This interview can be read in Interpret 11.
Burhan Sönmez is President of PEN International, the world’s most significant writers’ organisation, dedicated to the defence of literature and freedom of expression worldwide. At seventeen, he arrived in Istanbul to become a human rights lawyer; work with his own Kurdish people would see him imprisoned, tortured, and sent to the UK in a coma. It would take several years to recover from his injuries, learn English, become a fellow of Cambridge University, and write some of the most significant contemporary novels in Turkish and Kurdish. He spoke with our editor, James Appleby .
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I wanted to start with two cities: Istanbul and Cambridge. You fell in love with the first as a teenager, the second you came to as a refugee. Could you tell us about their importance to you and your writing?
Cities attach to our lives in two different ways. First, when we have a special moment in a city, we always feel attached to that time, to that place. Second is a period of your life, especially childhood and youth – always with you, positive or negative, where you spent your teenage years or twenties.
Istanbul was a city for a new phase of my life. I was seventeen years old, a teenage boy becoming a young man – ready to sail to the world, like all pirates. From a small town in the centre of Anatolia, Istanbul is mesmerising. Even though you meet so many, ah, obstacles, throughout the years you spend there, still you feel a love for the city.
I came to Britain to receive treatment. I stayed for one year, then back to Turkey for another year, then to Cambridge for a definite stay. I became a political refugee. Apart from my health issues, I had some legal problems with the Turkish police and authorities.
So I found myself as an outsider. I was not part of this culture. I didn’t know anything apart from the books in Turkish translation. English was just another language that I didn’t understand – Chinese, Arabic, same. I left my family behind. I left my profession: I was a lawyer in Turkey, but that means you are nothing here, because your diploma is not recognised.
You have to create something to survive. You have to get to the source of the culture, to understand the people and the land and the air and the history of the place. It was a challenge, I say, but also a big joy for me, because if your mind is open to new things, you feel so hungry, like a child. I always wanted to improve my English as quickly as possible – to be able to read poetry in English.
That facility for language and desire for knowledge is shared with your characters – Avdo, for example, in Stone and Shadow. What was it like for you to grow up legally unable to speak your own language in Kurdish?
Because you’re a child, you don’t understand the essence of the thing, but you know that your language is different. When the military came to our village, the elderly would warn us: don’t speak Kurdish. Then we kids would pretend that we spoke beautiful Turkish, you know, shouting so the soldiers would hear us. But in the child’s brain, it wasn’t something dangerous. It was another game for us, and we made fun of it, until I moved to the town where I learned Turkish at school.
This isn’t a personal story. It’s a social story: the story of my village and my people. Thousands of people, millions of people, going through the same thing, and somehow you think it’s normal. They couldn’t imagine another kind of life. They were born in that slavery and their ancestors too. It wasn’t until my teenage years that I started to listen to youngsters very active in my university. Leftist people, they would say, We are Kurds. We are a different nation. We need to have the same rights as anyone. I started to realise that there was a problem here. Something is wrong. Even though our elders tried to adapt to those conditions – forced by the authorities – we children and youngsters tried to find another way. To recreate ourselves. For me now, that recreation is literature and the right to use our mother tongue.
I wonder if this sense of recreation is one of the reasons you enjoy the labyrinth and the vignette, both key to the underground jail cells of Istanbul, Istanbul. What pushed you in that direction?
I keep asking this question to myself. It’s very much like a Borgesian or an American style, I may say, but I think the source is something based in my brain, related to my mother. My mother was a very good storyteller. She is the one who created me – who I am today. In her stories, Kurdish legends, she always had a way of retelling the same story every night, and as a child you would listen to the same fairytale one hundred times. And you would enjoy always the same thing, but you don’t realise that every night it’s a new story. Every night, a different environment, a different light maybe, a different intonation. Maybe a very bad day, melancholic – maybe a day of good news. The colour of her voice changed every day. And that changed the story, you know, because a story is not just what happens, but how it happens.
Invention is very important to me. As I said, when I came to Britain I had nothing: no money, no language, no past, no friends. It was time either to surrender or to recreate myself. After about ten years of being a refugee, I thought, I need to do something that will remind me always of this period of my life. I never felt that I should have a tattoo on my body – but I took a tattoo of a phoenix. You might be murdered, but you can be born again, no matter the conditions. I went to the tattoo shop, I gave them a design, and I said, Please make this tattoo on the back of my heart. People see me in Turkey by the sea and they’re surprised: Oh! You have a tattoo! What does it mean? And I say, This is my life, you know?
Because, when I left Turkey, I was heavily wounded. I remember the police over my head said, Ok, he now is dead, we can go. They wanted to kill me, but it was my job to survive.
I want to come to PEN International and their work in defending writers from the treatment you’re describing. One thing that unites the authors of this issue is a sense of crisis. Bluntly, in your view as President, are things are getting worse for writers worldwide?
Unfortunately I have to say yes. We left bad days behind; now we are going to the worst days. Because authoritarianism has got a new power across the world, from my country Turkey to Russia, from China to many countries in Latin America and in Africa, and now in Europe, there are many authoritarian governments taking power. They’re increasing the language of hate – of detachment from other nations. Always politicians say we are the best; the others have faults always, and either we have to correct them or keep a distance from them. This is the wrong policy, and also an easy policy for dictators. If you want to rule your own people, you have to give them a sense that they are unique, that others are only others. Us and the barbarians.
Just look at recent years. A coup d’état in Myanmar, then Taliban in Afghanistan, then war in Ukraine, then wars again in Palestine and Israel. When the military came to power in Myanmar, they imprisoned so many people, and hung a PEN member, a young poet. In Belarus, they imprisoned a PEN member for ten years: a Nobel Peace Laureate. In Turkey, a PEN member sentenced to life in prison, just for peaceful criticism of government. We are here to help our colleagues: writers, journalists, academics, intellectuals across the world. But our power is not enough to help everyone at risk, because the number of those people is increasing terribly fast. From every continent, every day, we receive new calls for help.
Literature is here to show us that another life is possible. Reading and writing gives a sense of immortality. When I read a beautiful book, I feel that the history of all civilisation is with me, and the future is in my hands. Not only literature, but all art, has been the source of survival for humanity.
My final question is about your latest project. What can you tell us about your first novel in your mother tongue?
I started writing in Turkish, and after five novels I have now turned to Kurdish. My own language is a minority language in four countries: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Those countries occupied and shared the land of the Kurds for a hundred years. The Kurdish language and culture have been oppressed, denied and despised systematically. When Harold Pinter went to Turkey on a mission with PEN International, to see the situation of writers after a military coup, he witnessed the harsh conditions of my people. He heard how their speech was called ‘mountain language’, a language of savages.
Now I am writing in that mountain language. The book is set in the 1968 student uprising, in the middle of the Cold War of Paris, West Berlin, and Istanbul. Its title is Lovers of Franz K. – Evîndarên Franz K. in the original.
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You can find out more about Burhan Sönmez on his website or on X.
@brhnsnmz
Stone and Shadow, in Alexander Dawe’s translation, is available through Other Press, New York. The original Turkish Taş ve Gölge was published by İletişim Yayınları, Istanbul.
Photo credit: Roberto Gandola
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