Suzan Samanci: The great yield of bilingualism
History bears witness to the struggles between rulers and the ruled, between oppressors and the oppressed, and those who resisted oppression. In this process, history accumulates lived events, clashes them together, divides them, separates them, and reconstitutes them. In anti-democratic societies, administrations that do not allow space for differences, view diverse cultures and languages as threats, and fail to establish their social identity and character are always confrontational.
In mythologies, sacred texts, fairy tales, and legends, the being called “human” always seeks itself in love, passion, anger, and hatred, yet strives to constitute its freedom. Confronted with the threat of annihilation, humans come together and turn toward reality, accepting the never-ending, painful, and arduous journey this entails. If philosophy is humanity’s attempt to respond conceptually to fundamental questions, then is literature merely language? For the human being who first imagines and then thinks, is literature an act of consciousness—shaped by the reflection of the society in which it lives—struggling to form itself, resisting social amnesia and reification?
During the years when unsolved murders were committed one after another, Can Yayinlari publishing house, which mainly published translated books, took a risk and released a book by a young author who had grown up in a different geography and experienced that reality to its core: Suzan Samancı: Helin Smelled of Resin. It instantly made an impression, and while questions like “Who is she? Where is she from?” lingered unanswered for a long time, the same publishing house released the short story collection Snow-Capped Barren Mountains and entered it into the Orhan Kemal Short Story competition. In an interview with Bianet in 2017, Samanci revealed the truth she had kept hidden for years to avoid cultivating a sensational image:
“I suppose this truth needs to be told: there is no room for us in the three or four translation agencies that currently exist, and it would be naive to expect otherwise. In a country that is not free, translation agencies cannot be free either! The response we get is, ‘We're overwhelmed!’ Or, if you register with the agencies, you meet only silence... For years I didn’t say it, I didn’t see the need, I didn’t even mention it. In 1997, when my story collection Snow-Capped Barren Mountains, which participated in the Orhan Kemal Story Competition, was unanimously awarded first place, the Adana Journalists Association intervened in the committee’s decision. Demirtas Ceyhun, a member of the selection committee, resigned from the jury, saying, ‘You are blocking the path for realistic literature.’ The second prize was awarded instead, and I heard much at the ceremony. While Refik Durbas was still alive, it’s worth mentioning that during our meeting in Diyarbakir (Amed), he had expressed his concerns about the award. After this incident, I never participated in any competitions again.”
In 2001, her book In The Shadow of Silence was regarded as one of the year’s most important works. Yet once more, while her name was mentioned in relation to an award, the matter became a subject of dispute, and the award was not given to Samanci.
In a long conversation with Metin Aydin in 2021 she said:“My decision to write was a very conscious one. In my early youth, it was such a passion that I refused to see the external reality and evil. I was quixotic enough to believe that art and literature could save the world; I was as in love with books as Professor Kien in Elias Canett’s The Blinding. As I came to understand that the act of writing is a long and arduous journey, I naturally experienced ups and downs. The process of learning and becoming conscious is a very painful one. Imposed dogmatic and sanctified values, habits, learned helplessness, dead ends, and submission are part of the journey. Saying no to these was not easy. Then, in the 1970s, when women participating in political movements took on masculine roles, a little space opened up for them, and toward the end of the 1970s in Turkey, the voices of a handful of women writers could be heard.
“When you confront the ‘Bluebeards’ who lurk everywhere and roam around in their patriarchal castles, with your mind and creativity rather than your emotions, being besieged is inevitable. As women learn and begin to signify truths and display their productivity in different fields, they are excluded in such societies. Failing to undertake the challenging journey of development paves the way for ‘loss of selfhood,’ and thus, those who lay the groundwork for political and social problems estrange what belongs to us. This estrangement also perpetuates the process of being unable to be effective in artistic, political, and other spheres. Writing, learning, and acquiring knowledge were, for me, the path to liberation, the path to ‘self-becoming.’ Choosing this continuity provided me with a firm foundation for the power to know and shape myself, while also becoming my best tool of defense.”
