ANADOLU SELÇUKLU DEVLETİ: 444

Writing of(f) Hunger, Life, and the Self: Biopolitics
and Poetics of Nâzım Hikmet’s Hunger Strike

Declaration of Originality
The intellectual content of this thesis, which has been written by me and
for which I take full responsibility, is my own, original work, and it has
not been previously or concurrently submitted elsewhere for any other
examination or degree of higher education. The sources of all paraphrased
and quoted materials, concepts, and ideas are fully cited, and the
admissible contributions and assistance of others with respect to the
conception of the work as well as to linguistic expression are explicitly
acknowledged herein.

In this thesis, focusing on his hunger strike in 9fg8, I try to problematize
the present image of, and discourse on, Nâzım Hikmet. Drawing on a wide
variety of 1ields including intellectual history, critical theory, social and
political thought, and literary and cultural studies, I embark on a critique
of the modern author/human as the uni1ied and single authority over its
life and thought.
I examine hunger strike as a biopolitical protest, considering biopolitics
to be a modern discourse in which the nation-state is de1ined by
its prime duty of “social defense” and is necessarily linked to the human
life. Speaking to the spheres presumably lying outside the state, hunger
striker suggests that the violence in1licted on her body is what the state
does to her and, thus, that the state deviates from the biopolitical norms
that de1ine itself.
In this sense, I try to understand what happens when Nâzım Hikmet,
a renowned literary and political 1igure, a communist from Turkey,
and a modern author, becomes a hunger striker. What is the signi1icance
of this event in the larger contexts of Nâzım’s life as “Turkey’s world
poet,” of the Turkish politics, and of the modernity? I try to illustrate that
Nâzım’s hunger strike can be taken as a “synecdoche” of Nâzım’s life as a
modern author who inscribes and asserts himself in his writings vis-à-
vis the others’ gazes that watch him. It is in this sense I see an analogy
between the modern author and the modern state, as both are constructed
as self-generating entities with a de1inite outside and the gazes
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that monitor them. Historically, the modern state has been conceptualized
closely following the model of the modern individualist self that
owns itself and vice versa in the Western political discourse.
It is these inside/outside, gaze/object binaries through which
Nâzım Hikmet (and the overly positive existing Nâzım Hikmet scholarship)
constructed himself that I aim to problematize in the thesis, by
drawing a provocative similarity as well as a connection between the
modern author and the modern state. Yet, while doing this, I also underscore
the fact that inside always needs outside to be able to become inside
and, thus, outside is already in. What makes the modern author
(im)possible, then, is the gazes that watch him. There are unconscious
fragments of this (im)possibility where Nâzım Hikmet writes off himself,
especially in what I term his late style. Thus, I try to show that it is this
instability that might help us 1ind still new possibilities in Nâzım Hikmet
in an age marked by human-made catastrophes that are now beyond human.
Yf,lfl words

Bu tezde, Nâzım Hikmet’in 9fg8’deki açlık grevini odağa alarak,
hâlihazırdaki Nâzım Hikmet imajı ve söylemini sorunsallaştırmaya
çalışıyorum. Entelektüel tarih, eleştirel teori, siyasal ve toplumsal
düşünce, edebiyat çalışmaları ve kültürel çalışmalar gibi farklı alanlardan
faydalanarak, yaşamı ve düşüncesi üzerinde bü tü nleşik ve tekil bir
otorite olarak kavranan modern yazar/insan kavramının bir eleştirisini
yapmaya çalışıyorum.
Açlık grevini biyopolitik bir eylem olarak ele alıyorum. Biyopolitikayı
ise, ulus-devleti “toplumu savunma” işlevi üzerinden tanımlayan ve
onu kesin bir şekilde insan yaşamıyla ilişkilendiren bir söylem olarak inceliyorum.
Devletin dışında kaldığ ı söylenen alana seslenerek, açlık grevcisi
bedenine uygulanan şiddetin ona devletin yaptığ ı bir şey olduğunu
ve, böylece, devletin devleti şekillendiren biyopolitik normlardan saptığını
göstermeye çalışır.
Bu anlamda, bilinen siyasi ve edebi bir 1igü r, Tü rkiyeli bir komü-
nist ve modern bir yazar olarak Nâzım Hikmet’in, açlık grevcisine dönü ştüğünde
ne olduğunu anlamaya çalışıyorum. Bu olayın “Tü rkiye’nin
dünya şairi” olarak Nâzım’ın yaşamı, Türkiye siyaseti ve sol siyasi pratikleri,
ve modernite bağlamlarında önemi nedir? Bu açlık grevinin Nâzım
Hikmet’in yazılarında sürekli kendisini ve yaşamını işleyen ve yeniden
üreten modern bir yazar olarak yaşamının bütününü açıklayabilecek bir
kesit olduğunu göstermeye çalışıyorum. Bu anlamda, modern yazar ve
modern devlet arasında bir analoji gözlemliyorum. Her ikisi de kendi
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kendini üreten ve belirli bir dışarısı ve onları izleyen gözlerle çevrelenmiş
şeyler olarak inşa edilir. Tarihsel olarak da Batı siyasi söyleminde modern
devlet ve modern bireyci kendilik birbirlerinin ardından modellenmiştir.
Modern yazar ve modern devlet arasında bu provokatif benzerliği
kurarak sorunsallaştırmayı amaçladığım şey Nâzım Hikmet’in kendini
inşa ettiğ i (ve çoğunlukla eleştirellikten uzak Nâzım Hikmet çalışmalarının
da devam ettirdiği) bu gibi içerisi-dışarısı, gö zleyen-gö zlenen gibi ikiliklerdir.
Ama, bunu yaparken, aynı zamanda “içeri”nin içeri olabilmek
için her zaman dışarıya ihtiyaç duyduğunun ve dolayısıyla dışarının içeride
olduğunun altını çiziyorum. Modern yazarı (na)mümkün kılan şey
onu izleyen “dışarıdaki” gözlerdir. Bu imkân(sızlık)ın, Nâzım Hikmet’in
kendisini yazmadığı bilinçdışı fragmanlarda, özellikle de onun geç dönem
üslubunda bulunabileceğ ini tartışıyorum. Bu içkin dengesizliğin bizi hâ lâ
Nâzım Hikmet’te yeni imkânlar aramaya iten şey olduğunu göstermeye
çalışıyorum, özellikle de insanın sebep olduğu ama artık insan-ötesi olan
yıkımlarla damgalanmış çağımızda.
Yf.lfl kelime
x
xi
Naz’a
“denizi ilk defa uçakla geçer gibi”
xii
xiii
Table of Contents
Abbreviations and Acronyms xv
Note on Turkish Names and Words xvi
Acknowledgements xviii
INTRODUCTION 1
I The Present 9
II The Autobiographer p
III The State Analogy 9Y
IV The Plan and Method 77
1 . WRITING OF LIFE: BIOPOLITICS, HUNGER STRIKES, AND THE PERSON OF
THE STATE ;<
r.r Biopolitics s8
r.t Genealogy of the Modern State sg
r.u Legitimacy, Gaze, and the Outside d7
r.v Hunger Strikes dg
r.w Being Like the Turkish State gY
r.x Person of the State l7
;. WRITING OF THE SELF: “NAZIM HIKMET” @A
t.r Encounters with “Him” Y8
t.t A Birth to Forget and Re-Births Yg
t.u OrigiNation fl
B. WRITING OF HUNGER: POETICS OF THE HUNGRY GAZE 1D<
u.r Knut Hamsun’s Hunger 997
u.t Franz Ka1ka’s “Hungerkünstler” 99p
u.u Nâzım Hikmet’s “Eyeballs of the Hungry” 97g
xiv
E. WRITING OFF HUNGER: NAZIM HIKMET’S HUNGER STRIKE OR “L’AFFAIRE
NAZIM” 1B1
d.9 The Concentration of Fascism in Late 9fs8s 9s7
d.7 The Military Trials 9sd
d.s The Dreyfus Affair 9sl
d.d The Navy Trial 9sY
d.g The World War II and After 9sf
d.l Toward the Hunger Strike 9ds
d.Y Hunger Strike Unleashed 9g9
d.p The “Turkish Dreyfus Affair” and Coming of Democracy 9l9
G. WRITING OFF LIFE AND THE SELF: LATE STYLE AND THE RHYTHM OF
TRANSIENCE 1@G
g.9 Late Style 9lg
g.7 Things Nâzım Didn’t Know He Wrote 9Y8
g.s Destructive Memory 9Yl
g.d The Fable and the Rhythm of Transience 9p7
CONCLUSION 1HA
I Critique 9pf
II The Present, Again 9fs
III Summary 9fl
BIBLIOGRAPHY ;D1
xv
Abbreviations and Acronyms
AIJD L’Association Internationale des Juristes Démocrates
(International Association of Democrat Jurists)
AKP Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development
Party)
CHP Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party)
CNE Comité National des E|crivains (National Committee of
Writers)
DHKP-C Devrimci Halkın Kurtuluşu Partisi-Cephesi (Revolutionary
People’s Liberation Party/Front)
DP Demokrat Parti (Democrat Party)
EU European Union
IUS International Union of Students
IoYTGD Iostanbul Yü ksek Tahsil Gençlik Derneğ i (Iostanbul
Higher Education Youth Organization)
IoTC Iottihat ve Terrakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and
Progress)
MTTB Millı̂ Tü rk Talebe Birliğ i (National Union of Turkish Students)
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
TKP Türkiye Komünist Partisi (Communist Party of Turkey)
UN United Nations
US/USA United States of America
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
PCF Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party)
TBMM Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi (Grand National Assembly
of Turkey)
WPC World Peace Council
WSPU Women’s Social and Political Union
xvi
Note on Turkish Names and Words
Throughout the thesis, I did not anglicize the Turkish words and names
even when it is conventional. For example, instead of “Nazim,” “Istanbul,”
“pasha,” I opted for “Nâzım,” “Iostanbul,” “paşa.” If the English translation
of a work in Turkish does anglicize, I modi1ied the translation accordingly
when quoting, except the titles in references and bibliography, which are
cited as in the original, whether they anglicized the Turkish names or not.
Until the passage of the Surname Law in 9fsd, individuals in Ottoman
Empire and Turkey had no of1icial surnames. Thus, between 9f87
and 9fsd, Nâzım Hikmet, too, was without one. Between 9fsd and 9fg9,
Nâzım Hikmet’s surname was Ran which he had always been reluctant to
use. When his Turkish citizenship was revoked and he was given a Polish
passport in 9fg9, his of1icial surname became Borjenski which he had virtually
never used. For this reason, throughout the thesis, including bibliography,
I refer to him as either Nâzım Hikmet or Nâzım. The latter might
sound irritating and even disrespectful, but I could not come up with a
better solution. In other cases, I often indicated the surnames adopted in
9fsd in parentheses as in “Ali Fuat (Cebesoy)” and sometimes leave them
as they are as in “Iosmet Ionönü.”
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xviii
Acknowledgements
MA students are spectral beings. They are there, but not really. They are
expected to do research, but not so much. They might be paid, but not
invested in. MA theses are equally spectral: they are limitlessly free, because
nobody will read them except the hapless thesis committee (and
the equally unfortunate partner), but they are also fully constrained by
the underdevelopment of knowledge and skills, by a “not-yet.” I try to
turn this spectrality into an advantage in this interdisciplinary study. I
formulate some ambitious arguments and yet most of the time do not
take them to their ends. Rather, I leave them as a series of provocative
gestures. I owe thanks to those who has helped me sustain this work of
spectrality and gesturing.
I want to thank my advisor Kutluğhan Soyubol. Most of the gestures
here are thought and re-tought under his critical guidance and
mentorship without which this would be a shallow(er) piece. Cengiz
Kırlı’s encouragement for the interdisciplinarity at the Atatürk Institute
as a whole help me dare to write such a thesis.
I want to express my gratitude to Meltem Ahıska. She cares about
her students, she reads them, she trusts “untrustable” MA students. The
Chapter g of the thesis was 1irst written for the experimental seminar she
taught on aesthetics and politics. In a sense, the whole thesis is designed
and written to be able to 1inally reach that chapter.
Berna Yazıcı taught me how much care and attention an ethnography
requires and how to do one. She also introduced me to the anthropology
of the state literature, from which I highly bene1it in this study.
Similarly, Ayfer Bartu Candan taught me how to read an ethnography and,
more importantly, how to read theory in and through ethnography.
Seda Altuğ introduced me to the history of the modern Middle
East. I am also thankful to her for her comments and feedbacks on the
initial thesis proposals as well as accepting to participate in the thesis
committee. For reading and commenting on the proposal and a draft,
thanks also to Ramazan O_ztan.
xix
Last summer, I attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell
University. Though held online due to the coronavirus, it was a superb
experience of learning and thinking together. Some of the courage
in this thesis was derived from this uncommon space. I want to thank
Hent de Vries, Caroline Levine, Marina Rustow, Matthew Engelke, George
Yancy, Heather Love, Stanley Fish, and the fellow participants.
Banu Bargu has read and commented on a different version of the
Chapter 9 that I have sent along without even meeting her. I am grateful
for the succinct feedback she provided and the encouragement to keep
going.
Nergis Ertürk encouraged me about the Chapter g, which was very
important, as the literary studies is a 1ield I am illiterate of and yet terribly
attracted to.
I am thankful to Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson for her nice comments
on an earlier version of the Chapter 9. Her own work also helped
me 1ind my way around genealogical discussions.
I want to thank Alex Freed, Oriana Tang, and Shaun Terry for
drawing my attention to Fredric Jameson’s work on the national allegory
and the debate around it. It helped me spell out some of my arguments
much better.
Thanks also to Berna Zengin Arslan and Bülent Küçük for kindly
accepting to take part in the thesis committee and for their questions,
criticisms, and suggestions.
For the 1inancial support I received in my last semester at the Atatü
rk Institute, I am grateful to the ATA Burs Komitesi. It has helped me
stay in Iostanbul to reach the necessary sources and complete the thesis.
I want to send my sincere thanks also to the research assistants
and the staff of the Atatü rk Institute.
The cats of Boğaziçi—each sui generis—and a pair of green parrots
I have been seeing all around Iostanbul helped me see the beauty “in
this world of calamity.” I could not miss the opportunity to thank them.
Sevim and Yavuz Oktay opened their home to me with no hesitation,
supported me ceaselessly, and always treated me as their own. I am
xx
beyond grateful. Thanks also to Oytun, Hayal, and little Ekin for their support,
friendship, and play.
My uncle Hasan Can is the 1irst person who introduced me to
Nâzım Hikmet and many other books that have had a certain impact on
me. In a way, it was his books, which always come with a particular humidity
of the basement he lives in, that inspired me to read further and
further. He will never know this, I will never tell him.
I should thank my parents. I have learned, unlearned, relearned in
and through their dif1icult experiences and lives, however painful they
have been to understand and deal with.
And Naz. No theses, dissertations, or books would be suf1icient to
express my gratitude, love, and debt to her. But, still, humbly, with the
merry knowledge of this, I dedicate this thesis to her, with love and care.
NOTE: The in-house editor of the Atatürk Institute has made detailed recommendations
with regard to the format, grammar, spelling, usage, syntax,
and style of this thesis.
xxi
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man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps
nearing its end.... one can certainly wager that man
would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of
the sea.
—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of
us was several, there was already quite a crowd.... We are
no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have
been aided, inspired, multiplied.
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
we project the outside that’s inside us.
—Fred Moten, “the gramsci monument”
Akşam nerde bitiyor nerde başlıyor
şehir nerde bitiyor sen nerde başlıyorsun
ben nerde bitip nerde başlıyorum?
—Nâzım Hikmet, “Şehir Akşam ve Sen”
9
Introduction
Only that which has no history is de=inable.
– Fredrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
The whole is the untrue.
– Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
§ I The Present
n recent decades, interest in hunger artists has greatly diminished.
Where it once paid to organize major performances of the kind, under
the personal direction of the performer himself, nowadays it is completely
impossible. They were different times.”1 This is how Franz Ka1ka
begins his “Ein Hungerkünstler” (A Hunger Artist), a short story he published
1irst in 9f77 in the German literary magazine Die neue Rundschau
and then included in the collection A Hunger Artist, the last book he
1 Franz Ka)ka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick, ed. Ritchie Robertson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, BCDB), FG.
“I
EMRE KESER
7
prepared for publication, which was published shortly after his death in
9f7d.2 Like Ka1ka’s, my initial puzzlement in the beginning of this study
was about “different times,” but rather than hunger artists, mine was concerned
with hunger strikers in Turkey: both of today and of the past. Similar
to Ka1ka, it seemed to me, at least prima facie, a reasonable conclusion
that the interest in hunger strikers and the socio-political unease
that they are capable to divulge have signi1icantly diminished over the
last decades.
In the summer of 789Y, having newly received my BA in philosophy,
broken by ahistorical methods of analytic philosophy and the free-1loating
liberal subject it operates on, I was in search of “concrete” issues and
“real” human beings that I can study further to give a historical shape to
my research and perhaps “redeem” myself. And “before my eyes,” as Ludwig
Wittgenstein suggests, a hunger strike had been going on for almost
three months at the time.3 It was the period of a widespread purge in
Turkey following the failed coup d’état on July 9g, 789l. In an effort of getting
the “parallel state” out of the “real” state, the government of Justice
and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and the president
Erdoğan declared a state of emergency that granted the government
a right to issue decrees having force of law. It continued for almost two
years and, as a result, hundreds of academics, teachers, government of-
1icers and workers were sacked from their jobs with the standard accusation,
and most of the time only with a purported suspicion, of the membership
to various “terrorist” or “parallel” organizations. Among those
2 As widely known, Ka)ka ordered his friend Max Brod to burn all the manuscripts he left
behind after his death. Many of his writings available today had not yet been published
at the time of his death. Ein Hungerkünstler is a book, a collection of four short stories,
he must have considered )inished and worth publishing. I make a larger discussion of
the story along with Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger and Nâ zım Hikmet’s poem “The Eyeballs
of the Hungry” in the third chapter of this thesis.
3 In Philosophical Investigations (§DB_), Wittgenstein suggests, “One is unable to notice
something—because it is always before one’s eyes.” In Turkey, for long, perhaps arguably
ever since Nâ zım Hikmet’s hunger strike, there has always been hunger strikes before
one’s eyes, and, as they have become everyday occurrences, they maybe become
dif)icult to notice.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
s
who lost their jobs were Nuriye Gülmen, an academic, and Semih O_zakça,
a high school teacher. To protest the state of emergency and get their jobs
back, they started a hunger strike preceded by a series of public demonstrations
and protests in Ankara. However, on the seventy-1ifth day of
fasting, they were arrested by the police and imprisoned with the accusation
of inciting people to rebel. They continued their fast inside the
prison. After almost ten months of fasting, when their state of health
reached a debilitating point, on January 7l, 789p, they ended the hunger
strike. Yet they were neither able to get their jobs back nor provided any
reparations.
Three years later, when I begin my initial research for this study
in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, this time another hunger
strike was on the news. Certain newspapers and digital media outlets
were full of news and photos of two musicians from Grup Yorum, a folkrock
protest band from Turkey, as these two hunger strikers were rapidly
approaching death in the middle of quarantine and lockdown measures.4
In June 789f, Iobrahim Gökçek, the bass guitarist, and Helin Bölek, the
singer of Grup Yorum, started their hunger strike inside the prison, demanding
the end of the concert ban on the band (and other state activities
trying to deter them from public appearance) and the release of the
imprisoned band members, most of whom had been allegedly linked with
the outlawed “terrorist” group Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-
Front (DHKP-C or alternatively known as Halk Cephesi) by the
4 Also, simultaneously, another hunger strike was being undertaken by Mustafa Koçak.
Koçak was arrested in September BCDe and then sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment
for “violation of the constitution” based on the statements of two secret witnesses
who later revealed that they were forced and threatened with torture to make false allegations
against Koçak. According to these allegations, Koçak helped the DHKP-C militants
who killed a public prosecutor in his of)ice. In demand of fair trial, Koçak started
a hunger strike which after a while turned into a death fast. He died on April Bg, BCBC,
the B_eth day of his fast, when he was twenty-eight years old and twenty-nine kilos. See
“Mustafa Koçak Dies on the B_eth Day of Death Fast,” Bianet, retrieved May DG, BCBC,
https://bianet.org/english/human-rights/BBii_B-mustafa-kocak-dies-on-B_eth-dayof-
death-fast.
EMRE KESER
d
government.5 When Bölek and Gökçek were released from the prison in
November 789f and February 7878 respectively, they did not end their
starvation which had been turned into a death fast in early January, since
the concert ban had not been lifted. On April s, 7878, the 7p-year-old Helin
Bölek, died on the 7ppth day of her fasting. What remained is a muchcirculated
photo of her from the funeral: dead in a cof1in, her emaciated
body lost in red, except her face, and her eyes fully open. Approximately
a month later, on May Y, 7878, d8-year-old Iobrahim Gökçek, too, passed
away after s78 days of fasting. He had in fact ended his hunger strike two
days before his death and had been under care in a hospital, but he could
not survive as his health had been irrevocably deteriorated during the
starvation.6 The ban on their band has not since been uplifted or eased
but remains intact.
When I compared these recent Turkish hunger strikes and their
ends to the one undertaken by Nâzım Hikmet in 9fg8, nothing but, just
like Ka1ka’s concern with the decline of the interest in hunger artists, a
5 Labeling any kind of oppositional groups or protestors as terrorist is the fundamental
rhetoric the government of AKP has been relying on since a while. This rhetoric constantly
produces terrorists and security threats to Turkey, and then, based on this justi-
)ication, the state embarks on elimination and exclusion of these terrorists and so its
insecurities. Studying the cases of Northern Ireland and Nepal, Priya Dixit calls this
practice of labeling “terroristization” in her The State and “Terrorists” in Nepal and
Northern Ireland: The Social Construction of State Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, BCDF), Dmi. Although this “terroristization” is mostly seen as a product
of AKP’s recent authoritarian politics in Turkey, as I will try to show in this thesis, terrorism
is a modern discourse that the biopolitical nation-state as “a mechanism of social
defense” operates on to be able to kill, exclude, and eliminate. Put differently, it is a
mechanism that enables the biopolitical state to kill in the name of defending society
and life. This is a long-rooted structure that is especially legible (post-)colonial, and
“near-colonial” contexts like Turkey, where there is always already a security threat and
thus perpetual insecurity problem. See Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Genealogies of
Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire (New York: Columbia University Press,
BCDm), _–DD.
6 Bethan McKernan, “Lonely Death of Grup Yorum bassist highlights Turkey hunger
strikes,” The Guardian, May m, BCBC,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/BCBC/may/Cm/lonely-death-of-grup-yorumbassist-
highlights-turkey-hunger-strikes
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
g
diminishment of interest in hunger strikers initially seemed evident to
me. For it took only eighteen days of fast for Nâzım, an internationally
renowned poet, writer, and a pioneer in Turkish literary modernity, to be
released from the prison, which was his only demand, supported by a
large public campaign underlining the unlawfulness of the 9fsp military
trials that sentenced him.7 However, even though the duration was much
longer and the harm done to the fasters was much more serious in the
aforementioned recent cases of hunger strikes, none of these strikes
could be considered “successful”—if, of course, by success we mean hunger
strikers’ demands being met by the state.
Following this line of thinking, one might inquire the differences
between the cases of Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger strike and the aforementioned
recent hunger strikers, as I am tempted to do initially. Was Nâzım,
as an appraised literary and public 1igure, able to manage the publicity
that the recent strikers were not capable of? Was he successful because
the success of hunger strike largely depends on a notion and scale of
“who may be let die” in society? Was Hikmet, as an acclaimed and wellknown
1igure, one of those who could not be easily disposed? One could
of course further argue that Nâzım lived under different times and conditions.
Today it is not plausible for hunger strikers to gain such a large
public attention. This is almost impossible in the age of neoliberalism
where human life, if not pro1itable, can easily be rendered disposable.
These might be reasonable positions to argue for, but only if we presuppose
the essential instrumentality of hunger strike and reduce it to a matter
of success or failure.
7 In the more recent hunger strikes in Turkey, the interval of fasting time is much larger,
usually much more than two hundred days. Even merely in this sense these hunger
strikes differ from Nâ zım’s, almost as two different phenomena. In the former, death
becomes a becoming, as hunger strikers by time turn into neither living nor dying beings.
Paradoxically, they dissolve the moment they establish their full sovereignty over
life. For a superb critical analysis of these prolonged hunger strikes speci)ically based
on the questions of sovereignty and temporality, see Ouzge Nadide Serin, “Writing of
Death: Ethics and the Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey” (PhD diss. Columbia University,
BCDi) and her article in Turkish “Egemen Çökü ş: Ou lüm Orucu ve Siyasal” Kampfplatz
i, no. _ (BCDF): G_–DCC.
EMRE KESER
l
Instead, we can start with the problematization of the approach
that de1ines hunger strike as a matter of success or failure. Are hunger
strikes really nothing but simply instruments to achieve certain ends and
to satisfy particular demands? As Hannah Arendt, who likes to “de1ine”
things and concepts, suggests in her account of violence, is violence—and
here I consider hunger strike an act of (self-in1licted) violence—solely instrumental,
mute, and expressionless?8 My answer is not in the af1irmative.
Thus, rather than Arendt, following Walter Benjamin’s suggestion
that violence can well be an expression or manifestation, I take hunger
strikes as events which express, manifest, re1lect, and illuminate.9 Each
hunger strike can be read as an expression of particular practices, discourses,
narratives, and cultures. As Ian Hacking suggests, it seems neither
plausible nor desirable to formulate a general theory of identities,
practices, discourses, and subjectivities.10 This applies to hunger strikes
8 Arendt says, “violence is distinguished by its instrumental character” and “where violence
rules absolutely... everything and everybody must fall silent.” See “On Violence” in
Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, D_eB), DgF, DFC and On Revolution (London:
Penguin, D_Gi), Dm.
9 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Selected Writings vol. L, ed. Marcus Bullock
and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, D__G), Bge–Bgm.
Similarly, citing Benjamin, Banu Bargu places an emphasis on the “expressiveness” of
the acts she called “weaponization of life” including practices of hunger strikes. Starve
and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, (New York: Columbia University Press,
BCDg), De–Dm. Here I do not use a terminology like “weaponization of life” or “human
weapons,” because, )irst, I feel that it “de)ines” the act or the event beforehand and, second,
Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger strike seems to me not to be intended or construed as a
weapon(ization) or meant to be a deadly struggle in the )irst place.
10 Ian Hacking, “Making Up People” in Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, BCCB). In the essay, Hacking points out that there could not be a universal
conception of how people are made up, that is, how selves are constructed. Different
selves require a historical elaboration of their own. However, with this, he does not
mean that nothing general or no historical generalizations can be said or made about
subjects, selves, and identities. Though not about hunger strikes, in another piece, Hacking
provides an example of how one can make generalizations about the ways suicide
bombers and their practices have emerged as part of modern and transnational asymmetric
warfare and insurgence discourses. See “The Suicide Weapon” Critical Inquiry iF,
no. D (BCCm): D–iB.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
Y
and hunger strikers. Rather than give a general de1inition of hunger strike
based on the instrumentality of the act and then apply it to the every case
of hunger strike, here I want to understand what Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger
strike manifests and expresses, what are the speci1icities and complexities
in it, and what it means in the context of Nâzım’s life as “Turkey’s
world poet,” as a political 1igure whose legacy historically looms large in
the imagination of leftist politics in Turkey, and as a modern author. However,
this does not mean that hunger strike is not an instrumental act at
all or that one can make no generalizations about hunger strikes. Rather,
I want to highlight that each hunger strike and hunger striker require
separate and dynamic historical elaboration that must treat them as expressive
and manifesting practices of resistance as well as goal-oriented
actions.
In her work on the death fast struggle in the early 7888s in Turkey,
Banu Bargu uses what she terms “political ethnography” as her method
“combining contextual immersion, personal observation, and in-depth
interviews” to be able to “trace the trajectory of the death fast in a way
that appreciates and conveys the rich details and paradoxical complexities
of the situation.”11 For ethnographic method of this kind makes possible
the exploration of an event, a case, or even a period in its particularity
and peculiarity without isolating it as a unique occurrence or
subsuming it under a supposedly larger phenomenon or de1inition. Each
event of hunger strike, then, requires a separate elaboration and delineation.
It is in this spirit that here I focus speci1ically on Nâzım Hikmet’s
hunger strike and interrogate what it expresses, re1lects, and manifests
in the context of his life, in the larger contexts of Turkish politics and culture
and of the discourse of modernity within which he cultivated himself.
Once again following in Ka1ka’s footsteps, I delve into a particular act
of hunger strike, that of Nâzım Hikmet, rather than compare different
hunger strikes belonging to different periods on the assumption that one
is an example of “success” whereas the other is “failure.”
11 Banu Bargu, Starve and Immolate, Bm.
EMRE KESER
p
In doing so, I still keep Ka1ka’s notion of “different times” (andere
Zeiten) in mind. Although I do not seek to answer it explicitly, the question
of how today differs from the past in the sense of “history of the present”
as Michel Foucault used the term is in play in the background of the
thesis.12 A history of the present, or genealogy, is a critical approach to
the present concepts, practices, and discourses that we take for granted
and seem to us to be beyond question. It is an approach that “explicitly
and self-consciously begins with a diagnosis of the current situation.
There is an unequivocal and unabashed contemporary orientation.”13
Taking Nâzım Hikmet’s life and hunger strike of 9fg8 as an iconic moment
and image that has historically given way to a tradition of the political
practices and discourses of the Turkish left, including a tradition of hunger
strike, I aim at a critique of the present and of the ways in which today’s
hunger strikers have been constructing themselves based on a purported
lineage between Nâzım Hikmet and themselves. Additionally, but
perhaps more directly, I attempt at a critique of the present image of
“Nâzım Hikmet,” depicted and valorized as a uni1ied and autonomous self
by the overly positive Nâzım Hikmet scholarship.
§ II The Autobiographer
The recent studies on Nâzım Hikmet usually begin by complaining that
most of the works on Nâzım is shallow and unable to do justice the rich
literary and aesthetic dimensions of his works, in that in most cases they
talk about his polemics, turbulent political life, and his love affairs, or,
worse, create an ideological battle1ield over Nâzım’s life and works. Then,
they go on to assign this “still remaining very dif1icult work” to
12 Foucault for the )irst time used the notion in the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish
to explain why he is interested in writing a history of the prison: “Simply because I
am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms
of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present.” Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, D__F [D_eD]), iD.
13 Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, D_mB), DD_.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
f
themselves. Yet, I want to argue, distinguishing these categories is an attempt
that is doomed to fail from its beginnings, since Nâzım was an autobiographical
writer who wrote all his life, politics, love into his literary
works and vice versa.14 If these studies assume that literary or aesthetic
aspects of Nâzım’s work and his “real” life, polemics, and the ideological
battles fought over his image, effect, and legacy can be distinguished or
isolated, then they are self-contradicting at best. For all such works, in
order to reach a “meaning,” and to offer a novel scholarly interpretation
of his works, have to spare large spaces at least to a number of these categories
and involve in one or more ideological battles themselves.
But what does being an autobiographical writer mean? As Paul de
Man points out in his critique of autobiography as a separate literary
genre, “autobiography... is... a 1igure of reading or understanding that occurs,
to some degree, in all texts”15 as soon as they are associated with a
name that claims to compose it. In this sense, there seems to be no work
or text that is not autobiographical. By reading a writer enough, one can
1ind autobiographical elements in all his works. However, I think that authobiography
is a 1igure of writing as much as it is a 1igure of reading. This
is evident from that it varies how much reading is enough to 1ind autobiographical
elements in different authors. In the case of Nâzım’s works,
one does not have to dig much deeper to 1ind the autobiographical; they
are plainly and sometimes nakedly there. In a sense, it is the way Nâzım
Hikmet writes. Therefore, there might be some autobiographies which
give themselves away without a need for much reading or overreading.
However, it is still not clear what is exactly the autobiographical in a literary
work. Scholars of Nâzım Hikmet usually make their case based on
a commonsense conviction that life and identity precedes autobiography.
That is to say, what is put into the text is who the person already is or
what already happened in his life at the moment of writing. However, this
14 Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Nâzım Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet (New
York: Persea Books, BCDi), DD.
15 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement” Comparative Literature _g, no. F (D_e_):
_BD.
EMRE KESER
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misses fruitful and critical possibilities through which to deal with an autobiographical
writer.
The 1irst is the possibility that writing can be seen as a performance:
the writer might be something or someone as he writes. That is
to say, while writing, he can perform a certain identity. Is not writing, after
all, an intense process throughout which one works on oneself and/or
convinces oneself of one’s oneness, no matter what one writes? Then,
identity does not precede the writing, but it comes out as the writer
writes. Second, the writer might become someone/something after writing,
most of the time to live up to what he has written, more accurately to
cohere what he has written and what he will do. Then, the writer might
be said to write in order to become something, which becomes a public
promise, even a contract perhaps, by him to become something or to have
an effect on the other.16 This contract opens his future actions to the public
gaze that would watch and check whether he 1its the written words.
Whether the gaze or maybe an assemblage or effect of written words
watch and check, or not, after writing, the writer feels it on himself in any
case.17 In the aforementioned article, De Man suggests,
We assume the life produces the autobiography as an act produces
its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that
the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine
the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by
the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in
all its aspects, by the resources of its medium?18
16 In a different context concerned with Nâzım’s poem “Mavi Gö zlü Dev, Minnacık Kadın
ve Hanımelleri,” Memet Fuat (D_BG–BCCB), Nâzım’s son-in-law immersed in the dissemination
of Nâ zım’s work, insists that most of the time Nâ zım wrote his poems to affect
others’ future behaviours rather than re)lect on their past behaviors. See his essays
“Minnacık Kadın” [D_mG], DDi; “Mavi Gö zlü Dev” [D_mG], DDm; “Gene Mavi Gö zlü Dev” [D__g],
BDg. All from Nâzım Hikmet Üzerine Yazılar (I€stanbul: YKY, BCDe).
17 Here when I mention the writer, I use the masculine pronoun “he” rather intentionally.
This is because the term “writer” in this context is the abstract way of referring to Nâzım
Hikmet and, more importantly, to the modern author as a male )igure who constructs
himself as a uni)ied subject at the center of the world.
18 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” _BC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
99
Then, we have at least three different senses of the autobiographical,
where the second and third has usually been ignored by the biographers
of the openly autobiographical writers like Nâzım: 1irst, the work contains
what the writer has already lived before the moment of writing (i.e.,
life precedes autobiography); second, the writer becomes someone,
crafts a self and subjectivity, as he writes (i.e., writing as working on oneself
and performance); and, third, the writer writes of a self that he aspires
to become or endorse in the future, perhaps an ideal or fantasy (i.e.,
autobiography precedes life).19 These are not mutually exclusive options.
There is another feature of the autobiographical I would like to
highlight here: the autobiographical is confessional, in the sense that the
writer in a poem or a novel announces what he sees as his weaknesses,
faults, and “sins.” By explicitly naming and counting these sins, the writer
wants to achieve two things. First, he wants to take his audience, the
gazes that watch or read him, under control in that, by confessing, he deprives
them of the opportunity to investigate, 1ind, and tell those sins in
the way that they want them to be transmitted. It is in this sense a way of
governing the others’ impression of himself, at least a way of having a
chance to affect the circulation of the image of themselves. Second, it is
also through confession that the writer wants to portray himself as a fragmented
whole, by which I mean that he wants to present himself as a
whole that is aware of his “weaknesses” and “sins,” in that he is as virtuous
as he is able to be cognizant of and confess them.20 Therefore, he
19 This last option carries an importance for the thesis in the sense of a more general notion
that “writing precedes life.” That is why, in the Chapter i, I try to demonstrate that
Nâzım’s writing of hunger precedes his act of hunger strike. Yet this preceding is not a
passage from the realm of signs to that of materiality, as, in Nâ zım, writing is as material
as the hungry eyeballs. In her critical autobiography of Nâzım Hikmet, Mutlu Konuk
Blasing points out this feature of the autobiographical in Nâzım, saying that “in Nâ zım’s
case... the actual person is the phantasmagoria” and “[Nâzım’s] life writes always of his
poems.” Nâzım Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet, G, e.
20 For example, in a D_GD poem named “Autobiography,” Nâ zım confesses: “I deceived my
woman/.../ I lied so as not to hurt someone else / but I also lied for no reason at all.” And
then he concludes: “I can say I’ve lived like a human being.” This is to say that although
EMRE KESER
97
portrays an image of him who has become a whole that knows that he is
not a whole.21 I think that this is an essential feature of modern writers
and hence of Nâzım Hikmet.22 This is also results from an awareness concerning
the historical quality of their works.23
he had done bad things and committed sins, he knows them and dares to confess them,
as a uni)ied human being would and should do. “Autobiography” in Poems of Nâzım Hikmet,
trans. and ed. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. (New York: Persea, BCCB), BFe.
21 This practice of confession, as Foucault argues, is in fact a technique of governmentality
and the self. By confessing, one establishes oneself as a uni)ied and conduct the other’s
gaze and the ways in which that gaze see the one. This is mostly expressed through confessional
narratives concerned with sexuality that is curiously thought of as “repressed.”
Foucault traces this practice back to the Medieval Christianity and a modality of power
which he terms as “pastoral power,” where the pastor looks after his )lock to make sure
that they confess to stay pure and help them guarantee a good life in the afterworld.
With modernity, the work of this pastoral power has been assigned to the secular biopolitical
state that guarantees health, security, and well-being of its subjects in this
world. See The History of Sexuality, Volume L: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage, D__C [D_eG]), “The Subject and Power” in Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, D_mB), About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at
Dartmouth College, L[\] (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, BCDG).
22 In his opening speech of the Nâzım Hikmet Institute at Boğaziçi University in BCDg, critiquing
the taboos surrounding Nâzım Hikmet, the Nobel-prize winning Turkish writer
Orhan Pamuk underlines the humanly sins/mistakes Nâzım might have committed. This
is not surprising, since most of Pamuk’s works, too, rely on such autobiographical-confessional
elements including wicked and yet humanly sins. This seems to be the technique
through which the modern male writers construct themselves as wholes. In his
autobiographical work İstanbul: Memories and the City (BCCi), for example, as Pamuk
tells his memories and dreams of I€stanbul from his childhood to adolescence, we witness
incidental scenes of his masturbation and ejaculation. He confesses the sins that
broke him, but underscoring awareness of these sins, he builds himself as a humanly a
whole, a self-identical being. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbTXevqrfvY retrieved
May DF, BCBD.
23 For example, Orhan Veli (Kanık) wrote in his D_gB autobiographical poem “I, Orhan Veli”:
“I have an esteemed lover / I could not tell her name / Let the literary historian )ind.”
Bütün Şiirleri, (I€stanbul: Can, D_mB [D_FD]), m_. Translation mine. Orhan Veli (D_Dg–D_FC)
was the pioneer of the D_gD poetry movement called Garip which also includes Oktay
Rifat (D_Dg–D_mm) and Melih Cevdet (D_DF–BCCB). In the polemical opening manifesto of
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9s
Taking for granted that life or identity precedes autobiography,
those who have written on Nâzım seems to overlook this multiplicity of
the senses of the autobiographical. Most of the time in tune with (or entrapped
by) Nâzım’s own portrayal of himself, critics (and biographers—
who are many) tend to talk about a Nâzım Hikmet that manages to cohere
in one way or another.24 They even force it to cohere as though there
could be only one Nâzım Hikmet, embracing too readily the categories
within which Nâzım de1ined himself, hence they end up creating a depiction
of Nâzım Hikmet that falls short of any critical edges. This might be
the reason that all of the attention and energy have been directed at a few
“critical” questions regarding Nâzım’s life: his relationship to and attitude
towards Atatürk and the Kemalist regime, his views concerning the Stalinist
USSR, and his secularism or religiosity. Concerning the 1irst, for example,
Ece Ayhan (9fs9–7887), a Turkish poet who was one of the pioneers
of the poetry movement known as the Second Novice (İkinci Yeni),
argues that in principle Nâzım Hikmet never had a problem with the Kemalist
Republic but rather he and his poetry always revolve around the
the movement, Orhan Veli stated that the poetry is the right of the working masses.
However, perhaps to distinguish theirs from Nâzım’s poetry, he said that they do not
want to defend the needs of these masses but look for and try to establish their taste in
poetry.
24 There is a huge pile of the biographical works and memoirs on Nâ zım Hikmet, most of
which was written by those who were his friends, in his immediate circles, or his sympathizers.
To name a few: Vâ lâ Nureddin, Bu Dünyadan Nâzım Geçti (D_GF); Radi Fiş,
Nâzım’ın Çilesi (D_G_); Ekber Babayev, Nâzım Hikmet: Yaşamı ve Yapıtları (D_eF); Zekeriya
Sertel, Mavi Gözlü Dev (D_ee); Kemal Sü lker, Nâzım Hikmet’in Gerçek Yaşamı (D_me);
Memet Fuat, Nâzım Hikmet (BCCC); Haluk Oral, Nâzım Hikmet’in Yolculuğu (BCD_). There
are the two biographical works written in English and primarily for the international
audience: Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of
Nâzım Hikmet (London: C. Hurst & Co., D___) and Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Nâzım Hikmet:
The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet (New York: Persea, BCDi). Though different
than the above Turkish literature and critical biographies (especially the latter), they,
too, still could not resist to cohere Nâzım’s story, which is also conditioned by the biography,
as Mutlu Konuk Blasing aptly notes in the beginning of her book.
EMRE KESER
9d
Kemalism.25 Ece Ayhan further argues that Nâ zım might have even replaced
Iosmet Ionönü, the second president of the Republic after Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk’s death in 9fsp, and this would not be a problem.
In response, Erkan Irmak, in his book Kayıp Destan’ın İzinde suggests
that although it is true that Nâzım wrote Kuvâyi Milliye (National
Forces), an epic poem telling the story of the Turkish War of Independence
“from below,” where he made explicit references to Atatürk and
cited his Nutuk (The Great Speech), he might have penned it solely for the
purpose of being let out from the prison in late 9fs8s.26 Implicitly addressing
the state of1icials, in Kuvâyi Milliye, Nâzım tried to show that he
is not an enemy of the regime and support the revolutions. Yet, at the
same time, he reconstructed the story of the Turkish War of Independence
in ways that could 1it, or at least would not detract, his Marxist political
formation. Anyway, Irmak supports his conclusion with the fact
that when this work has been re-written and re-used into Nâzım’s Memleketimden
İnsan Manzaraları (Human Landscapes from My Country, the
Landscapes hereafter), all the citations and references to Nutuk and Atatürk
had been carefully removed and the techniques of narration has
been accordingly regulated in a way that would turn the work into a critique
of the regime based on the post-war conditions that had let down
the real heroes of the preceding war. Relying on Nâzım’s references to the
25 Ece Ayhan, “Nâzım Hikmet’i Yeniden Bir Dü şünelim” in Kürt Çiçekleri: Özgür Gündem’den
Yazılar, ed. Uğur Yanıkel, (Pasaj.org, BCDG), DD–Di. First published in D__B. For a
recent discussion that touches on Ece Ayhan’s take on Nâzım in Turkish, see, Barış
Ouzkul, “Ece Ayhan Dü zyazısında Avam ve Havas” Birikim Haftalık, February Bi, BCBC and
Erdem Ou zgü l, “Ece Ayhan Haksız mı?” Birikim Güncel, February BG, BCBC.
26 Erkan Irmak, Kayıp Destan’ın İzinde: Kuvâyi Milliye ve Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları’nda
Milliyetçilik, Propaganda ve İdeoloji (I€stanbul: I€letişim, BCDD). The poem depicts
ordinary soldiers, peasants, and of)icers as heroes of the War. In this sense, it tells the
story from below, but its from-belowness comes from above, as some of the heroic examples
was taken, with proper citations, from Atatü rk’s The Great Speech which covers
and reconstrues the events between D_D_ and D_Bi. It is a speech delivered by Atatü rk at
the second congress of the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) in
D_Be and since then constitutes a single most important source for the “of)icial” historical
account of the War and the foundation of the republic.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9g
Nutuk, Irmak further argues that while Kuvâyi Milliye speaks top-down
with the language of the state, the Landscapes talks the language of common
people, who waged, suffered the war, but was later let down, therefore,
reaching the conclusion once again that Nâzım was critical of the
regime. Irmak invites us to take a g88-page work where all the references
to Atatürk, his regime, revolutions, or any of his “ideas” or “ideals” are
intentionally left out as an evidence that Nâzım had de1initely had problems
with the Kemalist regime.
There are several issues with these accounts. Irmak seems to miss
the point he himself made. If Kuvâyi Milliye, as he suggests, was written
for the state of1icials to read, it is only natural that Nâzım told the story
in the way they would want it to be told, in their own tone and language.
(And, as Irmak himself underscores several times in the book, it was written
for and sent out to the state of1icials through Nâzım’s uncle Ali Fuat
(Cebesoy), especially Iosmet Ionönü, to be read by them, and not exactly
intended for publication). Likewise, if the Landscapes were written for
the ordinary Turkish citizens and/or the lower classes, a change in tone,
narration, and language (and, perhaps, “cited works” section) of the
poem would be nothing but expected. However, the fundamental issue
here concerns how we can ever be sure that a literary work is written
solely for practical purposes. Put differently, how can we ever be sure that
a work is written for such-and-such purposes? What if, while writing
Kuvâyi Milliye, Nâzım founds ways of coming to terms with the regime;
that is, what if he was cultivating (wittingly or unwittingly) a republican
identity, was being transformed, and getting attuned to the Kemalist regime
and its revolutions? He might be crafting, “revealing” a self that
comes to terms with and maybe conscripted to the of1icial narrative of
the War of Independence. Had not Nâzım been already acceptant of various
fundamental aspects of the regime, especially its strictly secular and
“progressive” projects? Had not he seen in the Kemalist transformations
and reorderings aspects of a “bourgeois revolution” which would bring
the real revolution of proletariat one step closer, as the traditional
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9l
Marxist historical materialism envisions the evolution of revolutions?27
Was Hikmet interpreting the Kemalist revolution and its of1icial narrative
of the Turkish War of Independence as an anti-imperialist victory, also a
signi1icant theme in the of1icial discourse of the USSR? More importantly,
can all these not be true together at the same time? Do we have to resolve
whether Nâzım was supporting Kemalism or not (as Ece Ayhan and
Irmak seem to do) at once? Do we have to admit that Nâzım can be only
one thing but not others? Should he always be constructed as a uni1ied
self and subject, as if he made all his choices at once when he was a prior
“I,” as if there was a time that Nâzım created himself and only then started
to write, as if there was a pre-writing “Nâzım” that is in certain sense omniscient.
28
This seems to result from what Foucault calls the “absolute character
and founding role” that the author/subject constructs for himself
and the critics attribute to him “in undertaking the internal and architectonic
analysis of a work (be it a literary text, philosophical system, or scienti
1ic work).”29 Yet this is not only a fault on critics’ and biographers’ behalf,
but also the way Nâzım makes himself as a modern author, as the
discourse of modernity has been very much marked by self-identity and
self-assertion. In writing, Nâzım asserts himself, the “I,” so forcefully that
27 These are Nâzım’s own descriptions mostly informed by the doctrines of the Communist
Party of Turkey (TKP) that see the establishment of the Turkish Republic as a bourgeois
revolution, a progressive step taken toward the coming of socialist/communist revolution,
as there would not be such revolution without being preceded by a bourgeois revolution.
To cite a few early essays where Nâzım argued along these lines: “Tü rkiye’de
Amele Sınıfı ve Amele Meselesi” [D_Bg], “Muddei Umumi Bey I€stical Buyurmayınız”
[D_iC], “Çocuğun I€smi” [D_iC]. All from Yazılar (L[hi–L[ki) (I€stanbul: YKY, BCDe). Following
this line of thinking, it would not be wrong to argue, Nâzım Hikmet and the leftist
politics in Turkey has adopted an overly secularist outlook, labeling most of the resistance
movements that contain Islamic tones and elements, including the Kurdish
Sheikh Said rebellion in the early D_BF, as “reactionary” (mürteci or gerici in Turkish),
resisting the progressive elements of the bourgeois revolution.
28 Mutlu Konuk Blasing, too, suggests that Nâzım “himself played a major part in creating
the myth of ‘Nâzım’.” Nâzım Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet, D_.
29 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New
York: Pantheon, D_mg), DDe–DDm.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9Y
he elevates himself to a level of the sole agent of his own action and thinking.
