Turkish Nobel Laurette in literature2006

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MY FATHER’S SUITCASE
by ORHAN PAMUK
(page 2 of 2)
So this was what was driving me when I first opened my father’s suitcase: Did my father have a secret, an unhappiness in his life that I knew nothing about, something that he could endure only by pouring it into his writing? As soon as I opened the suitcase, I recalled its scent of travel and recognized several notebooks that my father had shown me years earlier, though without dwelling on them for long. Most of the notebooks I now took in my hands he had filled when he was in Paris as a young man. Although, like so many writers I admired—writers whose biographies I had read—I wished to know what my father had written, and what he had thought, when he was the age I was now, it did not take me long to realize that I would find nothing like that here. What disturbed me most was when, now and again, in my father’s notebooks, I came upon a writerly voice. This was not my father’s voice, I told myself; it wasn’t authentic, or, at least, it didn’t belong to the man I’d known as my father. Beneath my fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote was a more profound fear: the fear that, deep inside, I was not authentic. If I found nothing good in my father’s writing, if I found him to have been overly influenced by other writers, I would be plunged into the despair that had afflicted me so strongly when I was young, casting my life, my very being, my desire to write, and my work into question. During my first ten years as a writer, I had felt these anxieties keenly, and, even as I battled them, I had feared that one day I would have to admit defeat—just as I had done with painting—and give up writing as well.

So these were the two things I felt as I closed my father’s suitcase and put it away: a sense of being marooned in the provinces, and a fear that I lacked authenticity. For years, I had, in my reading and my writing, been discovering, studying, and deepening these emotions, in all their variety and their unintended consequences, their nerve endings, their triggers, and their many colors. Certainly my spirits had been jarred by the confusions, the sensitivities, and the fleeting pains that life and books had sprung on me, especially as a young man. But it was only by writing books that I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity (in “My Name Is Red” and “The Black Book”) and the problems of life on the periphery (in “Snow” and “Istanbul”). For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.

A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center.

But, as can be seen from my father’s suitcase and the pale colors of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a center, and it was far away from us. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with the same feeling of inauthenticity and Chekhovian provinciality, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, insecurity, and degradation than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger . . . but today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature ever could. What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears—the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin. . . . Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know that they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies, and nations outside the Western world—and I can identify with them easily—succumbing to fears that lead them to commit stupid acts. I also know that in the West—a world with which I can identify just as easily—nations and peoples that take an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their glory at having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.

So my father was not the only one: we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a center. Whereas the impulse that compels us to shut ourselves up in our rooms to write for years on end is a faith in the opposite, the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people the world over resemble one another. This, as I know from my own and my father’s writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt toward the West all his life—I have felt this, too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West and I have beheld the world that he built on the other side.

All writers who have devoted their lives to their work know this reality: whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing will, in the end, take us to other, very different places. It will take us far from the table at which we have worked in sadness or in anger; it will take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world. Could my father not have reached such a world himself? Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, rising from the mist in its many colors like an island spied after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us. We are as beguiled as the Western travellers who voyaged from the south to behold Istanbul rising from the mist. At the end of a journey begun in hope and curiosity, there lies before us a city of mosques and minarets, a medley of houses, streets, hills, bridges, and slopes—an entire world. Seeing this world, we wish to enter it and lose ourselves in it, just as we might in a book. After sitting down to write because we felt provincial, excluded, marginalized, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.

What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me, the center of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life but because, for the past thirty-three years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days, and its nights, making them a part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world that I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings seemed to begin to talk among themselves, interacting in ways that I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books but for themselves. This world that I had created, like a man digging a well with a needle, then seemed truer than anything else.

As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it occurred to me that he might also have discovered this kind of happiness in the years he spent writing. I should not prejudge him. I was so grateful to him, after all. He had never been a commanding, forbidding, overpowering, punishing, ordinary father. He had always left me free, always showed me the utmost respect. I had often thought that if I had, from time to time, been able to draw on my imagination, whether in freedom or in childishness, it was because, unlike so many of my friends from childhood and youth, I had no fear of my father. On some deeper level, I was able to become a writer because my father, in his youth, had also wished to be one. I would have to read him with tolerance—to seek to understand what he had written in those hotel rooms.

It was with these hopeful thoughts that I walked over to the suitcase, which was still sitting where my father had left it. Using all my will power, I read through a few manuscripts and notebooks. What had my father written about? I recall a few views from the windows of Paris hotels, a few poems, paradoxes, analyses. . . . As I write, I feel like someone who has just been in a traffic accident and is struggling to remember how it happened, while at the same time dreading the prospect of remembering too much. When I was a child, and my father and mother were on the brink of a quarrel—when they fell into one of their deadly silences—my father would turn on the radio, to change the mood, and the music would help us forget it all faster.

So let me change the mood with a few sweet words that will, I hope, serve as well as that music. The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

A week after he came to my office and left me his suitcase, my father paid me another visit; as always, he brought me a bar of chocolate (he had forgotten that I was forty-eight years old). As always, we chatted and laughed about life, politics, and family gossip. A moment arrived when my father’s gaze drifted to the corner where he had left his suitcase, and he saw that I had moved it. We looked each other in the eye. There followed a pressing silence. I did not tell him that I had opened the suitcase and tried to read its contents; instead, I looked away. But he understood. Just as I understood that he had understood. Just as he understood that I had understood that he had understood. But all this understanding went only as far as it could go in a few seconds. Because my father was a happy, easygoing man who had faith in himself, he smiled at me the way he always did. And, as he left the house, he repeated all the lovely and encouraging things he always said to me, like a father.

As always, I watched him leave, envying his happiness, his carefree and unflappable temperament. But I remember that on that day there was also a flash of joy inside me that made me ashamed. It was prompted by the thought that maybe I wasn’t as comfortable in life as he was, maybe I had not led as happy or footloose a life as he had, but at least I had devoted mine to writing. You understand . . . I was ashamed to be thinking such things at my father’s expense—of all people, my father, who had never been a source of pain to me, who had left me free. All this should remind us that writing and literature are intimately linked to a void at the center of our lives, to our feelings of happiness and guilt.

But my story has a symmetry that immediately reminded me of something else that day, bringing with it an even deeper sense of guilt. Twenty-three years before my father left me his suitcase, and four years after I had decided, at the age of twenty-two, to become a novelist, and, abandoning all else, shut myself up in a room, I finished my first novel, “Cevdet Bey and His Sons.” With trembling hands, I gave my father a typescript of the still unpublished novel, so that he could read it and tell me what he thought. I did this not only because I had confidence in his taste and his intellect; his opinion was very important to me because, unlike my mother, he had not opposed my wish to become a writer. At that point, my father was not with us, but far away. I waited impatiently for his return. When he arrived, two weeks later, I ran to open the door. My father said nothing, but he immediately threw his arms around me in a way that told me he had liked the book very much. For a while, we were plunged into the sort of awkward silence that often accompanies moments of great emotion. Then, when we had calmed down and begun to talk, my father resorted to highly charged and exaggerated language to express his confidence in me and in my first novel: he told me that one day I would win the prize that I have now received with such great happiness. He said this not because he was trying to convince me of his good opinion or to set the prize as a goal; he said it like a Turkish father, supporting his son, encouraging him by saying, “One day you’ll be a pasha!” For years, whenever he saw me, he would encourage me with the same words.

My father died in December, 2002.

(© The Nobel Foundation, 2006. Translated, from the Turkish, by Maureen Freely.)