The unfree

For years, the Turkish journalist, translator and activist Yasemin Çongar has been working and thinking at the centre of free speech concerns. As an editor and journalist, she has written and published journalism critical of the government - work that has since seen her tried multiple times in court. As the founding director of the literature house Kıraathane in Istanbul, she has made a space for political discussion and engagement, celebrating literature and community in the heart of Istanbul.

In May, she visited the House of Literature and gave a lecture on what it means to be "free" in today's world.

The lecture is also available as a podcast on our podcast feed.

THE “UNFREE”

1. GREETINGS AND GRATITUDE

Good evening.

I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to Litteraturhuset Oslo and the wonderful team of people who through their hard work and creativity give this house its life, relevance, breadth, and horizon. I thank them for hosting me as their guest curator this week, and I thank you all for coming today.

This house has an important place in my life. It was a little less than ten years ago, in the spring of 2015, that I first visited Litteraturhuset Oslo on the urging of a Norwegian friend —Lise Albrechtsen— who was then serving as a diplomat in Turkey. I came here with a colleague from Istanbul: together we ran a not-for profit organisation called Platform for Independent Journalism and were hoping to expand our efforts to defend freedom of expression by creating a space where an unhindered exchange of ideas could take place. After having seen and studied how Litteraturhuset Oslo and —albeit on a different scale— Litteraturhuset Bergen served their respective communities, the idea of creating a similar house became a personal passion —you could even say, an obsession— for me. And after three years of dreaming, planning, pushing the envelope and fending off the odds —and with odds, I mean a politically hostile environment with ongoing trials and arrests as well as serious financial shortcomings— Kıraathane Istanbul Literature House, the first “Litteraturhuset” in Turkey opened its doors to public in October 2018. Kıraathane had an ambitious program of activities that averaged around 100 events per each three-monthly season in its first five years and it has been embraced by a diverse community of students, readers, artists, writers, poets, and academics, by people who want their own voice to be heard while also opening their ears to other voices. It is a house very much inspired by the house we are in, and although I left my position as its founding director last year, I remain proud to have helped Kıraathane Istanbul Literature House become the place it is today and I remain grateful to Litteraturhuset Oslo and its staff—past and present— for the encouraging example they set for us in creating a free space of ideas.

2. A SALUTE TO PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE

Since that first visit in 2015, I’ve been back in this house many times, both to talk and to listen. On one of those visits, in April 2016, I had the opportunity to attend the International Saladin Days, the extraordinary series instituted by this house to promote understanding and peaceful coexistence between people from Christian, Islamic and Jewish cultures. On 13 April 2016, the keynote speaker of the Saladin Days, was “Turkey’s own Saladin,” the Kurdish political leader and human rights lawyer Selahattin Demirtaş. I was in the audience, and along with many others I found myself breaking into laughter more than once thanks to Demirtaş’s remarkable ability to find humour in irony. In that speech, he related to the pain that has been inflicted on various peoples of our country since the beginning of the twentieth century; he did this with the confidence of a person who knew he was speaking the truth, and in doing so, he not only explained why generations of people have suffered but also how that suffering could one day end.

Something about that speech was extraordinary. Demirtaş exhibited that day his ability and willingness, and yes courage, to think and talk outside the box. In this case, the box was not only the suffocating confines of the Turkish official ideology and state policy; but he also has broken free of the perhaps understandably self-focused and unfortunately often short-sighted views one might hear from a political representative of an oppressed and persecuted people. His strong criticism of the Turkish nation-state did not exclude a criticism of the artificial construct of nation-states in general, and his strong criticism of Turkish nationalism did not fall short of a universal criticism of all nationalisms. On the idea of a nation-state for Kurds, he found the inner freedom and political courage to say — and I summarise — “If you ask me, we do not need the chauvinism and nationalism that comes with a nation-state. We do not need to be dealing with all the racism and ethnic nationalism nation states have produced. We will however never give up on our identity and language. What we propose is pluralism, equality for all, a joint life that embraces many cultures, many faiths and many languages, and a new constitution that will safeguard this equality.” A proud Kurd, a politician who as part of a long-lasting national struggle, he was speaking up against the oppression of his culture, identity and language, and yet he believed that freedom from oppression would not be achieved through replacing and emulating one’s oppressors, but by eliminating the oppression itself, by getting rid of its root ideology and legal mechanisms, by changing its foundational mentality, by creating not yet another system of domination, but a new contract for peace based on constitutional equality.

