Approaches to Teaching the Works of Orhan Pamuk by Sevinç Türkkan and David Damrosch

Author:Sevinç Türkkan and David Damrosch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Modern Language Association of America
Published: 2017-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

The Discourse of the Other in Snow

Esra Mirze Santesso

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I should start by admitting a few things about myself: I am Turkish, I grew up in Istanbul at a time when the veil was banned by the constitution, and I have had the opportunity to interview Orhan Pamuk a couple of times. In many ways, these things mark me as an insider: I am able to appreciate the local nuances of Pamuk’s problematization of Turkish identity and I have benefited from conversations with the author himself. Of course, being an insider does not necessarily provide me with a reliable, unfailing perspective, a point I make at the start of class discussions about Pamuk’s Snow in my upper-division courses The Novel after 1900 and Contemporary World Literature.

First, I encourage my students to think about the implications of being an outsider, one of the central concerns in Snow. The protagonist, Ka, grapples with his outsider status in Kars, a remote, forlorn border town in eastern Turkey. As soon as he arrives in the decrepit city—which suffers from staggering unemployment and a growing suicide rate among so-called headscarf girls—he is marked as an outsider because of his background as an educated, middle-class, secular journalist from cosmopolitan, booming Istanbul. In our initial discussion, my students quickly infer that Ka’s ideological position is shaped by his urban identity. The locals believe that Ka’s metropolitan affiliation impedes his ability to represent and give a voice to the headscarf girls; as a secular urbanite, Ka simply cannot contextualize the hardships imposed on young Muslim women. His cultural and political separation from the veiled women, in other words, obfuscates his ability to comprehend their predicament: “[f]or girls like that, a suicide wish is a wish for innocence and purity” (124).1 At the end of our discussion, my students recognize that the tension between urban and rural identity hints at an irreconcilable ideological gap: for the rural inhabitants, the veil is a form of resistance against a repressive state regime that has forsaken religion for the sake of modernization; for the secular urbanite, the veil represents antisecularism and is regarded as an emblem of Islamism, which wants to replace the constitution with the laws of sharia. This initial discussion allows the students to step into the shoes of the protagonist and to think about their own positions as outsiders unfamiliar with the culture and politics of the region.

While Ka initially suffers from the community’s distrust and feels ostracized, his outsiderness eventually serves as an advantage in capturing the stories of the “suicide girls” (10). To put it differently, if Ka’s goal is to truly understand the plight of these women, then his position as an outsider affords him various opportunities he can capitalize on as a reporter. This line of thinking echoes the Bakhtinian form of “creative understanding” that requires estrangement as a condition for empathy:

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture.

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