30 It is for this reason that the critics usually thinks of him as a source
of all the signi1ications which 1ill his work and as a complete, absolute
character that is either one thing or another, that can never be split or
mutliple. This kind of indivisibility and autonomy is the principle behind
almost all of the pieces he wrote, in which he was elevated to the role of
the “hero” 1ighting a war of one man against all, against the rest of the
world, against the outside. That is why one can never plausibly manage
to forget or ignore Nâzım’s presence while reading a poem or a novel of
his, even when the narrative is not in the 1irst person or when he was
most realist.31 Nâzım is thus always either against or for. To the multiple
gazes, in both metaphorical and literal senses of the term, that watch him,
he tries to prove that he is this or that. Yet it is in fact those gazes that
make him speak as an author and that make him exist and prevail one
way or the other, that is to say, make him (im)possible at all. (These are
mainly the points I make in the Chapter 7).
30 In his study of historical origins of the autobiography and the modern individualist self
in the West, Michael Mascuch de)ines autobiography as “a performance, a public display
of self-identity, even when composed secretly for an audience of one.” And the individualist
self, coming out of this performance, is “a producer and a consumer of stories
about himself and other selves which place the self at the center of the system of relations,
discursive and otherwise.” Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-
Identity in England, Lm[L–Ln[L (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, D__G), _, BD.
31 At the dawn of the realism, Gustave Flaubert wrote that “[i]n my book I do not want
there to be a single movement, or a single re)lection of the author” (Letter to Louise
Colet, February m, DmFB); “No lyricism, no comments, the author’s personality is absent.
It will make dreary reading.” (February D, DmFB). Documents of Modern Literary Realism,
D_Ge, _D, emphasis in the original. Although Nâ zım’s realism is informed more by Balzacian
realism, he was also planning to diminish the voice of the author in his realist experiments.
In early D_gCs, while working on the Landscapes, he noted that if readers are
to be shaped by a realist writer who is an engineer of the soul (ruh mühendisi), this
would be much easier and without opposition if they do not notice the presence of author.
Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. Di, February Di, D_gB, in Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusane’den
Mektuplar (I€stanbul: YKY, BCD_), FC. Despite this, as I try to demonstrate in the Chapter
B, Nâ zım was most of the time present in his texts, especially in the Landscapes, his realist
opus magnum.
EMRE KESER
9p
§ III The State Analogy
It is in this sense his hunger strike expresses and manifests Nâzım himself,
since what makes a hunger striker (and a hunger artist, as in Ka1ka’s
case) possible is the gaze itself. Both hunger strikers and artists can exist
as long as there is a gaze (or gazes) that watches their performances. This
fragment of Nâzım’s life, thus, illuminates that while, paradoxically, constructing
himself as a complete, autonomous, and uniform subject, he always
needed to speak to the gazes emerged in and through the power
relations he was involved in. That is to say, he would not be in the absence
of the gazes he speaks against. Without these gazes and relations, or his
relationship to the other, there would not be Nâzım Hikmet as a literarypolitical
1igure, and his life would neither be a public concern nor a public
spectacle at all. I argue that Nâzım Hikmet as an eminent poet, writer, and
a political 1igure was the outcome of a complex process of subjectivity
formation embedded within the constitutive effects of multiple and
mostly indivisible gazes. It is this mode of being under and with the gaze
that is manifest in his hunger strike or his choice of hunger strike as a
method of resistance.
Hunger strike is an act that has appeared when human life for the
1irst time has come to be at the center of politics, or when human life has
become the central occupation of the modern state. More accurately, the
modern state is de1ined fundamentally through its relationship to human
life. It is the discourse of biopolitics that de1ines the modern nation-state
primarily based on its relationship to human life (i.e., what it can do and
what cannot do with it), because the existence of the state is justi1ied in
its ability “make” and “foster” life and in its defense of the society. The
state is supposed to protect its citizens from each other and external
threats, concern with their health, life expectancy, and well-being, and
not in1lict violence on them unless it is justi1ied by a more and better life.
For this reason, a gaze, most of the time called public (sphere), or simply
society “outside” the state, is put to work, and the work is to monitor,
keep an eye on, the state all the time, in case it violates these conditions
and thus deviates from the norm of being a state. It is this inside/outside,
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9f
state/gaze, binary that has made possible hunger strike as a form of resistance,
because hunger strikers, talking to the gaze, either suggest that
the state in1licts violence on them through certain acts and politics or
provoke an image of the state that is unable to look after its citizens based
on modern signi1ication of hunger as a social problem, a problem that
concerns the entire society and at most the state that is supposed to make
life and prevent hunger.
It is intriguing that, just as the modern author, the modern state is
thought to be a uni1ied entity and is monitored by the multiple gazes, and
that human life can be conceived only through its relationship to the
state, as the state is de1ined through its relationship to life. This mode of
thinking-like-the-state is rather apparent when we consider that hunger
strike in principle is an attempt to usurp the state’s monopoly over sacri-
1ice by forming a resistance in which they take the decision on sacri1ice
of their bodies in their own hands; that is, it is no more the state that decides
the sacri1ices to be made. And, paradoxically, hunger strikers in a
certain sense still let the state decide whether they are going to live or
not, because in the vast majority of the cases of hunger strike, the demands
of the strikers ultimately require the action of the state.
There seems to be a strange relation and analogy here. The author
makes his life subject himself to the gazes. And the modern state justi1ies
itself in being subject to the gazes that watch for its violations of human
life, in being constantly checked out. Both make themselves as autonomous,
indivisible objects. Speaking to the gaze, hunger strikers suggest
that the state deviates from the norm of human life, but at the same time,
acting like the state, they usurp the state’s monopoly over sacri1ice. What
seems to give life to these three modes of being is the gaze. However, they
have gazes of their own. The state have wide surveillance mechanisms.
The gaze of hunger striker relies on the gaze of hunger as a social problem,
and the author is the gaze that look at, speaks to, the other gazes. It
is this modern relationship of the gaze that binds three modes of being:
being an author, being a hunger striker, and being a state. This is the relation
and analogy that I problematize in this thesis.
EMRE KESER
78
In his “infamous” essay, Fredric Jameson discusses that the “thirdworld”
literatures rely on an allegory between the individual and the nation
con1lating the private and public, unlike the “1irst-world” literatures:
Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested
with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a
political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of
the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled
situation of the public third-world culture and society.32
The problems associated with his notions and generalizations like “all
third-world texts are necessarily... allegorical” notwithstanding,33 Jameson’s
comments are not without merit but require some quali1ications
and reconsiderations. First, among other things, he simply points out that
the “non-Western” (“third-world” in his language, or, “Global South,” as it
is now called) literatures and texts establish a necessary and visible connection
and con1lation between the person and the nation, the individual
and the nation-state, the private and the public. However, while pointing
this out, he seems to miss the fact that this connection and con1lation is a
result and/or side-effect of colonial processes bringing the Western humanism
and civilization to the “anti-human” and “uncivilized” culture of
the East. These colonial humanizing practices are mostly established
through the formation and transfer of the modern state apparatus as the
defender of life and society into the “non-West,” which must replace the
alleged Eastern despotisms where human life has no importance or value
whatsoever. It is at this point that the individual story becomes
32 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” Social
Text no. DF (D_mG): G_, emphasis in the original.
33 The most well-known criticism of Jameson’s essay comes from the Marxist Urdu critic
and poet Aijaz Ahmad. Although Ahmad dislikes any sort of identity talk, his criticism
relies on the idea that the one mentioned and whose speci)icities overlooked with a desire
of generalization in Jameson is the postcolonial subject, namely Ahmad himself. See
Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” Social Text
no. De (D_me): GF–mm. For another take on the discussion, also see Imre Szeman, “Who’s
Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization” South Atlantic
Quarterly DCC, no. i (BCCD): mCi–mBe.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
79
“necessarily” the national story in the East. Placing (or leaving behind)
the biopolitical modern nation-state in the East but at the same time, with
its very existence, constituting the perpetual security issue to it, the
Western colonial humanism brings about this necessary con1lation. For
the biopolitical nation-state that the colonizer left behind (or, alternatively,
the one that is constructed through self-modernizing nationalist
projects, as in Turkey), turns into a paranoid security state that constantly
produces its own terrorists and enemies as a threat to the society.
This enables the biopolitical state to kill in the name of fostering life and
defending society. As life is always under threat in the “East,” individuals
must (or are forced to) act and see like the state to defend it, even in their
practices of resistance. This is reinforced by the colonial introduction of
the notion of human as the author who owns and produces itself with
de1inite inviolable borders and boundaries.
Second, unlike Jameson, I do not use allegory. For, although the allegories
under consideration are not “an elaborate set of 1igures and personi
1ications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences”
but rather “in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present
of the text,”34 Jameson appears to suggest that all our narratives are
in fact allegorical as a way of defending the much-criticized notion of “totality”
and its importance in our critical practices, especially in his recent
revisit of the essay.35 This is the Marxist narrative structure that Jameson
celebrates and refashions in most of his works. According to this narrative
structure, all events can be ordered into a narrative, as they all can
ful1ill a certain function in it. It seems to me that the narrator in such a
narrative structure is all-seeing outside being that can put every event
after its occurrence into a pre-given narrative form by assigning it to
function/role in the story. Suspicious of the narrator of this kind and of
the related notion that all narratives are necessarily allegorical, here I opt
for “analogy” in the very loose sense of the term: there is just an historical
similarity (an analogousness) between the state and the human. (In the
34 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” e_.
35 Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso Books, BCD_). Though not substantially,
I engage with this work more in the Chapter B.
EMRE KESER
77
Chapter 9, I try elaborate on both of these points emphasizing the connection
between the biopolitical nation-state, colonialism, the social, and humanism.)
More speci1ically, I discuss that there is an analogy between the
“Nâzım Hikmet,” the main character of Nâzım’s writings and the state, between
the author and the state. That is to say, 1irst, the hunger strikerauthor
reproduces the state by reiterating it as the protector of the life;
second, the author-hunger striker acts like the state in the sense that both
are determined with the gazes, the outside, that watch them. Simply, the
autobiography of the author is the (auto-)biography of the state.
More generally, in the thesis, I try to ask in what ways do our
modes of thinking of ourselves and our lives emulate the thinking of the
state? That is, in what ways do we construct ourselves, like the state does
or is constructed, as an indivisible and autonomous unity under and with
the gaze, and in what ways do we think our lives solely in relation to the
state embracing the mechanisms of the state and vice versa? And in what
ways do the gaze/object, outside/inside binaries play a paradoxical role
in this construction? For it is against the gaze, as a performance, we construct
ourselves as a unity, but at the same time it is only through the gaze
that our existence can be recognized. Put differently as a question, although
we always need the help or simply the gaze of others, how come it
is that we construct ourselves indivisible unities? And how is it that these
anthropocentric and state-centric discourses posit(ion) us against the
“outside,” the nonhuman, or what is supposedly outside the human? Are
there possible ways of thinking unlike ourselves, unlike the state, and unlike
the human? These are the questions I attempt to pursue in this study.
§ IV The Plan and Method
To be able to do so, throughout the thesis, I draw on multiple 1ields including
intellectual history, critical theory, social and political thought,
literary and cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. Though it is impossible
to say that I am able to do the justice to the subtleties in all these
1ields. In elaborating Nâzım’s hunger strike in 9fg8, I pay attention to the
historical details of the event with a particular emphasis on how Nâzım’s
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
7s
hunger has been publicized, circulated, and narrated before, during, and
after the strike. This is the work I undertake in the Chapter d. As I have
already hinted at in this introduction, the Chapter 9 lays out the theoretical
groundwork upon which most of the subsequent chapters are based.
Overall, I primarily read what Nâzım Hikmet wrote and his act of
hunger strike, proposing a different and somehow unsettling reading
strategy. First, reading literally, I take him as part of a discourse, the discourse
of modernity, which is largely marked by the self-identity and selfassertion
rather than approach him hagiographically as the current literature
mostly tends to do. This is what I try to do in the Chapter 7 where I
aim to demonstrate the ways in which Nâzım constructed and asserted
himself as a uni1ied self despite all the precarity he had been exposed to
and all the multiplicity he had come to embody.
Second, my reading lets him contradict, fragment, and break, rather
than cohere as a whole. Related to this, I do not attempt to distinguish
the myths from the facts. For it is the inseparability of the two that
opens up new possibilities in reading Nâzım Hikmet as an autobiographical
writer in the multiple senses of the term autobiography that I have
tried to show above. For Nâzım Hikmet writes himself in retrospect as
much as he writes it as a fantasy and a promise. I read him against the
grain. I put him together with the others that are prima facie seen as disparate
1igures, texts, modes, in order to 1ind the other, the strange, the
unknown in him. This is what I mainly try to achieve in the Chapter s and
g. The Chapter s brings together Nâzım’s “The Eyeballs of the Hungry”
with Ka1ka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger to shed light
on the modern discourse of hunger through the notion of the gaze. I investigate
the ways in which not only hunger in many different forms has
come to be an object of the gaze but also how it has come to be an object
to have its own gaze directed at the other. I attempt to show that the discursive
construction of hunger strike through the signi1ications that the
issue of hunger gained with modernity can be found in these three works
written by three different literary 1igures who are otherwise unlikely to
be thought under the same light. This lends support to my argument that
Nâzım’s writing of hunger precedes his hunger strike.
EMRE KESER
7d
The Chapter g suggests that Nâzım Hikmet had a “late style” by
drawing upon Theodor Adorno’s and Edward Said’s discussions of the
concept. I argue that this unruly, un1itting, and lyric late style Nâzım had
developed towards the end of his life negates the indivisibility, unanimity,
and autonomy of Nâzım by decentering, or even unmaking, the self, as he
explores how 1leeting, contingent, minute, and precarious a human being
is in the face of the sublime earth. This time I read Nâzım Hikmet together
with Fredrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin.
So, to repeat, I employ a dual reading strategy: the 1irst is literal
while the second is what I call “reading against the grain.” On the 1irst,
reading literally, I try to show the ways in which Nâzım Hikmet, as a modern
author, constructs himself as a whole, as the sole authority over his
words and acts, speaking against the gazes that supposedly monitor him,
à la the modern state. He wants to subject himself to the objectifying
gazes of the others to be able to become a uni1ied subject with a de1inite
inside and outside. On the second, reading against the grain, I point to the
sheer impossibility of this subject, as what makes it (im)possible is its
constant need for the gazes of the other. Put differently, it needs the outside
to be able to become inside. Building on this instability, I read Nâzım
Hikmet against the grain by putting him together with the ones that is
strange to him, to 1ind the unconscious marked by this impossibility of
the uni1ied subject, an impossibility that opens up new critical possibilities.
The tone and mode of my critique is negative throughout. In addition
to what I have learned from Adorno—“[negative dialectics] is suspicious
of all identity”36—this choice is conditioned by the overly positive
Nâzım Hikmet scholarship that is even detrimental to the Nâzım it valorizes,
as I have tried to emphasize thus far. In an oversimpli1ied way, my
negative critique might sound like that Nâzım Hikmet is a modern author-
subject shaped by the Western post-Enlightenment discourse/epistemology.
In his recent perceptive critique of the postcolonial criticism,
Fadi Bardawil points out that the postcolonial criticisms of the
36 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, BCCe [D_GG]), DgF.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
7g
nonmetropolitan intellectuals and thoughts, which are done in the metropolis
and shaped by the “metropolitan unconscious” that take an implicit
or explicit opposition to the West, are overwhelmingly based on
what he terms as “epistemology critique.”37 That is to say, in our critiques,
we keep identifying the ways in which the intellectuals and texts are
structured by the Western/Eurocentric epistemologies. Bardawil’s critique
might well apply to the oversimpli1ied version of my argument in
this study. However, I hope that my negative critique—which is directed
at the ways Nâzım Hikmet’s thought and agency is shaped by the post-
Enlightenment Western notions of the self, subjectivity, and authorship—
is justi1ied by the fact that it runs against the stagnant literature. Also, and
more importantly, the above dual reading might save me from the charge.
For, on the one hand, I read Nâzım as a modern author that construct
himself as a whole, that is, I do the usual epistemology critique, on the
other hand, I point to the sheer impossibility of this modern Western
ideal, focusing my attention on the novelties, nuances, rhetorical and narrative
techniques in Nâzım’s oeuvre. In the concluding chapter, I revisit
this discussion in more detail.
37 Fadi Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, BCBC), D.

7Y
!
Writing of Life: Biopolitics, Hunger Strike, and the
Person of the State
The political state everywhere needs the guarantee
of spheres lying outside it.
– Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’
the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of
our days is not to try to liberate the individual from
the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate
us both from the state and from the type of individualization
which is linked to the state.
– Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”
İnsanı yaşat ki devlet yaşasın.
[Make the human live so that the state can live.]
– Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
he Turkish edition of Foucault’s 9fYl lectures at the Collège de
France “Society Must Be Defended” omits the quotation marks in the
title of the original French edition and the preceding English translation,
T
EMRE KESER
7p
and more curiously the back cover of the edition reads: “This important
thinker of twentieth century, analyzing race war discourses and conquest
narratives, embarks on a protection of society from ‘bio-power’ and state
racisms.”1 But, wait a minute. Does Foucault really want to “protect society”
in these lectures? Does not he rather argue that the discourse on the
defense of the society is what leads to the idea of the modern nation-state
and biopower and, thus, justi1ies state racisms—society and nation being
modern constructions and the new subjects of history? Why then the
blurb claims that Foucault wants to defend society and, perhaps more importantly,
emphasizes that society must really be defended without quotation
marks? What would be the source of this “misinterpretation”?
What kind of a problem of cultural and political mistranslation is this?
What is it that turns Foucault into a defender of society in Turkey?
In this chapter, I do not exactly look for answers to these questions,
but I travel around, offer some hints on, and make several gestures
toward them. Here my primary goal, working mostly through Foucault’s
own formulations, is to discuss biopolitics as a modern discourse that
places human life under the protection and guarantee of the modern
state, that urges the state to defend the society by all means and at all
costs, and grounds its existence on this prime duty of social defense.
Then, I move on to argue that hunger strike is a modern biopolitical resistance,
as it capitalizes on this discourse of the state as the protector of
life and suggests that the state is unable to do so as evident in the suspended
body of hunger strikers. It calls for those who are “outside” the
state to look at them and, thus, look at the state deviating from the norm
of being state. With this, I try to discuss that hunger strike is a practice of
resistance that reiterates the notion of the biopolitical state but at any
moment, especially as the striker turns toward death, is able to escape
from the reaches of biopower. Yet, paradoxically, the hunger striker dissolves
when becomes the sovereign over life. Despite this latter aspect, I
1 The original Turkish version reads: “Yirminci yü zyılın bu önemli dü şünü rü , ırklar savaşına
ilişkin söylemleri ve fetih anlatılarını çözümleyerek, toplumu ‘biyo-iktidardan’dan
ve devlet ırkçılıklarından korumaya girişiyor.” See Toplumu Savunmak Gerekir, trans.
Şehsuvar Aktaş (I€stanbul: YKY, BCDm).
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
7f
predominantly argue that it is a practice that is closely connected to and
reinforces the modern state as the defender of life and society. (As I said
in the Introduction, this choice is conditioned by the nature of Nâzım Hikmet’s
hunger strike. Still, I mention what the other options might be
while elaborating on this below.) This makes up the 1irst two parts of the
chapter.
In the third part, I try to inquire into a potential resemblance between
the idea of the author in particular, the individual in general, and
the modern state. In what ways the individual is constructed as the sovereign,
the autonomous and self-producing entity, and in what ways this
is similar to the discourse of the modern nation-state, the self-enclosed
entity with borders, with a de1inite inside and outside, and as the sole
rationality and authority of life. To be more speci1ic, I try to interrogate
the ways in which the modern author is constructed analogous to the
making of the modern state, the ways in which the modern political and
literary authors/authorities interact with each other and are modeled after
one another. As I have discussed brie1ly in the Introduction and will
discuss more substantially in the next chapter, as a modern author, Nâzım
Hikmet tends to establish himself, strives to be or appear as, the indivisible
authority over his life, word, and action. Keeping this in mind, on a
more general level, here I attempt to investigate, or once again make a
gesture toward, the ways in which modern individuals practice state and
the modern state is imagined as a person, as an author through a series
of anthropomorphisms and personi1ications in Western political thought
that permeated the colonial practices. In conclusion, I try to discuss that
we tend to be like states in two senses. First, we are like states in the
sense that we call the state to arms to safeguard life and reinforce this
everywhere, even in our resistance practices. That is, we constantly reproduce
it. Second, we are like states in the sense that we de1ine ourselves
as single uni1ied entities, individuals, self-producing wholes with
de1inite inviolable borders and boundaries vis-à-vis others outside. In
conclusion, following Foucault, I attempt to show that “the state is a
EMRE KESER
s8
practice”2 or, differently, our practices de1ined by the discourse of the human
are “stately.”
§ O.O Biopolitics
What does it mean to say that biopolitics is a discourse that places human
life, society, population under, and fundamentally links these to, the modern
state? There are different elements to dissect here: state, society, population,
human, modernity. First of all, this is to say that the notions state,
society, population, and human are modern constructions. To oversimplify,
the human has come to be the principle of the order of things, or the
ordering principle, starting from the seventeenth century. This is the issue
Foucault deals with in The Order of Things in detail, charting the archaeology
of the human sciences, that is, biology, linguistics, and political
economy: man as a species being, man as a speaking being, and man as
producing and consuming being. With this centering of the human in our
discursive practices, the human life has come to be the ordering principle
of our politics as well.3 The state has been grounded on its duty of protection
and guarantee of the inviolable human rights, of which “right to
life” is the most fundamental. Thus, everything that relates to the human
life has come to be put under scrutiny and has made their ways into our
discourses: rates of mortality, longevity, average life expectancy, child
mortality, reproductive and sexual health, etc. And the object these notions
speak through and about has come to be identi1ied as the “population”
by which we often refer to a generality or totality, an organism of its
own. These issues also make up the notion of what is called “the social.”
This is one of the most important works of the dividing and
2 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, L[nn-
L[n\, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
BCC_), Bee.
3 It might be fruitful to trace Foucault’s notion of biopolitics emerged in the mid-D_eCs to
his earlier works written in D_Gs like the Order of Things (D_GG) and the Birth of the Clinic
(D_Gi). For an example of such attempt, see Catherine Mills, Biopolitics (New York:
Routledge, BCDm), BC–Bi.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
s9
compartmentalizing modernity. The category “the social” has been a
realm often distinguished from the political, the realm of public discussion,
parliament, democracy, etc. and the economic, the realm of distribution,
needs, and trade. The social has come to constitute the realm concerned
with phenomena such as the crime, disease, poverty, disasters,
household, etc. The issue for the state, then, has become how to govern
the social and population in the most ef1icient way, how to optimize life,
as the emergence of the modern state is by no means separate from the
development of capitalism.
And soon it has been discovered that it is the norm and normalization
that are the most suitable techniques to govern society. To protect
the human life, the state has come to be the regulative force, which is supposed
to bring, for example, mortality rates, poverty and disease 1igures,
to a balance. That is to say, the state has to account for the health and
well-being of the population measured through statistical and demographic
facts and descriptions shaped around a norm and a level of normality.
If these carefully measured and recorded facts and descriptions
suggest an anomaly in the population, for example, if the child mortality
rates are observed to increase too much, the state has to make the necessary
regulations that will bring those rates to a normal, an acceptable
level. Thus, the population and society are the objects that the state constantly
interferes with, make regulations and adjustments, applies its
forces on to bring them to a level of normality, to improve the life in the
general and biological sense of the term, “man-as-species.”
There is also more individualized workings of this biopolitical
state. Or, to put it in a way that is more congruous with the Foucault’s own
terms, there are two poles of biopower.4 The 1irst pole is what I have told
4 Foucault explains “two poles of biopower” as follows: “One of these poles... centered on
the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion
of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into
systems of ef)icient and economic controls.... The second... focused on the species body,
the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological
processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and
EMRE KESER
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in the previous paragraphs. He gives this pole two different names: biopolitics
or regulatory power. The second pole, however, is individualizing:
it is called disciplinary power and sometimes referred to as anatomo-politics
by Foucault. It applies to the individual body to shape it, to discipline
it, to make it docile and normal. This second pole is what Foucualt mostly
deals with in Discipline and Punish where the contrast is mainly between
the disciplinary power and the sovereign power. Sovereign power runs
within the limits of law, within a legal/illegal framework. The question its
punitive mechanisms rest on is whether an act is legal or not, whether a
particular person is guilty or not. That is, the focus is on the crime and
the aim is bodily public punishment and exclusion. On the other hand,
disciplinary power operates more widely through its ability to make nuanced
distinctions, since its basis is norms rather than the law. It is capable
of making distinction between the healthy and the sick, the normal
and the abnormal, the heterosexual and the homosexual, the delinquent
and the docile (i.e., dividing practices). Its punitive focus, therefore, is on
the criminal rather than the crime, and its aim is to correct, rehabilitate,
normalize, set the criminal right by the existing norms. Therefore, while
sovereign power is exclusionary, violent, and based on visible bodily punishment,
disciplinary power is corrective, carceral, rehabilitating, and
normalizing.
In Foucault’s account of biopower, however, there are two related
points that he does not develop or rather leaves underdeveloped. First,
when he talks about biopower, or about the state as the protector of life,
the life he is talking about is not only biological life, especially when it
comes to the practices of resistance emerged within biopower. In the 1irst
volume of the History of Sexuality, he says,
longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary.” This means that biopolitics
is one of the poles of biopower. That is, the latter refers to a larger phenomenon in
Foucault’s language. Yet throughout the thesis I use them interchangeably and refer to
the biopower in Foucault’s use. Also, note that according to Foucault, the )irst (disciplinary)
pole )irst appeared in the seventeenth century, while the second (biopolitical)
pole “formed somewhat later.” History of Sexuality, Volume L: An Introduction (New York:
Vintage, D__C), Di_.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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against this power... the forces that resisted relied for support on
the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being....
One no longer aspired toward the coming of the emperor of the
poor, or the kingdom of the latter days, or even the restoration of
our imagined ancestral rights; what was demanded and what
served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs,
man’s concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plenitude
of the possible.... The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health,
to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions
or “alienations,” the “right” to rediscover what one is
and all that one can be, this “right”... was the political response to
all these new procedures of power which did not derive... from the
traditional right of sovereignty.5
This passage is of vital importance, because it shows that, unlike what is
usually thought, Foucault does not think that the life that is the object of
biopower does not just refer to biological life, but it includes other senses
of life such as a happy life, an authentic human life with various possibilities,
and socially, politically, or spiritually meaningful life, and a life that
is worth living, and so on. That is, unlike Giorgio Agamben’s take, Foucault’s
notion does not rely on a distinction between animal life and quali
1ied life.6 As my discussion of hunger strikes below will clarify,
5 The History of Sexuality, Volume L: An Introduction, DgF.
6 This is one of the reasons why I think that Agamben’s account is futile and rather follow
Foucault more closely. In the Homo Sacer, Agamben distinguishes between bios and zoē.
The former, according to him, is a politically meaningful life, a quali)ied and perhaps an
authentic life, while the latter is the animal life, or life in the most basic and biological
sense, that is produced by the states and the world order. Stripping off the individuals
of their social and political attachments, qualities, possibilities, this order is based on
the logic of zoē that constantly produces bare lives, mere biological existences. Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, D__F). That is, Agamben implicitly suggests that we have to look
for politically meaningful lives that is beyond the minimum biological existence. However,
as Foucault appears to suggest, the biopolitical state works to do the same thing,
to improve their lives beyond the mere biological existence. That is, the state fosters life
in all the senses of the word, just as resistance practices capitalize on the multiplicity of
the senses. The use of these different senses of the life, or con)lation of the bios with the
zoē, is also important for making connections between Foucault’s notion of biopolitics
and his late works on the technologies of the self and ethics.
EMRE KESER
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biopolitical practices of resistance tends to challenge the state by strategically
employing these different senses of life, and bene1itting from the
ambiguity between them, to be able to prove that the state is unable to
protect life.
This is related to the other underdeveloped idea of Foucault: resistance.
Although he famously suggests that where there is power, there
is resistance, and vice versa,7 he most of the time devotes his works to
the analyses of power or government rather than practices and forms of
resistance.8 Even when he suggests “taking the forms of resistance... as a
starting point” and “using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to
bring to light power relations, locate their position, 1ind out their point of
application and the methods used,”9 he continues to be preoccupied with
the power part. Yet I think this is crucial for the kind of investigations
undertaken and inspired by Foucault, both because they help better understand
how power operates and because they might provide insights
into the ways in which human beings turn themselves into subjects,
which is what he seeks to investigate in his late works. Here I am interested
in the former, because, I think, different forms of resistance are
ways of understanding how different forms power can take. This helps us
understand that resistance practices are not in fact against power but
themselves are power relations and notice how certain power relations
are subverted, expanded, stolen, and nuanced by resistance practices. For
instance, when hunger strikers put their body and life in suspense, they
claim that the state is unable to protect its citizens by willingly enacting
the hunger that the state is supposed to prevent. This particular form of
resistance is shaped around the discourse of the state as the protector
and guarantor of life and society. Relying on this, individuals invent
7 The History of Sexuality, Volume L: An Introduction, _F.
8 Nonetheless, as Allen Feldman and Banu Bargu suggest, these resistances internal to
power were not suf)iciently analyzed by Foucault himself. See, respectively, Formations
of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, D__D), Dgg and Starve and Immolate, F_–GC.
9 “The Subject and Power” in Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Foucault: Beyond
Hermeneutics and Structuralism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, D_mB), BDD.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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themselves as subjects such as hunger strikers relying on the discourse
of biopower but at the same time they reinforce the state as the mechanism
of social defense. Moreover, employing different formulations and
conceptions of life, hunger strikers both challenge the state and yet extend
its possible 1ields of operation on life. This will be clearer when I
discuss hunger strikes below, but now I want to brie1ly trace the genealogy
of the modern state to be able to show how the state has been developed
as the perpetual security apparatus against perpetual insecurities
and threats the society is surrounded by.
§ O.Q Genealogy of the Modern State
The emergence of the modern state, and of the concept of the state, can
be traced back to sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, since
then there has never been an agreed concept with a clear de1inition. Rather,
what the state is has always been a matter of contention and debate.
For this reason, as Quentin Skinner points out, genealogy might be the
appropriate method to understand and trace the idea of the state. This
does not mean, however, that there is no commonalities, persistent and
recurring themes among these contested and contingent de1initions of
the state. Genealogy charts similarities as well as differences, longue durée
as well as short periods, disruptions and breaks as well as continuities.
Here loosely following Skinner, admitting that the discourse concerning
the state never stays the same, I discuss that the modern state
has been fundamentally conceived as the protector and guarantor of human
life as well as the rights and common good of its population.10 Its
existence is grounded on the fact that it is there to provide, safeguard, and
improve life.
To begin with, in 9ggl, John Ponet wrote that the duty of the state
is “to see the whole state well governed and the people defended from
10 Quentin Skinner, “The State” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence
Ball, James Farr, Russell L. Hanson, _C–DiD, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
D_m_) and “A Genealogy of the Modern State” Proceedings of the British Academy DGB
(BCC_): iBF–ieC.
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injuries.”11 Similarly, perhaps the earliest theorist of absolutist state, Jean
Bodin suggested in the Les Six Livres de la République written in 9gYl and
translated into English in 9l8l: “their sovereign has a duty to care for ‘the
health & welfare of the whole state’.” More importantly, he continues,
“princes and other governors have an obligation not to inconvenience but
to protect both ‘the subjects in particular’ and ‘the whole bodie of the
state’”12 This already echoes the “two poles” of biopower Foucault speaks
of: individualizing, looking after the individual bodies, and generalizing,
observing, protecting, and regulating the whole social body, population.
Just as Machiavelli warns the prince that he ought not to do any evil to be
able maintain his state, according to the legal theorists of the same period,
the rulers “must preserve the welfare of the body politic, and... they
cannot hope to maintain their own status unless they keep this body in
security and good health.”13 Evident from the discourse of these remarkably
different theorists is Foucault’s distinction between sovereign
power and biopower. While sovereign power manifests itself only
through the death it is able to order, biopower is obliged to foster and
multiply life. In contrast to the sovereign power’s right to “take life and
let live,” biopower is based on a new right to “make live and let die.”14 In
both cases, there is an asymmetry in favor of the former rights; namely,
taking life in sovereign power and making live in biopower. Thus, roughly
starting in the sixteenth century, what we see here is the retreat of the
sovereign power and advance of the biopower that centers the state as
the safeguard of life and securer of society and the common good. This,
however, does not mean that biopower replaced the sovereign power and
that the state no more takes life. On the contrary, as I will try to show, the
aim of the notion of biopower is to understand how the state kills when
it is supposed to make live.
11 Quoted in Skinner, “The State,” DDD.
12 Quoted in Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iB_.
13 In Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iBm.
14 “Society Must Be Defended”, BgD; The History of Sexuality, DiG–Dim.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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I want to continue with the thinker whom Skinner refers to as “the
theorist of the state”15 while Foucault calls him “a false paternity.”16 In his
infamous book Leviathan, 1irst published in 9lg9, Thomas Hobbes describes
what he calls a state of nature. This state, he says, is a state of war.
All are equal to one another in their capacity to kill each other and totally
free to do so. Even in cases where one is apparently weaker than one’s
rival in strength, one can always form coalitions and alliances with others
to defeat the rival. Therefore, this is a state of total insecurity and fear for
everyone. Everybody can virtually kill everybody. They are completely
open to all internal and external threats. To save themselves from this
fear and insecurity, Hobbes suggests, these people come (or should
come)17 together to form a social contract that irrevocably transfers their
power of killing to an indivisible authority that will protect them from
each other and external threats. This is, according to Hobbes, what put an
end to the ever-present state of insecurity de1ining the state of nature.
The principal of this authority, Leviathan, or the state, “consisteth in the
end for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration
of the safety of people.”18 The state must “procure the common
interest”19 and it must be judged by its “aptitude to produce the peace
and security of the people, for which end they were instituted.”20 The fundamental
duty and the ground of existence of the state is to make people
live and improve their life. While making people live, the state makes itself
live. “Those who institute a state... make it live ‘as long as Mankind’,
15 Skinner, “The State,” DBD.
16 “Society Must Be Defended”, F_, BeC.
17 It is not exactly clear whether Hobbes describes how states or the political authority
have been historically formed, or he guesses that this is what must have happened, or
he formulates a normative theory saying that this is how it ought to be. From the text of
Leviathan, one )ind evidence for all three options.
18 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson, (London: Penguin Classics, D_mF), ieG.
Right after this, he adds that “by Safety” he does not only mean “a bare Preservation, but
also all other Contentments of life, which every man by lawfull Industry, without danger,
or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himselfe.”
19 Leviathan, BgD.
20 Leviathan, BgD.
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thereby establishing a system of ‘perpetual security’ that they can hope
to bequeath to their remote posterity.”21 (I will come back to this idea of
“perpetual security” in a moment).
In John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (9lpf), the state of
nature is not as fearful as Hobbes’s, but still, he thinks, some people can
interpret the freedom and equality in this state as the license to do whatever
they want to do and obtain as much as they can. To prevent this situation
of insecurity stemming from the potential misinterpretation and
misunderstanding of the God-given equality and freedom, the state needs
to be founded “as a trust established by the members of a community for
the more effective promotion of their own good, ‘the peace, safety and
public good of the people’.”22 The state thus exists for “the attainment of
the common good.”23 In Hobbes, what is done or what needs to be done
is the absolute transfer of fundamental rights and liberties. So, for him,
the state, the sovereign, does not act in the name of the people, but on
their behalf. What the state does is what the people does. For Locke, “we
never ‘deliver up’ our fundamental liberties in establishing a commonwealth,
but merely depute or delegate a known and indifferent judge to
safeguard them more effectively on our own behalf.”24 However, in both
cases, the state is founded out of an insecurity and fear.
Against Hobbes and perhaps Locke, Rousseau argues that in the
state of nature, or in their natural, “prepolitical,” state, human beings by
no means compete with each other or are enemies to one another. They
just want to preserve their lives and since each of them by nature knows
that the God orders them to preserve their lives, they act in the way that
their actions do not harm anybody. What corrupts this nature of human
beings is in fact the formation of the political society which fosters competition
and envy. Thus, the reason why Hobbes and Locke want to exit
the state of nature, because they look at it from the standpoint of the political
society, that is, these theorists project their present into the past
21 Quoted in Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” igG.
22 Quoted in Skinner, “The State,” DDF.
23 Quoted in Skinner, “The State,” DDF.
24 Quoted in “The State,” DDF.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
sf
state of nature. However, despite this criticism, the need for the social
contract and the emergence from the state of nature is necessitated by
the individuals who seek peace and security. Thus, in Rousseau, too, the
state is put in place to preserve the citizens’ life. In this regard, though in
different way, he comes close to Hobbes and Locke, despite the fact that
his account is usually thought to diametrically oppose the former.25
Similarly, de1initely in1luenced by Rousseau, Kant and his constructivism
imply that human beings are endowed with a rational capacity
and yet they are not able to make effective use of it in all circumstances.
It is in this sense remarkably similar to Rousseau whom he once
called “Newton of the mind.”26 Thus, in Kant, too, the state is based on
reason that is able to identify universal laws, laws that can be valid for
everyone everywhere all the time. But according to Kant, the state can
never be based on a principle like preservation of the common good and
providing welfare of the citizens. Rather, he thinks, the basis of the state
is freedom, being free from a constrain by another’s choice. However, it
seems that the freedom is only possible if the state is committed not to
violate and protect the freedom and autonomy of citizens, which seems
to be the case, as Kant suggests that the revolt against the state is not
allowed. Therefore, it would not be wrong to suggest that the primary
duty of the state is to protect citizens from external coercions and one
another’s violations that violate freedom and autonomy. It must then defend
society against all threats to their freedom and autonomy and, more
importantly, it must not do anything that interferes with their freedom.
To continue with other examples, William Blackstone, for instance,
suggests that “a state is a collective body, composed of a multitude
of individuals, united for their safety and convenience and intending to
25 For a similar argument saying that Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s conceptions of the state
might be closer than they are usually thought to be, see Peter J. Steinberger, “Hobbes,
Rousseau and the Modern Conception of the State” Journal of Politics eC, no. i (BCCm):
F_F–GDD.
26 Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, D_mD), m_.
EMRE KESER
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act together as one man.”27 Similarly, according to what Skinner calls the
1ictional theory of the state, including Hobbes’s Leviathan, “the conduct
of government is morally acceptable if and only if it serves to promote the
safety and welfare of the person of the state, and... the common good or
public interest of the people as a whole.”28 Here the state, or “the person
of the state,” is identi1ied with the people as a whole. Quite similar to
Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf29 says “the general Rule which Sovereigns
are to proceed by, is... Let the Safety of the People be the Supreme Law.”30
(Here also note the notion “person of the state,” I will return to it in the
last part). All in all, the accounts of the Western political and legal theorists,
despite their remarkable differences, are based on the discourse of
the modern state as the protector and guarantor of life, society, and what
is called common good. This permeates our everyday discourse in many
respects and aligns with other discursive formations. This is, I argue,
what Foucault calls biopower.
Foucault’s account is often found insuf1icient for several reasons
though. First, it is said to distinguish premodern sovereign power and
modern biopower so smoothly that they seem to be completely separate
phenomena. Second, due to this, it is unable to account for the wide-ranging
violent, murderous, and arbitrary actions of the modern state.31 This
27 In Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iFg.
28 In Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iGB.
29 In the very beginning of the last chapter of the History of Sexuality, “Right of Death and
Power over Life,” Foucault, too, refers to Pufendorf’s idea of sovereign as the new juridical
being composed of very union of individuals but having rights which none of those
individuals could claim. That is, it is a different “person.” DiG.
30 In Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iGB.
31 For example, Yael Navaro-Yashin suggests that Foucault’s clear-cut distinction between
the “violent versus the manipulative or the enforcing versus the rationalizing,” the formers
being the premodern while the latter ones modern, forms of power does not help
study contexts like Turkey where both forms of power have been enmeshed. Faces of
the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
BCCB), BBF, Dm_. Similarly, in her in)luential essay in Turkish, Meltem Ahıska seems to
argue that Foucault’s historical narrative is unable to account for the contexts like Turkey
where the arbitrary and the rational have been intricately connected. See
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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is why scholars seem to feel a need for alternative conceptual constructions
to explain the modern state’s appeal to violence: necropolitics,
thanatopolitics, biosovereign assemblage.32 However, it seems to me that
Foucault’s intention with the invention of this notion is to explain the killings
of the modern state rather than show that the state protects life. In
the last lecture of “Society Must Be Defended” and the last chapter of History
of Sexuality, vol. ], he seeks an answer to this question: how can a
state whose prime duty is the preservation of life kill? His answer is that
it kills in the name of making live. It is perhaps even more violent and
murderous than sovereign power, but unlike sovereign power, it kills to
make live. Killing is the only way sovereign power can manifest itself,
while it is only a means for the biopower to make live, to foster life, to
exclude threats to society. It kills to defend the society. Sometimes it even
kills the same group of whose life it wants or claims to defend. And to
defend the society, there has to be a state of perpetual insecurity. For this
reason, the state must be there as the perpetual security apparatus. In
order for the state to exist as the perpetual security apparatus, as Hobbes
desires, there needs to be a state of perpetual insecurity.
This is why Foucault insistently underlines the fact that in
Hobbes’s state of nature, there is no war at all, it is just “a state of war.”
There is a threat of war, there are representations of war, but no war. Perhaps
due to speci1ic historical conditions from which Leviathan emerged,
Hobbes wants to take war out of the picture. In the state of nature, since
all are equal, they are not at an actual war. Rather, they present themselves
in such a way to deter the rivals from starting a war. What Foucault
“Tü rkiye’de I€ktidar ve Gerçeklik” in Türkiye’de İktidarı Yeniden Düşünmek, ed. Murat
Güney, (I€stanbul: Varlık, BCC_ [D__m]).
32 For “necropolitics,” see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public
Culture DF, no. D (BCCi): DD–gC. For “biosovereign assemblage,” see Bargu, Starve and Immolate,
BG. Both )ind Foucault’s notion of biopower lacking due to the lack of “sovereign”
element in it, implicitly equating the sovereignty with killing. For example, Bargu says,
“Foucault views only the af)irmative pole of social and political struggles... [and] he
tends to neglect the sovereign element of contemporary power formations.” GB. Drawing
on Agamben, Mbembe underlines the “states of exceptions” where “terror” reigns as
missing in Foucault's account of biopower.
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implies is that there must be such a state full of fear and insecurity, a pretext,
in order for the state, the fundamental security apparatus, to exist.
Therefore, Foucault suggests, the formation of the state does not end the
war, as there was already no war whatsoever, but there is always a fear of
war, a constant insecurity, a presentation of war. That is why Foucault
calls Hobbes a “false paternity.” His discourse is juridical and ahistorical,
as the state of war is always already there. But there is no real historical
war, but only perpetual pretensions of war. It is conditioned to suppress
“historico-political” discourses of war.33 If we want to explain power relations
in terms of war, Hobbes is not the person we must turn to.34 However,
the point here is rather that Hobbes’s case explains very well how
biopower kills: it kills because it always produces security issues, internal
and external threats and terrorists to the body of the people, there is
always a presentation of a war-to-come. These are what the society must
be defended against by the state. This is a mobile and polyvalent discourse,
as eloquently highlighted by Ann L. Stoler,35 which I think might
be applied to many different phenomena including colonialism, sexuality,
race, and international politics, which are related to the relative notions
I have identi1ied above such as human, humanism, society, the social, population,
etc. I will turn to this later but now want to go into another related
discussion.
33 “Society Must Be Defended”, _B–_i, BG_–BeC.
34 Hobbes is usually taken to be the father )igure of what is called “realism” in political
theory and international relations theory, emphasizing con)lictual and warlike nature
of politics and international system, vis-à-vis “idealism” that argues for the consensusoriented,
rational, harmonious political systems. See, for example, critical political theorist
Raymond Geuss’s Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, BCCm), BB–Bi. If Foucault’s account is somehow correct that there is no war in
Hobbes at all, it would be interesting to see the twist this would add to this discussion.
35 Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, BCDC [BCCB]), in particular, the Chapter
G of the book, “A Colonial Reading of Foucault: Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves,” DgC–
DGD.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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§ O.S Legitimacy, Gaze, and the Outside
This discourse of the state always comes with a problematic of “legitimacy.”
Put differently, the emergence of the modern state is marked by a
question of legitimacy. Though the human life is placed under the guarantee
of the state, the discourse maintains, the state might fall into the
hands of the corrupt, or those who are in power might get corrupted, so
there needs to be a mechanism or mechanisms to check, to monitor the
state concerning its treatment of, and dealings with, human life and
rights.36 Therefore, there must be something non-state, outside of the
state, a gaze that must watch it against its possible ill treatments of human
life and thus its deviations from the norm of biopolitical state. This
gaze might take many forms and names such as public sphere, civil society,
media, non-governmental/non-state organizations, etc., which are
willingly designate themselves as an outside of the state and place themselves
in that outside.
The concept of “watchdog” brilliantly captures the sense I want to
convey here. These “outsider” gazes monitor, hold accountable, and legitimize
the modern state. Thus, as Marx aptly suggests, “the political state
everywhere needs the guarantee of spheres lying outside it,”37 because
the outside is in fact what makes the inside, the outside of the state is
what makes the inside of the state. The condition of possibility of the
state is the existence of the spheres that are said to stay outside of it and
the constant monitoring of these spheres.
We usually assume that the state is an entity that is watched out
by non-state bodies, in case it diverts from its prime duty of making live
or starts to kill. That is why most of the modern resistance practices try
to make the case that the state is unable to protect the life, in1licts
36 Skinner points out that as early as the Renaissance Italy, power was seen as liable to
corrupt, based on the idea that “all individuals or groups, once granted sovereignty over
a community, will tend to promote their own interest at the expense of the community
as a whole.” “The State,” DCg.
37 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, D_eC [Dmgi]), DDF.
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violence on people, that is, it is unable to ful1ill the role for which it exists:
the outside is called for to look at the state. For this reason, these practices
appeal to something outside the state, they try to convince the outside
to that the state is not able to ful1il its duty, it uses its authority illegitimately,
it stops being state. In doing so, they want to produce certain
effects on the state actions, limit its force on them, and where possible
direct it toward the direction they want to lead. However, by trying to adjust
the state, every time they produce it anew.
This is not limited to national or local politics. On the contrary, it
is the de1ining feature of the international or global power relations.
There are international “non-state” organizations that claim to watch the
states to see if they violate the human life and rights. They position themselves
in the outside, as having nothing with the states, as independent
organizations that reject receiving help or funding from the states. As in,
for example, Human Rights Watch, an international organization “watching”
the human rights violations of the states, staying outside the states,
they watch and report the human rights violations to the public, which
usually results in a kind of humanitarian interventions of the other “liberal”
states, which are said not to violate human rights, to end the illegitimate
political regimes and the human suffering they cause. That is to say,
the state has both nationally and internationally is watched. It has both
local and global outside and inside. When necessary, the local outside appeals
to the global outside to stop the inside, the state, practices of taking
life. The state attempts to justify by showing that its killings are to make
live, and its outside, the practices of resistance, strives to make the case
that the state violates the human life and is unable to defend the society.
Therefore, the supposed outside of the state also act like another state,
therefore, as inside.
This is not dispensable from, or rather has been rooted in, the
practices of colonialism. The colonizer comes to humanize, to make the
people of the colonized regime live in a humane way, who are said to have
lived, until the arrival of colonial humanist forces, under arbitrary, violent,
murderous, and personal regimes of certain despots, tyrants, and
autocrats. Thus, colonialism colonizes to make live, to humanize, to give
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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the colonized a decent human life on a global level.38 When faced with
resistance, it does not hesitate to kill, because nothing should stand before
the human and humane life. If they resist the life, they are already
dead, so there is in fact no killing whatsoever, only making live, making
people live better and in properly human ways. As Stoler suggests, this is
how biopower operates as a mobile polyvalent relation and structure cutting
across gender, race, sexuality, imperialism, colonialism.39 It moves
across boundaries, different insides and outsides, states and non-states,
local and global, national and international. It creates complex relationships
among them but never hurts the binaries, never violates the borders
and boundaries. It positions and repositions them over and over
again. It ultimately operates on the discourse of the state as the protector
of life, life in many senses of the term, and make it possible for certain
states to intervene in other states to make people under the latter states
live, improve their life, and turn them into proper humans as they deserve.
This means that outside the state is also the state or non-state bodies
calling the other states for intervention in another one. I will revisit a
related point below. Now I want to turn to hunger strikes as modern biopolitical
practices of resistance.
