On October 15, 2022, Reuters reported that Turkey’s parliament had passed a law criminalizing the spread of alleged misinformation and forcing social media platforms to hand over users’ personal information. The law doesn’t say what comprises “misinformation.” Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ruled Turkey for nearly two decades, having rammed through a new constitution in 2017 that caters to his presidency. But restricting free speech in Turkey is a longstanding pastime. In the wake of the country’s military coup in 1971, the writer and tv/radio program director Sevgi Soysal was imprisoned for alleged obscenity in her second novel Walking (Yürümek), published in 1970. Undaunted, during her eight-month prison term, she wrote Noontime in Yenişehir (Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti) which received the Orhan Kemal Award for Best Novel (1974).
Before her death by cancer at age 40 in 1976, Soysal produced four novels, a story collection, and a prison memoir. The final novel was Dawn (Şafak, 1975) which takes place during the 1971 coup. Dawn integrates all of Soysal’s signature techniques and preoccupations. She had no interest in publishing manifestoes or airing grievances disguised as prose fiction. Yet the conditions of her time dominate the atmosphere of the story. “Dawn” here is the morning after the novel’s main characters have spent a night in an Adana jail and faced interrogation. Located 100 miles from the Syrian border, Adana is the city to which Soysal was exiled after her imprisonment. The narrative begins when Oya Ertem, a woman under detention in Adana, leaves her apartment to attend a dinner at the home of Ali and his nephews, Mustafa and Hüseyin. Ali had worked for years in a textile factory; Mustafa is a teacher who spent 14 months in prison; Hüseyin is a struggling lawyer and Workers’ Party member who has done some work on Oya’s behalf.
When the military pushed aside Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel in 1971, the country’s various political parties and factions were terrorizing each other. Far-left workers went on strike, students shut down universities, Marxist revolutionaries sparred with neo-Fascists, industrialists and business owners demanded law and order, and Islamist and Kurdish factions joined the fray. The police raided the offices of the teachers’ union. A cabal of senior military officers decided that liberal democracy didn’t have clout to quell the disorder. On the day of the coup, the state prosecutor opened a case against the Workers’ Party of Turkey, while CIA-trained counterintelligence officers went after anyone suspected of Communist sympathies. Martial law persisted for two years. This history seethes in the background of Dawn.
The first of the novel’s three parts is “The Raid.” In the opening scene, the police have arrested everyone but had not been expecting her. She is alone there, waiting. “Though she knew full well that there was beauty and ugliness in all things under the sun, she was still in the habit of closing one eye, so as to separate out the beauty from the rest. In the name of beauty, she was willing to take any risk. She took courageous stands for no other reason than she found beauty in courage itself. Ask her to confront an ugly fact or deed, though, and she collapsed.”
Soysal’s characters may strive or yearn for social justice, but she won’t let the reader admire them simply for that reason. Their aspirations and values trigger a range of behaviors and situations, conflicts and suspicions, self-doubts and resentments. These dramatic elements emerge as Soysal shifts from one character to the next, her third-person narrator tracing their agitations and actions. Soysal’s translator, Maureen Freely, skillfully registers the tones of disquiet and grief that empower Soysal’s sentences which, more invested in deepening context than unspooling a plotline, focus on the importance of family ties during social unrest and the persistence of tribal affiliations that are assailed by violent repression. Ultimately, and without Soysal having to spell it out, it is clear that each individual’s turmoil results from the anguish caused by the unforgiving powers of the state.
The novel’s second section is “The Interrogation” at police headquarters – a procedure interrupted narratively by Oya’s recollections of her earlier time in prison, and her observations of and relations with other women. Shifting to the interrogation, Oya faces another debacle: her period: “Suddenly she is in a panic. What to do, to avoid disgracing herself – that is her one and only thought. Maybe there’s a guard outside the door. A guard with just a bit of compassion. Maybe I can get him to bring me some cotton. She pounds on the door. Somehow forgetting that it’s the middle of the night, that no one is going to find cotton … She stopped. How strange, she thought. To be seized by this one thought, where there are so many other ugly things she might be facing.” Then, Soysal pivots to the interrogator, Zekai Bey – impatient, overworked, blandly hateful, dismissive of his aides: “The secret is to hit them where they least expect it. Wear the victim down by accusing him of crimes he’s not committed. Scramble his brain. And then, at the very moment they expect the very worst from you, you start treating them well. Years of experience have taught him this. ‘Would you like a cigarette?’” A tour through his psyche renews our connection to the distress of the prisoners, as portrayed with complexity in Mustafa:
“To risk death. A phrase everyone knows. We used it often. And there were those who had indeed risked death. But to risk silence. We didn’t dwell on that enough. Never tested it out. None of us knew how hard silence would be. We thought it would be enough to stay honest and courageous and true to our ideas. Silence would be something that came naturally. But then, all of us who ended up in that place – we all found out how wrong we were, and in the most painful way. It took more than honesty, courage, and commitment to stay silent.”
