While Mutlu Konuk
Blasing’s biography of Nazim
Hikmet makes for an interesting read today, my guess is it will be an even
more interesting and educational read 100 years from now when removed from the lethal
politics of this era.
The book’s subtitle is: The
Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet.
It is one part literary critique, and one part political history. Some might think that an odd combination, but
it’s not. Literature has always played a
central role in political movements.
Could democracy be understood without “When in the course of human events” or communism without “The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles,” or the forever relevant: “What happens to a dream deferred?”
Literature defines society, and more often than not, it is
penned by a poet.
Hikmet is a Turkish poet revered by the Turkish people. He spent much of life as a political prisoner, or in exile in Soviet Union. As an unrepentant communist, he was feared by
the Turkish government because his writings could steer the hearts of the
country as it was still trying to find its way in the world after the collapse
of the Ottoman Empire.
Hikmet died in Moscow in 1963 and is buried there, though
his request was to be buried in a village in Anatolia. His love affair with his native country and
its native language is what has endeared him to its people. His verse, particularly his epic Human
Landscapes from My Country, tells of the average citizen, without
romanticizing their existence – an antidote to the “orientalist” viewpoint of Turkey
exported to the western world. Significantly,
his work was banned in Turkey until two years after his death. It was through illegal copying and sharing
that Hikmet was widely read in his home country. He was read by both the intelligentsia and the
working class – he spoke to both of them.
Linguistics is not usually my area of interest; but it is
covered in depth in Blasing’s book. Her
chapter on Turkey’s conversion to the Latin alphabet is fascinating. The Turkish language has never been Arabic,
but because the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state, Arabic was used for the alphabet. Problem was, a lot of the sounds used in the
Turkish language, don’t have counterparts in Arabic – and a lot of the sounds
used in Arabic, aren’t used in the Turkish language. One of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s, founder of
the Turkish Republic, lasting modernizations was converting Turkey’s alphabet,
to one which more closely matched its spoken language.
Why is that important to this story? Because Hikmet wrote his work in this new
alphabet, making it accessible to the entire population, not just the elite who
could read Arabic.
I mentioned earlier that my belief is this book will become
more interesting in the years ahead. I
say this because so much of Hikmet’s life’s story is tied up in the politics of
his time, the peak of Communism, and the rise of Fascism. What is lost when one reads through these
filters is that Hikmet was popular with the people because he spoke to their
needs, which were not being met by any of the powers of the day – and this
included his disillusionment because of the unfulfilled agenda personified in Lenin.
For an American who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s, these
are powerful and hard to undo filters.
The meanest taunt one could use when I was a kid was “pinko commie…” The politics of this was black & white,
there was no gray area. While Hikmet was
a “card-carrying” communist, his actual philosophy veers closer to socialism –
an ideology that Americans are still not able to differentiate.
Recommendation: One
has to have a strong interest in either poetry or political history for this book. I recommend it highly.
No comments:
Post a Comment