Here is the first of my two reports (and there's probably a few pieces more to come) from my attendance at the European Writers' Parliament in Istanbul, 25-27 November, 2010. For me an extraordinary few days - bringing me into contact with a continent of writers and thinkers, and beginning a relationship with one of the most compelling cities I've ever visited (and one of the most fascinating national political cultures too). This piece is also published in my Caledonian Mercury column.
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At the start, the suburbs of Istanbul whoosh by the coach window like Naples, or the outer boroughs of New York: it's all toothsome ad hoardings, mysterious blocks of industrial storage, lots of interpretive driving not worth thinking too much about.
And then, as the hills around the Bosporous begin to rise and dip, the living city comes into view - box-houses flecked with yellow windows, encrusted on the hills like domestic coral. And breaking up the pattern, with spotlights spilling up walls, minarets and domes, are huge mosques. Sitting at the top of each hill, they loom and recede in your perspective, following a natural order.
I've been attending the European Writers Parliament in Istanbul, over 25-27th November, 2010, as the Scottish representative. Just off the plane, I'd already met some fellow Writer-Parliamentarians: a clutch of Icelandic writers ebullient about their country's future. "We've identified the bad people, we have a new constitution, we're voting on it tomorrow. It's all quite dynamic!"
Among them is a homburg-hatted philosopher, who's working with Bjork on resisting the corporate take-over of Icelandic natural energy assets. We lightly compare the fate of small nations, and the relative utility of Kindles (they will be in my "Commission", titled "Literature in the Digital Era").
Eventually the Hilton International Istanbul lets us in, as we pass through two security checks and an airport scanner in the lobby. Again, this sets off some familiar city memories: the Europa Hotel in Dublin, in rock'n'roll most loved, and in terrorism most bombed; the Glasgow Hilton, which sits across from my beloved Mitchell Library like the defensible headquarters of some future coup.
Amid decor which combines Texan carvery with sultan's library, there are photo blow-ups of previous visitors - including the Queen, Muhammed Ali and Jackie Kennedy - to Conrad Hilton's first international hotel outside of America. (Why? Hilton was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor at the time, who was brought up in Istanbul). So if it was safe enough for the glitterati of the 50's and 60's - and where was Sinatra, incidentally? - it's safe enough for this group of pensive, variably-kempt shufflers. But where is the implicit threat coming from?
This recent bombing of the business district in Istanbul might make a temporary resident of a prestige building a little nervous (the suspects' list includes Kurdish rebels, Al-Qaida or some other faction in the swirl of Turkish politics). But we emerge from our power-showers the next morning to face a somewhat more literary rebellion. VS Naipaul, due to give a keynote speech to the delegates, has "by mutual agreement" withdrawn from the conference: a delegation of Muslim Turkish writers have objected to the great curmudgeon's disdain for political Islam and all its works.
If I've understood anything from my cribbing over the last few days on Turkish history, the very selection of Naipaul as speaker in the first place triggers instant debates around the importance of Turkish secularism. The very formation of Turkey, as a modern-nationalist project under Ataturk in 1923, is premised on a suppression of everyday, visible and audible Islam from the public sphere.
And Kemalism (the name for Turkish secularism) isn't just backed up by the usual layers of Enlightenment-wielding bookish intellectuals, but by the full force of the military establishment. This "deep state" recently threatened to conduct a "e-coup" in 2007 - the message was posted on an army website - because the wife of a prospective president was wearing an Islamic headscarf in public.
Above all this floats a familiar balloon of world-city ambition. Istanbul's current status as European City of Culture (an obvious component of Turkey's long and thwarted campaign to become a full member of the European Union), and its general fashionability among the Newsweek types, means this Writers' Parliament is clearly a prized part of a cosmopolitan branding strategy.
But if you're going to invite grumpy radicals like the UK novelist Hari Kunzru, Ireland's William Wall and myself into the room... well, they can hardly expect this to all go too smoothly. The Naipaul no-show is merely a lightning-rod for the contrarian, critical energy that's already crackling through the enormous convention room at the Hilton.
And after one or two throat-clearing or majestically abstract speeches (I liked the idea from the veteran left-liberal Murat Belge that "the only ethos of writing should be infinite critique - this is the only control mechanism of the writer"), Hari Kunzru serves very well indeed as an alternative lightning-rod.
