartment at dawn, followed by the arrest of his brother Mehmet, a professor of economics at Istanbul University who lives nearby. (In a twist worthy of slapstick comedy, the police at first believe that Mehmet is not home because they have been knocking on the wrong door. The book brims with such moments that would bring some emotional levity to Altan’s account, if it did not carry damning testimony of the police force’s incompetence.) The chapters are short out of necessity: written as stand-alone vignettes and smuggled one at a time by his lawyers amidst personal papers. This structure adds to the book’s power. The memoir goes on describing Ahmet’s arrival in jail and his fellow prisoners, some who are extremely religious while Ahmet is not. Yet what they experience together in prison supersede their religious beliefs and brings about a new ability to live together. Several encounters with judges and doctors boggle the mind with their Kafkaesque undertones. But moments of kindness between prisoners also tug on the reader’s heartstrings, such as when the daughter of a very religious inmate is arrested and Ahmet, in spite of his indifference of religion, agrees that if his daughter is released, he will pray alongside the inmate and give his devotions to God. And the daughter is released after four months, and Ahmet prays.
Ahmet also documents his resolve, often tested, not to lose his sanity in an environment where the lack of mirrors makes inmates feel they have become invisible and where the lack of a clock makes prisoners lose the sense of time. He caps the book with writing so crystalline the reader is caught between the impulse of buying whatever novel of his has been translated into English and sign petitions to call for his release. The lyrical writing in the last chapter about how he ultimately stood up for his inner freedom even as he was imprisoned will take the reader’s breath away. Altan himself is aware of the danger of using readers’ emotions triggered by injustice and he touches upon it movingly in that very last chapter, although he must have hoped that the international spotlight would help assuage his plight, since the legal proceedings against him remained decidedly farcical. His story possesses an ending beyond the last page, since the Supreme Court overturned Altan’s life sentence in July of this year but refused to drop the charges against him, alleging that he knew in advance of the attempted coup. Altan, who will turn seventy in March of next year, remains in prison.
Yet the overturning of his sentence doesn’t lessen the impact of the book. Hundreds of Turks are rotting with him in jail: members of the upper middle class, educated people, citizens who have much to bring to Turkey’s economic prosperity. The exodus of academics out of Turkey after the coup, because of fears regarding what they call freedom of mind, has even caught Erdogan’s attention. Altan’s fellow prisoners may not be writers but they would still make valuable contributions to a democratic Turkey. Instead, they are caught in a very wide net that makes them culpable by association, culpable by thought, culpable because someone who wanted to save himself denounced them.
Faced with yet another debacle surrounding the Nobel Prize of Literature, split this year between a genocide denier who has expressed support for Slobodan Milosevic and a woman whose latest book translated into English has been decidedly minor, Altan’s book also begs the question of what purpose literature prizes serve, if they go to either deeply flawed individuals or second-tier artists instead of crowning works of stunning artistry like this book. It is worth mentioning that the genocide at Srebrenica has been well documents by many human rights organizations and news outlets, and Slobodan Milosevic has been found guilty of war crimes at La Hague. The fact that the Nobel Prize was split for the first time in history does suggest a certain ambivalence from some judges, to reward an individual demonstrating such moral turpitude, which they apparently felt could only be resolved by splitting the prize. Not giving it out might have proved a wiser decision, although Altan proves in this memoir that he would have been highly deserving of the prize. But of course giving a literary prize to a political prisoner does not only look backward, at his past body of work, but forward, with the hope that the international spotlight will contribute to his release.
Am I placing too much hope in the Nobel Prize as a way to pressure oppressive regimes? In 2010 Chinese poet Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize – not the Nobel Prize in Literature – for his support of the Tiananmen protests, where he is widely credited with saving countless lives when he exhorted students to leave the square, as well as his far-ranging activism in favor of democracy. For instance he took part in drafting the Charter 08 manifesto, which demanded freedom of speech, the upholding of human rights and democratic elections in China. Poetry itself can also prove a sharp weapon against autocrats, as Liu demonstrated in June Fourth Elegies, which commemorated the Tiananmen massacre in spite of autocrats’ efforts to scrub the events from memory. Condemned to prison, Liu received the Nobel Prize in absentia and died in 2017, only three weeks after being granted medical parole for liver cancer. Did the Nobel Prize help or worsen Liu’s suffering? Did it motivate the Chinese leadership to flex its muscles instead of perhaps releasing Liu once his name had sunk in obscurity? Liu’s magnificent poems have gained a broader international readership thanks to the publicity surrounding his Nobel Peace Prize, but his books remain banned in China, where they are most needed.
Like Liu, Altan given his age may well only see the world again for a few weeks before his death. He will live on through his books, especially the translated ones that escape the censorship of his native country. But the goal of good literature is not just to save its writer from obscurity. It is to change the readers, so that they will pass the book forward through their actions, and not fleeting remembrance that they once perused a memoir. There is no worthier impact for literature that to incite us, we the lucky ones who live without having to fear a knock on the door at dawn to be hauled off to damp jails and preposterous trials, to pressure the people in position of power to use their influence for the good of their fellow citizens.
I will never see the world againby Ahmet Altan, translated from the Turkish by Yasemin Çongar, Other Press, 2019, 212 pages, $15.99.
