The Body in Pain
Fernando Botero’s work in response to Abu Ghraib photographs.
By ARTHUR C. DANTO, The Nation, November 27, 2006 issue
Colombian artist Fernando Botero is famous for his depictions of blimpy figures that verge on the ludicrous. New Yorkers may recall the outdoor display of Botero’s bronze figures, many of them nude, in the central islands of Park Avenue in 1993. Their bodily proportions insured that their nakedness aroused little in the way of public indignation. They were about as sexy as the Macy’s balloons, and their seemingly inflated blandness lent them the cheerful and benign look one associates with upscale folk art. The sculptures were a shade less ingratiating, a shade more dangerous than one of Walt Disney’s creations, but in no way serious enough to call for critical scrutiny. Though transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.”
When it was announced not long ago that Botero had made a series of paintings and drawings inspired by the notorious photographs showing Iraqi captives, naked, degraded, tortured and humiliated by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it was easy to feel skeptical–wouldn’t Botero’s signature style humorize and cheapen this horror? And it was hard to imagine that paintings by anyone could convey the horrors of Abu Ghraib as well as–much less better than–the photographs themselves. These ghastly images of violence and humiliation, circulated on the Internet, on television and in newspapers throughout the world, were hardly in need of artistic amplification. And if any artist was to re-enact this theater of cruelty, Botero did not seem cut out for the job.
As it turns out, his images of torture, now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan and compiled in the book Botero Abu Ghraib, are masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art–art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts. Botero’s astonishing works make us realize this: We knew that Abu Ghraib’s prisoners were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours. When the photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment. But the photographs did not bring us closer to the agonies of the victims.
Botero’s images, by contrast, establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own. As Botero once remarked: “A painter can do things a photographer can’t do, because a painter can make the invisible visible.” What is invisible is the felt anguish of humiliation, and of pain. Photographs can only show what is visible; what Susan Sontag memorably called the “pain of others” lies outside their reach. But it can be conveyed in painting, as Botero’s Abu Ghraib series reminds us, for the limits of photography are not the limits of art. The mystery of painting, almost forgotten since the Counter-Reformation, lies in its power to generate a kind of illusion that has less to do with pictorial perception than it does with feeling.
The Catholic Church understood this well when, in the final session of the 1563 Council of Trent, it decided to use visual art as a weapon in its battle with the Reformation. One of the pillars of the Reformation’s agenda was its iconoclasm–its opposition to the use of religious imagery, over which the church enjoyed a virtual monopoly. The Reformation feared that images themselves would be worshiped, which was idolatry. The Catholic response was to harness the power of images in the service of faith. Artists were instructed to create images of clarity, simplicity, intelligibility and realism that would serve as an emotional stimulus to piety. As the great art historian Rudolph Wittkower observed:
Many of the stories of Christ and the saints deal with martyrdom, brutality, and horror and in contrast to Renaissance idealization, an unveiled display of truth was now deemed essential; even Christ must be shown “afflicted, bleeding, spat upon, with his skin torn, wounded, deformed, pale, and unsightly,” if the subject requires it. It is these “correct” images that are meant to appeal to the emotions of the faithful and support or even transcend the spoken word.
It took more than twenty years for artists to devise a style that executed these directives, and there can be little doubt that the art of the Baroque was successful in its mission. The art achieved extraordinary precision in the depiction of suffering and hence in the arousal of sympathetic identification. It is often noted that we live in an image-rich culture, and so we do. But most of the images we see are photographs, and their effect can be dulling, if not desensitizing. To elicit the kinds of feelings at which the Counter-Reformation aimed, photographs now often need to be enhanced. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is not realistic in the sense in which photography is realistic: It is enhanced and amplified, showing Jesus “afflicted, bleeding, spat upon, with his skin torn, wounded, deformed, pale and unsightly,” in a manner that would have pleased the Council of Trent. Sontag was right: Photography must be augmented–with text, she proposed–if we are to feel the pain it shows. A picture may be worth a thousand words, as the cliché goes, but a photograph does not speak for itself. At the least it requires the skilled augmentations of Photoshop–at which point, of course, visual truth is sacrificed on the altar of feeling.
