Zahra Yarali

Snow by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Vintage International, 2005, 425 pp., $26

Last summer, I worked at a private research university in Istanbul, studying the psychology of religion. A few days into my internship, my lab mentor and I had returned from a coffee break, and he opened his laptop to close out my Qualtrics training for that day. We had established a friendly relationship by this point. We were cognizant of our different backgrounds and had found intellectual common ground. When the topic of the hijab arose, I did not expect my mentor to be invested in my practice of it.

“I don’t practice Islam, I’m an atheist. But what you are wearing is not the hijab.”
I asked him what he meant.
“You know you’re not doing it right—you’re not supposed to let your hair show.”

My scarf allowed for my curtain bangs to protrude, sliding back to the crown of my head too often. He proceeded to demonstrate the circular lining around a face the headscarf is supposed to form. A few moments later, my mentor entered “Emine Erdogan”—the Turkish president’s wife—into the search engine bar on the screen in front of us, assuming, surely, that I had seen the movie E.T. and knew what he was laughing about.

I wondered why it mattered to him so much that he had to let me know. He did not hold reverence for a God the way he believed I should, even though I engage in a publicly scrutable act of worship and he doesn’t. But even then, what good would it do? If I wore the hijab properly, I ought not wear it too heavily wrapped, lest I be made akin to an alien too.

My journey to Turkey last summer began when, over winter recess, I read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. Upon receiving recommendations that he would be a favorite of anyone who enjoys Murakami and Kundera, I scanned the synopses of his most famous works. I skipped the more widely-read Museum of Innocence and My Name is Red for a story that read closer to home—a story I could not have anticipated from a writer with such a secular background as Pamuk.

In Snow (Turkish: Kar), Orhan Pamuk clears a path for readers to a land forsaken by all but God (and of that, even, the Istanbulites are dubious). As a blizzard envelopes the city of Kars, the poet Kerim Alakasoglu (known as Ka) briefly visits “the very edge of the world,” recounted to us by our narrator, Ka’s friend Orhan. Ka visits Kars, a geographically isolated and culturally neglected Turkish city bordering Armenia, during the coldest stretch of winter in the 1990s.

An émigré returning to Turkey from Germany after 12 years, Ka is ostensibly there as a journalist to report on the alarming rates of suicide among pious young Muslim women—a spike in frequency that corresponds with the prohibition of women’s attempts at attending university while veiled. He begins a furtive pursuit of Ipek, a former lover, who lives in Kars and is estranged from her Marxist-turned-Muslim former husband (and current mayoral candidate) Muhtar. Ka becomes quickly enveloped into the town’s affairs, beginning with the shooting of the director of Education in Kars at the hands of a political Islamist.

Making his rounds, Ka exchanges pleasantries with the policemen of Kars and the owners of the only newspaper in town—an alliance that can reify in print any reality for the right price. He interviews the families affected by the suicides and shares several heartwarming exchanges with Muhtar and two revolutionary juniors named Necip and Fazil. Ka then makes the private audience of the underground radical named Blue. Another Marxist-turned-Muslim with experience in Islamist groups in Eastern Europe, Blue is venerated by the revolutionary youth in Kars. He has returned to Turkey to continue organizing against the West among his own people. He quickly appears to trust Ka as a confederate, labeling Ka to be a “modern dervish” in search of his poetry and his way back home. This begins Ka’s role as the “impartial agent” of both political spheres in Kars–the arbiter between modernity and tradition.

Throughout recent history, there has been no state cleaved by the East and West as possessively as Turkey. Ka’s return to his homeland is a return to the self—but, as Pamuk conveys, a return to the Turkish identity is a return to internal turmoil. Even while living in Germany, Ka refused to learn German—his body “rejected it, so he was able to preserve his purity and his soul.” Language and a salient ethnic heritage constitute the modern Turk—these are permissible markers of identity west of the Bosphorus. But what happens when the nagging pursuit of Turkic purity leads you to your people, a world away from Istanbul but closer than the jugular vein is to God?

After meeting these religious and solitary men—a combination he once believed to be impossible—Ka feels inspired to write a poem titled “Snow.” An ode to the silence of snow, which reminds him of God, verses poured from him for the first time after years of writer’s block. It awakens in him a happiness he had not known for years.