Before coming here today, I listened to Demirtaş’s speech again, in an episode of the LitHouse podcast series and was struck by the simple and powerful fact that his was indeed a FREE mind, a soul who has been through hardship and pain yet has not become hardened to the pain of others. If you speak Turkish, I urge you to listen to that speech. And when you do, remember that they have attempted to silence his mind and soul for over seven years now: Selahattin Demirtaş was sent to prison on political charges on November 2nd, 2016, almost exactly six months after his lecture here in this house. As of today, the 22nd day of May 2024, he has been kept in the Edirne High Security Prison for exactly 2758 days (that is 7 years, 6 months, 20 days). Let’s reflect on that for a moment. Demirtaş was sentenced —pending appeal— to over 40 years in prison last Thursday, for disrupting the unity and integrity of the state by his various speeches and statements. Let’s reflect on that for a moment. Reflect also on the days and weeks and months and years they want to deny him his freedom. Reflect on the still not-finalised verdict. And reflect on his views some of which I just shared with you.

The topic I was asked to address today is “UNFREE…” It is a potent word, and it will bring me back to Selahattin Demirtaş as I will try to think aloud about what it means to be free. But before I do that, let me first invite you to remember others who are kept behind bars today in Turkey; people of different genders and ages, of various convictions and ideas, people who have dared to disagree with the state.

—Let’s remember Figen Yüksekdağ: a journalist and politician, co-founder and former leader of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed and former member of parliament. She has been kept behind bars for the last 2756 days (that is 7 years, 6 months, 18 days). Yüksekdağ was sentenced to over 30 years in prison last Thursday —pending appeal— and was ordered to remain in prison.

—Let’s remember Osman Kavala: human rights defender, philanthropist, businessperson, who has been in the notorious Silivri High Security Prison for 2394 days to date; that is 6 years, 6 months, 21 days.

—Let’s remember Mehmet Baransu: a reporter, my colleague from Taraf newspaper and co-defendant in an ongoing trial, who has been imprisoned on various cases involving his journalistic work for exactly 3369 days to date; that is 9 years, 2 months, 20 days.

—Let’s remember Selçuk Kozağaçlı: a lawyer who defended many political activists in court as well as the families whose loved ones died in a man-made disaster in the coal mines of Soma in 2014. He has been in prison for 2382 days (6 years, 6 months, 9 days).

—Let’s remember Çiğdem Mater: a journalist and civil rights defender as well as an independent film producer, Mater has been accused of thinking about making a film and sentenced to 18 years in prison for a film she never even made. She has been in prison for 757 days to date; that is 2 years and 26 days.

—Let’s remember Hüda Kaya: a defender of women rights, and indeed everyone’s rights and freedoms without bias or exception, an active participant in organisations such as the International Union of Muslim Women; an outspoken former member of parliament. Hüda Kaya has been imprisoned for 203 days to date (that is 6 months and 21 days) and still no legal charges have been made against her.

There are thousands of innocent people in prisons today. At the moment, at least 32 journalists are behind bars for their journalism in Turkey, whereas many more politicians, civil rights defenders, lawyers, and academics are being kept on unfounded charges, political verdicts, often times without a verdict and sometimes even without a charge. I know that not only the names I mention, but also each and every name I fail to mention, or to learn, or to remember, is a life that has been interrupted, a freedom denied; each prisoner of conscience, because ultimately these people are in prison for their views, has a story that needs to be told and a hand that needs to be held in solidarity. No gathering around the topic of freedom, no lecture on the topic of “unfree” will ever serve its true purpose without a willingness to stand with each and every prisoner of conscience anywhere in the world: without bias or exception.

3. WHAT IS FREEDOM: THE ARENDTIAN ANSWER

Keeping these people in mind, reminding ourselves that we need to learn and tell their stories; let us now think together about what it means to be free and unfree in today’s world. This is of course a question that has engaged the inquiring minds of philosophy and literature for centuries. One political thinker whom I always turn to on this issue is Hannah Arendt; and when I did so once again in preparing for this talk, I noticed with a big mental smile that she indeed gave her seminal lecture on freedom — Freiheit und Politik — exactly sixty-six years before today, in Zurich, on May 22nd, 1958. Many things changed in our world in those sixty-six years, yet several things remain the same and some frighteningly so. Arendt elaborated on that day on her understanding of freedom, leaving us with a concept of political freedom, and while there are many other definitions of freedom, it is the Arendtian concept of being free that I feel closest to and today I’ll be basing my observations on that.

