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Tag: Colonialism

  • Silence, Our Noisy Silence: A Conversation with Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury

    Silence, Our Noisy Silence: A Conversation with Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury

    Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury discuss shame, representation and the Turkish language.

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    Sema, how did Every Fire You Tend come to be?

    SEMA KAYGUSUZ: I have been writing this book since my childhood. I grew up in a secular community, in an incredibly open, loving family. We were close, and we shared things – we had no dramas, violence, or deprivation, but we spoke openly about personal difficulties and emotions. No word was unspeakable. And yet I always felt that something was secret, silent. That all the talking was to cover something up.

    In my childhood, every year, for ten days, I visited my grandparents. There is one particular moment that I always remember. My grandmother said to me, with empty eyes: ‘They butchered us’. This one phrase. I began to ask who they and us were, and this is when I realised that we never spoke about the past.

    This is when I began to conceptualise the silence – our noisy silence. And, then, years later, I discovered our history. At university, I found the history of Dersim. I found witnesses to it. I found out that my grandmother had seen the bodies of all her brothers and sisters floating in the river-waters. She was the only one to survive.

    And then I began to conceptualise shame; to consider the psychology of genocide, and how it related to the silence. There is an important Jewish proverb: the children always want to forget what their parents lived, but the grandchildren always want to remembers what their grandparents lived. I felt I had to remember. This book is my way of doing so.

    You mention two words I wanted to ask about: ‘survival’ and ‘shame’. In a way, this is a narrative of survival – of how one can survive when one’s community, language and culture have been violently removed. But it is also one of shame – of how one remembers, or chooses not to; voices, or chooses not to, because one is ashamed of, is told one must be. I wonder what the relationship between survival and shame are? Is shame a way of surviving?

    SK: Definitely. I know that my grandmother kept asking herself: Why do I get to survive? To be seen – to say something about survival – is not easy. We all live with the taboo that Turkey has not yet confronted. A national secret.

    After the holocaust, Adorno said no one can write poetry, now. But then Paul Celan did. And maybe the silence and shame of my grandmother – what she had to live, as a burden and a legacy in her body – maybe it is a language that I need to decipher. It took me years to understand the shame, the secret, the silence.

    I have chosen a way of trying to decipher it. Zeus has two sons, Chronos and Cosmos. Chronos always talks about time in a linear way. He writes his story by linear arrangement, and always about himself. His story is always written through dominance and power. He uses classification, symbolisation, polarisation, organisation, dehumanisation, extermination, and denial. This is what linear time does. I did not want to write this way.

    I’d say that linear organisation is also tied up with masculine and colonial narrative – and that they do all they can to homogenise and claim totality. In Every Fire You Tend, there’s a plurality of narrative – these are women’s voices, and they’re many. Is this a response to the male, colonial, official narrative?

    SK: Yes – it is. It is Cosmos. I turn my back on Chronos and recognise that time can be elliptical. Cosmos appreciates shame and silence and everything else that comes from history – recognises the small and the large. Cosmos sees things as helical, with pathos and mythos and sensual experiment.

    I agree with Walter Benjamin: tragedy is a pile of debris growing skywards before me. My life is okay; but before me is tragedy. I climb up the debris and I see survival. My life – my survival – is a coincidence. And I ask myself how I convey tragedy not for the past, and not linearly, but for the future, and with plurality.

    Could you speak a bit more about representing plurality?

    SK: I don’t write communities; I write individuals. When you say the Armenians, you make Armenian individuals a material.

    You homogenise.

    SK: Yes, you homogenise and instrumentalise. I didn’t want to do that to the Zaza community. I don’t want to instrumentalise any community as a cultural product. Everyone has their own special moments, and as a writer I need to touch one spirit that can open the others. My grandmother’s individual experience can speak to the global, but it should not speak for the global.

    Nick, when we talk about representation and plurality, we’re talking about something to do with narrative structure. When you came to this book, how did you perceive that?

    NICHOLAS GLASTONBURY: The form is significant when we talk about modes of representation: the novel form, at large, is bound up in the same violences of the nation-state, coloniality and modernity that are at the heart of the novel’s critique. By writing something elliptical, you confront some of the assumptions of how narrative is supposed to function.

