By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, was originally published in Turkey as Kar by İletişm, Istanbul in 2002. It was a national bestseller. In August 2005, Vintage International published the English translation by Maureen Freely.
Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.
Kars is a city in northeastern Turkey, not far from the country’s border with Georgia and Armenia. In Snow, Border City News is the main newspaper of Kars. Its news is a day ahead of live TV. Nevertheless, the local TV station, predictably called "Border City Television", gains nationwide notoriety with its live telecasts from the National Theater.
Border City
Kars was not always a "border city". In the 9th and 10th centuries, it belonged to an Armenian principality. Timur conquered it in 1387. In 1514, Kars became a part of the Ottoman Empire. Russia laid siege to it in the 19th century, annexing it in 1877. The Soviet-Turkish Treaty of March 1921 returned Kars to Turkey though, post-World War II, U.S.S.R. tried and failed to tag Kars on to the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. A place like Kars defies man-made borders, yet, in the 1990s, when most of action of the novel occurs, it is very much a bordertown where only a blanket of snow can bring a dreamy harmony, till it does not.
Political exile
Pivotal to the plot of Snow is forty-two-year-old Kerim Alakuşoğlu, who goes by "Ka”. He is a Turkish poet and a political exile. Had he not fled to Germany, Ka would have been jailed after the military coup of 1980, for an article that he had written for a small political newspaper in the late 1970s.
Ka is not the only person from his generation or even his University class whose life was wrecked by morphing political definitions of freedom. Here is a long excerpt from Chapter 7 of Snow:
"So he [Ka] relaxed when Muhtar, losing patience with his own story, changed the subject to left-wing friends and political exiles who had fled to Germany. Ka smiled and told him that he’d heard about Tufan, their curly-haired friend from Malatya, who had once written about third-world issues for various periodicals: It seems he’d lost his mind. Ka last saw him in the central station in Stuttgart; he had a great, long pole with a wet cloth tied to its end, and he was racing back and forth mopping the floor, whistling as he worked. Then Muhtar asked about Mahmut, the man who, never one to mince words, had once caused so much upset. Ka explained how Mahmut had joined the fundamentalist group of Hayrullah Efendi; he now devoted himself to its internal wranglings with the same argumentative fury he had shown as a leftist, except that now his issue was who got to control which mosque. As for the lovable Suleyman, Ka smiled when he told how he had been living off the dole of a church charity that had given refuge to many political exiles from the third world, but having grown bored with life in the small town of Traunstein, he’d returned to Turkey, even knowing full well that he’d be thrown into prison the moment he got there.
"Ka spoke about Hikmet, who had died under mysterious circumstances while working as a chauffeur in Berlin; Fadil, who had married the elderly widow of a Nazi officer and now ran a small hotel with her, and Tarik the theoretician, who had made a fortune working with the Turkish mafia in Hamburg. As for Sadik, who alongside Muhtar, Ka, Taner and Ipek had once folded periodicals fresh off the press, he was now running a gang that smuggled illegal immigrants over the Alps and into Germany. Muharrem, the famous sulker, was living a happy underground life with his family in the Berlin metro, in one of those ghost stations abandoned at the time of the Cold War and the wall. As the train sped between the Kreuzberg and Alexanderplatz stations, the retired Turkish socialists on board would stand to attention just as the old bandits of Istanbul would salute whenever passing through Arnavutköy, gazing into the swirling waters where a legendary gangster had driven over the edge and perished. Even if they didn’t recognize one another, the political exiles standing to attention in the car would cast furtive looks about them to see whether any fellow passenger might also be honoring the legendary hero of their secret cause. It was in such a metro car that Ka met up with Ruhi, who had once been so critical of his leftist friends for their refusal to engage with psychology; Ka found out that Ruhi was now working as a test subject in a study measuring the effectiveness of an advertising campaign for a new type of lamb pastrami pizza marketed to Turkish workers in the lowest income bracket.
"Of all the political exiles Ka had met in Germany, the happiest was Ferhat, who had joined the PKK and was now attacking various offices of Turkish Airlines with revolutionary fervor; he’d also been seen on CNN, throwing Molotov cocktails at Turkish consulates; apparently he was now learning Kurdish and dreaming of a second career as a Kurdish poet. As for the few others Muhtar asked about with a strange note of concern in his voice, Ka had long forgotten them; he could only guess that they had followed in the paths of so many others, who joined small gangs, worked for the secret services or some segment of the black market, or otherwise vanished or went underground. Some, no doubt, had ended up by some violent means at the bottom of a canal.”
Ka is not a Kars native. He was raised in Nişantaşi, Istanbul. After graduating from Istanbul University, he started to make a name for himself as a poet. He aspired to be an influential modern Turkish poet. Instead, when Snow begins, Ka leads a lonely life in Frankfurt, writing nothing. His mother’s death brings him back to Istanbul after twelve years. He deals with grief and nostalgia. The city has changed. He feels like a ghost. While catching up with Taner, a mate from University who works for the Republican, Ka half-heartedly accepts an assignment in Kars. He is really more interested in reconnecting with Ipek, an interest sparked by Taner's news that Ipek lives in Kars and is single. Ipek was one of many beautiful girls at University. Ka were seventeen when they met in the Literature department. They hung out with a left-leaning group of students but were not close friends. Ipek married another classmate, Muhtar, the very next year.