Arendt’s sense of political freedom does not suggest merely having choices in the political arena, such as being free to speak about your political preferences, defending parties and policies of your choice, or exercising your right to vote and to run for office. Yes, of course, it presumes all that… But also, for Arendt —and for the case I’ll be trying to make today— the concept of freedom is political by nature. Necessarily so, inevitably so. For Arendt, to be free is “a state of being manifest in action.” What enables freedom is first and foremost a space for encounters — what she called an “in-between” — a place where people come together to speak and to act in public, to talk and to listen, to form and to exchange opinions. Freedom for Arendt is, by definition, a social phenomenon, it is truly exercised only in concert with others, it demands therefore —and it depends on— the presence of others. So: encounter and engagement, action and participation, agreement and disagreement, thinking with and against others are constituent elements of what Arendt calls freedom. It is only through an engagement with the world, one can fully appreciate and realise their human condition. It is only through an engagement with the world, one can truly be free. Therefore, I think, this very social —very political— concept of freedom at the same time holds the key to the affirmation of one’s individual existence; our being in the world holds the key to our being. As Arendt writes elsewhere, in an essay in which she finds herself in momentary agreement with French existentialists: “The disgust with an absurd existence disappears when man discovers that he himself is not given to himself, but through commitment, through engagement can become whoever he chooses to be. Human freedom means that man creates himself in an ocean of chaotic possibilities.” But the key for Arendt here is not self-creation in a vacuum, but self-creation in a social context, through an engagement with the other, with a plurality and within a plurality.

There are other ways of feeling free, of course. For example, I’ve been practising yoga for some time now, for me it is a solitary exercise during which I feel completely aware of the universe and myself in it, at peace, untouchable and free. Or some among you might have a cabin with the view of a fjord or the mountains perhaps, a place you go to find peace, to feel free from any unwanted interference, which is wonderful, of course, but that’s not what Arendt meant by freedom. The Arendtian freedom is not a negative freedom: as in freedom from an interference or obstruction of what one wishes to do; nor is it the kind of positive freedom thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and other liberal theorists have put forward, a freedom that manifests itself as self-mastery, as sovereignty over one’s own life. No, in the Arendtian sense freedom is never a solitary and passive state, it is a state of being in an encounter and inevitably perhaps in a dispute, in action and interaction; it is only in the “in-between,” in the exchange with the other one can truly become free. The name I give this Arendtian concept is “proactive freedom,” because it is achieved only through action — it’s a freedom that is gained, that is built only by exercising it. Never easy; this exercise often takes place under conditions that are less than ideal and even hostile, with limited space and possibilities, and at high risks. I will give some examples. But first, allow me to clarify something else.

Here I stand before you, a citizen of Turkey, coming from a country which never had —yes, I’m not talking about the present day only, but the entire history of the century-old Turkish republic— a country which never ever had a single day of real democracy. Whereas you who are in the audience have always been, or have recently become, or perhaps on the way to becoming a citizen of Norway, a country which, it would be fair to say, has enjoyed democratic rights and freedoms more than the country I come from. However, everything I’ll say today about being free and unfree, everything Arendt invites us to do if we want to be free, apply to the citizens of Norway as much as the citizens of Turkey. Notwithstanding the indisputable gap in the constitutional rights they might enjoy —and believe me, I don’t underestimate that gap— both Western democracies and their never-truly democratised neighbours are threatened today by an erosion of freedom in the Arendtian sense.

French thinker Jacques Rancière came up with a good name for this— for Western nations that are dominated by the economic constraints of neo-liberal capitalism. Post-democracies, he calls them, democracies after demos, “democracies that have eliminated the dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests.” Democracies where statistics of public opinion have replaced the actual body of people, or the “in-between” where the actual, the flesh and blood constituents of that body of people, encounter and engage with one another. German philosopher and art-historian Juliane Rebentisch follows Ranciere’s definition and calls our attention to a common misunderstanding, that to me seems very much intentional. It is the misunderstanding of human freedom,” she writes, “as a kind of self-realisation free of all social preconditions and relations…” I agree with Rebentisch that, “this misunderstanding has gained in social influence at the very moment that Western democracies appear to be moving toward post-democracy.”

Even in the countries where self-creation —becoming just one unique possibility in an ocean of chaotic possibilities— is respected and welcome, which admittedly is not always the case in Turkey, even less so in Russia, and perhaps never in Iran; even when a society seems more accepting and inclusive of personal differences, it is still the case today that political freedom as an essential element of self-creation and thereby freedom, and the sovereignty of the political as a structural element of democracy are often threatened. So, when thinking about who is “free” and who is “unfree”, I invite you to not only think about countries like Turkey that persistently rank low on the global freedom index, but also places like the U.S. and the E.U., and, yes, even Norway, which persistently ranks very high.

