This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Selahattin Demirtaş
Copyright © 2017 Dipnot Yayınları
Translation copyright © 2018 by Amy Marie Spangler and Kate Ferguson
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Maureen Freely
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by SJP for Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H and SJP colophons are a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in Turkey in the Turkish language under the title SEHER by Dipnot Yayınları, Ankara, Turkey.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Demirtaş, Selahattin, author. | Spangler, Amy, translator. | Ferguson, Kate, (Translator), translator.
Title: Dawn : stories / Selahattin Demirtaş ; [translated by Amy Spangler and Kate Ferguson].
Description: London ; New York : Hogarth, 2019. | Originally published in Turkish under title: Seher. | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018038558 (print) | LCCN 2018046723 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525576952 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525576938 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Demirtaş, Selahattin, 1973—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PL249.D45 (ebook) | LCC PL249.D45 A2 2019 (print) | DDC 894/.3534—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038558
ISBN 9780525576938
Ebook ISBN 9780525576952
Illustrations by Agnes Lee
Cover design by Christopher Brand
Cover photograph by Johannes Schober
v5.4
ep
This book is dedicated to all women who have been murdered or victims of violence
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Maureen Freely
Preface
The Man Inside
Seher
Nazan the Cleaning Lady
It’s Not What You Think
Greetings to Those Dark Eyes
A Letter to the Prison Letter-Reading Committee
The Mermaid
Kebab Halabi
Asuman, Look What You’ve Done!
Settling Scores
As Lonely as History
A Magnificent Ending
Notes
About the Author
About the Translators
FOREWORD
Selahattin Demirtaş has been in prison since November 2016. The official charge is terrorism, a term that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has expanded in recent years to cover anything he regards as a political threat. And Demirtaş is indeed a great threat. He is Turkey’s voice for peace, not just on behalf of its Kurds but for all those seeking social justice in Turkey through democratic means. Denied his place in the National Assembly, he has nevertheless kept in touch with the outside world by writing fiction.
When he first picked up his pen in his prison cell near Turkey’s western border, he would have known that he was joining a grand tradition. He would have recalled, in the first instance, Turkey’s greatest poet, Nâzım Hikmet, who composed his most powerful and enduring works behind bars. He would have thought, too, of Orhan Kemal, chronicler of the dispossessed, who wrote his first fiction under Hikmet’s tutelage behind those same bars. He would have taken inspiration from Sevgi Soysal, who wrote with humor and heart about life in a women’s political prison, and from Yaşar Kemal, the master of the modern epic, who devoted his life on and off the page (as well as in and out of prison) to those who could imagine a world beyond the injustices of authoritarian rule.
In addition to giving Demirtaş courage, his literary predecessors would also have given him an audience. Running alongside Turkey’s grand tradition of writing resistance is a grand tradition of reading it. For the book in your hands is not a political tract. It is a collection of short stories, telling of ordinary people with ordinary lives and drawing out their hopes and fears with compassion and a gentle wit.
Born and raised in the southeastern city of Elazığ, Selahattin Demirtaş was five years old when the newly founded Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) began its campaign for Kurdish independence. By the time he was eleven the PKK had made its bid for a full-scale Kurdish insurgency. Throughout his teenage years, Demirtaş was a silent witness to the civil conflict that ensued—assaults on the police and the army by the PKK, and mass arrests, widespread use of torture, village clearances, and extrajudicial killings at the hands of the state.
Violence bred violence. In 1991, when Demirtaş was seventeen, a prominent Kurdish activist named Vedat Aydın stood up at a human rights conference in Ankara and caused a furore by addressing his audience in his mother tongue, thereby breaking a language ban that had been in place for more than a decade. Here, at last, was a man seeking a voice for Kurds in the corridors of power. But not, it transpired, for long. It was after Aydın’s mutilated body was found in a country field, and Turkish security forces opened fire on the many thousands attending his funeral, that Demirtaş decided to devote his life to the Kurdish cause. After graduating with a law degree from Ankara University, he worked as a human rights lawyer and joined the executive board of the Diyarbakır branch of the Human Rights Association, which Vedat Aydın himself had once headed. Demirtaş soon earned himself the nickname Bones, on account of his dogged commitment to recovering the bodies of PKK fighters and returning them to their families for burial. The undeclared war raged on, with no end in sight.
In 2007, when Demirtaş won his first seat in the National Assembly as an independent, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had been prime minister for four years. His chief ally was the Islamist cleric Fethullah Gülen, who, though living in exile in rural Pennsylvania, presided over a vast empire of schools, banks, and newspapers, and was believed to have filled the state’s institutions with his supporters. Erdoğan’s chief adversary was the staunchly secularist military. A protracted power struggle ended with his charging the leadership of the three branches of the armed forces with treason. Most were still incarcerated when the leader of the PKK, also in prison, announced that he was prepared to discuss a cease-fire. As talks progressed, Demirtaş became an increasingly powerful voice, not just at the negotiating table but in public, advocating for peace and a nation in which Turks and Kurds might work together, “arm in arm,” as he put it, to “salvage Turkey’s crippled democracy.”
