With Livaneli on "Restlessness"

Some time ago I wrote a piece on Zülfü Livaneli's novel Huzursuzluk, prompted by a debate begun by Orhan Miroğlu. While I was in Tunisia, a message from Mr. Livaneli about that piece reached me. He said that I had upset him considerably and that my assessments of his book were unfair. Thinking that his objection to my assessments of his book in this column, made with his customary courtesy, has a right to be voiced from this same column as well, I am sharing it as it is, and on this occasion I would also like to expand a little on what I said. Mr. Livaneli says:

"I must say that your piece today (6 November 2017) upset me quite a bit. You have talked about a different book. This novel was published a year ago and has reached half a million copies. People read it in tears. The novel begins with Hüseyin from Mardin being killed in America by Islamophobic racists. As we go back into the past, we learn that in Mardin he was also wounded by a DAESH sympathizer because he wanted to marry a Yazidi girl. That is, a love that was the victim of two radical extremes. I wish you had read the book first. There are no DAESH groups or anything of the sort in Mardin. We have taken in millions of refugees. Girls fleeing persecution come to Turkey for salvation. I wanted to tell these things.

Also, I constantly lash out at the tragicomedy in Iraq. Please have a look at my piece published yesterday on T24."

In light of Mr. Zülfü's explanation, when I went over my piece once more, I told him frankly that I found it harsher than necessary. It needs to be understood that the matter is not personal. By coincidence, on the evening of the very night I received his message, when my friends and I sat down at a piano we found free in the hotel lobby to play and sing together, two of the first pieces that came to mind were "Karlı Kayın Ormanları" and "Geceleyin Gökyüzünden Güneş Topla Benim İçin". It did not even occur to us that these works were Livaneli's; they have become so classic, they are such beautiful works.

But that is not our subject. The subject is the novel Huzursuzluk and the context in which it sits. Do some details within this novel, for example, change the role the work plays in general?

Can the novel's beginning with Hüseyin being killed by American racists create, in the face of what the DAESH tyrants later do, a balance of the "oppression is everywhere" kind? Or can this balance feed a discourse against the American occupation, as the current and real danger put forward by the work?

After all, nobody looks at bigotry or racism in America and thinks of, or is able to think of, invading America and imposing on them a medieval oppression in the name of humanity. Yet because our powers are not symmetrical, this dual story turns much more easily into a justification for the Americans to send their armies out "to set us straight." American racism today is a process that negatively affects the entire world. As for how much DAESH bigotry has to do with our lands, the people of our parts know best. Our childhood was lived through in a perfectly ordinary cultural atmosphere, in good neighborliness and at a selfless level, with Yazidis, Nusayris, non-Muslims, Kurds and Arabs among one another.

In these parts, the general rule is of course endogamy (marriage within the group). But in all my life I have never heard of anyone being killed, lynched or stoned for violating endogamy. The violation of the endogamy rule certainly creates social pressures and mechanisms of exclusion, but there are various ways of escaping them. There are people who choose to live outside their city because they made an exogamous marriage, but these are never regarded in society as an example of bigotry. This is true not only in Mardin or Siirt but for every society, Muslim or not, in which the rule of endogamy operates. Do you think this rule, which exists in Greece and even in America, operates differently there?

Do we not see how the story of a couple forced to live through such a tragedy because of a Yazidi-Muslim marriage can feed the world of orientalist fantasies? Moreover, one no longer needs to be much of a discourse expert to see that this orientalism is ultimately used as an ideological ground for the occupation of the Muslim world.

Meanwhile, is there still anyone who does not see how DAESH is being used by America itself as a lever to open up space for the PYD and for occupation?

Every place DAESH enters becomes, after a while, a place that is liberated by PYD militants armed to the teeth by the US and given powerful air-bombardment support, and whose administration is left to the PYD. The ethnic cleansing the PYD immediately starts in those places should be far more striking to a man of letters with a conscience. A writer would find so many stories, so much drama, so much tragedy to write there.

Moreover, there is a well-known international effort to brand Turkey as a country that supports DAESH, despite the only genuine struggle against DAESH having been waged by Turkey. Everyone now also knows how FETÖ put the MİT frame-ups into play to do this. Even though no one other than Turkey has fought a real war against DAESH... Even so, what conscience can remain silent before an effort that even hints that Turkey is somehow connected with DAESH?

Of course, DAESH militants are not roaming freely in Mardin. But a few figures placed in a novel are enough, and more than enough, to draw this kind of image of Mardin in the narrative.

Yet, like Miroğlu, I have firsthand observations that the real great bigotry, ethnic cleansing, oppression and terror that should have been seen there for some time was carried out by the PKK-PYD. I was right in the middle of the Kobani events (6-8 October). We all saw together by whom and with what savagery Yasin Börü, who was distributing sacrificial meat to the poor, was killed. We also lived through the savage killing of two people who had come to Mardin as guests, only because they had beards. In addition, a total of 55 people were savagely massacred in those three days. The trench terror the PKK unleashed in the region before and after shows clearly that the real great tragedy that could come out of Mardin and the region, the one that could be drawn attention to, is not DAESH, which was in any case contrived to serve as a pretext for imperialist interventions in our region, but the PKK's oppression, indulged by those same imperialists.

Setting everything aside, do the heroism and beauty of the hospitality that Turkey, with its people, its cities and its state, extends today to 3.5 million Syrians and to the oppressed from other countries not deserve far more literature, without being overshadowed by stories suited to orientalist fantasies?