4.WHO IS FREE: DENIZENS OF THE TENTH VILLAGE

Rosa Luxemburg, who Hannah Arendt wrote about with admiration and whose legacy was for years the target of lies and vilification by none other than Stalin, has been an inspiration to me with her revolutionary spirit since my early youth. I recently re-read her letters from prison and my middle-aged self was again struck by her incredible vitality and faith in the possibility of change, as well as by her unflinchingly critical eye and her courage to keep a FREE mind even in prison, even in the middle of the revolutionary turmoil of the early 1900s. Rosa Luxemburg is often quoted to have said: “The most revolutionary thing one can do always is to proclaim loudly what is happening.” Or, to share a more loyal translation, that is what she actually wrote in 1906: “As Lassalle said, it is and remains the most revolutionary act to always ‘say loudly what is’.” Lassalle, of course, is Ferdinand Lassalle, the Prussian jurist who initiated the social-democratic movement in Germany. To me, this definition —150 years after Lassalle said it, and some 120 years after Luxemburg etched it to public memory— remains true not only of a revolutionary act, but also of the fundamental element of what I call proactive freedom.

To proclaim loudly what is happening! Sounds simple enough. And on the surface, there doesn’t need to be anything revolutionary about it really. But can you do it?Can we always proclaim loudly what is happening? To what extend can we do so? And at what risk? Can we do it in today’s Turkey? Can anyone do it in today’s Russia? What about in Germany and in the United States? Lassalle’s words resonate with us today, because the wonderful proverb which Cape Verdeans have gifted to us also remains pretty much universally relevant: “Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages.” Can we risk being chased out of nine villages? Could it be that it is only those who can risk such a plight are the truly FREE among us? The denizens of the proverbial tenth village? Those who have paid the price of exercising their proactive freedom by being bullied, excluded, expelled, or to use the current term: cancelled, and even exiled, and in less tolerant societies even arrested, put on trial, imprisoned, and yes, even assassinated as we have seen not only in Turkey and Russia, but in too many places; or even being placed on the death-row and ending up on the gallows like we continue to see in Iran?

Think about it: Why is it so hard to say loudly what is? Why does proactive freedom come with a price tag? Often it is because most of us live in countries that are built on lies; it is because we belong to nations that have created themselves out of a fictionalised re-telling of history, creating a glorious and innocent past that never was; and on a larger scale, it is because we live under a leviathan system of wealth and capital that has been —and for the most part continues to be unjustly procured— a global system of markets that is built on layers and layers of inequality which relies on the silent acquiescence of millions and millions of people. And it is because our religion or ethnicity or class or sect or congregation or club or workplace or clan or neighbourhood or family —yes, the village — is not ready to hear the truth, or anything that deviates from its core orthodoxies for that matter. Each of us, I’m sure, can think of situations when we wanted to proclaim loudly what was happening and immediately saw in our mind’s eye the blinking lights of silencers, or a sobering “hush” sign like the ones that were hung on the walls of my grade school in Turkey. In the various communities that we belong to, all of us at one time or another have met the powers of dissuasion when we wanted to say loudly what is.

