Trauma & Art

The Day I am Free

“Every country must take their responsibility for their own romani inhabitants; nobody should have to flee to another country to ensure their human dignity….” Hans Caldaras (musician, Taikon’s cousin)

Today’s post is about a book titled, The Day I Am Free, which tells the story of Swedish-Roma Katarina Taikon in three parts.The first section contains her biography written by journalist Lawen Mohtadi in 2012. Mohtadi also examines the historical contexts, and sociopolitical and ideological background of the events of Taikon’s life and activism. For instance, she writes that “during the same period that the Swedish welfare society begins to take shape, another political current emerges: eugenics.” The second part includes the first volume of Taikon’s autobiographically based children’s book series, Katitzi, in which she writes about a girl’s struggle as part of an ethnic minority in Sweden. The third section includes an essay about the cultural impact of Katitzi by curator Maria Lind. The book also includes photos, book illustrations and book covers.

Most of us know that Sweden is a welfare state, a society that prioritizes environmental issues and recycling, civic engagement, free access to good quality education, child care and health services. Its people also boast one of the longest life expectancies in the world. The Swedes have also managed to balance work and free time better than other countries, and have pursued a policy of peace since World War I, and I think, have not engaged in direct military conflict since the early 19^th century. Many of us are familiar with furniture or some other home product from IKEA. Sweden is also a beautiful country, and years ago I managed to visit Sweden and a bordering Finland town over the Christmas holidays.

Swedish films, artists and writers have exerted an influence on me since adolescence. I am also aware of Sweden through the lens and writings of Theodor Kallifatides, a Greek who has lived and written in Sweden since 1964, and explores themes of memory, identity, alienation, of belonging and of being an outsider, immigration and displacement, the complex process of integration and navigating cultural differences, the experience of writing in Greek and writing in Swedish.  On leaving one’s homeland and on immigration he writes: “Emigration is a kind of partial suicide. You don’t die, but a great deal dies within you. Not least, the language,” and “Your home country makes you more of a foreigner than you feel yourself.”

However, there is no place on earth exempt from social ills, and Sweden too, has its stories and history of racism and discrimination against minorities and immigrants. I knew nothing about the history of the Roma people in Sweden and their struggles during a great part of the 20^th century or Katarina Taikon until I came across the book: The Day I Am Free. There is nothing exceptional about Sweden’s treatment of Roma. According to Amnesty International these minorities have suffered systematic and widespread discrimination across Europe for centuries. In 2016, the European Commission coined the term antigypsyism to designate anti-Roma institutional and individual hostility, aggression, and exclusion. Katarina Taikon’s older sister, Rosa Taikon, states: “I am worried. Are we going back to the 1930 – and 40’s? We see Roma in the Balkans, where they may live with their children on toxic slag heaps…..”

Katarina Taikon, an actress and prolific writer, is considered a prominent Swedish human rights activist of the 20^th century, often compared to Martin Luther King Jr. Her writing defined the Roma struggle for equal rights, and also, produced realistic and anti-racist narratives for children. She lived in Sweden in an era when the Roma minority was heavily discriminated against, excluded from education, housing and the rights of citizenship that the Swedish welfare state provided for its citizens. Taikon’s activities were aimed at securing the civil rights of Roma in Sweden. Through political activism, media campaigning and writing, she raised the issue of the living conditions of the Roma.

Taikon was born in 1932 in a camp in Sweden, the youngest of four children of Johan Taikon, a Kalderash Roma musician and silversmith, whose parents were Hungarian subjects and had come to Sweden from Russia at the turn of the 20^th century, and ho had remained stateless all his life, and a non Roma Swedish woman, Agda Karlsson, whom Johan met while she was employed as a waitress and he as a violinist in the same restaurant. Agda became his second wife, and formed an almost ‘daughter-mother relationship’ with his first wife, known as mami Masha, who was at the time in her fifties. Masha had been a dancer at the Bolshoi Theatre in Russia and was not Roma either. Agda died at the age of 29 from tuberculosis leaving four young children behind. KatarinaTaikon and her siblings were close to mami Masha and when their mother passed away she supported them.