Ka last visited Kars twenty years ago, in the 1970s. It is snowing on the February night he arrives in Kars by bus from Erzurum. The only people he knows in Kars are Ipek and Muhtar. Getting off the bus, though, Ka spots national celebrity, theater actor Sunay Zaim. Zaim and his wife, actress Funda Eser, took the same bloodcurdling bus ride to Kars.
"Suicide girls"
Ka checks into Hotel Snow Palace. The hotel is part-owned by Ipek’s father, Turgut Bey. The next morning, armed with a current press card, Ka goes through the charade of being a famous journalist from Istanbul. He tells people he is in Kars to cover the municipal elections (Ipek's ex, Muhtar, is a mayoral candidate of the Prosperity Party, which espouses Islamist fundamentalism) and perhaps also write about the "suicide girls". He meets Serdar Bey, the publisher-editor-reporter of Border City News, and Kasim Bey, the assistant chief of police. Serdar Bey takes Ka to the poorest neighborhoods, where Ka talks with folks who are struggling with poverty and unemployment. He also listens to the "suicide stories."
The locals say the suicide contagion spread from Batman, a Turkish city located far away, southwest of Kars. First they heard the news about the spike in suicide among young women in Batman, then a young married woman traveled all the way from Batman to Kars to kill herself. Following a normal and happy visit with her family, on the eve of her return to her husband's home, she overdosed on sleeping pills.
Ka is given to understand that every one of the Kars suicides was triggered by a different personal ordeal, though the girls and women had one thing in common: they belonged to low-income families.
The exception was Teslime, whose father owns a little grocery store. Teslime had joined the campaign launched by her school friend Kadife (Ipek's younger sister) to oppose the no-headscarf law, under which covered girls are barred from the local Institute of Education. Although Teslime was shattered by the capitulation of those covered girls who stopped wearing head scarfs or wore wigs to continue their education, her family supposed that suicide was out of the question for her. The city's Department of Religious Affairs as well as the Islamists were yelling from the rooftops that "suicide is blasphemous". Yet Teslime hanged herself with her head scarf. On the fateful night when Zaim performs at the National Theater and Ka joins Turgut Bey and his daughters for dinner, we hear more about Teslime's suicide from her friend Hande, another covered girl.
Hande says that for Teslime "the head scarf did not just stand for God's love, it also proclaimed her faith and preserved her honor". However, the head scarf debate, as delineated in Snow, is not only a matter of Islam versus secularism, or political power play. It may well be that the leader of the protesters, Kadife, does not care about anything but her own lover, who is an "Islamist terrorist" (as Serdar Bey characterizes the young man in Chapter 3). Maybe the girls in Kars and Batman who decided to take their lives (except Teslime) despaired of being permitted to protest anything at all. Kadife keeps telling Ka that she is poor and that she grew up poor after Turgut Bey lost his teacher’s job and was jailed for holding leftist views. The fact of the matter is that she has a voice, she is educated (went to Istanbul University but did not graduate) and she has a loving, liberal, middle-class father who is now part owner of a hotel and certainly does not curb her freedom. On one side are the voiceless girls whose ultimate, willful act of shutting up (as they have been told to do since childhood) is oversimplified or misrepresented by society and the newspapers (Hande says: "We believed what the papers said -- that the suicide girls had killed themselves because they had no faith, because they were slaves to materialism, because they had been unlucky in love..."); on the other side are young women like Hande and Kadife who, whether they sound confident or confused or disingenuous, may freely voice their opinions, and are not sexually abstinent before marriage.
Even two decades after Ka's university days, many youngsters in Kars are on course to become middle-aged train wrecks. If they survive three snowbound days in Kars; coups and purges; daily, backbreaking work; lack of personal dignity and freedom; the haunting dilemma of loving God and hating poverty.
Blizzard & Revolution
Border City News makes sure that Ka gets plenty of scrutiny from all quarters. Serdar Bey first lets Kars know that a celebrated, award-winning Turkish poet is in their midst. The day after the acts of violence at the National Theater, Serdar Bey calls Ka a "so-called poet” and insinuates that he cannot be trusted. Consequently, questions accost Ka whichever way he turns: at teahouses, interrogation rooms, Turgut Bey’s dining table, Hotel Asia. The answers are entwined in the tangle of personal histories in this fascinating novel.
The blizzard closes all roads to Kars. Snow falls, and poem after perfect poem falls into Ka’s mind. In other words, Ka experiences a creative blizzard. The poems write themselves. It is a divine coup! All Ka has to do is scribble the lines down before he forgets them. Even so, the poems are Ka’s, because they mesh his childhood experiences in Istanbul with the conversations he is having in real time in Kars, the events he is witnessing, and the emotions that he is feeling. Ka is at his happiest and truest when perfect verse is pouring out of him.
How quickly the suicide stories recede into the background! Weapons take over, twenty-eight people, including young boarders at the religious school, are killed in two days. Ka is in the thick of things. He knows all the main players on all sides. They know him too, he is the double agent, the plant of the German press who will tell the world about the "blasphemous" suicides, he is the atheist, he is the peddler of Western ideas. They consider how to use Ka as a pawn in their own games. But, for all the talk in an intensely and desperately expressive microcosm, no one can talk their way to peace, harmony, or honesty.
"Orhan”, a friend of Ka’s, is the narrator of Snow. He wrote Snow during April 1999-December 2001, that is, quite a few years after Ka's short visit to Kars. Such is the artistic achievement and complex deception of the novel that we are encouraged to doubt the objectivity of the author's conclusions regarding Ka's final day in Kars.
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