In 2012 he helped to found the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which soon reached voters well beyond its Kurdish base. Educated Turks, particularly younger ones, were impressed by the party’s embrace of cultural and political diversity, its call for peaceful reconciliation, and its commitment to gender equality. This last commitment was reflected in its institutional structure, modeled on the German Green Party’s co-leadership system, in which roles were shared between a woman and a man at every level. In 2014, when Demirtaş stepped up to the party’s top position, he did so alongside a female colleague, Figen Yüksekdağ. The party’s charter also called for an autonomous Women’s Congress. Charged with mainstreaming women’s concerns, it played a key part in the selection of nominations, encouraging women to step forward and set
ting their application fee at half the fee set for men.
In June 2015, the Peoples’ Democratic Party fought its first general election. It came in fourth, winning 13 percent of the vote and 80 of the Grand National Assembly’s 550 seats. This unprecedented victory might have marked a new era in national politics, had it not been complicated by other machinations on the political chessboard. Having cleansed and tamed the army, replacing his old enemies with his own supporters, Erdoğan was becoming steadily more autocratic. Shedding his pluralist rhetoric, he had reverted to the old monolithic nationalism. With this came a growing mistrust of Kurdish ambitions. The conflict in neighboring Syria, and particularly its Kurdish fighters (much admired in the West for holding back ISIS), posed a dangerous example. Once again, tanks rolled into the cities of the Kurdish Southeast. Curfews were imposed, often lasting days, trapping residents in their homes with limited food and water amid gunfire and bombs. As their neighborhoods turned to rubble, they were prevented even from burying their dead.
Back in Ankara, meanwhile, the Islamist alliance had come apart. Following a series of high-profile corruption cases launched by the pro-Gülen judiciary and police against Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), the nation’s two leading Islamist groups were now bitter political foes.
Then, on July 15, 2016, came one of the most bizarre and bloodiest attempted coups that Turkey—a veteran of unusual coups—has ever seen. Live-streamed from the outset, and foiled within hours, it prompted in Erdoğan a rage that he was quick to take out on his critics, real and perceived. He reasserted state control over the Kurdish regions, meeting any resistance with grotesquely disproportionate force. By November of that year, Demirtaş and other leading members of his party were arrested and accused of spreading propaganda for the PKK, a charge Demirtaş categorically denies.
Three years after the attempted coup, Turkey is the world’s largest jailer of journalists. Tens of thousands of civil servants, teachers, and academics have lost their jobs or been subjected to criminal investigations. Outside the public sector, many have suffered the same fate simply for having sent their children to the wrong school or used the wrong bank.
While some of Erdoğan’s critics have been able to flee the country, many more have had their passports revoked or been banned from travel. For those branded “traitors” or “terrorists,” it has become difficult to find work, and it is now estimated that there are more than a million Turkish citizens suffering what some are calling “civil death.” Shunned by neighbors, barred from employment, and unable to make new lives abroad, they and their families have been left destitute and without recourse.
The Kurdish regions have been hardest hit. “Today, if you go to Kurdish cities,” says the author and artist Nurcan Baysal, “you will see police barricades in front of municipal buildings, police stations, and official buildings. You will see tanks, armored vehicles, police, and soldiers with heavy weapons in the streets. You will see demolished cities and homeless people. You will see people living in tents in the rural areas of Şırnak and Hakkâri. You will see thousands of teachers, doctors, academics, writers, and journalists out of work. You will see checkpoints everywhere. Inside the prisons, you will see four to six people trying to sleep in one bed because of how crowded it is.” But, as she goes on to point out, the eyes of the world remain closed. Following several high-profile detentions of foreign journalists, very few reporters from the international media can be found in the regions.
Erdoğan now controls all major domestic media outlets. His heavy employment of surveillance technologies means that no one using social media can expect to do so undetected. Nevertheless, since Dawn was published in Turkey, in the spring of 2018, it has sold at least 220,000 copies; and when twenty authors stepped in at a recent book fair to sign copies in Demirtaş’s absence, the queue was six hours long.
What attracts Turkey’s readers to Demirtaş the writer is what drew them to Demirtaş the politician: his humor, his compassion for the common man, his long-standing commitment to women’s rights, and his connection with Turkey’s younger generation—wired, worldly, and wishing for greater personal and political freedom. But above all, they treasure him for the precious sliver of hope that rises out of every story in this collection, however dark—that despite all the reversals of recent years, there is hope for Turkey’s broken democracy, if only Turks and Kurds can learn to work together.