The final section, “Dawn,” releases Oya from jail as her exile in Adana nears its conclusion. “She had to find a way to bring her fine ideas about freedom and humanity into lived experience. How easy it would be to create a spineless, apathetic, and confused Oya who was still convinced that she was carrying on the struggle. Because from this point onward, she would find herself up against things that were much more difficult to grasp. It would be much harder to distinguish between a right and wrong turn.”
Some have maintained that Soysal’s arrest for obscenity may have had less to do with her fiction than her media programming job. I disagree — the combined power of the fiction and her profile as an opinionated and influential woman made her an enemy of the state. As for her work in media, perhaps it cultivated her confident feel for the cinematic tight shots of her prose. Released from prison, Soysal co-founded the ANKA News Agency which brought together those journalists who became unemployed after the coup – an act that surely represents Soysal’s “way to bring her fine ideas about freedom and humanity into lived experience.”
[Published by Archipelago Books on November 15, 2022, 306 pages, $20.00 paperback]
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The word “scientific” is said to have first appeared in English in 1589, just twelve years before the first performance of Hamlet. Science was striding towards the Enlightenment’s ecstatic proofs, while Hamlet couldn’t find certainty in anything. The apparent antagonism between science and the arts supposedly fizzled out well before our era of truthiness. “It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should,” wrote Freud in his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Today we assume that science isn’t a process of establishing nature’s ultimate truths, but a changeable social construction influenced by whomever is financing its development.
But imagine you’ve just received your degree in chemistry, having been influenced by your father, a physicist, and your mother, a mathematician – and now, you’ve decided to attend the University of Iowa’s Spanish Creative Writing MFA program. The language and signifiers of science have been your foundation, your toolbox. This is the path taken by Andrea Chapela, who is compelled to take up the old questions about the supposed clash between the facts of science and the observations expressed in creative writing. “Miroslav Holub, Czech poet and immunologist, wrote: ‘The sciences and poetry do not share words, they polarize them,’” she notes. “As soon as I read that phrase, I wanted to negate it. Contradict it. It comes back to me when I set out to write a series of experiments – let’s call them ‘essays’ – to look at science through the lens of poetry and observe the result of that polarization: liminal language.”
Glass, mirrors, and light: Her three essays in The Visible Unseen consider the scientific history of each phenomenon and the language rigged up to describe each one. As a student of chemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (“chemistry is the study of changes in matter”), she encountered the anomalous nature of glass, “a material that doesn’t behave like either a solid or a liquid.” The chaotic nature of glass spurred scientists to devise terms to describe it – but left the aspiring writer with a dilemma: “How can I write about language from outside it? How can I stop seeing through language, using it as a tool, pretending exactitude is possible in words?”
When we arrive at her essay on mirrors, she says, “Lacan says the dissociation we feel when we look in the mirror comes from the way we perceive our own likeness in pieces … This close to myself, I can hardly grasp the whole I make up. Every idea I have of myself is imaginary.” Haltingly, Chapela proceeds toward what agitates her most deeply – if she aspires to be a writer but cannot perceive the “truth” about herself or establish a one-to-one correspondence between a word and a thing, then how does one proceed and with what intended effects in mind? “Even this [mirror] essay is becoming a reflection of the act of writing it,” she says, “a Borgesian game of writing an essay about writing an essay, with the author at the center, multiplied in all the mirrors of her life at once, trying to figure out which is the real version.” Her observation of the meta-nature of her essay may come across as quaint or worn – we’ve heard it all before. But the generosity of Chapela’s efforts springs from the probity of her inquiry and her understanding that the questions she asks may never go out of fashion for an ambitious artist.
There is no abiding lyricism in The Visible Unseen, the essays aren’t vectors pointing to or offering the flavor of art she may undertake. On the contrary, even in the third and final essay she is still announcing, “I want to make something personal out of the scientific” but not divulging either exactly what she sees of herself or the world in the mirror, “a world beyond our measure.” These essays present a figure who has painstakingly considered the ingenious flight of scientific description and is now prepared to jump out of the plane with her parachute. “It took me a long time to accept that writing helps me understand the questions,” she says, “rather than nailing down the answers. But sometimes I long for the clarity and security of math, to be able to simply state, ‘this is what I wished to demonstrate.’” And then, at the very end, one hears the core concern: “A while ago I decided I didn’t want to be scientist, but sometimes I don’t feel I relate to the world like a writer.”
These are essays of precision, balance, and reasoning – brilliantly translated by Kelsi Vanada who not only captures all of the scientific language with what sounds and looks like ease but demanded her most dedicated efforts, but also registers the desirous if restrained narrative tones of a young writer who seeks a way “to appreciate, to feel, to seize, the unseen, the unconscious.”
[Published by Restless Books on October 11, 2022, 160 pages, $20.00 paperback]