§ O.V Hunger Strikes
Where does hunger strike stand here? It is a biopolitical practice of resistance,
as it strictly depends on the discourse of the state as the safeguard
of life and the outside of the state as there to check it. The history
38 For a whole study on this, Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, BCDg). Esmeir studies the colonization of Egypt
through the introduction of the notion of the human as a juridical category and convincingly
argues that it is this “humanization” of the colonized is at the core of colonial processes.
39 Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Dg_. In Imagined Communities, Benedict
Anderson, too, underlines that how nation is a mobile, adaptable, and modular
concept and practice that can be made )it in very different contexts. Imagined Communities:
Retlections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, BCCG [D_mi]),
DgC–DGB.
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dl
of hunger strikes as political resistance practices can be traced back to
the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Here I will not,
and in fact cannot, examine the entire history of it, but once again attempt
a partial genealogy predicated on brief, fragmentary descriptions and examples
within this history. Such an attempt aims to show how varied a
practice it is, which might be taken as the reason why a history of hunger
strikes would not possible, but at the same time how it is practice of resistance
that help us understand the workings of biopower as I have tried
to describe thus far.
Hunger strikes have a curious historical and trans-regional trajectory.
One of the very 1irst examples appears in Tsarist Russia at the end
of nineteenth century. This hunger strike undertaken by the political
prisoners in Kara Katorga, a high security penal labor facility located
along the Kara river, resulted from the abolishment of the relative privileges
the political prisoners had been enjoying in the prison. In addition
to this, the Katorga prison administration started a harsh treatment of
political prisoners, especially the women members of the Narodnaya
Volya, a political organization conducted the (mostly unsuccessful) assassinations
of governors and politicians to overthrow the autocratic Tsarist
regime. In 9ppf, after the beginning of the hunger strikes, the women
prisoners were exposed to the severe corporal punishment by the prison
administration. Following this, some of the prisoners started to take their
own lives by taking poison, which resulted in the death of six. The events
have come to be known as the “Kara Tragedy.” They stirred a public outcry,
the Kara Katorga was closed and the corporal punishment against
women was forbidden.40
What is started mostly by women prisoners in Russia was then
taken up by another group of women in a different context, namely the
suffragette movement in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In fact, as the historian Kevin Grant argues, there is a historical connection
between these two series of hunger strikes. Some of the Russian
40 Mariam Betlemidze, “Suicidal Activism in Siberia: Femina and Homo Sacers of Kara
Dmm_” Russian Journal of Communication _, no. D (BCDe): eD–mG.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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women political exiles linked with the Kara events and Narodnaya Volya
1led to Britain at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth
centuries. And they made connections with and inspired the British suffragettes
with their ideas and methods of resistance. Of course, in the
Russian context hunger strikes were more of means of suicidal, anarchist,
or “terror” activity. Now in the British context they were appearing in a
more democratic form as part of a series of struggles, tactics, and strategies
undertaken for the women’s right to vote.
Another importance of this translation and import is that these
hunger strikes undertaken by different women in Britain attempted to
represent the British state as emulating the Tsarist regime and, therefore,
as a despotic and autocratic government. This image of the British government
grabbed a considerable public attention and led to a public pressure
on the state in both national and international contexts. Thus, the
British suffragettes, capitalizing on the newly emerging humanitarian
sympathy for the hungry and the discourse of the state as the protector
of them, attempted to corrode the power of British government. 41 Simply,
they evoked an image of the British government as violent and despotic
as the Tsarist regime in Russia. As Kevin Grant delineates, “the suffragettes
articulated their constitutional claims by using the hunger strike
to liken themselves to starving Russian revolutionaries and their own
Liberal government to the tsarist regime.”42 While the strike in the 1irst
instance was a means to overthrow the autocratic government or headon
confrontation with the Russian state, in the second one, borrowing
from and building on the former’s image, it turned out to be a means of
representing the government as authoritarian, as taking life and using
41 Kevin Grant, “British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike” Comparative
Studies in Society and History Fi, no. D: DDD. Also see Grant’s recent book on the hunger
strikes in the British Empire: Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, BCD_).
42 Kevin Grant, “British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike,” DDe.
EMRE KESER
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illegitimate violence.43 Thus, the threat for the British state was to be
seen as similar to the Russian state.
What does it mean though? Does this con1irm Mohandas Gandhi,
who perhaps made the most effective use of hunger strike as part of his
satyagraha, saying that “you cannot fast against a tyrant”? Nicholas Michelsen
takes this claim of Gandhi to mean that he rightly assumed societal
conditions affected the use of hunger strike, namely the presence of
a liberal democracy.44 To a similar effect, in her essay on violence, Hannah
Arendt writes that that if India had not been invaded by the “liberal democratic”
British state but “a different enemy—Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany,
even prewar Japan, instead of England—the outcome would not
have been decolonization, but massacre and submission.”45 That is, his
nonviolent forms of resistance would have been complete nonsense. Gandhi’s
choice of hunger strike had been in1luenced by his encounter with
the British women’s suffrage movement. As it turns out, all three cases
succeeded each other by somehow affecting one other. And yet in each
case hunger strike has been reformulated, readjusted according to the
context it appeared and the needs and demands of the strikers. (Nâzım
43 The British suffragettes adopted the method of hunger strike at the very beginning of
twentieth century. In July D_C_, Marion Wallace Dunlop, a member of the Women’s Social
and Political Union (WSPU) undertook a hunger strike in the prison protesting her
treatment as an ordinary criminal in the British penal system. Demanding political prisoner
status and her transfer to the )irst division, she started refusing food. She was released
after ninety-one hours of fasting because of the fear that her death might lead to
a large-scale political crisis in the country. Grant, DDe. After this, the method of hunger
strike became a common practice among WSPU members. Many suffragette militants,
who were imprisoned due to their political activities, adopted the method with the same
demand of a political prisoner status. They were strongly emphasizing political nature
of their acts and offences, which, is as we shall see below in play in many other cases of
prison hunger strikes. In many cases, this turns into a demand or claim for political life
over mere biological life.
44 Nicholas Michelsen, Politics and Suicide: The Philosophy of Political Self-Destruction
(New York: Routledge, BCDG), De.
45 “However,” continues Arendt, “England in India and France in Algeria had good reasons
for their restraint. Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost.”
“On Violence,” DFB.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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Hikmet was also watching closely what happens in India at the time and
has interesting comments on Gandhi and paci1icism, to which I will come
in a minute). However, does this mean that fasts against the autocratic
Russia is necessarily suicidal and non-instrumental while those against
the British is life-af1irming, instrumental? I will argue against such a schematic,
binary approach. Although the political regimes are de1initely different,
the hunger strikes in both cases seem to be conditioned by the
power of the claim that the state is unable to look after its citizens or that
it directly in1licts violence on them.46 Both the Tsar and the British were
scared by the possibility of being seen as unable to defend the society, to
protect human life. They were threatened by the death they cannot control.
There is also a question as to Gandhi’s satyagraha. Some argues
that his practices are by no means instrumental and cannot be aligned
with the other nationalist, anti-colonial struggles in the early twentiethcentury
India. Since Gandhi was an ardent “anti-modernist,” his practices
were rather moral and spiritual practices that do not necessarily serve an
end, especially the end of creating an independent modern nation-state.
Rather, they were ends in themselves, spiritual practices for the puri1ication
of the soul.47 Others, on the other hand, suggest that independent of
Gandhi’s intentions, his hunger strikes and broader politics of nonviolence
had both served and been “hijacked” by the nationalist movements
which turned him into the symbol of the struggle leading up to the
46 Also, the historian I€lber Ortaylı points out that at the end of the nineteenth century, selfmodernizing
regimes like Tsarist Russia and Ottoman Empire started committing to,
and de)ining themselves through, their ability to make their subjects live. See İmparatorluğun
En Uzun Yüzyılı (I€stanbul: I€letişim, BCCi [D_mi]), gD.
47 In this sense, Bikhu Parekh’s comments suggesting that Gandhi’s fasts were not hunger
strikes, “nor forms of moral or emotional blackmail, nor ways of evoking and exploiting
others’ pity, but form of self-sacri)ice and represented a perfectly moral method of action
because of its underlying commitment” seem to miss the point by concentrating on
Gandhi’s own formulations about his hunger strikes. Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, BCCD), DF.
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independence and the nation-statehood.48 Yet these are not mutually exclusive
alternatives. As recent studies suggest, Gandhi’s politics of nonviolence
neither has to be considered purely instrumental nor purely spiritual.
It can be understood as doing both at the same time.49 Spiritually,
his hunger strikes were means of achieving self-rule, self-sovereignty,
while, instrumentally, they had been directed at achieving certain ends.
(For example, in 9fs7, he launched a “fast unto death” to protest the British
backed new Indian constitution that gave the “untouchables” their
own distinct political representation, as he believed that this would irrevocably
divide the social classes in the country. The strike lasted six
days ending after the British government reversed the separation decision).
However, both spiritually and instrumentally, Gandhi appealed to
the outside of the state. He wanted to establish his own self-sovereignty
as he critiques the state and Western discourse of human rights but at
the same time addresses the eyes, international audience, watching the
British state and claimed that what happens to his body is a product of
certain state actions. That is, there was a double discourse in play in Gandhi’s
satyagraha: a method of puri1ication of the soul as well as of resistance,
an instrument as well as an end in itself.
“Is the famous Gandhi a hero or a traitor?” asks Nâzım Hikmet in
a 9fs8 essay anonymously published in Resimli Ay. For him the answer
was obvious at the time: Gandhi is de1initely traitor who betrays the great
Indian revolution, because the local bourgeoise supported him, used him
as face of the national struggle, as a way of blocking violent movements
48 Gyan Prakash, for instance, suggests that nationalist politics during and the after the
decolonization of India hijacked Gandhi “in its drive to create a nation-state devoted to
modernization” and turned him into a symbol of the nationalist struggle. “Writing Post-
Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography” Comparative
Studies in Society and History iB, no. B (D__C): i_D.
49 There is an ample number of recent works that point to this duality in Gandhi’s satyagraha.
Among others, see Karuna Mantena, “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources,
Contexts, Conjectures” Modern Intellectual History _, no. i (BCDB): FiF–FGi; “Another Realism:
The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence” American Political Science Review DCG, no.
B (BCDB): gFF–geC; and Alexander Livingston, “Fidelity to Truth: Gandhi and the Genealogy
of Civil Disobedience” Political Theory gG, no. g (BCDm): FDD–FiG.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
g9
of the workers and peasants, and because for the British administration
he played a role to relieve the violent pressure that might come from the
Indian people. Serving as the front of the national struggle, his paci1ist
protests prevented the real struggles of the lower classes. Obviously,
these remarks of Nâzım was informed by the of1icial attitude of the USSR
toward the Indian nationalist and anti-colonial movements shaped by the
Third International supporting the violent means of 1ight with the British
colonial administration as the only viable way of defying imperialism.50
Disliking Gandhi’s call for paci1icism as a surrender and as playing into
the hands of both Indian bourgeoisie and the colonial administration,
Nâzım Hikmet seems to have disregarded hunger strike, the method
which he will appeal to in a very different context to take himself out of
the jail by successfully turning his unlawful imprisonment by the state
into a national problem and drawing the attention of the international
public opinion on the Turkish state for his release.
It seems that all these hunger strikes are somehow connected to
one another. Another connection is between Nâzım Hikmet and the 9fp9
Irish Republican hunger strikes. The title of Dennis O’Hearn’s book that
tells the detailed story of Bobby Sands, IRA, and 9fp9 hunger strikes, An
Un=inished Song,51 comes from a verse of Nâzım’s poem “Letter to My
Wife” that he wrote to his wife, Piraye, from prison in 9fss. Of course, Irish
Republicans were also well aware of the fasts of the suffragette movement
and Gandhi against the British state, as well as previous hunger
strikes undertaken by Irish republicans. As in the Kara and suffragette
strikes, the 9fp9 Irish hunger strikes began as a protest against the British
50 See Zafer Toprak, “Nâ zım Hikmet, Uu çüncü Enternasyonel ve Mahatma Gandhi” Toplumsal
Tarih BGg (BCDF): Fm–GG. Also, see Murat Belge, “Nâ zım Hikmet ve Sabiha
Sertel’den ‘Hint Masalları’” Kitap-lık Ge (BCCi): iG–gF. Belge discusses that both Nâ zım’s
writings, especially his “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” and his friend Sabiha Sertel’s
“unfortunate” novel depicting a story of Indian anti-colonial, nationalist movement and
militant, both written from afar and deeply shaped by the doctrines of the Third International.
Nâzım’s attack on Gandhi, too, was seemingly informed by the Third International’s
take on the South Asian national independence movements.
51 Dennis O’Hearn, Nothing But An Untinished Song: Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Strike
Who Ignited a Generation (New York: Pluto Press, BCCG).
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government’s withdrawal of the Special Category Status that differentiates
political prisoners from ordinary criminals providing them with
some rights and privileges such as right to refuse prison work, freedom
of association, and right to wear their own clothes instead of prison uniform.
52 Irish republican prisoners underlined the political nature of their
offenses and wanted to be treated accordingly. They aimed to re-establish
their political prisoner status based on 1ive demands: the right not to
wear a prison uniform, the right not to do prison work, the right of free
association with other prisoners, the right to one visit and one letter
per week, and full restoration of remission lost through the protest.
When it became clear that these demands will not be satis1ied by the
Thatcher government, the prisoners declared their intention to fast on
the basis that the government is unable to manage and resolve the crisis
in its prison/penal system. In this case, instead of making live by forcing
hunger strikers to live, Thatcher choose to let them die, and after Bobby
Sands’s death, she rendered it a “choice”: “Mr. Sands was a convicted
criminal. He chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organization
did not allow to many of its victims.”53 Here Thatcher makes a biopolitical
claim; more accurately, she utilizes the method of “letting die”
instead of “making live” and “taking life.” Note that Thatcher here prefers
the rarely used option. She suggests that the person who chooses death
did not give such a choice to the people whose deaths he is responsible
for. She lets him die but he can still live if he chooses. And the hunger
strikers choose to insist on the claim that it is the state that is responsible
for their death and others.
In case of the Turkish death fast struggle starting in the beginning
of 7888s, however, the state chose to force hunger strikes to live, even
killed them to make them live however paradoxical this might sound.
Similar to the Irish republicans, the reason why prisoners in Turkey
52 Megan O’Branski, “‘The Savage Reduction of the Flesh’: Violence, Gender and Bodily
Weaponisation in the D_mD Irish Republican Hunger Strike Protest” Critical Studies on
Terrorism e, no.D (BCDg): DCD.
53 “What happened in the hunger strike?” BBC. May F, BCCG.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/B/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/g_gDmGG.stm
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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launched a hunger strike was the introduction of a new penal system that
is based on prisons built in the form of a system of cells constructed for
one or three people, where prisoners are not permitted to contact and
communicate with each other most of the time. The strikers’ aim was to
demonstrate that solitary isolation is against human rights, because human
beings “by nature” are social animals. They were, at least in the 1irst
instance, able to attract a considerable public attention and media coverage,
especially from human rights organizations in both Turkey and Europe.
Thus, they achieved to threaten the legitimacy of the state with national
and international negative public opinion they were able to
attract.54
Then, the political prisoners, vast majority of whom are members
of outlawed Marxist-Leninist armed organizations that might be said to
embrace the legacy of the communist Nâzım Hikmet in one way or another,
in different prisons all over Turkey launched a hunger strike demanding
the immediate abolishment of the F-Types, because, as they declared,
the F-Type isolates them from all human attachment, qualities,
interactions, and, thus, is nothing other than their death in this world.
This line of argument concerning “how human and humane life should
look like” aligned with a human rights discourse received a considerable
amount of attention from human rights organizations, legal advocacy
groups, foreign, especially European, committees, and intellectuals
among others.55 This is curious, because the introduction of this prison
system, advertised as the modernization of the Turkish penal system, was
part of the Turkey’s European Union accession policies surrounded by
the anxiety of catching the European train in the early 7888s,56 but with
the hunger strikes launched against this system, the state was now subject
to another test by the European gaze (and gate) with regard to how
it takes care of the new crisis.
54 Patrick Anderson, “‘To Lie Down to Death for Days’: The Turkish Hunger Strike, BCCC–
BCCi” Cultural Studies Dm, no. G (BCCG): mDe
55 Bargu, Starve and Immolate, g.
56 For now a classical critique of this, see Meltem Ahıska, “Occidentalism: Historical Fantasy
of the Modern” South Atlantic Quarterly DCB, no. B/i (BCCi): iFD–ie_.
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However, labelling the prisoners as terrorists who need to be rehabilitated
in and by isolation, the Turkish government advocated that as
long as these individuals are kept together, their “ideological perversion”
would only progress, continuing to threaten the very existence and integrity
of the Turkish state and its sovereignty and the Turkish people. In a
sense, the biopolitical Turkish state presented itself as the healer of a collective
perversion, mental disorder or a disease. As a regulative-disciplinary
mechanism, the state wanted to normalize the prisoners, to treat
them individually, and, at the same time, wanted to prevent them from
posing a threat to the larger population.
This was re1lected in other forms of justi1ication for the introduction
and maintenance of the F-Type. For example, it was widely disseminated
that ward-type prison conditions were unhealthy, unhygienic, and
insecure for the prisoners as citizens, because a high population of prisoners
were living together in a very small space and the state was not
allowed in the wards by the highly crowded and organized prisoners.57
Nobody knew what was going on inside, and, in the discourse of the state
of1icials, it was certain that people were being tortured and brainwashed
in there. As guarantor of their security and welfare, the state was supposed
to do something. As such, the Turkish state presented itself as the
agent that is supposed to “take care of” its citizens/prisoners, no matter
what crime they committed against the state and Turkish people in the
past. Note here that the discourse of the state is truly biopolitical committed
to make live, make prisoners live better, even save them from
themselves. This discourse was being played out both for the national
and international outsides of the state.
It is used to tell the reasons why the state showed no willingness
to accept prisoners’ equally biopolitical demands which were also being
produced for the outside, the gazes that are supposed to monitor the
state. The state wanted to bring an end to the hunger strike and its effects
on itself, which apparently put a great deal of burden and pressure nationally
and internationally. To put it differently, the state’s biopolitical
57 Bargu, Starve and Immolate, B, DBC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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justi1ications for a violent intervention in prisons was aimed at trumping
over the hunger strikers’ biopolitical demands threatening the state with
a likely loss of legitimacy and power.
For this reason, on December 9f, 7888, the Turkish government
staged a military operation in twenty prisons across the country. The operation
was ironically named “The Operation Return to Life” (Hayata Dönüş
Operasyonu) during which thirty prisoners were killed, many more
were seriously injured, and more than a thousand were dragged out of
the prisons and transferred to the F-Type prisons.58 As suggested, the operation
was held in the name of the prisoners’ well-being and health, to
return them to life, but forced, coerced, in1licted violence on them, and
even led to the death of thirty. It also included occasional practices of
force-feeding. This is how the biopolitical state exercises its power of
making live by killing, let alone forcing and coercing. Since this coercion
and killing were exercised in the name of life (i.e., making live or making
life better), it was justi1ied, because nothing can stand before the defense
of the human life and society at large. And at least in the local outside of
the state, the hunger strikers were accused of valorizing death.
In response to this, the hunger strike turned out to be a mere selfdestructive
practice, a fast and run unto death.59 Some strikers stopped
taking vitamins and drinking water to accelerate the coming of their
deaths, and the transferred prisoners started to set themselves on 1ire
whenever possible.60 Denying the biological life which they thought is the
only thing granted to them by the state, the strikers were liberating themselves
from the biopolitical through a determinateness to die sacri1icing
themselves for their cause, the community, and becoming martyrs of the
upcoming revolution. Since the biological life granted to them by the state
was not the politically digni1ied life in the way that they formulate it, they
chose not to live it both to free themselves from and perhaps do one last
harm to the biopolitical regime. That is why the paradoxical slogan of the
58 Patrick Anderson, “‘To Lie Down to Death for Days’: The Turkish Hunger Strike, BCCC–
BCCi” Cultural Studies Dm, no. G (BCCG): miC.
59 Bargu, Starve and Immolate, Bm.
60 Starve and Immolate, BCg.
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Turkish hunger strikers was “Long Live Our Death Fast Struggle!”
(Yaşasın Ölüm Orucu Direnişimiz!).61 For as long as their dying lives, the
workings of biopower is somehow interrupted, because, as Foucault suggests,
“this determination to die [is] strange and yet so persistent and
constant in its manifestations, and consequently so dif1icult to explain as
being due to particular circumstances or individual accidents.” 62
Hunger strikers attempt to dispossess the state of its right to decide
who may die and make possible for themselves a truly political life
through death “by negating bodily existence as the basis of the particular
form of life that is allowed, securitized, and sancti1ied by the state’s political
rule.”63 They violated the state’s monopoly over life, but only by being
and acting like a state. As Allen Feldman suggests, “starvation of the 1lesh
in the hunger striker was the inverting and bitter interiorization of the
power of the state... [a] transfer [of] power from one topos to another.”64
At the end, acting like the state, they steal the state’s authority over life,
and when they wish to transcend the politics of life, they turn to death,
because “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes
the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private’”65
What all these brief transregional genealogy of hunger strikes
suggest is that, despite all the differences, multiplicity, wide variety of
methods, tactics, and strategies among them, is that hunger strike as a
biopolitical form of resistance claims that the state fails to protect the life
or directly harms it, thereby deviating from the norm of biopolitical state.
With this claim, they address the outside of the state, the gazes that monitor
it, and try to cast a doubt on the state’s legitimacy. The state responds
by making live at the expense of killing, chooses to let die by rendering it
a choice, tries to justify its murderous practices. However, what these
hunger strikes reinforce are also multiple: the central value of human and
human life, the state as the protector of life, or to put it differently, the
61 Starve and Immolate, BF_.
62 The History of Sexuality, Di_.
63 Starve and Immolate, iiC.
64 Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence, Bie.
65 The History of Sexuality, Di_.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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reproduction of the biopolitical state as the fundamental security apparatus,
and objecti1ication or solidi1ication of the state by leading it to be
de1ined through de1inite categories of inside and outside, the gaze and
the object, or simply the seer and the seen. (The only time hunger strike
strips off the state, bring a shock to the biopolitical is when it turns out
to be a necroresistance as Bargu formulates. This is important, but I do
not go into this direction, as I said in the beginning of this chapter, due to
the not deadly nature of Nâzım’s hunger strike). Below I try to argue that
there is a close connection between this reproduction and reiteration of
the modern state as the de1inite unity, a whole, and the modern author’s
construction of himself as the autonomous and indivisible authority over
his life, action, and thought. Before going into this, I want to brie1ly mention
the ways in which this polyvalent structure of biopower connects
with the practices of the nation-state building, colonialism in the historical
context of Turkey.
§ O.W Being Like the Turkish State
To continue with the inside/outside binary, the designated outside, as it
gazes, seems to objectify as well as legitimize the state as the protector of
life against internal and external threats and encroachments, which paradoxically
unify the inside and the outside. More accurately, the purported
external threat tends to unify, make one the local inside and the
local outside. Put differently, the state as a whole is able to expand its 1ield
of killing possibilities only in the presence of the external security
threats. The outside subjects the inside to a control, to a legitimacy test,
but simultaneously it brings it to a concretion, give it a solid body with
de1inite boundaries. The external/foreign threat to the state and the gaze
objecti1ies the state together make it a concrete, uniform entity, while at
the same time subjecting it to control. When there is a possibility of intervention
and encroachment, the biopolitical state as the social defense
mechanism is able to kill widely, not only externally, but also internally,
as there constantly emerges parts of the inside that cooperate and collaborate
with the outside. Also, the outside gazes might be made into threats
EMRE KESER
gp
and security issues. Those who call for the Western intervention from the
inside against the human rights violations of the state might be an example
of this. They are killable or at least excludable, because they pose a
threat to the life and person of the state that is all the persons within the
state, therefore, life of all within the state by bringing the outside in. That
is, the existence of the outside turns the inside, the state, into an author,
a person who owns his own word and action, the single author of and
sovereign over life.
What is the connection between the person and the state, the author
and the state? Here a brief engagement with the literature on the
anthropology of the Turkish state is in order: “Faces of the state,” “personal
states,” “state-society.”66 These are some of the titles and key
phrases of the political-historical ethnographic works on the Turkish
state written in the last two decades. The commonality is that they all
signal an intertwinement between the state and people/society, the state
and the non-state, the inside and the outside. However, what is more
striking is that almost all of them either personify or anthropomorphize
the state. Whether they discuss bureaucratic institutions as concrete
sites of encounter with the Turkish state or take the state as an idea
and/or ideology, all seem to imply and converge on the idea that the Turkish
state is constantly reproduced in and through practices and discourses
of the Turkish citizens and, more importantly, the Turkish state
has a personal aspect, a “face.” All also seem to imply that the Turkish
citizens act and think like and sometimes in lieu of the state. And the state
acts like a single person to defend the citizens, the society, from constant
66 The works pointed: Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in
Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, BCCB); Catherine Alexander, Personal
States: Making Connections Between People and Bureaucracy in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, BCCB); Michael Meeker, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of
Turkish Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, BCCB). For a comprehensive
review of the anthropology of the state literature in Turkey, which also connects
with the introduction of anthropology as “the state’s anthropology” (devletin antropolojisi)
in Turkey as part of the racial nation-state making projects, see Berna Yazıcı,
“Devlet Antropolojisi” in Kültür Denen Şey: Antropolojik Yaklaşımlar, ed. Ayfer Bartu
Candan and Cenk Ou zbay (I€stanbul: Metis, BCDm), FD–mD.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
gf
threats. Yet this is hardly peculiar to the works concerning the Turkish
state. “Seeing like a state,” “acting like a state,” “states of imagination,”
“maddening states,” are the some of the phrases and titles of the anthropological-
ethnographic-historical monographs and anthologies that do
not speci1ically focus on the Turkish context.67 Why seeing or acting like
a state? More properly, why think state as something that sees and acts,
something similar to human with a memory and imagination? I want to
try to explain this through the Turkish case.
From eighteenth to twentieth century, Ottoman Empire and Turkey
somehow managed to remain “independent,” “non-colonial,” mostly
negotiating it with Western/European forces and of1icially embracing
their discourse of progress and modernization which required the “humanization”
of those who are deemed Turkish and said to have previously
lived under arbitrary, Islamic, despotic, inhumane rule of the Ottoman
Empire. That is, as now a commonplace, Turkey was founded on a
rejection of the Ottoman imperial legacy. The fundamental reason for this
is to avoid a potential colonization, that is, to 1ight against the Western
colonial forces by holding the Western standpoint, emulating the West as
the highest form of civilization.
Yet this has brought with itself an ever-present fear of colonizability
and encroachment, because, whenever the project of being like and
catching up with the Western modernity is interrupted for some reason,
there emerges a danger of intervention. However, this is also the case
when the Western modernity is seen as not the only option, when it is
believed that there can be alternative modernities, an authentic Turkish
modernity, for example. In this case, because there is always an anxiety
of both being authentic and modern, both local and universal, the anxiety
67 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, D___); Thomas B. Hansen and Finn
Stepputat, ed., States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, BCCD); Lisa Weeden, “Seeing Like a Citizen, Acting
Like a State: Exemplary Events in Uni)ied Yemen,” Comparative Studies in History and
Society gF, no. g (BCCi): GmC–eDi; Begoña Aretxaga, “Maddening States” Annual Review
of Anthropology iB (BCCi): i_i–gDC.
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is translated into a security regime anew, an anxiety that sees and feels
everywhere “foreign” interventions: the alleged authentic element
should by no means be contaminated with the Western penetration.
Therefore, this historical foundation has brought the ever-present threat
of colonizability and encroachment, which seems to have forced the
Turkish people to think and act like the state and even sometimes in lieu
of the state, equating their life with the life of the Turkish state. For whenever
the state is said to be at stake, the life of the Turkish society is also
put in jeopardy. It is a situation of perpetual insecurity. Like Hobbes’s
state of war. There is no real war, perhaps no external threat, but there is
a constant insecurity issue, an issue that uni1ies mostly inside and outside
against the global outside. Therefore, there is a constant threat coming
from the outside of Turkey, against which the state should defend the
society. Thus, the current president Erdoğan’s oft-repeated imperative
“make the human live so that the state can live” (insanı yaşat ki devlet
yaşasın) says not only that the state is to make its citizens live but also
that the life of the state is once and for all identi1ied with the life of the
human.
From the standpoint of the resistance inside, there is also always
a security issue, because the Turkish state has been historically violent
and killing. What the resistance try to show, then, is that the state is unable
to protect society and even in1lict arbitrary violence on it. It strives to
prove the illegitimacy of the Turkish state, the violent and bloody nature
of it. And the state works to prove the terrorist and “foreign” nature of
the resistance inside, that they are the enemies of life and society, and of
the authenticity of our culture, of our own modernity. It calls for the foreign
to intervene, to penetrate. And this discourse is usually aligned with
the purported ever-present danger of colonizability and encroachment.
The discourse of “non-coloniality but ever colonizability” serves
also as a marker of difference from Turkey’s once colonized Middle Eastern
and North African “others” like Lebanon and Egypt and, for them,
Turkey plays the role of an ambiguous object of difference through which
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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to (or not to) de1ine the self.68 Yet both the colonized and the “non-colonized”
are similarly marked by the emergence of the human, a legal subject
of natural rights, correlative with the introduction of the modern
state in their territories. That is to say, whether colonized or non-colonized,
in these regimes, there is a perpetual security problem. The society
must always be defended, because it is always under threat. Perhaps it
would be said that just as post-colonialism does not mean the end of colonization
in the region but its (re-)colonization by the remaining paranoid
security regimes, being non-colonized does not mean that a country
is not colonized. Colonialism is not exactly about establishment of a colonial
administration by the Western forces in certain regions of the Orient,
but rather it is polyvalent mechanism that is, at least in some aspects,
based on the defense of society, perpetual (in)security, and humanization.
Perhaps that is why the Turkish edition of “Society Must Be Defended”
without quotation marks renders Foucault the protector of society,
ironically giving him the role of the state. Because for the cultural imagination
and formation from which it emerges society is something that
is always under attack and that must always be defended at all costs. But
in this case, it must be protected from the state. But who will defend it
68 For a nice elaboration of this (or of a similar point), the penultimate chapter of Wilson
Chacko Jacob’s Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial
Modernity, L\n]–L[i] (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, BCDD) might be helpful. There,
based on the D_iB “tarbush incident” where the Turkish president Atatü rk made Egypt’s
ambassador of Turkey take off his tarbush/fez upon his arrival at the Ankara Palace for
the celebration of the Republic Day, Jacob discusses con)licting reactions to the event in
Egypt. For example, while some characterized Turkey as independent, masculine nation
embodied in Atatü rk’s masculine act vis-à-vis the colonized, feminine Egyptian president,
others see this as Turkey’s loss of authenticity and complete surrender to the
Western culture through dress code. This shows, according to Jacob, how national subjects,
selves, and identities are formed in international, interactive, comparative contexts.
In similar ways, as I try to argue here, Turkey’s proud “non-colonialism” most of
the time are employed to form a national consciousness and subjectivity vis-à-vis the
“colonized Arabs.” Though rarely, reverse also might be true, that is, Turks might also
describe themselves based on their loss of authenticity due to the pro-Western, secularist
foundational reforms of the Kemalist state vis-à-vis the “authentic Arabs.”
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against the state? Against the inside? It is probably the outside, the global
outside that must protect the inside from the inside state. However, when
the outside is called for, the inside tightens up, solidi1ies against the outside,
and becomes one, undetachable entity which is able to kill widely in
the name of making live.
Lastly, this brings us back to the discussion of Frederic Jameson’s
debate on the national allegory. Jameson argues that all postcolonial literature
are national allegories. Characters in a postcolonial novel, for example,
re1lects the emergence of nation as an independent, self-generating
entity, indivisible nation. As Aijaz Ahmad discusses, Jameson’s
account is overly generalizing and reductive, talking about “all” “postcolonial”
“Third World” literatures at once, in contradistinction to the
“1irst world.” As I have said, however, I think, this is not the fundamental
problem in Jameson’s analysis. Where he seems to be mistaken is when
he talks as though this is a peculiar to the third world, to the postcolonial
condition, or, more accurately, his inability to point to the sources of the
obviousness of this allegorical situation in the third world. Although in
his recent revisit of the essay he wants to show the interdependence of
the nations and their understanding of each other through stereotypes,
he is still unable to explain how this interdependence operates and in
what direction it asymmetrically moves. Equating with the state with the
person is a deep-rooted tradition in the Western political thought and
carried to “third world” through colonial practices permeated by this
thought. Also, it is not the nation that is analogical, or “allegorical,” to the
person or the author, but rather the nation-state. It is analogy between
the state as author and the author as the state when both the state and
the author appears as the single, indivisible, and self-producing authority
over life. In what follows, I brie1ly try to show how this is one of the founding
analogies in the modern Western political thought that invents the
state as the author of life.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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§ O.X The Person of the State
In Perpetual Peace (9Yfg), Immanuel Kant, for instance, argues that “A
state.... is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command
or to dispose except the state itself.” And he continues with a biological
metaphor: “It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another
state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing
it to a thing.”69 For him, the state is a person and when its inviolable
body is violated, when it is multiplied or incorporated into a “foreign”
thing, this means that its rights are violated like a violation of human’s
rights which are also inalienable, a violation of human’s indivisibleness,
individuality, and authority. The state is a society of men only the state
can command and only the state can dispose. Therefore, the only authority
over life is the person of the state. It owns itself, like an individual
owns himself or herself, his or her actions and thoughts, and the moral
responsibility brought by those actions and thoughts.
This idea of the individual owning himself or herself is also central
to Locke’s thought. An individual is de1ined by the de1inite and inviolable
borders of its body. It is the sole authority over his own life and body. For
him, the body is the 1irst property. And when the individuals mix their
labor with the objects in the world, they are entitled to own the fruits of
that work. The state, thus, is to protect that body, both the individual body
and the body of the people owning their selves. The idea of modern individual
and individualism is in this sense intricately connected to the making
of the modern state owning the life it produces and, by the same right,
it can dispose.
This is manifest in Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s social contract accounts.
For Hobbes, the social contract establishes a “commonwealth,”
which he de1ined as the “Multitude so united in one Person... of whose
Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have
made themselves every one the Author,” and this is done for the purpose
69 “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other
Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld, trans. David L. Colclasure
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, BCCG), Gm.
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that “he may use the strength and means of them all... for their Peace and
Common Defence.”70 Out of a social contract of a multitude emerges a single
uni1ied entity, an “Author,” to defend the society. The covenants, thus,
say to each other, “I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe,
to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up
thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.”71 Therefore,
this is a process of authorization that everyone agrees on. When a single
individual does not join or agree with this authorization, the commonwealth
cannot be established. For this reason, the moment all authorize
“this Man,” there is no return, because they permanently granted him the
authority to speak and act in their name and own its words and actions.
Therefore, the actions and words of this author equal their own actions.
But this author is not a covenant or somewhat included in the contract, it
is independent from the contract and yet emerges out of it. It is in this
sense an “arti1icial person.”
This is how multitude of men, are united in “One Person.” The result
is “a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by
Covenant of every man with every man.”72 Skinner suggests that the contract
may be said to produce two persons who have not existed in the
state of nature. The 1irst is the arti1icial person to whom the Authority is
granted to speak and act in the name of all participating in the contract.
This is the sovereign. The second
is the person whom we bring into being when we acquire a single
will and voice by way of authorising a man or assembly to serve
as our representative. The name of this further person, Hobbes
next proclaims in an epoch-making moment, is the Commonwealth
or State. ‘The Multitude so united in one Person, is called a
COMMON-WEALTH,” and another name for a commonwealth is a
CIVITAS or STATE’.73
70 Hobbes, Leviathan, BBm.
71 Hobbes, Leviathan, BBe. Italics in the original.
72 Hobbes, Leviathan, BBe.
73 “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” igF.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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That is, the state is the author/person who acts in the contractors’ name
and yet who owns its words and actions.
Skinner argues that according to Hobbes the state does not act on
behalf of the people but rather in their name. It is a person both 1ictional
and real. And Foucault makes the same point concerning Hobbes’s account
of the state:
The sovereign who is so constituted will therefore be equivalent
to all those individuals. He will not simply have part of their rights;
he will actually take their place, and the whole of their power. As
Hobbes puts it, they appoint him ‘to beare their person.’.... Insofar
as he represents individuals, the sovereign is an exact model of
those very individuals. The sovereign is therefore an arti1icial individuality,
but also a real individuality. The fact that this sovereign
is a naturally individual monarch does not alter the fact that
he is an arti1icial sovereign; and when an assembly is involved, the
sovereign remains an individuality, even though a group of individuals
is involved.74
What is important here is the idea that the sovereign is an exact model
and/or copy of the individuals who granted their rights to him. The state,
then, is an individual, it is inviolable like an individual, it has rights like
an individual. And moreover, like an individual, it is all about the preservation
of life. In many works of the modern political thought, the driving
idea is that humans want to preserve their life. It is based on this “anthropological
fact,” the 1irst principle, from which the political emerges. Like
individual, the state has boundaries, a de1inite outside and inside. When
the outside “illegitimately” interferes with the inside, inside has every
right to defend itself, even kill the outside and outsiders. It is like individual;
it has a moral responsibility of its actions. So, it is also a moral person.
That Kant, Rousseau,75 and Vattel76 all called it a moral person
(personne morale) is not a coincidence in this sense. For in the Western
political thought, the idea of individual comes with the idea of the state
74 “Society Must Be Defended”, _g.
75 “Purely moral person” in Skinner, “The State,” DBF.
76 In “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iFC.
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and vice versa. This is why individual is the author of his life just as the
state is the author of life in general, the only authority that can produce
and dispose life that is put under its control, guarantee, and ownership.
Furthermore, like individuals interacting with each other, states also interact
with one another. As Vattel suggests, they “are bodies politic, societies
of men united together to procure their mutual safety and advantage”
and as such a union, “the state is the name of a distinct ‘moral
person’ possessed of ‘an understanding and a will peculiar to itself.”77
Thus, different states can be seen as “moral persons who live together in
a natural society... every nation that governs itself, under what form soever,
without any dependence on a foreign power, is a sovereign state.”78
Therefore, the state seems to be modeled after the ideal of autonomous,
self-suf1icient/self-producing individual, because it is independent of any
outside force and it is sovereign of itself, it inviolably governs itself, authors
its own life. Like an individual living in a society and among others,
they take responsibility for their willing actions.
According to Pufendorf, too, the state exists “like one Person, endued
with Understanding and Will, and performing other particular Acts,
distinct from those of the private Members” who creates it. Giving credit
to Hobbes, he echoes him by saying that the state is “a compound Moral
Person whose Will... is deem’d the Will of all.”79 Similarly, William Blackstone,
too, de1ines the state as “a collective body, composed of a multitude
of individuals, united for their safety and convenience and intending to
act together as one man... with one uniform will.”80 In both Pufendorf and
Blackstone, the feature of “will” is not stressed for no reason. The state
has a will of its own, like every individual, every author, is thought to have.
In his 9pff Philosophical Theory of the State, Bernard Bosanquet goes on
to say that the state is not a legal 1iction or “an empty 1iction” at all. “The
state possesses its own substantial will, the contents of which are equivalent
to what we would ourselves will if we were acting with complete
77 In “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iFB.
78 In “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iFB.
79 In “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iFD.
80 In “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iFg.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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rationality.”81 That is, what he proposes is that the state is not like the
individual, it is the individual who has a real will, when operates rationally
as the individual, it is exactly what the individuals authorizing it
would do or “will.” This is “the identi1ication of the State with the Real
Will of the Individual in which he wills his own nature as a rational being.”
Therefore, the will and freedom of citizens conform to the will of the
moral person of the state.82
In sum, in the discourse of the Western social and political
thought, the state is almost identi1ied with the individuals, even though
the individual thinkers usually differ from each other in their elaborations
of the notion of individual and person. The state is modeled after
the individual and the individual after the state. The author is paradigmatic
here, because author acts and wills rationally. He writes his own
life. He owns what he writes, what he says, and what he does. He is the
owner of his body and life. He owns his own person. This person has definite
borders and boundaries, an inside and outside. And it is inviolable.
When violated, he has every right to defend those boundaries and borders
against those who violate them. He can kill them whenever necessary,
because, when violated, its moral personality is destroyed. The
modern biopolitical nation-state is constructed on the basis of this authority.
It is the authority of life. It is in fact the author of life, because
within its boundaries, nobody but the state itself can make live or let die.
And it is the only one who can take life to make live, to make life better, to
improve life. It writes life over and over again by defending it against internal
and external outsides. It writes life by taking life of the enemies of
life. It writes life by defending the society, by taking life of the enemies of
society. That is, there is always a need for enemies. To write the life, the
state needs to write enemies simultaneously. To write the life, outsiders
must be there watching the state and the author. Writing of life is then
writing of enemies. Writing of life is writing of terrorists. Producing life
is producing terrorists.
81 In “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iFe.
82 In “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” iFe–iFm.
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So, why is this a problem speci1ically for the “post-colonial” and
the “non-colonial” like Turkey—where the post-colonial does not refer to
the end of colonization and the non-colonial not to the absence of colonization?
Because for them there is a danger of constant violation from outside,
an anxiety of what is yet to come, what is about to come, and what
has been somehow avoided in the past but can revisit at any moment.
And there is always an inside that collaborates with the outside. These
are paranoid security regimes, of the Middle East, in this context, that
have replaced the colonial administrations or somehow prevented colonization
by being like the colonizer. It is thus the beginning and re-beginning
or renewal of colonialism. It is the beginning of colonialism where it
never started and yet was always already there. Colonialism, a foreign,
outside intervention, is always already there. Perhaps that is why Foucault,
a “foreign” 1igure, an outsider, when translated into Turkish, wants
to defend the society from the state.
In the next chapter, I attempt to show how Nâzım Hikmet as a
modern author writes his life as the indivisible author over his actions,
thought, and words, how he strives to present himself as a uni1ied entity,
despite the multiplicity he had been, despite the brokenness of his life
and self. This will be continuation of my argument pointing to an analogy
between the modern nation-state and the modern author, marked by the
(non-)colonial practices and structures, and introduction to my attempt
at situating Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger strike as a fragment, a synecdoche, of
his life.
lf
"
Writing of the Self: “Nâzım Hikmet”
Meçhûle tapma, akl ü izâna tap, dedim
Hayvâna tapma, insana tap, dedim
[Don’t worship the unbeknown but the reason, I
said
Don’t worship the animal but the human, I said]
– Abdülhak Hamit, quoted in Orhan Selim
[Nâzım Hikmet], “ps Yaşında Delikanlı”
aving brie1ly laid out the autobiographical kernel of Nâzım Hikmet’s
poetics as the author of his thought and action, and the continuation
of this tendency in his critics and biographers in the introductory
chapter, in this chapter I try to point to some recurring themes,
images, origin stories, beginnings and re-beginnings, through which
Nâzım and the discourse on him constructed “Nâzım Hikmet” in his poems
and other works. This might be seen as a biographical sketch. However,
rather than attempt to establish a linear, factual, and coherent biographical
narrative, I play with fragmentary stories and myths that have
been surrounding and constituting the still present discourse on Nâzım
Hikmet. The argument I will try to make is that despite the fact that
Nâzım is many and multiple, he tends to portray himself as one, an
H
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identity, always positioning himself vis-à-vis the gaze of others, always
responding and reacting to their presence whose objecti1ication, in turn,
makes possible Nâzım as a self-producing and uni1ied authority over his
own life and thought. Beyond the biographical sketch, this will serve as
one of the building blocks for my argument that his hunger strike is a
synecdoche of Nâzım’s life and poetics; that is, it is a fragment of his life
that explains the “whole,” the whole that both Nâzım himself and his biographies
claim for him. Yet at the same time this will demonstrate the
paradoxical nature of such a work in which the “man” needs the presence/
gaze of others to be able to construct himself as the one.
§ Q.O Encounters with “Him”
There are three main myths/stories about Nâzım’s encounters and confrontations
with Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). These are where one of the
main contentions over the 1igure of Nâzım take place. If one is a Kemalist
or nationalist, one strives to have a Nâzım that got along well with Mustafa
Kemal, the one that Mustafa Kemal had “secretly” protected all along,
or one wants to see them as the two 1igures doing the same thing through
different ways. If one is a leftist/communist/Marxist, one wants to have
a Nâzım that was against the atrocities of Kemalist regime and perhaps
Mustafa Kemal himself. The degree of the disagreement or opposition to
be demonstrated varies in accordance with which end of the leftist spectrum
one occupies. For instance, if one is on the radical end of the spectrum,
one can argue for Mustafa Kemal and Nâzım as diametrically opposed
1igures to illustrate how a committed communist Nâzım was and
how a 1ierce anti-communist Mustafa Kemal was. Thus, there are three
popular stories I could manage to identify concerning this relationship,
each of which can be employed in different ways. I will try to summarize
them as they appear here and there.
!.#.# The First Encounter
Nâzım’s journey to Anatolia with his friends to join the national forces in
the initial days of the War of Independence is another recurring theme in
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
Y9
both his own discourse and that of his biographies. It is narrated as a series
of birth moments. I will try to brie1ly summarize them. They went
secretly to Ankara to join the national forces led by Mustafa Kemal and
his friends. It seems that their intention was to go to the front or somehow
join the war. Four young men (Nâzım Hikmet, Vâlâ Nurreddin, Yusuf
Ziya, and Faruk Na1iz), all nationalist poets, had to go to Ionebolu 1irst, a
town in the western Black Sea region, and from there to Ankara. When
they arrived at the town in January 9f79, the town was full of people waiting
to be permitted to go to Ankara and join the war. Among them were
the Spartacist Turkish students who were just deported from Germany,
perhaps after the Spartakusaufstand in January 9f9f, where they had
come under the in1luence of the German Spartacist movement spearheaded
by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. During their stay there,
they were talking about concepts that were strange to Nâzım such as
class war and the proletariat. This is usually cited as the 1irst time Nâzım
came in touch with Marxism/communism.1 When Nâzım and Vâ-Nû are
permitted to travel to Ankara, they chose to walk from Ionebolu to Ankara.
Their journey lasted almost two weeks and, in the meantime, they had to
pass through and sometimes stay in the villages of Anatolia. The two
young men who grew up in their relatively safer and privileged environments
in Iostanbul was for the 1irst time witnessing the poverty, “backwardness,”
and “ignorance” in those villages. According to the most accounts,
this experience also contributed to the developing
“consciousness” of Nâzım, to what Nâzım will be or have to be.
The encounter with Mustafa Kemal took place when they arrived
at Ankara after walking about a hundred kilometers from Ionebolu in two
weeks. According to Vâlâ Nureddin’s memoir, when they were introduced
to him as “two young poets,” Mustafa Kemal recommended them to write
“poems with a point, a purpose” (gayeli şiirler), because, he says, youth
tends to write poems without content, just because they think this is
modern.2 We do not know what Nâzım did with this advice, but it would
1 Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, Romantik Komünist: Nâzım Hikmet’in Yaşamı ve Eseri,
trans. Mehmet B. Gümü şbaş (I€stanbul: YKY), ge–FC.
2 Göksu and Timms, Romantik Komünist, FB–Fi.
EMRE KESER
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not be wrong to say that he had always written poems “with a point” afterwards.
Whether Mustafa Kemal agreed or would agree with that point
is matter of contention that still shapes “Nâzım Hikmet.” These two young
poets had waited for weeks to learn whether they will be sent to the front
or not and, in the end, they were rather appointed to Bolu as teachers.
They are appointed to the “war of education,” a war that was fought to
enlighten the Turkish people in Anatolia, to save them from the mindset
of traditional society. He seems to have always stand for the project of
enlightening and educating the Turkish people. But still, this seems to be
not what Nâzım Hikmet expected to do initially. He wanted to join the
front, to 1ight a war for his nation and his people, and yet he was returned
by Mustafa Kemal. This encounter shapes one of the recurring themes in
his poetics. This is a duality: on the one hand, a mourning, as there an
“intellectual” who is unable to 1ight or prevented from being part of the
struggle; on the other hand, a fantasy, as the intellectual (i.e., Nâzım) imagined
and placed himself as the one being able to be part of the 1ight, the
struggle for beautiful-days-to-come such as equality, freedom, independence.
The 1irst part seems to be informed by this encounter with Mustafa
Kemal who 1irst denied him to 1ight was Mustafa Kemal who rather told
him write poems with a point.
