20 May 2011

My mother had a great voice and was amazingly gifted in music. Growing up in 1950s Turkey, however, she had never been encouraged to develop her artistic talents. As a girl she was told not to be extraordinary and simply blend with the rest. So when I was born she was determined to give me everything that had been denied to her. Although she was a single, working mother and money was tight, she took me to choirs, year after year, where children like me would sing miserably while excited middle-class parents sat among the audience mouthing the lyrics. This was in mid-1970s Ankara when each day activists of different ideologies would clash on the streets. Outside bombs exploded, guns were fired; inside we sang about butterflies and daffodils in the sun.

After several years my mother decided it was time for me to learn the guitar. She hired an American teacher – a tall, lithe hippie who had been robbed while touring Europe and was now saving money to go to Katmandu. On his card, it said he gave private lessons in English, music, maths and poetry, except the word poetry was crossed out and instead was written "spiritual wisdom".

It took my new teacher one lesson to realise what I had known all along: that I had absolutely, irreversibly, no talent in music. For the next six months the only song he taught me to play was Yellow Submarine. It became our routine to play the Beatles once or twice in each class, and then put our guitars aside and talk about books. More precisely, I would talk about books, he about William Burroughs. I would ask questions about Russian literature, he would rave about Burroughs. Just like I had only one song in my repertoire, he had only one writer in his, and a single book: Naked Lunch. This, in a nutshell, was my introduction to the literary movement known as the Beat Generation.

This month when it made the news that a Turkish publisher, Irfan Sanci, was being brought to trial for publishing William Burroughs´s The Soft Machine, it was the memory of my maverick music teacher that came back to me. Not least thanks to people like him, the Beats nowadays have a reputation for a hippyish wishy-washiness, a certain lack of focus. What is easily forgotten is that the Beats also introduced new values into American culture: they believed in portable homelands, self-imposed exile, uprootedness and outsiderness. Their continuing influence knows no limits. They inspired music bands in London, uprisings in Prague, graffiti artists in Paris, and they even have an underground following among young people in Istanbul.

Burroughs himself was no stranger to prosecution. In 1962 he was indicted on grounds of obscenity. Naked Lunch was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The writer Norman Mailer and the poet Allen Ginsberg had to defend the book in court before the ruling could be reversed. In Turkey, it is now our turn to stand up for the novel.

Most western media coverage focuses on the issue of freedom of expression in Turkey. This, however, is not the root of the problem, but only an outcome. The main dilemma that modern Turkey faces today is the relationship between the state and the individual. This is a country that has a strong state tradition, and a relatively weak civil society. It is an issue of seeing the state as a father who should guide, control and watch over his sons, that is, the nation. If you trust citizens you leave it up to them to choose what they want to read. If not, you protect them against inside and outside sources all the time, protect the individuals from words. Thus the reason why a Turkish government board concluded that, "the book lacks narrative unity, while it is written in an arbitrary fashion that is devoid of cohesion in meaning".

Not only the publisher of The Soft Machine but also the translator, Suha Sertabiboglu, is being indicted. Translating Burroughs is no small feat, and Sertabiboglu says this was the most difficult of the 38 books he has hitherto translated. Burroughs once said that writers worked with words and voices the way painters worked with colours. In his desire to transcend language and overcome its falsifications he used special techniques and non-linear narrative. The Soft Machine, like Naked Lunch, is written with the cut-up method. Without understanding this technique and the rationale behind it, the novel cannot be grasped in its entirety.

In Turkey today, writers, poets, artists, cartoonists, journalists, publishers and translators work in a vivid, dynamic world of culture. And yet the existing laws dangle like the sword of Damocles over our heads. The case of Irfan Sanci has shown us, once again, that Turkey urgently needs a new, progressive, more democratic constitution. The existing constitution is a byproduct of the 1980 military takeover and directly reflects its limitations. There are loopholes in the legal system, which work against freedom of expression and individual freedoms. Amendments have been made over the last few years but they are not enough.

Young people in Turkey deserve to live in a country where books are not banned, publishers are not prosecuted, art is not frowned upon. Democracy is here to stay, bans on books are ephemeral. Meanwhile, the writer, as Burroughs once beautifully said, makes a silent bow and disappears into the alphabet.

guardian