The Abu Ghraib photographs are essentially snapshots, larky postcards of soldiers enjoying their power, as their implied message–”Having a wonderful time…. Wish you were here”–attests. The nude, bound bodies of the prisoners are heaped up like the bodies of tigers in Victorian photographs of smiling viceroys displaying the day’s hunt. There must be a quantitative impulse in the expression of gloating–think of the strings of fish held up in snapshots taken after fishing trips, yellowing on the walls of seafood stores. In another artistic response to Abu Ghraib, British painter Gerald Laing lifted the backdrop of Grant Wood’s American Gothic but replaced the two farmers with the American MPs Lynndie England and Charles Graner, signaling thumbs-up with their blue-rubber-gloved hands above a pile of bare-bottomed bodies. The Americans are in bright poster colors, while the bodies are gray and evidently cut from a newspaper photograph, reproduced with the dots of a coarse Benday screen. It is witty and a bit sickening, but it does not call up the feelings of a Baroque evocation of martyrdom.
Or, for that matter, of Botero’s Abu Ghraib series, which draws on his knowledge of the graphic, even lurid paintings of Christ’s martyrdom by Latin American Baroque artists, in which Jesus bleeds from the crown of thorns, or from the wounds left by lance points in his ravaged chest. Abu Ghraib, in Botero’s rendering, also evokes Baroque prisons, like those one sees in the paintings titled Roman Charity, where a visiting daughter breast-feeds her chained father in the gloomy light of his cell. Although the prisoners are painted in his signature style, his much-maligned mannerism intensifies our engagement with the pictures. This is partly because the prisoners’ heavy flesh–broken and bleeding from beatings–looks all the more vulnerable to the pain inflicted. While their faces are largely covered with hoods, blindfolds and women’s underpants, their mouths are twisted into expressions of pain or agony. Their arms and sometimes their legs are bound with thick rope, and sometimes a figure is suspended by his leg, or tethered by all four limbs to the criss-cross of bars that form a cell wall. Everyone is nude, except when wearing female underwear, which the Americans evidently considered the supreme form of humiliation. In some paintings, a prisoner is sprayed with urine by a guard who lies outside the frame. Broomsticks protrude from bleeding anuses; hooded men lie in their feces. Several of the paintings feature savage dogs that look like demons in medieval scenes of hell.
None of these works are for sale–Botero has said he has no interest in profiting from them. He has offered them as a collection to a number of American museums, but none have been willing to accept them, I dare say for the same reason that the Marlborough Gallery, when I visited the show, had someone searching bags and backpacks–not a common sight in commercial galleries.
Botero rather ingenuously suggested that, just as few would remember Guernica were it not for Picasso’s painting, Abu Ghraib might be forgotten if he did not make this series. But Abu Ghraib was a world event, rather than an incidental horror of war like Guernica. Yet unlike Picasso’s painting, a Cubist work that can serve a purely decorative function if one is unaware of its meaning, Botero’s Abu Ghraib series immerses us in the experience of suffering. The pain of others has seldom felt so close, or so shaming to its perpetrators.
Further resources: Read an interview with Botero about his Abu Ghraib series.
Documentary on Botero: click to watch.
Click for gallery of Botero’s work.
Watch Botero’s short movie about Abu Ghraib series: A Permanent Accusation
Subconscious Tunnels: Haruki Murakami’s dreamlike novel “Kafka on the Shore”
By John Updike, The New Yorker, January 24, 2005
Haruki Murakami’s novel, “Kafka on the Shore” (translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel; Knopf; $25.95), is a real page-turner, as well a an insistently metaphysical mind-bender. Spun out to four hundred and thirty-si pages, it seems more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps than the author wanted it to be. Murakami, born in 1949, ran a Tokyo jazz clu before he became a published writer, with the novel “Hear the Wind Sing,” i 1979. Though his work abounds with references to contemporary America culture, especially its popular music, and though he details the banal quotidia with an amiable flatness reminiscent of Western youth and minimalist fiction i the hungover nineteen-seventies, his narratives are dreamlike, closer to the visci surrealism of Kobo Abe than to the superheated but generally solid realism o Mishima and Tanizaki. We often cannot imagine, while reading “Kafka on th Shore,” what will come next, and our suspicion—reinforced by Murakami’ comments in interviews, such as the one in last summer’s Paris Review—is that the author did not always know, either.