Let me be more specific and briefly turn to what being FREE involves in Turkey. To me it involves crossing the red lines of the official doctrines in search of truth. It involves discussing the foundations of the republic — the ideology and the acts that the nation has been built on; it involves coming to terms with our past and proclaiming loudly the crimes that were committed, including the Armenian Genocide of 1915 under the leadership of Committee of Union and Progress: the execution of Armenian intellectuals and a death march of over a million Armenians from their ancestral towns and villages all around Anatolia; it also involves proclaiming loudly what happened in 1938, in Dersim, when under the country’s founder’s orders tens of thousands of Kurds were bombed and massacred. And yes, it involves the Wealth Tax of 1942 that was arbitrarily levied on Armenian, Greek and Jewish citizens of Turkey and the sending of over 1200 non-Muslims to labour camps in Eastern Turkey for non-payment of taxes, which to some meant death and burial in the fields; it also involves saying loudly what the Istanbul pogrom of 1955 was about, digging into who had organised the brutality directed primarily at the Greek citizens of Turkey… In short, proactive freedom in Turkey would first and foremost involve an honest conversation through a national chronology of crimes, a proclamation of what actually happened each of those ominous dates. What happened, for example, in the military coups of 1960, 1971, 1980; what happened in the post-modern coup of 1998; what actually happened in the attempted coup of 2016? It would mean coming face to face with the memory and the truth of those who have been executed as a result of military coups, who have been tortured and killed in state custody; it means seeking the truth, along with the proud and persistent Saturday Mothers of our land, about what happened to thousands and thousands of people that went “missing,” those who were made to disappear, those who were denied a tombstone; it means proclaiming the truth about hundreds of thousands who have been arrested and purged and exiled and denied their basic human rights by a militarised and/or politicised judiciary over the years. It would mean an end to impunity for thousands of extrajudicial killings that peaked in the 1990s, but never completely stopped. And yes, it would involve questioning a Turkification process, the denial of all other identities, cultures, mother tongues. And yes, it would involve being mindful of the fact that Muslim women who chose to wear the hijab were also seen inferior and denied equality in Turkey for over eighty years, until as late as 2008. And today it still involves defending gender equality and questioning the patriarchy. It involves waving the banned —yes, banned— rainbow flag to say loudly that LGBTI individuals exist and have a right to visibility and participation, to representation and yes, to marriage if they wish so; to being treated as the equals that they are.

To me, those who are truly free in Turkey are those who have felt the urgency and responsibility, those who have found the courage to seek and speak the truth on these matters, among others. But I need to make two points before I move on: First, please understand that I’m not talking about the problems of the past here. The chronology of crimes is relevant, because it is what keeps up injustices and inequalities of the present day. Faulkner was right, “the past is not even past.” Secondly, I’m not talking about one specific government here, or a few specific governments, for the roots of being “unfree” go deeper in Turkey; the nation state’s official redlines, the age-old lies and taboos, as well as the inequalities those lies have created find defenders from all walks of society. The root of most of the issues I mentioned today can be traced back to what Barış Ünlü, a scholar and author from Turkey, aptly calls the “Turkishness Contract.” This is how he briefly defines it: “a largely unspoken and unwritten agreement amongst the majority of Muslims in Anatolia that took place gradually between 1912 and 1925, the formative years of Turkish nationalism. Yet this contract is not a relic of the past. As the basic constitution of the Turkish Republic, unwritten, yet far more effective than anything in writing, the Turkishness Contract has, since the 1920s, defined the norms and rules of fields and institutions, and formed the schemas of thought, feeling, and action of individuals born, raised, socialised, and working within these fields and institutions, making them Turkish subjects. The Turkishness Contract also constitutes a particular ‘interaction order’ that informs and guides countless everyday encounters, between individuals inside the contract and those outside.” Proactive freedom in Turkey involves questioning and eventually tearing up this century-old contract to replace it with the country’s first ever democratic constitution, something that can be done only through encounters in that “in-between”, through engagement and inevitable dispute, through exercising proactive freedom in order to lay the foundations of a FREE society. Stepping into that in-between takes courage and it is usually those who are already in the tenth village that speak most freely.

Now, let us turn our attention toward Western democracies for a moment. How free are they? How free are you? What happens these days when the Europeans or the U.S. citizens choose to proclaim loudly what is? What do their respective governments do? What keeps them from telling the truth? The countries that have much better track records than Turkey in facing the horrors in their past, of admitting their crimes and apologising for them, choose not to say loudly what is —and even attempt to punish who do— when it comes to crimes committed in the present day. In a powerful article published in March, Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra summarised the situation: “The world, or more specifically the West, doesn’t do anything. Worse, the liquidation of Gaza, though outlined and broadcast by its perpetrators, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony: from the US president claiming that Palestinians are liars and European politicians intoning that Israel has a right to defend itself, to the prestigious news outlets deploying the passive voice while relating the massacres carried out in Gaza. We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief. Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children.”

Pankaj Mishra is right. Every day since Hamas-led attacks which killed 766 civilians and 373 security personnel, while 252 Israelis and foreigners were taken captive to the Gaza Strip on October the 7th, 2023, many in the West sat and watched as their leaders condoned and enabled Netanyahu government’s disproportionate response: a campaign of slaughter that bluntly targeted the entire population of Gaza; the intention, methods and results of which, in my view, amount to genocide. The violence is there for us to see, in our pockets, on the screens of our phones, only a single click away. There is nothing too complicated about what is going on; the facts and figures tell it all: In Gaza, 35 thousand people have been killed and 10 thousand are missing; and according to the Israeli army, about two-thirds of those killed or missing are innocent civilians; among the dead are 13 thousand children, almost 400 medical workers and over 200 journalists; 75 thousand people have been injured; 30 percent of the surviving children suffer from acute malnutrition; many die each day from starvation and disease. And what do Western democracies do? For the most part, they remain complicit.