In the mid 30s Johan Taikon met Siv, a non Roma woman, who would become the children’s step mother, and mother to three new siblings. Masha was sent to live in another camp and Katarina was given to the Kreuters, a childless couple, who wanted to adopt her. Katarina’s life changed dramatically, she now lived in a warm house, had her own decorated bedroom, which looked like a toy store, dresses and any food she wanted. She lived with them for two years and then was turned over to child welfare services because they wanted to adopt her and her father had refused. She was seven when she was taken to an orphanage, and when a few weeks later her father came to retrieve her she refused to go with him, but eventually, she did return to her family, where despite her father’s warmth and understanding, she suffered beatings and emotional abuse from her step-mother.

Even though Johan Taikon had tried to enroll his children in school, he was always prevented from doing so, either by local authorities or other parents, who did not want Roma children in their schools. Katarina was denied education, and she attended school for a little while at the age of 10. It was only in her late twenties that she went back to school. At the age of fourteen Katarina was, like her older sister, Rosa, a few years earlier, forced to marry. Both sisters left these child-marriages. After a few months of being married Katarina ran away. She found shelter in a home for girls run by a humanitarian organization, where she was supported in finding work, saving a little money, and gaining financial independence.

In 1947 she was offerd a role by Arne Sucksdorff, a documentary filmmaker and Sweden’s first Oscar winner. He offered her the lead role in his short film, Departure, which portrays Roma life. Even though the film depicted their life in a romanticized way, the dialogues were spoken in the Romani language and the Roma were not portrayed in a negative context. It also opened the door to further artistic and public activity for her. During the next decade Taikon had various jobs for survival, but she increasingly performed in films and plays, often with her sister, Rosa, and began to move in artistic circles. In 1952, actor Per Oscarsson offered Katarina and Rosa accommodation in his large house, where they became acquainted with the Declaration of Human Rights for all people and the advocacy of the right to housing, employment and education, which would prove crucial for the Taikon sisters’ turning to activism and working to improve Roma life circumstances.

In the book, Mohtadi refers to friends and relatives that belonged to Taikon’s circle. She notes that “Katarina’s daily existence did not distinguish between work and pleasure, the personal and the political: the different spheres largely overlapped.” One person very close to Katarina was her eldest sister. Rosa Taikon was born in 1926 and was a mother figure for Katarina. Like her father she chose to become a silversmith, and since her first exhibition in 1966, her art has been shown in prestigious galleries throughout Sweden. Her work is a part of permanent exhibitions in various museums in Sweden and abroad. Along with her sister, she participated in political and social activities related to Roma rights and was awarded numerous prizes and merits, both for her artwork and her work in human rights. She died in 2017.

Hans Caldaras, a younger cousin of Roma ethnic background, was one of the many people who stayed in Taikon’s guest room for a while, when he was young and wanted to embark on a musical career. In his bio it is mentioned that he has done almost everything as an artist, concerts, musicals, theatre plays, festivals, many records and a variety of radio and television appearances. His repertoire is roma music with influences from improvised jazz, latin and gypsy swing. Caldaras mentions that Katarina and Bjorn introduced him to French films, and together they went to restaurants and bars, and he took care of the children when they were busy. He writes: “Political discussions, the roma question, Sweden geopolitics, were a constant in their living room.”

In 1958, Katarina met photographer, Bjorn Langhammer, who became her husband and partner in many artistic and political projects for over twenty years. That same year she, along with her sister Rosa and Björn, began a two-year course at a public college. With a basic education Katarina was able to continue her studies and she attended a business finance course. After her studies she took on the running of the Vips American Ice Cream Bar in Stockholm, which became a hub for many of her friends and acquaintances and her customers included many actors and artists. Katarina Taikon had her third child, Niki, in 1961, fathered by Björn Langhammar.

