HEPİMİZ HRANT DEĞİL MİYİZ? OR So what was that apology about a couple of weeks ago?
As Mamoste’s trial approaches, we have started to plan how we are going
to arrange our summer around it. No one really talks much about the emotions
involved. And why should they? There’s
nothing we can do about anything. I sometimes wonder if (or fret that) the
little bit I’ve written here and the interview in Radikal somehow made things
worse. Perhaps that’s why the name ‘Kemal Seven’ pops up so much in almost a
third of the 2500 page indictment—the government is punishing him for the small
bit of publicity whipped up by his son-in-law. Unlikely, but it crosses my
mind.
Occasionally, the topic of anger comes up between me and my in-laws.
When I watch the news with Delal, or any of the various talk shows where the
shrieking talking heads blather about their benighted political reviews or when
I read newspaper articles by Westerners that, after talking about the detention
of elderly Kurds for ‘terrorism’ or the massacre of the thirty four teenagers
of Uludere, feel obligated to say ‘The PKK is recognized as a terrorist
organization by the U.S, the E.U., and Turkey’—I feel such anger as I’ve never
felt before. The city would burn to the ground if my anger could get out of my
head. My family here inevitably says they’re used to it—it’s been happening all
their lives in one way or another and ‘You develop a thick skin’. But what’s
under that thick skin? We’re all outwardly calm, but I have dreams sometimes,
where Delal and I are hunted by brownshirts or else trapped in a room and
killed with cyanide gas. The dreams usually revolve around my failure to
protect her.
Recently I have gotten in a few arguments with a few yokels who tell me
that I have no right to stick my nose in this KCK business. As one commentator
on a blog site said,
‘Jeff, I know some of those people
arrested through KCK case. Turkey, unfortunately or fortunately, is not as
powerful as those outside-looking super powers. Otherwise, Turkey would have
its own Guantanamo base. And, outside-looking Turkish people would not dare to
talk about it. Instead they would focus on the jails in other countries.’
Even if this KCK case and Mamoste’s arrest had no
direct effect on my life or my emotions here, the effect it had on my wife (who
is my soul mate, lover, best friend etc. etc.) just might move me a little bit—not
to mention the effect it has on all my in-laws, whom I happen to love. I may be
foreign, but the imprisonment of one man in Turkey is far more relevant to me
than anyone incarcerated in the United States right now.
Someone else told me I don’t have the right to meddle
in Turkey’s business recently; someone rather unexpected and in a rather
backhanded way. For a few months now I have been translating Tuba Çandar’s
biography of Hrant Dink, Hrant. A
journalist friend of mine was fortunate enough to interview Ms. Çandar and
passed my name on to her as someone who might write an article that could drum
up interest in an English version of her book. Maureen Freely (Orhan Pamuk’s
translator) had been signed on as translator and had drawn up a proposal but it
was drawing little interest in the English publishing world, and maybe a few
articles or reviews here and there would help. I wrote Ms. Çandar explaining
who I was and what I wanted. I ended with the web address of this blog and said
that out of enthusiasm for her work, ‘I have translated maybe 60 pages on my private
blog—but always with your name attached and if this makes you uncomfortable in
anyway, I will immediately erase them.’
Five days passed before she wrote me back and it was a
very angry and aggressive email. Her first point was understandable. She said I
had used her material without her permission, which was a violation of copyright.
I could see why she was upset about that, which is why I posted the apology a
couple of weeks ago and erased all the translation I had done. It had simply
never struck me as important before because, let’s face it, my blog is read by
a small group of family and friends and by the occasional Google searcher who
types in ‘Peacock enemies’. But there
were more than a few things about her letter that struck me as odd, above and
beyond someone who feels that the right to their work has been violated, and I
wanted to discuss them here—not because I want revenge (though I am angry and
it may come out, so be aware) but because it might have something larger to say
about the whole situation here in Turkey.
The first thing she wrote was this,
Hello Jeffrey Gibbs,
I received your mail and your evaluation of my
biography really caught my attention. Especially, ‘It’s truly one of the most brilliant examples
of oral history I have ever seen’ and It’s not just about Hrant, but about
a country’s history that has been deliberately forgotten, hidden, or erased ‘,’ I was
powerfully moved by your book, and particularly impressed by its structure’ and
‘I consider it an imperative that the English speaking world know this story ‘. Upon reading such sentences, I began to be persuaded that you had
correctly evaluated the work that I did.
But then, when I went to your blog I did not run into any lines like the
above but rather the opposite.
"Tuba Candar does not so much write the book, as shape what already
exists. The writers are the hundreds of friends ... They write his story from
his birth to death...." or "I started reading Hrant Dink's biography,
put together by Tuba Candar..." and other such lines that made me doubt
your intentions.
