Telling the authoritarian drift of Turkish President Erdogan is the challenge taken up by the Franco-Iranian journalist Delphine Minoui in her novel "The Alphabet of Silence". A committed book where words...

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In Turkey, "fear, at some point, turns into strength"

Women's rights protests in March 2021 in Istanbul. © AP - Emrah Gurel

Text by: Anne Bernas Follow

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RFI: "The Alphabet of silence", why this title?

Delphine Minoui: "The Alphabet of Silence" is because I wanted to evoke what happens when we face prohibitions, when we face censorship. When you are imprisoned too, when you find yourself in a dictatorial country, even with an authoritarian drift. For me, the alphabet of silence is what we manage to weave. It is when the muffled word turns into an imaginary thread, a kind of new language that, all of a sudden, springs from within us. When there is a lot of pain and when words, finally, no longer have their meaning. And this is what happens to one of my characters, Göktay, who is a university professor who finds himself purged, forbidden to practice his profession, who finds himself behind bars, confined to total isolation in his prison. And in fact, when he can no longer speak, he begins to dream; when he can no longer dream, he begins to write; When he can no longer write, he draws, and then we are faced with a new form of writing, a writing that in fact transcends all prohibitions.

Why did you choose the novel genre to evoke contemporary Turkey, which you call "paradise turned hell"?

For a long time, I had a different desire to write, beyond my practice as a journalist. And this story really established itself as a story that was ready for the novel, simply because it had this strength to transcend the real to pass to the imaginary. And somehow, ironically, this fiction allowed me to approach reality as closely as possible, in the most appropriate way. Because I wanted to talk about an event that upset Turkey, at least Turkish civil society, at the beginning of 2016: the purge that began against many university professors who had ironically signed a petition for peace calling for an end to the conflict that had resumed in the south-east of the country between the army and Kurdish forces. And all of a sudden, all these professors who were calling for the suspension of the Turkish armed forces found themselves accused of being terrorists.

I wanted to start from this paradox and I went to meet these teachers who had incredible stories. What struck me was that these teachers, if I told their story as it was, I could also put them in danger. So the best way to get closer to this reality and better tell what was going on from the inside was to move on to the novel.

Also, I think that the novel offers us this possibility and this is the strength of fiction: to be able to go beyond the event as such, the one we cover as a journalist, and to show how this event can turn a life upside down. To slip through this story, myself into the flesh of my characters, to better tell how politics rubs off on the personal, on the intimate, on the body and on the heart too. And how, finally, it destroys and, paradoxically, it can also reveal a hidden part, forget about ourselves.

Does Turkish society feel that it is living in a climate of oppression today?

Turkish society, in my opinion, is no longer the same society I experienced in 2015. When I moved to Istanbul, there was still hope, we were coming out of the big Gezi demonstrations in 2013, which had been very repressed. But there was still a civil society that, as best it could, tried to survive, to organize itself, through the press, in particular, through conferences in universities that were bubbling with activity, through the social sphere too, blogs, networks, Twitter etc. And in fact, I've really seen Turkish society evolve over the last few years. There were the terrorist attacks. There was the abortive coup of 2016 against President Erdoğan, there was the gradual authoritarian drift. Even more recently, there was the earthquake. And in fact, under this lead cover, it is society permanently that has paid the price, even beyond political opponents.

But I have always been fascinated at the same time by this strength of resistance, this resilience of civil society. And that's why I wanted to write this novel too, to pay tribute to this society that has always, despite everything, tried to get back on its feet. I really wanted to work on that, on how fear, at some point, turns into strength. I saw it every day. There has been so much news around Turkey that we have missed this massive purge that has literally undermined all the teaching staff in Turkey. Thousands of teachers were sidelined overnight, found themselves pariahs of society, lost not only their jobs but also their social status, lost unemployment, and had no access to social and family benefits. Their email was also suspended. And despite everything, these people have tried as best they can to reorganize themselves and continue to create links with their students, for example, by setting up clandestine universities in the basements of cafes, in provincial towns, by transforming grocery stores into cultural centers etc. It is also this strength that I thought was important to mention.

