The voice of Turkish anxiety mutes his own

In 2000, two years before Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s father died, he left a suitcase of his writings with Pamuk to “just take a look” after he was gone. While accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, Pamuk, in his speech titled, ‘My Father’s Suitcase,’ confessed that the suitcase still lay unopened.

On Thursday, the 57-year-old author told a rapt audience gathered at the British Council that he still hadn’t touched the suitcase. “It lies there. It represents psychological anxieties. I don’t want to read my father’s writings,” he said candidly.

Pamuk may shy away from the unlocking personal anxieties, yet, giving voice to the anxieties of loss of identity and the clash of tradition and modernity in his own country through his writings is what has endeared him to readers across the world.

Pamuk’s outspokenness in criticising his country’s historical blindspots — the Armenian genocide and the suppression of the Kurdish minority — even had the Turkish government slapping criminal charges on him. “The charges were dropped due to international pressure but others are a still persecuted,” he said explaining that freedom of speech continued to be “troubled” in his country.

Pamuk writes in Turkish and said that he knew, “the humiliation of writing in a language that no one understands.” The irony of the candid confession made by an author, whose novels like My Name is Red, Black Book and Snow have been translated into more than 55 languages, is not easily lost.

“To be able to write in a language in which you speak to your grandmother and the grocery shop owner is a joy I have had. But writing is communicating. One must look for the best communication available,” he said in his charmingly accented English. Describing the process of translations to be “a complicated drama in his life, which I have come to love,” Pamuk said, “Every novel loses something in translation. I tell my translators to translate what I mean and not what I wrote.”

Pamuk urged authors to invent a language to express their own reality  instead of imitating western notions and characters. “I was happy to imitate (William) Faulkner. (RK) Narayan invented Malgudi. I needed that kind of voice,” he said.

Shuttling between the USA (where he teaches a class at Columbia) and Istanbul, Pamuk continues to feel unsettled. “I don’t belong to the western world of literature. I feel a sense of otherness. I spent all my life in Istanbul, in the same street,
neighbourhood and apartment block.

Yet, living in the same place does not mean you are comfortable with it. If I feel at home I would lose the energy to write. Ethics of modern literature is not to feel at home in the world.”
(Pamuk’s latest novel The Museum of Innocence was released in Turkey last August)