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Orhan Kemal, poet, novelist, playwright
and master of short stories, is the pen name of Mehmet Raþit
Öðütçü (1914-1970). Today, he is lovingly known as an
“immortal of Turkish literature”, a soubriquet that was
bestowed on him, deservedly, long before his untimely death.
Sadly, as is the case with many Turkish
writers of international stature, he has been woefully
ignored in the West, particularly by Anglophone publishers.
Although, recently, in 2008, the first two volumes of his
four-volume autobiographical novels, was published in the
U.K. by Peter Owen, under the title, The Idle Years,
this reader, for one, feels that this solitary tome proffers
merely a token recognition of his rightful place in the
constellations of world literature.
Kemal’s vast body of work not only
provides deep insights into the complexity of the Turkish
spirit – a spirit that evolved during centuries of
coadunation between diverse peoples and cultures – but also
through a profound understanding of the generic aspects of
human nature. A beautiful passage in Cemile, the
third volume of his autobiographical novels, written when
Kemal was still quite young, epitomizes perfectly the
universal vision that permeates his oeuvre. This is how he
describes the nostalgic overtones an immigrant from Bosnia
of Turkish descent exudes as he sings an old folk ballad: “The
song had the full range of colours of an ornate kilim. It
had longing, it had desire, and it had love… All the motifs
one would find from India to China, from Casablanca to New
York, from the Po Valley to the South American steppes, and
indeed in Anatolia. It was a complex tapestry of mankind’s
longing and desires.”
Since he designated his autobiographical
novels as the “diaries of a nobody” and since he always
exudes love and compassion for the impecunious “everyman”
for whom the acquisition of daily bread imposes Herculean
labours, we can be permitted to sum up Kemal’s genius as
“the chronicler of nobodies”.
But, of course, the hidden truth beneath
that summation – a truth which Kemal knew in his bones - is
that nobody is a nobody; everybody is somebody; and
somebody as exceptional, as meritorious of his or her
birthright, as those purported to be of notable lineage or
status. The inequalities that govern our societies do not
lie in the mysteries by which chance determines the
provenance of a person his/her race, faith or bloodline, but
in the ambitions of those whom Wilhelm Reich called “the
armoured men”.
Kemal astutely espies these multitudinous
“armoured men”. He sees the way their lust for power, their
craving for material gains, their obsession for unlimited
privileges drive them to self-appoint themselves as an
“elite” with god-given rights to leadership. He sees the way
they form unconscionable cabals and the way they array
themselves in the ostentatious garbs of politics, the
military, religion and finance.
It is in defiance of such a rapacious and
supremacy-mad establishment that Kemal, stands up, to
paraphrase Pablo Neruda, as the singer who sings “for those
who do not have a voice”. Indeed, the vigour of his
inimitable prose, the unswerving integrity with which he
portrays, in stark realism, starving children, oppressed
women, the plights of factory, farm and migrant workers, the
lives of prisoners and the love, friendship and solidarity
of the underprivileged, deliver an unequivocal voice for
those crushed into hopeless silence.
The two volumes comprising The Idle
Years recount Kemal’s journey to maturation in the 1920s
and 1930s; starting with his life in Adana, where he was
born, then living in exile and impoverishment in Beirut
where his father, Abdülkadir Kemali Bey, a lawyer and
erstwhile member of the nascent Turkish parliament, had to
escape with his family for having dared form an opposition
party. The latter part relates Kemal’s repatriation, his
failure to find employment in Istanbul, and, finally, his
return to Adana, to a humble job and the prospect of
betrothal.
Though both volumes are early works, they
amply exhibit Kemal’s humanity and compassion. His
allegiance with the downtrodden is even more forceful in the
following two autobiographical novels, Cemile and
Dünya Evi. The former, relating his endeavours to marry
an immigrant young Bosnian deemed to be of inferior stock,
not only condemns the prevalent prejudices of traditional
class structures – perhaps even more prominent in rural
areas than in metropolises - but also exposes the ferocity
unleashed by unprincipled entrepreneurs in their pursuit of
wealth.
The fourth volume, Dünya Evi -
still to be translated into English – recounts his
frustrations in an uninspiring employment which not only
alienates him from his fellow-workers but also leads him to
be dismissed from his job, a misfortune which also provokes
separation from his wife. The fulminating passion of this
novel serves as a poignant paean for the countless men and
women of our times who are thrown into robotized industrial
labyrinths in the name of “progress” and “development”. But,
as in all of Kemal’s works, no matter how severe the
hardships, there are always embers of hope. And, as he
constantly reminds us, it is love that invariably keeps hope
burning brightly. Consequently, it is love that triumphs in
Dünya Evi and reunites the rueful protagonist with
his wife.
Significantly, the budding gifts of the
young Kemal blossomed when he, like many Turkish writers
before him, was imprisoned, in 1938, for pronouncing
socialist views. It is often proclaimed in Turkey where
incarceration and judicial harassment of writers is still
prevalent to this day, that time spent in jail by a writer
not only affirms his literary stature but also evolves his
gifts by providing him with the profound experiences
requisite for any great artist. (Not surprisingly, the same
rubric is also expressed in numerous other countries where
their respective governments insidiously suppress freedom of
expression.)