The following year her brother Paul was murdered, and a year later in1963 her first autobiographical book for adults, Gypsy Woman, was published, a great achievement if one considers that it was first book by a Romani author dealing with the living conditions of the Roma in Sweden. Mohtadi comments: “The book landed like a bomb in Swedish society….. Sweden took a leading role as a proponent of global equality and justice. The nation’s self-perception hinged on an idea of Sweden as a place free of racism, or, as it was sometimes termed, minority problems.” The book generated a public debate about the discrepancy between the Swedish welfare state and the segregation of the Roma population, and the need to do something about this.

A year later Taikon met Martin Luther King Jr., who had come to Scandinavia to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and with her sister Rosa, launched, among other things, a literacy course for adult Roma. Because the Swedish educational authorities were not willing to fund further education for the Roma, the Roma Union organized a series of protests culminating on May 1, 1965. The protests were successful and a delegation led by Katarina Taikon was invited to talk to Prime Minister Tage Erlander. As a result, ten adult schools were opened in Sweden within a year, and the program was included in the national education system. The Union went on to publish its own magazine called We Live from 1965 to 1973, and Taikon published her second book titled We Are Gypsies. In 1964 Katarina was appointed as an honorary member of the Swedish Youth Peace Alliance. 

In 1967, the Swedish authorities turned to Taikon for help concerning the status of Roma refugees from Poland and Italy. After an initial failure to allow the refugees to stay, a protest was organized that led to a new meeting with the minister at which it was decided that they would be allowed to stay; however, two years later, the Social Democratic government decided that a group of 47 French Roma would not be granted asylum. Although this decision would be reversed two years later, the deportation both disappointed and had an impact on Taikon’s stance on how to effect change in society.She decided to focus on working with the young, believing that they were the engine of change in Swedish society.

So, in the 1970s she started writing a semi-autobiographical series for children and adolescents centered on a young Roma girl called Katitzi.The series was hugely successful and became the most read children’s books in Sweden, after Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstockin’s series. She drew on her own experiences and touched upon themes of injustice, ignorance, and exclusion, concerning the Roma community in Sweden. Maria Lind writes: “Katitzi manages, despite quite dreadful circumstances, to find her way to an acceptable existence and, in time, to self-actualization.”

Taikon’s work to bring about social changes brought her into contact both with the most marginalized, and many artists, activists and politicians, all the way up to the Prime Minister. Her life long struggle for human rights for the Roma, and her focus on access to education and decent housing was successful; however, she also became the target of attacks, and eventually, the cumulative effect of personal history and trauma, lack of rest and overwork led to exhaustion, depression, physical ailments and pain. She was also hospitalized for double pneumonia. Mohtad writes: “Demands had increased from all directions. Some were of her own making: she believed that she had an obligation to transform society and that people should not have to suffer and struggle to survive. Other denmands were external from people who asked for help, and whom she could not refuse…”

In 1981, a year after Taikon and Langhammer published the last book of the Katitzi series, they divorced. The following year, she suffered a heart attack whilst undergoing tests at a hospital and fell into a coma from which she never awoke. Langhammer cared for her in their home until his own death in 1986. Then her three children and her sister, Rosa, took care of her until she passed away in 1995 with her beloved sister, Rosa, at her side.

From 1975 the Katitzi stories had already begun to be adapted into other media with the publication of comics, the creation of a television series, followed by theatrical performances. In 2012 her biography, The Day I Am Free, was published by Mohtadi, and based on the book, Mohtadi and journalist Gellert Tamas made a 2015 documentary film: The Untold Story of a Roma Freedom Fighter. In 2019, the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) in Stockholm organized an exhibition dedicated to Katitzi and her influence on Swedish society. Seven short documentary films dedicated to the book and its author were also produced, and Katitzi’s stories were republished.

Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk

“Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us”. Orhan Pamuk

“So the notice is there to remind him that, while some people pass through this door, others cannot. Which means the NO ENTRY sign is a lie. Actually, what it should say is NOT EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO ENTER  IS ALLOWED TO DO SO. By implying that certain privileged people can pass through, all those who do not possess the requisite privileges are barred, even if they wish to enter. At the same time it accords to those who have no wish to enter the same fate as those who do.” Orhan Pamuk

“…. to be happy is not rude, and it takes brains.” Orhan Pamuk

“One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.” Orhan Pamuk

Today’s post is about a book I’ve been reading by the Turkish writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature, Orhan Pamuk, Other Colours (2007), and some recent, accompanying artwork.

