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Tag: Ece Temelkuran

  • No time for arrogance: a conversation with Ece Temelkuran

    No time for arrogance: a conversation with Ece Temelkuran

    Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer now based in Zagreb. We caught up with her during her book tour to talk about politics, the marketplace of ideas, and how writers in exile are victimised.

     

    You’ve written about how problematic the notion of ‘writer in exile’ is for you. Can you tell me more?

    A woman, coming from the third world, throwing herself into the arms of civilised Europe, lady in distress and so on – that’s victimisation! When you’re described as an exiled writer, you’re supposed to tell that story and only that story. But I’m not telling the story of Turkey right now. With my new book, How To Lose A Country, I’m telling the story of the rest of the world. I’m trying to tell Europe and the US their story.

    So you’re holding up a mirror to the West.

    Yes. It’s already hard, being a woman from Turkey, to be taken seriously. There is that orientalist thing – you can speak about my country, but I can’t speak about your country. And I’ve experienced that, from an audience in the UK, I’ve been told that I can’t speak about Great Britain because I can’t understand Britain.

    Why not? Because you’re a woman or because you’re foreign?

    Well, I was telling a friend of mine about the reaction I’ve been getting while launching the book: the challenges, the resistance. She told me, You’re a woman and you have ideas. Nobody likes that. When you have feelings, they love it. When you have ideas – not so much.

    I’ve been thinking about the brilliant essay you wrote a few years ago about being seen as a victim. There’s an odd tension about Westerners who want to ‘help’.

    A few years ago, when I launched another book, a woman in the audience folded her hands and said, What can we do for you? I felt like I was a panda, being adopted by a website. What was interesting was that at that time, Brexit was happening. It was so amazing to see that the British were still convinced that they’re in a position to help other people. You know those clichés, those roles, they don’t work anymore.

    I guess the UK hasn’t done its reckoning with its past yet and still sees itself in a certain role.

    It’s doing that right now, but in a very tense way. It’s messy. This is what populism does to a country: it makes debate impossible. All of a sudden you realise you’ve lost the basic consensus of how we communicate, the basics of rationality. I can see what will happen in the UK because it’s the same pattern everywhere.

    So what do you think will happen?

    It’s not going to get better on its own unless the side that promotes rationality and sense has some more political power. Everybody, not only in Britain, has to realise that this is about politics, it’s about morality, and it’s not going to get better on its own. Everybody has to do something.

    I guess that brings us to the question of personal responsibility.

    It wasn’t always like it is now. It wasn’t like this before the 1980s in the UK, but then this woman with her handbag arrived, and then suddenly people became political objects. They weren’t subjects anymore. This didn’t just happen in England. It has become the motto of our age to say, ‘Oh I hate politics’ – without realising that that is the most political statement you can come up with.

    It’s the height of cynicism and privilege.

    It’s a very political statement because you’re giving up on being a subject. And it makes you very open to authoritarianism.

    So what is our personal responsibility in the current political state? Is it being an active voter, is it activism?

    Before that, before any of that, what I see happening in Europe is this: they’re getting caught up in an excess of emotion. It doesn’t solve anything. Expressing your emotion is an ideological pattern. After neoliberalism took over, it made us think that antagonism is not good, confrontation is not good. But they are good. Get rid of the emotions and start using your mind. This is how I escaped from my own anguish regarding the political situation in Turkey and my position in it. It is not personal. Unfortunately our generation has to suffer the last crisis of neoliberalism and therefore a crisis of democracy. Unfortunately we have to deal with this.

    If we need to take emotions out of politics, what do you think about the idea of left wing populism as an answer to right wing populism?

    I think that the remedy for right wing populism is going to come from the new generation. The right wing populism we’re seeing now is a 21st century problem, and we’re trying to deal with it with 20th century tools, with political parties and so on. I’m expecting a lot from climate strikers. Sooner or later they are going to come up against the hard surface of neoliberal greed, and they will soon understand that they have to fight against big capital and so on. They’re going to invent ways of doing so. Since it’s not invented, we just don’t know yet. It’ll be like Tahrir Square all over again. 

    You touch on Hannah Arendt in your new book. Tell me why you think she’s still relevant.

    We have to remember that that generation was a defeated generation. There’s a bit of a defeatist layer there; broken people remaking themselves. I do think that what has changed since then is this social and moral transformation that made me reverse her term from banality of evil to evil of banality. Now evil is not as obvious. It comes in the form of banality. Trump is a great example of this. Banality, when it builds up and becomes a political identity, qualitatively turns into evil . Whereas before, evil was very obvious, it wore uniforms. It is different now, it comes across as something that we consider not that dangerous: Oh, it’s another idea in the free market of ideas, oh, it’s just another opinion, another faith. But all these small political choices add up to create their own form of identity.

    What do you think of the concept of the marketplace of ideas?

    It’s still relevant. Otherwise the British media wouldn’t still be obsessed with giving space to this or that idea, would not be giving space to Nigel Farage.

    Do you think everyone has the same access to the marketplace of ideas, especially when it comes to questions of freedom of speech?