Her first and I guess foremost beef with me is that I
did not give her credit for being the writer of the book, just the compiler.
She went on to say that if I had bothered myself with reading the prologue of
her book I would have known just how much work had gone into it. Well, I did
read the prologue which is what gave me the idea that this was not the kind of
biography where the writer takes the front seat.
‘This is not a classic biography,’ she writes in About the Book.
‘There is no omniscient narrator who, after reading a ton of research and
investigations and books full of anecdotes, after making inquiries and research
into a life, after reading letters and diaries and using every detail that
happened to get recorded somehow places herself inside that life and writes, as
if she is a first-hand witness, ‘the story of a life’. And it was a deliberate choice...Hrant Dink
was an archive of oral history. As to the voices in the book besides Hrant, I
spent three years talking with the owners of those voices one by one and
recording what they said. Then I arranged them according to chronology and
theme. Connecting them as they moved from one to anther was almost like weaving
a piece of lace...But as far as contents, not one word that they didn’t say has
been added.’
She seems to feel my failure to praise her enough
connects to secret intentions to steal her book. She goes on to say that much
of the style I incorporate into this blog, in particular the italics I use and
the method of narration, is plagiarism. She says she has serious doubts about
my intentions, that what I have translated amounts to a book on its own.
When I first read all this I was, to be honest, heartbroken.
I so much wanted to make a connection on an issue I felt very strongly about. I’ve
always followed the Armenian issue since before I even came here, and moreover,
her book on Hrant had helped me to see just what my Kurdish family here was
facing—they don’t want to talk about it so much—it’s too immediate--but these
people in Hrant were talking about
it. When Hrant Dink wept as the court sentences came down, I thought I caught a
glimpse of what Mamoste might be feeling as he sits in prison for being in the
wrong political party, charged with betraying the society he wanted to help, a
victim of page after page of false and deliberately misinterpreted evidence
(all elements very similar not only to the Hrant Dink trial but countless
others). But this, according to Çandar,
was another big mistake.
‘And while you are using the English translations on your blog, at first
you say ‘Tuba Çandar’s biography of Hrant,’ later you don’t see fit to say
anything.’
Not true by the way. I mentioned her
every time except for once, on April 1st. She continues,
Let’s say, you jump right from a BDP meeting into my
book and by mixing in my text with part of your own story, render it a part of it?....These are all legal issues
but there is also a moral dimension that does not stop with stealing my labor.
You are stealing Hrant’s life and using it to create your own story. You are
forming parallels between your father-in-law and Rakel Dink and her father
Siament and rendering them part of your own life. Did you ever wonder how they
would feel about you comparing your marriage with theirs? Did you talk with
these people and get their approval? Whenever I spoke with them I was terrified
of touching their wounds. Are their incomparable lives, so full of pain and
suffering story material for you to use and insert yourself into however you
please?
This accusation also pained me
very much. Every writer must confront this question. Am I just using someone
else’s pain for my own benefit? I imagine Çandar herself asked herself this
several times and very well should have, because even the best of us can get
overenthusiastic about the writing part and forget about the people part. But
no matter how much this particular paragraph upset me, it also made me angry.
The problem, it seemed, was that I had dared to compare myself with the great
Hrant Dink. His family and their pain were untouchable. As much as I admire
Hrant Dink, I do not think his and his family’s pain is unique or untouchable,
not in this country where political assassinations of minorities, show trials,
and media attacks organized secretly by the government have been the norm for
decades. I thought that was one of the strengths of the book—it certainly was a
source of comfort for me. You’re not alone. Someone else has been through what your
family is going through. There are others out there.
I can’t quite figure out what
the problem is. Is it that I, a tourist and overfed Westerner dared to compare
myself to one of Turkey’s martyrs? One of the ‘superpowers’ who ‘insist on
focusing on the jails in other countries?
One of Erdoğan’s ‘secret outside forces’ causing all the problems with
our meddling and our encouraging of caesarians? If so then I answer what I did
to that blog commenter. When you take my
nearly 60 year old father-in-law out of prison, stop the heartache my wife and
her family are suffering, and stop insulting them daily in the press—then I’ll
shut up about the unjust prison system here. On a personal level, I have my
rights as a reader, as a human being. I had a very confusing time getting
engaged and I did not really understand any of the unspoken things happening
around me—reading about Rakel’s father and the difficulties
they had gave me a clue. Mine and Delal’s story is very different from Rakel
and Hrant’s, and was much less of a struggle (I said that explicitly when Iwrote about it, too--link here) but I do know what it’s like to be the wanna be son-in-law
coming into a closed society that has been harassed for decades and fearful for
its existence. And I imagine that if Rakel Dink is anything like she seems, if
her and Hrant’s example served as comfort and inspiration to us, she would be
pleased. I do not consider Delal’s and my love as anything less than theirs
just because we are not famous, just because we did not suffer in the same way.
