Turkey’s ‘ostinato’ song

A few months ago, this column described Turkey as a piano partition composed by Philip Glass: “It finds beauty in itself by repeating itself.” Turkey’s song is repetitive, or ostinato, like in many children’s songs. But it’s hardly entertaining.

Nazım Hikmet (1902-1963) is probably the best-known Turkish poet. His poetry has been translated into more than 50 languages and, in the 1950s, Hikmet was compared to Federico Garcia Lorca, Louis Aragon, Mayakovsky and Pablo Neruda. In 1950, he was a recipient of the International Peace Prize, along with Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Wanda Jakubowska and Neruda. But his life in the country he dearly loved was less enchanting.

In 1921, together with a friend, he volunteered to join the Turkish War of Independence. But the “romantic communist” was viewed as big of a threat as the occupying powers. In later years he was repeatedly arrested and spent much of his adult life in prison. Hikmet was the bête noire of Turkey’s ruling ideology, but a cause célèbre among intellectuals worldwide. In 1949, a committee including Picasso, Robeson and Jean-Paul Sartre campaigned for his release.

In 1950 he was released as part of a general amnesty and fled to the Soviet Union where, in 1963, he died, heartbroken. His Turkish citizenship had been revoked in 1959. In 2009, a bill sponsored by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) reinstituted his Turkish citizenship, a move that deserves much praise, but possibly enacted because the Turkish Islamists thought the dead poet was no longer a threat to the emerging Turkish empire.

Between Hikmet’s death and the rise to fame of a Turkish pianist, Turkey’s ruling ideology was secularism and devout Muslims were the bête noire.