Barbara Frischmuth’s „Die Schrift des Freundes“ and Orhan Pamuk’s novels „Rot ist mein Name“ (English)
Veronika Bernard
Barbara Frischmuth’s „Die Schrift des Freundes“
and
Orhan Pamuk’s novels „Rot ist mein Name“
and
„Die weiße Festung“
as fictional approaches to Muslim identities
Abstract
In talking about mediating between cultures it is essential to discuss fictional approaches to cultural identities. What makes cultural identities? It is also essential to change perspectives on the problem if necessary. In discussing encounters with Islam within European literatures it is relevant to not only ask questions which focus on a more or less forced contemporary western interest in Muslim culture. It is even more relevant to discuss European identity – if there is something like this – as it is seen by Muslims. What makes Europe, and what makes Europeans? In fact, Islam has reached Europe not only, as the CFP points out, personified in Muslims living there but it has reached Europe as part of a literature which has been written by authors of Muslim culture and has been translated into Western European languages.
As Turkish writers are in a particular situation of defining their literary and personal identities in a context of living in a state which has a history of defining its cultural identity in an effort to be seen as a part of Europe the paper will analyze two of Orhan Pamuk’s novels according to the above questions, and compare them to a text by Barbara Frischmuth – in particular with respect to differences in approach to Muslim identities.
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
most of you will know Barbara Frischmuth, and, of course, Orhan Pamuk, last year’s Nobel laureate for literature; but why compare three of those writers’ texts with respect to differences in approach to Muslim identities on a conference whose topical context has been set by a title: “Neuer westöstlicher Divan”, and by this referring to one of Goethe’s poetic works? Talk about Frischmuth? O.k. At least some of her major texts reflect the writer’s strong interest in Turkish culture. But why Pamuk? He is not even a German writer but a Turkish one.
Well, as I pointed out in my abstract mediating between cultures also means translating, and even more, receiving the literature of a so-called different culture into the literature of one’s mother-tongue – just like Goethe did in his Divan-poems.
However, what does translation and reception mean in this context? Certainly not just transferring words from one language to another one but rather trying to make readers get an idea of the cultural background of what they are reading. The point behind this is that just as the truth lies in the eye of the beholder the image of a certain culture most certainly will not be the same if included in a text by a writer belonging to another culture and in a text by a writer of the same culture.
In terms of a “Neuer westöstlicher Divan”-discussion one of the relevant issues of discussion therefore ought to be to contrast Frischmuth’s outside view on Islam, which is represented predominantly by the Turkish characters in her book “Die Schrift des Freundes”, to Pamuk’s inside view on Islam and his discussion of Muslim as well as Turkish cultural identity in “Die weiße Festung” and in “Rot ist mein Name”.
Let me start off this discussion by quoting two lines from Barbara Frischmuth’s text “Die Schrift des Freundes” (The writing of a friend/ A friend’s writing): “Jetzt aber, da der Alevismus eine tatsächliche und nicht-westliche – was sehr wichtig ist – Alternative zum orthodoxen Islam und zum sogenannten Fundamentalismus ist, entdecken sie ihn wieder.“ (Schrift des Freundes, p. 180) “Jetzt soll aus dem Alevismus eine großstadt- und auslandstaugliche Glaubens- und Schicksalsgemeinschaft werden, die die Herausforderung eines anderen Teils der islamischen Welt, nämlich der sich radikalisierenden Islamisten, anzunehmen bereit ist.” (Schrift des Freundes, p. 180) (Now, however, that Alevism is a real and non-western – which is most important – alternative to the orthodox version of Islam and to what is called fundamentalism, they are discovering it anew. Now Alevism is supposed to be turned into a community of belief and fate which is fit for life in big cities and abroad and which is willing to accept the challenge another part of the Muslim world, namely the radicalising Islamists, has been approaching it with).
Apart from the term Alevism you find most of the keywords concerning Islam in those two lines which people are increasingly confronted with when consuming non-Muslim media which at the same time convey and shape a current interest taken in Islam by a growing number of non-Muslims: Orthodox Islam, fundamentalism, Islamism. The focus on Alevism, however, is the specific Frischmuth part of the lines quoted.
Most of Frischmuth’s texts which incorporate aspects of oriental culture predominantly represent Islam in its Alevite version. The majority of her Turkish characters are Alevites. In the epilogue of “Die Schrift des Freundes” this interest in Alevism held by Frischmuth is traced back to the fact that she wrote her doctoral thesis on the Bektashi order’s writings and their links to the occult doctrine of Alevism and by this has been established as sort of an external expert on Alevism in Turkey within European literary circles.
