Pamuk and Eurocentrism

I've been struck by the parallels in the Middle-eastern and South Asian experiences when it comes to colonial subjugation and Orientalism, before.  I could appreciate these even better while  reading Orhan Pamuk's "Snow" recently.  I guess this is part of the reason that I usually find Orhan bey's works ("Istanbul" is a personal favorite) such good reads, because there is enough to identify with. Stylistically he belongs so much to the genre of Calvino and Kundera, while also being half-the-outsider to this very European game, while having to deal with the peculiar social issues, politics and matters of identity of a largely conservative, Asian, Muslim and technically third world country.  Detractors might say that this combustible combination renders him sexy enough to  Western audiences to win him the Nobel prize (and I cannot completely disagree).

In "Snow", Pamuk builds up a microcosm of the strange and conflicting world of Turkish politics in a small Anatolian frontier town, where secular leftists, Islamists and Kurdish nationalists jostle for space as the old army led Ataturkist establishment is prepared to try all means to hold on to a pretense of authority.  Framed by all this, is the story of the personal difficulties of a formerly exiled poet, who has his own agenda for coming back to Turkey from Frankfurt.  Many critics on the bauble of my copy of the book have congratulated Pamuk on recreating his country and its politics through his narration, and yet he is doing so much more. He has the onerous task of representing Turkey to the outside world, is at high risk of being labeled as a "Turkish" author, and he deftly plays on those attempts at packaging. The urge to  not compromise the artist's personal element of creation while fulfilling the social expectations of the novelist  is echoed in the  protagonist Ka - who is in really looking for love and personal happiness but has no means to escape the national politics. The two narratives, the two expectations from the narrator, are all indistinguishably woven into each other.

A review of the whole novel is beyond the scope here. My original purpose was to bring out the varied postcolonial response that the different Turkish characters exhibit in the book, including the protagonist, the narrator and possibly the author, and generalize it to some extent. But before that a quick introductory note to the history and political trends in the modern Turkish republic are in order.  Turkey is a very interesting case study of inversion in politics. Here the conservatives are secular, and the Islamist parties usually more moderate and populist.  This is by dint of Ataturk, the authoritarian Westward looking post-Ottoman leader who is rightfully regarded as the architect of modern Turkey - who used the sword to spread a secular Westernized worldview.  Under his direction, Turkey came to have a Europeanized army and bureaucracy, the cultured elite in Istanbul and Ankara came to be enamored of Western culture :  from music and literature ,to furniture and cigarettes; Turkish began to be written in the Roman script,  Turkey imagined itself part of Europe, had its own successful football clubs (I've often wondered how important it is for a good European republic to be democratic, secular, practise freedom of expression, have its own national culture and language, and last but not least, its own footballing teams) - and all ostentatious display of religious tendencies, including the headscarf, were banned. These forced reforms were never popular beyond the urban elite, but the establishment, largely led by the army had been successfully keeping all dissent in check.  In deviance with the stereotype of conservative Islamist governments repressing popular democratic dissent a la Iran (where the headscarf is legally enforced),  Turkey is a case where the populist and democratic tendencies often tend to be Islam-inspired, and the average Turk came to resent the government-enforced imposition of Western values. Eurocentrism is thus a living, contentious issue in Turkish politics, probably more so than other Asian countries, like India where it is mainly a culture and class thing. True to its geography, if one may be permitted a rather broad brushstroke of a metaphor, Turkey is at the crossroads of East and West and torn between the two. The characters in Snow represent a varied landscape of  misgivings and mixed feelings about this Eurocentrist trend, and present an interesting spectrum of postcolonial response and confusion.  A lot of this is inspired by a poignant passage in the novel where the various political groups in town gather to frame an open letter to be sent to a Western newspaper protesting the recent coup, and each one tries to answer a question about how they would like to see their country represented to a Western

audience.

First there is the staunch Islamist in "Blue" - the young, western educated, enigmatic and strikingly handsome leader of an underground Islamist movement - who seems to attract a fan following of frustrated and unemployed men and repressed young women who want to cling on to the headscarf probably because they consider it the defining point of their identity. His response is that of the staunch nationalist.  He defends Islam because it is good for Turkey, because it is intrinsic to the Turkish "character and temperament", and scoffs at the secularists for their "West-aping" ways which he considers weak and subservient.  His message to the West is : "We are not religious because we are poor but because we choose to be so", mocking the secular notion that poverty and ignorance lead people to cling to religion ("opium of the masses" anyone?)

Then there is the old school Leftist in Turgut Bey, who is old and has been imprisoned for his political beliefs by the military government in the past, who is basically schooled in Western values and sees Marxist-inspired ideas as beneficial to his country.  He doesn't believe that secular, humanist or democratic values are the exclusive preserve of the West and wants them to know that there are people who care for the defence of these institutions in Turkey too.

There is an young Kurdish idealist who believes that the West looks upon his people as objects of pity - fighting poverty, ignorance and political strife, and dreams of earning their respect, but isn't sure how.

Then there are the "headscarf" women, some of whom have committed suicide to protest the goverment's ban on their wearing these symbols of personal faith. Their confusions are articulated best by the very assertive Kadife, who is schooled in secular values (she is Turgut Bey's daughter) but finds herself irresistibly drawn to radical Islam (she is secretly  Blue's mistress) who is angry at women being made pawns in this very male-dominated political game. 

The most fractured and confused response comes typically from the "intellectual in town" - the poet Ka, who has returned to Turkey on some obscure pretext after spending many years in loneliness and isolation in Germany (he has already confessed to himself that the real reason of his visit is not political or intellectual but to win the affections of a beautiful woman he's been in love with for a long time). He is of course the elite Westernized Istanbullu to the humble townspeople and clumsily goes about inviting their suspicion and wrath, while poetic inspiration comes to him in taverns and snowy evenings like spiritual ecstasy for a dervish.

People familiar with Pamuk might be forgiven for imagining that this protagonist is Pamuk himself by proxy, and while firmly entrenched in Western values of ethics and aesthetics, he often goes in search of his roots and succumbs to spiritual impulses, often tiring of the politics, often imagining his personal quests to be more heroic than than the political ambitions of people around him. He is conscious of Turkey's being a West-dominated society, he is impressed and in love with European ideals (he toys with the idea of eloping with his woman to Frankfurt) and yet finds himself lonely and depressed and creatively dried-up while living there. In this same novel, we are led to love, pity and despise him for the same set of actions - his weakness and vacillations at once earn our sympathy and empathy for being very human, while eliciting our disapprobation for failing to be firmer and managing his life and affairs better - and finally  the Indian reader in me is led to find a strange connection -  a similar admixture of blind admiration and suspicious wariness of  Western culture, and the difficult problem of defining our identities, roles and responses in this fractured framework.  The end is reassuringly tragic, for I tend to echo a Pamuk quote:"My unhappiness protects me from life".