Samanci was born on September 20, 1962 in Karacimen (Hashuli) village near Diyarbakir. Her father was a sophomore in the Faculty of Theology in Ankara when he said to the family, “Get your identity cards issued; I will take you to Ankara.” Thus her papers were issued with the date 1964. She was two and a half years old when she went to Ankara with her mother, who did not speak any Turkish. Her mother also faced great difficulties in Ankara due to the language barrier.
Among the autobiographical stories that appear in her fiction are Ankara on the Radio and The Haunted City. During the 12 March 1971 military memorandum period, her father was a teacher at Diyarbakir Imam Hatip High School and was exiled to Nevsehir. In her 2023 essay A Letter to Gulseren and the Women, written in memory of her sister who had passed away, she recalls:
“A few of our childhood memories that we can never forget, or perhaps don't want to remember, imposed themselves and leapt into my stories. During our five years in Nevsehir, we accumulated many things. In summer, all the children would go to the mosque to learn verses. We wanted to go too. On our second day, we were surrounded by some boys and girls who were older than us. ‘Look, they’re Kurds, and communists too!’ they shouted, trying to beat us. We broke through the circle, ran home breathless, terrified. That evening, the family decided we would not return to the mosque. Then came the year of the Lice earthquake. Our grandmother arrived and stayed with us for three months—a torment for her. She couldn’t speak Turkish, so she grew weary of visitors, knitting constantly, sighing, grumbling, ‘When will they leave?’ One evening, when we went to the mosque with a group of women for tarawih prayers [nighttime prayers performed during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan], the women whispered as they looked at my grandmother’s hand on her knee. All the women placed both their hands on their knees, but my grandmother’s index and middle fingers rested open like an angel. We had done the same. Under the strange stares of the other women, we were left isolated. My grandmother’s lips trembled as voices from behind, I can never forget them, said, ‘Repent, repent, are they infidels or what?’”
Throughout her life, Samanci embraced difficulty and pursued the impossible. In the dark 1980s, she defied the patriarchal order and clung to writing and literature as her mode of existence with an awareness of identity. While creating “a room of her own” and deciding to pursue the traces of literature and aesthetics, she graduated from Diyarbakir High School in 1979. To allow her to work at a bank, her birth year was altered to 1961. Yet she wanted neither to continue her education nor to work in banking. As her mother put it, “Her mind was full of books and movie stars!” Choosing writing as her true profession, she followed twelve literary journals, even sold her earrings to afford the books she ordered from Istanbul. Surrounded by the concern of her relatives, she agreed—without knowing why—to a marriage with a bank employee, all while burying herself in intensive reading and poetry, submitting poems to journals.
Because of her father’s profession, she encountered many different cultures: Ankara, Nevsehir, Giresun, Samsun. Perhaps for this reason, she has always loved roads, distant places, and solitude. Writing—in countries where democracy, art, and aesthetic consciousness have not developed—meant exile, imprisonment, and court summons. The pages of history are full of the tragedies of writers, thinkers, and true intellectuals. “As women learn, point toward truths, and display their productivity in different arenas, they are excluded in such societies. To shy away from the arduous journey of development prepares the ground for “loss of self”; thus, those who lay the groundwork for political and social problems estrange what belongs to us. This estrangement also makes permanent the process of being unable to become active in artistic, political, and every other sphere.For me, writing, learning, and gaining knowledge were the path toward liberation, toward “becoming myself; choosing this continuity laid a firm foundation for the strength of recognizing and shaping myself, while also becoming my best means of defense. On the journey of setting out alone, one must not view the act of writing and creating solely within the framework of a masculine mindset, especially for those who have something to say to society.” With the awareness that knowing the relationship between society and the state in which one lives, the geography, and the causes of the individual–society and state–society relation naturally reflects in literature, at first she was anxious while writing poetry, stories, and novels—because the years and the geography in which she lived were harsh, a ring of fire, times when fear and death ran rampant.