%.&.% The Second Encounter
Nâzım Hikmet recorded some of his early poems such as “Salkımsöğüt”
(Weeping Willow) and “Bahri Hazer,” and the vinyl copies of these records
were quite popular almost until the distribution of his poems was
banned in late 9fs8s. According to the story, or rather one version of the
story, one night, at the dinner table in the Dolmabahçe Palace, Atatürk
listened to these records and enjoyed them. He then ordered his men to
1ind and bring Nâzım to the palace. That is, according to the story, Atatürk
wanted a live performance from Nâzım. At midnight the men found
Nâzım at his house and told him that Atatürk is waiting at the dinner table.
Pissed off, Nâzım told the men, “I am not Efthalia the Mermaid!” (“Ben
Deniz Kızı Eftalya değilim!”). E1halia the Mermaid (Deniz Kızı Eftalya)
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
Ys
(9pf9–9fsf) was a Greek-origin popular women singer of the time who
often performed before Atatürk and his guests in 9fs8s. Both Nâzım’s poems
and Eftalya’s songs were distributed by the Columbia Records that
started to operate in Turkey in 9f7Y. According to this gendered story,
Nâzım rejects “being served” at Atatürk’s dinner table like a woman
singer whose job is to entertain men. And according to another version
of the story, when Atatü rk’s men came to him, Nâzım told them, “It’s past
midnight. If this is a state order, I will come. If I need to volunteer, it is too
late, I cannot honor the invitation!” In any case, in any version of the story,
Nâzım confronts Atatürk, he stands upright before his power and orders,
but at the same time he makes sure that he would never escape from
serving his country, his people, his state: “If this is a state order...”3 Here
Nâzım originates as a true communist and yet never the one who shies
away from the national service, a 1igure that can be embraced as the pioneer,
whose footsteps can be followed, for communists and others.
%.&.' The Third Encounter
There is a much-circulated letter Nâzım is said to have written to Atatürk
just before Atatürk died and just before Nâzım was sentenced to the
twenty-eight-year long imprisonment. It is short but subtle:
I received 1ifteen-years long heavy imprisonment with the charge
of inciting the Turkish Army to rebel. And now I am being judged
also with the accusation of inciting the Turkish Navy to rebel. I
swear on the Turkish revolution and your name, I am not guilty. I
did not incite the army to rebel... I am not mad, drifter, reactionary,
sold, or a traitor of the revolution and nation, who could think of
3 Memet Fuat, “Deniz Kızı Eftalya” in Nâzım Hikmet Üzerine Yazılar (I€stanbul: YKY, BCDe),
DiC–DiD. Originally written in D_me, in the essay, Memet Fuat argues that nothing like this
ever happened, so it is fabricated, on the grounds that if Atatü rk had invited Nâzım, he
would have somehow known or heard this occurrence. For Atatü rk’s invitation was not
just an everyday event that would easily go unnoticed. Also, he supports this by saying
that that the event is fabricated is evident in the idea of Nâzım saying “I am not Efthalia
the Mermaid,” because, Memet Fuat says, Nâzım would “never” say things like that. Nor
would he degrade artists like Efthalia in this way.
EMRE KESER
Yd
this even for a moment. I did not incite the army to rebel. I am poet
of the sacred Turkish language who believes in your monument
and in you. I could be as patient as to serve all the time I received.
I would not want to keep away you from your great works with a
Turkish poet’s catastrophe. Forgive me. If I keep you busy for a
moment, this is because I believe that only your hands can remove
the stain left on me by this defamation of “inciting the army of the
revolution to rebel.” You are the most revolutionary head I can appeal
to. I demand justice from Kemalism and you. I swear on the
Turkish revolution and your head, I am not guilty.4
It seems that it was written before the second trial or during the trials
going on in 9fsp. (It is suggested that it was the Minister of Interior Affairs
of the time, Şükrü Kaya, advised Nâzım to write this letter.5) In his Marxist
take on the letter, literary critic Orhan Koçak suggests that it must have
been written in “a moment of weakness” and the content of the letter had
been shaped by the discourse of Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) in the
early years of the republic that sees Kemalism as a bourgeois revolution,
a revolutionary movement, a progress toward the socialist revolution-tocome.
This is also a discourse that blames, for example, Kurdish rebellions
as reactionary (mürteci). Yet, more curiously, Koçak goes on to argue
that this is the 1irst and only time Nâzım could not manage to stand upright
before the bourgeoisie. For him, it was written in a moment of
4 The Turkish original reads: “Tü rk Ordusunu ‘isyana teşvik’ ettiğ im iddiasıyla DF yıl ağ ır
hapis cezası giydim. Şimdi de Tü rk Donanmasını ‘isyana’ teşvik etmekle töhmetlendiriliyorum.
Tü rk inkılabına ve senin adına and içerim ki suçsuzum. Askeri isyana teşvik
etmedim... Deli, serseri, mü rteci, satılmış, inkılap ve yurt haini değ ilim ki bunu bir an
olsun dü şü nebileyim. Askeri isyana teşvik etmedim. Senin eserine ve sana, aziz olan
Tü rk dilinin inanmış bir şairiyim. Sırtıma yü klenen ve yü kletilebilecek hapis yıllarını
taşıyabilecek kadar sabırlı olabilirim. Büyü k işlerinin arasında seni bir Tü rk şairinin felaketi
ile alakalandırmak istemezdim. Bağ ışla beni. Seni bir an kendimle meşgul ettimse,
alnıma vurulmak istenen bu ‘inkılap askerini isyana teşvik’ damgasının ancak senin ellerinle
silinebileceğ ine inandığ ımdandır. Başvurabileceğ im en inkılapçı baş sensin. Kemalizm’den
ve senden adalet istiyorum. Tü rk inkılabına ve senin başına and içerim ki
suçsuzum.” Quoted in Orhan Koçak, “Nazım Hikmet: Şiirden Siyasete, Siyasetten Şiire…”
Bianet, June Bi, BCC_,
5 Göksu and Timms, Romantik Komünist, BCD; A. Kadir, L[k\ Harp Okulu ve Nâzım Hikmet,
DBg.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
Yg
weakness with the discourse of TKP that had later decided to end its existence,
or “decentralize” itself, concluding that there was no more a need
for a communist opposition within the Turkish revolution.6 That is, since
this was the only moment of weakness and the guilt can be attributed to
the misconceptions of TKP, we can still consider Nâzım a true Marxist/
communist who had almost always stand against the Kemalism and
bourgeoisie. As I also noted in the Introduction, according to such takes,
there is only one Nâzım, it is communist Nâzım in this case. For such a
take, Nâzım could never think of the Kurdish rebellions as reactionary. If
he had been reasoning by himself, he would not de1initely conclude that
Kemalism is a revolutionary movement. However, in many of his writings,
he seems to have seen the Kemalism as revolutionary movement and
never shied away from supporting secular politics of Kemalism that renders
“reactionary” (irticai) the events such as the 9f7g Kurdish rebellions
which had de1initely an Islamic aspect. Yet from Koçak’s standpoint,
Nâzım the communist could never willingly accept these, he must have
either been tricked or had “a moment of weakness.” Man confronting “the
man” should not and could not have many moments of weakness, especially
if he was coming from bourgeois background.
§ Q.Q A Birth to Forget and Re-Births
In 9f87, Nâzım was born into a well-to-do family in the Ottoman Salonica
where almost twenty years earlier Mustafa Kemal was born too. Both of
his grand fathers were Ottoman paşas in relatively important positions.
His mother, Celile Hanım (9pp8–9fgl), was a painter. His uncle Ali Fuat
Paşa (later Ali Fuat Cebesoy) (9pp7–9flp) was among the notables of the
Turkish War of Independence and until his dead he served in signi1icant
positions as a general, bureaucrat, and politician, despite the fact that
there had been times Mustafa Kemal and him parted ways. The
6 Orhan Koçak, “Nazım Hikmet: Şiirden Siyasete, Siyasetten Şiire…” Bianet, June Bi, BCC_,
https://m.bianet.org/bianet/siyaset/DCeieD-nazim-hikmet-siirden-siyasete-siyasettensiire.
The essay was originally published in Sosyalizm ve Toplumsal Mücadeleler Ansiklopedisi
(I€stanbul: I€letişim, D_mm).
EMRE KESER
Yl
immediate friends around the family mostly consisted of similarly educated
people that consist of writers, bureaucrats, doctors, generals, lawyers,
artists etc. Nâzım was educated in Galatasaray High School in
French and later Ottoman Naval School. That is, he was cultivated in the
upper echelons of the Ottoman-Turkish society.
In his poetics, this birth usually appears as a moment to forget or
something to undo. He imagines himself as someone who could and
should leave behind his bourgeois background and join the struggle for
and with the working class, as someone who could not be in real 1ight “by
nature” but who could endure any kind of pain to be part of this 1ight and
struggle, and as someone nobody could take away from the 1ight. This act
of forgetting is a fantasy that permeates his poetics. It appears in writing
as an inscription of an ideal self that is able to participate in the struggle
of the working class for a better life by overcoming all the obstacles before
doing so. But also, at times it turns into a bewailing confession for
being unable to or not let join the 1ight, an apologetic insertion, a mourning
for the lack of “natural” (or rather social) dispositions to be part of
the 1ight.7 There usually appears two main obstacles. The 1irst is a doubt
concerned with his upbringing or social predispositions: can he, as intellectual
coming from the privileged part of society, really be part of the
class struggle? The second is about the politics that constantly takes him
away from the 1ight in one way or another: imprisonments, attempts of
deterrence, exiles, or simply being not allowed to join the front by “him.”
This is de1initely connected to what I mentioned above, that is,
writing of an ideal self that is able to be part of the 1ight, the struggle,
constant yearning for it as well as constant mourning for being unable to
7 For example, intervening with the authorial voice from the Bursa prison in a long parenthesis,
he says in the Landscapes: “—I’m ashamed to say it— / I’ve never once / Put
my life on the line / in seven years of war and live perfectly )ine, / even in prison.” i_m;
gGi. For the Human Landscapes, throughout the thesis, I cite both English and Turkish
versions. The )irst page number is the English translation while the second is the Turkish
original. The editions I use are as follows: Human Landscapes from My Country: An
Epic Novel in Verse, trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (New York: Persea Books,
BCCB) and Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (I€stanbul: YKY, BCBC).
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
YY
join. This is one of the autobiographical driving forces in Nâzım’s poetics.
He writes in such a way that the 1igures that he aspires to become always
appears to be scattered all around his writings. Nâzım, or more properly
Nâzım-to-be is always there in his writings and in the writings on him.
This usually takes place as journey, births and re-births, and as origin stories.
In every turning point of the journey, he comes to the world anew,
re-originates.
As I pointed above, his story is usually told retrospectively in the
form of how “Nâzım” emerged in the sense that all the disparate facts
somehow contribute to the creation of the ultimate and uni1ied Nâzım
1igure. Drawing from Sartre’s Nausea, in his work on the allegory, Fredric
Jameson says that stories “always involve a chronological reversal and illusion.
We start with the ending and reorganize the aimless facts into a
telos, a sequence of events that is going somewhere and in which something
happens: here the aleatory is turned into necessity.” Jameson sees
this as the necessary form through which our stories are told: “narrative
is a ghostly allegory into which a given set of events is reorganized.”8 The
reason why Jameson sees this allegorical narrative everywhere is the
grand Marxist narrative he clings to, which is the narrative that explains
every event after it takes place and places into a functional schema where
the event in consideration is anticipated. This is the narrative structure
Nâzım’s story is usually told as well. One of the origins is found in his
journey to Ankara. He met the Spartacists 1leeing Germany. They plant
the 1irst seeds of consciousness in him. Then, he witnessed the poverty
and ignorance in the Anatolian villages on his way to Ankara. He grew
even more consciousness. Then, he met Mustafa Kemal. He told him to
write poetry with a point, with an aim. However, he did not let Nâzım go
to the front, join the national forces, 1ight for the people. These were the
1irst origins of Nâzım. Now there is also the rest of the journey: to the
Soviets this time. What I want to say is that whatever happened or not in
Nâzım’s life in one way or another 1ind its way into the narrative of Nâzım
as whole.
8 Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, BCG.
EMRE KESER
Yp
%.%.& Blindness?
While teaching in Bolu, he and his friend Vâ-Nû decided to go to Russia to
see the revolution for themselves. They planned to go to the port of Batum
through Trabzon. But not long ago, on January 7p, 9f79, in this region
Mustafa Suphi (9pp7?–9f79), the Turkish communist leader and the 1irst
president of the Communist Party of Turkey, and his comrades, were assassinated
in the Black Sea.9 Being able to escape this fate, in the fall of
9f79, they managed to get to the Batum. Nâzım was nineteen and the Bolshevik
revolution was as young. In the meantime, the relationship between
Turkey and Russia has been settled down by the Treaty of Moscow
signed on March 9l, 9f79. With this treaty, the USSR has become the 1irst
country recognizing the Ankara government of Mustafa Kemal and the
borders of Turkey.10 Then, after their arrival, they decided to join the
Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). Nâzım narrates the moment of decision
as follows in the novel Life’s Good, Brother:
9 Concerning the instigators of this assassination, there have been differing opinions.
Some claim that it was done by the orders of Mustafa Kemal and others close to him
such as Kazım Karabekir, while others point to Enver Paşa and other members of the
Committee of Union and Progress (I€ttihat ve Terrakki Cemiyeti, I€TC) in exile. Also, there
are claims that it was realized by a secret collaboration between Turkey and the USSR.
The D_BB poem “Onbeşler I€çin...” (For the Fifteens) is written by Nâzım Hikmet and Vâ-
Nû for the memory those who were murdered in the event. “Fifteen” probably refers to
the number of communists who, they think, were killed in the event. Yet this, too, is a
matter of contention. See Göksu and Timms, Romantik Komünist, GB–Gi.
10 One of the representative of Turkey during the negotiations of the treaty was Nâzım’s
uncle Ali Fuat Paşa. Also, these were the time Mustafa Kemal was making important
diplomatic maneuvers to strengthen his hand internationally. Although he is said to
have prevented the spread of communist movements like that of Mustafa Suphi’s and
his comrades, he was at the time addressing Lenin and the other Russian leaders as
“comrades.” In the early D_BCs, the two regimes were on good terms, when both were
still under construction and going through tumultuous times. In the Allies this aroused
a fear of “Muslim communism.” See Şü krü Hanioğlu, Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, BCDe), mG–DB_.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
Yf
Decide, son, I say to myself, decide. The decision was made: death
before turning back. Wait, don’t rush, son. Let’s put the questions
on this table, right next to Anatolia here. What can you sacri1ice
for this cause? What can you give? Everything. Everything I have.
Your freedom? Yes! How many years can you rot in prison for this
cause? All my life, if necessary! Yes, but you like women, 1ine dining,
nice clothes. You can’t wait to travel, to see Europe, Asia,
America, Africa. If you just leave Anatolia here on this rococo table
in Batum and go from Tbilisi to Kars and back to Ankara from
there, in 1ive or six years you’ll be a senator, a minister—women,
wining and dining, art, the whole world. No! If necessary, I can
spend my whole life in prison. Okay, but what about getting
hanged, killed, or drowned like Mustafa Suphi and his friends if I
become a Communist—didn’t you ask yourself these questions in
Batum? I did. I asked myself, Are you afraid of being killed? I’m not
afraid, I said. Just like that, without thinking? No. I 1irst knew I was
afraid, then I knew I wasn’t. Okay, are you ready to be disabled,
crippled, or made deaf for this cause? I asked. And TB, heart disease,
blindness? Blindness? Blindness... Wait a minute—I hadn’t
thought about going blind for this cause. I got up. I shut my eyes
tight and walked around the room. Feeling the furniture with my
hands, I walked around the room in the darkness of my closed
eyes. Twice I stumbled, but I didn’t open my eyes. Then I stopped
at the table. I opened my eyes. Yes, I can accept blindness. Maybe
I was a bit childish, a little comical. But this is the truth. Not books
or word-of-mouth propaganda or my social condition brought me
where I am. Anatolia brought me where I am. The Anatolia I had
seen only on the surface, from the outside. My heart brought me
where I am. That’s how it is...11
He tries to decide once and for all. There is no return. He puts the questions
on the table. He asks himself whether he is ready to lose limbs in
the 1ight and whether he is ready to lose his sight, to be blinded. A similar
passage appears in the Human Landscapes from My Country, where the
communist prisoner and intellectual Halil, the main character in the
book, whose eyesight is gradually deteriorating faces the same question:
Süleyman asked:
11 Nâzım Hikmet, Life’s Good, Brother: A Novel, trans. Mutlu Konuk Blasing (New York: Persea,
BCDi), iC–iD.
EMRE KESER
p8
“What’s the matter, Halil?”
“Nothing.
Just a little matter of darkness.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Darkness is bad, Süleyman,
to see only darkness—
nothing but darkness—is bad.”
Süleyman laughed:
“Why don’t you just say ‘blindness’?
I agree it’s the worst handicap.”
Fuat joined in:
“Losing an arm or a leg beats going blind.”
Halil, as if he’d just remembered something, asked Fuat:
“If you struggles demanded your eyes, would you give them?”
“I’ve never thought about it.
If it’s absolutely necessary, I’ll give them, too.
Why did you ask this now?”
....
“No.
[Halil turned to Fuat]
I was two years younger than you, Fuat, when I got into this business
of
Imagining the impossible,
ready for the highest sacri1ice,
full of compassion,
utterly pitiless,
and an enemy of lyricism
and more than a bit of a romantic—
in short, a young intellectual
with all his strengths and weaknesses.
You won’t understand—
thankfully, you’re a worker—
but Süleyman will.
Young intellectuals are full of contradictions
when they get their 1irst whiff of the people,
when they 1irst join the masses:
on the one hand, they totally deny themselves as individuals;
on the other, they’re self-absorbed.
I used to ask myself:
‘Are you ready to give your all, Halil?”
‘Yes.’
‘Your eyes?’
‘Yes.
After I’m blind, I can still speak and others can write it down;
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
p9
After I’m blind, I can still 1ight...’”
Fuat laughed:
“You’re right,” he said,
“but even the Devil couldn’t think something like that out of the
blue.”
“An intellectual could.”12
“An intellectual could,” because he does not “naturally” belong to the
class, he is not “organically” attuned to making decisions that require sacri
1ices for others, especially sacri1ices from his privileges. It is not his “social
condition” that brought him where he is. The intellectual is paralyzed
by thinking too much and thus by not being able to do what the masses
can do organically, at ease. There is also the problematic of an intellectual
who is constantly suspicious of himself, of whether he can do it, whether
he can irretrievably commit himself to the 1ight. It is this doubt that make
him self-contradictory and self-absorbed at times. He needs to check
himself, needs to remind himself that he is ready to sacri1ice even his
eyes. As I try to show throughout the thesis, the “eyes,” the gaze, is one of
the most signi1icant devices in Nâzım’s poetics. It 1igures not only as the
organ that sees, but also what monitors the surrounding, controls the
looks upon the author or how the author is seen. Furthermore, they are
also the author itself, more accurately that which is seen by the other. Being
seen is important, because this doubt is not only a self-doubt, but a
doubt that is brought on the author by the other gazes directed at him
with a suspicion, these are the gazes the author always feels on himself.
Thus, both being able to see and being seen are equally crucial, because
the author must see how he is seen. For this reason, it is dreadful for him
to lose his vision but it is equally terrifying to be lost in the darkness.
Halil has drawn eyes in the margins of his map.
Some frontal views, some pro1iles.
From a gashed eyebrow, blood
Trickles down the lid
of a bold, glaring eyeball.
12 Human Landscapes, BBe–BBm; BGF–BGG.
EMRE KESER
p7
Some eyes are in pairs, some single.
There are single eyes as sneaky as a submarine periscope.
Some eyes are jumbled together,
all over one another.
Some open wide,
Their fate frightfully legible.
And some are closed tight, like locked walnut boxes:
what are they hiding?
There are eyes
of mothers.
There are eyes: just two pupils gleaming
with hate and rancor.
There are eyes
of love.
There are eyes
like a wheat harvest in the sun.
And over and over,
that same eye:
the gashed eyebrow, the blood
trickling down the lid,
the bold, glaring eyeball.13
Halil, through which Nâzım speaks, in the face of losing his eyes, knows
that he is being watched by all different kinds of eyes everywhere: the
loving ones as well as the hostile ones, the inquisitive ones as well as the
sincere ones. To be able to present himself as the one, as a whole, Halil
needs to keep seeing.
%.%.% Making the Decision: “Ağaç Yaşken Eğilir”
To go back, despite the superiority of being an organic intellectual and
having the natural class inclinations, Nâzım still believes in the change,
13 Human Landscapes, imi; ggG–gge.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
ps
because such a change, such a moment of decision, is his origin. He was
re-born from such a decisive moment. The earlier one has this moment,
the more decisive the change will be. Once again from the Landscapes
Halil speaking:
“This is why, Faik Bey:
because you are alone in life,
you are alone in death.
If you’d stayed a doctor for the police
and kept your ties,
if you hadn’t cut the strings between you and your class,
or if you’d gone over to the other side
after this operation
and become attached to other people with
other ties,
then this chronic disease that now grows unchecked
would 1lare up but rarely...”
Faik Bey laughed out loud:
“You sound like a doctor,” he said,
“but look, rarely or not, it would still 1lare up.”
“Yes, it would 1lare up, Faik Bey.
A tree bends only when it’s green,
and it’s not that easy to change headquarters:
we carry inside us something from the cradle.
And then...”14
In this passage, Halil tries to diagnose a depressed doctor, Faik Bey. He
tells him what the problem in his life is. He works for the people, but he
is not with them. He does not belong with them. But he also seems to have
left behind his original class like Nâzım (or Halil) and yet could not be
able to attach to the people entirely. He says that it is a dif1icult task and
it is even more dif1icult when it is not done in the youth: “a tree bends
when it is green.” And if it is not done, if one is struck in the void, this is
dangerous. And, at the end of this section of the book, I guess not so
14 Human Landscapes, iDm; ieD–ieB.
EMRE KESER
pd
surprisingly, the doctor commits suicide.15 And Halil knows why. Note
here that even though sometimes he is self-contradictory and self-absorbed,
Halil is in fact already a whole, he is in peace with himself, because
he seems to have decided what needs to be decided long ago, hence
in better position than the doctor whose suicide, for Halil, is no surprise.
This is the end that waits for the one if one has to make a committed
class decision, just like Nâzım did in his nineteenth year. In his 9fs8
poem “My Nineteenth Year,” he personi1ies his nineteenth year as a moment
of decision, a moment he changed his class, and addresses it as his
teacher and comrade. This is obviously one of the most important turning
points in his self-narrative. Nâzım pictures his arrival at the Soviets and
his decision to become a communist as a moment of rebirth and personi
1ies his “nineteenth year” calling it “my 1irst child, my 1irst teacher, my
15 In D_iC, Nâzım Hikmet wrote a short essay on the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s
taking his own life for the magazine Resimli Ay under the pseudonym Sü leyman: “Why
the Great Poet Mayakovski Commit Suicide?” In this essay, he mainly argues against
those who claim that Mayakovsky’s suicide is the failure of the communist ideas like
materialism, belief in the future, and the beautiful-days-to-come. Rather, drawing on the
words of the Russian poet Demyan Bendy (Ye)im Alekseevich Pridvorov), Nâzım suggests,
there is a certain individualism that had made Mayakovsky lose his touch with the
working masses, which sometimes had led him see himself as the standing man against
the society as a whole. Mayakovsky’s suicide is a result of this individualism catching
him in “a moment of weakness,” coupled with a disease and an accidental loneliness. It
seems that this is what happens to Faik Bey who is an individualist and lonely doctor
and, just like Mayakovsky, all of a sudden, who commits suicide. The moral of both stories
seems to be that this is what happens when one is detached from society and is
unable to make the decision to be the masses. See [Sü leyman], “Muazzam Şair Mayakofski
Neden I€ntihar Etti?” Resimli Ay F (D_iC): Bm–B_. See also Zafer Toprak, “Mayakovski’nin
I€ntiharı ve Nâ zım Hikmet,” Toplumsal Tarih BGC (BCDF): BB–iD. This “moment of
weakness” discourse is familiar from Koçak’s points that I cited above. It constitutes a
crucial part of the communist movements in contexts like Turkey where lots of courage,
discipline, strength, and sel)lessness are required to )ight the state. Thus, there is not
much room for moments of weakness, a discourse and practice that still imbues with
Marxist politics in Turkey, most of the time turning the organizations into counterstates.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
pg
1irst comrade”: “I respect you like I respect my mother / I follow and will
follow the way you 1irst tread.”16
He respects this moment just as he respects his mother that gave
birth to him. He originates at this moment and, he says, he will follow this
origin all the way to the end, even if it requires his eyes from him. In Moscow,
Nâzım attended the Communist University of the Tailors of the East
from 9f79 to 9f7d.17 This period is also the one when, as he implies, he
started to work to reach the full consciousness, to become a “ha1iz” of Das
Kapital in a 9f7s poem called “Şair.”18 That is why he writes in “My Nineteenth
Year”: “BOOK, BOOK, BOOK...” It is period that the 1irst seeds of
consciousness planted in him during his journey in Anatolia has come to
fruition, to a full consciousness, following an extensive reading of Marxist-
Leninist literature at the time. It is a moment that he decisively
changed his class, with the exception of a few doubts that come and go.
“He’d entered the 1ight through his mind and books / but he’d been as
true to it as an honest laborer [namuslu bir amele].”19 In his 9fdY poem,
too, he emphasizes this change of the class. The poem’s name is “In the
Era of Sultan Hamit”:
16 “D_ Yaşım” in Bütün Şiirleri, BBm. Translation mine.
17 For a recent account of Nâ zım’s student years there, see James Meyer, “Children of
Trans-Empire: Nâ zım Hikmet and the First Generation of Turkish Students at Moscow’s
Communist University of the East” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association
F, no. B (BCDm): D_F–BDm.
18 “Şair” in Bütün Şiirleri, DDi–DDg. One of the recurring practices in Nâzım’s poetics is that,
to underline his secular and materialist convictions, he often provocatively replaces the
Islamic concepts, forms, and discourses with Marxist-materialist content. For example,
as in here, he takes the concept of being ha)iz, which in Islamic tradition refers to those
who completely memorize the Qur’an and can recite it from memory in order to protect
it from being forgotten as the “guardians.” Nâzım, in this sense, replaces the Qur’an with
Das Kapital and wants to become a ha)iz of the latter. There are many other examples of
this. For example, he also changes the suras about the resurrection in Qur’an with the
resurrection of the working class. See Nedim Gü rsel, “Nâzım Hikmet’in Rubaı̂leri” Birikim
DF (D_eG): G–BC and “Nâ zım Hikmet’in Kıyamet Sureleri” Birikim De (D_eG): DD–Bg.
19 Human Landscapes from My Country, gCB–gCi; gGm.
EMRE KESER
pl
In the era of Sultan Hamit, my father had not served in the army
in Yemen for ten years,
he was from the class of high of1icers, a son of a paşa (paşazadeymiş
kendisi)
I changed my class and became a communist,
imprisoned for nine years
—and this time—
in the sweet era of the Republic,
and it is not known
how much longer
this national service (vatan hizmeti)
will last.20
The message is clear: he changed his class and became a communist. He
gave up his position in the upper echelons of society. And he calls this a
national service. Perhaps one of the most obvious element here that permeates
the discourses of many factions of the left in Turkey is the discourse
of communists being the real nationalists or patriots. This is at
once a defensive discourse against the one that labels communists as traitors
of the nation and an inclusive (or perhaps populist) one that addresses
the people with national sentimentalities. However, this should
not be understood as that Nâzım Hikmet was communist more than he
was nationalist. This speaks against the right-wing nationalist politics,
saying that the most patriotic people is in fact communists, because they
care for their people, they want them to live in better conditions and they
want them to be happy. They love their nation not as a symbol or a piece
of land but as where people suffer and yet deserve better. Loving nation
is loving people inhabiting that nation, according to this discourse. Once
again, here is a relevant passage from the Human Landscapes:
“Kerim,” Halil said,
“praised be the glory of the Turkish people and humanity
...
praised be the glory of the Turkish people and all people
and, thanks be, I’m a Communist—
to the core
and more so every day,
20 “Sultan Hamit Devrinde” in Bütün Şiirleri, mme. Translation mine.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
pY
each day a little more of a Communist,
a Communist...
[As he repeated Communist,
he felt he could breathe easier.]
Thanks be, I’m a Communist.
That much is true, Kerim.
And like all Communists, I’m a true patriot,
with a love for my country more real, more
advanced,
than any in all history,
encompassing a whole era,
and all of humanity...21
He suggests that communists are true patriots full of love for their countries,
nations, and people. They are patriots more real and more advanced
than everyone else. Just before that, Halil (or Nâzım) repeats that he is a
communist over and over again. As he repeats it, he relieves, he starts to
“breathe easier.” He inscribes and asserts his identity: “I am a communist.”
He inscribes and asserts it as if it became even more real as he
repeats it.
All this is because there are gazes that watch him and ready to see
his digressions from communism and concessions, and to see that being
communist is just a guise through which Nâzım advertises himself and
his works. Perhaps the most important expression of this gaze was
spelled out by Hikmet Kıvılcımlı (9f87–9fY9), the in1luential leader and
theorist of the Communist Party of Turkey. In a piece he wrote, Kıvılcımlı
suggests,
Among the types who have rubbed themselves on the Marxist
movement in Turkey, there are the ones like Nâzım Hikmet. Since
this type of people gained their identities, their status, in the bourgeois
society by disguising themselves under Marxism, they cannot
abandon this disguise. Rip off the “so-called Marxist” form the
poet Nâzım Hikmet wants to give with his poems like a shirt that
is not close-1it: under it, you will 1ind a petit-bourgeois poetry that
we are able to come across on the streets of Babıâli every minute...
This type of people, for sure, is more harmful to Marxism than
21 Human Landscapes From My Country, gFB–gFi; FBF.
EMRE KESER
pp
anybody else. Nâzım’s desire is to be always on the stage by using
some radical “Marxist” terms due to his anxiety of mystisizing and
protecting his “literary identity” by masking it. We do not even
want to talk about those who were once fervent communists like
Şevket Süreyya, Vedat Nedim, Ahmet Cevat...22
This is from a piece Kıvılcımlı wrote in 9fsl. Apparently, ever since, it had
had a massive impact on Nâzım’s poetics in the way that I have tried to
explicate so far. According to Kıvılcımlı, Marxism is a front Nâzım put up
and used as an identity through which he promoted himself.
To go back to the organicity of the working masses vis-à-vis the
clumsiness of the intellectual in being part of the struggle, in his 1irst
novel Blood Doesn’t Speak (Kan Konuşmaz), 1irst serialized in a newspaper
in 9fsl, Nâzım tells the story of an adopted child, O_mer, raised by a
working man Nuri Usta. The child was from a wealthy Ottoman paşa who
had an affair with the maid Gülizar serving in his mansion. After the discovery
of the affair, the maid was 1ired from the palace. Upon seeing the
desperate maid and the child in the neighborhood and their bad treatment
by the neighbors, Nuri Usta decides to marry Gülizar and look after
22 The Turkish version reads: “Tü rkiye’deki Marksist harekete sü rtünüp geçen tipler arasında,
bir de Nazım Hikmet gibileri vardır. Bunlar burjuva toplumundaki kimliklerini,
konumlarını, Marksizm kılığ ına bü rü nerek elde ettiklerinden, bu kılıktan bir tü rlü ayrılamazlar.
Şair Nazım Hikmet'in şiirlerle vermek istediğ i “sö zde Marksist” şekli, eğ reti
bir gömlek gibi soyup atınız: Altından, Babıâ li kaldırımlarında her dakika rastladığ ımız
bir kü çü k burjuva şairliğ i fırlayıp çıkacaktır. I€şte Nazım’ın bazı radikal “Marksist” terimlerle
sahnede yü rü tmek isteyişi, hep o “edebi kimliğ i”ni maskeleyerek mistikleştirmek
ve korumak kaygısındandır. Bu tipler, muhakkak ki, Marksizme herkesten daha zararlıdırlar.
Bir zamanlar ateşli komü nist geçinen Şevket Sü reyya, Vedat Nedim, Ahmet Cevat…
gibilerinden sö z bile etmek istemiyoruz.” Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, Marksizm Kalpazanları
Kimlerdir? Kerim Sadi (Köxü z Yayınları, [D_iG]), DD. Kıvılcımlı is arguably the most
proli)ic and the most original thinker of the twentieth-century Marxist-revolutionary
movement in Turkey, despite the fact that his works are hardly studied. Unlike most
)igures of the Turkish left, Kıvılcımlı was not born into a wealthy family. However, he
learned different languages on his own, translated some works of Marx and Engels into
Turkish, and attempted to construct a Marxist theory and practice attentive to practices,
values, and conditions of Turkish, and mostly a Muslim, society. See Canan Ou zcan Eliaçık,
Barbarın Tarihi - Ezilenin Dini: Hikmet Kıvılcımlı’da Tarih ve Din (I€stanbul: I€letişim Yayınları,
BCBD), DF.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
pf
the child as if he was his own. The child does not know that Nuri Usta is
not his real father but a wealthy Ottoman paşa and grew with a working
class habits and consciousness. This consciousness is even sharpened after
the World War I and the Turkish War of Independence, as the poor
gets even poorer and the rich gets even richer in the post-war period, despite
the fact that the war of independence is fought and won by the poor.
That is, while the child’s biological father gets even richer, his working
father gets even poorer. (This is the way in which Nâzım was accustomed
to tell the story of the war, which is also explicit in the Human Landscapes
and Kuvây-i Milliye). However, together they try to 1ight against the regime
that exploits them as much as they can. Toward the end of the book,
there occurs a confrontation between him and his real father. His biological
father needs the child to support himself, telling him that they are
from the same blood. However, the child tells him that “blood does not
speak” and this how the novel ends.23 This is, 1irst of all, a critique of fascist/
racist discourse based on the blood ties, as the Nazi ideology was on
the rise at the time the novel was serialized and had supporters inside
Turkey. Yet there is also an important aspect to our discussion here. Remember
that Halil was saying that a tree bends when it is green. Being
able to 1ight with and for the class is guaranteed when the class consciousness
is put in place as early as possible or when the decision to side
with the class is made decisively at some point. Though biologically from
a wealthy man, the child was raised and cultivated by the working man
and in a working class environment. He was organically thrown into the
class struggle. Even when he learned about his biological father in his adolescence
as a young lawyer, this changes nothing for him, because the
blood does not speak, what speaks is upbringing: a tree bends only when
it is green. That is, once the decision to be with and for the class is made—
and the earlier it is made, the surer its outcomes are—one can change
one’s social class and status. Therefore, this proves, though an intellectual
coming from upper echelons of the society, Nâzım, too, can change his
class and make the decision, which he had already made in his nineteenth
23 Kan Konuşmaz (I€stanbul: Ararat Yayınevi, D_eG), iBg.
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f8
year. There needs to be a re-birth, a moment (more accurately, multiple
moments, as the seeds of consciousness are planted in different times
and places) where one originates. Once this is done, the rest is a matter
of self-government to ensure that one does not digress.
In “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” (Benerci Kendini Niçin
O_ldü rdü ?), Nâzım, this time seemingly speaking and acting through
Banerjee, shows that he is ready to sacri1ice himself when he is no more
of help in the 1ight or a burden on the shoulder of his comrades. The Indian
anti-imperialist Banerjee takes his own life without a doubt when
he realizes that he is nothing other than an obstacle before the 1ight,
probably in the form of an emotional and moral weight on his comrades.
He does this while others betray the 1ight and side with the enemy to live
comfortably. If one wants to join this 1ight seriously, one needs to be selfless
and disciplined in order to be able to make the most important sacri
1ices for the better days to come, even if this means that one will not see
those days. This is also a theme in his early poem “Salkımsöğüt.” While
the red horse riders go to the revolution, they are not concerned with the
fall of a comrade on the way. And the comrade who fell, too, is not saddened
by this, he is calm and collected, as the future better days are on
the horizon even if he will not live them.
%.%.' To Be Read by the Class and the Necessity of History
As all these suggest, “Nâzım Hikmet” is expressed by and through multiple
characters. There is no one single representative character in Nâzım’s
oeuvre and even in a single book. It usually speaks through more than
one characters as well as by entering the narrative with his own authorial
voice. At times these characters, as the narrative moves forward, change
direction and suddenly stop or fall short of representing “Nâzım,” while
at others they stick to the ideal, the phantasm that represents the values
and beings Nâzım longs to attain, originates toward, is reborn for over
and over again, that makes up the principled core of “Nâzım.” Despite this
multiplicity of characters and speakers (or spokespersons), they are all
put to work to accomplish a single uni1ied task, which is to unify the idea
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
f9
of Nâzım by reconstructing the past and extending and asserting him into
future with no rupture, break, 1issure, excursion, and no moment of
weakness, but as a whole, as an authority vis-à-vis the gazes of the other
watching him to see his digression and renunciation.
But he continuously crafts, inscribes, and asserts an ideal self that
he is, or that he is going to be, in his writings as well as a self that mourns
for not being able to join the 1ight organically. Even in the latter case, he
places himself in the narrative as a poet who is read by the working classes
and makes them conscious about their conditions. This is another
version of the fantasy to be with and, more importantly, to be read by the
class. This is legible in the move he makes in the Human Landscapes to
place parts of Kuvây-i Milliye into it. The working men on the train’s dining
car, the cook, the maı̂tre d’hotel, the waiter, happened to have an epic
written by “the poet in prison.”24 Before beginning to read, the waiter
Mustafa tells the chef Mahmut Aşer that it is a different kind of epic. Rather
than talking about trenchant struggles of the prisoner life, it talks
about those people who fought the Turkish War of Independence, whose
names usually go unnoticed. As the men reads the epic and the train
keeps moving, they start getting conscious about their own conditions
and then, at some point, the waitress Mustafa starts to look at the people
(like Hikmet Alpersoy, “the cannery owner and arms dealer”25) he serves
in the dining car with a certain disgust and revenge, because they are the
rich who took advantage of the war. He starts to see being waiter as being
a servant.26 The new neoclassical cuisine the chef Mahmut Aşer cooks
24 The epic is brought and read to others (that is, maı̂tre d’ and the Chef Mahmut Aşer) by
the waiter Mustafa. Mustafa’s worker (amele) brother is a friend of the poet in prison
and Mustafa himself met him once. Human Landscapes, DGg; D_g. The friendship between
the poet and the worker is signi)icant here. It appears in the book once more in the
friendship between the intellectual Halil and the thirteen-year-old child worker Kerim
whom the narrator calls “the heart of my heart” (“canım, ciğerim... I€şçi Kerim”). iie; i_i.
25 Human Landscapes, DFF; Dmg.
26 “Besides, for the past year / (since the day he visited the man in prison), / being a waiter
had felt like wearing a sticky, dirty undershirt.... / Whatever it was, / Mustafa was no
longer considered waiting on table respectable. / It was like being a servant.” DFg–DFF;
Dmg.
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suddenly starts to feel strange to Mustafa.27 And Mahmut Aşer, who himself
fought in the war, knows Iosmail from Arhave whose story is told in
the epic.28 Here what we see is that Nâzım places himself as a poet of the
class, who is able to make them realize their own conditions and raise in
them a class consciousness. This is how Nâzım imagines “Nâzım” or
simply what/who he wishes to be: “the poet in prison” who, though unable
to join the 1ight, is read by the class and help them raise a consciousness.
Although the Human Landscapes is the perfection of his realist turn
and the attempt to “portray the complex reality with all its contradictions,”
29 what we hear out loud in this portrayal is the central place and
voice Nâzım occupies: the author, as a fantasy, is always present in it,
speaking and responding to the gazes.
One last and interesting example for this might be taken out from
Nâzım’s earlier work, the Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin (Simavne Kadısı Oğlu
Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı) written and published in 9fsl. The Epic was
about a fourteenth-century Ottoman sheik, mystic, and his “socialistic”
ideals of sharing everything which led to the multicommunal rebel that
brought together Muslim, Jewish, Greek communities around the Aegean
27 “Chef Mahmut Aşer, / the “neoclassic” type of our new reformed cuisine, / suddenly appeared
completely different to Mustafa, / down to the shape of his nose.” DGg; D_i
28 Human Landscapes, DGB; D_B.
29 During D_iCs, Nâzım’s poetics took a realist turn after his so-called constructivist/futurist
period. This turn might be seen as a part of Nâ zım’s never-ending experiments, but
it was also a project crystallized in the wake of the dissemination of Engels’s famous
remarks favoring Balzacian realism that is capable of “portraying complex and concrete
totality with all its contradictions,” and the Soviet state’s embrace, and perhaps dictate,
of it as the true art form and genre. Toward the end of D_iCs, Nâzım often expressed that
he wanted to apply Balzacian realism to the poetry to express society with all the elements
including the wicked and uncanny facts included in it. It would not be completely
wrong to generalize that most of what he writes in D_iCs and D_gCs was realist experiments
in this regard, the apex of which was the Human Landscapes from My Country,
which was initially intended to be a social, economic, and historical portrait of Turkish
society in the early D_gCs, written and re-written in his prison years and afterwards over
a period spanning more than ten years. However, as I discuss here, while portraying the
society, Nâ zım’s realism was never lacking in the authorial presence and his voice is
most of the time one of the central speakers/narrators.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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region and its eventual loss against the Ottoman state and the Sultan
Mehmed I. He reads Bedreddin’s revolt as a national and proto-socialist
struggle that is bound to fail, because, as any historical materialist knows,
the class struggles cannot succeed in places where capitalism is not fully
or at least partially developed, or where there cannot be classes or class
consciousness. Nâzım knows this very well and makes it explicit in the
poem. It is exactly at this point of the poem that he feels that adding a
footnote to the epic would be in order. First, here are the verses that require
the footnote: “Don’t say / this is the necessary consequence of / the
historical, social, economic conditions! / I know! / And I bow down to
that object you mentioned. / But this heart / it does not understand this
language, / It says, / ‘Oh cruel fate, / oh 1ickle fortune.’”30 These words
are the narrator’s mourning for the loss of Sheikh Bedreddin, but the narrator
knows very well that this is the necessary consequence. Still, he
mourns, because knowing what has to happen does not exclude the sadness
that comes out of what happened. This is what Nâzım told in the
footnote. He says that there will be those who call themselves “left” and,
upon reading this, they will accuse me of making a distinction between
his “head” (kafa) and “heart” (yürek): “What a Marxist!” So, this footnote
is a response to this type of people. But, no, Nâzım announces right after,
this digression or parenthesis (istidrad) is not for them but for those who
has newly started to read Marxism and are far from left snobbishness (sol
züppelik). That is to say, he adds a footnote to the poem, to one of the peak
points of the narrative, just to educate the young Marxists. Then, he continues,
with a hypothetical example: think of a doctor who knows that his
child will die soon, he also knows that this is a physiological, biological
necessity, and is he not allowed to cry, be sad when his child is dead eventually?
Similarly, did not Marx probably feel sorrow after the fall of the
Paris Commune despite the fact that he knew in advance that its fall is a
historical necessity. Therefore, Nâzım concludes the footnote, “Marxist is
30 “Simavne Kadısı Oğlu Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı” in Bütün Şiirleri, g__. Translation mine.
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not ‘a machine-man’, a ROBOT, but a historical, social, concrete human
being with his 1lesh, blood, nerves, head, and heart.”31
I want to draw the following conclusions from this. First, Nâzım’s
poetics is shaped by an authority, or his auto-production of himself in
writing, by speaking to and responding to the gazes. He intentionally
makes himself the object of these gazes to become the secular subjectauthor
of his life and self without, however, realizing that it is in fact those
against which he speaks that enable him to construct himself as a consistent
whole: a truly secular, Marxist, materialist, nationalist, (class-
)conscious self. Second, in constructing himself as a whole, he in fact
misses being as such. As he inscribes and asserts himself as a sel1less and
disciplined communist right into the class war (organically, just like a
“namuslu amele”) through a strong authorial voice present in almost all
his writings, he in fact misses being as such and rather asserts the selfabsorbed
intellectual from which he strives to release himself. (Here unlike,
for instance, Nergis Ertü rk’s deconstructive reading that focuses on
the narrative techniques and points out that what she calls Nâzım’s
“ghostwriting” where “the singularity of the writerly self is willingly
given up,”32 I argue that the singularity of the author is overly present in
Nâzım’s writings by focusing on the “message” of his writings and
thereby doing mostly a “literal” reading of his writings. However, the conclusion
I reach similarly is about the impossibility of this singular author.
33) Third, as I have said above, the way Nâzım and the discourse of
Nâzım Hikmet construct him as a consistent whole is the Marxist-functionalist
narrative that puts all the past events in a meaningful and linear
31 “Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı,” g__. Translation mine.
32 Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, Deg–DeF. Unlike Ertü rk, I argue that the
authorial voice and presence of the author is never lost in the Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin.
33 However, I employ two strategies at the same time as I have pointed out in the Introduction.
On the one hand, I do the literal reading to illustrate how Nâzım constructed himself
as a uni)ied, singular author of his life and the self. On the other hand, I read Nâ zım
against the grain to be able to show the impossibility of such an author and the narrative
through which he is constructed. That is why, for example, I try to show that it is also
the case that writing precedes life and that Nâzım has a late style that de)ies, or undoes,
this construction.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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form of explanation. In this kind of narrative form, one can place every
past event into a function that helps the story cohere as a whole and in1inite
additions are always possible in such a story. Every event can be put
in a form that 1its in the 1inal coherence of the narrative. For example, as
I said previously, Nâzım’s story is told in such a way that everything that
has happened to him turns out to be a contribution to the “Nâzım,” or
ful1ills a vital function in the making of him. Formally, this is on a par with
the idea that Sheikh Bedreddin’s revolt was bound to fail, because it was
“untimely”: a not-yet. It thus failed to change the social order, because,
according to the laws of historical materialism, there could not be a socialist
revolution where there is no class society and class consciousness.
Told this way, Bedreddin’s epic revolt stops posing a challenge to the
Marxist narrative/theory. Here is another example of this narrative that
Fredric Jameson likes to tell: there are racial, religious, ethnic con1licts
and, for this reason, the identity politics is prevalent, because they help
the capitalist world order continue by taking people away from the class
struggle and dividing the working class in this way.34 The presence of
such con1licts is explained by being explained away, by the function that
they ful1ill in the capitalist system after their presence is observed. That
is to say, every event can be subsumed under such a narrative, because
there can be found a function for every event in the narrative, especially
autobiographical constructions like Nâzım’s where every incident takes
its place as a historical necessity, another distance covered to reach the
1inal consciousness, which composes the consistent whole.35
34 Allegory and Ideology, D_C–BDg.
35 Also, we must note here that the construction of the whole vis-à-vis external enemies is
compatible with the secular Marxist content positioning the “man” at the center of the
world as its prime creator. And, not so surprisingly, nature is one of the most recurring
themes and )igures in Nâzım’s writings, but, most of the time, as an outside thing, an
external enemy, to change, conquer, tame, exploit, and as a fecund woman that serves as
the element providing the background tension that moves the poem forward to the explosion,
as in The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin. This is in direct con)lict with the “ecocritics”
rendering Nâzım “environmental-friendly” citing the profuse references to nature in his
poems. See, for example, Kim Fortuny, “Nâzim Hikmet’s Ecopoetics and the Gezi Park
EMRE KESER
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§ Q.S OrigiNation
Nâzım’s construction of himself as a secular whole and the author of his
life is in no ways unrelated to the emergence of the modern Turkish nation-
state as a self-originating entity with de1inite borders and boundaries
and the producer of human life inside (and out). Rather, they are
analogous processes that affect one another. Nâzım not only serves as a
model human that the Republic was set out to build, he also constitutes a
formal model that is embraced in the making of the state itself and vice
versa. As Nâzım originates, the modern Turkish nation-state originates.
Put differently, Nâzım’s story can be interpreted as the story of the Turkish
nation-state, as in both cases the occurrences in the lives of two entities
turned out to be historical necessities. This is akin to what Jameson
calls the national allegory. As I have noted in the Introduction, I am not
sure if this is allegory or analogy, but here what is important is that there
are parallelisms between these constructions and the narrative through
which the their story is put into a whole. As he insistently underlines the
fact that he is the poet of the sacred Turkish language in his letter to Atatürk,
the fate of Nâzım turned out to be the fate of the Turkish language.
This is one of the images through which “Nâzım Hikmet” is produced and
reproduced as the Turkish itself.36
Protests” Middle Eastern Literatures D_, no. B (BCDG): DGB–Dmg. Also, in arguing that every
collective, to achieve the cohesion, need an external enemy and threat, Fredric Jameson
says, or confesses, “as human mortals, nature always was our enemy in the )irst place.”
Allegory and Ideology, D_m. In the Chapter F, I argue that Nâzım has a late style that diverts
from this understanding of nature as an external enemy.
