Blood of Others by Rory Finnin

Author:Rory Finnin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ADD SUBJECT
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

In disputing the absurd literalism of the prosecutors, Dzhemilev echoes Russian writer Andrei Siniavsky but with more irreverence. In 1966 Siniavsky and Yuly Daniel were on trial for “anti-Soviet agitation”; both were convicted and sentenced to terms in forced labour camps. In his “Final Word,” Siniavsky insisted that “a word is not a deed, but a word; the artistic image is a thing of convention” (khudozhestvennyi obraz usloven).7 Dzhemilev may have mocked the authorities’ argument with a deft reductio ad absurdum, but his point was the same. Literature does not advance a series of propositions and truth claims; unlike “accounting reports,” as he reminds us (incidentally echoing Samuel Beckett, who once declared that “literary criticism is not book-keeping”), poems do not aspire to concrete, determinate meaning or full disclosure.8 They are up to something else entirely.

In the Republic of Turkey, poems like Elçin’s “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi,” which we will examine more closely next, intersected with novels and pulp-fiction “penny dreadfuls” to engage in a poetics of solidarity with the Crimean Tatars throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Like the dissident Soviet works of the previous two chapters, these literary texts invite the reader to visualize the suffering victim and to grapple with a language of guilt, but their we-relation conceives of the Crimean Tatars very differently, as “part of us,” as ethnic Sunni brethren enslaved by Soviet communism. They are presented as esir Türkler (captive Turks). Especially in conservative pan-Turkist literature, poetry and prose are put to work in the cause of their “liberation”: poetry as incense, summoning the oral traditions of folk poetry as well as the rhetoric of religious sermons and litany, and prose as a drum, pounding images of graphic victimization and heroism into the mind’s eye.

The works of literature in this chapter, published under various censorship regimes, complicate the view that Turkey “ignored the plight” of the Crimean Tatars, as Alan Fisher posits, or failed to take “particular interest in the plight of the Crimean Tatars,” as Isabelle Kreindler writes.9 Such neglect may have been true of a “passive” elite in Ankara consumed by Cold War Realpolitik.10 But on the level of culture, especially popular culture, we encounter a much different picture. As we will see, it is a picture of pan-Turkist journals like Emel publishing poetry about Crimean Tatars alongside digests of Soviet samizdat and tamizdat for a Turkish readership, which included a Crimean Tatar diaspora population numbering as many as five million.11 It is a picture of millions of readers routinely entering into the perspective of dispossessed Crimean Tatars via the bestselling novels of Cengiz Dağcı, which are a staple in Turkish secondary-school curricula today. Through Crimean Tatar characters, also described as “Turks,” tortured by both Stalinism and Nazism, Dağcı’s novels offer readers “prosthetic memories” of the Second World War, false-but-felt memories of a conflict that Turkey had avoided by declaring neutrality. The success of these novels in turn inspired epigones in the realm of pulp fiction, which found particularly receptive audiences and enthusiastic distributors in the Turkish military.

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