Of course, I am, as we all are, aware of the work of many European and American jurists and scholars who play an active role in the proceedings at the International Court of Justice and on other fora. We all read the words by European and American academics, politicians, actors, writers and poets, who refuse to remain silent in an increasingly McCarthyesque atmosphere. We hear the voices of thousands of Americans, Britons, Germans, and the French, the Swedes, and yes, the Norwegians, as well as scores of people in Israel, and Jews around the world calling for a ceasefire. We have seen the rallies and encampments on many campuses from the Ivy League universities to community colleges in the U.S. and many prestigious schools in Europe. And yes, just this morning we heard the Norwegian government along with governments of Spain and Ireland announce that they were now ready to recognise Palestine as a state: certainly a step in the right direction.However, we also see non-governmental institutions, cultural foundations, university administrations, publishers and media outlets in the U.S. and in Europe that have failed miserably in proclaiming loudly what is. We have seen an unwillingness to hear the facts, from the Frankfurt Book Fair to the Oscar ceremony, from classrooms to the front pages of major newspapers; we have seen this in the cancellation of awards, in the postponement of scheduled events, in the nullification of people’s contracts, in the dismissal of employees, in the suspension of students, in the handcuffing and arrests. We have seen how easy it has become to criminalise speech in a post-democracy.

This was not a complete surprise. Criticism of Israel’s policies and the Zionist ideology has always triggered a burden of guilt and consequential silence in Europe; the unlawful occupation of Palestine, everyday occurrence of targeted killings, torture in prisons, confiscation of land, illegal settlements, checkpoint violence and humiliation, the everyday treatment of Palestinians as lesser-humans, the ghettoization of Gaza had most Western governments and many Western opinion makers as enabling partners. It is not a surprise to see the blinking lights of silencers now, because we have long seen a readiness to attack even prominent Jewish writers who dared to criticise Israel, from Hannah Arendt to holocaust survivor Primo Levi, to British historian Tony Judt, to French-American critic George Steiner, to Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. What is perhaps more surprising and more dangerous today is the readiness of some in the West to instrumentalise antisemitism; an act which weakens the essential struggle against antisemitism by equating it with the absence of an unconditional solidarity with an extremist regime. And, make no mistake, this is a game straight out of the playbook of fascism. It is a major first step in the creation of “unfree” societies. It is what nationalist authoritarian regimes have always done to silence political criticism — they label their critics as “enemies of the people” and accuse them of being “anti-German,” of “hostility against Russia,” of “denigrating Turkishness.” One certainly hopes this is not a road the Western democracies would want to go down, but when I hear voices from the European “democrats” these days crying “wolf” at the sight of a Palestinian keffiyeh, it makes me wonder.

5. LITERATURE AND FREEDOM: TELLING THE TALE, FLYING THE KITE

In this final section of my speech, I will invite you to think about what literature can do for freedom and how writers remain FREE even in the direst of circumstances. But let us be frank, they don’t all do that. Not only the iron hand of censorship and the prisons of authoritarian regimes, but also conformism, the comforts of one’s own village, render many who work with language "unfree". We see it most vividly in the context of Israel-Palestine today, but the invisible prisons have always been there. French writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous touched on that in her Oxford Amnesty Lecture in 1992. She gave the title “We Who Are Free, Are We Free?” to her lecture and chose to not only address the “tangible prisons and camps behind barbed wire,” but also “those invisible and impalpable prisons in which each of us lives today as hostages of a spell, an evil spell the size of the society we live in.” Listen to what she said thirty-two years ago:

“Writers are afraid. Almost all those whose instrument of work is language are afraid: journalists, critics, university teachers, almost all of them. Fear and lies govern their tastes and their activities. Fear of what? Fear of death by social starvation, fear of not being invited to the dominant banquet, fear of not immediately receiving a pittance of compliments, fear of not being published, of not winning prizes, of not being invited onto the greatest possible number of TV programs. Fear of not belonging to the powerful cliques that reign over institutions private and public, fear of not belonging to the inquisition clubs. Fear for their reputation, fear of not being cited in the maximum number of papers, fear of not always being congratulated, of never being congratulated, fear of being unmasked and called inferior, fear of not getting in touch with the establishment, fear of

never getting a taste of power, fear of exile, of cold, of solitude, of that severe climate that follows the artist, as Joyce well knew. Fear of being honest and of this old-fashioned virtue costing them very dearly indeed.”