Significantly, in “Die Schrift des Freundes”, which on the surface is the tragic love-story between Anna Margotti and a young Turkish man named Hikmet, it is not one of the Turkish-Alevite characters or a so-called Westener who speaks the lines quoted above but Jussuf. Jussuf is of Arabic origin, and has been living in Austria for a long time. He is what may be regarded as an assimilated migrant. He is Anna’s colleague at a Vienna based IT company for which he works as a Middle East expert. This company regularly receives state funded contracts from Anna’s long-term lover Haugsdorff, a representative of the Austrian ministry of the interior, to design data management programmes, one of which is PACIDIUS, a programme to sort out migrants according to their cultural and political backgrounds.
Jussuf is the character in Frischmuth’s text who in a way reflects the writer’s external expert status. He is the one who provides Anna – the completely ignorant stranger to the cultural system of Alevism and Islam – with a survey on Alevite and Muslim culture after she has fallen in love with Hikmet and tries to understand what is going on with Hikmet and the members of his family.
Jussuf reflects the European attitudes to Muslim culture in his way of analyzing the topic for Anna, when they both take part in a Alevite festival in Vienna. This attitude has been defined “Orientalism”, a term coined by Edward W. Said in his basic book on Europe’s traditional attittude on the Oriental world years ago (Edward W. Said: Orientalismus. Übersetzung aus dem Amerikanischen …, Frt. a. M., Berlin, Wien 1981).
In fact, Said has pointed out that the Orient has been created by Europeans to serve as their inferior Other. This means two things: piling up knowledge on the Orient and to enact power based on this knowledge. Exactly this is what Jussuf does: He provides the Austrian Ministry of the Interior with so-called expert knowledge so they can sort out the “good” migrants from the “bad” ones – and part of this knowledge he also passes on to Anna.
The Alevites belong to the “good” ones, he points out to Anna: They are “Nicht-Demonstrierer” (non-demonstrators; Schrift des Freundes, p. 151), they allow women a higher status in society, and they are not as formalistic in their religious rules as main-stream Muslims are. So, although being of Oriental origin Jussuf adopts the European perspective: Muslims are evaluated by cultural standards which have been developed in and for post-enligthened European environments.
The Turkish-Alevite characters in the text “Die Schrift des Freundes”, as there are: Anna’s current lover Hikmet; his brothers; his mother, and his dead father; Samiha Yılmaz, whose dead husband belonged to a calligrapher’s dynasty and was Hikmet’s calligraphy teacher, correspondingly are supposed to present a view on Turkish-Alevite life from the inside. However, the inside view conveyed by them again is rather an outside one, as they are characters made up by a non-Muslim writer’s mind.
Through them Turkish Alevism is represented as a highly mysterious community based on very strong ties of friendship, relation and belonging. Those values re-appear together with an intense sense of hierarchy, tradition and protection of one’s family in the way in which the characters are shown to live their Turkish Alevite family lives. The mysterious aspect is particularly fostered by the fact that Hikmet appears and disappears without warning; by the calligraphic symbols and their links to names and hidden meanings behind the symbols and names; by Anna’s sneaking suspicion that Hikmet’s brothers keep changing their names and identities, and finally by her lover Haugsdorff’s suspicion that all of them might be involved in some illegal business of lending their identities and passports to people who would like to immigrate to Austria.
Although Anna spends quite a lot of time talking and listening to Jussuf and the members of the Alevite community mentioned above, what she learns about Muslim, in particular, Alevite culture does by no means lead her to reflect on her identity, her culture, and her environment. In a way, for most of the book she represents the average European if it comes down to factual knowledge on Muslim culture and to identifying with her European environment simply by non-reflecting. Her love affair with Hikmet and Hikmet’s death in a police raid finally makes her reflect at least on certain aspects of European attitudes towards other cultures, and it makes her change sides and positions.
All in all, however, it can be said concerning the view on Islam present in Frischmuth’s text that the reader is confronted with a search of a version of Islam convenient to Western thinking. Islam is judged according to a western cultural system. Considering the aspects pointed out above Western thinking and culture is indirectly defined as secular, non-hierarchical and emancipated from formalistic rules and taboos.
With Frischmuth’s text you get the impression that some of the non-mainstream versions of Islam consciously and wilfully try to adapt to a western life style. Consequently they are not seen as religious movements which are self-content and entities in their own right but as systems which take efforts in defining themselves in relation to extra-Islamic standards although at the same time Islam is seen as a religious and cultural system stretching from a mystic and mysteriously exotic spiritualism to a felt threat to a so-called western life-style. It is felt to be threatening in its strict rules (which are felt to be restrictive) and its insistence on belief instead of reason to be found with its mainstream version; but it is felt to be exotic, enriching and fit for what is considered modern western society in its non-mainstream versions, e.g. Alevism (or Sufism).
What you find in Orhan Pamuk’s texts “Die weiße Festung” and, even more, in “Rot ist mein Name” is an intellectual discussion of identity and of those aspects which work together in shaping both a person’s individual identity and a society’s cultural identity in general. By chance the characters and the societies presented are Turkish, or rather Ottoman, and Muslim on the one hand, and European, on the other. Still, the attitude taken towards the topic discussed is universal. In the preface to “Die weiße Festung” this is underlined by the name chosen for the character who introduces himself as the one to pass on the story of the white fortress/ castle to the following generations. He calls himself Faruk Darvinoğlu: Faruk, Darvin’s son.
