By PHK
On the jacket of Orhan Pamuk’s latest book, Other Colors: Essays and a Story, stands the black silhouette of a lone man – hands in his pockets, shoulders shrugged, face away from us – walking on top of a rail of the electric tram line that runs down the left lane of a damp, dark empty cobblestone street illuminated only by the fog smeared light of distant street lamps. In the background, two dark gray minarets of a giant mosque pierce the lighter grey sky. The jacket tells us that Ara Güler took this evocative photograph, that Chip Kidd designed the jacket and that Maureen Freely translated the text from Turkish - but nothing more.
On the surface, Other Colors might appear to be a hodge-podge of autobiographical short essays by Pamuk – many, but not all, that had never been published before. But hodge-podge is not a fair description because these essays are as well-ordered and crafted as a carefully designed complex multistoried, multi-use building by a leading international architect.
As such, these essays, in one way or another provide, the back – or back-back stories of several of Pamuk’s previous works. They’re not essential for enjoyment of reading My Name Is Red or Snow, for instance, but for me at least, they answered questions about characters and locations I had previously had, but not found in the novels themselves or in their prefaces. Yet, what I, as a social scientist, found among the most intriguing in Other Colors was Pamuk’s description of the painstaking research – historical, contemporary, familial and societal – that he undertook to ensure the accuracy of the periods, people and physical surroundings of which he wrote. The tales of murder, intrigue, love –emotions and events that drove these post-modernist novels forward – seem almost incidental.
Neither East nor West
Pamuk accurately characterizes himself as a westernized, secular Turk and his political views – whether he likes it or not – under-pin and replicate part of that complicated, multifaceted push-pull relationship between Turkey and Europe described so explicitly and poignantly in Snow and Istanbul.
He points, in Other Colors, to influences from two great Russian writers - Dostoyevsky and Nabokov. Russia’s intellectuals, too, have felt many of the same ambiguities towards Europe as they, like the Turks – over the centuries – have knocked on Europe’s door attracted like moths to its flame only to be repelled by the flame’s searing heat.
Pamuk’s description of his problems with the dark forces in Turkish politics that charged, tried, but then let him off on a technicality for violating the controversial Article 301 of the Turkish penal code are particularly troubling. Who are these people? Why are they so powerful? What are their motives? Who are their supporters? Why should Turkish writers and others be harassed and intimidated for wanting to know and write the truth about the history of a dead empire that preceded their births and that of their country? Are these dark forces among the same people who have apparently begun to monitor Turks’ access to the Internet? What makes them so afraid? I as a Westerner want to know.
Why should late Ottoman history be kept under such wraps? Isn’t it part of Europe’s and, through our immigrant population and early religious and commercial ventures in the Middle East, America’s too? Why shouldn’t teams of legitimate scholars who read the Turkish language as it was written in the Arabic script be allowed to research freely still controversial questions in the Ottoman Archives – perhaps to put to final rest charges and counter-charges that have developed lives of their own even though the perpetrators are long dead? And why, I wonder, are Armenians abroad so insistent upon obtaining the world’s validation of their version of a multi-sided story that happened over 85 years ago? Do they really want to know what those archives yet to be researched may contain?
Originality: “put two together things that were not together before”
Pamuk tells us he is foremost a Turkish writer who holes up ten hours a day in an office full of books with
a view of the Bosporus that gives reign to his fertile imagination. The formula for originality, he told The Paris Review in an interview republished near the end of Other Colors, is “very simple – put together two things that were not together before.” This he does magnificently. The Review interview alone is well worth the read.
Throughout Other Colors, Pamuk returns again and again to the theme of non-European or third world writers seemingly forever relegated to the margins – not the center of civilization – until – he suggests that for him, at least, and perhaps by implication Istanbul too, the elusive center has shifted in his direction. As such, Pamuk seems to say that he has found his bearings as a major 21st century writer and Istanbul, his city which straddles Europe and Asia, is now far less isolated from Europe and the West than it had been in years.
As Pamuk describes the changes he has seen occurring in this spectacular, sometime bedraggled city at the cross-roads of the world, he writes about the impact of Turkey’s internal migrants - the massive influx of Anatolian villagers who, in search of a livelihood, brought the village to the city, stretching its resources to the breaking point - and changing its face from the 1970s to the present.
Some of these villagers both Turks and Kurds from Turkey’s impoverished east also immigrated to Western Europe – into Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and elsewhere as guest workers – carrying the same village culture, religion and ethnic vendettas on their backs. That many would not want to return from abroad to live in a Turkey or at least an Anatolia where jobs were scarce and educational opportunities lacking should not be surprising. After all, many of Istanbul’s poor migrants from eastern Turkey came, stayed and also did not return to the hinterlands.
Pamuk’s Nobel laureate 2006 speech “My father’s suitcase” concludes Other Colors just as Pamuk’s descriptions of his complex relationships with his extended, intergenerational family and his often absent father began this book. This final poignant, highly emotional recollection of Pamuk’s ambivalent memories of his father – brings full circle - with almost a sigh of relief - this younger son’s description of an enigmatic, troubled and professionally unsuccessful man who despite his frequent and lengthy absences from home clearly played an incredibly important role - whether he realized it or not - in his son’s life.
Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors: Essays and a Story, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Translated by Maureen Freely.
Photo credits: PHKushlis, Bosporous View from Topkapi, Sept. 2006; Istanbul, Sultanamet District, Tram at night, Sept. 2006.