He attributes this happiness to the pure-heartedness and the simplicity of the people of Kars; to returning home; to the snow. Upon Ipek’s encouragement, he finally agrees to meet with the town’s respected Sheikh in search of answers to his internal disunion. The Sheikh is dubious of Ka’s intentions, aware that he likely sees all of the Muslims of Kars as “bearded provincial reactionaries.” But Ka, in a haze—having downed a double raki before the meeting—says:

“I felt guilty about having refused all my life to believe in the same God as the uneducated—the aunties with their heads wrapped in scarves, the uncles with the prayer beads in their hands. There’s a lot of pride involved with my refusal to believe in God. But now I want to believe in that God who is making this beautiful snow fall from the sky. There’s a God who pays careful attention to the world’s hidden symmetry, a God who will make us all more civilized and refined… But that God is not among you. He’s outside, in the empty night, in the darkness, in the snow that falls inside the hearts of outcasts.”

To which the Sheikh responds, “If you want to find God by yourself, go ahead—walk out into the darkness, revel in the snow, use it to fill yourself with God’s love… But don’t forget the arrogant men who think too much of themselves always end up alone.”

And Ka says, “So what shall I do…? I want to believe in the God you believe in and be like you, but because there is a Westerner inside me, my mind is confused.”

I suppose this is a burden that any Muslim émigré to the West—or the everyday Turk—should feel privileged to carry. These labels are ultimately tied to lifestyles which we can’t extract from our beings. The paradox lies herein: our experience of a divided self is precisely what makes us feel most whole. To select just one conviction as one’s predominant identity is to sacrifice an inalienable part of the whole self.

For Ka, God is the cure to loneliness. God is loving Ipek; God is the hush of the fallen snow in the city of those who have forgotten their stories and fear their own voice. God delivers Ka his poems, and he is grateful to his sender. But God has only ever been an escape, never a reality; and Ka’s long-awaited return to his motherland cannot be the same as his great departure.

Blue eventually realizes this and says, “In a place like this, if you worship God as a European, you’re bound to be a laughingstock. Then you cannot even believe you believe. You do not belong to this country; you’re not even a Turk anymore. First try to be like everybody else. Then try to believe in God.”

Just ahead of the town’s mayoral elections, a theater troupe leader named Sunay Zaim, in cahoots with the town press, police, and the Turkish intelligence and military establishment, presents an on-stage coup–distracting audiences as an attempted coup of Kars takes place. The performance demands through blackmail a public unveiling of Kadife–Ipek’s sister and the local leader of the “headscarf girls.” Kars’ National Theatre embodies the treatment of political motifs by Turkish politicians as an entertainment industry of its own; it is also the political theater that demands Ka pledge his allegiance outright.

Before Kadife’s performance, Ka says to her, “Life is not about principles, it’s about happiness.” She replies, “But if you don’t have principles, and you don’t have faith, you can’t be happy at all.”

Ka brokers time for the people of Kars with incremental lies between both factions, only to ultimately reveal Blue’s hiding place to the Turkish intelligence agency, putting Blue at risk. The story ends with the death of Blue and his lover, Kadife; in a matter of days, Ka’s connivances–due perhaps not to malintent, but rather spinelessness–come to light. In his role as a political intermediary, he ultimately picks no side, losing agency by selecting indifference.

Ka’s happiness was plentiful during the first few days in Kars, as the poems exuded from him. As the roads out of Kars reopen following the heavy snowstorm, however, he believes his only remaining chance at happiness is leaving for Germany with Ipek. Learning of Ka’s betrayal ultimately holds Ipek back from meeting Ka at the station as the train departs for Frankfurt.

Inspired largely from his own lived experience–he is both an Istanbulite and a Muslim–Pamuk crafts in prose the contours of the modern-day Turk in Snow. Ka’s hubris is not simply an unwillingness to submit, but an inability to be convinced of his decision. But it is endemic to many experiences of such cultural clash–after all, working at a lab to study the psychology of religion, I too traveled to Turkey to intellectualize the practice of faith. Altogether, the 44 chapters of this story could stand alone as a collection of Turkish cultural and political criticisms that reflected plainly upon the population in 2003 and do so just as well even now. Though the bar is low, as my lab mentor showed me, Pamuk provides dimensions to the thoughts and convictions of the people of Kars in a way that returns a voice and agency to a body of the Turkish people seen as damned to antiquity.

Zahra Yarali misses her stop on the Northeast Regional more often than she’d like to admit…