Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature today, and this has inspired me to create a new banner:

The original photo is here, not much different from the cropped version used in the banner:

This is Istiklal Cadessi (Independence Avenue) in the heart of Beyoglu, Istanbul’s fashionable European inspired neighborhood. Istiklal is the wild heart of cosmopolitan Istanbul, where cultures, races, creeds, nations, and genders all come together in a loud bizarre mishmash the likes of which you haven’t seen unless you’ve rewatched Tales from the City recently.

I went to Turkey in 2004 for the first time on a Fulbright program that took us first to the troubled island of Cyprus. Coming from a Greek-American family, I’d heard all of the horror stories about both places, about what “they” did to “us.” For the record, both halves of my family are from Greece proper, and we have no relatives in Cyprus, so I’m not sure who “us” is, but that’s another story altogether. As I had begun to suspect, after some time in both places, I realized that most of my relatives had no idea what they were talking about.

On the other hand, there are skeletons in the closets of all three nations: Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey, and so far it seems that Cyprus is the only one of the three that has even remotely begun to take a hard look at itself (even though it’s also the only one that has reason and motive to place a good chunk of the blame for its current situation on outsiders).

When I suggested at a recent family gathering that Greeks and Turks have more in common than they do in difference, my aunt began speaking in tongues and crossed herself so much that I was afraid she’d develop carpal tunnel syndrome. Her Greek sister-in-law (by which I mean that she’s actually from Greece, not of the diaspora) was far less troubled by this statement. And so the struggle continues.

Which brings us back to Orhan Pamuk. He’s been in trouble in Turkey recently for taking his government to task for not allowing open discussion of That Which We Shall Not Discuss: namely, the issue of what happened to Turkey’s Christian minorities in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire (whether it be genocide or not), and the issue of Turkey’s Kurds, for whom the problem can best be summed up in a statement that I heard in a lecture in Ankara: “There is no Kurdish problem. There is no problem for the Kurds at all. They can be anything they choose, as long as they choose to be part of the Turkish nation.”

Pamuk’s greatest achievements, though, as Svenskaakademien recognized in their choice, have to do with his writing. His books play off the conflict and union of cultures as East and West have combined to create something new. Anyone whose read any of his novels recognizes that he’s also taken a uniquely western form of writing (the novel) and made it into something new. (My personal favorite is My Name is Red, set amongst intrigue and murder in 16th century Istanbul).

Pamuk is only the second writer from an Islamic country to be awarded the prize, the first being Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who died in August. Where Mahfouz was a popular writer, Pamuk seeks to re-define writing on his own terms. Both of them have loads to offer us in the West by way of introspect into how a part of the world that we view only in terms of difference and conflict really thinks, feels, and acts.