    And though this point is about form, it relates deeply to language – something with which Every Fire You Tend is highly concerned. Could you both talk a little about the book’s language – which is, in the English and the Turkish, extraordinary?

    SK: When I go to France, they ask about women in Islam. That’s the role I’m asked to play. But I am not a ‘Muslim writer’ or a ‘Turkish writer’. I call myself a ‘Turkish-language writer’. And this is not a homogenised language: it includes Arabic, Greek, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Kurdish. If you speak with a Turkish nationalist, you realise that they don’t speak real Turkish. They don’t know Turkish – just a very narrow version of it. Nationalists get their irons out and flatten everything. The Turkish of Every Fire You Tend refuses this.

    NG: Before I even read the book, I spoke to friends in Istanbul about it. They told me that they stopped ten pages into the Turkish version because they couldn’t ‘understand it’. That emboldened me to translate it.

    As a translator, the difficulty comes in translating the historical development of Turkish that the book explores. Certain words that were used 100 years ago in the Turkish feel as antiquated as words from 400 years ago in the English.

    I suppose that’s another way of capitulating Chronos.

    NG: Yes – and being able to move between language histories was the most difficult, but most rewarding, thing the book asked of me. Each section varies tonally, and striking that polyphonic register took me several years.

    SK: I never choose a word coincidentally; I always choose consciously. Nick got that.

    Did you work together closely on the translation?

    NG: We did, and there’s a long WhatsApp thread – the archive of the process – that testifies to that. I also spent several days staying with Sema, in her home, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and going to the text. But, even though it was an involved process, something I always felt positive about was the Sema encouraged me to seek out my own authorial capacity – my way of making the constructions of the book sensuous or supple in English.

    You speak in your afterword, Nick, about the novel being ‘written in the coloniser’s language’. Translation into English is often bound up with a history of colonialism; there’s a reason English is prevalent, and that it offers access to wide markets. I wondered if there was something particularly fraught about translating between two languages that, in a conception, are both colonising languages?

    NG: That’s something I spend all my free time thinking about. A lot of the ways in which world literature is framed are about building bridges. But that denies the political, historical and economic violences that subtend cultural contact-zones. It’s totally fraught, and there’s no easy answer. It’s one of the many paradoxes that tear through this book, and make it what it is.

    SK: I’d add to that: whilst every word, on its own, is innocent, the context it is written or means with is not. Nick’s job of transforming Every Fire You Tend into English is paradoxic, yes. But the fact that the book absents masculine and orientalist narratives means the job is, perhaps, a little less fraught.

    Has is taken a combination of you, Sema, as a writer; you, Nick, as a translator; and Tilted Axis as a publisher to make this book work?

    NG: We pitched it a lot. One thing I heard from a lot of editors was that it seemed too experimental. But then wheat is literature if not experimental? If not about new ways of thinking and speaking? Who wants to publish non-experimental literature?

    Capitalists?

    NG: Exactly. Even if the act of translation is about rendering into a colonial language, there are still ways of avoiding the problematics of capitalistic world literature – like Sema refusing the monikers of Turkish writer and Muslim writer. These kind of refusals are important. One of the central points of Every Fire You Tend is that language is always insufficient, but it’s also always all we have. And that’s true of the life of the book itself, too.

    Sema, I want to ask about danger. The environment for Turkish-language writers is fraught, but the Turkish-language literature being translated into English – particularly work by women – is vital and powerful and oppositional. Could you speak a little about your relationship to danger?

    SK: I live some difficulties. But I deny speaking them. I cannot say I’m in danger; if I speak my bravery, I’m really speaking my fear. Living in Turkey, at this moment, is easy for no one. But it is the journalists in prison and academics in exile who are those that can really speak about danger. How can I speak about danger?

    It’s also larger than Turkey. When I’m invited to speak in Germany – an apparent democracy – I think about the fact that they still sell arms to Turkey. When I speak in Germany, I don’t want to allow my existence to become a vehicle. Anywhere in the world, at a moment of crisis, fascism, sexism, essentialism and speciesism emerge. This is why Berlusconi, Erdoğan, Johnson are all the same man. Their differences are just in tone.

