*To Have And Have Not* *Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk tells Robert Cottrell the west has pushed the world's poor towards envy and nationalism*
The Financial Times Magazine The view from the terrace offers a vision of earthly riches so sweeping and extravagant that if the Devil were trying again to tempt Christ after 40 days in the wilderness, I would recommend his doing it in Istanbul. The city seethes and glitters for miles on all sides, its hills laden with palaces and mosques and gilded domes. Its lights dance, reflected on the dark waters of the Bosporus below. Hong Kong or San Francisco may be as picturesque, but neither can rival Istanbul for sheer drama. Here two continents begin and end. On the near side of the Bosporus lies Europe. On the far side lies Asia. And Turkey straddles the space between them, geographically, historically and intellectually. The terrace, not far from Taksim Square in the heart of the city, belongs to Orhan Pamuk, widely considered Turkey's greatest living novelist. The view is one great delight of this flat that he keeps for writing. The other is the mass of books lining the walls, thousands of them, roughly arranged by topics from Japanese fiction to French philosophy. I think for a moment that Pamuk has all my favourite books, then I realise he probably has everybody's favourite books. He is a tall man, a fit-looking 50, dressed casually in the American fashion, soft-spoken and courteous. His grandfather made a fortune early last century building railways for the Ataturk regime. His father, who died just a few months ago, spent the fortune living well, investing badly, and translating French poetry - a lifestyle choice that Pamuk clearly admires, even though it left him less rich than he might have been. John Updike, the American novelist, has compared him with Proust. The analogy is one that Pamuk himself also makes, a little wistfully, as we talk. Western readers know Pamuk best for My Name is Red, an intricate and seductive murder mystery set among 16th-century Ottoman miniaturist painters, which was published in English in 2001. The plot is a fine weave of theological disputes, court etiquette and miniaturist techniques, shot through with sex and violence. The critic Maureen Freely called the book "almost perfect... All it needs now is the Nobel prize". He is working on a book about Istanbul that will be part-memoir and part-meditation. He wants to test his own sense of the city, where he was born and grew up, against the Istanbul that others have remembered and imagined down the centuries. After that he has a novel planned, "about the idea of museums, collections, the attachment to objects and the loss of love". But if all this sounds a little abstract, a little bookish, there is another side to Pamuk, a political engagement. He made headlines in 1999, and risked prosecution, when he signed an international petition urging the Turkish government to give members of the country's Kurdish minority "constitutional guarantees" of their rights, and so rescue Turkey from the "shame" of past repressive policies. In the last five years, says Pamuk, he has become "more and more political". Attacks on his liberal views in the Turkish press have only made him "more angry and more involved", he says. "It is a son-of-a-bitch kind of anger and it turns out to be part of your life." An article of his which sticks in my mind is one he wrote in September 2001 soon after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. He describes meeting a neighbour on the street, an elderly man, who says to him: "Sir, have you seen, they have bombed America? They did the right thing!" Pamuk muses on what could prompt an old man in Istanbul to condone terror in New York, or a Palestinian to admire the Taliban, and he arrives at a formulation that does not quite blame the west, but which assigns it a contributory negligence. The basic problem, he says, is "not Islam, nor what is idiotically described as the clash between east and west, nor poverty itself. It is the feeling of impotence deriving from degradation, the failure to be understood, and the inability of such people to make their voices heard." The west has not tried enough "to understand the damned of the world". Pamuk, who professes no religion, has made his own bid since then to understand Islamic fundamentalism by writing a political novel about its place in provincial Turkey today. His aim, he says, was to "understand what a fundamentalist is, in his own terms. Not why he is so right, but why he is so angry." The subject is a highly sensitive one for Turkey, which has an overwhelmingly Muslim population, but has proclaimed itself a secular state since 1923. The government allows freedom of worship, but keeps a close eye on it through a Directorate of Religious Affairs, and clamps down smartly on what it regards as signs of fundamentalism - such as the wearing of headscarves by women, which is forbidden in official buildings. This latest novel, called Snow, has sold 140,000 copies at home since publication last year, and is now being translated into English. It made him enemies on two fronts. First were "the ultra-secularists, who were not pleased to see me going into the inner [thoughts] of religious fundamentalists," he says. "They did not want to see Islamists as human beings, they wanted to see them as fanatics, midway to barbarians." Then there were the Islamists; angered that he gave his religious characters an active sexual life. "They said, 'How can an Islamist, a true believer, have sex outside marriage?'" The Islamists, like Marxists before them, "wanted writers to portray an idealised version of people". Pamuk accepts cheerfully enough that he makes an easy target for critics. "I have my subscriptions to the TLS and The New Yorker," he says, "while other people are more limited here. My name is on the billboards. I am from the spoiled upper class. People are very resentful." But when it comes to the war in Iraq, at its height when we talk, Pamuk is very much in tune with the popular mood. He thought it a dangerous mistake, as did everybody else I met in Turkey, from a bus driver in Ankara to a professor of economics in Istanbul. They saw the war as a foolish adventure promoted by a willful US president, a US government wanting Iraqi oil, and a US industrial sector hungry to profit from reconstructing the country once the war was over. Saddam may be a bad man, they say, but that did not give the US any right to depose him. So far, so familiar. The same sort of criticisms could be heard almost everywhere in the world at