“I find bravery disgraceful in a writer,” writes the novelist and journalist Ahmet Altan in I Will Never See The World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer. “A writer should be admired and praised for his writing alone. He should place himself before his readers bare of all but his writing. He should never entertain or deceive his readers by putting on shows of heroism or bravery.” He inherited this attitude from his father, Çetin Altan, a journalist and member of parliament who was prosecuted more than 300 times arrested three times for his outspoken articles. Exactly 45 years after Çetin was arrested for the third time and sentenced to prison for three years, the police came for his son Ahmet, then 66 years old.
On July 15, 2016, the day before a military coup failed to topple the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ahmet Altan appeared on a televised talk show. A novelist and blunt critic of Erdoğan, Altan was arrested at his house later that September for delivering “subliminal messages” in support of the insurrection and was ultimately sentenced to prison for life. “When the police searched the apartment, I put the kettle on,” he writes. “’Would you like some tea?’ I asked. They said they would not. ‘It is not a bribe,’ I said, imitating my late father.”
These cheeky remarks to the police seem to signal the bravery that he otherwise disavows. But Ahmet Altan the novelist, always intrigued by the conflicts within individuals, rarely allows opposites easily to resolve. “I am a person who likes being brave, but the same time, I scorn bravery. I am the very embodiment of a contradiction.”
I Will Never See The World Again is itself formed through the parallel cultivation of clashing perceptions. Inspired by his father, Altan begins his narrative by asserting his political and imaginative freedom in the face of his antagonists:
“There are certain actions and words that are demanded by events, the dangers and the realities that surround you. Once you refuse to play this assigned role, instead doing and saying the unexpected, reality itself is taken aback; it hits against the rebellious jetties of your mind and breaks into pieces. You then gain the power to collect the fragments together and create from them a new reality in the mind’s safe harbour.”
This early declaration leads to the many sequences in the book about sustaining – and being sustained by – the power to write while confined in prison. “The act of writing harbours a magical paradox,” he says. “It is something that you can take refuge and hide in while at the same time you are opening yourself up to the world and spreading out with your words. It enables you not only to forget but also to be remembered.”
But turn the page, and his spirited avowals dissipate into abjection:
“It is impossible to describe the kind of longing one experiences in prison. It is so deep, no naked, so primal that no words can be that naked and primal. It is a feeling impossible to describe in words. It can only be described by the growling and moaning of a dog that has been shot.”
The debasement and loneliness, impossible for him to dismiss, murmur in the narrative’s austere diction and bruised candor. This is not lyrical writing. But unwilling too permit the misery to get the upper hand, Altan exploits it as a prod to mine materials in his cramped space that present opportunities for elevating his spirit and exercising his voice. He had faith that his voice would carry: the chapters of the text were smuggled, one by one, out of the prison by his lawyers.
The first half of the memoir takes up his arrival at Silivri prison, his initial reactions to confinement and institutional routines, and his early encounters with other inmates. Among the latter are a group of “navy colonels” who had all graduated from the military academy in the same class, victims of “a huge epidemic of double-crossing in the armed forces, with officers informing on each other without mercy.” Altan observed that one staff colonel in particular, “the one with the most brilliant career among them,” seemed to suffer the most for “his future that was fast disappearing” — unlike the submarine colonel who, when asked “How is life in a submarine?” replied, “Worse than here.” I Will Never See The World Again, in its melding of emotional extremes, is Altan’s precariously balanced and, it must be said, brave response to the indiscriminately inhumane actions of the Erdoğan regime.
But this is a writer’s narrative told to a world of listeners, more than a disputatious plea for the restoration of Turkish democracy. For Altan, time had become an affliction – and as with all other torments he faced, he wrote about time in order to manage what bedeviled him:
“Tempus absoluto. Absolute time, which Newton said was moving with an uninterrupted speed beyond anything humans could sense, had arrived, gliding in from the universe, and was casting itself over me in this dusty sickroom, leaving me with no room to escape. Now I understood why human beings invented the clock, why they put clocks on the streets, the squares, the towers. They did this not in order to know the time; they did it so that they could divide and escape from it.”
He continues: “It took me eighteen steps to walk in zigzags from one end of the sickroom to the other. If I walked without haste, every step would take a second; if I went back and forth ten times, a total of 180 seconds – in other words, three minutes – would have passed. I found part of a newspaper page on the floor and tore it into ten small pieces. At every 180 steps, I put one of those ten pieces on one corner of the table. When ten pieces gathered at that corner, I calculated that half an hour had passed. I had invented a newspaper clock.”
Without sententiousness, in fact with the utmost delicacy, Altan made me sharply aware that I had a purpose as his reader. “anyone on earth who finds a listener has a story to tell,” he says. “What is difficult to find is not the story, but the listener. I was the listener in that cage.” Late in the narrative, several former judges are brought to Silivri. One says to Altan,” I wouldn’t have arrested so many men had I known prison was like this.” And Altan reflects, “The severity of the impact shattered their souls.” I Will Never See The World Again is the testimony of an unshattered soul – though how he continues to be unbroken is a matter beyond bravery. If the judge who suffered the most “was shaking his very being to free himself from the pain affixed to his consciousness,” perhaps Altan survives through the writer’s habit of affixing everything to this consciousness – and shaping it all beyond himself for us into the work.
(Postscript: Just as we were preparing to publish this review, it was announced that Ahmed Altan had been released from prison after a retrial. He had been incarcerated for three years. Phillipe Sands, the president of English PEN, tweeted this image [below] of Altan leaving Silivri prison.)
[Published by The Other Press on October 1, 2019, 212 pages, $15.99 paperback]