Pamuk enjoys a significant readership in Greece, and many of his books have been translated and critically acclaimed here, but as far as I can recall I don’t seem to have read any of his works, even though I did find a copy of a Greek edition of Snow on my shelves recently. I had purchased it in 2007, but apparently I’d never got round to reading it and then I forgot about it.

Other Colours is an abundant collection of 76 non-fiction pieces written over decades, as well as, some photos of Ottoman miniaturists’ art and the writer’s illustrations. The book is structured into nine sections, each exploring different facets of the writer’s thoughts on a broad range of topics. Pamuk notes: “…this book is shaped as a sequence of autobiographical fragments, moments, and thoughts,” and elsewhere, “I gathered up these pieces to form a totally new book with an autobiographical center.” He reflects on almost everything, with melancholy, nostalgia, irony, and a lot of humour, and manages to weave, memories, ideas, dreams, buildings and places, history and politics, human rights and censorship, self and identity, personal joy and public tragedy, natural and social disasters, family and the fragility of life, Eastern and Western art, his early resolutions to become a painter, the reason he didn’t become an architect, his experience of being a novelist, his own artistic process,  his novels, literature and literary figures, and more, into a coherent narrative.

On literature he comments: “Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than “seeing the world with words.” From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.” As for what it is like being a novelist he tells us: “When a novelist begins to play with the rules that govern society, when he digs beneath the surface to discover its hidden geometry, when he explores that secret world like a curious child, driven by emotions he cannot quite understand, it is inevitable that he will cause his family, his friends, his peers, and his fellow citizens some unease. But this is a happy unease. For it is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are.”

The book includes critical essays of the works of many literary figures, such as, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Hugo, Nabokov, Camus, Salman Rushdie, Sterne, Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Mann, Hemingway, Proust, Borges, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, with whom he finds he shares an affinity, and many more from different countries and cultures. Pamuk sheds light on Dostoyevsky, the man, his era and the contradictions of those who live, as he writes, on the edge of Europe. He claims that to understand the secrets that Dostoyevsky’s book, Notes from Underground, “whispers to those who, like me, live on the edge of Europe, quarreling with European thought, we need to look at the years during which Dostoyevsky was writing this strange novel.” He adds that even though Dostoyevsky had begun to feel anger toward the Western intellectuals who looked down on Russia, he was still a product of his Western education and upbringing and still practising a Western art, the art of the novel.

He goes on to tell us that he has a vivid memory of reading The Brothers Karamazov at the age of eighteen, alone in his room in a house that looked out on the Bosphorus. I also read some of Dostoyevsky’s works, including this lengthy book, when I was 16 and 17. Unlike Pamuk though, I didn’t return to the book in adulthood and so it inevitably became a distant memory. If we don’t return to books, the stories, characters and ideas we at one point engaged with often become faded memories. However, even though we may forget the stories, other things remain, like how the book made us feel, the actual physical object, the context we read it in, our response to its ideas at the time, and maybe other peoples’ responses, too. Ultimately, all the books we have read make us who we are. They reduce our childhood innocence and show us how the world works. Pamuk observes that unlike Proust’s hero, he never assumed the identities of characters in books or believed these events were happening to him, but he did enjoy the excitement of entering a space altogether different from his everyday world. He liked to study “the interior world of the novel in much the same way as [he] once studied the liquid inside [his] soft-drink bottle.”