the time. But in Turkey they were voiced with a special anxiety. The country's border with Iraq made it a front-line state in the war, exposed to stray bombs and refugees. Ninety per cent of the public was appalled, according to Pamuk, when the Turkish government seemed ready to join the US war effort in exchange for a big enough package of US aid - many billions of dollars - which Turkey desperately needed. That plan was scuppered unexpectedly by the parliament in Ankara, which voted against letting US combat troops invade northern Iraq from Turkish soil. Pamuk compares the US intervention in Iraq to a strong person "slapping" or "insulting" a weak one: bad behaviour even when the strong person believes he has been provoked. The US can do such a thing, he says, partly because it believes Muslims are "lesser people, backward, stupid, lazy orientals who don't know about things, who torment women. You have the feeling that one American life is more important than thousands of these people. The justification of the war starts with these things." Reading my notes of the conversation later, I have to remind myself that Pamuk is an outspoken admirer of western values, western culture, western democracy. He welcomes globalisation, and Amazon.com cartons litter his floor. He believes the US is a highly successful social and economic model. What he objects to is the manner of exporting it. The US is becoming "fanatical" too, he believes. If the Americans would only "take all the money they have spent on this war, and spend it like Soros has done on civil societies in these countries, then in 10 years they would have wonderful results." He sees the divide widening between what he calls "this relentless civilisation of the west, superior in arts, science, education" on one side, and "85 per cent of the human race, with much lesser, disintegrating, unsuccessful civilisations" on the other. But he dismisses the idea that the divide is mainly a religious one, even between the US and Arab countries. "The Koran is a small part of it. It is not a text that makes this history, it is history itself: the people, the land, the climate, the geography. The fact that there is less democracy in the Middle East, that the Middle East is poor, these are things shaped not by the Koran but by layers of history and of interaction with the west." The real gulf, he says, is the material one, between wealth and poverty. The real question is why it should have become such an acute problem now. The answer he comes to is that global media have become so successful, so universal in projecting images of western wealth, that the picture is getting "impossible to accept, impossible to come to terms with" in poor countries. The poor have no comparable means of celebrating their own culture, their own way of life, which might otherwise give them solace. They are left only with "material envy", says Pamuk, "it is inevitable, they want the things the Americans have." So long as they lack those things, he feels, "the only consolation for such a time is nationalism, past glories, the enjoyment of this or that terrorist attack. They may know that ethically, morally, this is not right, but secretly they enjoy it." In an ideal world, I say, we might debate this, try to understand that envy of the east and moderate the stereotypes of the west. But in the case of Iraq, the rich part of the world believed the angry part of the world was posing a direct threat to it, and was acting to block that threat. Not so, says Pamuk. In Iraq it is "the rich part of the world making a direct, violent attack on the poor, disorganised part of the world". The west may or may not be right to worry about dangers from "ruthless dictators" in the Middle East, he says, but right now it is part of the west that is controlled by "a vulgar and brutal and not very sophisticated ruler, Bush." The other big Turkish worry about the war concerned the Kurds, whose communities straddle the borderlands between eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. The Turks feared the war might lead to a Kurdish state in northern Iraq, and with it a new spur to Kurdish separatism in eastern Turkey. Only four years have passed since the last wave of guerrilla warfare subsided with the arrest of the Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan and the collapse of his movement, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or the PKK. The separatist campaign, and Turkey's brutal suppression of it, cost 30,000 lives, most of them Kurdish. It cast a long shadow over civil liberties and human rights. It soured relations with the European Union so badly as to set back Turkey's hopes of joining the EU by at least a decade. Nobody in Turkey, liberal or conservative, wants to go back to those days. Alternatively, there is Pamuk's approach, which has the merit of simplicity. "Kurds in northern Iraq should have every right to decide for themselves what they want to do," he says, "and if they want to have a state that is their business." If Turkey fears a contagion of separatism among its own Kurds, it should treat them more kindly and so make them less restive. Besides, he adds, Turkey is a fragile country economically, and "the geopolitics of a fragile country should be: 'I am polite to my neighbours'." I imagine Pamuk (pictured below) is polite to his neighbours too, even when they applaud the knocking down of the World Trade Center. He loves Istanbul and everything in it. While researching his new book he has studied engravings of the city, and finds them full of "nationalistic and nostalgic sentiments", above all "the feeling of melancholy that comes from loss of empire". He feels an echo there "of the decay of my family, as it disintegrates from a big family with uncles and grandmothers to just the four of us, parents and children, moving from big house to apartment building, then on our different ways." The big house he knew as a baby was home to an extended family of 12 or 14 people. Now, after a recent divorce, he lives alone. We talk more about melancholy, and I begin to sense how he can admire the US so much, while criticising it so strongly. "Countries without much history, or without much sad history, are more naive," he says. "But in their naivety they are realists, they can see their problems easily. Here we have lots of melancholy which blurs the vision and which saps the energy to invent, to invest, to create." -- Jogesh Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East - to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them - who were above such trifling. - Henry David Thoreau