Yet “Kafka on the Shore” has a schematic rigor in its execution. Alternate chapters relate the stories of two disparate but slowly converging heroes. The odd-numbered chapters serve up the first-person narrative of a fifteen-year-old runaway from his affluent, motherless home in Tokyo; his father is a world-renowned sculptor, Koichi Tamura, and the son has given himself the peculiar first name Kafka. He totes a carefully packed backpack and, in his head, talking in boldface, a scolding, exhorting alter ego called Crow—which is what Kafka means, or close to it, in Czech. The even-numbered chapters trace, beginning with a flurry of official documents, the life of a mentally defective sexagenarian, Satoru Nakata. He was one of sixteen fourth graders who, in 1944, while on a mushroom-gathering walk with their teacher, fell into a coma after an unexplained flash of silver in the sky. Nakata was the only one who didn’t wake up, unharmed, within a few hours; when he did wake up, several weeks later in a military hospital, he had lost his entire memory and, with it, the ability to read. He doesn’t know what Japan is or even recognize his parents’ faces. He is able, however, to learn to work in a shop producing handcrafted furniture, and when, upon the owner’s death, the factory disbands he supplements his government subsidy with a modest-paying sideline in finding lost cats, since along with his disabilities he has gained the rare ability to converse with cats. (Cats frequently figure in Murakami’s fiction, as delegates from another world; his jazz club was called Peter Cat.) One cat search leads Nakata to a house—that of the sculptor Koichi Tamura, in fact—where he is compelled to stab to death a malevolent apparition in the form of Johnnie Walker, from the whiskey label. Fleeing the bloody crime scene, Nakata hitches truck rides south to Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four major islands, where Kafka Tamura, as it happens, has recently arrived by bus.
Both the young man and the old, though independent and reclusive, have a knack of forming useful friendships. Kafka befriends Oshima, the androgynous, hemophiliac assistant at a small library where the boy can read all day and, eventually, bunk at night; Nakata in his winning simplicity finds a disciple in one of the truck drivers who give him a ride, the lower-class, hitherto unenlightened Hoshino, “with a ponytail, a pierced ear, and a Chunichi Dragons baseball team cap.” The double plot unfolds in cunningly but tenuously linked chapters. There is violence, comedy, sex—deep, transcendental, anatomically correct sex, oral and otherwise—and a bewildering overflow of possible meanings.
In a prefatory chapter, Crow promises Kafka a “violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm,” with “hot, red blood.” He assures him, and the expectant reader, “Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through. . . . But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.” At the center of this particular novelistic storm is the idea that our behavior in dreams can translate to live action; our dreams can be conduits back into waking reality. This notion, the learned Oshima tells Kafka, can be found in “The Tale of Genji,” the early-eleventhcentury Japanese classic by Lady Murasaki. Oshima summarizes:
“Lady Rokujo—she’s one of Prince Genji’s lovers—becomes so consumed with jealousy over Genji’s main wife, Lady Aoi, that she turns into an evil spirit that possesses her. Night after night she attacks Lady Aoi in her bed until she finally kills her. . . . But the most interesting part of the story is that Lady Rokujo has no inkling that she’d become a living spirit. She’d have nightmares and wake up, only to discover that her long black hair smelled like smoke. Not having any idea what was going on, she was totally confused. In fact, this smoke came from the incense the priests lit as they prayed for Lady Aoi. Completely unaware of it, she’d been flying through space and passing down the tunnel of her subconscious into Aoi’s bedroom.”
Read in context, in the first section of Arthur Waley’s translation of “Genji,” the episode borders on the naturalistic. Within the tight, constrained circles of the imperial court, emotional violence bursts its bonds. Both women are gravely sickened by the trespassing spirit of one of them; Lady Rokujo, a beauty of great refinement, is horrified that her dreams about Princess Aoi are full of a “brutal fury such as in her waking life would have been utterly foreign to her.” She reflects, “How terrible! It seemed then that it was really possible for one’s spirit to leave the body and break out into emotions which the waking mind would not countenance.”
From the inarguable truth of the second observation the possibility of one’s spirit leaving one’s body could be plausibly deduced in a prescientific, preëlectric age when, Oshima points out, “the physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two.” In Murakami’s vision of our materialist, garishly illuminated age, however, the boundary between inner and outer darkness is traversed by grotesque figments borrowed from the world of commercial imagery: Johnnie Walker, with boots and top hat, manifests himself to the cat-loving simpleton Nakata as a mass murderer of stray felines, jocularly cutting open their furry abdomens and popping their still-beating hearts into his mouth, and Colonel Sanders, in his white suit and string tie, appears to Nakata’s companion, Hoshino, as a fast-talking pimp. The Colonel, questioned by the startled Hoshino about his nature, quotes another venerable text, Ueda Akinari’s “Tales of Moonlight and Rain”:
Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I, rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man.