My first encounter with him is hilarious: we both greet each other in like media-wanker manner ("good to see you actually exist"), and it takes us about thirty minutes of motor-mouthing to situate ourselves in our respective cultural landscapes (Deleuze? Check. Kirsty Wark on Late Review? Check. Tales of postmodern drollery and criminal networks in three other continents? Check). After that, all is well, and I can settle back with my You-Tube-ready iPhone and happily record his plenary speech, given in lieu of Naipaul.
It's excellent. His first theme is "the space of literature", nowadays defined all around by information technology. Out of this space's main shapers - corporate bodies, adminstrators and engineers - writers should make common cause with the last of those (otherwise known as hackers). Yet what writers and coder-hackers should build together is not an easy objective to define.
Current information platforms can potentially send a writer's texts all over the world, able to gather new readers in the most surprising places. But they also release those texts from any kind of commercial relationship - easily evading any copyright laws, and freed from any solid paper object that could be sold. "In this world of sharing and infinite reproducibility", says Hari, "the value of our labor is being driven down. People want us to work for free. How are we to live, as writers? Should we even expect to live ‘from writing’?" Much discussion about e-books, neo-communism and United Writers later.
Hari's second main theme was around the consequences upon language of the war on terror, particularly the way that a "playful, creative" multiculturalism has become "increasingly used by cultural conservatives of all stripes to police cultural boundaries".
It's a delicate argument to conduct in the Turkish context - where, for example, the millions of Kurds who live in the country also reside in many of its national neighbours, and whose politics are articulated through both the most normal modes (their own national tv channel and media) and the most extreme (the PKK, a political movement that uses terrorism as a tactic). A country where a self-consciously "moderate Muslim" government finds itself in a delicate battle of position with secular-nationalists (backed by the generals) as to the "Islamicization" of daily life in Turkey.
So when Kunzru criticised the super-patriotic Turkish Penal Code 301, which makes it a crime to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions, there is at least the virtue of something clear and incontrovertible to oppose, on freedom-of-speech grounds. The chief patriotic insult seems to be the description of the massacres and deportations of the Armenian people from the Ottoman empire after WW1 as a "genocide" (uttered by Pamuk, and our opening speaker Murat Belge).
But it gets tricky when Kunzru condemns "Enlightenment fundamentalists... puffing up their chests about the values of the Enlightenment, as a badge of their superiority against poor and marginalised immigrant populations". I'm not quite sure whether Kemalism, Turkey's mix of rationalism and nationalism, would see itself in that picture.
Hari advocates instead a "genuine internationalism...asserting our common life across borders of race, class and religion". But doesn't that "internationalism of our common life" have some relationship to the Enlightenment - at least in its universalism, if not for its fundamentalism?
"A liberal politics of absolute inclusivity, while presenting itself as pragmatic, has the disadvantage of obscuring genuine differences and antagonisms", continued Kunzru. But such a liberal politics would have the advantage of being able to include and cope with VS Naipaul airing his "divergent views" in a tolerant, rational space of a Writers Parliament, rather than (as the Muslim writers were able to achieve) cancelling his visit on the grounds of "offence to Islam".
For all those quicksands, Hari's statement was a great way to start our journey across this almost impossibly varying European terrain of cultures, languages and nations.
And straightaway, you arrived in the most surprising of places. I wandered into our discussion room, and found myself sitting next to a graceful, modest woman with her head traditionally covered. Introducing herself as Cihan Aktas, I found out later that she had been in the forefront of objections to Naipaul's visit: "The disgust he feels for Muslims in his books is appalling", she was quoted in the Guardian, "I cannot attend the event given all of this."
But in the meantime, after listening to her reserved take on the relationship between the net and literature, I watched her pick up a copy of my book The Play Ethic, and rifle methodically through the bibliography. Before we started, Cihan passed me a scrap of paper with list of names. "You know these thinkers?" she asked. On the paper were the roll-call of the European philosophical far-left: Zizek, Ranciere, Badiou, Negri. "I'll mail you on your philosophical interests", she said firmly. "For my newspaper column".
Curiouser and curiouser. Meanwhile, the Macedonian poet in the corner was concentratedly marking a fistful of sheets, readying to deliver...
Visit the European Writers' Parliament website.