In 2004, The River of Fear was published. Lacking a conventional plot, this novel transformed a gray, fear-laden atmosphere into a poetic and linguistic festival. It carried into universal texture the rasp of oppression, the weight of war on human beings, the ways people sought exits amid repression and violence, the entanglement of freedom, humanity, city, and nature.
In 2012, The Lover from Halabja was published. Based on the reality of those who fled the Halabja massacre in March 1988 and were settled in tents along the Tigris, the novel spans Halabja, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Geneva. Through the story of Zeynep—a teacher from Ayvalik who, during her compulsory service, marries a Kurdish man named Huseyin, later killed in an extrajudicial murder—we encounter the realities of Anatolia, of Kurdishness, and of Europe. When Zeynep loses her job, she dedicates her life to learning and to the struggle for human rights. She becomes the guardian of Delia, the protagonist, who lost her entire family in Halabja.
In 2016, The Big-Bellied City was published. Told through the eyes of Havin, it narrates with irony, metaphor, and poetry the drama of a family forcibly migrating to Istanbul. It is a socio-political and deep analysis of Turkey and its difficult geography. “Every night the family, weary of the big-bellied city, searched the map for the country they could never find. Samanci distills vast history into concentrated words; in her writing there is no place for excess, and she is no novelist for lazy readers.”
In 2008, she voluntarily settled in Geneva. Courageous enough to start over with a new life, new language, and new culture, she endured the hardship silently and did not write for five years. In 2015 she published, for the first time, a book in her mother tongue: Masked Women and Men. She published several other books in Kurdish in the following years.
“Since the mid-1990s, with the spread of Kurdish publishing houses and the partial emergence of spaces of freedom, Kurdish, which had long flowed quietly, began to surge. All languages are mutually enriching, but a soul torn from its mother tongue lives in a lifelong trauma, a ‘linguistic drama,’ from which there is no release. The mother tongue is the true home of our soul; a consciousness that does not reconcile with its mother tongue, that does not internalize it, will drift through life nameless and role-less, remaining outside of history. At the core of our existence lies the free use and writing of the mother tongue. This natural and necessary act renders visible the relation between language and subjectivity: it comes to life when it embodies both subjectivity and objectivity, concretizing meaning in language.” Samanci said in her 2021 interview with journalist Metin Aydin.
Linguist Necmiye Alpay remarks: “In any case, Suzan Samanci is, I am afraid, one of those great, augmenting yields of bilingualism that have not yet been studied in our country; although her writing resembles no one else’s, she is like [renowned Kurdish novelist] Yasar Kemal and many others…” Literary critic and writer Tufan Erbaristiran has also carried out comprehensive studies of Samanci’s stories and novels.
Subjected to criticism for writing in Turkish, Samancı later ignored the silence that followed her writing in Kurdish, disregarded those trapped in colonial psychology, and refused to be caught in the cliques of literature. She knows that real freedom, good and lasting literature, does not need the approval of others.
The advancement of a country, its true democracy, is embodied in the status of women, and in the value placed on writers, artists, and intellectuals. A government that views intellectuals, artists, and writers as threats and Others is one far removed from democratic values—a government in name only. The process of art and creation can only develop and find meaning in an environment of freedom and support. Societies that do not value art and artists cannot liberate themselves. It is necessary that Kurdish publishing houses come together and establish serious translation agencies, as there are now writers who can make their voices heard in the arena of contemporary world literature.
Today, as we enter a process of resolution, we hope for steps that will enable the return of exiled writers like Suzan Samanci, and for the emergence of a democratic structure that goes beyond critical democracy to protect the rights of different cultures.
Faik Ocal is a Kurdish writer who publishes in both Kurdish and Turkish. He writes on a range of subjects—including literature—for various websites and magazines. He has published more than a dozen books in both languages.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.