Istanbul: Memories and the City-Orhan Pamuk

                                                                                                                                                       Memoir

 

Istanbul: Memories & The City

Orhan Pamuk

           

            A city is built not only of bricks and mortar but also by its people and their lives, their aspirations and their character. At the same time, destiny of its people is not independent of the character of the city. These two are inseparably entwined. History of a city, its glorious chapters and its dark ages, its bright corners and its unlit streets; influence and make the denizens, the human being they are. Most of us do not recognise these inconspicuous links. Certain overly sentient people do and a book like this, results. In this book Orhan Pamuk explores his childhood memories and his experiences of Istanbul and how the city led him inescapably towards his future. This is an ingenious way to look at the past.

            Istanbul, one of the oldest cities in the world was at the centre stage of world-power for long periods in its history. It was the capital of Eastern Roman Empire and then for five hundred years the capital of one of the mightiest empires that the world saw, Ottoman Turks. As it lies at the junction of Europe and Asia, its culture was a mixture of these. After the fall of Ottomans in early twentieth century, Kamal Ata Turk built the modern republican state of Turkey on the ruins of old Empire. There was a sudden rush to emulate everything western and discard and deride the old culture. People robbed of their old identities could not adapt to newer and alien ways overnight. It is Orhan’s view that this reflected in the disintegration of generations of Istanbullus caught between the conflicting natures of these two cultures.

            Book is author’s ode to the city he loves deeply. He grieves over the ruin and disrepair which visited the city after the fall of Ottomans and explains how this destruction gave a melancholia to its inhabitants which became an integral part of their lives. He writes about the mansion of his grandparents where he was born and his grandmother’s obsession with the old paintings, photographs, memorabilia, chinaware which gave the house a dour musty atmosphere. He talks desultorily about city’s history and the decrepit mansions of Pashas of yore which dot the city. There are innumerable black and white photographs, almost on every page mostly of the dark streets with their haunting ruins and Orhan’s photographic description and poetic prose imperceptibly intermingles with these evocative images. Page after page he explores the beauty of Bosphorus and the tumbledown old buildings, the ‘Yalis’, dotting its banks. He talks of the fires which have gutted these wooden mansions from very long back and the strange fascination of Instanbullus for these fires. He describes the paintings of old Europeans who were entranced with the beauty of Istanbul skyline; its Bosphorus, the hills on its shores, its mansions, its impoverished corners, its dark back streets, its magnificent mosques and churches.

            He is exceptionally frank and writes unhesitatingly about the feuds in his large family and the continuous bickering between his parents. Though he does not hide the innumerable affairs and the long absences of his father from home which is the cause of these squabbles, he is not censorious of any of his parents. In beautifully composed pieces here and there his love for both his parents is expressed irrepressibly. Gradually with the description of the city, he explores his own growth from his childhood to early adulthood.

 In a chapter he discusses the origin of the melancholia of Istanbullus, which is so different from the individual melancholy of western writers. In Turkey it is known as Huzun, the melancholy of the whole community. He ruminates over the long origin of this Huzun and how it has become one with the lives of Istanbullus for last few centuries. He writes on Huzun many times in the book. He discusses in details how four writers, a generation before him, developed and embraced this melancholy. He writes on his religion, his school, his grandmother, his beautiful parents and their western ways, on the western authors who visited Turkey and wrote about it, namely Gautier and Flaubert, obsession of Istanbullus with the western writers’ opinion of their city. He reminisces about his dalliance with painting and how it helped him to escape from his own Huzun. He is unsparing in his criticism of the city of his heart and its inhabitants. He writes unflinchingly how the ultranationalistic fervour of post-Ottoman period made its people destroy the Greek, Albanian, Jew and Armenian neighbourhoods and their culture. He can’t hide his severe dislike of his co-nationals for their slavish hunger to emulate west. But he does not disparage west. On the contrary he appreciates the western concepts of writing and culture which became such integral part of his own outlook in life. He talks about the ecstasy and then the agony which resulted from his first love, his gradual disillusionment with painting, the troubled years of his late teens when the only solace he found was walking in the back streets of the poor neighbourhoods of Istanbul in late nights, his rebellion against the tedious and mundane ways of the society of his parents. He writes about his incessant quarrels with his mother who was always critical of his unconventional ways and his love for painting. She wanted him to take up a profession like her successful and rich friends. He writes how he finally realised that he wanted to be a writer; to capture the beauty of his old, decrepit, dark and haunting Istanbul, he explains.

            In a translation, it is not possible to experience the language of the author directly. But Maureen Freely has rendered a commendable translation. Her language is poetic, evocative and lucid like a well-done picture. I am sure this reflects Orhan Pamuk’s language faithfully.

This is a unique memoir, an elegy to the lost glory of a city, an expression of gratitude to the city that shaped author’s mind and skills, a sensitive but unsentimental portrait of childhood and youth in a city which is losing its centuries’ old identity and foundering on its newly forced culture and structure.