He is the one who tells a story of an Italian being captured by an Ottoman warship in a sea battle off the Italian shore in the 18th century and who is taken to Istanbul as a prisoner of war and is lucky enough to be able to work as a medical doctor even for the Padishah although his status is that of a slave. In the Padishah’s residence he meets a man called Hodja (teacher), who looks like his twin-brother. Although he is struck by this resemblance the Hodja does not seem to realize. Finally, the Hodja buys him from the Padishah as his personal slave to save his life after he has rejected to convert to Islam, at the price that he is supposed to teach the Hodja everything he has learned about nature, the universe, philosophy, medicine, weapons and pyro-technics during his days back in Italy.
In doing so the two men struggle a fierce fight of intellectual dominance and submission, and step by step they intrude the other’s individuality following a psychologically threatening discussion on the question: “Who am I, and how can I be me?” (Die weiße Festung, p. 70 ff).
The Christian European who has never felt the wish to become a Turk and a Muslim but who has developed respect for the Turkish people and the Padishah in particular, finally adopts the Hodja’s identity by changing clothes with the Hodja, when the Hodja has to flee the Ottoman war camp besieging a fortess called Doppio, the white fortress, because his wonder-war-machine did not work and the fortress could not be taken. Still, the European-turned-Hodja survives and lives the Hodja’s life from then on.
The Hodja, who has been interested in European knowledge in order to give his emporer the chance to defeat the Europeans because he is convinced that Muslims, and Muslim Ottomans in particular, are superior to Europeans and Christians, and who at the same time feels deep detest for his “stupid and ignorant” countrymen and for the “most stupid and ignorant” Padishah, finally adopts the Italian’s identity, and starts living the other one’s life back in Italy.
So, all in all, with the Hodja taken as an example the text re-presents Muslim Ottoman man as someone feeling superior by faith but deeply inferior by knowledge, skill and technology. The conflict between those two contradictory aspects of self-perception leads him, on the one hand, to be interested in the other (European) culture and to reflect on his own cultural and individual identity and, on the other hand, to wishing to suppress and destroy the other culture in order to make it an inspiring part of his own Muslim Ottoman culture.
“Rot ist mein Name” discusses this particular aspect of Muslim and Muslim-Ottoman self-perception at still more depth and diversity. On the surface the text tells both a thrilling crime story of a painter of miniatures, who has been convinced he had been committing a sin because he had been illustrating a book in which the illustrations are using European-Renaissance-style perspective, being killed (by one of his colleagues), and his murderer trying to stay in hiding and a love story with an at least somehow happy ending.
The actual issue of discussion, however, again is Muslim identity in comparison to European- Renaissance identity shown at the example of perspective in painting. The book plays in a highly creative, and provocative, way on the theory of classical Muslim painting which does not use perspective. Muslim painting adopts Allah’s view of the world from above. As humans are not supposed to produce representations of god and his world of human beings this is seen as a legitimate way out if you wish to paint anything but ornaments based on plants.
As a consequence everything in the paintings is same size, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the not so beautiful, just as everything and everyone is equal for Allah. And just as people are not supposed to paint portraits of Allah they are also not supposed to paint portraits of people because those portraits might take the place of goddesses people might feel lured to worship.
With European Renaissance painting perspective is used. In other words European painting puts everything into perspective. So, as one of the doubting painters of miniatures puts it, in a European painting due to this principle a mosque may be same size as some very low creature, for instance. And this is seen to be blasphemous.
Still the central character of the book who has been an embassador to Venice and who has been so impressed by European painting tries very hard to convince the Padishah to have a book illustrating the Great-ness of the Emporer and the Ottoman Empire illustrated European style in order to send it as a present to Venice in order to impress the Venetians and all of Europeans of the might, artfulness and skill of the Ottoman people. He is so obsessed by this idea to adapt European style that he finally even dies for this idea.
In discussing the point of perspective in painting the text, however, suggests that, maybe, exactly adapting Allah’s perspective might be the sinful thing as humans are daring to take Allah’s position. Doing so might be as sinful as the European style of putting things into perspective.
So, all in all, you again find the idea of a felt European superiority which leads to aggressive behaviour towards those who are eager of adopting those ideas and who try to promote them. All this is shown by analyzing a problem of artistic discussion incorporating most of the relevant aspects of a culturally determined universal concept of humanity.
Comparing Frischmuth’s and Pamuk’s re-presentations of Muslim cultural and individual identies on a general level the striking difference, so, lies in the fact that Frischmuth’s text picks exactly those points of Muslim identity which may be “interesting” for European readers; whereas Pamuk’s texts provide attempts to understand a man’s identity in being a Muslim and a Turk. His texts trace the roots of the aspects and factors which have worked together in shaping this identity over a long period of time.