    That is the most bullshit illusion that has ever been created. I’m not even going to discuss this.

    Coming back to the idea of victimising Turkish writers that we spoke about earlier: what is the best way to counter these notions?

    You know, we don’t have time for arrogance at the moment. Every country has its material to feel superior over others. In Turkey, we had the Arab world. We used to think, Oh all those crazy things happening in Arab countries. Now people think exactly the same thing about Turkey. But it is in fact happening to you, in Europe, and you’re so absorbed that you don’t even see that it is happening. Global solidarity is crucial at this time because right wing populism cannot be defeated in just one country. They’re already cooperating, so get your act together!

     

    Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator, whose journalism has appeared in many major newspapers. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow on Knots (translated by Alex Dawe and winner of a PEN Translates grant), and the Ambassador of New Europe Award. Her new book, How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, is out now.

    Ece was in conversation with Theodora Danek.

     

  • What is a country?

    Following her visit to the UK last week for the London Book Fair Turkey Market Focus, Ece Temelkuran reflects on ‘Writing Turkey’ and what the term ‘country’ has come to represent for her.

    I became fixated with this question when I started reflecting on the topic I was asked to talk about at the Arcola Theatre in London: ‘Writing Turkey’. As Turkey was the Market Focus for this year’s London Book Fair, we, the writers from Turkey, were supposed to represent ‘all the colours of Turkey’, as advertised in promotional materials. Well, we did not have that much to do. The bad news about Fazil Say exploded on the first day of the fair while the Turkish Cultural Ministry was busy representing the country as a haven of multiculturalism.

    It emerged that the acclaimed pianist had received a ten-month suspended sentence for comments posted on Twitter ‘insulting religion’. The charges against him included retweeting a poem by Omar Khayyam. Thanks to English PEN the visitors at the Fair learned that the official version was not the only colour of Turkey.

    The campaign for imprisoned journalist Zeynep Kuray was also very much alive at the Fair. Zeynep is one of the hundreds of imprisoned journalists in Turkey and Turkey currently has the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world. My country is indeed a colourful place. Apparently so colourful that the political power needs to erase a few colours, just to tone it down a little.

    Coming from such a country, during my talk at the Arcola Theatre, I decided to pose the question: ‘Is it possible not to write about Turkey?’ rather than ‘Writing Turkey’. As a writer and a journalist I am trying to avoid daily politics in Turkey at the moment. I’m trying to move from reality to truth, from journalism to literature. I have two reasons. The first reason is, I think, fairly obvious considering the incidents mentioned above. The second is more theoretical. Journalism, I have come to believe, is just a form of reality, and a rather boring one. There is an untold agreement in journalism. In every piece of news you promise the reader: ‘I am going to shock you now!’. You guarantee that ‘this time is different’.

    ‘Today is not like yesterday.’ After repeating this promise to myself for about 20 years I finally understood that repetition is the most sickening form of torture that the human mind can endure. And in this case, it was my own mind. After writing two novels I admitted that I need a new ‘country’ from which only I can report and where there is no need for repetition: Literature. Literature, for me, is a country where I don’t have to shock people but I do hope to amaze them. All in all, I am at a stage where reality and fiction are not that far apart. Fiction can become real and reality can be passed off as fiction. A little anecdote about how easily reality and fiction can be mixed.  In my first novel, Sounds of Bananas, I created the concept of the Bread Tree. One of the characters, Zeinab Khanim, was hanging bags of left-over bread on a tree and the whole neighbourhood was following her. After reading the novel some Turkish readers went to Beirut and started asking about the Bread Tree. I heard that there are people in Beirut now, who after being asked about it so many times, came to believe that the Bread Tree actually existed; they just didn’t know about it.

    After working as a journalist for so many years and seeing that nothing has changed in my country, I think one would agree with me that I have enough reasons to believe that fiction is stronger than reality.  And although my journalism didn’t set any of the imprisoned journalists free, at least my fiction created a Bread Tree in Beirut.

    Yet again it is almost impossible not to write about my country even when I am writing fiction. In Sounds of Bananas  Diyarbakır, a Kurdish town in Turkey, becomes Sabra Shatila Camp. And in my second novel, people in Libya are actually Kurds. I guess one cannot get away from one’s country even if one distances oneself from it. Therefore the central question remains: What is my country to me?

    While reflecting on the question I remember Angelopolous’ film Eternity and a Day. I remember the question that the protagonist was asked: ‘What is tomorrow?’ The answer was as the title of the film: ‘Eternity and a day!’ My answer would be similar if I was asked: ‘What is a country?’: ‘A land much bigger than the world and as small as a table.’ Much bigger because, for me, a country is a moment. It is that moment when friends burst out laughing, interpreting a reference in a joke the same way. A moment of mutual and deep understanding. It is as small as a table because actually what you long for, when you are away, is a bunch of good friends who would only fill a space at a table. You miss that very table, not the vast land. You miss the colours of your country. Not all of them. But certainly those that are being erased.