Being honest is an old-fashioned virtue, indeed. And it is exactly what makes some writing truly great and some writers truly free, no matter what happens to them. The title of Pankaj Mishra’s essay that I quoted from is “Shoah after Gaza” — a reference, of course, to Adorno’s “dictum”: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric…” Many great works of literature since Shoah have proven that some writers are indeed capable of finding the poetic tools to convey the most barbaric acts and thereby resist them. But how does a person whose modus operandi is being alone in a room — and sometimes a prison cell— and putting words to paper can be free in the Arendtian sense? Where in the lonely act of writing fiction and poetry do we find proactive freedom?

Paul Celan left us a powerful description of just that in The Meridian, the lecture he delivered on the occasion of receiving the Georg-Büchner-Preise in Darmstadt, on October 22, 1960. “The poem is lonely,” he said. “It is lonely and en route. Its author remains added to it. But doesn’t the poem therefore already at its inception stand in the encounter — in the mystery of the encounter? / / The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs this other, it needs an opposite. It seeks it out, it bespeaks itself to it. / Each thing, each human is, for the poem heading toward this other, a figure of this. / The attention the poem tried to pay to everything it encounters, its sharper sense of detail, outline, structure, colour, but also of the “tremors” and “hints,” all this is not, I believe, the achievement of an eye competing with (or emulating) ever more precise instruments, but is rather a concentration that remains mindful of all our dates.” And he continues, quoting the seventeenth century French theologian Nicholas Malebranche, “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.” For Celan, “the poem becomes —under what conditions! — the poem of someone who —always still— perceives, is turned toward phenomena, questioning and addressing these; it becomes conversation —often a desperate conversation.”

A close look at the life inside and around us, at both the internal and external dimensions of being human, concentrating on what is, understanding it, imagining what it might become, transforming it into a tale that will travel toward new encounters and start a new conversation that will multiply by each person receiving it. This is what literature does. It rises from its lonely inception which already stands in the mystery of the encounter and reaches out to you and me, the reader, the other, the opposite, and provides an in-between.

Turkish novelist and journalist Ahmet Altan, my good friend and former partner in running the Taraf newspaper for which we’re still on trial, was imprisoned for four years and seven months in the Silivri High Security Prison outside Istanbul. Initially, he was sentenced to life without parole for three political columns, and in a cell he shared with two other inmates, he penned — literally, penned — three books. This is how Altan describes his life in prison in I Will Never See the World Again, a memoir that still has not been published in Turkey:

“I talk all day with people who are seen and heard by no one, people who don’t exist and won’t exist until the day I mention them. I listen as they converse among themselves. I live their loves, their adventures, their hopes, worries and joys. I sometimes chuckle as I pace the courtyard, because I overhear their rather entertaining conversations. // I soar like smoke and leave the prison with those people who exist in my mind. They may have the power to imprison me but no one has the power to keep me in prison. I am a writer. I am neither where I am nor where I am not. Wherever you lock me up I will travel the world with the wings of my endless mind.”

Sounds stoic at first, a non-Arendtian form of freedom perhaps, a mere mental state rather than what I’ve been focusing on in this talk. But that isn’t so, really. For Altan too has confidence in the power of the encounters, the in-between that the written word provides. “I have friends all around the world who help me travel,” he writes from his prison cell, “most of whom I have never met. Each eye that reads what I have written, each voice that repeats my name, holds my hand like a little cloud and flies me over the lowlands, the springs, the forests, the seas, the towns and their streets. They host me quietly in their houses, in their halls, in their rooms. I travel the whole world in a prison cell. // I am writing this in a prison cell. But I am not in prison. I am a writer. I am neither where I am nor where I am not. You can imprison me, but you cannot keep me in prison. Because, like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through your walls with ease.”

“The Writer’s Paradox” as Altan calls it, indeed turns the written word, the tale and the poem into a force of freedom for writers and readers alike. Selahattin Demirtaş who has spent the last 2758 days in prison in Turkey has also become a taleteller behind bars. The short stories and novels he wrote in prison are traveling the world now, starting new conversations. In the preface to his first work of fiction, Dawn, Demirtaş discusses the role of literature. And I quote: “Some may think it naive to turn our attention to the role of literature in the midst of such troubles. I would beg to differ. Literature not only remains at the vanguard of critical thinking but also serves as a catalyst of thoughts and feelings that in turn create political change. Let us not forget that as long as we continue to breathe life into words, those words will not abandon us.”