To be a child in Turkey is to have a wasted childhood, like that of little Deniz in your novel?

Yes, it is somewhere having to adapt at all times to the context of this society that advances on quicksand, it is taming fear too, the fear of police officers in the street, the fear transmitted by parents, it is trying to find a place between the different unspoken in "the white between the lines", red lines, that are constantly changing. It is living with the omnipresence of the censorship of power. A child, he sees things different from us and it is true that little Deniz, for example, in the novel, is surprised on a daily basis by the increasingly ostentatious presence of portraits of President Erdoğan in the streets, the speeches on the radio that she sometimes avoids, simply by putting on music. That's what it is like to be a child in Turkey today. It also means suffering propaganda at school that interferes in transmission, knowledge and education. At some point, for example, when there is the coup, foiled by President Erdoğan, this little Deniz finds herself being forced to repeat songs supporting the government, to read booklets defending the power and also to have to watch videos of extreme violence, when there were all these tensions on the night of the coup between the putschists on one side. and the population that came to blows, sometimes to arms, against the putschists.

Nostalgia is also very present in your book. Göktay denounces "the backward step of a country that claims to be moving forward". Are Turks nostalgic today, and if so, for what?

Often, when we face an increasingly authoritarian power, a power that no longer resembles us, we tend to take refuge in nostalgia for the past. For Turkey, nostalgia for the past is Atatürk, who remains a key figure in Turkey, the father of the Republic that was erected in 1923 on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Atatürk was a man who really defended this idea of secularism, which was a forced secularism, but which arouses a lot of nostalgia in the face of a power today that is both nationalist, but also faces an Islamizing drift.

This is also denounced by Göktay, who has always defended free thought. He wonders about this nostalgia: isn't it distorted? Should we not also put Atatürk in context, because he himself at one point imposed this secularism in a very radical way: he imposed women to no longer wear the veil, he imposed a new alphabet (since it must be remembered that in the Ottoman era, the alphabet was an alphabet full of both Arabic and Persian influences, an alphabet that was written from right to left). Overnight, Atatürk said no to the Ottoman Empire, no to Islam. And this new writing, and this is what Göktay says at a given moment, finally, created a break with the past, so a break in 1923. This means that the new society could no longer read what the fathers and grandfathers wrote, including by visiting the stelae in the cemeteries.

And Göktay has this very strong sentence where he says: "How can I know my past if I don't know my language?" This is also where I wanted to emphasize, this idea of permanent erasure. Atatürk wanted to erase the past of the Ottoman Empire, just as today Erdoğan tried to erase Atatürk's legacy. But in this erasure, we still arrive, we try, in civil society, to shape an identity, to revive also a certain form of identity to find a continuity that will allow society to reconcile with itself and to reconcile with its past.

You also address the Kurdish issue. Will this ancestral issue be one of the issues at stake in the presidential election in May?

The Kurds have always been Turkey's oppressed minority. It must be remembered that somewhere, it is all irony, it was Erdoğan who in the early 2000s, when he came to power with his AKP party, reached out to minorities and it was not only the Kurds at the time. I am thinking of the Alevi minority, the Armenians who have suffered genocide in the past. He reached out to the Kurds, he was the first to have made it possible to speak of the Kurds as such, as a member of society, with their differences, their culture but also their Kurdish language. It allowed the teaching of the Kurdish language, allowed for the first time the use of the word Kurdish, since before Erdoğan we spoke of the Kurds by saying the Turks of the mountains. He also thought at one point that this opening of the field to the Kurds would have allowed him to win more votes in the elections, to win more support. And at some point, the Kurds had this desire to create their own political party that triumphed later at the ballot box in 2015, this famous HDP party that was a synthesis between leftist movements and this desire to defend Kurdish identities.

This party made an incredible breakthrough in parliament and very quickly overshadowed Erdoğan. As a result, in the following years, Erdoğan completely changed his policy towards the Kurds and began to try to block this political momentum. And he made Kurdish militants, beyond professors, all those who defended the Kurdish cause, new targets. That is where we are today in Turkey.

