And Yet...

And Yet... by Christopher Hitchens Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: And Yet... by Christopher Hitchens Read Free Book Online
Authors: Christopher Hitchens
have switched sides in an ingratiating manner. Ka himself is boiling with guilt, about the “European” character that he has acquired in exile in Frankfurt, and about the realization that the Istanbul bourgeoisie, from which he originates, generally welcomes military coups without asking too many questions. The posturing Sunay at least phrases this well:
    No one who’s even slightly westernized can breathe free in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they’re better than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren’t for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them and their painted women and chopping them all into little pieces. But what do these upstarts do in return? They cling to their little European ways and turn up their affected little noses at the very soldiers who guarantee their freedom.
    A continuous theme of the novel, indeed, is the rancor felt by the local inhabitants against anyone who has bettered himself—let alone herself—by emigrating to an undifferentiated “Europe” or by apingEuropean manners and attitudes. A secondary version of this bitterness, familiar to those who study small-town versus big-city attitudes the world over, is the suspicion of those left behind that they are somehow not good enough. But this mutates into the more consoling belief that they are despised by the urbane. Only one character—unnamed—has the nerve to point out that if free visas were distributed, every hypocrite in town would leave right away and Kars would be deserted.
    As for the past tense in which Kars is also frozen, I have to rely on a certain amount of guesswork. Although Ka’s acronym could ostensibly have been drawn from any pair of consonant/vowel first and last names, I presume from Pamuk’s demonstrated interest in codes and texts that K and A were chosen deliberately. There seem to be two possibilities here: one is “Kemal Atatürk,” the military founder of modern secular Turkey; the other is “Kurdistan and Armenia,” standing in for the national subtexts of the tale.
    Pamuk supplies no reason for his selection, but the setting of Kars means that he might intend elements of both of the above. The city was lost by Ottoman Turkey to Russia in 1878, regained in 1918, and then briefly lost again to an alliance of Bolsheviks and Armenians until, in late 1920, it became the scene of a Turkish nationalist victory that fixed the boundary between Turkey and then-Soviet Armenia that endures to the present day. (This event was among the many negations of Woodrow Wilson’s postwar diplomacy, which had “awarded” the region to the Armenians.) From Kars, also in 1920, the legendary Turkish Communist leader Mustafa Suphi set out along the frontier region, dotted with magically evocative place-names like Erzurum and Trebizond, and was murdered with twelve of his comrades by right-wing “Young Turks.” This killing was immortalized by Nâzim Hikmet in a poem that is still canonical in Turkey. (Hikmet himself, the nation’s unofficial laureate, was to spend decades in jail and in exile because of his Communist loyalties.) The outright victor in all those discrepant struggles was Mustafa Kemal, who had helped defeat two “Christian” invasions of Turkish soil in his capacity as a soldier, and who went on to assume absolute political power and to supervise anddirect the only lasting secular revolution that a Muslim society has ever undergone. His later change of name to Kemal Atatürk was only part of his driving will to “westernize” Turkey, Latinize its script, abolish male and female religious headgear, adopt surnames, and in general erase the Islamic caliphate that today’s fundamentalists hope to restore.
    Pamuk is at his best in depicting the layers of the past that

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