36 During the D_iCs, Nâzım Hikmet penned articles which he called “clean/pure Turkish
essays” (temiz Türkçe denemeleri) under the pseudonym “Orhan Selim,” mostly in the
newspaper Akşam. He described himself as “Orhan Selim who writes essays on clean
Turkish.” These writings were instructing and proposing new ideas about how to use
Turkish language clearly and purely, how to bridge the gap between the oral and the
written language, the latter being the supplement in the sense that the written language
must be as close as possible to the spoken language. As I will try to show below, these
attempt at the puri)ication of the language was also a part of the modernizing projects
of the republican state. Orhan Koçak calls these types of writings “dil yazıları” (language
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
fY
For example, in a conversation with Haluk Oral, Gündü z Vassaf
suggests comparing writings of Atatürk and those of Nâzım Hikmet from
the same period. What we will see, he says, is that most of what Atatürk
said and wrote when he was alive is dif1icult to understand today, as he
used extensively Persian and Arabic words common in Ottoman Turkish,
one needs a dictionary to read him, while there is no dif1iculty in understanding
Nâzım today.37 That is, in such a discourse which is quite prevalent,
Nâzım is almost the origin of the modern Turkish that is one of the
most important building blocks of the making of the Turkish nation-state,
given that a nation-state is founded upon a language that is understandable
for everyone and a written language, as a supplement, must be as
close as to the speech. The sounds the people make while speaking and
is able to understand while listening must be the way in which writing is
ordered. Writing is an auxiliary that helps the original sounds appear uniformly.
38
Nâzım’s iconoclastic experiments during 9f78s and early 9fs8s
were not also far away from the nationalist projects of purifying language,
cleaning it up from the foreign and traditional effects of the Arabic
and Persian. As Nâzım Hikmet radicalizes his experiments with form and
content, as he breaks up with the established norms of Turkish literary
scene, he also breaks up with the old, imperial, and traditional ways of
speaking and writing. It is in this sense not surprising that just as the
founding Republican elites, Nâzım Hikmet, too, saw the Ottoman Empire
writings), or at least a version of them. He says that the )irst examples of such writings
had been given in Turkish by Nurullah Ataç during D_gCs, a critic about whom Nâzım
had often had positive opinions. However, Nâzım Hikmet, under the name Orhan Selim,
had seemingly embarked on these writings a little earlier than Ataç. See “Ataç’a Saygı”
Birikim Haftalık, July i, BCDm.
37 Gündü z Vassaf and Haluk Oral, “Nâzım Hikmet I€çin Bir Sohbet Denemesi,” in Haluk Oral,
Nâzım Hikmet’in Yolculuğu, xiii–xxi. I€stanbul: I€ş Bankası Kü ltü r Yayınları, BCD_.
38 In her book, Ertü rk calls this vernacularization and de)ines privileging of speech and
oral language as “phonocentrism.”
EMRE KESER
fp
as the backward regime and a symbol of decline.39 His strong secularism
is also in line with the projects of modernization/Westernization of the
Turkish state. The publication of his hij Satır (hij Lines) in 9f7f, only a
year after the alphabet reform in Turkey, is considered to be a revolution
in Turkish language and literature. It marked the birth of a modern Turkish
literature and the single most important example of how to use the
Turkish language at its best.40 The book was also the event that helped
Nâzım establish himself in the literary scene de1initely. Mostly written
under the effects of Russian constructivism and futurism (in particular,
Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold), most of the poems in the
book are now well known and each one of them was considered to be
running against the established norms and habits in the Turkish literary
scene. For example, instead of syllabic meter and verse, Nâzım was writing
in free verse and in lines rather verses, and those lines are ordered in
different shapes and sizes with plays of typography and thereby are directed
at the eye of the reader, which gives writing a materiality, as I
brie1ly explicate in the next chapter.41
39 In the Human Landscapes, for example, Ottoman dynasty is said to have collaborated
with the banks of London and the Greek leader Venizelos to conquer the Anatolia and
dispossess the Turkish people, because, just as capitalists in other parts of the world,
for them, too, the love of nation is just about their personal gains and pro)its. BBi; BGB.
40 It was celebrated as a “book-event” by the various names of the Turkish literary and
intellectual circles of the time, including Ahmet Haşim and Yakup Kadri, with whom
Nâzım Hikmet was going to decisively fall apart soon. Yakup Kadri, for example, said
that \km Lines is “the )irst line in Turkish poetry and even Turkish language... [Nâzım
Hikmet] is not only a literary revolutionary who marked a new epoch but also a brandnew
type of poet that we are not accustomed to see.” Quoted in Memet Fuat, “Nâzım
Hikmet’in Tü rk Şiirindeki Yeri,” DCi, translation mine. On the importance of the miF Lines
in Turkish poetry, also see Nergis Ertü rk, “Nâzım’s Ghostwriting” in Grammatology and
Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, BCDD), DGB–DGG.
41 There are sixteen poems included in \km Lines, some of which were either known previously
or already published somewhere else. Some of the notable poems in the book that
still de)ines the Nâ zım Hikmet imagery are “Güneşi I€çenlerin Tü rkü sü ” (D_Bg),
“Salkımsö ğü t” (D_Bm), “Piyer Loti” (D_BF), “Makinalaşmak” (D_Bi), “Açların Gö zbebekleri”
(D_BB), “Berkley” (D_BG).
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
ff
The year 9f7f is also important in the discourse of “Nâzım Hikmet,”
because, following the great revolutionary impact hij Lines had
had, being the “1irst lines” of the Turkish literature, as Yakup Kadri called,
in the summer of 9f7f Nâzım launched an anonymous campaign called
“We’re Breaking the Idols” in Resimli Ay42 where he started an open attack
against the two established 1igures of the Ottoman-Turkish literature
Abdü lhak Hamit and Mehmed Emin, and he got into con1lict with others
who objected to him afterwards. In the spirit of the 9f97 Russian futurist
manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, one of the authors of which
was Mayakovsky, which suggests throwing the 1igures like Dostoyevsky,
Pushkin, and Tolstoy overboard from the ship of modernity,43 in his own
manifesto Nâzım argued that the times of the aforementioned 1igures in
the Turkish literature has long passed and most of them are in fact “overrated.”
Therefore, they do not deserve the titles attributed to them: “the
great genius” (dâhi-i âzâm) to Abdü lhak Hamit and “national poet” (millî
şair) to Mehmet Emin who, Nâzım Hikmet thinks, was not even writing
in Turkish. As I pointed out above, he says that Mehmet Emin is far from
the Turkish language peasants, workers, merchants, and intellectuals
42 Resimli Ay [Illustrated Monthly] was one of the )irst popular and literary magazines in
the wake of the establishment of the Turkish Republic. Founded by the progressive couple
Zekeriya (Dm_C–D_mC) and Sabiha (Dm_F–D_Gm) Sertels, holding degrees from Columbia
University, the magazine is best known as an organ for radicalizing the Turkish revolution
by providing a space for socialist, feminist, and avant-garde artists and writers
such as Nâ zım Hikmet, Sabahattin Ali, Suat Derviş. In fact, initially, it was intended to be
a popular American magazine and yet the involvement of these writers and political activists,
especially Nâ zım Hikmet’s young idol-breaking energy, turned it into a leading
oppositional space for intellectuals during the late D_BCs. It was, for this reason, censored
and shut down by the Kemalist regime from time to time. On this, see Mehmet
Fatih Uslu, “Resimli Ay Magazine (D_B_–D_iD): The Emergence of an Oppositional Focus
Between Socialism and Avant-Gardism,” MA Thesis, (Boğaziçi University, BCCg). During
his lifetime, Nâzım and Sertels had stayed as close friends and together in the opposition.
Just before Nâzım )led the country, Sertels had to leave in September D_FC due to
the intensi)ication of the political pressure on them. For a recent comprehensive account
of Sertels’ lives in Turkish, see Korhan Atay, Serteller (I€stanbul: I€letişim, BCBD).
43 Ertü rk, too, points to this similarity. See Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey,
DGF.
EMRE KESER
988
speak. Similarly, he was refusing to call Abdülhak Hamit genius on the
grounds that his works are so unclean or impure that they could hardly
be translated into and understood in another language than Ottoman—
here he appears to use “Ottoman,” instead of Turkish, rather intentionally
to draw attention to the outdated nature of Hamit’s writing and language,
bound to disappear just like the Ottoman regime.44
This was one of the breaking points or rather another moment to
forget for Nâzım. For, by attacking these 1igures, he was indirectly, and
sometimes directly,45 attacking and breaking with Yahya Kemal (Beyatlı)
(9ppd–9fgp), his 1irst mentor who helped him write his 1irst poems while
he was a student in the naval school. Yahya Kemal was also one of the
most in1luential and respected poets of the time, Nâzım de1initely admired
him in his youth, but at the same he was a lover of Nâzım’s mother,
the painter Celile Hanım (9pp8–9fgl), in the late 9f98s. According to
Orhan Koçak’s account, one of the driving urges behind Nâzım’s young
and iconoclastic experiments with Turkish language and poetry results
44 “Putları Yıkıyoruz No. D: Apdü lhak Hâmit” Resimli Ay (June D_B_) and “Putları Yıkıyoruz
No. B: Mehmet Emin Beyfendi” Resimli Ay (July D_B_). See also Zafer Toprak, “Nâ zım Hikmet’in
‘Putları Yıkıyoruz’ Kampanyası ve Yeni Edebiyat” Toplumsal Tarih BGD (BCDF): ig–
gB. However, while writing as Orhan Selim in Akşam, seemingly Nâzım, all of a sudden,
turned into a fan of Abdü lhak Hamit and kissed his hand, upon meeting him and learning
his secularism/atheism embodied in his words: “meçhule tapma, insana tap” (don’t
worship the unbeknown, worship the human) at the very end of D_ig. Also, he was noting
that those who were in the past attacking Hamit was not in fact attacking himself
but breaking the “idol” made out of him, which prevented the real Hamit from being
seen and understood. See his writings: “Ou ptü ğüm El” (December De, D_ig), “mi Yaşında
Delikanlı” (December BC, D_ig) “Bu Böylece Biline!..” (December iD, D_mg). All from
Yazılar L (I€stanbul: YKY, BCDm), eF, eG, mC.
45 For instance, in “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?,” Roy Dranat, who is trying to make
Banerjee give up the )ight and convince him to enjoy the life as it is, suggests Banerjee
to take a walk and modernize (asrîleştir) Yahya Kemal. Then, he cites a verse supposedly
written by Yahya Kemal: “‘we take refuge in such a comfortable corner / we are happily
in love with this tumult of the age’” (‘Şöyle rahat bir kü şeye sığ ındık da biz / Dehrin bu
hayı huyuna meclubu handeyiz...’). Bütün Şiirleri, iCB. In another quadrant, called “Comparison”
(Mukayese) (D_ge), Nâ zım compares Yahya Kemal, fat and in pain, to the English
romantic poet Lord Byron who joined the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman
Empire and died of a disease he had during the war in DmBg. Bütün Şiirleri, mmB.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
989
from his desire to forget Yahya Kemal and his anxiety to be somehow in-
1luenced by him. Thus, implicitly drawing upon Harold Bloom’s notion of
“anxiety of in1luence,” which already implies the Freudian family drama,
Koçak claims, Nâzım, the emerging writer, was strongly shaking himself
to get rid of any in1luence Yahya Kemal, the literary precursor, might have
exerted on himself, to liberate himself from this father 1igure that looms
large both in the unconscious of Nâzım and that of the Ottoman-Turkish
literature. On this, Koçak gives an account of the Oedipal anxieties of in-
1luence.46 He suggests that Nâzım’s radical and constant experiments
with poetry during the 9f78s and early 9fs8s was an expression of his desire
to forget, to break up with the tradition, to get rid of any in1luence of
the kind of 1igure like Yahya Kemal, and eventually to overcome it.47 However,
Koçak suggests, after this work of forgetting, after perhaps Nâzım
has established himself and found his own voice, he starts to remember
without realizing doing so. Koçak suggests that mellowing and settling in
Nâzım’s poetics during 9fd8s that brought his poems a certain calmness,
ease, and rhythm are a result of this unconscious remembering, or perhaps
overcoming of the anxiety of being in1luenced and, for this reason,
of being open to the in1luences.48
Nâzım’s avant-garde experiments running against the existing Ottoman-
Turkish literary tradition on the one hand, were in line with the
state’s puri1ication and vernacularization of the Turkish language, but, on
the other hand, were equally unsettling, as the 1igures he run against
were either deployed and favored by the state and bureaucracy or already
among the state elites or the of1icially supported institutions like
46 Orhan Koçak, “Yahya Kemal’le Mayakovski Arasından Nâzım Hikmet” in Kopuk Zincir:
Modern Şiir Üzerine Denemeler (I€stanbul: Metis, BCDB [BCCC]), _–Bi.
47 For another account underscoring Nâ zım’s iconoclasm, see Talâ t S. Halman, “Nâ zim Hikmet:
Lyricist as Iconoclast” Books Abroad gi, no. D. (D_G_): F_–Gg.
48 This is similar to what I argue in the Chapter F. My argument there in brief tries to point
out that Nâzım has a late style where he starts to remember what he forcefully forgot
while working to inscribe and assert himself as a whole and the single author of his life.
However, unlike Koçak, I do not argue that this is legible only in a certain period of
Nâzım’s work but rather consists of scattered moments of remembrance intensi)ied toward
the end of his life.
EMRE KESER
987
the Turkish Hearths. Also, there were others changing their opinions
about Nâzım due to the idols he broke and the communist politics most
of the time he did not step away from. In fact, he went into one of the most
severe con1licts with Yakup Kadri who celebrated the hij Lines as the 1irst
lines of modern Turkish literature, Ahmet Haşim who also praised for its
multivocality but noted that it plays the same song all the time initially,
and Hamdullah Suphi. In his response to Yakup Kadri, this time he was
writing by using his name, Nâzım published an extremely furious poem
in Resimli Ay where he addresses Yakup Kadri as “black jack of spades”
(kara maça bey)49 and says, “you put your soul on sale like a black slave
(zenci bir esir) / you turned your skull into a whore’s room / stealing the
khaki jacketed dead’s money / from their pockets / you bought yourself
/ the air of / the Swiss mountains.”50 As in his many accounts, here, too,
he says that the intellectuals and the state elites like Yakup Kadri are the
bene1iciaries of the Turkish war of independence, despite the fact that
the war is fought and won by the poor. He does this by referring to Yakup
Kadri’s earlier visit to the Switzerland to be treated for his tuberculosis.
We are already familiar with this much, but there are also racist comments.
As it turns out, born in Cairo, Yakup Kadri was a dark-skinned and
hairy man. The blue-eyed and white Nâzım attacks him on this fact by
charging him of putting his self on sale like a black slave. I do not think
that we can skip this as just an angry incident. It is more than that. In a
9fss letter-poem he wrote to his wife, he says, “if a miserable gipsy’s /
hairy hand that looks like a black spider / is going to put the execution
rope / around my neck, / they will look at Nâzım / in vain / to see the fear
in my blue eyes.”51 The contrast between the dark, hairy gipsy and the
49 “Maça” in Turkish slang also refers to “ass.” It is not fully clear to me in what sense Nâzım
used the phrase here.
50 The Turkish version reads: “Behey! / Kara maça bey / behey, yü zü kara. / Ruhunu zenci
bir esir gibi çıkardın pazara, / bir orospu odası yaptın kafa tasını… / Hâ ki ceketli ö lü lerin
ceplerinden / çalarak parasını / satın aldın kendine / I€sviçre dağlarının havasını.” “Cevap”
in Bütün Şiirleri, DDG.
51 The Turkish: “zavallı bir çingenenin / kıllı, siyah bir ö rümceğe benzeyen eli / geçirecekse
eğ er /ipi boğazıma /mavi gö zlerimde korkuyu görmek için / boşuna bakacaklar
/ Nâzıma!” “Karıma Mektup” in Bütün Şiirleri, gBC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
98s
blue-eyed Nâzım, and the opposing values they represent, is apparent
here as well. This is not far away from the upcoming racial projects of the
Turkish state to prove that the Turkish race is white. Perhaps Nâzım
served the exemplary civilized white man that the state wanted to create.
However, as I have been insisting, there is no one single Nâzım:
racist Nâzım or anti-racist one. The above comments are de1initely racist
and not free from or unrelated to the racial projects of the state. Yet he
was also anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist, when almost no
one could dare to be one. During the 9fs8s, when the fascism and racism
was on the rise all over Europe and the world, and while Nazi ideology
has had ardent supporters in Turkey, he was one of the rare 1igures to
write against them. In 9fsg, upon Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia),
he wrote “Letters to Taranta-Babu” where the fascist and imperial
expansion of Italy is subject to critique and condemnation. This kind of
critique was in fact evident in, and preceded by, his previous works,
namely, “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” (9fs7) and “La Gioconda and Si-
Ya-U” (9f7f).52 In 9fsl, he also published the pamphlet “German Fascism
and Racism” against the prevalence and free circulation of fascist and racist
ideas as well as the aforementioned serialized novel Blood Doesn’t
Speak where he openly criticized the importance of biological/blood ties
and implicitly defended the idea that human beings are malleable, they
are shaped by all the other factors such as upbringing, family, education.
And during the 9fd8s and 9fg8s, he wrote against anti-black racism. He
was friends with Paul Robeson. In his poem 9fdf “Fear,” dedicated to
Robeson, he writes: “they are afraid of hope Robeson... / they are afraid,
my eagle-winged canary / they are afraid of our songs Robeson.”53 As
early as 9f7g, way before the scholarly criticisms of Orientalism and/or
postcolonialism, he wrote in “Piyer Loti” against the Western “friends” of
the Orient, who 1inds mystery, harem, faith, submission, and authenticity
in the East, and told them that the Orient is where the slaves die from
52 For a )ine account of these anti-colonial writings in Turkish, see Ou ykü Terzioğlu, Nâzım
Hikmet ve Sömürgecilik Karşıtlığının Poetikası (Ankara: Phoenix, BCC_).
53 “Korku” in Bütün Şiirleri, ,-.. Translation mine.
EMRE KESER
98d
hunger.54 However, this multiplicity of Nâzım is most of the time is overlooked
or explained away to build the narrative of “Nâzım Hikmet.”
To sum up, in this chapter, I have attempted to show that Nâzım
was present in his works and never hesitated to intervene even when he
embarked upon the project of Balzacian realism to portray the complex
reality with all its contradictions. He strives to appear as a uni1ied self
with a narrative form where every past event can be shaped and reshaped
in such a way as to be included and to ful1ill a function in the
“grand” narrative of “Nâzım Hikmet,” which is the form on which the unifying
Nâzım Hikmet scholarship and politics operate.
In the 1irst part, I have tried to sketch out Nâzım’s encounters and
confrontations with Mustafa Kemal, “the man” of the Turkish Republic. It
is one of the most fundamental driving forces in the unifying Nâzım Hikmet
scholarship and politics to be able to determine, conclude whether
Mustafa Kemal (and/or Kemalism) and Nâzım were allies or foes. I have
tried to demonstrate, beyond this friend-foe binary, that the main theme
from this confrontation that permeates Nâzım’s poetics is Mustafa Kemal’s
and his regime holding Nâzım away from the 1ight in different ways.
Coupled with his social background as intellectual from a wealth family
background, this “being unable to join the 1ight” as a mourning/bewailing
for it, as a condition that is changeable and was in fact changed by the
author, and as a fantasy of its reversal marked his writings. This is what I
have mainly dealt with in the second section. In its 1irst form as a
54 See “Piyer Loti” in Bütün Şiirleri, ig–ie. Finally, recently, a work that considers this poem
of Nâzım as a critique of orientalism “from the East” has been published recently:
Zeynep Çelik, Europe Knows Nothing About the Orient: A Critical Discourse From the East,
L\nh–L[kh (I€stanbul: Koç University Press, BCBD), D_e–BBC. Çelik brings together passages
from different Ottoman-Turkish writers in the late eighteenth and early twentieth century,
which criticized the Western perceptions of the East as its authentic, mystic, irrational
other. (This might be considered a part of the shift of emphasis in the humanities
that critique and theory can also be found, or emerge, in “the Orient” or the Global
South.) I must also note Sabri Ateş who uses the relevant part of Nâzım’s “Piyer Loti” as
an epigraph, on a par with other critiques of Orientalism, in his essay where he discusses
Orientalisms inside the Orient and Kurds as the Orient of Turkey. See “Oryantalizm ve
Bizim ‘Doğumuz’” Doğudan D, no.D (BCCe): D–BC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
98g
mourning/bewailing, it takes the form of a shameful confession of being
taken away from and being unable to join the struggle. In the second
form, Nâzım, in retrospect, attempts to show how he changed his class
and joined the class struggle. And in the third, perhaps to reiterate the
second, it appears as a fantasy, as an ideal Nâzım, “the poet in prison” who
is read by the class and help them get conscious of their situation, and as
a sel1less, disciplined communist ready to give whatever the 1ight demands
from him, even his eyes. In fact, all three, including the confessional
form, are put to work to construct this ideal uni1ied self: a truly and
purely secular, materialist, communist, nationalist “Nâzım Hikmet,” the
sole author of, and authority over, his life and self.
By his presence in his writings, he speaks and responds to the different
gazes that supposedly watch him. This is the way in which he establishes
his authority as a whole. In a sense, he objecti1ies himself, “inside,”
in the sense of a uni1ied object, in the presence of an “outside,” to
be able to turn himself into a subject. That is, the outsider gazes solidify
“Nâzım Hikmet” while Nâzım objecti1ies them by placing them in de1inite
viewpoints. It is in this way that he produces himself, writes, inscribes,
and asserts his life and self. Yet it is exactly at this point that this inscription
turns into an impossibility, because to be able to construct himself in
this way, he always needs the others. Put differently, it is the others that
make “Nâzım Hikmet” (im)possible, as there is no clear-cut separation
between inside and outside. Lacking this realization, the discourse of
Nâzım Hikmet, drawing upon a Marxist-functionalist narrative which
turns everything into a historical necessity post hoc, seems to keep producing
and reproducing this distinction.
In the next chapter, I will focus on a 1iguration of the gaze in his
poem “The Eyeballs of the Hungry.” First, I will try to show how the paradoxical
nature of the gaze appears in one of the earliest poems of Nâzım
Hikmet, where the hungry is an object of gaze, a spectacle, as well as
wants to be under the gaze to be able to be seen and cared. But this brings
a certain dread on the gaze. Second, I want to show that writing is not just
representation, a means of communication, mere signs, but rather has a
materiality in Nâzım. Third, I want to connect this to Nâzım’s hunger
EMRE KESER
98l
strike which is shaped by the gazes, the international and national audience,
outside and inside, how the writing of hunger precedes the act of
hunger strike.
98Y
#
Writing of Hunger: Poetics of the Hungry Gaze
if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also
gaze into thee.
– Fredrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Fed up with everyone and everything.
– Stanley Yortis, a British prisoner and his reason
of refusing food in 9f78
To speak, and above all to write, is to fast.
– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Ka=ka: Towards
a Minor Literature
oming from the previous chapter, I want to continue with another
favorite origin story associated with Nâzım Hikmet: the biographical
stories as to how the poem “The Eyeballs of the Hungry” (Açların Gö zbebekleri)
was composed. It is the poem from where “Nâzım” emerges, originates
as intrinsically humanist poet who had been deeply touched,
shaken, by the scenes of poverty and starvation he had to witness
C
EMRE KESER
98p
throughout his journeys to Anatolia, Batum, and 1inally Moscow. According
to the story, Nâzım wrote the poem upon having witnessed the mass
poverty in Anatolia and the Russian famine of early 9f78 as well as having
seen a 1ilm called “The Hungry” in his early days in the Soviets.1 This is
one of the events that led to the emergence of Nâzım and his so-called
humanist/romantic communism, an ideal where no one ever starves.
Once again following from the previous chapter, I want to suggest that
another importance of the poem, another origin story, stems from the fact
that it is the 1irst poem that Nâzım wrote in free verse and, perhaps more
importantly, the 1irst Turkish poem written in free verse. It is, or has been,
thus, also an origin of the modern Turkish literature. Furthermore, it is
for the 1irst time that content determined and gained a logical superiority
over form, because, as it is often told, Nâzım could not manage to 1it the
poem to given, traditional forms of poetry. He was not able to write it using
syllabic meter, for instance. As Nâzım himself often indicated, the true
poetry is the one whose form is shaped, forced, by its content, as the form
for the sake of form can only produce shallow, pointless poems—as Atatürk
once suggested to him to write “poems with a point” rather the ones
formed for the sake of form just to seem modern. It is also told that he
was in1luenced by the ladderlike form of a poem he saw in a Russian daily
written by Mayakovsky when he had not yet learned Russian. This is how
modern Turkish literature was born, originated, by and through Nâzım
Hikmet, overcoming the traditional forms by giving the priority to the
content.2
1 See, for instance, Halman, “Nâzim Hikmet: Lyricist as Iconoclast,” F_–GC; Göksu and
Timms, Romantik Komünist, eB–ei. It can be found in almost any other account on
Nâzım.
2 For instance, criticizing Oktay Rifat, Nâ zım suggests that he could not )igure out that the
poetry must move from content to form, not vice versa. Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. BCi.
Undated. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar, iF_. Memet Fuat, too, states that the
most genuine form is the one that is determined, forced, by the content, which is manifest
in Nâzım’s poetics at its best. Others rely on form for the sake of form. That is why
modern Turkish poetry starts with Nâzım Hikmet. And curiously, he points to a similarity
between the base/superstructure and the content/form: those who appeal to form
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
98f
In this chapter, I read this poem along with Knut Hamsun’s early
novel Sult (Hunger, 9pf8) and Franz Ka1ka’s 9f77 short story “Ein Hungerkünstler”
(A Hunger Artist).3 My goal is to demonstrate that in all
these seemingly disparate 1igures and works of late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, hunger 1igures as something to be looked at as well as
something having a gaze of its own. Another point is to make a gesture
toward the idea that Nâzım’s writing of hunger equipped and surrounded
with gazes preceded his act of hunger strike, which is a form of resistance
itself shaped by the visibilities. Reading together these disparate works
and writers is part of the larger methodology of the thesis which I name
as “reading against the grain.” What brings Hamsun, Ka1ka, and Nâzım
Hikmet, and a novel, a short story, and a poem, together is the idea of
reading them against each other’s grain to be able to go beyond what is
immediately given and what is considered clearly distinct.
Hamsun and Ka1ka, Hunger and “A Hunger Artist,” have been in
many cases taken and thought together, so there is not much novelty in
putting them together.4 The novelty, if any, stems from putting Nâzım Hikmet,
and his poem, together with them. As I have argued so far, Nâzım’s
literary oeuvre is overwhelmingly shaped by his experiments in realism,
or realist poetry, and an urge to represent the injustices and inequalities
the working masses were subject to as well as the wicked parts of the
to satisfy their personal rebels only stay on the level of superstructure, but the real
change starts on the level of the base, that is, the content. See Memet Fuat, “Serbest
Nazım” in Nâzım Hikmet Üzerine Yazılar (I€stanbul: YKY, BCDe [D_eG]), mg–mG.
3 For Hunger, I use the second edition of George Egerton’s English translation, )irst published
in Dm__. The second edition was published in D_BD, right after Hamsun won the
Nobel prize and come to a prominence. For “Hunger Artist,” I rely on Joyce Crick’s English
translation as part of the book A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, edited by Ritchie
Robertson. For “The Eyeballs of the Hungry”, I refer to the Turkish edition of Nâ zım’s
collected poems published by YKY. English translations of the poem is mine.
4 Even the works that do not speci)ically focus on Hunger and “A Hunger Artist” but
Hamsun and Ka)ka in general underlines the similarity between each other and the in-
)luence the former had on the latter. For instance, Walter Benjamin, too, mentions
Hamsun in his re)lections on Ka)ka. See “Franz Ka)ka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His
Death” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, D_Gm), DBe.
EMRE KESER
998
social reality. And Hamsun and Ka1ka are usually considered to be the
“great writers” of modernist European literature, which is, to oversimplify,
characterized by an attention to the individual consciousness, imagination,
brokenness, and equal inattentiveness to the social issues. Put
this way, there is no way in which these two “camps” can be brought and
read together. They are “clearly distinct”: Nâzım is a romantic/humanist
communist who wanted to represent the social reality as a whole and advance
the causes of the downtrodden in his works, while Hamsun and
Ka1ka are enigmatic and “timeless” 1igures of modernism, they had nothing
to represent and speak for, and there is no historical context their
works emerge from, speak for or against.5 Thus, the gesture, in this chapter,
is to read them against such a clear distinction; that is, to contaminate
Nâzım with modernism and timelessness, and Hamsun and Ka1ka with
historical representations and the social.
In his article “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,”
Thomas Laqueur points out that the humanitarianism that emerged in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is based on what he calls
the humanitarian narrative. This narrative speaks about the details of the
bodies of the suffering people and describes them in ways that are very
realistic, medical, and even sometimes shocking, tries to arouse a sympathy
and compassion for them, and eventually expects this to translate into
actions aiming to remedy these sufferings.6 In the origin story concerning
how Nâzım wrote the poem and in the poem itself, too, the signs of such
a narrative can be found. It is written in free verse, because, as widely
discussed, it was the only way for Nâzım to describe the suffering of the
hungry in such a way that their hunger can be “felt” or “seen” by the audience.
It is not surprising that Laqueur sees a convergence between the
5 See, for instance, William C. Rubinstein, “Franz Ka)ka: A Hunger Artist” Monatshefte gg,
no.D (D_FB): Di–D_. According to him, Ka)ka’s story would have nothing with hunger strike
and its emergence at the end of the nineteenth century. It is rather a story about how
hopeless and far from being understood the artist is by others—one of the cliché interpretations
of the story.
6 Thomas Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative” in The New Cultural
History, ed. Lynn Hunt. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, D_m_), DeG–BCg.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
999
emergence of this humanitarian narrative and the realist and naturalist
novel form where the bodies, details, pains, and ordinary people would
be described and represented in depth. Given that Nâzım’s poetics tend
to be prosaic and vice versa from the beginning, according to the origin
story above, Nâzım’s poem can be seen as a humanitarian narrative in
this sense, which I believe is also related to the emergence of biopolitics,
where human life has come to be central object and objective of politics
and placed under the guarantee of the newly emerging modern state invested
in the biological and corporeal details of the population and the
individual. It is then no surprising that this narrative is thus closely interested
in hunger and starvation as bodily processes. However, as I will try
to show below, Nâzım’s writing might not be seen merely as a tool of representation,
consisting of immaterial signs.
James Vernon suggests that it is a relatively recent phenomenon
that hunger has turned into a social question. For long it has been seen
as a fault or failure of the hungry, or “inevitable part of the human condition...
sent as divine retribution for man’s sinful ways”7 or as, for example
Marx argued, what spurs the lazy to continue to work. With eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, however, it has come to constitute a social
problem, a problem that needs to be taken care of, or at least paid attention
to, by the modern state, because it has begun to be thought as the
evil caused by the economic system. This development is closely linked
to the emergence of the modern state as well as “the social” and the social
question: “phenomena such as poverty, crime, and disease, which were
seen as neither economic nor political in origin or character, but which
were thought to similarly transcend the control of individuals, while
shaping their lives.”8 As I discuss in the Chapter 9, these phenomena have
been subject to the observation, statistical analysis, regulation, and normalization
of the state. That is to say, the emergence of the social and that
of the modern biopolitical state as the defender of society, concerned
7 Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, BCCe), DC.
8 Vernon, Hunger, Di. This is what I have already discussed in detail through Foucault. For
the emergence of the social and it connections with the emergence of the “nation,” see
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, ig.
EMRE KESER
997
with health, well-being, and robustness of the population have conditioned
each other. Thus, hunger has turned into a question that is necessarily
related to the state as well as into a spectacle that attracts a public
attention and that puts the regulative capacities of the state to work.
Within this framework, hunger and the hungry has come to be
both something that looks and something that needs to be looked at and
paid attention to. It has been registered with and through gazes. As a
problem, the hungry threateningly gazes at the society and the state, as a
creature that is dangerous, liminal, and vulnerable at once. It is also subject
of the gaze, because society needs to pay attention to the human suffering
and the state is supposed to take care of society, protect it from the
dangers and wrongs of the socioeconomic system. This means that hunger
as the social question can only exist when the audience to look at it is
assumed to exist and the hungry is supposed to throw a demanding gaze
at the audience, society, and the state. It is in this sense that the fundamental
point of this chapter is to illustrate that in all three aforementioned
works, hunger 1igures as, with, and through gazes. It is not surprising
that the publication of these works coincide with the emergence
of the hunger strikes in different places of the world at the end of ninetenth
century, cited in the Chapter 9.
§ S.O Knut Hamsun’s Hunger
Hamsun’s novel9 depicts an anonymous writer who often 1inds himself
suffering from, experiencing, and experimenting with, hunger due to his
unemployment and, also for this reason, he lives either in the streets of
Christiana, today’s Oslo, or in the occasional places he 1inds in the city,
9 Note that Hamsun rejected to call Hunger a novel in the )irst place on the grounds that
what was known as novel, as pointed by Laqueur as well, was in fact the realist novel
that has de)inite beginning and end as well as objects (or reality) to represent. Timothy
Wientzen, “The Aesthetics of Hunger: Knut Hamsun, Modernism, and Starvation’s
Global Frame” Novel: A Forum on Fiction gm, no. B (BCDF): BCm.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
99s
especially when he earns some money from his writings.10 The events in
the novel take place circa 9pf8, the present of the novel. However, to live
up to the social mores of his time and society, where ostensibly the effects
of the Victorian era are intact or somehow persist, he could not ask for
help. Whenever he comes across a friend or an acquittance, he pretends
that he is doing well and everything works 1ine. He does not want to be
“seen” hungry, poor, and indigent, but at the same time, as he wanders
the streets, he seems hope to be “seen” by someone who is kind, perhaps
truly Victorian,11 enough to understand the situation and help him without
offending him. In a scene where the protagonist’s hunger becomes
almost unbearable, he describes the situation as follows:
It was three o’clock. Hunger began to plague me in downright earnest.
I felt faint, and now and again I had to retch furtively. I swung
round by the Dampkökken [Steam cooking kitchen and famous
cheap eating-house],12 read the bill of fare, and shrugged my
shoulders in a way to attract attention, as if corned beef or salt
pork was not meet food for me. After that I went towards the railway
station.13
10 Even though at the present of the novel Oslo was only a peripheral city in Europe, it was
still in the process of becoming a central/capital(ist) city of Norway and of being incorporated
into the world economy. The protagonist’s strolling in the streets of Norway is
both a pioneer of the )lâneur of the modernist literature and a trans-regional experience
of the capitalist city and migration. The distinction between the rural and the city is
underlined by Hamsun. In a scene, the blind man understands that the protagonist is a
stranger to the city. Timothy Wientzen, for example, aptly discusses that Hunger depicts
“a history of the economic development that endowed the starving body with transnational
signi)icance... making macroeconomic structures legible.” “The Aesthetics of Hunger:
Knut Hamsun, Modernism, and Starvation’s Global Frame” Novel: A Forum on Fiction
gm, noB (BCDF): BC_. Also, as Peter Sjølyst-Jackson points out, being a migrant to the
city, the writer (and Hamsun) seems to be always on the edge of the city, about to relocate
and dislocate. Troubling Legacies: Migration, Modernism, and Fascism in the Case of
Knut Hamsun (New York: Continuum, BCDC), BD.
11 It seems not to be a coincidence that one of Hamsun’s later novels was named Victoria,
which was also his daughter’s name.
12 The translator’s note.
13 Hamsun, Hunger, trans. George Egerton (London: Duckworth, D_BD), GG.
EMRE KESER
99d
As an “honest soul,” an “upright sort of person,”14 the protagonist almost
always (or when hunger is not yet to start to kill him) tries to present
himself as a proud, self-contained individual, a conceited man who does
not want to seem weak or indigent in any way. This has a strong hold on
him, especially when he makes some money out of his writings accepted
for publication. In a particular scene, having read the editor’s letter of acceptance
of his manuscript, he starts to see the room he stays as a wreck,
something that a person of his caliber, a great and accomplished writer
like himself, by no means deserve: “On no account would I keep it. I had
held my peace, and endured and lived far too long in such a den.”15 The
room that he could do everything not to lose a moment ago turns into a
den all of a sudden.
Taking his blanket, he abandons the room. Then, the blanket becomes
a trouble: “in the meantime, the green blanket was a trouble to me.
Neither could I well make myself conspicuous by carrying such a thing
right under people’s eyes. What would anyone think of me?” (g9) This is
the manifestation of the mood in the text: the (im)possibility of being
seen, catching attention, being under eyes, making the self conspicuous.
He wants to evade the gaze everywhere, because he thinks that his poverty,
unemployment, and hunger is his own fault (or perhaps God’s fault,
a curse, a divine injustice). As an “upright” man, he cannot stand the idea
of being seen as needing help from others, but at the same time, he desperately
needs them, needs to be seen by them. Hamsun seemingly plays
with the idea of the autonomous individual constructed vis-à-vis others
based on a problematic of visibility.
To provide another example, in one of the early scenes of the book,
a beggar wants money from the protagonist while wandering the streets.
Even though he is hungry himself and has no money, to be able to help
the man, he tells him to wait and sells his vest, and brings the money to
the man. After getting the money, the man starts gazing at him, in particular
he examines the knees of the writer’s trousers. And upon seeing how
14 Hunger, FC.
15 Hunger, g_.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
99g
miserable he is, he wants to give the money back. Needless to say, the
protagonist 1inds this very rude, feels uncomfortable by this examination
and doubt that he is looking poor and gets angry at man: “My good fellow,
you have adopted a most unpleasant habit of staring at a man’s knees
when he gives you a shilling.”16 He is constantly disturbed by the gazes,
always tries to escaped from an “inquiring look,” feels eyes on his back.
But, in order not to die, he needs to be paid attention, helped, observed.
It is this molestation of the individual authority by hunger that Hamsun
plays with in the text.
According to Arnold Weinstein, the writer seeks “a mad kind of
autonomy,” a freedom from hunger, from biological bounds of the human.
It is not surprising that at certain points he willingly embraces the hunger.
The performance of hunger, done for the passersby, for the other
gazes, is embraced by the individual as a kind of liberation from the
bounds of natural, physiological laws. Thus, the madness, light-headedness
brought about by hunger is celebrated by the hungry as way of freedom
from the “clutches” of the body.17 However, this seems to reduce
Hunger to a book where the psychological effects of hunger is narrated
based on individual experience, which gives it (and hunger) an ahistorical
and asocial quality. However, as Weinstein himself notes very well,
there is a great nod, a gesture, toward the sociohistorical formation of the
work, manifest in the protagonist’s dealings with the date “9pdp.”
One of Hamsun’s parables in the text seems to draw attention to
the absurdity of the protagonist’s thinking of hunger either as his own
fault or as a divine curse. The absurdity, the mad desire for hunger, points
to that hunger is a social problem and the “upright man” vis-à-vis others
is an impossibility. Therefore, madness does not only result from hunger
but also it results in hunger. Even in a Marxist sense, it is the ideology, the
delusion that keeps us hungry, or differently, it is the ideology that prevents
us from seeing hunger as social problem but leads us to seek its
16 Hunger, DD.
17 Arnold Weinstein, “Hamsun’s Hunger and Writing” in Northern Arts: The Breakthrough
of Scandinavian Literature and Art, From Ibsen to Bergman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, BCCm), BDm.
EMRE KESER
99l
causes in the individual mistakes. In a scene, waiting for inspiration to
write his article, the protagonist, “involuntarily” and “mechanically”
wrote the date 9pdp in every corner of his paper: “I am sitting on the seat,
and I write, scores of times, 9pdp. I write this date criss-cross, in all possible
fashions, and wait until a workable idea shall occur to me.”18 After a
while he sends in a job application for an accountant position and mistakenly
dated the application 9pdp, which later becomes the reason why
he loses the job he could otherwise easily have as told by the employer.
What does the failure of 9pdp cost him? What are the results of writing
and re-writing 9pdp? Would he still be hungry had the 9pdp upheavals in
Europe succeeded?
“Was there now any reason whatever that absolutely every one of
one’s earnest and most persevering efforts should fail? Why, too, had I
written 9pdp? In what way did that infernal date concern me?”19 That infernal
date concerns the protagonist as a missed possibility which might
have brought an end to hunger and starvation in the society. In the text,
it is a nod to the hunger as a social problem. That is why we keep following
the hungry seeking the gaze by the very act of evading the gaze. It is a
problem that concerns the society. But at the same time, it is a problem
that scares the society. That is why the writer wanders the streets of the
city always under the eyes and control of the police. He is constantly
watched and followed by the police. When he wakes up on a bench, the
1irst thing he sees the “the 1lash of shining buttons” of a police uniform.20
The buttons seem to gaze at him everywhere. When they are the buttons
of Ylajali, the lady he fell in “mad” love,21 “even the very buttons on her
18 Hunger, gD.
19 Hunger, eD.
20 Hunger, mC.
21 In the beginning of the novel, while walking in the street, he came across two ladies. He
accidentally touches one of them while passing by and turn around to apologize. Upon
seeing her lovely face, he is taken by her and seized with a desire to annoy her: “I overtake
her again, pass her by, turn quickly round, and meet her face-to-face in order to
observe her well. I stand and gaze into her eyes, and hit, on the spur of the moment, on
a name which I have never heard before—a name with a gliding, nervous sound, Ylajali!"
Hunger, DF–DG.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
99Y
gown seem to stare at me, like a row of frightened eyes.”22 Thus, the hungry
is frightening, a security issue that requires a policework. Also, it perhaps
gets more frightening, on different occasions, the protagonist mocks
the police of1icers that want to keep him under control. For example, in
an encounter, he asks a police what time it is. It is ten o’clock, says police.
The writer objects immediately: no, it’s two.23 This perplexes the police,
puzzles the security work.24
The hungry is scary, while evading the gaze, it threatens the gaze.
It is seen to the gaze as a threat, a security issue, and perhaps a future
version of itself. It is looking hungry. For this very reason, it needs to be
monitored and put under control. Uncontrolled hunger terrorizes the society.
But, as we know already, society must be defended. As a work of
literary modernism, in the Adornian sense, Hunger is then against the society
by embracing hunger. It wants to put hunger under eyes as a social
problem and at the same time against eyes as a threat to them, a threat
society cannot lock down or “stomach” easily. But, on the other hand,
hunger is social problem only insofar it is seen. It needs to be paid attention
to and taken care of. It disturbs the eye. It utilizes the visibility of
hunger as a social issue, an issue of security, but threatens the society by
hungering. I will come back to this, but now want to turn to Ka1ka’s story.
22 Hunger, De.
23 Hunger, _i.
24 On another occasion, relatedly, the protagonist claims that what he sees is not potatoes
but cabbages. As Weinstein argues, he wants the reality to be different or rather he
wants to be free from reality. But at the same time he still plays with the reality, as the
potato, the fundamental part of the workers’ daily meal, is almost the single most important
symbol of the social movements and protests for the hungry during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. It is also inscribed into the reimagining of Dmgm, especially
in the materialist imaginations that inform the social movements and the
perception of the hungry. On this, see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, “The
Potato in the Materialist Imagination” in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, BCCC), DDC–DiF.
EMRE KESER
99p
§ S.Q Franz Ka_ka’s “Hungerkünstler”
In Ka1ka’s story, the protagonist is a hunger artist who performs starvation
in a cage for forty days. Unlike Hamsun’s protagonist describing his
own experiences himself, what happens to Ka1ka’s hunger artist is told
by the third person narrator. As I noted in the Introduction of the thesis,
the story begins with the present condition of hunger artists: there is a
historical decrease in the interest in the hunger artists, they are no more
paid attention as they used to before. And then the narrator seems to go
on to describe what it was like in the past and then turns back to the present
situation of our particular hunger artist who is at the moment the
greatest hunger artist of all times.
In good old days, the hunger artists would starve in a cage periodically
for forty days at most. This is the upper limit, both because the artist’s
life comes under risk beyond it and because the attention span of the
spectators usually tend to decline after the fortieth day of the “show.”
Therefore, it is deemed the best way to limit the performance to around
forty days by the “authorities,” especially the hunger artist’s impresario/
manager. However, the protagonist always thinks that he could go
much farther than that but could not manage to convince others that he
could do so.
The performances are held in a little cage. The audience gathers
around the cage every day to watch the artist. There are even subscription-
holders who watch the starving artist through the end of his performance.
There are also observers, “permanent watchmen elected by the
public.”25 They are placed there to make sure that the artist does not
cheat by secretly eating anything and these watchmen most of the time
are selected from butchers. The narrator tells us that there are two kinds
of watchmen. The 1irst type is those who intentionally avert their gaze
from the artist often to create the impression and suspicion that the artist
secretly eats. On the contrary, the second type is those who closely monitor
the artist. Our hunger artist prefers this second type of watchmen
25 “A Hunger Artist,” Fe.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
99f
“who sat close to the bars, who were not satis1ied with the dim lightning
in the hall at night, but shone a light on him with the electric pockettorches
the impresario put at their disposal.”26
This desire for light is present in Hamsun’s Hunger as well. Escaping
the gazes, Hamsun’s protagonist is afraid of darkness, of not being
seen. The lightlessness for him means almost death. Out at night, police
wants him to go home or a hotel. He makes up some excuses as to why he
cannot go to those places. “Well then, you must go to the guardhouse and
report yourself as homeless!” says the police. He is locked in a cell in the
guardhouse. “‘The gas will burn for ten minutes,’ remarked the policeman
at the door. ‘And then does it go out?’ ‘Then it goes out!’” Then it goes and
the hungry protagonist starts to feel darkness. “The darkness had taken
possession of my thoughts and left me not a moment in peace. Supposing
I were myself to be absorbed in darkness—made one with it?”27 He tries
to sleep but could not manage to drop off the thoughts the dark brings to
him, afraid of being dissolved in darkness:
The same darkness brooded over me; the same unfathomable
black eternity which my thoughts strove against and could not
penetrate. I 1ind the most despairing efforts to 1ind a word black
enough to characterise this darkness; a word so horribly black
that it would darken my lips if I named it. Lord! how dark it was!
and I am carried back in thought to the sea and the dark monsters
that lies in wait for me. They would draw me to them, and clutch
me tightly and bear me away by land and sea, through dark realms
that no soul has seen. I feel myself on board, drawn through waters,
hovering in clouds, sinking—sinking.28
Both Ka1ka’s hunger artist and Hamsun’s hungry writer is deeply scared
by the darkness, in the face of being absolved in the darkness. It is not
coincidence, then, that the hunger artist is “happiest of all when morning
came,”29 when light is fully there, and dies when people does not look at,
26 “A Hunger Artist,” Fm.
27 Hunger, __.
28 Hunger, DCg.
29 “A Hunger Artist,” Fm.
EMRE KESER
978
pay attention to, him anymore. This is equivalent to the hungry writer
who, despite constantly escaping the gaze, needs the light to be seen by
the gazes, as it is the condition of possibility for him to continue living
and being a security threat. Thus, to go back to my argument concerning
hunger strike in the Chapter 9, hunger strike is possible only when there
is light, spectators to watch the shrinking bodies of the strikers.
To continue with Ka1ka’s story, despite all the suspicions as to his
cheating, the hunger artist knows that suspicions are inextricable part of
his performance, implying that they are in fact what sustains his performance,
what creates curiosity and suspense about it. He says that the
only true spectator of this spectacle is himself. But our hunger artist is
never satis1ied with this performance, because he can go much longer but
is not let do so. It is in fact this dissatisfaction that make him lose much
more weight than he would otherwise lose in a forty-days-starvation period.
But the impresario uses the immense loss of weight as an evidence
of the fact that he could not fast more than forty days. But hunger artist
thinks that it is the result of the forty-days-limit, not the reason of it.
When the fortieth day of the fast comes, fans 1ill the salon, military
band plays marches, doctors enter the cage ornated with the 1lowers to
examine the body of the artist. And then the results are declared through
the megaphones for the audience in the salon. Then, two happy ladies
comes to take the hunger artist to the food table. But the artist is too obstinate
to move from his place, as he believes it is too early to end the fast.
Why these people could not keep their attention beyond forty days? “Why
did this mob, who claimed to admire him so much, have so little patience
with him; if he could endure hungering still further, why wouldn’t they
endure it?”30 At this moment, thinking of food makes him nauseous and
tired. And then the impresario comes and holds up this miracle, this “pitiful
martyr.”31 He moves delicately, “with the exaggerated care to make
them [the audience] to believe what a fragile he had to do with here.”32
Then, he hands him over to the ladies who are terri1ied and disgusted by
30 “A Hunger Artist,” F_.