Later, with some exasperation, the Colonel tells Hoshino, “I’m a concept, get it? Con-cept!” Concept or whatever, he is a very adroit fixer when it comes to such supernatural hustles as handling the entrance stone to the spirit world, where the dead and the drastically detached live in the heart of the forest like writers at the MacDowell Colony—meals and housekeeping provided and other residents discreetly out of sight.
This novel quotes Goethe as decreeing, “Everything’s a metaphor.” But a Western reader expects the metaphors, or symbolic realities, to be—as in “The Faerie Queene,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Goethe’s “Faust”—organized by certain polarities, in a magnetic field shaped by a central supernatural authority. No such authority controls the spooky carnival of “Kafka on the Shore.” To quote Colonel Sanders once more:
“Listen—God only exists in people’s minds. Especially in Japan, God’s always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person.”
In “Kafka on the Shore,” the skies unaccountably produce showers of sardines, mackerel, and leeches, and some unlucky people get stuck halfway in the spirit world and hence cast a faint shadow in this one. Japanese supernature, imported into contemporary America with animated cartoons, video games, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, is luxuriant, lighthearted, and, by the standards of monotheism, undisciplined. The religious history of Japan since the introduction of Chinese culture in the fifth century A.D. and the arrival of Buddhism in the sixth has been a long lesson in the stubborn resilience and adaptability of the native cult of polytheistic nature worship called, to distinguish it from Buddhism, Shinto. Shinto, to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica, “has no founder, no official sacred scriptures, in the strict sense, and no fixed dogma.” Nor does it offer, as atypically surviving kamikaze pilots have proudly pointed out, an afterlife. It is based on kami, a ubiquitous word sometimes translated as “gods” or “spirits” but meaning, finally, anything felt worthy of reverence. One of Shinto’s belated theorists, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), defined kami as “anything whatsoever which was out of the ordinary.”
A tenacious adherence to Shinto in the Japanese countryside and among the masses has enabled it to coexist for a millennium and a half with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, and to be subject to repeated revivals, most recently, from 1871 to 1945, as the official national religion and a powerful spiritual weapon in Japan’s imperialist wars. After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Shinto, under the direction of the Allied occupation force, was disestablished, its holidays were curtailed, and the emperor’s divinity—based on the first emperor’s purported descent from the sun goddess—was renounced. But Shinto shrines remain, in the imperial precincts and in the countryside; its rites are performed, its paper wish-slips tied to bushes, its amulets sold to tourists Asian and Western. Shinto’s strong aesthetic component, a reverence toward materials and processes, continues to permeate the crafts and the arts. Kami exists not only in heavenly and earthly forces but in animals, birds, plants, and stones. Nakata and Hoshino spend hours trying to learn how to converse with a stone—to divine what the stone, at times easily lifted and at others heavy to the limits of a man’s strength, wants. Kami pervades Murakami’s world, in which, therefore, many Western readers will feel, a bit queasily, at sea, however many fragments of globalized Western culture—Goethe, Beethoven, Eichmann, Hegel, Coltrane, Schubert, Napoleon—bob from paragraph to paragraph.
The novel’s two heroes interact only in the realm of kami. Of their entwined narratives, the story of Kafka Tamura is more problematic, more curiously overloaded, than that of the holy fool Nakata, with its familiar elements of science fiction, quest, and ebullient heroics. As Hoshino remarks, “This is starting to feel like an Indiana Jones movie or something.” Return and release to the underworld of his childhood coma are the old man’s intelligible goals, for which he prepares with prodigious sessions of sleep. Less intelligibly, the “cool, tall, fifteen-year-old boy lugging a backpack and a bunch of obsessions” labors under an ill-defined Oedipal curse. He hates his father enough to dream of killing him, and to feel little sorrow when he is killed, but we never see the father, unless it is in the bizarre guise of Johnnie Walker, and know only that he was a famous artist and, as such, probably pretty egocentric. Kafka’s mother left home, with his older sister, when he was four years old, and when he encounters her in Shikoku it is in the form of a fifteen-year-old spirit projection of the library director, trim, prim, reserved Miss Saeki, who is over fifty. Miss Saeki and Kafka Tamura talk like this:
“We’re not metaphors.”
