The world’s population is three and a half billion; in about fifty years it will be seven billion, in eighty years fourteen. There are no new Americas left to discover. The world has more atomic bombs than cities “worthy” of an atomic bomb. Yet my child’s toothless smile, soundless squeal and aimless wriggling make me burst with joy: they are an entire happiness. Darius’s military-post rider rode for three days; in three days he met one person, took off his cap and greeted him from his heart’s depths: well met! Uncle Dilan lived seventy or a hundred years; in memory’s sunny valleys there was one Sona, one unexpected gift of herself, rising on the plain of recollection immense, incomparable, desired, like a spring in the desert. One rooster was slaughtered, ten pairs of eyes: each of us got a scrap of meat, a taste of broth, and the neighbour’s question, did you kill a chicken? Now the clever Dutch method of feeding birds has become the world’s only method: tongs grip the goose’s neck, the beak opens, a ladle fills its belly. Willing or not, it will digest, fatten, grow heavier; there will be more meat, everyone can eat a goose. They fatten and feed tomatoes, pears, fish, potatoes, cows. Every condition exists for each person on Earth to have only standing room in a few years. I long for Darius’s times. All writers long for Darius’s times. Asked, “Would you like to have lived yesterday, to live tomorrow, or does today satisfy you?”, the overwhelming majority of Japanese young people answered: yesterday. I say tomorrow: tomorrow our numbers too will command respect. Tomorrow the United Nations will decide to halt world population growth intelligently, humanely, consciously… In the second week of June 1941, in our remote village without telephones, an old woman fainted and foretold blood, slaughter and famine. The council chairman locked her in a cowshed for deception, and a week later, on 22 June, went to the front with the shed’s key in his pocket. Now people speak of the unquestionable existence of biological currents. Perhaps there was a highly civilised world before a great catastrophe; perhaps Sodom and Gomorrah are no myth. In Japan they build multistorey cemeteries of cement and glass, grow tomatoes without soil. More than half the United States’ young people are unfit for conscription because of fat around the heart. The cadets of China’s first military aviation school, despite their Chinese fanaticism, could not endure flying because of their monotonous diet. In this beloved-terrible, clever-mad, comprehensible-tangled world, it is cruel to be naked, to be the world’s exposed nerve: a writer. Before a blank page, you can be paralysed at any moment.
What does the writer do? The world is not as he wishes, and he wants to bring it to his desired shape. That was beyond fascism’s power; all the geniuses and schizophrenics have broken their heads over it. Yet a wretched little figure called a writer, possessing only ink, sits wanting to shape this chaotic world in his own image. So far he has done this: chip by chip, chip by chip, as from granite, fashioned Christ; made woman an idol instead of a mere bearer of children; made Greece, Persia and Spain beloved; turned Russia, the old hemp field, into a Russia giving literature to the world. Without Abu-Lala Mahari, the desert would be only sand. He has humanised a misanthropic world. Literature is humanity’s longing for life. By making people monumental, literature makes us long for the person standing beside us; makes a market rose costing thirty or fifty kopecks lyrical. Literature is a creator equal to God, though any petty lieutenant can shoot any García Lorca like a dog, any company commander order any Saroyan to crawl.
The colonel commanding a Turkish punitive battalion was pacifying Chete and Kurdish villages: deceiving some, hanging others. He swayed in the saddle from village to mountain, mountain to forest, forest to a lonely monastery atop a cliff, where a few hotheads must have taken refuge. In the nearby town, the Europeanised brats of the municipal council had spent a year or four sitting and dozing over a half-question. The colonel commanding the Turkish punitive battalion swayed from mountain to forest, forest to lonely monastery, when suddenly he took a fierce dislike to those polished council brats. He spurred his horse and rode off, rode it to death on the way, mounted another, thundered over the paving stones, handed the reins to a sentry blocking his path. With his Mauser drawn, he climbed the stairs softly, softly, kicked the doors back and shot those Paris-seeing brats who had drowsily turned one question over for four years. A police detachment fired at him, he at them; he was wounded, wounded and killed some of them inside the building, remained alone for a day. Then he bled out; they came, lifted him by the arms, carried him out. Suddenly a thin-moustached lieutenant said, “Go on, go on, you dog, son of a dog.” The colonel twisted his neck and looked back from the stairs: another polished brat stood at their top, that lieutenant. He smiled sadly, then suddenly drew a pistol from his boot and one-two-three-seven: planted the bullets in the lieutenant’s forehead.
I like this story: the person here is primal and monumental. Entangled in bureaucracy’s webs, seeing the apparatus swell like an unstoppable plague, I find simple sympathies and antipathies in it. It is one of my longings. This solid, rounded tale might become a story, novel or novella. One must enter it, grope onward, find and fully realise its philosophical power and artistic wings. But perhaps it has no powerful philosophical charge? Never mind: who has been harmed by alchemy? What remains will be the suffering of a writer travelling pathless slopes towards his truth; that is already art. The world grows richer through that honest effort. Literature is the world’s painful effort to become nobler. That is its calling from birth. As slaves’ children are born into slavery, every writer appears on the galley slave’s bench.
Very well, but why “a Turkish punitive battalion”? Well, Turkish. Why specifically Turkish? Not specifically, simply Turkish. Why Turkish? Because Turkish: I was told it happened in Turkey. Or are you trying to say something about 1915? It is hard not to speak of 1915, but hard to speak of it through art. No, better write: an Indian punitive battalion… Agreed: the colonel commanding an Indian punitive battalion swayed in the saddle from village to mountain, mountain… Why Indian? You said so! No, Indians are our friends; better write “the colonel commanding a punitive battalion”. What, in thin air? I already do not know whether to write this as a prose poem or rough prose; whether I can call the colonel Hasan or whether that name will recall Abu Hasan of the familiar tale, robbing him of his proud grandeur. Was the colonel a good man, or were the Paris-seeing young men humane, intelligent and indecisive? Did the lieutenant insult him by chance, or had he fought, won and boasted from a victor’s pedestal? Should I tell it as fact, or is the content already partly fabulous and will become wholly a fairy tale in factual form? How can my paragraph’s stress take up the horse’s run, gallop, bursting heart, dying snort? How can the landscape unfold with the action, scorched central Anatolia remain in memory when I have never seen it myself? How can I forget his kinship with my fathers’ executioner and respect him as material, as a stonecutter respects basalt? Restrain the lure of beautiful words? Make you feel the lieutenant’s momentary confusion on seeing the pistol in the colonel’s hand? How can I say the world grew deaf and blind for the dying colonel when I have never died? Say it without those words, because they are only words, and the sensations of deafness and blindness probably demand entirely different connections and combinations. One may break one’s head and still achieve nothing. And now the raw material is denied too. A sculptor sculpts, but from clay. What am I to do when the clay, the alphabet, the foundation of foundations is rejected?
Yet taking up your pen, you dared challenge the great Tumanyan, said: “Illusion is a good poem, but incomplete; now I will create the perfect one.” Yet you are competing with the world’s great figures…
The congress cannot write in the writer’s place, of course, but can do something as honourable as writing: create the atmosphere in which the writer feels himself this country’s keeper, concerned for its dignity. So that before a blank page he sits not as a pupil carrying out an assignment, but as a teacher uncovering literature’s and life’s complex questions from the unknown.
Grakan Tert, 14 October 1966.