In his essays we witness the pleasure he derives from reading, but also his need to recycle and dispose of books. He says: “Because I live in a country almost devoid of books and libraries, I at least have an excuse. The twelve thousand books in my library are what compel me to take my work seriously……,” and explains that “an easy way to clear them out is to decide which books we’d prefer to, shall we say, hide or banish altogether, so that our friends won’t see them at all. We can throw large numbers of books away just so no one will know you ever took such nonsense seriously.” He also reflects on themes like his belief in literature’s power to question life’s intrinsic nature and the process of creating meaning, as well as, the diminishing number of readers in Turkey. Concerning the low numbers of readers in his coutry he comments: “Still, I live in a country that views the nonreader as the norm and the reader as somehow defective, so I cannot but respect the affectations, obsessions, and pretensions of the tiny handful that read and build libraries amid the general tedium and boorishness.”

Through this narrative, composed of many fragments, Pamuk succeeds in revealing how personal and creative lives are inextricably linked. He doesn’t shy away from emotions and intimate experiences. He writes lovingly of his daughter. Parents, relatives and friends walk through his pages. He writes about his childhood, school experiences and early events to understand how they have shaped him and to make links between events and his stories and characters: “When I was little, a boy the same age as I—his name was Hasan—hit me just under the eye with a stone from his slingshot. Years later, when another Hasan asked me why all the Hasans in my novels were evil, this memory returned to me” or “Because I came to love horses during my childhood summers on Heybeliada, I’ve always given very good parts to horses and their carriages. My horse heroes are sensitive, delicate, forlorn, innocent, and often the victims of evil.”

He remembers his father, who despite his frequent long absences suffused him with the confidence to pursue his dreams: “When I was a child my father would look with heartfelt admiration at every picture I drew; when I asked his opinion, he would examine every scribbled sentence as if it were a masterpiece; he would laugh uproariously at my most tasteless and insipid jokes. Without the confidence he gave me, it would have been much more difficult to become a writer, to choose this as my profession. His trust in us, and his easy way of convincing my brother and me that we were brilliant and unique, came from a confidence in his own intellect,” and elsewhere, “Much later, when I’d put all that behind me, when anger and jealousy no longer clouded my view of the father who had never scolded me, never tried to break me, I slowly came to see—and to accept—the many and inescapable similarities between us.”

Pamuk explores his deep need to sit in solitude to dream, read and write. He gives us a glimpse of the workings of his creative mind and vivid imagination, and the thoughts he usually doesn’t talk about with others, concerning the objects that surround him, a sad, small tricycle or a beloved wristwatch, for instance. One such story is about an ashtray. I remember similar ashtrays in the shape of fish, shells or cupped hands from my own childhood. He writes: “Someone made a porcelain ashtray in the shape of a fish, and the poor fish will be burned by cigarettes for years on end, its mouth opened wide enough so that it’s not just dirty ashes it will have to swallow; its mouth is big enough to accommodate butts, matches, and all manner of filth.” Sometimes the author speaks to us through the voice of inanimate things like the figures in a drawing. These designs on paper tell us: “We are troubled by the abundance of rumors about where we come from, who we are, where we’re going…… after centuries of wandering, defeat, and disaster, our stories are lost. The drawings that once illustrated these stories have been scattered across the world. Now even we have forgotten where we are from. We have been stripped of our stories and our identities.”

Animals are also present in these essays and stories. Pamuk’s stories involve horses, seagulls, swallows and packs of stray dogs roaming the streets of Istanbul. For instance, he writes: “Revenge breeds revenge. Two years ago, when eight or nine dogs cornered and attacked me in Maçka Park, it seemed as if they had read my books and knew I had exacted poetic justice on them to punish them for roaming, especially in Istanbul, in packs. This, then, is the danger in poetic justice: Taken too far, it might ruin not just your book—your work—but your very life.”

In the part of the book with the title: My Books Are My Life he offers us insights into some of his novels and provides backstories, personal reflections on his books, and the emotional resonance he finds in his characters’ vulnerabilities. For instance, he draws on the material he gathered during his visits to Kars, the setting of Snow, to provide details of the the beauty, the sociopolitical landscape, and the loneliness and isolation that the city evoked in him. He notes: “If there is a silence, a dullness, a strange sense of calm, it is because the streets are full of people who have made peace with misery and helplessness; the state has banned all other possibilities, and done so with some violence.”