In The Idle Years the young Kemal
asks the skies: “What do you want from us?” He receives the
answer, a few years later, in Bursa Prison, from none other
than Nâzým Hikmet, Turkey’s supreme poet and one of the
literary giants of the 20th century. Fate, for
once compassionate, contrives to transfer, in December 1940,
the already legendary Hikmet to the very prison where Kemal
is serving a five-year term.
This quirk of history, despite the abiding misery
confinement inflicts on both geniuses, proves a boon for
them. It blesses Hikmet, sentenced to a long – in Hikmet’s
mind, interminable – confinement for advocating Communism,
with the constancy of a kindred spirit; and, with Hikmet,
having immediately recognized his young companion’s
narrative gifts, it bestows upon Kemal the spiritual
guidance and disquisitive mentorship that sets him on course
for the pinnacles of Turkish literature. Kemal reverently
admits that Hikmet’s panoptic advice on the essence of art -
simply that art must always harness itself to absolute
truthfulness and that in order to achieve that cohesion the
artist must commit himself to total engagement with his art
- has been the pellucid beacon throughout his life.
Apart from Nâzým Hikmet’s own letters and
poems from prison, there is no better testimony to the
courage of dissident patriots, and not least, to those
champions of human rights and freedom of expression, than
Kemal’s memoir, In Jail with Nâzým Hikmet. This book
has now been beautifully translated into English by Bengisu
Rona, the Professor of Turkish language and literature at
the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, and published by Anatolia Publishing with an
international edition planned for 2010. It will provide the
Anglophone readership a cause for celebration.
I should like to offer a special mention
for In Jail with Nâzým Hikmet.
It depicts, devotedly, the solidarity
that, with only a few exceptions, grows between prisoners
and bonds them so strongly as to make custody almost
bearable. By exploring this stoic comradeship, Kemal
highlights one of the great virtues of humankind,
particularly evident in Turkey, which impels communities to
lend to one another all possible support when calamity
strikes.
Just as interestingly, Kemal’s memoir
depicts the prisons of his times as institutions that were
incomparably more humane to their inmates – particularly to
writers and dissidents - than those of today where the
disintegration of the soul through isolation, dehumanization
and brutality – and, indeed, torture – have become standard
practice. The present iniquities in prison conditions – many
governments dissemble the changes with the misnomer
“modernization” - should make us reflect, as indubitably
Kemal expects, that the sacrifice of human rights and values
at the altar of expediency should never be allowed and are,
in any case, contrary to the ethos of progress and social
development.
Kemal’s insight also casts light on the
bitter conflicts engendered by rigid, muddled dogmas. For
the discerning reader this dimension is omnipresent between
the lines of almost all of Kemal’s works. The period when
Kemal and Hikmet spent in Bursa prison was a time when the
armies of Nazi Germany were rampaging across Europe.
Although Hitler’s ideology of a thousand-year Reich under
the rule of a super race was deemed, by most of the free
world, as the flotsam of a demented mind, it had found
support in various reactionary circles. Similar approval was
to be found in Turkey also, mostly from hardliners who,
still clinging to their imperial mentality, still mourning
the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and, therefore,
mistrustful of reforms, saw National Socialism as a panacea.
By conflating Stalin’s Communism – as ruthless and brutal as
Nazism – these obscurantists remorselessly and
self-righteously dismissed the original and humane aspects
of Socialism. (Socialism, advocating universal
wealth-sharing and equality for every individual, was, as
readers well know, the utopian rule for humankind that both
Kemal and Hikmet championed throughout their lives.) In
In Jail with Nâzým Hikmet, Kemal relates the unforgiving
factionalism that these alignments produced by depicting, in
microcosm, the equivalent divisions between the prisoners.
This account provides a reflection into the great divide
that bludgeoned the fledgling Turkish republic and only
barely kept the country out of the Second World War until
all but the end of it. More importantly, it should serve as
a condemnation of the fanaticism that present-day racist,
political, religious and nationalist ideologies
sanctimoniously nurture. Today both Kemal’s and Hikmet’s
conviction holds truer than ever: patriotism does not lie in
the hysteria of nationalism or religion or racism but in our
compassion and humanity not only for our fellow-citizens but
also – and not least - for those whom the family of man, for
perverse reasons, has chosen to ostracize as “the other”.
Orhan Kemal’s work should command
the attention of all lovers of literature. The honesty and
passion that gives resonance to his clarion voice should
exhort us all. And to Turks, in particular, especially to
those still labouring to bring about the social changes our
secular charter demands, his works should be standard texts.
Then they will see that the strength and natural goodness of
the Turkish spirit, so truthfully caught by Kemal, can
outweigh, and thus thwart, the re-emergence of the
oppressive elements in Turkey’s otherwise magnificent
heritage.
MORIS FARHI
1829 words
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