Breathing life into words, but to what end? This is how Salman Rushdie answered that question when I interviewed him in 2007, three decades after the Iranian regime issued a fatwa on his life for a novel he wrote and 15 years before he was stabbed in the neck and torso in a literary event in western New York: “Literature,” Rushdie told me, “does not belong to any single group, it cannot belong to any one group. No one owns the writer. A novelist does not speak for an ideology. A writer’s job is merely to say, ‘This is how I see it.’” Despite the fatwa, despite the direct threats to his life and a near-fatal attack, Rushdie has remained free by exactly doing that, by telling us how he sees it.

And Adania Shibli, the Palestinian writer who we proudly hosted at the Kıraathane Istanbul Literature House in 2022 and who, I know, has been a guest here at Litteraturhuset Oslo and will be back soon again, wrote an article after the scheduled ceremony to take place at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair for the Litprom award given to her novel, Minor Detail was cancelled. It was a deplorable decision and one of the very first signs perhaps of the “unfree” atmosphere that has been thickening since then. In the article she wrote, Shibli briefly mentions the lies and untruths that surrounded the cancellation. Then, she says, “The untruths, or fictions of literature, never manage to have such effects in the real world, perhaps for the better. Literature’s relevance is not to incite change but intimacy and reflection; to bring others back to ourselves, perhaps a field where we can consider how we relate to ourselves and to others, from living to pain; and to guide us towards imagining how to live better.”

Bringing others back to ourselves is what literature does. It provides an engagement with the world, with the other, an engagement through which we can begin to break free of the boxes, the villages, the invisible prisons we find ourselves in. And by doing that, literature —like other art forms— becomes an essential component of awareness and self-creation through an engagement with the other. A poem, a tale, a novel does not incite political change, but it can inspire us to be proactively free, it gives us courage to step into an “in-between,” come to houses like this and pay attention to each other, to talk and listen, to act through language and engage with the world.

I started this lecture by saluting political prisoners in Turkey. Allow me to conclude it by saluting a dead poet from Gaza. The late Palestinian writer, poet and professor Refaat Alareer was the editor of two anthologies of stories by young writers in Gaza. He was also the co-founder of the mentorship program “We Are Not Numbers,” which promoted the power of storytelling as a means of Palestinian resistance. Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 6th, 2023, when the apartment he was in with his family was surgically bombed out of the entire building where it was located in Gaza.

Here is how he bids farewell:

IF I MUST DIE

If I must die,
you must live 
to tell my story
to sell my things 
to buy a piece of cloth 
and some strings, 
(make it white with a long tail) 
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 
while looking heaven in the eye 
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell 
not even to his flesh 
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope 
let it be a tale

Thank you for listening.

REFERENCES (or RECOMMENDED READING):

Refaat Alareer, “Gaza Writes Back: Narrating Palestine,” Biography, Volume 37, Number 2, Spring 2014, University of Hawaii Press.

Ahmet Altan, I Will Never See the World Again, tr. Yasemin Çongar, Granta, 2019.

Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn, Schocken Books, 1994.

Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version-Drafts-Materials, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein & Heino Schmull, tr. Pierre Joris, Stanford University Press, 2011.

Hélène Cixous, “We Who Are Free, Are We Free?” tr. Chris Miller, Critical Inquiry,

Volume 19, Issue 2, Winter 1993, Basic Books, 1992.

Selahattin Demirtaş, Dawn: Stories, tr. Amy Marie Spangler & Kate Ferguson, SJP for Hogart, 2019.

Joke J. Hermsen, A Good & Dignified Life: The Political Advice of Hannah Arendt & Rosa Luxemburg, tr. Brendan Monaghan, Yale University Press, 2022.

Kei Hiruta, Hannah Arendt & Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity, Princeton University Press, 2021.

Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Huids, Annelies Laschitza, tr. George Shriver, Verso, 2011.

Pankaj Mishra, “The Shoah after Gaza,” London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 6 · 21 March 2024.

Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Juliane Rebentisch, The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence, tr. Joseph Ganahl, Polity Press, 2016.

Adania Shibli, “Once, the Monster was so Kind,” Berlin Review, No. 1, February 2024.

Barış Ünlü, The Turkishness Contract, tr. John William Day, Temple University Press, 2024 (forthcoming).