Cherrypicker  The revolution and its children

Özge İnan has written a debut novel that is extremely well worth reading. It is about Turkey in the 1980s, the difficult decision to emigrate and the omnipresence of politics.

© Piper When Selim discovers that Hülya is pregnant he knows beyond any doubt that the two of them must leave the country immediately. The mother-to-be can hardly believe her ears, however. Emigrating from Turkey to Germany would not only mean living in a foreign country whose language she doesn’t speak, far away from her family and friends. She would also have to give up her degree in medicine, not to mention the young couple’s shared dream of being able to bring about some kind of change in their home country, despite all the restrictions. She cannot believe that Selim, who has been an active member of the political Left ever since the military coup that took place while he was still at school, is willing to give up in this way. Her response is unequivocal: “Of course one cannot live here. But that’s no reason simply to run away.”

Twenty years later, sixteen-year-old Nilay, who has grown up in Berlin and knows Turkey only from family visits during the summer holidays, is annoyed with her father. Though Selim closely follows the news of the protests on Taksim Square, he is fatalistic about their chances of success. “Strange, isn’t it? As if he had nothing to do with it,” wonders Nilay, who herself would like nothing better than to board the next plane to Istanbul in order to join the battle against the police brutality and Erdoğan’s regime.  

Everything is political

Özge İnan achieved a certain fame at an early age thanks to social media. When Twitter was still called Twitter and its CEO was not yet Elon Musik, she used the medium to draw attention to herself, first and foremost with her strong opinions and comments about current political affairs in Germany, Turkey and beyond. These days she has nearly 80,000 followers on the platform, which now goes by the name of the latter X. İnan, who works as an editor for the weekly newspaper Der Freitag, is still regarded as one of the most important left-wing dissenters on the “town square for debate” that has recently come to be increasingly dominated by vociferous town criers positioned at the opposite end of the political spectrum.

It seems hardly surprising therefore that politics should also play a central role in her first narrative work. That said, it explicitly does not revolve around the current political situation in Turkey.  The 2013 protests serve merely as an extremely marginal framing device for the plot, and the novel makes no mention whatsoever of the aftermath of the democracy movements in the past ten years. It is rather the awakening political consciousness of Nilay, who was born in the same year as her author, that provides the reason for a detailed description of the political socialization of both her parents in Turkey in the 1980s and thus also goes some way to explaining the political apathy of a generation of immigrant parents.

İnan describes with great sensitivity the atmosphere in the society in which Selim and Hülya grow up. The individual chapters are devoted to different points in time, the personal stories of the protagonists each being closely related to the political events of the time. Gradually these episodes combine to create a historical panorama that vividly illustrates how Turkish society became increasingly narrow and confined between 1980 and 1992. How politics pervaded every aspect of society, thereby becoming omnipresent. School, university, friendship, love, family, neighbourhood – everything is political, not least having children.

A glimmer of hope rather than a happy ending

The novel’s great strength is the empathy with which its author describes the inner conflict of its main characters. In their battle to achieve their emancipatory political goals, Selim and Hülya are not only fighting against a repressive regime but also against the values and ideals of their own families. The pain of being betrayed by close allies and friends is portrayed with just as much sensitivity as the inner struggle between loyalty towards the political movement to which they both belong and their personal sense of responsibility towards their own future children.

Naturally, the political reality precludes any happy ending for this novel. The future must remain uncertain, yet this does not mean there is no glimmer of hope. This lies with future generations of children who might yet take over the political baton from their parents.
 

November 2023