Orhan Pamuk is one of my favorite authors. I had never heard of Turkey’s most famous novelist until a few years ago, when I got My Name is Red as a surprise birthday gift.
When Snow came out, I actually heard Pamuk speak about it at the Kennedy school. Later, I reviewed it for the books section of a weekly newspaper.
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Snow
By Orhan Pamuk
426 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004.
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely.
Snow is a political novel. Pamuk settled any doubts about the novel’s nature by unambiguously stating so on his North American book tour. Like most of Pamuk’s other works, it is also a tragic love story.
On the political front, Snow deals with a number of themes. How European a country is Turkey? What does the resurgence of political Islam imply for the Kemalist legacy? How does the Turkish state’s steadfast commitment to secularism, the army being its guardian, stand against the rise of the Islamist parties? Are the roots of Islamism purely ideological in nature or do endemic poverty and unemployment play a part? What is the role of the artist in the midst of such political turmoil?
Ka, the protagonist of Snow, is a poet who has spent many years in political exile in Germany. He travels to Kars, a small town on the Turkish/Armenian border, ostensibly for a journalistic assignment, but actually to woo a former classmate who lives there. The journey from liberal Istanbul to poor, conservative Kars involves more than just geographical dislocation for him.
History has not been kind to Kars. Although the town used to be a thriving commercial center during Ottoman times, dwindling trade with Russia has impoverished much of the population. Unemployment is high, and working-age men idle away their days in gossip and tea (coffee being too expensive) in the town’s many chaikhanas (coffee shops). Not surprisingly, Kars is also a hotbed of political activity, with a number of feuding factions: former Communists, Kurdish rebels, Kemalist secularists, and of course, the Islamists.
The suicide rate among religious young women in Kars—the so-called head-scarf girls—is several times the national average. Ka’s journalistic assignment is to track down the reasons for this statistical anomaly. No sooner has he arrived in Kars than all roads in and out of the town are closed because of a fierce blizzard. Tiny insulated Kars, with its diverse characters and politics, is a microcosm of Turkey itself. As Pamuk has noted, this is an extremely useful literary device: an experimental petri dish of contemporary Turkishness. The harder the snow falls, the more isolated Kars becomes, and the more erratic become the activities of its citizens.
Pamuk himself traveled to Kars and spent many weeks there while he was writing the novel. He saw much of the same small-town conspiratorial gossip and suspicion of strangers that Ka encounters. In some ways, Snow is an autobiographical account of Pamuk’s time in Kars. But Ka is not Pamuk. He is much too shy, unhappy and self-destructive for the comparison to be valid. His quest for happiness is ill-fated from the onset; his personality will admit no simple solutions to life. As Pamuk puts it:
Ka had always shied away from happiness for fear of the pain that might follow, so we already know that his most intense emotions came not when he was happy but when he was beset with the certainty that this happiness would soon be lost to him.
The Kars of Snow however, is most certainly the Kars of reality. Poverty, despair and violence are all features of the real-world town. As one of Pamuk’s characters remarks, if a Western embassy started handing out free visas in Kars, the city would be empty of its residents—including the Islamists—in no time.
Kars goes through a number of traumatic events during the blizzard. A local official, who had enforced the state’s writ on head scarves, is gunned down. Suspicion naturally falls on the Islamists, specifically on Blue, a wanted terrorist on the run. Army officers, led by an idealistic theater company owner, instigate a military coup and a harsh crackdown on the Islamists follows. In a surreal blending of art and life, the coup leader promises to free Blue if one of the head-scarf girls agrees to take off her head-scarf on stage. Caught in the middle of this political storm is Ka, whose only desire towards the end is to escape the cursed town with his lover and lead a life of ordinary happiness in Germany.
Since Snow deals with political Islam, intense theological debate is one of its necessary features. In the religious self-doubt of some of its characters, Snow resembles a nineteenth-century European novel. Consider the following conversation between Ka and a young religious student, which is reminiscent of Dostoevsky (one of Pamuk’s admitted influences).
“You’re not saying—God forbid—that I will no longer believe in God?” […]
“It’s not going to happen overnight[…] It’s going to happen so slowly that you’ll hardly even notice. And because you’ll have been dying so slowly, having been in this other world so long, you’ll just be like the drunk who realizes he’s dead only after he’s had one raki too many.”
“Is that what you’re like?”
“No, I’m just the opposite. I must have started believing in God years ago. This happened so slowly, it wasn’t until I arrived in Kars that I noticed it.”
The dialectic between religion and secularism is a key element in Snow. Pamuk is consciously harsh on his own class: Westernized secular intellectuals who embrace European values and have all the answers to Turkey’s problems. These intellectuals disregard religion and fail to appreciate the part that Islam plays in the lives of many Turks. Their enlightened liberalism is also opposed to the heavy-handed tactics of the army, which sees itself as the secularist bulwark against reactionary forces. Is there a paradox between the two positions? Will giving full political rights to the Islamists bring them to power, leading to every “moderate” Muslim state’s nightmare: an Islamist government that uses its popular mandate to suppress democracy, women’s rights and free thought? As a leader of Kars’ military coup angrily tells Ka:
“No one who’s even slightly westernized can breathe freely 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. When we go the way of Iran […] they’ll kill you just for being a little westernized, for being frightened and forgetting the Arabic words of a simple prayer […]”
Is Pamuk sympathetic to Islamism? The question has been posed in several reviews of Snow, most forcefully by Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic. That Hitchens holds Pamuk himself in high regard is obvious: he places him among the pantheon of such illustrious “Islamic” authors as Naguib Mahfouz and Abdelrahman Munif. But Pamuk’s depiction of Islamists as either naïve idealists or ordinary people forced into militancy because of poverty and hopelessness may force the reader into wondering exactly where Pamuk’s allegiances lie.
Fortunately, Pamuk himself furnishes the answer. He is an enthusiastic supporter of Turkey’s accession to the EU. His commitment to secularism is undeniable. However, unlike many public intellectuals, he also understands the root causes of political Islam and the role that religion plays in the lives of ordinary people.
With the rise of Islamic militancy, many former Western-liberals (like Hitchens) may have traded their heroes for ghosts and embraced Islamo-Fascism as a global evil, but that does not make anyone who tries to explain the Islamist phenomenon an enemy. Pamuk is a rare breed: a public intellectual who embraces Enlightenment principles, yet does not look down upon the masses from an ivory tower of lofty idealism. Amongst the famous writers from Muslim cultures whose work is available in English, more than Rushdie—who’s not Muslim at all—or Mahfouz—who’s Egyptian first and foremost—Pamuk understands political Islam.
Even more, by virtue of being a successful author from that chimera of a country—a Muslim European nation—Pamuk is in a unique position to explain political Islam in Turkey to the rest of the world. In the words of The Daily Telegraph reviewer of Snow, he is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented.