    And you’re very sensitive to differences in tone. In being so, you reveal things we aren’t always readily able to see. I was struck by the way you tell violence as silence, and silence as violence. In Every Fire You Tend, atrocious things are described with beauty and lyricism, and lyrical, beautiful things horrifically. I think of the image of the ‘baby struggling to nurse at the breast of the dead mother’. It’s a moment when the beauty of life, with a specific focus on gender and maternalism, is turned into something abject. What do these inversions do?

    SK: To write very raw, brutal moments as raw and brutal requires a certain degree of narcissism. So instead of writing them directly, in this narcissistic register, I took a more wayward path.

    NG: A part of the work of the book is about trying to disrupt our ways of understanding representation. The wayward ways of representing, which Sema talks about, is a way of calling to attention. You likely wouldn’t have been struck by this passage had it not been written in this paradoxical way.

    Yes, sometimes we have to do that. Sometimes, when we are so desensitised to the traumatic, it is only in describing in non-traumatic ways that we’re arrested.

    To finish with a question for both of you, is this novel a celebration or a lament? What do its ‘wail’ and ‘sigh’ signify?

    SK: It celebrates, even as it laments. Everything on earth is divine – even, in a way, our tragedies. But it is not the church of the mosque that has divinity; it is language, which makes everything.

    I think humans want to be gods. But we must ask what kind of god we will be. We do not want to be the sort of prophets who use language that makes us politicians, traders, and slaves to civilisation. If we use the divinity of language, we must look to give the future ethics. We don’t need temples; we need poets. And, really, we are all poets.

    So Nick, with this translation, are you on your way to becoming a god?

    NG: Maybe. To answer your question, I think it’s both. Sema mentioned Walter Benjamin earlier, and I think that part of his philosophy of history is about encouraging us to see ourselves as agents of history – as agents who can stop the ongoing accumulation of destruction and debris. We have this messianic power; this capacity to do so.

    The book, for me, is about how language can provide us with the tools to arrest history. It’s mourning a tragedy, but it’s also a celebration of the human will to make history for ourselves.

    Sema Kaygusuz (born 1972) is one of Turkey’s leading female writers and the author of Every Fire You Tend. She has published five collections of short stories, three novels, a collection of nonfiction essays, and a play, which have won a number of awards in Turkey and Europe and have been translated into English, French, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. Her short story collection The Well of Trapped Words was published in an English translation by Maureen Freely (Comma Press, 2015).

    Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator of Turkish literature. He is also a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya. He is the translator of Every Fire You Tend.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Margaret Mazzantini

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor.

    Many of your books touch upon current conflicts, their aftermath and the tragedy they cause to individuals. How do you see the role of literature?

    Literature is increasingly alone. We live in an excessively extrovert period, everyone wants to say something before they’ve even thought about what to say. Writing is damaged, words lose their meaning. We speak too loudly and too quickly, we scream on television, we write on our iPhones. To deprive words of their dimension and depth is to become dehumanised, because we are the words we utter. It’s words that make us human. For me as a writer, introspection is the only way to protect human beings. Our society needs to find its way back to introspection.

    In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino said that literature must be ambitious, must set itself vast objectives. That’s what I think too. For me, literature is a revolutionary force, it requires courage and risk-taking, it must have the ability to thrust you out of your comfort zone, take you on a dangerous journey, a journey into the unknown, and then bring you back to the centre of yourself. The purpose of literature is to make us more human. Today more than ever.

    In Twice Born you deal with the post-Yugoslav conflict and the siege of Sarajevo; in Morning Sea it is the current refugee crisis and Libya in the 1960s and 1970s.  How do you choose your subjects? Is the fact that all these dramas happen on the doorstep of Europe significant?

