A Kurdish-Turkish writer about the tensions between politics and art

The weighty Turkish presidential election, whose second round takes place on Sunday, has more than just geopolitical implications; it is also a turning point for culture. Since 2016, after a failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğanhas the government here cracked down on artists, writers, filmmakers and academics, who have faced censorship, job losses and a climate of fear.

For the novelist Burhan Sönmez, who is part of the country’s ethnic Kurdish minority, the upheavals of the Erdogan years are just the latest chapter in an ongoing struggle between Turkish power and Turkish art.

Born outside Ankara in 1965, where his first language was Kurdish, he worked as a human rights lawyer, but went into exile in Britain after a police attack. He has written five novels, including the award-winning ‘Istanbul Istanbul,’Labyrinth‘ and ‘Stone and Shadow’, newly released in English by Other Press. His novels delve into captivity and memory, with echoes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jorge Luis Borges.

Sönmez now lives in Istanbul and Cambridge, and in 2021 he was named president of PEN Internationalwhere he has been an outspoken defender of freedom of expression in Turkey and elsewhere.

I spoke to Sönmez via video a few days after the first round of the Turkish general election, in which Erdogan finished half a point short of an absolute majority. This interview has been edited and shortened.

Istanbul has always been a city of arrivals. When did you first come here?

During the military coup era, the 1980s. I was born and raised in a small village in central Turkey. It is in the middle of the countryside, like a desert village, without electricity. I moved to Istanbul to study law, and the next phase of my life began after I went into exile in Britain. So now I can combine those different spaces – small village, big Istanbul and then Europe. They all come together and sometimes they separate.

Often there is an indeterminacy of the setting in your novels, not only of geography but also of time. You rarely use the obvious stories about technology or current events that some authors use to ground a reader in time.

In particular, in my novel ‘Istanbul, Istanbul’, I have not mentioned a specific year or period in which the events take place. When people read it, everyone feels that this is the story of their generation.

For better and worse!

Yes. But you know, only a naive writer would be proud of that. You would say, “Okay, I’m depicting the feelings of different generations in one novel.” In fact, it comes from society itself in Turkey. Every generation has gone through the same suffering, the same problems, the same oppression, the same pain. So it is not really a literary talent to put all those times in one story.

In ‘Istanbul, Istanbul’ the narrators are prisoners, held without charge in underground cells, who tell each other stories. What their stories depict in total is a kind of dream state of Istanbul, where freedom is always abbreviated but with which freethinkers and artists remain hopelessly in love.

This really started in the 1850s, when the first liberal intellectuals were suppressed by the Ottoman sultan and went into European exile. If we look at this history over time, 150 or 170 years, we see that every decade governments used the same methods of oppression against writers, journalists, academics, intellectuals.

But the tradition of oppression also created a tradition of resistance. And now look: after 20 years of Erdogan’s rule, almost half of society is still strongly against him. We’re not done yet. This is part of our history of resistance.

Turkey, like America, has a strong political divide between the cities and the countryside. But your novels have criss-crossed from Istanbul to rural Anatolia and back.

Especially in my last novel, “Stone and Shadow”, I wrote about this, comparing the eastern, central and also the western part of Turkey over the last 100 years.

What is the difference between living in a small village in the Turkish countryside and in Istanbul? You could say this is the difference between living in a tiny shack with a gas lamp and living on a street with flashing neon lights. Two different worlds, two different eras.

But you have to understand: Istanbul is now also part of rural Turkey. There has been a massive migration from the countryside. When I went to study in Istanbul, about five million people lived there. Now it is 17 million. It is not easy for a big city to create a new citizen, a new cultural spirit.

In that regard, one of the most disturbing themes of this election is the demonization surrounding refugees. I wonder how it sounds to you, even as a former refugee.

The sad thing for Turkey now is that we have seen a new rise of nationalism – actually colored by racism – against immigrants. There is open racism against Syrians and Afghan people in Turkey. And every party, every political platform has different ways of legitimizing this.

Right-wingers say, “These people are underdeveloped Arabs. This is a backwards race.” From secular progressive people you hear: “Oh, they are right-wing Islamic militants. They are here to support Erdogan, and to invade our country, to turn it into an Islamic republic.” In all cases, racism or hatred against immigrants is at the top of the agenda.

Nationalism now dominates almost every political movement.

Yet there is a rare lightness and freedom in your characterization of these political themes. ‘Labyrinth’, the story of a musician who loses his memory after jumping into the Bosphorus, barely hints at the upheavals of the Erdogan years, when the amnesiac sees a torn poster of the president and mistakes him for a sultan .

We know the difference between art and journalism. Journalism speaks directly. When we speak this other language of art, we feel that we are no longer in the realm of society, of politics. A political issue or a historical fact is just a color in my novel. That’s real power. When I write a novel, I feel like I’m uniting the past and the future. Because the past is a story and the future is a dream.

Has there been self-censorship of artists and writers in Turkey in recent years?

Firstly, more than 500 new Turkish novels are published every year. When I was at university, there were about 15 or 20 new novels in Turkish. That’s a huge difference.

I see in the young generation that they are courageous. Despite all this oppression, this danger of going to prison or becoming unemployed, young people write fearlessly. They write about Kurdish issues, about women’s issues, about LGBT issues, about political crimes in Turkey.

Hundreds of writers are like this: they write openly, and at one point a little dangerously, for themselves. This is something we can be proud of.

As president of PEN International, you have a particularly good view of the state of free speech. Has things improved in Turkey since the 2016-2017 crackdown, when thousands of academics and journalists were arrested or purged?

No, no, it’s not better. In Turkey we have never been able to distinguish between bad and good. It was always: bad or worse.

In Turkey, PEN International supports writers in prison. For myself, as a lawyer, I have the opportunity to go to prisons. Every time I go to Turkey I use this advantage. I go and I see Selahattin Demirtasor Osman Kavala, so many people. It’s sad to see grown people still in prison.

But it is also great to see that we are showing solidarity. At the end of my novel ‘Istanbul, Istanbul’ I used a motto of a Persian Sufi from the Middle Ages. He says, “Hell is not the place where we suffer, it is the place where no one hears us suffer.” I know that if I am arrested, I will never be left alone.

I probably shouldn’t ask you what you expect when the Turks vote in the presidential election next Sunday. …

No, you have to ask. I think we’re going to win. I am too optimistic in life and very naive.