31 “A Hunger Artist,” GC.
32 “A Hunger Artist,” GC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
979
the emaciated body of the artist. They do everything to escape the touch
of the hunger artist. Upon seeing the ladies turn “deadly pale,” a servant
comes and grabs the body. Then, the artist starts having his food almost
by force. (Perhaps Ka1ka’s gesture toward force feeding). While this is
happening, the impresario works hard to divert the audience’s attention
away from the dissatis1ied mode and eerie look of the hunger artist and
the band supports this playing the fanfares even more loudly. Then, the
audience starts to leave the salon. Among all these happenings, the only
dissatis1ied being is the hunger artist.
His life, the narrator tells, is in fact incredibly sad, no matter how
glorious it seems from outside. The moment somebody tells him that the
reason of this sadness is his starvation, he loses his auto-control, gets
mad, tries to attack the person who uttered these words beyond the
barns of the cage. The impresario, by way of apology, tells the audience
that these are the effects of long-term hunger: hunger maddens. Yes, hunger
maddens, but also madness of the society brings about hunger. Hunger
artist in a sense restages this social madness. He refuses food, because
he is fed up with the order of society who cannot endure even
watching hunger beyond forty days. For perhaps hunger artist becomes
a security issue after a while. It becomes unbearable, unendurable after
certain point. But hunger artist calls for the audience to be looked at, just
as Hamsun’s writer never wants to stay in dark, he everywhere searches
for the light. However terrifying he is, he wants to be seen by the society.
He wants to look at them in the eye, terrify them. As we will see below,
this is what Nâzım tries to achieve in his poem. He wants the readers to
feel the “mad eyeballs” of the hunger on themselves, as the eyeballs re-
1lected in the materiality of writing.
For Ka1ka’s hunger artist now comes the decay. Due to the deeprooted
reasons nobody cares to discover, the hunger artist observes the
number of audiences gradually declining, and they start to search for the
joy somewhere else. People no more pay attention to the hunger artists.
All they (the hunger artist and the impresario) do to prevent this decline
do not work. It is too late. This results in the hunger artist leaving the
impresario and starting work in a circus. He demands from the circus to
EMRE KESER
977
place his tent next to the animal cages rather than focal points of the circus,
because he thinks that those who come to visit the animal cages
would see him as well. His tent is furnished with billboards informing the
audience about the hunger artist and his performance. His idea was that
the visitors of the animal cages will necessarily pass by his cage and at
least some of them will stop and pay attention. However, whenever someone
stops to watch the artist, the people behind them impatiently pushes
them forward to be able to reach the animal cages. So, he “found himself
deserted by the pleasure-seeking masses, who preferred to go in their
droves to gaze at other spectacles.”33
As the time passes, even the workers in the circus forget about the
artist. As his body shrinks, he becomes illegible under the straw in the
cage. The billboards are no more renewed, nor the cage is cleaned. Even
the billboard informing the audience and showing the number of fasting
days have not been touched by anybody since a while. The people assigned
this job got tired and sick of doing it every day. In the meantime,
the hunger artist was achieving what he has always dreamed of: he was
fasting inde1initely, enduring hunger beyond the limits. As he always
claimed, he can easily fast beyond the fortieth day. But no one, even himself,
was not aware of what he achieved. This is the source of his sadness.
“If once in a while some idle stroller stopped and made fun of the old 1igures
and spoke of fraud, it was in this sense the most stupid lie it was
possible for indifference and inborn malice to invent, for it was not the
hunger artist who cheated—he laboured honestly—but the world
cheated him of his reward.”34 It was the world, the society that cheated
the hungry, not the other way around.
In the 1inale comes the resolution. Someday a supervisor in the
circus notices the empty cage while doing an inspection. He wonders why
this perfect cage that could be put to good use is empty. Nobody knows
why it is empty until one of the old employers remember the hunger artist.
They poke at the straw with poles and 1ind the hunger artist below
33 “A Hunger Artist,” GD.
34 “A Hunger Artist,” Gg.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
97s
them. “What, are you still hungering?” the supervisor asks the hunger artist.
“When are you going to stop?” “Forgive me everyone,” whispers the
hunger artist. The supervisor, with a gesture that means that the hunger
artist lost his mind due to starvation, said “Of course, we forgive you.” “I
always wanted you to admire my hungering,” says the hunger artist. Supervisor
assures him that they do admire it. “But,” the artist said, “you
shouldn’t admire it.” “Well, then we won’t admire it. Why shouldn’t we
admire it?” And the hunger artist said that because he cannot do otherwise,
he has to hunger. “Because I could not 1ind the food that was to my
taste. If I had found it, believe me, I would not have caused a stir, and
would have eaten my 1ill, like you and everybody else.”35 His last words.
The supervisor orders the employer to empty and clear up the
cage. “Let’s have some order!” Then, they put a young panther into the
cage. The narrator describes the robust body of the animal in opposition
to the crippled, abnormal, and perhaps abominable body of the hunger
artist as follows:
It was a recovery that even the bluntest of senses could feel, to see
this wild beast leaping around in the cage that had been desolate
for so long. It lacked for nothing. The keepers did not have to re-
1lect for long about bringing it the sustenance that was to its taste;
it didn’t even seem to miss its freedom; this noble body, equipped
nearly to bursting with all the necessaries, seemed to carry its
freedom around with it too; it seemed to have it hidden somewhere
in its teeth; and its joy of life came with such 1iery breath
from its jaws that it wasn’t easy for the spectators to resist it. But
they held out, surged around the cage, and wouldn’t stir from the
spot.36
What a truly living being, especially when contrasted to the emaciated,
ill-functioning body of the hunger artists and hunger strikers. This
is the body and shape people would want to be in and enjoy seeing
around rather than threatening body and dreadful madness of the hungry.
Curiously, in Hamsun’s Hunger, there is a similar passage concerning
35 “A Hunger Artist,” Gg–GF.
36 “A Hunger Artist,” GF.
EMRE KESER
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the wild animal bodies. Yet, unlike Ka1ka’s narrator, the writer thinks that
the caged animals do miss their freedom and, thus, not enjoyable objects
to see:
On the whole it did not interest me in the least to see animals in
cages. These animals know that one is standing staring at them;
they feel hundreds of inquisitive looks upon them; are conscious
of them. No; I would prefer to see animals that didn’t know one
observed them; shy creatures that nestle in their lair, and lie with
sluggish green eyes, and lick their claws, and muse, eh? [....] It was
only animals in their native wildness, in their fearfulness and peculiar
savagery that possessed a charm. The soundless, stealthy
tread in the dread darkness of night, the hidden monsters of the
woods; the shrieks of a bird 1lying past; the wind, the smell of
blood, the rumblings in space; in short, the regaining Spirit in the
kingdom of savage creatures brooding over savagery.... The poetry
of the Unknown!37
The savage creatures brooding over savagery are what one wants to
see.38 That is why the idea of going to a menagerie with Ylajali deeply
37 Hunger, DmD–DmB.
38 With the knowledge that Hamsun had later become a Nazi collaborator, one would certainly
)ind in this passage the seeds of that act such as the thrill before the savagery,
power of the “native” wilderness, and the desire for “the submission to the stream of
incomprehensible and incalculable forces.” This is how, for example, Leo Löwenthal
chose to read Hamsun’s oeuvre. Peter Sjølyst-Jackson, Troubling Legacies, _–Di. This
form of critique of aestheticization is quite common. For example, based on the case of
Leni Riefenstahl, the director of a Nazi propaganda )ilm, Susan Sonntag argues that the
signs of fascism in Riefenstahl’s entire works might be found, especially her aestheticization
of wilderness, bodily forces, submission to the nature, etc. That is, Sonntag says,
fascism fascinates with an aestheticization of politics, by making even the most wicked
politics look good, even appealing. “Fascinating Fascism” in Under the Sign of the Saturn
(London: Penguin, BCC_), ei–DCF. The problem here is that with the foreknowledge of a
writer’s or artist’s Nazi af)iliations, you can read all of his or her works as always carrying
an underlying fascist aesthetics. There is nothing easier than this, as in the reverse
case of Nâ zım Hikmet always reproduced as an unmistakable singular )igure. Another
problem with this kind of critique is the idea that modernist (and postmodernist) works
always tend to aestheticize issues like hunger by depriving its materiality and sociality.
But they too readily assume that writing has no materiality, it is just a communicative,
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
97g
scares the writer, because going into “that blaze of light, with the crowd
of people”39 will de1initely reveal how miserable he is, especially when he
is compared to the robust animals, even when those animals miss their
freedom in their cages and are not in their best form. Yet still, once again,
neither the hungry writer nor the hunger artist would want not to be
seen, because they live as long as they are looked at. And as they are
looked at, it gets harder and harder to look at them.
§ S.S Nâzım Hikmet’s “The Eyeballs of the Hungry”
This is what Nâzım’s “Eyeballs of the Hungry,” too, tells us. In the poem,
he manipulates the typeface, uses italics, numbers, and arranges the lines
in a ladderlike form. It begins as follows:
Not a few
not 1ive or ten
thirty million
hungry
ours!40
The hungry is ours, because they are part of the society and the result of
the inequal and unjust organization of the society. Needless to say, it registers
the hunger as a social problem.
The hungry lined up!
Neither man, nor woman, nor boy, nor girl
skinny stunted
with crooked branches
crooked trees!
representative means. As I try to show here, writing may not just be a representative
means but a materiality as much as hunger is.
39 Hunger, DmD.
40 All references to the poem: “Açların Gö zbebekleri,” in Bütün Şiirleri, gC–gi. Translations
mine.
EMRE KESER
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Neither man, nor woman, nor boy, nor girl
the hungry lined
up!
These are!
the walking parts
of those arid
soils!41
They are nothing but hungry. They have no identity other than being hungry.
They are crooked trees and the walking parts of the parched lands.
Interestingly, the hungry is not outside the nature but rather its walking
parts. The words are bolded and shocking, and the description gets even
more “realistic.” They are almost dead, “nothing but skin,” the only living
part of them is their eyes which are maddened. They “overfunction” due
to the hunger.
mad eyeballs,
eyeballs!
They have such a pain,
They,
look in such a way!....
Our pain is great!
great!
great!
….
>?,???.??
mad eyeballs!
mad eyeballs!42
41 “Açların Gö zbebekleri,” gC–gD.
42 “Açların Gö zbebekleri,” gD–gB.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
97Y
The only living part of the hunger is their eyes and those eyes are maddened.
Their pain is great. And this makes them look madly, terrifyingly.
The mad eyeballs (deli gözbebekleri) turned toward the society; the hunger
and the hungry has a gaze. That gaze is turned toward the society and
the state as the defender of the social, but their gaze also constitutes a
security issue. They are looked at but after a while they turn into mad
eyeballs. They need to be looked at carefully. They are and want to be always
under light, as in Ka1ka and Hamsun’s works. They are the only legible
parts of the arid lands. For this reason, Nâzım wants the reader not
to avert their gaze from them and in the meantime, typeface gets bigger
and bigger:
Oh
man
who listens to me
with a mouth wide open!
The man who
calls me
behind my back
“insane”
for pouring my heart out!
If, like others,
you are
a
goose too,
if you can’t
grasp the meaning of my words
Just look at my eyes;
They are:
Mad eyeballs
eyeballs!
EMRE KESER
97p
If the words are not enough, look at the eyes of the hungry to see their
pain and to see the social causes of their great pain. In fact, he does not
say look at the eyes of the hungry but look at my eyes. Of course, at this
point of the poem, the narrator speaks through the mouth of the hungry,
but still the eyes of the hungry and of the writer/poet are in fact the eyes
of writing.
The technical aspects of the poem here is important. By arranging
the stanzas and lines in a ladder form, manipulating the typeface, bolding
and italicizing words, and ordering the size of the words in a gradually
increasing way, Nâzım wants the mad eyeballs of the hunger to be felt in
the eyes of the reader as if they were the eyes of the hunger directed at
them. Here I would like to go back to a passage from Hamsun’s Hunger,
wherein the protagonist is afraid of dissolving in darkness in the cell.
There he works despairingly “to 1ind a word black enough to characterise
this darkness; a word so horribly black that it would darken my lips if I
named it.”43 In an earlier part, he says, “I weigh my writing in my mind,
and value it, at a loose guess, for 1ive shillings on the spot.”44 In both
Hamsun and Nâzım, writing and words seem to have a materiality. It is
not just what represents or means for communication of the suffering of
hungry or the psychological effects of starvation on the hunger.45 Rather,
it is as concrete as the mad eyeballs of the hungry or the thing that darken
one’s lips and have weight. As Nâzım wants the delirious eyeballs of the
hunger to be felt in the eyes of the reader, it is not surprising that
43 Hunger, DCg.
44 Hunger, ge.
45 To a similar effect, Arnold Weinstein says “Hunger is stunningly prescient text because
of its achievements in this area. It is a book about the anarchic power of words, the demiurgic
power of words to engender their own World, a World that has not truck with
trivial and vulgar details such as ‘proof’ or ‘verisimilitude’ or even ‘reality.’” Therefore,
“can it be surprising that a good piece of writing is something you could weigh in your
hands, to determine its value?” “Hamsun’s Hunger and Writing,” BGD, BGi.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
97f
Hamsun’s hungry writer argues for the materiality of words. Remember
also that the writer’s struggle is to write while hungering.46
One last commonality between Hamsun, Ka1ka, and Nâzım is that
in their works the hungry constantly watches out, monitors the other, the
audience, the society. This requires a careful work: while continuous attempting
to evade the gazes that embarrasses, inquiring looks of the others
that crushes one, the hungry works hard to be seen in the correct way.
The hungry writer acts weirdly, the hunger artist wants his cage to be put
alongside the animal cages to catch the attention of passersby, Nâzım’s
hungry writing tries to madden the eyes of the reader. However, these are
not ahistorical writings, and it is not coincidence that all of these works
are written during the same period. The hungry’s ability to see and be
looked at comes from the fact that hunger has become a social problem.
Then, it is no surprise that all these works historically aligns with the
emergence of the hunger strike that restages the hunger as a social problem
and derives legibility from it.
In conclusion, I have argued that there is a similarity among the
ways hunger 1igures in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Franz Ka1ka’s “A Hunger
Artist,” and Nâzım Hikmet’s “Eyeballs of the Hungry,” all written at the
end of nineteenth century and early twentieth century, when the hunger
strike as a political protest has emerged. They con1igure hunger as a matter
of visibility. It emerges as a social problem that needs to be paid attention
by the society and the state as the defense apparatus of the society.
This equips hunger with a gaze of its own. It calls for other gazes. But
at the same time it poses a threat to the society, both because it represents
what they may become and because it is against the society. All of
the works I discuss here position hunger in a way that it is both a problem
of the society and security problem against the society. They are looked
46 Deleuze and Guattari say “writing is to fast.” Ka)ka died from hunger, as he was unable
to eat due to his illness. In a similar vein, Maud Ellmann, in her book on “hunger artists,”
argues that the longer hunger lasts, the greater the volume of writing becomes. This is
especially signi)icant for the bodies of prison literature emerged at times of hunger
strikes. See her The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, D___).
EMRE KESER
9s8
at but become unendurable to see, to face with, from a certain point on.
The society cannot stomach the hunger after a certain moment. That is
why the city shines bright at night while Hamsun’s protagonist leaves the
city: “out in the 1jord I dragged myself up once wet with fever and exhaustion,
and gazed landwards, and bade farewell for the present to the
town—to Christiana, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the
homes.”47 The maddened and maddening hungry leaves the city and then
the city starts to gleam. Before it was darker in order to make the hungry
illegible or less disturbing. That is partially why “non-state” bodies are
always already disposed to press the state from outside to cure the hunger
in society. For it is a threat, a great security issue. Otherwise, the state
is seen as deviating from the biopolitical norms that de1ine itself through
its capacity to make live, to defend society. This is the very ground on
which hunger strike as a biopolitical protest is formulated. It is in this
regard that in the next chapter I will discuss that Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger
strike is preceded by his writing of hunger through gazes. Yet this does
not mean a mere passage from ideas to action, but rather, as I have tried
to show thus far, that writing of hunger is as material as the hunger itself.
47 Hunger, iDC.
9s9
$
Writing off Hunger: Nâzım Hikmet’s Hunger Strike, or,
“L’Affaire Nâzım”
when truth is buried underground, it grows and it
builds up so much force that the day it explodes it
blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we
have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding
of disasters, yet to come.
– E|mile Zola, I Accuse!
n this chapter, I give a detailed historical account of Nâzım Hikmet’s
hunger strike while underscoring its two aspects in particular, that are
related to the theoretical groundwork I have undertaken in the previous
chapters. The 1irst aspect is concerned with the idea that hunger strike is
possible only when there are outside gazes that pay attention to the strikers
and watch the state for its potential violation of human life. In Nâzım’s
hunger strike, this is evident from the international audience he addresses
in the poem he wrote on the 1ifth day of his fasting. He brings the
outside in, both the international gaze and the negative public opinion of
Turkish intellectuals and people weary of the single-party regime despite
the post-WWII atmosphere of relative political and economic liberalization.
The second aspect I want to underline is connected with how this
I
EMRE KESER
9s7
event is shaped around images and imaginations of the Dreyfus Affair
and the 1igure of the public intellectual emerged in this affair in the nineteenth-
century Europe with E|mile Zola’s monumental intervention and
involvement in the affair. Even long before Nâzım’s hunger strike, the
Dreyfus events and E|mile Zola’s role in them had been lurking in the
background in the actions and minds of both Nâzım himself and others
around him. This has turned the event into a “Turkish Dreyfus affair,” or
“L’affaire Nâzım,” which are even taken so far as to be a sign of Turkey’s
“real” democratization, as the state is said to have put under public pressure
for the 1irst time in the history of the republic.
§ V.O The Concentration of Fascism in Late ObScs
In the second half of the 9fs8s, all over the world nationalist, fascist, authoritarian
regimes and ideologies were on the rise. In 9fss, Hitler came
to power in Germany. Since the early years of 9f78, Mussolini was advancing
the fascism in Italy affecting all others abroad. In 9fsg, he invaded
Ethiopia. In late 9fsl, Franco came to power in Spain and, like Hitler and
Mussolini, embarked on creating a party-state apparatus to collect all
forces in his own hands. This “family resemblance” could not be expected
not to affect Turkey where the authoritarian Kemalist regime were already
dominating politics singlehandedly ever since the 9f7g Law on the
Maintenance of Order that followed the Sheikh Said Rebellion. The blood
ties and the supremacy of the white race were the fundamental discourse
that determined the practices of these states. During the 9fs8s, the Turkish
state were at pains to show to the West that Turks are essential member
of the fully civilized white race through Turkish History Thesis (Türk
Tarih Tezi), Sun Language Theory (Güneş Dil Teorisi), and the statefunded
anthropological studies that largely relied on the phrenology, craniometry,
and physiognomy. Also, during 9fsY and 9fsp, the Turkish air
forces were dropping bombs on Dersim, and evacuate villages in the region,
to suppress another Alevi-Kurdish rebellion.
Another family resemblance among these regimes was their
strong anti-communist politics that repressed any kind of communist or
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9ss
leftist activities as a “foreign” element. In Turkey, perhaps the greatest
representative of this politics was Fevzi Çakmak (9pYl–9fg8), the second
and last Field Marshall (Mareşal) after Atatü rk and the president expected
to succeed him. At the time, a fan of the German militaristic discipline
and perhaps a supporter of collaboration with the Third Reich, he
was the Chief of General Staff and had no tolerance for the existence of
left-wing ideas and sentiments in the army. Similarly, racist and Turanist
sections of the Turkish right-wing politics were 1inding themselves an
enormous space to operate. All in all, all kinds of nationalist, racist, fascist,
authoritarian elements had somehow consolidated their presence in
politics of Turkey and abroad when we came to late 9fs8s.
Undoubtedly, as perhaps the most famous “face” of communism in
Turkey (even though he was earlier dismissed from TKP), Nâzım was
feeling this growing fascist pressure on himself, as he was already arrested,
put in custody, deterred several times, his books were tried and
banned. Perhaps to avoid further pressure and to prove that he is not a
“foreign element” or “traitor” as thought by the right, he added a postscript
to the Epic of Seikh Bedreddin in 9fsY, one year after the work was
published, in which he tried to reformulate the rebel of Sheikh Bedreddin
as a matter of “national pride.” (Still, he formulated the concept of “national
pride” by drawing upon Lenin’s “On the National Pride of the Great
Russians” (9f9d)).1 Also, no more a member of the Communist Party,
Nâzım was avoiding the open political con1licts and confrontations.2 He
was writing newspaper columns under different pseudonyms, most notably
Orhan Selim,3 and working for the Iopek Film Studios in Iostanbul as
a script writer and editor. It is at this period that he was invited (or somehow
brought) to Ankara by the minister of interior affairs and the general
1 The original title of the postscript: Simavne Kadısı Oğlu Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı’na Zeyl:
Milli Gurur. As Nergis Ertü rk notes, this might also be a response to the internationalist
left accusing him of “regressive nationalism,” presenting himself as siding with Lenin on
the matter. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, DeF.
2 Göksu and Timms, Romantik Komünist, DmG.
3 Though it is not hardly true that he avoided political comments and that people did not
know the pseudonyms under which he was writing.
EMRE KESER
9sd
director of security, and was suggested (or rather “blackmailed”) by them
to write an epic of the national struggle emerged in the Turkish War of
Independence. It is highly likely that this is how the idea of Kuvây-i Milliye
was conceived for the 1irst time.4 Yet despite these precautions and
measures, however reluctant, Nâzım had taken to avoid the attention, his
arrest in January 9fsp could not be avoided.
§ V.Q The Military Trials
In January 9fsp, Nâzım was arrested. Soon it became evident that the
charges made against him is based on his interactions with a few military
academy students and on his books found among those students’ belongings.
He was accused of inciting the cadets and the army to rebel and of
the communist propaganda. Nâzım met some of these students. In October
9fsY, O_mer Deniz visited Nâzım in the 1ilm studio he was working at
and told him that he and his friends were enormously in1luenced by his
works. Having suspected that he was an agent, he called the police directorate
and told them to stop sending spies to him. However, three months
later, O_mer Deniz visited Nâzım’s home once more and tried to ask some
questions about the Marxist literature he and his friends from the school
had being reading. Pissed off, Nâzım rebuffed to answer and wanted him
to leave his house. The rumors of this contact with Nâzım started to circulate
in the military academy, but apparently these did not stay on the
level of the cadets. The source of the rumors was also Nâzım’s own call to
the police directorate. Making the call, he drew attention to both himself
and the military students who were just left-leaning and affected by
Nâzım’s works. In January 9fsp, all these students who were connected
with Nâzım and was reading/possessing his works were arrested, put in
custody on the campus of their school in Ankara, and questioned about
their relationship with Nâzım. On January 9Y, 9fsp, Nâzım, too, were arrested
and his house were searched tediously. After the initial investigation,
he, too, was transferred to Ankara and there he learned that he was
4 Erkan Irmak, Kayıp Destan’ın İzinde, gi–FC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9sg
being charged according to the Military Penal Code No. fd for inciting the
cadets to rebel against their superiors.
In March 9fsp, the trials began in the military court in Ankara Military
Academy where the students were held. Outside the court, there
were terrifying anti-communist slogans. There were three main charges
against Nâzım: 1irst, inciting more than one of1icer to rebel together
against their superiors; second, provocation for doing harm to the military
equipment and/or staff; third, inciting mass mobilization for riot.
One of the fundamental evidences was a document penned by O_mer
Deniz and other students called “A Good Lifestyle in an Organized Way”
in which the students set rules for themselves such as getting up early,
working out, making friends, etc. Although the initial evidence was not
suf1icient to lock Nâzım up, the initial testimony O_mer Deniz gave in custody
was troubling. According to the testimony, Nâzım told him that the
real danger in Turkey comes from fascism and suggested him and his
friends to teach the students 1irst the republic and then communism
when they make their way into the army. O_mer Deniz later changed this
testimony, but the judges still considered it valid. At the end of March, the
judges had come to a conclusion. Nâzım was sentenced to a 1ifteen-year
imprisonment for inciting army and cadets to rebel. Some of the military
school students including O_mer Deniz received similar sentences and
others lost their right to work in the army. In a letter he wrote to his wife
upon hearing the decision, he was saying that “I was sentenced to 1ifteen
years with a decision that is similar to the one given in the Dreyfus affair.”5
In his memoirs of the trial, A. Kadir (originally Iobrahim Abdülkadir Meriçboyu,
9f9Y–9fpg), who was one of the military students tried and convicted
with Nâzım, and later became a poet in1luenced and highly praised
by Nâzım himself, cited that when the trial had newly begun, Nâzım was
hoping to be released soon due to the lack of serious evidence. However,
A. Kadir then told him that the situation does not look good, they will be
locked up. Surprised, Nâzım asked why. “Think about the Dreyfus trial,”
5 Göksu and Timms, Romantik Komünist, D_D–D_B.
EMRE KESER
9sl
said A. Kadir. 6 This suggests that as early as 9fsp, the Dreyfus affair was
shaping the imaginings of Nâzım’s situation as a model. Thus, perhaps
here it is in order to brie1ly remind the Dreyfus affair.
§ V.S The Dreyfus Affair
The series of events known as the Dreyfus Affair lasted more than ten
years and deeply divided the Third French Republic throughout. Everything
began in the late 9pfd when the Captain Alfred Dreyfus, of Jewish
descent, was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason, namely, for
communicating French military secrets to German Embassy in Paris. He
was imprisoned in the French penal colony of Cayenne, commonly known
as the “Devil’s Island.” Two years later, through an investigation undertaken
by the army of1icer Georges Picquart serving as the head of counter-
intelligence, a counterevidence came to light, which identi1ied the
real culprit as another of1icer named Ferdinand Esterhazy. However,
high-ranking military of1icials suppressed the new evidence and immediately
found Estherhazy unguilty. On top of it, additional charges are laid
out against Dreyfus based on some made-up documents. In all these, antisemitism
played an important role, as antisemitic sentiments and ideologies
were on the rise all over Europe and the Jews were often seen as
“betrayers” and hostile groups within different nation-states. On January
9s, 9pfp, the in1luential French writer E|mile Zola published an open letter
titled “J’Accuse...!” in the newspaper L’Aurore. Having convinced to the unlawful
imprisonment of Dreyfus, Zola addressed the French president
and accused the government of antisemitism and injustice by pointing
out judicial errors and lack of evidence in the trials leading up to the imprisonment
of Dreyfus. Printed on the front page of the newspaper, the
letter immediately caused a public stir in France and abroad. Zola, too,
was judged and found guilty immediately. He 1led the country for England
to avoid the imprisonment. In 9pff, both Zola and Dreyfus returned to
France. Dreyfus was tried anew and sentenced to a ten-year
6 A. Kadir, L[k\ Harp Okulu Olayı ve Nâzım Hikmet (I€stanbul: Can, BCC_ [D_GG]), GD.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9sY
imprisonment, but he was pardoned and released from the prison. In
9f8l, Dreyfus was 1inally exonerated and reinstated as a major in the
army. He served during the WWI and ended his army service as a lieutenant-
colonel.
Ever since, the Affair has become a symbol of resistance to the injustice
instigated by the governments and marked the beginning of an era
in which the intellectual as a political 1igure has come to a prominence.
Zola’s participation in the events and the popularity of his letter inspired
and shaped the imaginations of many other struggles, resistances, and
protests, especially the ones included the active participation of intellectuals.
“I accuse” turned out to be the slogan of protests. It is in this sense
that even long before the start of hunger strike and surrounding protests
the Dreyfus Affair was shaping the imagination of Nâzım Hikmet and the
military trials leading up to his imprisonment. It is not surprising, then,
that biographical accounts often narrated the event as the Turkish “L’Affaire”
and sometimes even an affair that almost brings democracy to Turkey.
I will return to this further below.
§ V.V The Navy Trial
In May 9fsp, Nâzım’s sentence given by the Military Academy Trial was
approved. And in June, he was transferred to Iostanbul and included in another
court that were going on for the same set of charges.7 At a time
when the power struggle in Ankara were heated in favor of the right-wing
politics, Fevzi Çakmak was determined to hold a radical operation to
eradicate all communist activities in the country, but particularly in the
army. In June 9fsp, Çakmak sent a note to all the army members, in which
he suggested that the communist propaganda is organized through a corrosion
of the of1icers’ respect for their superiors and, thus, diminishment
of the discipline in the army. This served as the reason for the expansion
of anti-communist purge in the army and, more importantly, led to the
7 Turgay Fişekçi, “Nâzım Hikmet’i Açlık Grevine Gö tü ren Yol” in Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık
Grevi, ed. Yeşim Bilge Bengü (I€stanbul: Bilgi Uu niversitesi Yayınları, BCDD), e.
EMRE KESER
9sp
additions of the law articles no. 9d9 and no. 9d7 that turned communist
propaganda into a crime, after Nâzım was sentenced partly based on the
communist propaganda.8 On August 98, 9fsp, the Navy Trial began in a
department of the ship named “Erkin” turned into a court. On August 9Y,
9fsp, he wrote the letter to Atatü rk, cited in the Chapter 7, that asks for a
pardon saying that he did not and would not incite the army to rebel.
However, it is highly likely that the letter never reached Atatü rk. As a result
of this trial, on August 7f, 9fsp, Nâzım was sentenced to an additional
thirteen-years-and-four-months imprisonment. Combined with the Military
Academy Trial, Nâzım was sentenced to twenty-eight years and four
months in total. On November 98, 9fsp, Atatürk passed away and Iosmet
Ionönü succeeded him as president. And, on December 7p, 9fsp, this sentence,
too, was approved by the military court.
In the meantime, the process of judgments and trials were being
criticized by some lawyers and intellectuals, especially in terms of judging
the civilians on military courts for the communist propaganda. On
May s, 9fsf, the Military Penal Code no. 9dp was arranged in such a way
as to furnish the military courts with the right to try civilians when suspected
of the communist propaganda in the army. These changes were
retrospectively applied to the Military Academy and Navy trials in July
9fsf, almost one year after the decision was approved. Fevzi Çakmak
were seeing these purges against the known communists as a lesson and
warning for others, showing what could happen to the communists who
would want to capture the country by sneaking into its military.9 This is
how Nâzım’s prison years began.
8 Göksu and Timms, Romantik Komünist, D_F–D_G.
9 Göksu and Timms, Romantik Komünist, BCi. In the parliament, the prime minister Re)ik
Saydam gave a talk concerning this necessary change of the article. See Mehmet Ali
Sebü k, “Büyü k Adlı̂ hatâ” Vatan, December BC, D_g_; “Askeri Adalet diye bir hukuk şubesi
yoktur” Vatan, January i, D_FC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9sf
§ V.W The World War II and After
Right after his jailing, the Second World War broke out in September 9fsf.
Things were getting worse. In January 9fd8, Law on the National Protection
(Milli Korunma Kanunu) was passed in order to strengthen the army
with the very limited resources available and in the middle of the crisis
caused by the war while Turkey was insisting on the politics of neutrality.
10 In the meantime, Denmark, France, Norway, Belgium, and Holland
fell to the Germans. In May 9fd9, with the German-Italian invasion of Athens
and Salonica, the war came to the Turkish borders. Nâzım and other
communists began to be worried about their security in the face of Germany’s
invasion of, or potential alliance with, Turkey. In June 9fd9, the
German army attacked the USSR. They were now in the Black Sea. And
Iosmet Ionönü was being pressured to join the war alongside the Axis powers,
especially the Germans, as the nationalist-fascist groups were feeling
even more strengthened. In 9fd7, Varlık Vergisi (the wealth tax) was
passed, a tax mostly applied to the non-Muslim citizens of Turkey under
the pretext of raising money for the defense of the country in the event of
eventual entry into the World War II. However, in the same year, following
the Pearl Harbor attack of Japan, the United States entered the war, which
was a game changing move. Around 9fdd, the defeat of fascism had come
to the fore. Finally, the German army was on the retreat. With this development,
Turkey and the world started to move into a period of political
and economic liberalization. It was not a mere coincidence that in 9fdd,
the Turanist, racist, nationalist groups of the far right were eliminated
through varying sentences their leaders received11 and a little earlier
Fevzi Çakmak retired from the position of the Chief of the General Staff, a
10 Erik Jan Zü rcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, BCDe [D__i]), BCe.
11 I€lker Aytü rk, “Nationalism and Islam in Cold War Turkey, D_gg–G_” Middle Eastern Studies
FC, no. F (BCDg): G_F. This development was also celebrated by Nâzım Hikmet, as he
underlined the fact that the president of the country of)icially declared them as the traitors
to the nation, which was not the case for Nâzım and other leftists. Letter to Kemal
Tahir, no. DBG. Undated. Kemal Tahir’s Mahpusaneden Mektuplar (I€stanbul: YKY, BCD_),
BGe–BGm.
EMRE KESER
9d8
position he had held since the beginning of 9f78s. This period also
marked the beginning of the post-9fdg alliance between Turkey and the
US. In February 9fdg, Turkey declared war on the Axis powers after
breaking off all the relations with Germany in late 9fdd. And in April 9fdg,
Turkey participated in the San Francisco Conference and signed the UN
Charter. With this, the Turkish state had now committed itself to the
(rhetoric of) democracy and freedom. And the Turkish government felt
compelled to move closer to the West, especially the US, under these circumstances.
12
Toward the end of the World War II, in March 9fdg, the Soviet Union
noted to Turkey of its intention to abrogate the Treaty of Friendship
and Non-Aggression Pact between the countries, and, right after the war,
laid claims to the northeastern provinces of Turkey (Kars and Ardahan)
that were Russian territories between 9pYp and 9f9p as well as the control
of the Straits of Bosphorus and Dardanelles through an introduction of a
base to be managed by the two countries together.13 This was partly a
gesture of punishment on Turkey’s insistent neutral stance during the
war—which seems to be why neither the British nor the Americans opposed
this request of the USSR initially in the Potsdam conference.14 Still,
this had put Turkey and the US in close contact, as a potential Soviet control
on the Black Sea, Marmara, and Aegean regions was posing a serious
threat to the US interests in the Middle East. Thus, the Americans encouraged
the Turkish government to take a 1irm line and refuse the demands
of the USSR. This is how Turkey began to get closer to the West and especially
the United State with the start of the Cold War, which also brought
the rhetoric of democracy with itself.
As early as 9fdd, the president Iosmet Ionönü revealed their plans to
have a more democratic and/or pluralistic regime. Right after this, starting
with the passage of the Land Distribution Law unanimously, con1licts
and factions started to become apparent within the CHP. Celal Bayar,
12 Zü rcher, Turkey, BDC.
13 Aylin Gü ney, “An Anatomy of the Transformation of the US-Turkish Alliance: From ‘Cold
War’ to ‘War on Iraq’” Turkish Studies G, no. i (BCCF): igD–igB.
14 Zü rcher, Turkey, BDC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9d9
Adnan Menderes, Re1ik Koraltan, and Fuad Köprülü submitted a memorandum
demanding the full establishment of democracy, which has come
to be known as the Dörtlü Takrir (Memorandum of the Four). At the same
time, newspapers like Ahmet Emin Yalman’s liberal Vatan and Sertels’
left-oriented Tan were giving a space for the Four to voice their demands
and opposition. That these attempts were not initially suppressed by the
government was a sign that things started to change, but soon the four
were ousted from the party. Yet, later this opposition of the four was able
to turn into a formation of the party. In the early days of 9fdl, the Democrat
Party (DP) was of1icially registered, which was developed under the
discretion of Ionönü. The 1irst multi-party elections of the Republican period
was held in July 9fdl, despite the fact that the electoral procedures
were seriously 1lawed with no secrecy of voting, partial supervisions, and
fully closed counting process. As a result, the DP won only sixty-two of
the dlg seats in the parliament.15
Also, it would not be true to say that the DP, at least initially, was a
full-1ledged opposition to the Kemalist single-party regime and ideology.
Rather, it subscribed to the fundamentals of Kemalism, most notably nationalism
and secularism. Furthermore, DP’s promise of economic and
political liberalization, as its main difference from the CHP, were also
taken over by the governing party starting in 9fdY.16 Thus, one of DP’s
maneuvers to generate a negative public opinion on CHP was accusing it
of being tolerant or soft on communism—which was supported by the
fact that the party eliminated the Turkist far right. However, soon, CHP
15 Zü rcher, Turkey, BDg.
16 The relative economic prosperity and growth during this period was partly a result of
the Truman Doctrine through which the US planned to help “free nations” defend themselves
from the foreign pressure (of the Soviets) and the militant minorities inside their
borders, as well as the Marshall Plan through which the US planned to provide a considerable
amount of )inancial support to the European countries to rebuild their economies.
Zü rcher, Turkey, BDD. Economic plan of D_ge was also an important development
loosening the ties of the centrally planned economy. As a result of this, the Turkish economy
saw an explosive growth between D_gF and D_FC. Zü rcher, BDe–BDm. In the meantime,
after the establishment of NATO in D_g_, Turkey was looking for the ways to join the
alliance, but could only join in D_FB after the DP came to power. Zü rcher, Bie.
EMRE KESER
9d7
started to direct the same accusations of communism at the DP. As this
rally of anti-communism was heated, in 9fdp and 9fdf, there started another
wave of purge against the left and communism, and the Turanist/
Turkist groups of the far right, who were eliminated at the end of the
War, were rehabilitated.17
There was a confusion brought about by the American-encouraged
Cold War democratization and liberalization. On the one hand, there
were relative liberalization of the divergent political voices and oppositions,
but, on the other hand, there were a strong tendency to suppress
left-wing and/or communist politics, which would not disturb the relations
with the US at all in the context of the Cold War. However, in the case
of a renowned poet and intellectual like Nâzım Hikmet supported by
other intellectuals worldwide, this confusion became even more complicated.
He was a communist intellectual and yet held in high regard by the
human rights organizations, international democratic and engaged intellectuals,
and cultural institutions. In such an environment, Nâzım’s case
was becoming more and more apparent, and as complicated, in the second
half of 9fd8s.
Sometime in the 1irst half of 9fdl, Nâzım Hikmet wrote a petition
to the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) concerning the judicial
error and unlawfulness he had exposed to and demanded the correction
of this error, that is, his release from the prison.18 At the same time, now
in a two-party regime where each wanted to gain an upper-hand over the
other, a rumor about an upcoming general amnesty started to circulate
among the prisoners and around the parliament.19 In 9fdY fall, while the
17 Zü rcher, Turkey, BDF.
18 Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. Dei. Undated. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar (I€stanbul:
YKY, BCD_), iBG. Though this was not the )irst he sent to the parliament. Since almost
the beginning of his imprisonment, he either made attempts to connect with the state
authorities mainly through his uncle Ali Fuat (Cebesoy), “Dayı Paşa,” as he referred to in
his letters, or wrote independent petitions for a pardon.
19 Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. DmF and no. D_m. Both undated. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden
Mektuplar, igC, iFF.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9ds
rumors was still continuing, Nâzım’s petition was put in process.20 In late
9fdp, as the discussions about a potential general amnesty became and it
was expected to apply to the sentences of political prisoners like Nâzım,
the Minister of Justice Fuat Sirmen visited him in prison. According to
Nâzım’s account, the minister dropped by in his room, too, and they had
chatted for about twenty minutes. Nâzım described him the unlawfulness
and injustice he was exposed to and complained about the dif1icult living
conditions in prisons, and the minister listened to him carefully.21
§ V.X Toward the Hunger Strike
On August 9f, 9fdf, the thirty-fourth death anniversary of the revolutionary
Ottoman-Turkish poet Tev1ik Fikret (9pYl–9f9g), in the newspaper
Vatan, Ahmet Emin Yalman22 wrote a column titled “Fikret and Nâzım
20 Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. BCg. September BG, D_ge. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden
Mektuplar, iGD.
21 Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. BBD. October G, D_gm. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar,
imB.
22 Ahmet Emin Yalman (Dmmm–D_eB) alone was one of the key )igures throughout the campaigns
for Nâ zım’s freedom. Born into a Sabbatean family in Ottoman Salonica, attended
a German high school in I€stanbul, Ahmet Emin received a PhD in journalism from Columbia
University in D_Dg with a dissertation titled The Development of Modern Turkey
as Measured by Its Press, an interesting and detailed historical account of the press from
the Tanzimat period to the present of writing. In the conclusion of the dissertation, Yalman
ends that soon a new order will be established in place of the empire and this new
order will be predominantly based on a free economy and capitalist regime. This will
bring stability and respect for Turkey, which are much more powerful resources than
all kinds of armament against any foreign invasion. Also, scattered all around the dissertation,
Yalman places a considerable emphasis on nationalism, Turkishness, and
Turkish language. This liberal nationalism of his was seemingly transferred into the outlook
of his newspaper Vatan, served as one of the main publications arguing for Nâzım’s
freedom. The dissertation has been very recently translated into Turkish. See Modern
Türkiye’nin Gelişim Sürecinde Basın, L\kL–L[Lk, trans. Birgen Keşoğlu, ed. Serkan Yazıcı,
Fikrettin Yavuz (I€stanbul: I€ş Bankası Kü ltü r Yayınları, BCDm).
EMRE KESER
9dd
Hikmet”23 following his meetings with Nâzım in Bursa prison. In the essay,
after a prelude where he bemoaned the revolutionary men like Tev1ik
Fikret, who paid high prices to serve their people, falling into oblivion, he
opens up a discussion about Nâzım Hikmet who, according to Yalman,
was experiencing the same fate, as a way of rejoicing Fikret’s soul. He
suggests that the responsibility for Nâzım’s unlawful imprisonment was
not only on those who arranged the two military trials, or on the singleparty
regime, or on the judiciary administration that kept their silence
despite the open injustice committed, but also on each and every one of
the twenty-million Turkish citizens. Under this responsibility, he said, he
is now speaking against the injustice and hopes that his voice will 1ind an
echo.
He then went on to prove that if there is any communism in Nâzım,
it could not be traced back to an external (or foreign) resource but rather
to his love of this country and its people, and his inability to stand their
suffering. Speaking on behalf of his newspaper, Vatan, he says, as a newspaper
that sees the Moscow-type-communism as “the most hypocritical
movement in history,” he notes that they take it as their task to 1ight
against it, and believe in the free enterprise and market economy as conditions
of progress and freedom, we declare that Nâzım’s imprisonment
could not be a measure against the threat of communism. Rather, it could
only be a service to communism. Yalman suggested that Nâzım’s unlawful
imprisonment and the indifference to his situation were being used as an
ef1icacious weapon against us all over the world by the international organizations.
He then brie1ly touches on why the sentence Nâzım received
is unjust: 1irst, when he was arrested, he was working in a 1ilm studio
with no interest in politics like an ordinary citizen; second, that he was
just contacted by an excited military student without his approval and
that his books were found in this student’s belongings could not be considered
to be a serious evidence of offense in any kind of judicial and
23 Ahmet Emin Yalman, “Fikret ve Nâzım Hikmet” Vatan. August D_, D_g_. In the essay, Yalman
notes in passing that he attempted to publish an essay of this kind two times before,
but they were not published, as he could not overcome the hesitation and intimidation
widely attached to the name of Nâzım Hikmet in Turkey.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9dg
penal system; and third, even if proven guilty of the offense, his sentence
far exceeds the sentences given in similar cases.
In the last part of the essay, he returns to his work of rendering
Nâzım Hikmet a true nationalist. He cites Nâzım saying that he is connected
to this country through language, the strongest connection ever.
To Yalman’s request from him to declare his patriotism, Nâzım is said to
reply: “Would you invite a man to prove that he is a man? How would one
ask a person who sings in Turkish language, who proves his love for the
country with his whole existence, and who takes every risk and makes
sacri1ices everything for this country, to prove that he is a patriot? If the
Turkish nation is subject to an external encroachment, wherever it comes
from, I will be in the front line of the defenders.”24 That is why, Yalman
concluded, it is a necessity to 1ix this injustice, a necessity that we owe to
Turkish culture and literature, but more importantly to our history. He
ends the essay with the hope that twenty-million Turks would not consent
to carry the burden put on their shoulders by the pain and suffering
of a great Turkish poet who had been unjustly held in jail for years.
Following Yalman’s attempts, which might be said to have marked
the beginning of the campaigns to save Nâzım from prison, the lawyer
Mehmet Ali Sebük25 wrote a series of articles explaining thoroughly and
in more detail that there was a “judicial error” (adli hata) in the 9fsp
24 Complaining about the article in passing, Nâzım Hikmet noted to Kemal Tahir that Yalman
made him say things that he did not say and even could not imagine saying. Letter
to Kemal Tahir, no. BB_. September _, D_g_. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar, i_D.
25 Until D_gF, Sebü k was a public of)icer in the small northeastern town Ordu, interested in
child criminology. Trained in law and criminology in France, he was widely engaging
with the prisoners in Ordu and trying to )ind out ways of reducing child criminality. His
book Memleket Kriminolojisi (Ordu: Gü rses Basımevi, D_gg) investigates crimes in Ordu,
especially the ones committed by children. In D_gF, he retired from his position and
moved to I€stanbul to become a private lawyer. He became the legal consultant of Ahmet
Emin Yalman’s newspaper Vatan. It is at this period that he met Nâzım Hikmet in Bursa
prison through Yalman’s initiatives. Starting in D_g_, he wrote numerous pieces in the
newspaper to inform public about the “judicial error” in the D_im military trials convicting
Nâzım. He collected his memories of the period in his book Korkunç Adli Hata ve
Nâzım Hikmet’in Özgürlük Savaşı (I€stanbul: Cem, D_em).
EMRE KESER
9dl
military trials that sentenced Nâzım and that these errors are similar to
the ones done in the Dreyfus trials in France. In a November 9fdf article,
called “The elements of crime in Nâzım Hikmet’s actions,”26 Sebü k, in a
succinct and technical-legal language, explicates why the sentence Nâzım
received was unlawful. First of all, according to the Military Penal Code
no. fd, in order for one to be guilty, one must have incited more one military
personnel together to rebel against their superiors. However, Sebü k
points out, the evidence convicted Nâzım is based on the allegations of a
single military student and, moreover, there is no evidence whatsoever
that all cadets were agitated against their superiors. These are the objective
elements of the attributed offense. Sebük suggests that one should
also take the subjective elements into consideration, for example, intent
in the offense. The court could not provide a suf1icient body of evidence
whether Nâzım has had any intention to incite the army and cadets to
rebel.
The other allegations against Nâzım were concerned with the
communist propaganda in the army. However, appealing to the legality
principle, Sebü k says, when these alleged events were taking place, doing
communist propaganda and even forming a community for this purpose
in the army did not constitute an offense. Even if they were, the same action
could not be convicted both as inciting the army to rebel and as a
communist propaganda in the army at once. Furthermore, there is neither
a suf1icient number of allegations nor a necessary evidence that
would require conviction. The only evidence the court had had was a few
words that are supposedly told by Nâzım to two military students and
they could not constitute the necessary evidence. In conclusion, Sebü k
argues that the trials convicting Nâzım violated the legality principle and
yet sentenced Nâzım to a heavy imprisonment due to some alleged words
far from constituting a de1initive evidence. That is to say, Sebük suggests
that the military trials committed a “judicial error” (adlı̂ hata). (Note here
that they try to avoid mentioning the instigators and/or perpetrators of
26 Mehmet Ali Sebü k, “Nâzım Hikmete ait )iilerin suç unsurları” Vatan, November Bi, D_g_.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9dY
this “error,” a term that seems to be chosen for this purpose, as it does not
necessitate the personal intention and effort).
This was the title of another column by Sebük written in December
9fdf: “Great Judicial Error” (“Büyü k Adlı ̂ hata”).27 In this column, too,
Sebük lists the judicial errors in Nâzım’s case from a legal perspective.
However, this time, he tries to show that there is a gap between the reason
of the conviction and the clause according to which the conviction
was given. He states that Nâzım was convicted for the communist propaganda,
yet he was tried for inciting the army to rebel, and gives several
quotes related to this from the accusations presented in the court. At the
same time, implying that the government of the time was aware of this
gap between the clause and the reason of conviction, he cites the prime
minister Re1ik Saydam’s speech in the parliament, where he argued for
the change of the relevant article in such a way as to include the communist
propaganda in the army as an offense against the article no 9dp,
as mentioned above. Although Sebük overall had been using a dry and
legal-technical language in his essays, he ends this one by noting that he
had encountered countless judicial errors in his 78-year-long career,
however, he had never seen one that was as obvious and lasted for so long
as this one.
