Ahmet Altan was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2019 for allegedly sending “subliminal messages” to the July 2016 Turkish coup plotters the day before the coup happened. Writing for The New Republic, Kaya Genç asks whether his real offence against Turkey’s government was contained in his novels.
Altan wrote about he and his brother’s arrest in 2016 that “By claiming that Mehmet Altan and I were knowingly capable of delivering ‘a subconscious message that was imperceptible to normal consciousness,’ and about a coup plot of which the president, the prime minister, the chief of general staff, even the head of the National Intelligence Agency (MİT) were unaware is nothing less than sheltering behind nonsense.”
Unfortunately, many of Turkey’s best writers over the past 100 years have found themselves in prison for their art. Nazim Hikmet sentenced to 28 years in prison in 1938 on charges of sedition because of a poem about a fifteenth-century rebellion against Ottoman rule. Altan’s father Çetin Altan was a parliamentarian for the Workers Party of Turkey in 1968 when he was beaten by deputies from the Justice Party (AP) for calling Hikmet a “great poet” in parliament. Çetin was also a writer and endured continuous legal harassment for his writing.
According to Genç, “It was the Ottoman Quartet, an epic novel spanning the turbulent era between 1873, the year Sultan Abdülhamid II was enthroned, and 1915, when 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians died in an act of genocide, that earned Altan the distinction of a leading Turkish historical novelist”. The quartet includes Like a Sword Wound (1998), Love in the Days of Rebellion (2001), Dying is Easier Than Loving (2017) and a fourth novel yet to be published which will be about the Armenian Genocide. The series spans the end of the Ottoman Empire from 1873-1919, and tells some honest truths about Turkish society which today’s Erdoğan government, with its neo-Ottoman love of the glory days of the Sultanate, finds uncomfortable.
When he was sentenced, a judge reportedly told Altan that “If only you had stuck to writing novels and kept your nose out of political affairs.” Yet in Turkey, the past is always political, and fictionalising it is something that people are often prosecuted for. Many other famous novelists, such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak, have been prosecuted for their fiction.
Genç says that “Altan’s Quartet shows that continuities, rather than ruptures, have defined the history of Turkish autocracy over the past century”. Altan’s treatment of the Young Turk revolution from 1908 onwards reveals the uncomfortable truth that Turkey’s military rulers may have overthrown a Sultan, but in many respects were even more authoritarian than him.
Genç recalls one of Altan’s characters saying that “Whatever you do, whatever you call your form of government, you end up with a sultan at the top”. She notes how another character “sees how “tyranny never ended in this land, that one tyranny had ended only for another to begin, that nothing other than tyranny could grow” in Turkey. His novel’s final sections detail how Young Turks (“an administration unaccustomed to governance”) ruled Turkey even more harshly, selling out Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim revolutionaries who initially supported them to build a democratic country.”
Many countries are built on national ideologies about how they were founded, but few have an origin story so recent and also so contested as Turkey. Altan’s fiction persistently looked at the historical sacred cows of Turkish nationalism, and his reward was that he got to experience the same repression the early Turkish republic punished Nazim Hikmet with. Altan himself has said that “I wrote years ago about the turmoil I’m going through at this very moment. I live now what I write in my novel. I am a novelist living his novel. My life imitates my novel.”
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