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Bookmark Not Without My Scarf Snow, at its core, is a book about the difficulties faced by a nation torn between tradition, religion, and modernisation. By Aquila Ismail
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Set between 1999 and 2001 in the bleak north-eastern Turkish city of Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, Snow deals with some of the overtly unrelenting issues of Turkey and the Middle East - the conflict between a secular state and an Islamic government, poverty, unemployment, the veil, and the role of the army. Kars is remote, dilapidated and comes with its mournful relics of Armenian civilisation, the Russian imperial rule and spectacularly awful weather. Kar's inhabitants are a tangle of poverty-stricken families, Kurdish separatists and political Islamists . During the three-day period in which the story is set, the city is cut off from the world and also, to an extent, from reality by three days of unrelenting snow. The story begins when, after years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. He finds the city only vaguely familiar and not at all like the place of his cultured, middle-class youth. He is confronted by news of strange events in the country comprising a string of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. The suicides seem unrelated, but Ka glimpses an emerging pattern. The girls involved are Muslims and all, in one way or another, are victims of the increasingly fierce climate in which traditional Muslim values are being challenged and defended. Commissioned by an Istanbul newspaper to write an article about the municipal elections in Kars, the city which is the epicenter of suicides, Ka learns that the girls are committing suicide because of pressure by the college authorities to take off their headscarves in class. In true Dostoevskian style, Ka encounters idealistic students, shopkeepers, government officials, leftist theatre groups and the charismatic, and perhaps a terrorist, Blue. All the characters are reflected through Ka's own melancholy as the dark journey into faith, identity, betrayal and solitude moves forward. It is snowing when Ka arrives, and the snow continues to fall, cutting off the town from the rest of the world. The tension is palpable when, in the upcoming mayoral election, the struggle between religion and secularism comes to a head. In Kars, Ka also hopes to reconnect with the beautiful Ipek, whom he knew as a youth and has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions. Ka, who has spent years living in Germany, knows where he stands on the issue: "[he]could never feel sexually attracted to a woman in a headscarf." Soon, a military coup begins at the National Theater, which is packed to hear Ka read a poem and to see a stage revival of an old pre-war classic, 'My Fatherland or my Scarf.' Soldiers burst into the theatre, shoot randomly into the audience, which thinks the shots are part of the show, kill a number of people, then round up 'dangerous' citizens. In this maelstrom of a military coup and the surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, Ka reasserts his dormant creative powers, writing poem after poem in sudden bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness with Ipek. Snow, at its core, is a book about the difficulties faced by a nation torn between tradition, religion, and modernisation. The struggle therein is not only with the west, but with the strong tradition of secularism in Turkey itself. As one character says, "To play the rebel heroine in Turkey you don't pull off your scarf, you put it on." Pamuk effectively portrays these difficulties, and the many ambiguities in contemporary Turkish life where there is little that's simply black and white. Snow's
author, Orhan Pamuk, is a leading contemporary Turkish novelist.
He was born in 1952 in Istanbul where he spent his entire life,
except for the three years that he lived in New York. After attending
the architecture programme in Istanbul Technical University for
three years, he ended up at the Institute of Journalism at the Istanbul
University. He began writing at the age of 22, and is now the author
of seven novels and the recipient of major Turkish and international
literary awards. He is one of Europe's most prominent novelists,
and his work has been translated into 26 languages. My Name is Red
won the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. |
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