Never Know Who Might See Again
T o review certain books seems like an impertinence. This is one of them. It speaks for itself with such clarity, certainty and wisdom that only one affair needs to be said: read it. And then read it over again. It is a short book, divided into brief chapters, some no longer than two pages, each recounting some incident from the author's prison experience. Information technology is wonderfully distilled, but not sententious; even in extremis, Altan never loses the limpidity and translucence, vivid with the vividness of dreams, which is feature of his other writing – as far as i tin can guess from the simply other books of his available in English translation, Similar a Sword Wound, the superb first volume of his Ottoman Quartet; and Endgame, a phantasmagorical crime story. Even the latter has, at the heart of all the violence, a dreamy, wide-eyed quality that seems to be quintessential Altan. To judge by I Will Never See the World Once more, it has been and will be his conservancy.
His arrest was no surprise to him. He was in the frontline. As the writer of Atakurd, a much-read piece in Milliyet newspaper arguing for equal status for Kurds, he had, as early as 1995, received a suspended xx-month sentence, and been fined $12,000. In 2007, he founded and edited the satirical newspaper Tara, in which, a year later, he wrote a slice chosen Oh My Brother. For this, he was charged under the draconian Article 301 of the Turkish penal code that criminalises "denigrating Turkishness", though not, at that time, imprisoned. Knowing how exposed his position was, he habitually carried a gun.
Clinker is the Altan family unit business organisation: Ahmet's father Çetin, a polemical journalist, novelist, editor and MP, had been apprehended nearly half a century before past an earlier repressive regime. When the police came to get him, Altan senior offered them tea; they refused it. "It'south non a ransom," he remarked, pleasantly. "You can drink some." The joke didn't get down very well. Four and a half decades later on, Ahmet repeated it to the policemen who came for him; they were as unamused. To be making jokes at all in the circumstances reveals an almost inconceivable sangfroid. He knew that at that place was no chance whatever of a fair trial; the sentence was a foregone decision.
Never again would I be able to kiss the adult female I dear, embrace my kids, meet with my friends, walk the streets … I would not be able to eat eggs with sausage or drinkable a glass of wine or get to a eating place and order fish. I would not exist able to sentry the sunrise.
In the car that took him to prison, the guard offered him a cigarette. "I only smoke when I am nervous," replied Altan. He had, he said, no idea where the words came from. Only they inverse his life. "There are sure deportment and words that are demanded past the events, the dangers and the realities that surround you. Once you turn down to play this assigned role, instead doing and saying the unexpected, reality itself is taken aback; it hits against the rebellious jetties of your heed and breaks into pieces." This insight – "Reality could not conquer me. I conquered reality" – gave him the strength to face what followed. He saw that this capacity was an extension of his trade as a novelist: creating an alternative reality. I Volition Never See the World Again is as much about writing equally it is about prison, but above all it is about freedom, a liberty epitomised by the exercise of the imagination.
His freedom and independence of thought were not effortlessly maintained: whatever your inner fortitude, prison, by its very nature, is crippling. "In a matter of five hours I had travelled beyond five centuries to arrive at the dungeons of the Inquisition." The sensory impecuniousness was immediately disorienting: like Oscar Wilde, he discovered that time ceases to mean annihilation. "The air and the lite in our cage never changed. Each minute was the same equally the last. It was equally if a tributary of the river of time had hit a dam and formed a lake. We sat at the lesser of that motionless pool."
Taken to court, the disorientation connected. The judges were out of Kafka, just as in Kafka, not savage or fell, but erratic, bewildering, surreal. He constitute that he had been arrested not, as originally stated, for sending "subliminal messages" in support of the attempted coup, simply for having participated in it. Challenged every bit to the change of charge, the judge, remarked, airily: "Our prosecutors similar using words the meanings of which they don't know."
He was released and returned abode; later on that evening, a new warrant is issued and he is back in prison house, put into a cell marked Ladies' Infirmary. He launches an entreatment, based on the Supreme Court's rejection of his conviction: as he waits for the verdict, he tries to dismiss "the stake flickering dreams fed by hope" that "stir shyly in the shadowy folds of my listen". He begins to realise as he waits that he is living out the very scene that he wrote years earlier in his novel Like a Sword Wound, where a graphic symbol also waits for a verdict. "Years ago as I was wandering in that unmarked, enigmatic and hazy territory where literature meets life. I had met my own destiny merely failed to recognise it; I wrote thinking it belonged to someone else. I feel I am being dragged into a vertiginous, wuthering vortex in which novel and life are entangled, where what is real and what is written imitate ane another and change places, each disguised equally the other."
The verdict is handed down: life, without parole.
I will never see the globe over again; I will never see a heaven unframed by the walls of a courtyard. I am descending to Hades. I walk into the darkness similar a god who writes his own destiny. My hero and I disappear into the darkness together.
But in time, his imagination saves him:
Like Odysseus, I will act with heroism and cowardice, with honesty and craftiness. I will know defeat and victory, my hazard volition end simply in decease … a transport stands in the heart of the cell; its timbers are creaking. On its deck is a conflicted Odysseus.
In a center-stopping moment, he thinks to himself:
What a cute scene to describe. I reach for a pen with a mitt that is white in the ghostly light. I tin can write fifty-fifty in the dark. I take the ship cracking in the storm in the palm of my easily and brainstorm writing. The prison house door close behind me.
Put together from papers found among notes Altan gave to his lawyers, and translated – superbly – into English by his friend Yasemin Çongar, I Will Never See the World Again is deeply satisfying in class. It is non Midnight Express; it is not From the House of the Dead, and it is not De Profundis. In a sense, it eclipses all of these. It is a radiant celebration of the inner resources of human beings, above all those triggered by the imagination. Its account of the creative process is sublime, among the most perfectly expressed analyses of that perpetually elusive miracle. And it is a triumph of the spirit. "Yous can imprison me but you cannot keep me hither. Because, like all writers, I have magic," Altan says in his terminal phrases. "I tin can pass through your walls with ease." Aye: simply plenty is enough. He is still in prison. Eighty Nobel prize-winners have protested, unsuccessfully. We must move heaven and earth to spring him.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/13/i-will-never-see-world-again-ahmet-altan-review
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