    I always find it hard to talk about how my work comes into being. Even now, I don’t know how it functions. For me, writing is like trusting in a creative engine that’s travelling towards an unknown destination. I never look for a meaning first. I never know why I’ve decided to write a particular book. If I did, I wouldn’t write it. I write to talk about what I don’t know, which only writing reveals to me. Every time it’s as if I was trying to stop a landslide. The first mental image is always the recurring one of a landslide, a hole. I go through an apprenticeship, a long inner preparation. A kind of spiritual retreat before battle commences. I withdraw from the world in order to try and restore something of the world. What I want before anything else is to free myself of my own ego. I never write in front of a mirror, I write leaning out of an open window. At this window, I see everything that goes on. The story of the siege of Sarajevo is emblematic, a terrible war that took place in the heart of Europe just a few years ago and seems to have already been forgotten. Very few people know the painful story of the Italians of Libya. I felt the need to go back to these roots of pain that unite the peoples of Europe. They are things that young people today know nothing about. In this sense, literature can have a political role.

    Morning Sea is also an exploration of Italy’s colonial past and the ‘festering wounds and collective guilt’ carried by the whole nation. Why did you decide to look at this period in Italian history?

    I’m not an essayist, I’m just a writer of novels. The novel is the Trojan horse in which I hide my warriors: the subjects that mean a lot to me, the things which make me indignant, which I can’t swallow, which weigh on my conscience.

    I feel I’m being given the opportunity, in a very small way, to stitch up the wound, to ease the pain by simply not leaving it alone. To put people in contact with themselves, with the damaged, most bereft part of themselves. In this excessively extrovert era, we aren’t really in contact with the pain of the world, we are an expression of its sickness. A writer is like a detective who lingers at the scene of the crime when the floodlights have been turned off. He looks for traces of a past that may just possibly point to the future. Since the end of the Cold War, which froze the world into two opposing poles, the great rift of our time has come to the surface: on one side, the rich West, on the other, the South of the world. Through the human stories of my characters I’ve unearthed the hidden story of Italian colonialism, which was about poor people deported and flung out into the desert, but also about a cruel and ruthless policy.

    You look at these events through the damaged lives of two women and their families: Angelina, Italian, born in Tripoli and expelled from Libya following Gaddafi’s coup, and Jamila, Bedouin, escaping the Libyan unrest with her son across the Mediterranean. Why did you decide to link these two women in your novel?

    A writer is a person who lives in an unbalanced way, between her need to withdraw, her own inner tension, and the great conflicts convulsing the world. Like a seismologist, she captures the tremors of the time in which she lives. My starting point was those distressing images of boats and people fleeing wars and famine, which we see every day on our television sets. An abyss of pain which seems as if it will never end.

    True charity, as we know, isn’t throwing the dog a bone. It’s becoming that hungry dog. We Italians know what that means, we’ve also been hungry dogs. We mustn’t forget it.  There are stories of emigration that everyone knows about, like the Italians who went to America, but nobody remembers the ‘Tripolini’, the Italians who were born and brought up in Libya, and were expelled by Gaddafi after his coup in 1970. I felt the need to unearth this story, the story of these ‘interrupted lives’. Because that same sea which today is overrun by people fleeing Africa, just a few decades ago was crossed by Italians with the same desperation in their eyes. The history of man is the history of his hunger. Man moves through hunger. The hunger of the poor. The greedy hunger of the powerful.

    Your book is also a serious reflection on the refugee crisis on the borders of Europe. And tragically, even though your book was published in Italy a few years ago, the terrible refugee crisis has deepened since then and people die every day trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. How do you think Europeans should address this problem?

    Europe is wondering how to stop this migration, how to ‘sort out’ these people. It’s a ‘technical’ problem. Now everyone is afraid of this ‘black sea’. We should probably have thought about it before. Angelina in my book says: no nation that has colonised another nation is innocent.

    For us Italians, it’s personal. These people reach our coasts, or die in our sea. Italy is surrounded by sea. The people of Lampedusa have been heroic over the past few years. They’ve had a huge burden to bear. But the world shouldn’t need isolated heroes, just greater sharing of the responsibility.

    The Mediterranean is a door that must remain open. A bridge. I thought of that hanging bridge, of a silent dialogue between a woman of the desert fleeing war who boards a boat to get to Italy and an Italian woman born in Tripoli who looks at the sea and keeps searching for the meaning of her interrupted story, but also the moral responsibility of her country.