    About the Author

    Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known journalists and political commentators, writing regularly for the Turkish newspaper Habertürk. She has published widely and won numerous awards for her work, including the Pen for Peace Award and Turkish Journalist of the Year. Temelkuran, whose articles have been published in Nawaat, New Left Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Global Voices Advocacy and the Guardian, has written regularly for Al-Akhbar English. Her book Deep Mountain, Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide was published by Verso and Book of the Edge  by Boa Editions.

    Additional Information

    Ece will take place in European Literature Night at the British Library on 15 May 2013.

    You can read more about the Turkey Market Focus in this piece by Andrew Franklin, Director of Profile Books, in BookBrunch.

    You can also read Ece’s previous PEN Atlas piece: Literary festivals: playground or construction site?

  • Literary festivals: playground or construction site?

    This week’s PEN Atlas piece reports from the Tanpınar literary festival in Turkey. Journalist Ece Temelkuran gives her personal response to this year’s festival

    As world politics becomes bloodier, commercial literature becomes increasingly depoliticised. People eat, pray, love and think Tahrir Square is just crazy Arabs partying all night and the Madrid riots an attempt to break the record for the most crowded flamenco competition. On the bus to work your 10 hour shift you notice a guy casually selling his Ferrari, and yet this literature still says ‘please follow your heart’! Follow your heart, especially while you’re being smuggled across the Mediterranean on an inflatable boat to reach Italian shores… Follow the signs in any case, until you reach the fifty shades of commercial writing.

    If literature is where writers play, festivals are playgrounds, but one where we learn about the market. For me the anxiety of networking at these events is painful. Fully equipped with this inappropriate attitude, I joined the Tanpınar Festival in Istanbul.

    Although Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) is not necessarily seen as an issue-driven writer his novels always focused on the main questions of his time. One of the central themes of his writing was the identity crisis at the turn of the century in Turkey, where East and West meet and frequently clash. His masterpieces A Mind at Peace and The Time Regulation Institute focus on the individual torn between enforced state modernisation and the traditional customs of an Eastern society. Ultimately Tanpınar considered what mattered to society, and I would say his ghost was watching over the festival last week.

    The writers hadn’t been asked specifically to talk about the political issues of the day, but most of the meetings at some point ended up being political. This tendency is quite understandable as the festival’s theme was ‘the City and Fear’. Istanbul is a city of political clashes and the main conflicts of our times are played out on our doorstep. Politics intruded through both themes of the festival.

    I attended a reading by Kader Abdollah and Laia Fabregas on Displaced Identity, Survival through Language, Who is the Other? Laia, a Dutch writer of Spanish origins, read a piece from her book Girl with Nine Fingers, in which the protagonist, an eight year old girl, witnesses the night of a military coup in Spain. Since I witnessed the Turkish coup in 1980 when I was eight, the experience was very moving; Laia’s description of that night reminded me of the beginning of my own enforced politicisation.  When Kader was reading from his novel The Journey of the Empty Bottles, I was imagining myself in his place, at the end of my personal political history: a political refugee who had to abandon her mother tongue to tell the story and be entertaining while doing it. This was easy to imagine for me as I come from a country with a history of authoritarianism.  It was unexpected, but the event became a mirror that showed me a different version of myself.

    The other talk I moderated was Playing with the facts and fiction. I imagine I wasn’t chosen for my spectacular moderating skills but for the novel I wrote about Beirut, Sounds of Bananas. In this novel, I played with the historical facts of the civil war and the 2006 war and made sure that the facts most unexpected to the readers were actually true and the most illogical stories were taken from real life. We gathered round the table to talk about playing with facts, the confusion between facts and fiction, and discussed the theme for next year’s festival: Facts and Fiction. 

    Although we all tried not to, we couldn’t keep ourselves from real political discussions. Ned Beauman, Jenn Ashworth, Nermin Yıldırım, Soti Triantafillou, Levi Henriksen, Marit Nicolaysen, Can Eryümlü, Doğu Yücel and I, we all ended up going beyond fiction and reached the events of the world that we all want to…well, fix. That was the result of the five hours of discussion on the topic: literature was there to cure reality. And that for me, I think, is the ultimate politics. That is why the title of this little piece is Literary Festivals: playground or construction site?  What I took from the Tanpınar festival is that, although the industry wants writers to be depoliticised, the very heart of writing emerges despite all restraints and engages with the reality. By playing with the truth, perhaps we are reconstructing the story of what it is to be human.

    About the Author

    Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known journalists and political commentators, writing regularly for the Turkish newspaper Habertürk. She has published widely and won numerous awards for her work, including the Pen for Peace Award and Turkish Journalist of the Year. Temelkuran, whose articles have been published in Nawaat, New Left Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Global Voices Advocacy and the Guardian, has written regularly for Al-Akhbar English. Her book Deep Mountain, Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide was published by Verso and Book of the Edge  by Boa Editions.

    Additional Information

    Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar was one of the most important modern novelists and essayists of Turkish literature. He was also a member of the Turkish parliament between 1942 and 1946.

     More information about Laia Fabregas can be found here.

     More information about  Kader Abdollah can be found here.