West 'minority in writing': Turkish Nobel Prize Laureate
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Turkey's only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Orhan Pamuk has been translated into 58 languages. Yet he feels that the western literary world is " constantly trying to provincialize" his work.
Pamuk, best known for his widely translated works such as "My Name is Red", "Snow" and "Museum of Innocence", bases all his stories in his beloved city Istanbul. The author, who teaches humanities at the Columbia University, writes in the Turkish language.
"When I write about love, the critics in America and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can't love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity. When non-Western authors express this humanity through their work their humanity is reduced to their nation''s humanity," he said recently in an interview with Xinhua in India.
"Another problem which is the consequence of all these problems is the issue of representation. You are squeezed and narrowed down, cornered down as a writer whose book is considered only the representation of his national voice and a little bit of anthropological curiosity," said the writer who in India at the end of January for the Jaipur Literature Festival.
Pamuk feels that "West is actually a minority but since the other voices don't get the chance to emerge because of several problems, most of the human experience is getting lost."
Visibly peeved, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk said that non- English authors do not get better representation globally.
"My essential concern is with non-Western writers who do not write in English. They don't find true representation," he stated.
"Being a writer from the non-Western world poses a series of problems such as the question of human experience being marginalized only because it was not written in the language of the Western world," he said, adding that "for those writing in other languages, their work is rarely translated and never read. So much of human experience is marginalized. This is a major deficiency."
Pamuk has his own theories on writing which he has explained in his new book "The Naive and the Sentimentalist".
"There are two kinds of attitudes when you write a novel. You are either naive, that is you are writing unconsciously, or you are a sentimentalist, you are consciously aware of the artificiality of things. A good novelist is both naive and sentimentalist," he said.
Pamuk does not have a political bent of mind yet he comes across as fiercely "political" when it comes to debate politics or to defend his integrity.
"I do not have a political agenda. I do not have a utopian or political message. These things fall on me or rather I fall into political debates because I have to defend my dignity and integrity as an author," he mads a point.
Asked about any of his books particularly close to him, he says, "I found my voice with the novel 'The Black Book'."
However, he loves to discuss one of his most acclaimed novels " The Museum of Innocence".
"I am actually creating such a museum in Istanbul," he said.
"I wanted to look at the infatuation of an elegant Turkish man in the 70s and 80s and examine issues such as sexual politics, the taboo of virginity and the everyday rituals that make up a love story. I do believe, rather naively perhaps, that the human heart is the same everywhere, though our histories, cultures, classes and individual stories make us different," Pamuk said.
While in India for the Jaipur Literature Festival, Pamuk was seen mostly in the company of writer Kiran Desai.
Daughter of celebrated Indian writer Anita Desai, Kiran's "The Inheritance of Loss" got her instant limelight and the Booker.
When asked about her, Pamuk said, "my love life is a secret everyone knows about." "I am interested in the question of love. What happens to us when we fall in love and how human beings are capable of entertaining contradictory emotions, sentiments, attitudes," he said.
"I deliberately wish to write about love but not to put it on any pedestal. Love attaches itself to objects, because collecting, gathering, cataloguing, categorising lend meaning to objects. They bring the past back to us," the Nobel Laureate emphasized.
Talking of his autobiographical "Istanbul: The Memories of a City", Pamuk said that it is a mix of my experiences with the city and history of the city.
"Of all the things I had wanted to express about my life, only a few had found their way into the book. I could have written another 15-20 volumes describing my experiences. It was then I realised that autobiographies served not to preserve our pasts, but to help us forget them," he said.
Interestingly, Pamuk wanted to be a painter and writing was never on his wishlist.
"In my head, a screw got loose and I stopped painting," he said.
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