The book includes pieces about the 1999 earthquake that killed 30,000 people in a matter of seconds, and the general earthquake angst it generated. He writes about the lived experience, the fear, the destruction, the loss of lives, the Turkish mentality and the reasons so many buildings collapsed like a tower of deck cards. He comments: “…the death toll of thirty thousand had laid bare the construction sector’s practice of building shoddily on poor soil without any effort at earthquake proofing. For the twenty million living in the environs of the city, nightmares sprang from the well-founded fear that their homes would be unable to withstand an earthquake of the intensity that the scientists had now forecast……. very slowly the millions of İstanbullus living in unsound buildings on unsound soil have come to understand that they have to find their own way of fending off terror. This was how some came to leave the matter to Allah or, with time, simply to forget it, while others now take false comfort in precautions they adopted after the previous earthquake.”

He devotes pages to his beloved Istanbul, its neigbourhoods and buildings and the dramatic changes it has undergone. Pamuk says that the history of Istanbul is the history of fires and ruins from the middle of the 16th century, when the building of wooden houses became popular, until the early 20^th century. Fires, he explains, opened up its avenues and streets and shaped the city. He writes: “In those days it was against the law to knock down your old home to make room for the new apartment building……. people would move out, and once the mansion had become uninhabitable due to neglect, rotting wood, and age you could get permission to tear it down. Some would try to speed up the process by pulling out tiles to let in the rain and the snow. A faster, bolder option was to burn it down one night when no one was looking.” Part of the change happened to accommodate the rapidly growing population that went from one to ten million [today it’s about 16 million, the most populous city in Europe and larger than many countries, including Greece] in a very short space of time: “if you were to view it from above you would see at once why all this family strife, this greed, guilt, and remorse, served no good purpose. Below you would see the concrete legions, as great and unstoppable as the army in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, as they roll over all mansions, trees, gardens, and wildlife in their way; you see the tracks of asphalt that this force leaves in its wake…”

The writer shares his time between Istanbul and the Princes Islands. It was his essys about the islands and the Bosphorus that transported me back, as if little had changed since our visit, decades ago. Pamuk’s stories and descriptions brought back memories of a long ago trip I took to Turkey in the 80s when Isatnbul’s population was the quarter of what it is today. Even though one can safely assume that a lot of dramatic changes have taken place over these decades the book seems to have narrowed the distance of time. I visited Turkey in my twenties, with my husband and my sister. The experience left an indelible imprint on me. I had found the people friendly, hospitable, chatty and curious about people from other places. I was also young and much more open to interactions with strangers. We had a meal in a small tavern full of men [what we would call κουτούκι / koutouki in Greece, which actually derives from the Turkish word “kütük” that means tree trunk and is also used to describe someone drunk], we ate local sweets at cafes, or drank tea in small glasses on the boats we took to visit places outside Istanbul, and exchanged views about women, feminism, identity, and other such topics, with a variety of people we didn’t know or would ever see again… On the Bosphorus I was invited to teach English there by an older English lady that had made Istanbul her home, and although I was aware of the alure of the city, I could also sense the lack of freedom. The armed guards on every street corner reinforced the feeling.

When we visited it was apparent that the grand days belonged to the past, many houses were deserted or dilapidated, and yet, past more glorious days could be inferred. Like many islands across the world in earlier days, they were places of exile, initially, for defeated Byzantine emperors and politicians and apart from the prisons, monasteries and monks, vineyards and small fishing villages, they were empty places. However, Pamuk tells us that from the beginning of the 19^th century, the islands began to serve as summer resorts for Istanbul’s Christians and Levantines, Greeks and Jews, those connected to various embassies, and a little later, the city’s upper middle classes that began taking excursions to and building summer homes on the islands.

