When Historical Fiction Is a Crime (2020)

Soon a hush descends on Istanbul: “There were no arguments, no shouting, no laughter, no shopkeepers bantering from one side of the street to the other, no women talking from their windows … it was even forbidden to run in the streets, people avoided walking quickly lest they be thought to be running, everyone made a point of walking slowly.” The first order of generals is to burn the denunciations commissioned by the paranoid Abdülhamid, and millions of sheets of paper are piled into stacks and set on fire. These terrifying letters of denunciation

that had darkened the lives of thousands of people and that had nourished and increased the unjustified fears of an apprehensive sultan spread over the capital as ash and smoke like a pus that had accumulated in the collective bloodstream of an entire society, reminding everyone of their guilt and complicity.

In Altan’s novel, not many people object to this bonfire of archives. What Young Turks did was to “clear the past and save everyone from past fears by burning these documents that proved almost everyone had taken part in the tyranny of this period.” The Quartet’s final novel, if it is ever written, will tell of the Armenian Genocide, another act of historical erasure, planned and executed by the same leaders.

To modern Turkey, too, these tactics left a troublesome legacy. The putschist mindset, crystallized in Ragıp’s Young Turk brother Cevat’s words—“Who else but the military can protect this country … if the army removes itself from politics the motherland will fall into the hands of the reactionaries”—later solidified in a militarist tutelage system that ruled Turkey into the twenty-first century (as recently as in 2016, a band of Turkish generals staged a violent coup crushed by civilians). It paused briefly in 2002 with the rise to power of Erdoğan, who initially fashioned himself as a conservative democrat keen to retrieve the lost honor of Sultan Abdülhamid and rolled back century-old racist laws that suppressed the minorities whose properties modern Turkey confiscated and was built on. But a few years into power, Erdoğan revealed his authoritarian ambitions. In 2018, he built a presidential system that allowed him to annul election results, detain and replace elected mayors with loyal placeholders, and rule Turkey by decree. As Altan foretold, anyone “who enters politics has a bit of Sultan in them” in Turkey.

In a chilling moment in his prison memoir, Altan recalls a scene from the Quartet where Ragıp ponders the gap between the moment a person’s destiny changes and the moment the person realizes this, which, he writes, is “the most tragic and frightening aspect of life.” The loss of control over one’s life is terrifying, all the more so for an author imprisoned for his ideas. “The future became clear, but the person continued to wait for another future with other expectations and dreams without realizing that the future had already been determined.” As he waited to hear the outcome of his trial in 2018, hoping for freedom but already condemned to life imprisonment, Altan felt a shiver: “I wrote years ago about the turmoil I’m going through at this very moment. I live now what I write in my novel. I am a novelist living his novel. My life imitates my novel.”

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3o1NzU7