The harshness of life is always there, looming in the margins. But no matter where his characters happen to be—in prison or at the back of a bus, in a cemetery remembering their dead, or in the kitchen apologizing to their mothers—they remain artful and imaginative storytellers, ringing with the music of everyday speech, as they find the strength to keep on going, no matter what. “If you walk with courage and determination,” says one, “sometimes you can move faster than a car.” “Tough times eventually come to an end, Mother, they always do,” says another as he finishes admitting to his many boyhood pranks. “I kiss your hands in gratitude,” he adds, “and the hands of mothers everywhere.”
These words could strike readers as disingenuous if they did not know Demirtaş, who has, from the outset, seen women—be they mothers or daughters, workers or professionals, activists or voters—as a powerful force for change. That he also understands the dangers women face in Turkey today is starkly evident in his title story, about an honor killing.
The victim’s name is Seher, which means “dawn” in Turkish. But there is no light in this story. There is only the distress of the boy who is made to kill his sister. That he alone of the men will suffer pangs of conscience might not seem to offer his mother and younger sisters much hope, but Demirtaş the writer-politician refuses to lose heart. “Dawn marks the first moments when light emerges from darkness,” he said, when asked why he chose this name and this title for his book. “Dawn represents hope, revives itself anew each day. Darkness thinks itself eternal, and just as it believes it has defeated the light, dawn deals the first blow. This is the moment that brings an end to darkness and marks the beginning of light.”
The recent presidential election, in June 2018, won and perhaps rigged by Erdoğan, offered Demirtaş one such moment. When his party put him forward as its candidate, he campaigned with tweets disseminated by his family and his lawyer. The high point of his campaign was the speech he delivered from his prison cell during a phone call to his wife. She went on to share it, virally, on social media. Demirtaş won just over 8 percent of the national vote.
That he is currently facing a combined 183-year sentence is a measure, perhaps, of the danger Turkey’s president still sees in him. That he can find the peace of mind to sit in his prison cell, writing playful stories about the everyday world from which he is now excluded, is a measure of his spirit. We cannot know how long he will have to endure this injustice. In the meantime, we have his words, and his promise: to carry on writing; to celebrate the humanity we all share; to seek connection, through translation, with readers in other parts of the world who are also struggling with despots and fanatics; and to remind us that dawn will be waiting on the far side of the horizon.
Maureen Freely
London, November 2018
PREFACE
I write this as a political prisoner in a high-security prison in Edirne, Turkey. I imagine most of you will have never received a letter from prison before, so I would like you to think of this preface as just that: a letter written to you from prison.
I was arrested one year and ten months ago while I was a member of the Turkish parliament and the co-leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, known as the HDP, for which nearly six million people voted in Turkey’s last election. I am among the tens of thousands of dissidents who have been targeted by punitive measures normalized under the state of emergency. The government has so far started 102 investigations and filed 34 separate court cases against me. All in all, I currently face 183
years in prison.
In Western countries, prison is generally thought of as a place where people are punished for their crimes. In Turkey, however, it is a different matter. Behind these walls, there is now a considerable population of qualified and educated people who could serve the needs of any modern, moderate-sized country. As a human rights lawyer—one who has tirelessly reported rights violations in Turkey’s prisons for a number of years—it is with complete certainty and considerable sorrow that I tell you that, since becoming a lawyer in 1998, I have never known rights to be abused as frequently and consistently as they are now. Turkey has become a country in which those who stand up to the rising authoritarianism in the government—dissidents who share tweets considered critical of the current regime, university students who wave protest banners, journalists who truthfully report the news, academics who sign petitions calling for peace, and members of parliament acting in the public interest—quickly find themselves incarcerated. The government believes that this policy of collective punishment will suppress the millions of dissidents “on the outside,” who are living in a semi-open prison as it is. And so in the nearly two years that I have been imprisoned, there has never been any question in my mind as to why I am here. Like many other dissidents held in Turkey’s prisons, I, too, am paying a necessary price in the name of peace and democratization. Yet even if I were forced to spend my entire life behind bars, my belief in the right to defend peace, democracy, and human rights would not waver.
In today’s world, literature and politics are thought of as two separate realms, yet I’ve never subscribed to this view. What readers or voters expect from the writer and politician are, in essence, the same: to be inspired. Both are expected to create meaning and to observe their societies closely and reflect upon the issues that those societies face. Ultimately there is little difference, particularly in oppressive regimes, between the responsibility borne by politicians and that borne by intellectuals who prioritize the good of society.
Dawn Page 1