Or maybe the problem is that
anyone compares themself to Hrant Dink? This is a country where idols are made.
Before the AKP, you could not say a word that might even be construed as partly
negative about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk without serious repercussions. Now it looks
like Erdoğan is trying to set himself up as the same sort of figure—people are
arrested and charged and persecuted and fired every day for criticizing him.
Does Çandar unwittingly want to make Hrant and the Dink family the same sort of
untouchables? I wish the Dinks were unique. I wish there were not seven
thousand or more people in jail for their political beliefs, maligned by the
press, lied about, blackballed, turned into traitors. I wish their families did
not suffer so. All the little no names that no one is signing petitions for--I
see this now—of all the thousands arrested in the KCK operations, the only one
that gets attention is Buşra Ersanlı. Is her life more valuable because she is
known? Ragip Zarakolu was released most likely because of the international
outcry. What about the 7000 without the
international outcry? (7 more arrested yesterday by the way—I haven’t checked
today, but there’s always someone) Do you have to be Ataturk, or Dink, or a
public figure to be worth anything?
 |
| Musa Anter--assassinated in September of 1992 |
Or is the problem that I
compare Hrant, the book and the man, to Kurds? She seems particularly taken
aback by the BDP meeting (which, by the way, though strongly affiliated with
Kurds and Kurdish issues and populated by a majority of Kurds—is actually a
coalition party). There may be a reason for this I was not aware of
initially. Back in February, apparently,
her husband Çengiz Çandar was on schedule to be arrested in one of the KCK
round-ups for a forward he wrote in a book about Abdullah Öcalan. Perhaps me
going on and on about Tuba Çandar at the same time as I discussed BDP party
meetings freaked her out. I’ve read political indictments here, and it would
certainly serve as an acceptable piece of evidence that she was planning on
blowing up the Earth with her splittist ideas. Or maybe she herself just
doesn’t like Kurds, or at least the ‘bad Kurds’ who refuse to behave properly.
She once said, according to family hearsay—I can’t find the quote--that when Rakel
first came to Istanbul, her ‘wild look’ somehow made her look Kurdish. She has said other things that makes me think
she disdains Kurds. In an interview on the internet magazine T24 she said this,
(link here in Turkish)
‘I think Hrant was killed for his
truthfulness. You can see, there are so many Kurdish intellectuals and
politicians, but you will not find a Hrant among them. Hrant wanted a this
country to turn into a transparent civilian democracy, both for Turkey and his
own people. This is a difficult thing. Kurdish leaders can’t do this. They remain
silent about the problems concerning themselves. But Hrant said, ‘I don’t want
to talk about the problem of the dead Armenians, but the problems of those that
survived.’
Which implies numerous things—that
Kurds are not brave enough to speak out. That Kurds cannot speak the truth—Selahattin
Demirtaş and Gültan Kışanak (chairmans of the BDP party) immediately come to
mind as contemporary contradictions, but the comment insults a number of the
Kurds’ butchered and martyred. Of course, there were tons of Kurdish
journalists especially in the 90s whose chance to speak out were cut short with
murder. The writer and journalist Musa Anter is the first to come to mind—a man
called ‘a militant of Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood’ who was assassinated by a
former member of the PKK hired by the Turkish secret service. He spent a large part of his life in and out
of jail—once just for writing a poem in Kurdish (Some of his books have been
re-banned by the government this year—I tried finding one yesterday and was
told it’s now impossible). Watch the
film Press
for the story of the Özgür Gündem newspaper whose writers, editors, and distributors
were assassinated willy-nilly by government agents or whose assassinations by
Hizbollah were officially tolerated and encouraged. Or look up Ahmet Kaya, a
singer whose music is still loved by Turk, Kurd and Armenian. Like Hrant Dink,
he was hounded by the media as a traitor to Turkey in a government organized
campaign to destroy his name—false evidence, doctored photographs, misquotes.
What had he done? Threatened to sing a
song in Kurdish. Unlike Hrant, Ahmet Kaya fled the country and died of despair
in Paris.
Or maybe her English simply
was not good enough to properly read the tone and intent of my blog and she
filled in the gaps with paranoia. So many people here over estimate their
English.
Maybe it’s just a perfect
storm, a fruit cake mix of all of the above.
But I had not thought all this
through after getting her first email—I just felt chastened for having used her
material without permission and so I wrote a letter of apology. I felt
extremely bad about what had happened. I never meant any harm and would
immediately erase the translations. I still hold your work in the highest
respect and certainly didn’t mean to imply you had not done any work. Etc. etc.