In the areas of southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish areas are literally under the tutelage of the Turkish authorities. I remember, it marked me a lot, in 2009, during the municipal elections, practically all the Kurdish mayors who were elected, democratically speaking, in the months that followed, or even in the following years, were, under the pretext of "support for terrorism" (implied the PKK, the Kurdish guerrillas), put under guardianship for some, ousted. Others were directly imprisoned and the central government in Ankara imposed new mayors who, for the moment, were not democratically elected. And so, today, it is true that there is this fear in the Kurdish areas of seeing Erdoğan take advantage of the elections to put an end to this Kurdish question and also to put an end to this progressive suffocation of Kurdish civil society which, ironically, in fact paradoxically, had been encouraged in the early 2000s.

You write that the word "prison" has become "viral" in Turkey. "The Alphabet of Silence" is nevertheless a book of hope and resistance, against a "pseudo sultan of modern times".

The "alphabet of silence" is precisely also to give, to give a voice to university professors who are one of the pivots of this call, of this Turkish democratic resistance. They are smugglers, smugglers of history, transmitters of knowledge. These are people who have found themselves faced with forced propaganda, imposed in universities, an Islamizing drift also with new programs, including in schools where Islam must be given more and more prominence. We must praise, but often in a roundabout way, because Erdoğan also has this power to revisit history, but in any case praise the Ottoman Empire. And these university professors are sentinels of knowledge in all this, they are people who continue to defend the idea of a word, a plural word, a critical debate, a debate that sometimes no longer has any place in lecture halls; but which they seize in their own way by creating parallel universities.

And this is the case at one point for Ayla, Göktay's wife, who herself at first was not a political activist. In fact, it was the authoritarian drift that pushed it to its limits. She found herself more than hiring. So yes, there is a lot of hope in this novel, there is a desire of this society to take control of itself, to take back its destiny, to never accept what is imposed from above, to continue to try to open small windows when the doors are closed twice. And that's what these teachers do on a daily basis. But these professors, finally, they are a small sample of this society that also expresses itself through the press, which is regularly censored, through political activists, through all these movements that I have been able to witness in recent years, I am thinking of the feminist movement because women have seen their rights scratched over the last few years. 2 years ago now, Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention, which was there to fight precisely against violence against women, especially against femicide. These are women who organize themselves through NGOs, demonstrations, and so it is to all this civil society that I also wanted to pay tribute in this book, to remind us that behind the lead screed, there is always a lot of hope, a lot of vitality, a fearless youth, women too, intellectuals who also campaign behind bars to offer the new generation something that goes beyond a threat of the dictatorship that is now imposing itself on Europe's doorstep.

Without lifting the veil on the outcome of your, of your novel, there is an important character in your story and it is a cat.

I really wanted to give "the floor" to the cats of Istanbul, because this is also what makes the singularity, the strength, the beauty of this city Istanbul that I try to vibrate in filigree in this book: a plural city, an incredible city, a world city at the crossroads between East and West, separated by the Bosphorus. We have the Asian side and the European side, and in these two shores, beyond humans, there are cats. We can't talk about Istanbul, we can't talk about resistance on a daily basis without talking about these incredible felines that somehow symbolize this humanity. It has always fascinated me, living in Turkey for almost seven years now. Somehow, this is what also reconciles Turkish society in a country with so much violence, political conflicts. At some point, there is always this will of the Istanbulites, this empathy towards cats.

A people that can be so good to cats cannot be a people that allows itself to be embarked on an authoritarian drift. So we needed a cat in this novel. A cat because it is a step aside to tell this humanity that is there, in this city, and tell another look, because this cat, finally, it is witness both of this authoritarian drift but also of this slingshot. A cat can slip everywhere, it refuses obstacles and somewhere, it is also a form of metaphor for this society that also refuses obstacles and that constantly sneaks through the interstices imposed by the prohibitions.

► L'Alphabet du silence, éditions L'iconoclaste, 304 pages. Released on April 6.

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In Turkey, "fear, at some point, turns into strength"

In Turkey, "fear, at some point, turns into strength"

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