There are also references to Istanbul street food, [which I didn’t sample, because I’m a bit cautious in consuming food or water that might make me sick when I’m traveling], and the shift that quitting smoking brought to his sense of self. He says: “I no longer feel the chemical craving of the early days. I just miss my old self, the way I might miss a dear friend, a face; all I want is to return to the man I once was……When I long to return to my old self, I remember that in those days I had vague intimations of immortality.”  He also writes about his travels and stays in other countires, passports, and national identity. He notes: “It is when national difference is not a cause for celebration that a terrible variety emerges. It is the same with our passports, which sometimes bring us joy and sometimes sadness: As for the miserable ways they cause us to question our identity, no two are alike.”

In the section with the title Politics, Europe, and Other Problems of Being Oneself, he ponders on the complex interplay between cultural identity and political expression, the legal turmoil he faced in Turkey for acknowledging the Armenian genocide and the killing of 30,000 Kurds, the fraught relationship between personal belief and national law, life on the periphery, and the conflicts he has experienced as a secular, Westernized Turk. He discusses the issue of East and West, which he sees as a real and a mafactured chasm between East and West, with potentially dire consequences. He reflects on the cultural tensions between Eastern and Western experienced by Muslims all over the world, pointing to poverty, deprivation, and cultural and political factors rather than religious motivations concerning terrorism and the rise of fundamentalism and nationalism. He notes: “Today, as I listen to people all over the world calling for the East to go to war with the West, I fear that we will soon see much of the world going the way of Turkey, which has endured almost continuous martial law. I fear that the self-congratulatory, self-righteous West will drive the rest of the world down the path of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, to proclaim that two plus two equals five. Nothing nurtures support for the “Islamist” throwing nitric acid in the faces of women more than the West’s refusal to understand the anger of the damned.”

Pamuk speaks up against censorship, and writes about freedom of thought, his court case, the many prohibitions of Turkish society, politics, democracy, human rights, culture, religion, poverty, immigration. He traces the tendency for censorship and oppression and comments: “Here we might draw a parallel with something else I’ve seen often in my own lifetime: the modern Republic’s predilection for shutting down newspapers………. this sort of thing dates back to the 1870s, when Sultan Abdülhamit undertook to control the opposition by buying up its publications—a tradition that in a subtler way continues to this day.” Elsewhere, while describing Harold Pinter amd Arthur Miller’s visit to Turkey on account of the ruthless limits being set on freedom of expression he writes in1980 there had been a coup in Turkey and hundreds of thousands were thrown into prison, and writers were persecuted the most vigorously. Until then he himself had mostly stood on the margins of the political world, but listening to the suffocating tales of repression, cruelty, and outright evil, he had felt drawn in both by guilt and solidarity, while also feeling a desire to protect himself.

Throughout the book Pamuk highlights the significance of always focusing on the importance of respecting human rights and freedom of expression, which he believes is linked with human dignity. He comments: “But to respect the human rights of minorities, and to respect their humanity, is not to suggest that we should accommodate all manner of belief or tolerate those who attack or seek to limit freedom of thought in deference to the moral codes of those minorities. Some of us have a better understanding of the West, some of us have more affection for those who live in the East, and some, like me, try to do the two things at the same time, but these attachments, this desire to understand, should never stand in the way of our respect for human rights.”

It is not possible for me to do justice to the thematic diversity and depth of this undoubtedly interesting book, independently of whether one agrees with all the ideas contained in the book. There is for instance, a piece about diaries, his own first diary, a gift from his mother, and the vogue among Turkish writers of keeping a diary and publishing it while still alive, and he reflects on traffic anarchy and religion or politics and accidents. In one chapter he refers to one of Atatürk’s first reforms that concerned the statutory adoption of Western dress in 1925. Although it obliged everyone to dress like a European, it was still a continuation of the traditionally regimented Ottoman dress code that required everyone to dress according to religious affiliation, and which resulted, he notes, in the Turkish police still chasing people going about the conservative neighborhoods of Istanbul in traditional dress, seventy years after Atatürk’s dress revolution.

In the last two pieces he writes about his mother and father. The book ends with his 2006 Nobel speech with the title, My Father’s Suitcase, perhaps the most moving piece in the book. He wishes his father were there with him and says: “I had no fear of my father, and I had sometimes believed very deeply that I had been able to become a writer because my father had, in his youth, wished to be one too.”