Note here that both Yalman and Sebük were writing articles to
generate a public opinion for Nâzım’s case. While Sebük’s tone and mode
of writing is usually technical pointing one by one to the errors committed
in the trials, Yalman’s language is agitative crying out for the sufferings
of Nâzım, a poet of the Turkish language and defender of the Turkish
nation, who was made to pay high prices for his people. He suggests that
in the world, or outside Turkey, his case was being used against Turkey
to render us undemocratic, undeveloped country, to put a pressure on the
country and take advantage of the situation. That is, the international
gaze watching Nâzım’s case, in Yalman’s discourse, turns into a threat
and, more importantly, makes Nâzım’s case a national issue. For this
27 Mehmet Ali Sebü k, “Büyü k Adlı̂ hatâ” Vatan, December BC, D_g_. Also, see “Askeri Adalet
diye bir hukuk şubesi yoktur” Vatan, January i, D_FC.
EMRE KESER
9dp
reason, he was urging the people as a whole to 1ight for 1ixing this injustice.
To repeat, Yalman here plays with the threat of the outside to convince
the inside. By making the inside insecure, he wants to show that
Nâzım’s unlawful imprisonment is a threat to the welfare of the Turkish
society, a national security problem. Later, Sebü k’s writings tone, too,
changed though. Yet, instead of trying to prove that Nâzım is not a traitor
but rather an ardent patriot, he started to establish a direct similarity between
the Dreyfus affair and Nâzım Hikmet.28
In the meantime, Nâzım’s situation were gaining greater publicity
all over the world. The international gaze Yalman pointed to was rapidly
expanding. In France, young progressive Turks has already started to
publicize Nâzım’s situation forming a union called Union of the Young
Progressive Turks (Union des Jeunes Turcs Progressistes), consisting
mostly of the students from Turkey in France at the time including names
such as Attila Iolhan, Kemal Baştuji, Cahit Güçbilmez, Taci Karan, Avadis
Aleksenyan. It might be said that the 1irst echo Yalman hopes to 1ind for
Nâzım was found in France with this. These progressive young Turks got
in touch with the French intellectuals and artists around the National
Committee of Writers (Comité National des E| crivains, CNE) and the
French Communist Party (PCF). They asked them for help to publicize
Nâzım’s situation. Following this, a committee called the Committee for
Saving Nâzım Hikmet and Dissemination of His Works (Comité Pour la
Libération de Nâzım Hikmet et la Diffusion de ses OEuvres) was established
and chaired by Tristan Tzara. It consisted of the world renowned
writers, poets, intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, Tristan
Tzara, Simon de Beauvoir, and Pablo Picasso, some of whom Nâzım
named in the poem he wrote on the 1ifth day of his hunger strike. (I will
make a discussion of the poem shortly). Multiple times the committee
and the intellectuals sent letters to the president Iosmet Ionönü and the
prime ministers of Turkey requesting the end of the injustice Nâzım
28 Göksu and Timms, Romantik Komünist, BGB; Turgay Fişekçi, “Nâzım Hikmet’i Açlık
Grevine Gö tü ren Yol,” m.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9df
Hikmet was subject to. At the same time, they were communicating with
the world the situation Nâzım was going through.
On November l, 9fdf, they wrote a letter to the prime minister of
Turkey. One day later, International Union of Students (IUS) sent a letter
to the prime minister requesting the end of Nâzım’s unlawful imprisonment
which was, as argued in the letter, apparently against the UN’s Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.29 The president and the prime ministers
all seemingly opted for indifference. Tzara even wrote letters to
Saraçoğlu, who was at the time the chair of the Grand Assembly, although
he was informed by the progressive Turks that Saraçoğlu was a supporter
of the Nazi Germany. According to Taci Karan’s account, during the process,
the former judge Fahrettin Karaoğlan’s confessions published in the
newspapers were really helpful to demonstrate the unlawfulness of the
trials. He confessed that Nâzım was convicted with no evidence and reason
whatsoever.30 The Turkish students informed the French intellectuals
about Karaoğlan’s words. Relying on them, Joë Nordmann, the president
of the International Association of Democrat Jurists (L’Association
Internationale des Juristes Démocrates, AIJD), sent a letter to the presidency
of the Turkish Grand Assembly. So, when 9fg8s started, there was
a large pressure on the Turkish government. The activities of the French
committee lasted from the beginning of 9fdf to almost until the end of
9fg8, until Nâzım was taken out from the prison.31
Then, on January 7f, 9fg8, Sebük appealed to the Grand Assembly
for the elimination/correction of this error and requested a pardon for
Nâzım. In the columns he wrote in Vatan he had already explained the
errors Nâzım’s military trail included in detail from a legal perspective.
All these started a public discussion and perhaps marked the beginning
of the continuous attempts and campaigns to take Nâzım out of prison
29 Taci Karan, “Paris’in ‘Jö n’ Delikanlıları” Cumhuriyet Dergi, January DB, BCCi.
30 Yaprak, May DF, D_FC. When Nâzım’s case started to gain publicity in the country,
Karaoğlan’s confessions were seemingly put into circulation by his daughter.
31 Taci Karan, “Paris’in ‘Jön’ Delikanlıları” Cumhuriyet Dergi, January DB, BCCi.
EMRE KESER
9g8
that was to last until his release in July 9fg8.32 Following these, Iorfan Emin,
Nâzım Hikmet’s own lawyer, on February f, 9fg8, sent a letter to the president
Iosmet Ionönü informing him that Nâzım was thinking of starting a
hunger strike. Ionönü recommended him to see the Minister of Justice. On
March s, 9fg8, 1inally, a bill concerning a general amnesty prepared by the
Ministry of Justice was sent to the Assembly along with the names of the
political convicts planned to be released, but it was rejected and thrown
out by the deputies. Afterwards, the Assembly meetings were intermitted.
Nâzım Hikmet declared his intention to start a hunger strike soon.
Iorfan Emin recommended Nâzım to start after April p following the reopening
of the Assembly so that he can get in touch with the authorities
and politicians to once again negotiate his case. Nâzım accepted to wait a
little longer.33
In the meantime, there were coming out essays in the newspapers
claiming that Nâzım lost his appetite for living, he got depressed in prison
and no more wanted to live. That is, he became “suicidal” and were using
hunger strike as a pretext. In a letter he wrote to Kemal Tahir, on March
d, 9fg8, he argued that the news and articles speculating that he had lost
his appetite for living is false and warned him not to believe.34 In the same
days, upon learning that Kemal Tahir, too, was intending to start a hunger
strike of his own to help Nâzım’s case publicize, on March g, 9fg8, he sent
him another letter begging him to give up undertaking a hunger strike in
support of himself. This same request is remade 1ive days later in a letter
dated March 98.35
32 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet ve Açlık Grevi Kronolojisi” in Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık
Grevi, ed. Yeşim Bilge Bengü (I€stanbul: Bilgi Uu niversitesi Yayınları, BCDD), i_.
33 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet ve Açlık Grevi Kronolojisi” in Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık
Grevi, ed. Yeşim Bilge Bengü (I€stanbul: Bilgi Uu niversitesi Yayınları, BCDD), i_.
34 Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. Bim. March g, D_FC. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusane’den Mektuplar,
gCF. These news were probably emerging from his complaints to his mother and friends
about the psychological issues—“melancholia” and “neurosis”—he was experiencing
under dif)icult prison conditions. See Turgay Fişekçi, “Nâzım Hikmet’i Açlık Grevine
Gö tü ren Yol,” e–m.
35 Letters to Kemal Tahir, no. Bi_ and no. BgC. March F and March DC, D_FC. Kemal Tahir’e
Mahpusane’den Mektuplar, gCF–gCG.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9g9
Toward the end of March 9fg8, the amnesty was seemingly put
aside by the parliament once more. The right-wing newspapers and politicians
was in ardent opposition to the release of political convicts, most
of whom were known left 1igures like Nâzım Hikmet, Kemal Tahir, and
Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, all tried and convicted in the Navy Trial. On March s8,
9fg8, Nâzım wrote to Kemal Tahir that the temporary failure of the amnesty
bill did not disappoint him at all.36 This was frequent note he wrote
to Kemal Tahir since the beginning of 9fd8s. Oftentimes, when mentioning
the amnesty issue and his attempts in that regard, Nâzım was noting
that he is not optimistic, but he does not just give up, in case the right
time comes. He called this attitude of his own “hopeful realism” (nikbin
realizm).37
§ V.d Hunger Strike Unleashed
On the same day, he wrote a letter to Piraye, his ex-wife, and his kids and
relatives, noting that he was about to launch a hunger strike as a last call
to 1ight against the injustice he was exposed to.38 And, 1inally, on April p,
9fg8, he started the strike by declaring that “for the petition I present to
the people I use my life as a stamp.” (Millete verdiğim açık istidaya canımı
pul yerine kullanıyorum).39 By putting his body in suspense, he thought
he was giving a petition to the Turkish people to decide, because they are
the ultimate decision maker. He wanted them to decide whether he will
die or not. If they do not want it to happen, they should pressure the state
to free Nâzım. If they want it to happen, they do not need to do anything,
36 Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. BgD. March iC, D_FC. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar,
gCG.
37 But every time he reminds that Kemal Tahir sees this as pessimism (bedbinlik). He says
that it is an attitude that prepares one for the worst and yet not help one keep one’s
hopes still high. This is the role he thinks the writer should play in the realist literature.
See, for example, Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. B_D. Undated. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden
Mektuplar, iem–ie_.
38 He was careful to note in the letter that this is not a result of frustration, fear, or desperateness.
Turgay Fişekçi, “Nâ zım Hikmet’i Açlık Grevine Gö tü ren Yol,” _.
39 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet ve Açlık Grevi Kronolojisi,” i_.
EMRE KESER
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they could just stay indifferent. However, in the latter case, it might be
detrimental to themselves, because the “outside” might see them as the
undemocratic people, people that needs to be checked out, and negative
“foreign” sanctions might apply.
On the same day with the start of hunger strike, after his health
was examined in a hospital in Bursa, he was taken to Iostanbul by the police.
A group of intellectuals in Iostanbul and Ankara immediately wrote a
petition to the president Ionönü telling him that Nâzım fell a victim to a
“judicial error” and beseech him for Nâzım’s release from the prison. Next
day, Nâzım was examined in Cerrahpaşa Hospital, Iostanbul. Doctors detected
that his health had already deteriorated. Following Sebü k’s telegraphy
from Ankara afternoon requesting him to postpone the strike a little
further, as he was going to get in touch with several politicians and
hopeful about the outcome, Nâzım postponed the strike.40 On the same
day, Vâ -Nû published Nâzım’s letter about the start of the strike in the
newspaper Akşam. On April 98, 9fg8, he wrote to Kemal Tahir that “I
stopped my strike just for now.”41 Next day, another medical examination
was held in Cerrahpaşa Hospital once again. According to the results of
these examinations, Nâzım had had serious heart and liver problems.
Then, he was moved to Paşakapısı prison in U_sküdar, Iostanbul. After this,
he had never gone back to Bursa prison.
On April 9g, 9fg8, the medical report coming out of the examination
in Cerrahpaşa hospital demonstrated that Nâzım Hikmet was seriously
ill and must be treated in a full-1ledged hospital. If after the treatment
the cited health problems are observed to continue, the criminal
code no. sff would be appropriate to apply, that is, Nâzım’s must be released
if there is no progress in his health.42 Then, on April 7d, the of1ice
of chief public prosecutor in Iostanbul referred Nâzım to the medical
40 Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet ve Açlık Grevi Kronolojisi,” i_.
41 Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. BgB. April DC, D_FC. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar,
gCe.
42 Sebü k was continuing his writings to draw attention to Nâ zım’s case, which gained an
important momentum with the declaration of the hunger strike. He, too, was arguing
that this is a national issue that concerns all Turkish people.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9gs
jurisprudence. Next day, for this purpose, his health was reexamined in
Cerrahpaşa Hospital in a single person room under the supervision of
gendarmes.43 On the same day, he wrote to Kemal Tahir his intention of
starting hunger strike again but warned him once more not to do the
same thing himself.44 On April 7f, the doctors reported that he must be
treated for three months in a full-1ledged hospital and if the results are
not promising, he must be released from the prison. Then, he returned to
Paşakapısı Prison. Upon being convinced that this was not going to happen,
on May 7, he resumed his hunger strike in the prison, which was going
to continue for 9p days until May 9f.45
On May Y, the 1ifth day of fasting, he wrote the poem “On the Fifth
Day of Hunger Strike”46 telling those who campaign for him that “your
eyes are like sparkling starts at my bedside.”
My brothers, (kardeşlerim)
please forgive me
if I cannot say properly
what I want to say.
I’m a little drunk, a little light-headed,
not from rakı
but from starvation’s medicine.47
He says that he is light-headed from hunger. As I have discussed in the
previous chapter, hunger makes the hungry light-headed, dizzy, delirious,
and even delusional. But also, hunger results from the delusion that prevents
the hungry from seeing the causes of their hunger. Nâzım dramatizes
the opening as if it was a scene of extemporizing and plays with this
43 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet ve Açlık Grevi Kronolojisi,” i_.
44 Letter to Kemal Tahir, no. Bgi. April BF, D_FC. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar,
gCe.
45 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet ve Açlık Grevi Kronolojisi,” gC.
46 For the Turkish, see “Açlık Grevinin Beşinci Gü nü nde” in Bütün Eserleri (I€stanbul: YKY,
BCCm), _gg–_gF. Here I use the English translation “Five Days into the Hunger Strike” in
Beyond the Walls: Selected Poems, trans. Ruth Christie, Richard McKane, and Talâ t S. Halman
(London: Anvil Press Poetry, BCCB), DeF–DeG, but I modify the translation throughout.
47 “Five Days into the Hunger Strike,” DeF.
EMRE KESER
9gd
double meaning of hunger both as resulting from delusion and resulting
in delusion. In the next stanza, he opens up the issue:
My brothers,
Those in Europe, those in Asia, those in America,
I, in this month of May,
am neither in prison, nor on hunger strike:
I am lying in a meadow at night,
your eyes are sparkling like stars at my bedhead,
and your hands like one hand in my palm
Like my mother’s hand,
Like my loved one’s hand,
Like Memet’s hand,
Like life’s hand.48
What is obvious here is that he addresses an international audience
and/or shows that his addressee is an international, outside, group. And
this group looks at, and looks after, him: “your eyes are sparkling like
stars at my bedhead.” They gather around and work to save him. Remember
that he gave a petition to the Turkish people with his hunger strike
and now made it known that the outside is looking at, watching closely,
the inside. The eyes are directed at Turkey to see if they are going to do
the right thing. And he continues,
My brothers,
you have never abandoned me,
not me, nor my country, nor my people.
I know your love for me and mine
is like my love for you and yours.
For this my friends, I thank you, I thank
you.49
The gazes watching him have never abandoned him, his country, and his
people. They love his people, as he loves theirs. Remember that this is not
about saving Nâzım, but a national issue, about the welfare and well-
48 “Five Days into the Hunger Strike,” DeF.
49 “Five Days into the Hunger Strike,” DeF.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9gg
being of the Turkish people. He thanked them, because they are aware of
this fact. And in the next paragraph, his remarks get even more speci1ic.
My brothers,
I have no intention of dying.
I know,
I’ll continue to live still in your minds.
I’ll be in a line of Aragon,
‘in every line that tells of the beautiful days to come,’
and in Picasso’s white dove,
and Paul Robeson’s songs,
and most beautiful of all,
I will be your companion smiling in victory
along with the dockers of Marseilles.50
Aragon, Picasso, Robeson are the people who were making international
calls for Nâzım’s freedom. As I noted above, most of the international
campaigns to save Nâzım was based in France. So, he did not forget the
dockers of Marseilles. He ends the poem saying that he is thoroughly
happy, “over the moon.”51 As now clear, the gazes outside are of vital importance
here. They 1igure, as in Yalman’s narrative, both as gazes that
are detrimental to Turkey, since they will judge Turkey badly if Nâzım is
let die, and as loving gazes, in Nâzım narrative, since they love Nâzım’s
country and people, and, due to this love, they want them to help Nâzım
to 1ix the injustice, to 1ix the injustice problem as a whole in Nâzım’s Turkey.
Two days later, on May f, Nâzım’s health deteriorated and was
sent to the department of chest diseases of the Cerrahpaşa Hospital. Simultaneously,
his mother, Celile Hanım, launched her own hunger strike
naming it “oruç” (fast) and started to collect signatures from people on
the Galata Bridge, Iostanbul. Police intervened in the protests. In the placard
Celile Hanım held was written the following words:
50 “Five Days into the Hunger Strike,” DeF–DeG.
51 “Five Days into the Hunger Strike,” DeG.
EMRE KESER
9gl
My son Nâzım Hikmet, who was unjustly jailed, is on hunger
strike. I want to die as well. I am fasting day and night. Those who
want to save us, sign this notebook by writing your addresses. His
mother: Painter Celile.52
One day later, in Ankara, three poets of the Garip, Orhan Veli, Oktay Rifat,
and Melih Cevdet, announced their decision to launch their own hunger
strike for three days in solidarity with Nâzım through their journal
Yaprak. They were careful to note that their action was not a political call
but rather a matter of collegiality between poets.
And on May 99, a weekly named Nâzım Hikmet started to be published
by the students in the Iostanbul Higher Education Youth Association
(Iostanbul Yü ksek Tahsil Gençlik Derneğ i, IoYTGD)53 in order to further
Nâzım’s cause and increase its publicity and visibility. Its 1irst issue was
published with the headline: “They want to kill Nâzım.” Furthermore,
they strongly underline the fact that “the eyes of the intellectuals are now
[directed] at Iostanbul and Ankara” and that the killing of Nâzım meant “to
tarnish the name of the Turkish nation” (millitemizin üstüne yapıştırılan
leke en büyük ve tarihî leke). And, in the same issue, a declaration of the
IoYTGD was published as well with the title: “Save Nâzım Hikmet.” In the
declaration, it was underlined that the Turkish people do not want to be
mere spectators to the death of Nâzım Hikmet and, curiously, Nâzım was
referred to as “the eyeballs of the humanity” (insanlığın gözbebeği).54
52 “Haksız yere mahkûm edilen oğlum Nâzım Hikmet açlık grevindedir. Ben de ö lmek
istiyorum. Gece Gündü z oruçluyum. Bizi kurtarmak isteyenler bu deftere adreslerini
yazarak imzalasınlar.” Quoted in Turgay Fişekçi, “Nâzım Hikmet’i Açlık Grevine Gö tü ren
Yol,” DB.
53 Since the beginning of the public discussions on Nâ zım and the judicial error, the Turkish
newspapers, dailies, and journals were divided into two: )irst, there were those supported
Nâ zım’s case such as Vatan, Akşam, Cumhuriyet, Gerçek, Hür Gençlik, Nâzım Hikmet,
Yaprak, Bakış; second, those who were strongly against it such as Millet, Son Telgraf,
Yeni Sabah, Kudret. For example, against the discussions of general amnesty, see Nurettin
Ardıçoğlu, “Bunları mı affedeceğ iz,” Kudret, July G, D_FC. On the Nâzım Hikmet, see
also, “Fahri Oktay Nâzım Hikmet Gazetesinin Ou ykü sünü Anlatıyor,” interview by Erden
Akbulut, in Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık Grevi, ed. Yeşim Bilge Bengü (I€stanbul: Bilgi Uu niversitesi
Yayınları, BCDD), iF–iG.
54 Nâzım Hikmet D, May DD, D_FC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9gY
This just means that Nâzım was worldly renowned poet, but it is still interesting
that he is the eyeballs, because he needs to be looked after, as
he gets frail due to the starvation. And those who look at him also look at
the Turkish nation and people. And letting him die in prison, or rather
“killing” him, is a betrayal to nation and the Turkish people.
In the second issue published on May 9g, it was once again announced
to the Turkish people that Nâzım Hikmet was dying “because he
lived for you, he wrote for you, he devoted his life to your struggle of life
and freedom.”55 In the same issue, Nâzım’s poem “Korku” dedicated to
Paul Robeson was also published both to show the internationality of him
and to once again underline the outside gazes directed at the inside. Not
surprisingly, it was once again noted that “the most progressed intellectuals
and peoples directed their eyes at Turkey are following the events
going on here, and they pass judgments (hüküm vermekteler) about both
the relevant of1ices, on the one hand, and about our people, on the other.”
And this shows that these “hundreds of thousands of gazes” show very
well the magnitude of the effect of these events going on here. Then, the
newspaper goes on to say to the people: “You will not only save Nâzım
Hikmet, but also save yourself.” They are also instructed: “don’t close
your eyes” to Nâzım slowly dying “before the eyes of the entire world.”
Once again note how important the eyes and gazes in the event was: both
seeing and being seen. You have to see, since you are being seen, and you
have to see in order to escape being seen or gazed at.
The international groups were also working to help Nâzım at the
same time. Students from Glasgow was calling the situation “murder” and
protesting the Turkish embassy as well as UNESCO. The writers in Poland
drew attention to the medical conditions of Nâzım Hikmet and, similarly,
protested the Turkish government. In Delhi, Indian writers was objecting
to the delay of the amnesty by the Turkish government, sending a note to
the Turkish embassy, saying that Nâzım symbolizes the universal dreams
of peace, democracy, and better future.56 In New York, in front of the
55 Nâzım Hikmet B, May DF, D_FC.
56 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık Grevi,” Bg–BF.
EMRE KESER
9gp
Turkish consulate, the protests for Nâzım were held by the left-wing intellectuals
including Howard Fast. An American-Turkish committee was
established to publicize Nâzım’s case and appealed to the Turkish embassy
and consulates in the US. Paul Robeson was calling the black people
and the other democrat groups in the US for contributing the freedom
struggle of Nâzım Hikmet.57
On May 97, Orhan Veli, Oktay Rifat, and Melih Cevdet started the
strike in support of Nâ zım. On the same day, an article titled “Eğer Sen
O_lü rsen” (If You Die), written by Esat Adil, was published in the newspaper
Gerçek. Addressing Nâzım, he was saying, “If you die, ‘this hell and
this heaven’ nation becomes uninhabitable country of torment and sorrow.
And we would be cursed by the world of culture, the world of fairness
and justice.... Do not let Turkish poetry and Turkish language impoverish!”
58 The next day, the magazine Hür Gençlik published a special issue
to support Nâzım’s hunger strike and demanded his release. On May 9d,
general elections were held in Turkey. Democrat Party won the elections
taking vast majority of the seats in the parliament. The single party period
ended. Democrat Party won the gs.d percent of the votes while the
CHP’s votes were sf.p percent, which meant that the DP won d8p seats in
the new parliament against the CHP’s lf seats. This result is celebrated
as if a long-awaited liberation all over the country.59
On May 9g, the IoYTGD organized a demonstration for Nâzım Hikmet
in Çiçek Palas, Laleli to support the demands for his release and call
the newly elected government for ending the injustice Nâzım had been
subject to. However, the event was attacked by right wing anti-communist
students associated with the National Union of Turkish Students
(Millı ̂ Tü rk Talebe Birliğ i, MTTB), who were strongly opposed to Nâzım
Hikmet’s release. The students, receiving the support of the people
around, attacked the IoYTGD members, shouting the slogan “Communists
to Moscow!” (Komünistler Moskova’ya). However, the police took the
57 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık Grevi,” iC.
58 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık Grevi,” Be.
59 Zü rcher, Turkey, BD_.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9gf
members of the IoYTGD rather than attackers into custody. The events
have come to be known as Çiçek Palas Events.60
On May 9Y, intellectuals like Halide Edip, Adnan Adıvar, Sait Faik,
Sabahattin Eyü boğlu, Fikret Adil, Mina Urgan, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar,
Abidin Dino, and Cevdet Kudret sent a letter to Nâzım asking him to pause
his hunger strike until the new government was de1initively formed.61
And 1inally, on May 9f, he stopped the strike on its seventeenth day. He
sent a letter to Mehmet Ali Sebük saying that he stopped his strike once
again until the new government is put in place. The same day Iorfan Emin
had sent to the newspapers the letters written by the leading intellectuals
that ask Nâzım to give a break to the strike until the government is
established.62
Right after the end of the strike, the same group of intellectuals
started to pressure the new government to immediately pass an amnesty
law and/or special amnesty for Nâzım Hikmet. In the meantime, international
efforts to save Nâzım, too, were still going on. On June 7, the AIJD
president Joë Nordmann wrote a letter to the Turkish Minister of Foreign
Affairs underscoring that imprisonment of Nâzım Hikmet is a manifestation
of violence. The letter also noted that it was deeply concerning despite
the fact that previously they were told that Nâzım is about to be free,
this did not turn true. Another letter was also sent to the new president
Celal Bayar. The same day discussions concerning the general amnesty
started anew in the parliament. Once again, some right-wing deputies
showed strong opposition to the proposal concerning the inclusion of the
political prisoners like Nâzım Hikmet in the scope of the amnesty. Some
of the names were Tev1ik Ioleri, Şevket Mocan, Hüsnü Akşit, Remzi Oğuz
Arık, Suphi Baykam. All underlined the fact that communists like Nâzım
Hikmet are traitors of the nation.63
60 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık Grevi,” iC–iD.
61 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık Grevi,” iD.
62 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık Grevi,” iD.
63 Kıymet Coşkun, “Nâzım Hikmet’in Açlık Grevi,” ii. Also, Mehmet Ali Sebü k this time was
writing on, and arguing for, the amnesty project. See “Af Kanunu Projesi” Vatan, June Di,
D_FC.
EMRE KESER
9l8
On July 9d, however, on the second session, the much-anticipated
general amnesty was 1inally passed in the parliament. However, the political
prisoners were not included in it initially. Yet the sentences of those
who cannot bene1it from the amnesty was reduced by their two-thirds.64
This reduction, probably designed with Nâzım’s case in the background,
led to the release of Nâzım from the prison who had already served almost
half of his time. The next day, he was released.65 The MTTB published
a declaration saying that twenty-thousand Turkish higher education
students were saddened by the parliament’s decision letting the
communists and Nâzım Hikmet out from the prison in the newspaper
Ulus.66
On November 77, 9fg8, he was awarded the International Peace
Prize by the World Peace Council (WPC) alongside Pablo Picasso, Pablo
Neruda, and Paul Robeson. He could not attend the conference, because
he could not obtain a passport in Turkey. Pablo Neruda accepted the prize
on his behalf. On March 7l, 9fg9, Nâzım and his new wife Münevver have
a son named Mehmet. After his release, he went back to his work in the
Iopek Film Studios. Yet upon the state’s attempt to conscript him, he had
to 1lee the country, 1irst to Romania and then to the USSR once more. On
August 9g, 9fg9, after his escape, he citizenship was revoked by the Turkish
parliament.
§ V.e The “Turkish Dreyfus Affair” and Coming of Democracy
Even before the beginning of his prison years, Nâzım Hikmet’s trial, imprisonment,
and hunger strike leading up to his release from the prison
had been haunted by the shadow of the Dreyfus Affair. The “judicial
64 In his memoirs, Altan Ou ymen notes that when the law was passed, in the salon there
were either no deputies who were against the law or they were somehow not given the
opportunity to express their opposition. Değişim Yılları (I€stanbul: Doğan, BCCg), FBD.
65 Obviously, this was celebrated in Vatan by Yalman and Sebü k, who were really instrumental
in his release. Yalman, “Bayram Havası” Vatan, July DG, D_FC; Sebü k, “Milletin Bü -
yü k Affı ve Neticeleri” Vatan, July iC, D_FC.
66 Ulus, July DG, D_FC.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9l9
error” Nâzım was subject to have reminded and been continuously compared
to the errors included in Dreyfus’s case. It is even sometimes suggested
that Nâzım’s case was much harsher than Dreyfus’s. For in the latter,
even if fabricated, some evidence was provided to the court, the
military trials that convicted Nâzım Hikmet, on the other hand, did not
even bother themselves with 1inding, or making up, a necessary evidence.
67 The emergence of the intellectual as a politically responsible and
engaged being with the Dreyfus affair deeply marked the narrative of
Nâzım Hikmet’s case. Yet it is not exactly clear who Dreyfus was and who
Zola was in the Nâzım affair. Subjected to the unlawfulness, he occupied
the place of Dreyfus, but, at the same time, being the renowned intellectual,
he was able to wield the power of a public intellectual. Yet the intellectuals—
both national and international—also seemingly played the
role that Zola played in the Dreyfus case. Also, once again drawing upon
the Dreyfus affair, Nâzım’s case has been elevated to a national problem
that concerns the well-being of the Turkish citizens, as Nâzım’s hunger
strike was often formulated as a chance for the Turkish people not only
to save Nâzım but also to save themselves. They save themselves, as they
reinstall the rule of law, democratic politics, human rights—the principles
the outside is watching, and anticipating, to see their rehabilitation.
For unless they are rehabilitated, the sanctions and even an intervention
might be needed, because at stake is human life and the defense of a society,
embodied and exempli1ied in the starving and slowly dying body of
Nâzım Hikmet.
This is how the fate of Nâzım Hikmet was aligned with that of the
nation-state. As I have already discussed in the Chapter 7, he as the singular
author of his life and thought had been taken as a model Turkish
citizen as well as the same model on which the modern state has been
built, and with his work of purifying the Turkish language, he contributed
to one of the foundational elements of the uni1ied nation-state. Now, with
his hunger strike, as argued, he contributed to the democratization of
67 Göksu and Timms, for example, suggest that “ü lke tarihinde ilk kez basının öncü lü k ettiğ
i kamuoyu baskısı dü zeni zorluyordu.” Romantik Komünist, BGB.
EMRE KESER
9l7
Turkey as well. At a turning point of the Turkish democracy, by putting
the state for the 1irst time under a wide public and media pressure, bringing
the outside in, he also contributed to the installment of the democracy
in Turkey. The origins of democracy in Turkey, too, then, can be found
also in the story of Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger strike, who, after many years,
wrote that he was not let out of the prison, he get himself out of the prison
with the help of a few friends and the force of times.68 That is to say, according
these accounts, Nâzım’s story is in many ways is the story of the
Turkish nation-state. This story can also be told in the reverse. For example,
Kerim Korcan implicitly suggests that with Nâzım’s trial in a military
court, resulted in the 1irst place from his call to the police directorate to
complain about the Marxist military students who came to meet him, has
started the era of the prevalence of the military courts in Turkey.69 That
is, Nâzım originated, or strengthened, the military’s hold on the Turkish
society. However one chooses tell the story, one tells necessarily an origin
story where both Nâzım himself and the nation-state have analogously
emerged and re-emerged. Thus, whenever he writes himself and his life,
he seems to write the state, and vice versa. And the mode of his writing
of the self and life as one and whole are modeled after the thinking/writing
of the nation-state as one uni1ied entity.
In the next chapter, however, I attempt to show that writing of life
and the self as one with de1inite borders is an impossibility, because what
makes possible such a writing is the assumption of an outside to the self.
Without that outside, there is no inside. There are fragments in Nâzım’s
writings where this impossibility has been noticed, and where the self
and life as one is written off. (Although I use “writing” in a similar way
that Derrida uses it in a dual sense as both an inscription/assertion and
self-effacement, I still felt that I need to qualify the difference as “writing
of” and “writing off.” The former is assertion while the latter effacement.
68 See his D_Gi “Dokuzuncu Mektup” (Ninth Letter) of the “Tanganika Röportajı” (Tanganyika
Interview): “Hapisten çıktığ ım günleri hatırlıyorum, / hapisten çıkarıldığ ım günleri
değ il, çıktığ ım, / içerde kendimin dışarda dostların ve zamanların zorlamasıyla çıktığ ım
günleri hapisten.” Bütün Şiirleri (I€stanbul: YKY, BCCm), DmFD.
69 Kerim Korcan, Harbiye Kazanı (I€stanbul: E Yayınları, D_m_), Di.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9ls
I use the latter also to refer to unleashing, arising out of writing, as in
“writing off hunger”). I call these fragments Nâzım’s late style, drawing
mostly upon Edward Said’s elaborations of the concept. In the following
chapter, I try to explicate this before concluding the thesis.

9lg
%
Writing off Life and the Self: Late Style and the
Rhythm of Transience
late style does not admit the de=initive cadences
of death; instead, death appears in a refracted
mode, as irony.... the irony is how often lateness as
theme and style keeps reminding us of death.
– Edward Said, On Late Style
§ W.O Late Style
have discussed thus far that Nâzım (and his corpus), a towering 1igure
of the Sartrean committed literature (littérature engagée) in the early
twentieth-century, is overwhelmingly realist. Despite the fact that realist
literature aims to eradicate the voice of the author, and Nâzım, too, expressed
him plans to do so, in his works he always underscored it, his life
and self, perhaps because of, or despite, the precarity he has been exposed
to throughout his life. A self-de1ined communist,1 he spent almost
1 Nâzım often embraced the term komünist as an identity and provocatively played with
it against the derogatory and annoying sense it has gained in Turkey due to the prevalence
of the anticommunism in Turkey. Also, he preferred it over “socialist” because of
I
EMRE KESER
9ll
thirteen years in Turkish prisons and another thirteen in Russian exile.
More important, as a product of “entangled revolution”2 (of Russia and
Turkey), he was constantly blackmailed to speak for or against things, regimes,
ideologies; he always positioned himself as a consistent whole and
absolute character vis-à-vis others, by inventing and experimenting with
ways of re-presenting, or perhaps re-asserting, the “I.” This is congruent
with his secular Marxist-realist “content” posit(ion)ing the “man” at the
center of the world as its prime creator, a man that can easily “smash the
black earth.”3 Accordingly, nature 1igures extensively in his poems but almost
always as a source of man’s life, as a fecund woman, and as at man’s
disposal. There is a telos this man is directed at, an inevitable progress
the German National Socialism in an attempt to distinguish himself from them. See A.
Kadir, L[k\ Harp Okulu Olayı ve Nâzım Hikmet, Ge.
2 I borrowed the term from Nergis Ertü rk. See her “Nâ zım Hikmet and the Prose of Communism,”
boundary h ge, no. B (BCBC): DFi. The October Revolution in the early D_BCs was
still young and powerful as violent rejection of the past and the traditional; of what resists
the irrepressible advance of productive forces. Concurrently, in the early D_BCs, Ottoman
Empire was dissolving into Turkish nation-state where the imperial past was
perceived as a symbol of decay by the founding cadres and condemned as that which
fetters the progress. Of course, the Turkish Republic was not founded on a belief in historical
materialism, but there was another teleology in play, the teleology of westernization.
He was in this sense a product of entangled revolution and, precisely for this
reason, was doubly constrained. According to Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian formalist and
contemporary of Nâ zım, “the Soviet writer of the D_BCs had two choices: to write for the
desk drawer or to write on state demand.” Quoted in Svetlana Boym, Architecture of the
Off-Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, BCCm), BC. In the case of Turkey,
especially after the Kurdish rebellions of D_BF and the ensuing declaration of the Law on
the Maintenance of the Order, the Kemalist regime started to crush any dissonant voice
including the Turkish communists. Nâzım was not exactly forced to write for the state,
but he had always had to choose sides and show that he supports certain regimes, ideologies,
states, and revolutions not to be seen as traitor, petit-bourgeois, opportunist,
and so on.
3 In Letters to Taranta-Babu, he says mankind created such machines that can smash the
black earth and with its technology exploit the nature in any way it wants. Similarly, in
Kuvây-i Milliye and the Landscapes, man “create and destroy” everything. As I have argued
in the Chapter B, nature most of the time )igures as “outside” of the man, something
to be bene)itted from and exploited, in Nâzım’s poems.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9lY
he has to make. This too is in line with Nâzım’s presentation of himself as
temporally changing (or progressing) but still an indivisible author/ity
and as the sole agent of his action and thought. The critics and biographers
usually consider Nâzım a source of all the signi1ications that 1ill
his work and as a complete, absolute character that is either one thing or
another, that can never be split, multiple, nondirectional, or stray. For this
kind of indivisibility and autonomy, based on a modern conception of the
human, is the principle behind Nâzım’s own writings, which most of the
time tends to become “a war of one man against all.” So far I have attempted
to show these.
In this chapter, I want to discuss that Nâzım Hikmet has a late style
that diverts from this corpus by drawing upon Edward Said’s elaborations
of the notion as an exilic, disruptive, and lyric artistic mode, and a
phenomenon of literary modernism. Although Said seemingly takes it as
artist’s conscious turn from, break with, or objection to, his or her previous
works, Nâzım’s late works appear as not much conscious but 1leeting
“pop ups” rather than a fully conscious and de1inite turn. Following Said’s
suggestion that lateness is a critical attitude rather than a phenomenon
primarily related to the artist’s old age, I consider late style to be the artist’s,
in this case Nâzım’s, self-critique. He wittingly or unwittingly speaks
truth to power. Speaking truth to power means, as I interpret Foucault’s
notion, identifying and speaking truth to the power relations one takes
part in or that pass through one.4 Foucault’s account of speaking truth,
too, however, seems to be a conscious phenomenon, the subject’s intentional
choice and work on himself or herself, but I argue that it may as
well be an unwitting phenomenon, a slip of tongue, or a slip of poetic language.
5 It targets the self and aims to dethrone it, the I, by letting it be
4 On this notion, see Foucault’s Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(
e), BCCD) and The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures
at the Collège de France, L[\k-L[\i, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, BCDD).
5 Viktor Shklovsky argues that poetic language is always to some degree a foreign language.
See Boym, Architecture of the Off-Modern, Dm. Poets do not always get hold of their
EMRE KESER
9lp
inconsistent, stray, and multiple. In this sense, I suggest, Nâzım’s late style
is a critique of himself and a refusal of the man at the center of the world.
I try to demonstrate that Nâzım’s late style decenters the man and
the I simultaneously. It betrays his historical materialist representation
of time as a directional and linear progression, by popping up in the form
of shadowy and unchronological memories, fractured moments of looking
back, which turn into a grave critique of the self as well as anthropocentrism.
For this critique not only calls for lost personal moments,
missed experiences, but also remembers the existential precariousness
and minuteness of the human in the face of the great earth and the sublime
cosmos, of its condition of eternal passing away. è
This is not a mere theme or a simple parable portraying the human
as just a part of nature among other beings, but rather a mode, a
feeling, where the poet’s lyricism comes into touch with nature’s own
rhythm: the poet’s unmaking of the I becomes simultaneous and contiguous
with nature’s unmaking of itself. Put differently, it is poet’s feeling
through nature; a hapticality, which is, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
put, “the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here....
the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you
poems; that is to say, sometimes a poem cannot even be understood by its creator. It is
a foreign language; either it does not make sense at all (as in the case of one who is
presented with a language one has no knowledge of) or it makes sense but not as well
and fully as it does to a “native” speaker. This suggests that “meaning” of a poem might
not be )ixed either by what its poet says or by an historical research that thoroughly
describes all the connections, experiences, and in)luences the poet has had and how
they formed his or her poetics. This applies to not only poetic language but also language
as a whole. Can we ever get hold of the language we speak or write? Is not the
mastery of a language a “mastery of non-mastery” as described by anthropologist Michael
Taussig? See “The Corn-Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts,” Critical Inquiry ie, no. D
(BCDC): B_. Does not it slip away at the very moment we attempt to have it; at the moment
we try to )ix its meaning? Lacan infamously suggested that the unconscious is (structured)
like a language and de)ined it as the discourse of the Other, which I take to mean
that there is always something foreign to us in the language we speak, something that
we cannot know and control but sometimes somehow gives itself away. This is, I believe,
why we should analyze texts against the grain too and try to )ind the other, the strange,
the unknown in the author’s discourse.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9lf
to feel through them feeling you.”6 In this sense, the poet feels that the
upcoming destruction of nature is here and perceives it as the necessary
destruction of himself. He feels at one with nature, not as a mere literary
trope, but by feeling with it feeling him. This is where personal history
connects with “world history” and personal politics with “world politics”
whose method, Walter Benjamin suggests, must be nihilism.7 In this context,
I argue that Nâzım’s late personal critique cannot be disentangled
from his critique of the destructive age and the world ordered for the exploitation
of nature, of which he is a part and through which he feels in
his late works. He seems to suggest that we can keep up with the rhythm
of nature only by destroying the human. For, paradoxically, the only way
to slow down the tempo of nature’s own destruction is to speed up the
destruction of the human at the center of the world.
Nâzım’s lateness then is both critique of himself and his world.
However, this does not mean that at some point he abandoned communist
politics and switched from literary realism to modernism. Rather,
there are points, that intensi1ied in number toward the end of his life, that
unexpectedly remind him how fragile the “I” is, and despite this fragility,
how equally arrogant it is. These are 1leeting moments of “realization”
that the human must be humbled, decentered, and even destroyed, as
perhaps rem(a)inders of an alternative communism. To be able to illustrate
this, I close read three late works of Nâzım Hikmet juxtaposing them
with 1igures who are neither Marxist nor communist, at least in the way
that Nâzım was, namely early Fredrich Nietzsche and his “Truth and Lie”
essay, and Walter Benjamin and his essays “Destructive Character” and
“Theologico-Political Fragment.” I put them together to be able to 1ind the
6 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
(New York: Minor Compositions, BCDi), DCF.
7 “Theologico-Political Fragment” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund
Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, D_e_), DFG. Judith Butler aptly notes that
“Benjamin does not say that it must be called nihilism, only that it has been called that
[zu heissen hat], suggesting that his statement is less prescriptive than descriptive.” See
her “One Time Traverses Another: Benjamin’s ‘Theological-Political Fragment’” in Walter
Benjamin and Theology, ed. Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons (New York: Fordham
University Press, BCDG), Bmg.
EMRE KESER
9Y8
other, the strange, in Nâzım’s discourse, to disclose his exilic lateness and
perhaps nihilist world politics. Nâzım’s three works under consideration
are “On Living” (completed in 9fdp), “Fable of Fables” (9fgp), and “Things
I Didn’t Know I Loved” (9fl7).
§ W.Q Things Nâzım Didn’t Know He Wrote
I start with “On Living,” speci1ically with its title. It is not “On Life”
(Yaşama or Hayata Dair in Turkish),8 but rather “On Living” (Yaşamaya
Dair). “Life” implies something static, given, and stagnant, while “living”
seems to de1ine an active process, spontaneous, unfolding, and contingent.
In fact, the composition of the poem itself exempli1ies this; each of
the three stanzas (or parts) of it was written at different times, even in
different years, and they are separated from each other accordingly as 9,
7, and s. In one of his prison letters to his friend Kemal Tahir serving time
in another prison, Nâzım sent him the third part and wrote that “I am
sending you the third and last one of the On Living series.”9 He considers
it a series, but seemingly an unintended one. For, when he sent the 1irst
part to Kemal Tahir, he was talking about it as “a strange writing that I
have recently scribbled.”10 The 1irst two stanzas were written in the same
year, 9fdY, but probably at different times/months of the year, while the
last one was written in February 9fdp, which is the one I want to examine
1irst. I cite it here as a whole.
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
8 Note that Turkish noun “yaşam” is of relatively recent origin, so it was possibly not available
to Nâ zım. Still, it would not be wrong to say that most of the time he insisted on the
verb form rather than the noun; “yaşamak” instead of “yaşam(a).” Two of his novels are
titled Yaşamak Güzel Şey Be Kardeşim (translated into English as Life’s Good, Brother by
Mutlu Konuk Blasing) and Yaşamak Hakkı (Right to Living, initially serialized in a Turkish
newspaper but left un)inished due to Nâzım’s imprisonment in D_im).
9 Letter no. BDB. Undated. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar, ieC. Translation mine.
10 Letter no. BDm. Undated. Kemal Tahir’e Mahpusaneden Mektuplar, iGi. Translation and
emphasis mine.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9Y9
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space…
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived”…11
By way of comparison, I would also like to cite the introductory sentences
of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early and initially unpublished essay “On Truth
and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (“U_ber Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen
Sinne”) that he wrote in 9pYs, around the same time with The
Birth of Tragedy.
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe
which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there
was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was
the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but
nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few
breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had
to die.12
Both Nâzım and Nietzsche appeal to a scene wherein the world cools and
congeals and then human life perishes. Both attempt to tell us how small
and unimportant event this is for the entire universe—the world will roll
along like “an empty walnut” in just “a minute”—despite the fact that it
signi1ies the end of human life and, therefore, the greatest and most
11 I use Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk’s translation of the poem. When necessary, I either
modify or add the Turkish originals in parentheses. See “On Living,” in Poems of Nâzım
Hikmet (New York: Persea, BCCB), DFB–DFi.
12 “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive
Cazeaux, trans. Daniel Breazeale (New York: Routledge, BCCC), Fi.
EMRE KESER
9Y7
signi1icant event that would ever happen to us. Even de1ining this event
as “a minute” and “an empty walnut” is an anthropomorphism where we
translate an occurrence in the universe into our terms, the terms we can
make sense of how small we are. Nietzsche thus continues that even this
could not “adequately illustrate how miserable, how shadowy and transient
(=lüchtig), how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks
within nature.”13 Even in making sense of how unimportant, small, we
are, we maintain anthropocentricism.
To overcome this, Nâzım suggests in “Things I Didn’t Know I
Loved” that he knows “we live slightly longer than a horse but not as
nearly as a crow.”14 In a sense, he points to “perspectival” variations on
life for different beings. Yet I want to examine another passage from this
poem:
I have some questions for the cosmonauts
were the stars much bigger
did they look like huge jewels on black velvet
or apricots on orange
did you [become arrogant]15 to get closer to the stars
I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don’t
be upset comrades but non1igurative shall we say or abstract
well some of them looked just like such paintings which to
say they were terribly 1igurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them
they are our desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad
I never knew I loved the cosmos16
Here he asks cosmonauts whether they become arrogant when they get
closer to the stars. Since getting closer to them means getting hold of
13 “On Truth and Lie,” Fi.
14 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” in Poems of Nâzım Hikmet, BGD.
15 Here I modi)ied the English translation. The verse in Turkish reads: “Kibirleniyor mu
insan yıldızlara biraz daha yaklaşınca.” The translators render the Turkish verb
“kibirlenmek” “to feel proud.” I think that “to become arrogant” gives the sense better,
as my discussion here hopefully clari)ies.
16 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” BGi.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9Ys
them, “knowing” them, Nâzım wonders whether their anthropocentricism
was reinforced, as Nietzsche describes the invention of knowing as
“the most mendacious moment of ‘world history’.”17 In the artwork essay,
Walter Benjamin says,
[e]very day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very
close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably,
reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs
from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and
permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness
and reproducibility in the former.18
Nâzım asks the cosmonauts about their arrogance, as they are the ones
with the “auratic experience.” Then, curiously, he goes on to recount that
he saw the photographs, “reproductions,” of cosmos in a magazine, Ogoniok,
and liken them to non1igurative, abstract paintings, but in their very
being non1igurative and abstract, he 1inds them to be terribly 1igurative
and concrete. What does this mean? Why does he write “don’t be upset
comrades” (“kızmayın ama yoldaşlar”) before likening the photos to non-
1igurative and abstract paintings? Why would the comrades be upset with
or get angry at non1igurative paintings? Is it because those paintings are
not “realist” enough? Does he say it because he is afraid or because he
does not care anymore about the of1icial artistic de1initions by which his
oeuvre has been delimited?
17 “On Truth and Lie,” Fi.
18 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, D_G_), BBi. Emphasis mine. Similarly,
in her book studying the ways in which the Hubble spaces telescope images make
us to see the cosmos, Elizabeth Kessler argues that these images “invoke the sublime
and... encourage the viewer to experience the cosmos visually and rationally, to see the
universe as simultaneously beyond humanity’s grasp and within reach of our systems
of knowledge.” Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical
Sublime (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, BCDD), F. As also evident in
Benjamin’s and Nâzım’s remarks, cosmos represents a sublimity in the face of which the
human is decentered but at the same time the ability to “capture” it and its knowledge
with images recenter it in the universe.
EMRE KESER
9Yd
I believe that he does not care anymore but just speaks truth to
the very power relations through which he had made himself and his poetics.
In fact, he criticizes himself by taking all the risks. He seems to be
ready to burn all he had made up at once.19 He digresses in exile. He reveals
the things he did not know he loved, things he once suppressed successfully,
things he forgot not to be seen as a petit bourgeois, for example.
Here is another passage from the same poem: “moonlight the falsest the
most languid the most petit-bourgeois / strikes me / I like it” (“ayışığı
geliyor aklıma / en aygın baygın en yalancısı en küçük burjuvası / severmişim”).
20 He means that, however petit bourgeois and cliché it may be,
he likes the moonlight in all the forms, no matter what might be told
about him having such a “taste.” Once again, he speaks truth to all the
power relations he had clung to and perhaps still does, speci1ically to the
life-time tension that the possibility of being called “petit bourgeois”
caused.
