This peculiar power of the writer to transcend their physical surroundings is the thread that runs through I Will Never See the World Again. This slim volume, by the Turkish journalist and novelist Ahmet Altan, is not the overtly political book you might expect from the former columnist of Milliyet and Taraf who was jailed after a lifetime spent criticising the state. And though his book is a more or less explicit tribute to the literary imagination, it is also an example of it.
Ahmet and his brother, the economist and journalist Mehmet Altan, were detained following the failed coup d’état of 2016. They were accused of sending ‘subliminal messages’ to the supposed architects of the insurrection, which included the Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the Unites States. Gülen is the leader of an eponymous movement classed as a terrorist group by the Turkish state. Yet in a bewildering trial vividly recalled by Altan in his book, there is no mention of these alleged connections. Instead, he writes, the judges daydream. They check their phones. And then they pass a sentence of life without parole.
For Altan, criticism of the state is something like the family business. His father, the dissident writer Çeltin Altan, was a radical who was widely thought to be one of Turkey's finest men of letters. According to his son, he was put on trial 'hundreds of times’ and spent two years in prison. In the same tradition, Ahmet has spent much of his professional life denouncing the incumbent regime. In 1995 he was fired from the editorial staff of the leading paper Milliyet for publishing a piece in which he argued for the equal status of the Kurdish people: ‘Atakurd,' as the article was called, imagined a world in which Turkey was subsumed into a wider Kurdish state and its people forced to assimilate. Altan received a suspended sentence and a fine of $12,000, but only a year later was arrested once again, this time for the crime of ‘denigrating Turkishness.’ As the founding editor-in-chief and a columnist for the liberal daily Taraf (which runs the excellent slogan, ‘to think is to take sides’) he had dedicated a piece titled ‘Oh, My Brother’ to the victims of the Armenian Genocide.
So it was perhaps unsurprising that when the authorities came to arrest him for his supposed role in the 2016 coup, Altan had an overnight bag packed and waiting: he knew that day would come. As if to honour his father, as well as to point out the way in which history has a way of repeating itself, he offers his arresting officers tea, adding with a smile, ‘It’s not a bribe.’ Altan has the power to remain calm in even the most testing circumstances, and this is exemplified time and again throughout his memoir. It even seems to be a quasi-involuntary response: he cannot, for instance, explain why he refuses a cigarette offered to him in the back of a police car by responding ‘I only smoke when I’m nervous.’
Yet Altan denies he puts any store by ‘heroism and bravery,’ which he finds ‘disgraceful in a writer’. The writer’s role, he says, is to be admired and praised for his writing alone. He goes to some lengths to make this plain to his readers, writing that though he may seem to be brave or to act bravely, he is ‘not a brave person’. It seems a rather strange thing to say when all the evidence is to the contrary, but Altan is at least aware of (and comfortable with) this seeming inconsistency. ‘I am a person,’ he writes, ‘who likes being brave but, at the same time, I scorn bravery. I am the very embodiment of contradiction.’
He may at least accept the charge of defiance, if not bravery. In a passage that evokes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, he writes that ‘you can imprison me but you cannot keep me here’. Epictetus—born in what is now Turkey—is reported to have said that ‘you may chain my leg, but my will not even Zeus himself can overpower.’ Though Altan was and is principally a political writer concerned with collective governance, I Will Never See the World Again salutes the individual will, and exalts the imagination as an ultimate and ineradicable expression of freedom.
Altan’s composure does, at times, threaten to abandon him. In one striking passage, he describes ‘slipping down from the circle of “dead life”,’ like ‘Dante entering hell without Virgil at his side.’ Time, he writes, grows heavy and slow, crawling towards him ‘like a gargantuan reptile.' In an especially dark instance of the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ what Isaac Newton called tempus absoluto—time beyond human sensory ability—fills Altan's cell and threatens to smother him. It is only by creating a kind of rudimentary clock with scraps of newspaper that Altan overcomes this imagined monster.
Imagination, then, has its darker side. Altan conjures up wolves and disembodied feet and wanders ‘to the edge of madness.’ In the gloom of the prison, he imagines all the loved ones he will never see again. He takes refuge in the works of medieval Christian philosophy that he had packed in his overnight bag and the great works of literature filed away in the corners of his mind. His imagination is the solution to his torment as well as its cause:
At night, my adventures are filled with even greater activity. I wander the islands of Thailand, the hotels of London, the streets of Amsterdam, the secret labyrinths of Paris, the seaside restaurants of Istanbul, the small parks hidden in between the avenues of New York, the fjords of Norway, the small towns of Alaska with their roads snowed under.
With typical defiance Altan warns the reader in a moving final chapter against ‘playing the drums of mercy’ for him. Though he may be in prison for life, he says, he is not bereft of beauty or meaning or, indeed, of life itself.
All this is rendered deftly by Altan’s friend and former deputy editor at Taraf, Yasemin Çongar, and we can be sure that this was not a straightforward undertaking. What would become I Will Never See the World Again was initially set down by Altan on scraps of paper and given to his lawyers to be assembled later on. Yet Çongar captures Altan’s solitude and the highly personal quality of his writing in such a way that it is easy to forget her important role in its final expression.
It so happens that while I was writing this piece, Altan was released from jail. Again it was Çongar who ventriloquised him, this time in an article for The Guardian describing Altan’s sadness at leaving behind his fellow inmates and his fear that ‘they will rearrest me.’ He was right. Once again, it seems Altan knew that it wouldn’t be long before the authorities caught up with him. And again, he faced his fate with defiance, smiling and waving from the back of the police car as it sped away, back towards the prison he had left just a week before.