    I thought of a boy collecting the flotsam from shipwrecks on the beach of Lampedusa. A wonderful place, where the sea turtles lay their eggs, a place where death arrives every day. The boy collects this flotsam and pins it to a big panel. It’s as if he’s trying to restore memory, to stop a shipwreck. He may become an artist, but he doesn’t know it yet.

    The countries of Africa were colonised and exploited. We know what an enormous mistake the war in Iraq was, when the Arab spring came we all hoped things would change. But what emerged was the black flower of Isis. Those condemned to death wear the same orange jumpsuits as the prisoners in Guantanamo. Now we live in fear of beheadings on the internet, terrorist attacks, the Islamisation of the world. And many of us start to think it was better before… when there were local dictators who kept their populations subjugated. The vague idea of exporting democracy has failed in countries organised on tribal lines that are hard to fathom. The results are there for all to see, the civilian population is increasingly isolated, at the mercy of ragtag armies of madmen, which somehow attract the young. The phenomenon of infiltrators, of foreign fighters, is appalling. Now everyone is afraid – of these poor people arriving on ramshackle boats… of our dark-skinned neighbour who goes to the mosque. And we all know that whoever controls fear controls the world…

    Through Angelina you look at the issue of immigration and the feelings of alienation that it often brings. You were born in Ireland, lived in various countries and then settled in Italy. Have you experienced these feelings yourself?

    I felt a great deal of empathy with Angelina, a brusque, withdrawn woman with an interrupted life behind her. A woman who every Monday has a day’s silence like Gandhi and writes notes to communicate with the world. On one of these notes that she leaves to her son, she writes: break down the wall of feelings. That’s what I try to do every time I write, I try to break down that wall.

    I come from an eccentric family that wandered all over. I’ve always felt rather out of place everywhere, I’ve had to find a place within myself. An artist is always an illegal immigrant, a person who makes himself and other people uncomfortable, who finds it hard to acclimatise himself to the surface of things. Far from everything, he still remains in contact with his ‘ancestors’, with a distant spirit.

    Imagery and landscape play a huge part in Morning Sea. The sun is unsparing and the sea both uniting and dividing.  Are landscapes as powerful in your other novels?

    I write through images… for me, the activity that’s closest to writing is dreaming. In dreams, without the control of the ego, our inner images are able to emerge. Jung said we need to go back to the beauty in our hearts, and the heart doesn’t reason through ideas, but through images…

    The sea is an inner landscape that recurs constantly in my dreams and in my books. The sea is a psychic, mysterious, evocative place. A living barrier, like a blank page. It’s calm but it hides storms. The sea is amniotic, it’s the blue blood of the earth.

    This novel has been translated by Ann Gagliardi and your books have been translated into many languages. How do you work with her and with your other translators?

    A writer is her writing, the words she chooses, the rhythm with which she puts them together. When a writer finds her language, she finds the book. Language is the inner voice, the psyche of a book. You have to find the ‘music’. To restore this music in another language is very hard. That’s why I think translators have a very tough profession; they don’t just translate, they rewrite. They have to allow themselves to be ‘inhabited’, to reach an empathy with the subconscious level of the subject matter. I’ve been lucky, Anne Gagliardi did a really extraordinary job. Morning Sea is a very lyrical book, and translating poetry is particularly tricky.

    Who are your literary influences?

    Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Morante, Duras, Woolf, Böll… and today, Auster, Kureishi, Grossman, Oates… I could go on. Mishima says: life is short, but I want to live forever. That’s the possibility that true writers give themselves and their readers.

    Are there any young Italian writers whom you would like to recommend to readers and publishers abroad?

    I’ve heard that in America only six per cent of books are by foreign authors, and that includes Dante! And yet we have many well-known writers. Two names stand out: Roberto Saviano, a social and political writer, and Elena Ferrante, who’s more private and mysterious.

    Howard Curtis has translated more than ninety books from Italian, French and Spanish, mostly contemporary fiction.

    About the Editor

    Tasja Dorkofikis is editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books.