by Orhan Pamuk
A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft—to create a world—if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center.
But as can be seen from my father’s suitcase and the pale colors of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a center, and it was far away from us. In my books I have described in some detail how this basic fact evoked a Chekhovian sense of provinciality, and how, by another route, it led to my questioning my authenticity. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with these same feelings, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, lack of security, and sense of degradation than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger … but today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature can ever do. What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin…. Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies, and nations outside the Western world—and I can identify with them easily—succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West—a world with which I can identify with the same ease—nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.
This means that my father was not the only one, that we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a center. Whereas the thing that compels us to shut ourselves up to write in our rooms for years on end is a faith in the opposite: the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people all the world over resemble one another. But this, as I know from my own and my father’s writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins, of being left outside. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt toward the West all his life—I have felt this, too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have traveled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West, to behold the other world he has built on the other side.
All writers who have devoted their lives to this task know this reality: Whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing will, in the end, move to other very different places. It will take us far away from the table at which we have worked with sadness or anger, take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world. Could my father have not reached such a world himself? Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, slowly rising from the mist in all its colors like an island after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us. We are as beguiled as the Western travelers who voyaged from the south to behold Istanbul rising from the mist. At the end of a journey begun in hope and curiosity, there lies before them a city of mosques and minarets, a medley of houses, streets, hills, bridges, and slopes, an entire world. Seeing it, we wish to enter into this world and lose ourselves inside it, just as we might a book. After sitting down at a table because we felt provincial, excluded, on the margins, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.
What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: For me the center of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because for the last thirty-three years I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days, and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings would seem to begin to talk among themselves, and begin to interact in ways I had not anticipated, as if they lived not only in my imagination or my books, but for themselves. This world that I had created like a man digging a well with a needle would then seem truer than all else.
My father might also have discovered this kind of happiness during the years he spent writing, I thought as I gazed at my father’s suitcase: I should not prejudge him. I was so grateful to him, after all: He’d never been a commanding, forbidding, overpowering, punishing, ordinary father, but a father who always left me free, always showed me the utmost respect. I had often thought that if I had, from time to time, been able to draw from my imagination, be it in freedom or childishness, it was because, unlike so many of my friends from childhood and youth, I had no fear of my father, and I had sometimes believed very deeply that I had been able to become a writer because my father had, in his youth, wished to be one too. I had to read him with tolerance—seek to understand what he had written in those hotel rooms.
It was with these hopeful thoughts that I walked over to the suitcase, which was still sitting where my father had left it; using all my willpower, I read through a few manuscripts and notebooks. What had my father written about? I recall a few views from the windows of Parisian hotels, a few poems, paradoxes, analyses…. As I write I feel like someone who has just been in a traffic accident and is struggling to remember how it happened, while at the same time dreading the prospect of remembering too much. When I was a child, and my father and mother were on the brink of a quarrel—when they fell into one of those deadly silences—my father would at once turn on the radio, to change the mood, and the music would help us forget it all faster.
Let me change the mood with a few sweet words that will, I hope, serve as well as that music. As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and
riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—just as in a dream—I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.
A week after he came to my office and left me his suitcase, my father came to pay me another visit. As always, he brought me a bar of chocolate (he had forgotten I was forty-eight years old); as always, we chatted and laughed about life, politics, and family gossip. A moment arrived when my father’s eyes went to the corner where he had left his suitcase and saw that I had moved it. We looked each other in the eye. There followed a pressing silence. I did not tell him that I had opened the suitcase and tried to read its contents; instead I looked away. But he understood. Just as I understood that he had understood. Just as he understood that I had understood that he had understood. But all this understanding only went so far as it can go in a few seconds. Because my father was a happy, easygoing man who had faith in himself: He smiled at me the way he always did. And as he left the house, he repeated all the lovely and encouraging things that he always said to me, like a father.
As always, I watched him leave, envying his happiness, his carefree and unflappable temperament. But I remember that on that day there was also a flash of joy inside me that made me ashamed. It was prompted by the thought that maybe I wasn’t as comfortable in life as he was, maybe I had not led as happy or footloose a life as he had, but that I had devoted it to writing—you’ve understood…. I was ashamed to be thinking such things at my father’s expense. Of all people, my father, who had never been the source of my pain—who had left me free. All this should remind us that writing and literature are intimately linked to a lack at the center of our lives, and to our feelings of happiness and guilt.
But my story has a symmetry that immediately reminded me of something else that day, and that brought me an even deeper sense of guilt. Twenty-three years before my father left me his suitcase, and four years after I had decided, aged twenty-two, to become a novelist, and, abandoning all else, shut myself up in a room, I finished my first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons; with trembling hands I had given my father a typescript of the still unpublished novel, so that he could read it and tell me what he thought. This was not simply because I had confidence in his taste and his intellect: His opinion was very important to me because he, unlike my mother, had not opposed my wish to become a writer. At that point, my father was not with us, but far away. I waited impatiently for his return. When he arrived two weeks later, I ran to open the door. My father said nothing, but he at once threw his arms around me in a way that told me he had liked it very much. For a while, we were plunged into the sort of awkward silence that so often accompanies moments of great emotion. Then, when we had calmed down and begun to talk, my father resorted to highly charged and exaggerated language to express his confidence in me or my first novel: He told me that one day I would win the prize that I am here to receive with such great happiness.
He said this not because he was trying to convince me of his good opinion, or to set this prize as a goal; he said it like a Turkish father, giving support to his son, encouraging him by saying, “One day you’ll become a pasha!” For years, whenever he saw me, he would encourage me with the same words.
My father died in December 2002.
Today, as I stand before the Swedish Academy and the distinguished members who have awarded me this great prize—this great honor—and their distinguished guests, I dearly wish he could be among us.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orhan Pamuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Translation copyright © 2007 by Maureen Freely
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Turkey as Öteki Renkler: Seçme Yazilar ve Bir Hikâye by İletişim, Istanbul, in 1999. Copyright © 1999 by İletişim Yayincilik A. Ş.
The following pieces originally appeared in The New Yorker: “Frankfurter,” “My Father’s Suitcase,” “My First Passport,” “The View,” and “What I Know About Dogs.”
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Ángel Gurría-Quintana for permission to reprint his interview with Orhan Pamuk from The Paris Review (Fall/Winter 2005, Issue 175),
copyright © 2005 by Ángel Gurría-Quintana. Reprinted by permission of Ángel Gurría-Quintana.
The author’s Nobel Prize Address appears here as “My Father’s Suitcase.”
Copyright © 2006 by The Nobel Foundation.
ART CREDITS: 285 (Şirin looking at the portrait of Khusraw): © British Library Board.
All Rights Reserved; 286 (Khusraw sees Şirin bathing): courtesy of the Topkapi Palace Library; 291 (waiting groom with horse in wooded grove): courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; 315 (Sultan Mehmet II): Gentile Bellini, Layard Bequest 1916 © The National Gallery, London; 317 (seated Turkish scribe or artist), 1479/80 (pen & ink, gouache & gilt on paper) by Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507) (attr. to) © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library; 322 (three men and a donkey): courtesy of the Topkapi Palace Library; 324 (a demon carries off a man): courtesy of the Topkapi Palace Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pamuk, Orhan, [date]
[Öteki renkler. English]
Other colors : essays and a story / by Orhan Pamuk;
translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26783-2
I. Freely, Maureen, [date] II. Title.
PL248.P34O8413 2007
894′.3533—dc22 2007021132
v3.0