Her first response to the
apology was clearly not to me. It said simply, ‘What are we going to do with
these two retards?’ (The other retard being the friend who put me in touch with
her). ‘Reading this, I was so enraged I couldn’t even laugh!’ (She wrote geri
geri zekalı—and misspelled it in her rage—which the Zargan dictionary
translates as ‘stupid’ or ‘retarded’ though it literally means ‘Backward intellect’.
The repeated ‘geri’ must be like saying ‘super retard’).This was followed by an
email in English that said this, ‘Your so-called intentions are
irrelevant, since what you've done in your blog for months, proves the
opposite.’ There follows a repeat in
English all the things she had written in Turkish (which led me to think this
is all some weird English hang up) and finally a threat of legal action if I
did not publically apologize. I no longer felt all that contrite, but indignant
and angry and a bit afraid in an odd way, because it felt like I had somehow
struck up a conversation with a crazy person and now would never get rid of
them.
I found the statement ‘Your so-called intentions are
irrelevant’ odd, given that she wrote a book because she was inspired by a man
who defended the intentions behind a sentence he wrote that was taken out of
context by the press. Intentions didn’t
matter to the court, intentions don’t matter to her. I would think intentions were paramount—but
then of course she saw conspiracy and plotting and whatever else behind all my
reassuring words (of course, to be logical, why in the world would I have
notified her if I had intended on stealing her work?) Equally odd was her
desire to file suit against a man who only wanted to help her. This threat of
legal action was also ironic, it seemed, coming from someone who had involved
herself so intimately with a man who had been ruined by legal actions. But I
suppose it was all justified in her mind because she was right, she had
discovered my evil intent, my true self hiding behind the words—all of which
sounds agonizingly familiar if you have read any statement on official dealings
with Hrant, Armenians, Kurds, or the imaginary ‘internal enemies’ that Erdoğan
feels is encouraging abortions and caesarians.
In any case, I will restate here. I apologize for using Çandar’s material
without asking, but the to-do made about it was way beyond what it deserved. It
was just some guy’s private blog in the end, and if anything, it would have
helped her name and the name of her book get out there. Still, her reaction to that is totally her
business. However the rest seems rather demented—all that misplaced rage, a
storm of insulting emails, legal threats.
She would have been only a little less logical writing the same things
to a street cat. It all seems a
distilled example of all the paranoia, sense of persecution, and ego that can
be so endemic here. I’m still baffled and a bit bereaved. I still think her
book is a brilliant achievement. It took a lot of work and she did it
incredibly well—maybe it’s just best not to ask too many questions about the creator
of any piece of art. It can taint the
whole thing. The work stands apart from them and is not sullied by anything
they do...hopefully.
One last thing—the reason for the title.
For me, the biggest shock was that I reached out to someone who I thought
should be an ally, and found an enemy.
Anyone who had dared to spend three years writing about an assassinated
Armenian in Turkey, who, inadvertently or not, had discussed the genocide, who
would put themselves in that kind of risk—had to be sympathetic to the mass
arrests of Turkey’s other maligned minority. There’s so few people here you can
talk openly with. And yet she went, to put it bluntly, nuts. I am not convinced
Tuba Çandar has anything against Kurds—she was going to write the biography of
Mehmet Uzun (the famous exiled Kurdish writer) before he abruptly died after
returning to Diyarbakır. That’s impressive. She was even quoted in the Hurriyet
as saying ‘He was a warrior who fought for his identity and culture by writing
all the time.’ And yet, she made such a point of me lumping her in the same
entry as the Kurdish BDP. It is like hearing a trusted and beloved family
member suddenly tell a ‘nigger’ joke—there’s this punch-in-the-gut disgust and
a profound disappointment.
Maybe it’s nothing to do with Kurds (though
she might tell herself the ones in jail or all PKK and therefore okay to hate) I
suppose it might be just partly paranoia, partly ego, and partly a fight over
her ownership of a martyr. And yet, and yet. There’s that phrase associated
with Kurds, ‘No friends but the mountains.’ This is the first time I’ve ever
had my hand bitten by someone who should be an ally--but for my in-laws, it’s a
commonplace occurrence. The people that
hate you, hate you. The people that should like you, hate you. Where to go? Who
to turn to? In her book, Blood and Belief,
Aliza Marcus discusses the Kurds disillusionment with Turkey’s leftist
movements—who promised the usual blend of equality and brotherhood and justice.
She quotes Kemal Burkay as saying, ‘The Turkish left was heavily influenced by
Turkish ideology and could not openly come up with a Kurdish solution.’ They,
too, were in the end nationalists. The right wing Turks preach of Muslim
Brotherhood—but they, too, are ultimately nationalist when it comes to Kurdish
identity. There are at times, it seems,
no friends but the mountains.