In another part of the same poem, a blurry memory from his childhood
pops up like a silhouette:
I’ve written this somewhere before
Wading through a dark muddy street I am going to the shadow
play
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather’s hand
his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
with a sable collar over his robe
and there’s a lantern in the servant’s hand
19 In a similar fashion, yet a different context, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that Foucault
saw a moment of enlightenment in the Iranian Revolution, because there he observed
a group of people who were ready to pay a price, the price for access to the truth,
which is situated in the possible alteration and destruction of the self, and in the form
of a question: “What... is the work I must carry on myself... to be able to access to truth?”
Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minnesota, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, BCDG), Dee–em.
20 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” BGB.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9Yg
and I can’t contain myself for joy.21
The eight-year-old boy in the poem is Nâzım Hikmet, the grandson of an
Ottoman paşa. Why does he recall that moment vaguely, why is his
memory blurry, why is he so cautious that he says even that it might not
be his own past but from something he reads? Why is his remembrance
as shadowy as the shadow play (Karagöz) he was going to?22 Because,
once again, he forgot, not to be named as a grandson of paşa (paşa torunu)
but a communist, an uncompromising one. For there has always
been a question, a doubt, as to the sincerity of egalitarians who come
from wealthy families.23 During his entire life Nâzım seems to have
worked hard to forget or not to remember his grandfather, his family; he
tried to prove that “he changed his class and became a communist.”24 Of
21 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” BGB.
22 He says that he wrote this somewhere before. That somewhere is possibly his essay titled
“Oyunlarım Üstüne” (“On My Plays”) that he wrote around the same time with this
poem, in D_GB. He begins it by describing the same event, the shadow play he went to
with his grandfather. He says, “I am aware, for the )irst time in my life... I am writing a
memoir, I guess. However, if there is someone who cannot write his memories, that is
me. Why is that?... The reason is so simple: my memory is as weak as you cannot imagine.
Details do not stick in my mind, dates, names I cannot keep them in mind.” And at
some point, he stumbles, “once again, I con)lated the order of my memories. I am aware,
I am always complaining about this. But does human remember what he or she has been
through necessarily in a chronological order?” Nâzım Hikmet, “Oyunlarım Uu stüne,” in
Yazılar L (I€stanbul: YKY, BCDm), iBG, iiB. Translation mine.
23 Herbert Marcuse suggests that “[t]he fact that the artist belongs to a privileged group
negates neither the truth nor the aesthetic quality of his work. What is true of ‘the classics
of socialism’ is true also of the great artists: they break through the class limitations
of their family, background, environment.” This shows that even in the late D_eCs within
Marxist circles there is a question concerning the “sincerity” of the artists coming from
upper classes. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston:
Beacon Press, D_em), D_. A far more interesting thing comes out in Said’s discussion of
Theodor Adorno’s late style. He suggests that Adorno’s late style, that is his critical style,
is grounded in his acknowledgement of his elite uprising—“suspicions were well
founded”—as well as in his critical, ironic, and cynical attitude toward society in which
his critique is cultivated. On Late Style (New York: Pantheon, BCCG), BC–BD.
24 As I have cited in the Chapter B, see, for example, his D_ge poem “In the Era of Sultan
Hamit.”
EMRE KESER
9Yl
course, he also tried to get rid of the Ottoman/imperial luggage that his
connection with his grandfather might reveal. Let me turn to Nietzsche
once again on this matter.
Deception, 1lattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting
up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask,
hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself
– in short, a continuous 1lattering around the solitary 1lame of vanity
– is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost
nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest
and pure drive for thought could have arisen among them. 25
The roles we play for others and ourselves are shaped by the power relations
in and through which we make ourselves. Doing so, we forget, remember,
present and construct ourselves, modify and regulate who we
are, who we were, and who we may be. Nâzım identi1ies those relations
that made him and, perhaps without knowing, critique them and himself
made by them.
§ W.S Destructive Memory
He now remembers, he remembers how joyful it is that he once went to
a shadow play with his grandfather. However, he does not use the past
tense, which prevents the conclusion that it is a joy of the past experience
that he points to. He says, “I can’t contain myself for joy” (“benim içim
içime sığmıyor sevinçten”) while at the same time moving from the thirdperson
narrator to the 1irst-person. Would it be the joy of remembrance,
of recalling what was forcefully forgotten, and of being now able to critique
the act of forgetting and forgetfulness? Edward Said describes one
of the features of late style as “a return or homecoming to realms forgotten
or left behind by the relentless advancement of history.”26 Nâzım, in
literal exile, seems to have returned to a metaphorical home (of memories).
25 “On Truth and Lie,” Fg. Emphasis mine.
26 Edward Said, On Late Style, DiF.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
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Also important in Said’s remarks is breaking the advancement of
the history. And this is manifest in the multiple tenses and the fractured
structure that breaks the poem into discontinuous and disorderly episodes,
making it non-directional. There no more appears to be a teleology
Nâzım advocates for. The recurring verse of the poem is “I Didn’t Know I
loved” and it blurs the very distinction between past and present. It is a
realization at the present but at the same time recognition that he had
always loved some things in the past without knowing that he loved them.
They now “pop up” in a disordered mode at a moment of looking back, as
if it was a moment of catastrophe. He tells his “living” story but by no
means from a linear or chronological perspective. He began the poem
with supposedly the present, what the date is (March 7p, 9fl7), and
where he is (sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train). Then he
turns to future: “the river will bring new lights you’ll never see.”27 Yet a
little later he remembers his years in the prison between 9fsp and 9fg8:
in prison I translated both [two] volumes of War and Peace into
Turkish
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard
the guards are beating someone again.28
These are past memories, he translated Tolstoy’s War and Peace to make
ends meet in the prison, true,29 but he hears the prisoner beaten by the
guards now, at the present, while sitting by the window on the Prague-
Berlin train, twelve years after his release from the prison. Once again, he
tells a past experience in present tense: “Vera’s behind the wheel we’re
driving from Moscow to the Crimea”30 and then he remembers, however
vaguely, his grandfather and his holding his hand in a Ramazan night,
sometime in the 1irst decade of the twentieth century. From the age of
27 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” BGD.
28 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” BGD–BGB.
29 He translated the book in collaboration with Zeki Baştımar, often bene)itting from the
French translation. Recently, his name, too, for the )irst time, appeared in a edition of
the translation published by Can Yayınları.
30 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” BGB.
EMRE KESER
9Yp
eight he moves to seventeen (perhaps late 9f98s) and recalls his 1irst kiss
with a girl (named Marika) in Kadıköy, Iostanbul. But suddenly he turns to
the prison years again: “friends sent me three red carnations in prison.”31
From there he turns to a very recent moment, the moment he saw the
color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine.32 And so on. We are travelling
between discontinuous and shadowy moments. Adorno de1ines the
late Beethoven as “the cesuras, the sudden discontinuities that... moments
of breaking away.”33 Nâzım, too, seems to break away. He breaks
away from order, both from the teleological order and the order of his
own works.
We are not told about where he comes from (probably Prague)
and where he is going to (probably Berlin) and why he is travelling. Just
as his living story is by no means teleological as told by the poem, the
train does not have to arrive at somewhere; it just goes. He suggests, at
the end of the poem: “I didn’t know I loved so many things and I had to
wait until sixty / to 1ind it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin
train / watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return.”34
It seems that his journey (of living) has no directionality and no
teleology. It is not about arriving but going. It is “a journey of no return.”
Like Walter Benjamin’s destructive character, Nâzım now sees ways everywhere.
Benjamin has a piece, a Denkbild, called “Destructive Character,”
originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 9fs9. Here is how it begins:
It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized
that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its
course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of
a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day,
31 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” BGi.
32 The )irst Soviet spacecraft called Kosmos was launched on March DG, D_GB, almost two
weeks before Hikmet’s travel on the Prague-Berlin train.
33 Edward Said, On Late Style, DD.
34 “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” BGg. Emphasis mine. And they come with the shadow of
death. He asks why he discovers these now: “is it because I lit my sixth cigarette / one
alone could kill me.”
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9Yf
perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better
his chances of representing the destructive character.35
To dissect, this seems to suggest that when one day one looks back, and
Nâzım looks back over his life on the train, and understands that all the
troubles and obligations that he had in the past is due to destructive character(
s) and, upon this realization and “shock,” he himself starts representing,
becoming, that destructive character. Who is the destructive
character in Nâzım’s narrative though? Himself. A destructive Nâzım for
Nâzım’s self-construction and self-identity: a “petit bourgeois” who likes
the moonlight, the most languid one, and a grandson of paşa who cannot
contain himself for joy, who has a taste for non1igurative paintings. He
identi1ies the destructive character and “becomes” him by destroying
himself.
This character, according to Benjamin, destroys everything;
makes room and clears away. His is a journey of no return, no arrival, no
departure, no direction. For “his need for fresh air and open space is
stronger than any hatred.”36 Destruction is what keeps him young and
cheerful, because destroying rejuvenates by clearing away the traces of
age and clearing away “means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed
eradication, of his own condition.”37 In March 9fl7, on the train,
Nâzım is almost one year away from his death, and the idea of death is
there with him, but he roots out of his condition. He ventures into the
shadowy memories, the forgotten moments, the things he did not know
he loved. He breaks the “whole” into multiple Nâzıms. And, as he breaks,
he realizes how easily the world falls apart, multiplies, when it is tested
by destruction. Yet this is by no means an individual or personal matter.
Rather, “this is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is
a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.”
38 For it is, in fact, the nature that destroys, “that dictates his tempo,
35 Walter Benjamin, “Destructive Character,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans.
Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, (London: NLB, D_e_), DFe.
36 “Destructive Character,” DFe.
37 “Destructive Character,” DFe.
38 “Destructive Character,” DFe.
EMRE KESER
9p8
indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise, she will take over
the destruction herself.”39 We are back at the point. The world will perish.
It is just transient. We are minute. And the only way to deal with this destruction
is to destroy ourselves. That is why the destructive character is
always blithely at work.
The destructive character does not aim at being understood. He
1inds the attempts in this regard super1icial. In fact, he provokes misunderstanding,
“just as oracles and the destructive institutions of the
state”40 provoke it. Here Benjamin rede1ines petit bourgeois. A petit
bourgeois is not one who likes the moonlight but the one who is afraid of
being misunderstood and thus constantly represents himself as a whole.
Nâzım always wanted to be understood. He did not reveal, or forgot, that
he likes the moonlight not to be seen as a petit bourgeois. But Benjamin
suggests that a petit bourgeois is, in fact, the one who is afraid of being
misunderstood. The destructive character should perhaps be misunderstood.
By breaking away, Nâzım now wants to be misunderstood, misrepresented,
and led astray.
He has “an insuperable mistrust of the course of things at all times
to recognize that everything can go wrong.”41 Death is there with him at
every moment. It is usually held that late works of the artists are not reliable.
But Benjamin suggests destructive character is the reliability itself,
because he knows that there is nothing permanent. Late Nâzım is most
reliable now. For he knows that “no moment can know what the next will
bring.”42 The destructive character is an ambivalent 1igure. He tries to
beat the rhythm of nature by bringing about a closure and yet has no conception
of closure, no telos, no expectations, as in Nâzım’s journey of no
return, and he understands how small he is and thus is ready for his own
destruction.
Here Nâzım’s critique of himself connects to his critique of anthropocentricism
and the Anthropocene. Despite his precarious life, he
39 “Destructive Character,” DFe.
40 “Destructive Character,” DFm.
41 “Destructive Character,” DFm.
42 “Destructive Character,” DFm.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9p9
constructed himself at the center of the world vis-à-vis the other, as an
autonomous whole, just as his Marxist poetics places the man at the center
of the world as the creator and the destroyer of the world, the source
of everything in the world. Late Nâzım destroys this image of whole with
“a cascading series of discontinuous fragments, all of them in some way
assaulting suspicious ‘wholes’,” as Said comments on Adorno’s late
style.43 That is why, despite the fact that late style is not always about
aging and that even death seems fragmented in lateness, it reminds us
the death, not only the death of the artist, but also the approaching death
of “man,” as early Foucault announces in both the beginning and end of
The Order of Things.44 That is why Nâzım’s “late style is in, but oddly apart
from the present,”45 the present marked by the Anthropocene. It is in, because
it follows its rhythm, but apart from, as it is too late now to keep up
with it.
I consider the Anthropocene an ethos, as Foucault’s Kant consider
the Enlightenment, or Foucault himself considers modernity: it is at once
what is and what ought to be.46 The cause of the Anthropocene is the
“man” placed at the center of the world and its potential effect is the erasure,
unmaking, of the same man. Yet to unmake the Anthropocene itself,
the “man” must decenter, unmake himself. It is what is about to happen
unless we interfere and at the same time what ought to happen through
our interference. It is the present precarious existence of ours that urges
us to unmake ourselves. But we are late. And our lateness reminds us
death, or perhaps it requires death; it is dictated by the tempo of the nature,
its total passing away. We have to catch up with the rhythm, the cadence
of nature, that is the cadence of death.
43 On Late Style, gB.
44 In the preface of the book, he suggests that “[man] will disappear again as soon as that
knowledge [that invented him] has discovered a new form,” and ends the book by saying
that “one can certainly wager that [soon] man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand
at the edge of the sea.” The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Routledge, BCCB), xxv; gBB.
45 On Late Style, Bg.
46 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: Vintage, D_mg), iF.
EMRE KESER
9p7
§ W.V The Fable and the Rhythm of Transience
Referring to the story he told about cooling and congealing of this world,
Nietzsche says that such a fable might be invented but still would not be
adequate to illustrate how miserable we are. Still, Nâzım invents a fable
where (hu)man is not placed at the center but placed as just one among
all other living beings, as he now feels through nature and accords with
its rhythm. It is called “Fable of Fables” written in 9fgp in Warsaw. There
are 1ive “things” juxtaposed without one being superior over others, even
though the story is told by the poet. The things are plane tree, the poet
(i.e., Nâzım Hikmet or the “I”), cat, sun, water, and their life (ömür).
We are by the waterside
the plane tree and I.
Our re1lections are thrown on the water
the plane tree’s and mine.
The sparkle of the water hits us
the plane tree and me.47
There is a water and at its side stands the poet and the plane tree. And
they are lightened by the water’s shining—the water shines through the
sunlight—and their re1lections (semblances) are thrown on the water.
And then comes a cat. It repeats. “The sparkle of the water” this
time hits all three: “the plane tree, I and the cat.” In the third stanza, the
sun joins them and, interestingly, the life of the plane tree, the poet, the
cat, and the sun is also there, both as lifespan of each and life on earth as
a whole. It repeats again.
We are by the waterside
the plane tree, I, the cat, the sun and our life (çınar, ben, kedi, güneş,
bir de ömrümüz)
Our re1lections are thrown on the water
47 The original Turkish reads: Su başında durmuşuz / çınarla ben. / Suda suretimiz çıkıyor
/ çınarla benim. / Suyun şavkı vuruyor bize / çınarla bana. Here I use Richard McKane’s
translation of the poem. See Nâzım Hikmet, “Fable of Fables,” in Beyond the Walls: Selected
Poems, trans. Ruth Christie, Richard McKane, Talâ t S. Halman (London: Anvil
Press Poetry, BCCB), BCi–BCF.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9ps
the plane tree’s, mine, the cat’s, the sun’s and our life’s.
The sparkle of the water hits us
the plane tree, me, the cat, the sun and our life.48
Why does their life (ömür) join these living things though? Ömür, originated
from the Arabic ‘umr, also the root of the word umrah meaning
short visit, refers to yaşam (life) but with temporal implications, as in
“lifetime.” This time Nâzım does not use yaşam(ak) for life, with biological
and even sometimes organicist implications, but ömür, which seems to
signify a transience, ephemerality, and 1inality.
It is still puzzling that an “immaterial” concept, ömür, joins the
“material,” and living, things in the poem written by the self-proclaimed
materialist poet. It stands with them at the waterside. The next stanza of
the poem is about who will perish 1irst, whose life will end before others,
under “normal” circumstances, in the way the nature works without disturbance.
And “ömür” signi1ies here a total passing away, even its own
passing away as a notion. They are at the waterside: the cat, the poet, the
plane tree, the water, the sun, and their life. The 1irst one to leave, taking
its semblance on the water with itself, is the cat whose life is the shortest
under normal circumstances. The poet will follow the cat and his re1lection
on the water will be lost. Third is the plane tree and its re1lection on
the water, and then the water itself will go and there will be no more re-
1lection. The sun will remain for a while and then it, too, will leave eventually.
This is told as if they all, especially the poet, know this without
feeling any anger or sorrow. They all keep up with the rhythm of nature.
Each knows in what order they will leave the scene. Even the sun and the
life (ömür) itself will have a closure. No more repetition. Even the notion
of ömür passes away.
They are not uncomfortable with this in any sense. They just do
what they do. They do not force each other to do something, especially
the poet, the human. He is not in a hurry to make use of the water or the
plane tree; he does not work to shape them for his “needs,” to take the
advantage of “solar energy,” to extract something from the nature, unlike
48 “Fable of Fables,” BCg.
EMRE KESER
9pd
the nature as outside as it is the case with most of Nâzım’s previous poems.
Rather, now, he feels through it. The nature feeling his feeling, on the
other hand, is not in the business of “taking revenge,” as the popular trope
of our day goes. The sun does not warm more than it usually does; it is
just warm enough. They are standing side by side in peace as the last
stanza tells us.
We are by the waterside
the plane tree, I, the cat, the sun and our life.
The water is cool
the plane tree is huge
I am writing a poem
the cat is dozing
the sun is warm
it’s good to be alive. (çok şükür yaşıyoruz)
The sparkle of the water hits us
the plane tree, me, the cat, the sun, our life.49
Everything works in the way they “normally” do, and they do so on their
own terms: the water is cool, the plane tree is huge, the human is writing
a poem, the cat is dozing, the sun is warm. Life is good while passing away
in its totality. This is the Apollonian image of the destroyer that Benjamin
points to. The poet, the destructive character, lives the moment but
knows that it will perish, just as Nietzsche describes, in The Birth of Tragedy,
the Apollonian character as the dreamer knowing that what he sees
is a dream.50 And everything passes away in an Apollonian order. It is just
tranquil. He is happy. “Çok şükür yaşıyoruz.” “Şükür,” an Islamic concept,
rhyming in the poem with “ömür,” is an expression of being happy with
or grateful for what is given (by God) and/or having no further needs or
desires beyond the given. It is only in its transience that life is good.
In his “Theologico-Political Fragment,” written in the early 9f78s,
Walter Benjamin suggests,
49 “Fable of Fables,” BCg.
50 For a thorough account of Nietzschean effects in Benjamin along these lines, see Mauro
Ponzi, Nietzsche’s Nihilism in Walter Benjamin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, BCDe).
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9pg
To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality,
corresponds a worldly restitution that leads to the eternity of
downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence,
transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal
totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness. For nature
is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.51
For Benjamin worldly restitution is in the natural rhythm of perishing,
not in the overcoming of this perishing. We are not interested in surviving
death, but in the rhythm of its coming. It is the rhythm that leads to happiness
(Glück). As Yannik Thiem suggests, therefore, in Benjamin, “theological
thinking becomes a matter of grasping of our experience of transience
in life and history in a nonindividual, nonpersonal, yet not in an
ahistorical or transhistorical way.”52 In his lateness, Nâzım reaches his
own theological thinking which is deeply personal and, precisely because
of this, deeply historical and political. Thus, it is in tune with the rhythm
of nature, the rhythm of our own transience. This enables the total passing
away in happiness. The fable, and parable, of our age, of the modernity
and the Anthropocene, more urgently than ever, then, is to decenter
the human, the “I.” The poet knows very well how small, how 1leeting,
how transient his existence is in this world, and how insigni1icant this
world is. Coming to terms with this is the very condition that makes one
live “as if [one] will never die”53 but also as if tomorrow is the 1inal day.
So far in this chapter I have argued that Nâzım Hikmet, a Marxist
avant-garde and a pioneer in Turkish literary modernity, has a late style.
This late style is lyric, exilic, and catastrophic. It works against the linearity
of the teleological or chronological order and the order of Nâzım’s
oeuvre. However, this is not a “turn” or “rupture,” because it is not a selfconscious
move from one style or mode to another. Rather, like his shadowy
memories, Nâzım’s late works seem to pop up at different and
51 Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans.
Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, (London: NLB, D_e_), DFG.
52 Annika Thiem, “Benjamin’s Messianic Metaphysics of Transience,” in Walter Benjamin
and Theology, ed. Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons (New York: Fordham University
Press, BCDG), ig.
53 Nâzım Hikmet, “On Living,” in Poems of Nâzım Hikmet, Dii.
EMRE KESER
9pl
unexpected times. They are episodic both in genesis and in style. Neither
would this mean that he left behind communism by the de-Stalinization
of the Soviet Union in the early 9fg8s, because, though rare, he has late
works written before 9fg8s, like the poem “On Living” I analyzed here.54
Instead, these are just 1lashing moments that intensi1ied toward the end
of his life, when he started to look back. They just come out “strangely,”
as he de1ined the 1irst part of the “On Living series,” or in the form of
blurry, transient memories that are not even told in the 1irst-person.
Following Said’s remark that literary modernism itself can be seen
as a late style phenomenon,55 Nâzım’s work in late style might be taken
as his modernist moments. This has already been discussed by Nergis
Ertürk in the context of his 9fl7 novel Life’s Good, Brother, another late
work of Nâzım. And as Ertürk also discusses, these moments might be
seen as the “real” communism that Nâzım once envisaged and imagined.
56 I agree that these are the works that are political and the ones that
we need to look into for the present political possibilities, especially in
the Anthropocene. For these are the works that decenter the “I” by embracing
the always already precarity of that “I,” which becomes apparent
when it is conceived as just a being among others and juxtaposed with
the vastness of earth, “I mean this, our great earth,” and the sublimity of
cosmos.
I have tried to demonstrate this by reading the selected poems of
Nâzım against the grain, through a comparative close reading with the
ideas of Nietzsche and Benjamin. Using the retrospective advantage of
the intellectual historian, I have brought together seemingly disparate
54 Similarly, Nâ zım’s late lyricism does not mean that, after the revelation of Stalin’s mass
murders during D_FCs, he found refuge in the personal lyric from the totalitarianism his
politics turned into. Rather, it might be taken as a political and personal response to the
totalizing regime. A similar argument made by Clare Cavanagh in the context of Russian
and Polish poetry after D_De, against the discourses that tend to characterize the lyric
poetry as an escapist tendency under totalitarian regimes. See her Lyric Poetry and Modern
Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, BCDC).
55 On Late Style, DiF.
56 Nergis Ertü rk, “Nâzım Hikmet and the Prose of Communism,” boundary h ge, no. B
(BCBC): DFi.
WRITING OF(F) HUNGER, LIFE, AND THE SELF
9pY
1igures based on some thematical, or rather “anecdotal,” similarities. For
such similarities remind us that we must work against ourselves, risk
them, and only in this way we can remember that in question is not only
a personal issue, or the issue of personal lateness or poetic lyricism, but
rather lateness of our age. Let me end this by turning to Benjamin one
last time: “man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally.
It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience
as unimportant and avoidable and to consign it to the individual as the
poetic rapture of starry nights.”57
57 “One-Way Street” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorter, (London: NLB, D_e_), DCi.

9pf
Conclusion
Ölüyoruz, demek ki yaşanılacak.
[We are dying, so it is going to be lived.]
– Iosmet O_zel, “Yıkılma Sakın”
§ I Critique
o you’ve shown from afar how the discursive assumptions that
Marxist and feminist militants and thinkers are using are all
deeply entangled with power. This reveals that you have mastered the
application of critical tool, but is that enough?” asks Fadi Bardawil.1 Here
I, too, have shown how the discourses through which Nâzım built himself
are shaped by the post-Enlightenment Western discourses and entangled
with the relevant power structures, especially the modern state. Furthermore,
I have done this by applying to him the critical tools developed in
the Western metropoles and, thus, rendering him an object of the metropolitan
theory rather than a thinker on a part with it. However, to say that
1 Fadi Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment, BB.
“S
9f8
the metropolitan theorists see the nonmetropolitan political intellectuals
as not fellow theorists but objects of their critiques is to say these metropolitan
theorists are fully shaped by their material/social conditions—
and this always comes with an (implicit or explicit) inattentiveness to the
particularities of these “metropolitan” theories to underline their underlying
metropolitanism. So, this seems to (re-)apply the alleged metropolitan
critical tools to metropolitan theorists themselves.
But must our critiques, metropolitan or not, always turn into a
work of “revealing the underlying conditions” that shape certain texts,
intellectuals, theories, and works? This question captures one of the most
important stakes in this thesis: a search for, a gesture toward, a critique
that is not necessarily motivated to point to and uncover the underlying
conditions. For when pointing to the underlying conditions, the critics
usually position themselves in a conditionless space, a space of outsider
neutrality, and, ultimately, a space of the ahistorical liberal subject making
decisions about such-and-such conditions underlying such-and-such
works and thoughts. That is, critique often becomes a form of 1inding out
some “deeper” structures that delimit the other’s works and thought, assuming
that the critique itself speaks from a space and time unaffected
by the same or similar structures.
It is the positing of such a subject that is able to speak without
being affected by “deeper” structures that I have attempted to problematize
in this thesis. To be more explicit, this is the issue I have been at pains
to address in the thesis through a myriad of concepts such as the liberal
subject, the human, the uni1ied author, the whole, and so on. Whatever
name it is given, such a subject is imagined as the one who can make neutral
and rational judgments about the world one inhabits taking a step
back from it, and can constitute the single author(ity) over, and
owner/producer of, its own life, thoughts, and actions. This is also the
subject of the natural human rights and that of the positivist scienti1ic
neutrality. The issue that puzzles me is how come we work through this
subject even when our critiques are deeply historical (historicist or historical
materialist, if you like). In this regard, this thesis might be considered
self-contradictory, or betraying itself, because it, too, is at times
9f9
“seduced” by the work of identifying “underlying conditions.” But this is
in particular applicable to the Marxist epistemology. Although it is our
foremost historical/historicist discourse (or alternatively perhaps because
of this), it is able to tell everyone what kind of “underlying conditions”
within which they are speaking, mostly without being concerned
with the conditions that shape its own discourse. It is then a discourse
that is mainly directed at the historical conditions of the other, not those
of the self. In such a discourse, the Marxist thinker is always a subject that
is not conditioned by the underlying conditions. And this all-seeing quality
is what enable them to talk about the underlying conditions of the others.
They can explain the “whole,” or the “totality,” by assigning every
event and phenomenon to a function in the total narrative, except the
critic themselves. It is this humanism (of the critique) in Marxist thought
as it appears in Nâzım that I have tried to critically evaluate in this thesis.
This brings me to another related, and equally important, point
Bardawil makes in his work: some of those metropolitan critics and
theirs works, for example, Susan Buck-Morss’s Thinking Past Terror,
make a distinction between the Marxist and modernist-nationalist Arab
thinkers, on the one hand, and the Islamist ones, on the other, and then
considers the latter as the authentic politics of the region, which can resist
the hegemony of the Western epistemology while disqualifying the
latter being unauthentic, being “conditioned” by the Western discourse.2
This raises an important question for me too: should our critique of the
nonmetropolitan Marxist thinkers like Nâzım Hikmet3 necessarily end up
with a search for the “authenticity” in the supposedly “non-Western” elements
occupying the same place—which runs the risk of aligning with an
authoritarian government in most of the cases? (The problems associated
with directly identifying Islam as the “non-Western” element and
thereby the prime candidate for authenticity are also obvious here). If
our critique ends up with this search for the authenticity, as I have argued
here, this means that we still act and see like the state, as a whole, with
2 Revolution and Disenchantment, Fi–mB.
3 I must note that I am not sure at all whether Nâzım Hikmet was really a “non-Western,”
“nonmetropolitan” intellectual.
9f7
an outside from which we should always defend ourselves to protect our
“authenticity” from the penetration of the outside, Western, elements.
This is what I have tried to argue throughout the thesis. To make it
clearer: in question is a twofold argument. On the one hand, self-modernizing/
westernizing nationalist projects produce a nation-state where
there is always an external threat, because these projects are undertaken
at once both to be like the West and to be immune to its penetration that
is ready to be justi1ied under the pretext of bringing the humanity to the
non-West. On the other hand, those who identify authentic elements and
want to defend them against the Western contamination produce a similar
state structure to protect and keep themselves “pure.” In all cases, the
modern state structure brought from the West either by colonialism or
by self-modernizing projects is in play. And this structure is able to create
its own colonialism, its own Orient, as in Turkey against Kurds and Arabs.
Being state means being colonial.
Another question is whether critique is always a critique of an
outside object, of the “other.” Is my critique of Nâzım Hikmet really singlehandedly
directed at Nâzım Hikmet? Reading and getting to know
Nâzım was my coming-of-age experience. And I grew up weary of hearing
all the same positive appraisals and endorsements of his 1igure in Turkey,
and I read and hear about him not in the metropole, not even in the
metropole of Turkey. It is always said that Nâzım has always been “protected”
somehow implying either that he could not be silenced due to the
presence of his family in the upper echelons of the state and society or
that he was in fact “reluctantly” guarded by Mustafa Kemal and Kemalism.
Whether he is protected or not in this sense, he is always protected
in the vast literature devoted to his works. I believe it is now a time to
unprotect Nâzım, because only when he is unprotected, the new possibilities
of reading and by reading him might be opened up. Still, this is a critique
directed at the outside, no matter how much it had been part of my
experience. However, returning to Paul de Man’s notion that autobiography
is a 1igure of reading that can be found in every text. In this text,
too, the autobiographical elements can be found, but obviously I would
not cite them here. But the critique I directed at Nâzım Hikmet might be
9fs
taken as the critique directed at myself, a work on myself, because I do
not see him, his 1igure, not a distinct, outside phenomenon to myself.
My call for unprotecting Nâzım, unprotecting the subjects in a
context like Turkey, and now, might be seen as a “preach of violence”
and/or as yet another spelling out of the death-of-the-subject discourse.
This might also be triggered by Foucault’s apparent in1luence in this thesis,
as the “Western” theorist whose theories I apply to Nâzım Hikmet.
Furthermore, he kept telling us that what he speaks about is only valid
for the West or the Western modernity. Was he just being precautious
concerning the “unknown lands” to himself, or is he simply Eurocentric?
Even worse, in a few rare instances where he engaged with the “East,” he
seems to have highly romanticized it, especially the death-events he witnessed
there. As he is often charged, he praised for the Iranian revolutionaries
and their sacri1icial politics which led up to a theocratic and
murderous regime in Iran. He found his “heterotopias,” possibly his alternatives
to the Western modernity, in “certain Chinese encyclopedia” imagined
by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. So, was he nothing
other than a highly sophisticated Orientalist? Maybe. But what I take him
to be is a relentless critique of the (Western) modernity and its principle
based on the 1igure of the human that I have been talking about. He
searched for the ways in which we can decenter this human, which is an
utmost urgency in our present.
§ II The Present, Again
The decentering this human is not a personal matter, nor about a death
of this and that subject, nor about the institutionalized Western academics’
drawing “critical lessons” from the deaths of the Middle Eastern subjects.
It is a work of violating the borders and the boundaries of the human
that has been for long thought to be the central subject in and of the
world. Everything outside the human has been thought to be for the human.
Signed by the work of biopolitics, we, the humans, have forgotten
that we are mortal beings. As Benjamins suggests, to repress death is to
repress nature. So, it is a work of reminding ourselves the death and our
9fd
1leetingness. Therefore, it is an ethical and collective project of working
on ourselves, a project of writing off ourselves. One of the gestures here
is that maybe this writing off the self might be very related to the work of
writing off the nation-states. And maybe another gesture is that this
might be the work of the “non-West” or Jameson’s “third world” literatures
which have already been writing the self and the state together.
Another dimension of the present I have dwelt on in the Introduction:
hunger strikes might be seen as “parables” of this human and its
sheer impossibility. I have expressed my puzzlement with the difference
between Nâzım’s hunger strike and the hunger strikes today. The former
that took only eighteen days was not deadly at all while the latter are
deadly through and through usually taking more than two hundred days.
In the case of the latter recent hunger strikes, hunger strikers compete
with the state to win the sovereignty over their own life. They try to usurp
the state of its power to decide life and death by acting like a state but
also, at the end of the day, leaving the decision to the state once again.
However, they establish their full sovereignty over their life only when
death comes. This demonstrates the sheer impossibility of the sovereign
subject over life. This is also valid in the case of Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger
strike, especially acting like a state, but there I have argued that it must
be thought with his life and writing, and can be taken as a fragment from
which to read his life and oeuvre, which are deeply marked by his selfwriting
against the others and their gazes. He writes himself as a uni1ied
object and the single, absolute producer of his life and thought, vis-à-vis
these gazes. However, everywhere he needs these gazes, he needs the
outside to be in, he needs the help to write the self as one. His hunger
strike, too, has been made possible by the existence of these “outside”
gazes, just as himself as the author. That is, his writing of the self always
carries the possibility of writing off the self within itself, which, as I have
argued in the previous chapter, becomes apparent in his late style. Late
Nâzım is ready to violate his self and welcome the outside, which is perhaps
why the “guests” is really an important theme in these late works.
Once again to go back to the Introduction, this puzzlement between
the past and the present hunger strikes brought me to a
9fg
problematization of the notion of hunger strikes and to an understanding
that each hunger strike requires a different historical elaboration. For
there is no single de1inition of hunger strike that we can apply to the
every case identi1ied as hunger strike. There are all kinds of phenomena
that goes by the name of hunger strikes: hunger strike as a suicide, hunger
strikes as a way of disciplining the body, hunger strike as a paci1ist act
of civil disobedience, hunger strike as the prisoner’s method of resistance,
hunger strike as a weapon in the asymmetric warfare, hunger
strike as a “terrorist” tactic, hunger strike as a last call, hunger strike as
death fast, and so on. That is why I felt a need for the introduction of a
distinction, a break, between the past and present of hunger strikes in
Turkey. I do this in a sense to problematize the purported lineage from
Nâzım Hikmet to the present practices of the leftist politics of Turkey.
Nâzım Hikmet is no doubt a 1igure looming large in the mental life of the
Turkish left. However, his politics and present largely differs from the left
today, as even two different practices. And what is commonsensically
seen as the political in Nâzım might need to be replaced for the present,
as I have tried to do here. There is a distinction widely drawn between
Nâzım’s political, “ideological,” works and lyrical, “personal,” works. I
have tried to place the political in the lyrical, because working on the self,
or writing off the self, emerges there, and because reading him “now” politically
entails it.
Third meaning of the present that shaped the thesis or that is the
“underlying condition” of the thesis: the present of Turkey. Since a while,
there has been a purge going on in this country, in our schools, in workplaces,
and in our commons. The state is everywhere and everyone. It is
from this present emerges my critique of Nâzım’s writing of life and the
self as the state writing, searching for its roots in the larger context of
modernity, as it has been shaped by the humanism, colonialism, biopolitics,
and the modern state. That is to say, our present in this country might
have been the work of decades and centuries rather than a recent occurrence.
But, to repeat, the “dark” historical frame drawn here is conditioned
by the present, by our present writing of the state. But it is done
to seek out any hope for writing it off. And, as I have tried to show, it might
9fl
be possible only in connection with a writing off ourselves, writing off the
human. Before putting an end to this study, I want to summarize what I
have done in the chapters of this thesis once again.
§ III Summary
In the Chapter 9, “Writing of Life: Biopolitics, Hunger Strikes, and the Person
of the State,” working mostly through Foucault’s formulations, I have
discussed biopolitics as a modern discourse that places human life under
the protection and guarantee of the modern state, that urges the state to
defend the society by all means and at all costs, and grounds its existence
on this prime duty of social defense. I have argued that hunger strike is a
modern biopolitical resistance, as it relies on this discourse of the state
as the protector of life and suggests that the state is unable to do so as
evident in the suspended body of hunger strikers. It calls for the “outside”
of the state to look at them and, thus, look at the state deviating from the
norm of being state. I have argued that it is a practice that is closely connected
to and reinforces the modern state as the defender of life and society.
In the same chapter, I inquired into a potential resemblance between
the idea of the author in particular, the individual in general, and
the modern state. In what ways the individual is constructed as the sovereign,
the autonomous and self-producing entity, and in what ways this
is similar to the discourse of the modern nation-state, the self-enclosed
entity with borders, with a de1inite inside and outside, and as the sole
rationality and authority of life. To be more speci1ic, I have interrogated
the ways in which the modern author is constructed analogous to the
making of the modern state, the ways in which the modern political and
literary authors/authorities interact with each other and are modeled after
one another. Nâzım Hikmet tends to establish himself, strives to be or
appear as, the indivisible authority over his life, word, and action. Keeping
this in mind, on a more general level, here I attempt to investigate, or
once again make a gesture toward, the ways in which modern individuals
practice state and the modern state is imagined as a person, as an author
9fY
through a series of anthropomorphisms and personi1ications in Western
political thought that permeates the colonial practices and experiences.
In conclusion, I have discussed that we tend to be like states in two
senses. First, we are like states in the sense that we call the state to arms
to safeguard life and reinforce this everywhere, even in our resistance
practices. That is, we constantly reproduce it. Second, we are like states
in the sense that we de1ine ourselves as single uni1ied entities, individuals,
self-producing wholes with de1inite inviolable borders and boundaries
vis-à-vis others outside. In conclusion, following Foucault, I have attempted
to show that “the state is a practice.”
In the Chapter 7, “Writing of the Self: ‘Nâzım Hikmet’,” I have tried
to point to some recurring themes, images, origin stories, beginnings and
re-beginnings, and fantasies through which Nâzım and the discourse on
him constructed “Nâzım Hikmet” in his poems and other works. Even if
this might be considered to be a biographical sketch, rather than attempt
to establish a linear, factual, and coherent biographical narrative, I have
played with fragmentary stories and myths that have been surrounding
and constituting the still present discourse on Nâzım Hikmet. The argument
was simply that despite the fact that Nâzım is many and multiple,
he tends to portray himself as one, an identity, always positioning himself
vis-à-vis the gaze of others, always responding and reacting to their presence
whose objecti1ication, in turn, makes possible Nâzım as a self-producing
and uni1ied authority over his own life and thought. Beyond the
biographical sketch, this has served as one of the building blocks for my
argument that his hunger strike is a “synecdoche” of Nâzım’s life and poetics;
that is, it is a fragment of his life that explains the “whole,” the whole
that both Nâzım himself and his biographies claim for him. Yet at the
same time this has demonstrated the paradoxical nature of such a work
in which the “man” needs the presence/gaze of others to be able to construct
himself as the one.
In the Chapter s, “Writing of Hunger: Poetics of the Hungry Gaze,”
I have read Nâzım Hikmet’s 9f77 poem “Açların Gözbebekleri” along with
Knut Hamsun’s early novel Sult (Hunger, 9pf8) and Franz Ka1ka’s 9f77
short story “Ein Hungerkünstler” (A Hunger Artist). My goal was to
9fp
demonstrate that in all these seemingly disparate 1igures and works of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, hunger 1igures as something
to be looked at as well as something having a gaze of its own. Another
point is to make a gesture toward the idea that Nâzım’s writing of
hunger equipped and surrounded with gazes precedes his act of hunger
strike, which is a form of resistance, as I have discussed in the 1irst chapter,
shaped by the visibilities. Reading together these disparate works
and writers is part of the larger methodology of the thesis which I called
“reading against the grain.” What brings Hamsun, Ka1ka, and Nâzım Hikmet,
and a novel, a short story, and a poem, together is the idea of reading
them against each other’s grain to be able to go beyond what is immediately
given and what is considered clearly distinct.
Hamsun and Ka1ka, Hunger and “A Hunger Artist,” have been in
many cases taken and thought together, so there was nothing new in putting
them together. The novelty, if any, stems from putting Nâzım Hikmet,
and his poem, together with them. Nâzım’s literary oeuvre is shaped by
realism and an urge to represent the injustices and inequalities. And
Hamsun and Ka1ka are usually considered to be the “great writers” of
modernist European literature, which is, to oversimplify, characterized
by the attention to the individual consciousness, imagination, brokenness,
and inattentiveness to the social issues. Put differently, there is no
way in which these two “camps” can be brought and read together. Nâzım
is a romantic communist who wants to represent and advance the causes
of the downtrodden in his works, while Hamsun and Ka1ka is enigmatic
and “timeless” 1igures of modernism, they have nothing to represent and
speak for, and there is no historical context their works emerge from,
speak for or against. Thus, the gesture was to read them against such a
clear distinction; that is, to contaminate Nâzım with modernism and
timelessness, and Hamsun and Ka1ka with representations and the social.
In the Chapter d, “Writing off Hunger: Nâzım Hikmet’s Hunger
Strike, or, ‘L’Affaire Nâzım’,” I have given a detailed historical account of
Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger strike while underscoring its two aspects in particular.
The 1irst aspect is concerned with the idea that hunger strike is
possible only when there are gazes that pay attention to the strikers and
9ff
watch the state as an outside to it. In Nâzım’s hunger strike, this is evident
from the international audience he addresses in the poem he wrote on
the 1ifth day of his fasting. He brings the outside in, both the international
gaze and the negative public opinion of Turkish intellectuals and people
weary of the single-party regime despite the post-WWII atmosphere of
relative political and economic liberalization. The second aspect I wanted
to underline is connected with how this event is shaped around images
and imaginations of the Dreyfus Affair and the 1igure of the public intellectual
emerged in this affair in the nineteenth-century Europe with the
monumental intervention of E|mile Zola. Even long before Nâzım’s hunger
strike, the Dreyfus events and E|mile Zola’s role in them had been lurking
in the background. This has turned the event into a “Turkish Dreyfus affair”
or “L’affaire Nâzım,” which are even taken as a sign of Turkey’s “real”
democratization, as the state is said to have been put under public pressure
for the 1irst time in the history of the republic. Even in this event, in
which Nâzım resisted the state, the story of Nâzım “necessarily” coincides
with the story of the nation-state in different accounts.
In the Chapter g, “Writing off Life and the Self: The Rhythm of
Transience and the Late Style,” I have discussed that Nâzım Hikmet has a
late style that diverts from his self-identical, self-assertive corpus by
drawing upon Edward Said’s elaborations of the notion as an exilic, disruptive,
and lyric artistic mode, and a phenomenon of literary modernism.
I have tried to demonstrate that Nâzım’s late style decenters the
“man” and the “I” simultaneously. It betrays his historical materialist representation
of time as a directional and linear progression, by popping up
in the form of shadowy and unchronological memories, fractured moments
of looking back, which turn into a grave critique of the self as well
as anthropocentrism. For this critique not only calls for lost personal moments,
missed experiences, but also remembers the existential precariousness
and minuteness of the human in the face of the great earth and
the sublime cosmos, of its condition of eternal passing away.
Nâzım’s lateness then is both critique of himself and his world.
However, this does not mean that at some point he abandoned communist
politics and switched from literary realism to modernism. Rather,
788
there are points, that intensi1ied in number toward the end of his life, that
unexpectedly remind him how fragile the I is, and despite this fragility,
how equally arrogant it is. These are 1leeting moments of “realization”
that the human must be humbled, decentered, and even destroyed, as
perhaps rem(a)inders of an alternative communism. To be able to illustrate
this, once again as part of my strategy of reading against the grain, I
have close read three late works of Nâzım Hikmet, juxtaposing them with
1igures who are neither Marxist nor communist, at least in the way that
Nâzım was, namely early Fredrich Nietzsche and his “Truth and Lie” essay,
and Walter Benjamin and his essays “Destructive Character” and
“Theologico-Political Fragment.” I have put them together to be able to
1ind the other, the strange, in Nâzım’s discourse, to disclose his exilic lateness
and perhaps “nihilist” world politics. Nâzım’s three works under
consideration were “On Living” (completed in 9fdp), “Fable of Fables”
(9fgp), and “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” (9fl7). I have discussed that
this is where Nâzım comes to embrace the impossibility of himself.
789
Bibliography
REFERENCES TO THE WORKS OF NAZIM HIKMET
Nâzım Hikmet and Vâlâ Nureddin. “On Beşler Ioçin” in Bütün Şiirleri,
9fpd–9fpg. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p [9f79].
Nâzım Hikmet. “Açların Gözbebekleri” in Bütün Şiirleri, d8–ds. Iostanbul:
YKY, 788p [9f77].
. “Şair” in Bütün Şiirleri, 99s–99d. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p [9f7s].
. “Türkiye’de Amele Sınıfı ve Amele Meselesi” in Yazılar w,
9s–9Y. Iostanbul: YKY, 789Y [Aydınlık, ]xwy].
. “Piyer Loti” in Bütün Şiirleri, sd–sY. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p
[9f7g].
[Anonymous]. “Putları Yıkıyoruz, No. 9: Apdülhak Hamit” in Yazılar ],
9Y–78. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p [Resimli Ay, 9f7f].
Nâzım Hikmet. “Cevap” in Bütün Şiirleri, 99g–99Y. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p
[9f7f].
[Anonymous]. “Putları Yıkıyoruz, No. 7: Mehmet Emin Beyefendi” in
Yazılar ]. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p [Resimli Ay, 9f7f].
. “Meşhur Gandi Bir Kahraman mıdır? Yoksa Bir Hain mi?
Resimli Ay (9fs8).
[Süleyman]. “Muazzam Şair Mayakovski Neden Iontihar Etti?” Resimli Ay
(9fs8).
[Fıkracı]. “Müddeiumumi Bey Iostical Buyurmayınız” in Yazılar w, lf–Y8.
Iostanbul: YKY, 789Y [Hür Adam, ]xiz].
. “Çocuğun Iosmi” in Yazılar w, Y7–Ys. Iostanbul: YKY, 789Y [Hür
Adam, ]xiz].
Nâzım Hikmet. “9f Yaşım” in Bütün Şiirleri, 77p–7s7. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p
[9fs8].
. “Benerci Kendini Niçin O_ ldü rdü ?” in Bütün Şiirleri,
7gf–sdd. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p [9fs7].
. “Karıma Mektup” in Bütün Şiirleri, d78–d79. Iostanbul: YKY,
788p [9fss].
787
[Orhan Selim]. “O_ptüğüm El” in Yazılar ]. Iostanbul: YKY, 789p. [Akşam,
9fsd].
. “ps Yaşında Delikanlı” in Yazılar ]. Iostanbul: YKY, 789p
[Akşam, 9fsd].
. “Bu Böylece Biline!..” in Yazılar ]. Iostanbul: YKY, 789p
[Akşam, 9fsd].
Nâzım Hikmet. “Taranta-Babu’ya Mektuplar” in Bütün Şiirleri, dsf–dlp.
Iostanbul: YKY, 788p [9fsg].
. “Simavne Kadısı Oğlu Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı” in Bütün
Şiirleri, dp9–gs8. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p [9fsl-9fsY].
. Kan Konuşmaz. Iostanbul: Ararat Yayınları, 9fYY [9fsl].
. “Sultan Hamit Devrinde” in Bütün Şiirleri, ppY. Iostanbul:
YKY, 788p [9fdY].
. “Mukayese” in Bütün Şiirleri, pp7. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p
[9fdY].
. “Yaşamaya Dair” in Bütün Şiirleri, f8l–f8p. Iostanbul: YKY,
788p [9fdY–9fdp].
. “On Living” in Poems of Nâzım Hikmet, trans. Randy
Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, 9s7–9sd. New York: Persea Books, 78o7
[9fdY–9fdp].
. “Korku” in Bü tü n Şiirler, fsl–fsY. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p
[9fdf].
. “Açlık Grevinin Beşinci Gü nü nde” in Bütün Şiirleri, fdd–
fdg. Iostanbul: YKY, 788p [9fg8].
. “Five Days into the Hunger Strike” in Beyond the Walls:
Selected Poems, trans. Ruth Christie, Richard McKane, Talâ t S.
Halman, 9Yg–9Yl. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 7887 [9fg8].
. “Masalların Masalı” in Bütün Şiirleri, 9lss–9lsd. Iostanbul:
YKY, 788p [9fgp].
. “Fable of Fables” in Beyond the Walls: Selected Poems,
trans. Ruth Christie, Richard McKane, Talât S. Halman. London:
Anvil Press Poetry, 7887 [9fgp].
. “Oyunlarım U_stüne” in Yazılar ], s79–ssY. Iostanbul: YKY,
789p [9fl7].
78s
. “Severmişim Meğer” in Bütün Şiirleri, 9p88–9p8d. Iostanbul:
YKY, 788p [9fl7].
. “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” in Poems of Nâzım Hikmet,
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