Ömer Erdem
The Ottoman rulers of the time did not care to think about why intellectuals, the Young Turks above all, wanted to go to the West in order to breathe a little more freely and to write without fear. The dark thirty-three-year period of Abdülhamid II, for all his well-intentioned reform initiatives, never even attempted it. With the concepts of homeland and treason they produced, they set out to condemn everyone, rightly or wrongly. Yet the empire and its heart, Istanbul, had always been a centre of attraction in the past, and with a few exceptions men of culture and art had come into being there. Poets, scholars, artists, travellers, adventurers, merchants, spies, thinkers – Istanbul was the place where people of every disposition wanted to be. Mehmed the Conqueror had made great efforts from the outset to revive the multicultural, multilayered character of the city he conquered, for inheriting Rome required not only political and military power but cultural sensibility too. Istanbul, which kept this quality until the mid-nineteenth century, gradually dried up; after 1950 it was besieged from the periphery towards the centre and arrived at its present chaotic state. It no longer had the quality of being a centre, especially in cultural terms.
While reading Yedi Askı Şiirleri (The Seven Suspended Odes), translated by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, and thinking about the text signed by Adonis, “Reading Jahiliyya Poetry”, a question came alive in my mind: what would have happened if Adonis had lived in Istanbul? Then I murmured to myself: why does Adonis not live in Istanbul? Indeed, could Adonis have lived in Istanbul? Erich Auerbach, author of the legendary Mimesis, draws attention somewhere to the human diversity he observed on the Galata Bridge in Istanbul, where he had taken refuge. He stresses Istanbul’s power of attraction as well as its capacity to embrace intellectuals of every race, faith and culture. A similar suggestion is found in Alberto Manguel, whose grandfather’s path somehow passed through here. After all, travellers do not call at any port that is not safe. So, whatever the intensity of past debates, we need to think about why writers and poets such as Adonis or Amin Maalouf took refuge in Paris rather than in Istanbul. Istanbul is, after all, their city too.
Mehmet Hakkı Suçin not only reflects for the first time the world of “Jahiliyya” poetry for us; thanks to Adonis, he also shows the poetic depth of this poetry. Suçin respectfully acknowledges the translations previously made among us (most of them in prose). But perhaps for the first time, free of prejudice, we can see the clear world of a poetry. As the question “what if Adonis had lived in Istanbul?” runs through me, I also express my respect for Istanbul. This city should develop a strategy of life such that we can read Adonis not only from books but from his eyes and his voice. Not only Adonis: Istanbul should be able to be a refuge for people of culture and art from every corner of the world. Its social and cultural environment should offer them every possibility of living. The added value they produce should open spaces among us beyond “derived” concepts such as homeland, nation, heroism and treason. Poets, writers, painters, artists, thinkers, activists, politicians – people of every disposition should turn their faces to Istanbul.
The aim of the intellectuals who tried to find a way out of Istanbul about a hundred and fifty years ago was, of course, like that of those who stayed here and tried to keep the country on its feet, to “save the country”. They differed not in aim but in method; yet those in power were quick to “other” and curse those they saw as opponents. Were, for example, the forty-six-year rule of Süleyman the Magnificent and the thirty-three-year administration of Abdülhamid II entirely without problems? Or did the dialectic of long duration not inevitably create certain impasses? Could a country’s rise not depend, like a city’s ascent, on its openness and many-sided self-confidence? Would intellectuals coming from Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Uzbekistan, the Balkans, Bosnia, Crimea and Iran not broaden our world even further? Let us read the past of cultural history through this lens and see what picture we encounter.
Discussing the poetic world of the Seven Suspended Odes, after the statement “Those who wrote the history of the Jahiliyya period stated that the only art of the period was poetry and that poetry was the sole means of expression of Jahiliyya Arab creativity”, Adonis makes this assessment: “How can the man of the Jahiliyya create this great poetry without other branches of art such as sculpture, painting, music or architecture?” So let us ask: a mentality that tied up and threw away two figures who immortalised this city and its culture as an “Ottoman Şehnameci” and a “nobody” (kırtıpil) would not have granted Adonis and the plurality he represents a right to life either, would it? And thinking about a city and its poetry should not be considered merely a matter of municipal administration. Adonis is only one example. There are also those who try to live here.
Source: Karar, 22 September 2020. Translated from the Turkish for this site.