“I know,” I say. “But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.”
A faint smile comes to her as she looks up at me. “That’s the oddest pickup line I’ve ever heard.”
“There’re a lot of odd things going on—but I feel like I’m slowly getting closer to the truth.”
“Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?”
“Either way, I don’t think I can stand the sadness I feel right now,” I tell her.
“I feel the same way.”
Small wonder, as the teen-ager admits, that “the whole confused mess swirls around in my brain, and my head feels like it’s about to burst.” The Oedipus myth, shedding its fatal Greek gravity and the universality Freud gave it, just adds vapor to the mist of fancy and strangeness through which the young hero moves toward the unexceptional goal of growing up.
In the last pages, the novel asks that it be taken as a happily ending saga of maturation, of “a brand-new world” for a purged Kafka. But beneath his feverish, symbolically fraught adventures there is a subconscious pull almost equal to the pull of sex and vital growth: that of nothingness, of emptiness, of blissful blankness. Murakami is a tender painter of negative spaces. After his coma, Nakata “returned to this world with his mind wiped clean. The proverbial blank slate.” In his adulthood, “that bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already.” Throughout this chronicle, Murakami describes his characters falling asleep as lovingly as he itemizes what they cook and eat. Refrigerated severed cat heads, like the severed human heads of Tanizaki’s tremendous novella “The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi,” have a lulling serenity, “staring out blankly at a point in space.” Making love to a woman, “you listen as the blank within her is filled.” Kafka Tamura says, “There’s a void inside me, a blank that is slowly expanding, devouring what’s left of who I am. I can hear it happening.” Heading into the forest, leaving all his backpacked defenses behind, he thinks triumphantly, “I head for the core of the labyrinth, giving myself up to the void.” Existence as something half empty—a mere skin on the essential void, a transitory shore—needs, for its celebration, a Japanese spiritual tact.
Orhan Pamuk: My First Passport
What does it mean to belong to a country?
By Orhan Pamuk, The New Yorker, April 16, 2007. Translated, from the Turkish, by Maureen Freely.
In 1959, when I was seve years old, my father wen missing under mysteriou circumstances; several week later, we received word that h was in Paris, living in a chea hotel in Montparnasse. He wa filling up the notebooks that h would later give to me, and fro time to time, from the Caf Dome, he’d spot Jean-Pau Sartre passing in the street. A first, my grandmother sent hi money from Istanbul. M grandfather had made a fortun in railroads. Under m grandmother’s tearful gaze, m father and my uncles hadn’t ye managed to squander their entir inheritance—not all of th apartments had been sold. But, twenty-five years after her husband’s death, my grandmother decided that the mone was running out and she stopped subsidizing her bohemian son in Paris.
This was how my father joined the long line of penniless and miserable Turkish intellectuals who had been walking the streets of Paris for a century already. Like my grandfather and my uncles, he was an engineer with a good head for mathematics. When his money was gone, he answered an ad in the newspaper for a job at I.B.M.; once hired, he was dispatched to the company office in Geneva. In those days, computers were still operated with perforated cards, and the general public knew little about them. My father became one of Europe’s first Turkish guest workers. My mother soon joined him, leaving my older brother and me in our grandmother’s plush and crowded home. We were to follow our mother to Geneva after school had closed for the summer, which meant that we needed to get passports.
I remember having to pose for a very long time while the old photographer fiddled, under a black cloth, with a three-legged contraption with bellows. To cast light onto the chemical plate, he had to open the lens for a split second, which he did with an elegant flick of his hand, but, before he did this, he would look at us and say, “Yeeeees,” and it was because I found this photographer truly ridiculous that my first passport picture shows me biting my cheeks. The passport notes that my hair, which had probably been combed for the first time that year in preparation for the photograph, was chestnut brown. I must have flipped through the passport too quickly back then to notice that someone had got my eye color wrong; it was only when I opened it thirty years later that I picked up on the mistake. What this taught me was that, contrary to what I’d believed, a passport is not a document that tells us who we are but a document that shows what other people think of us.
As we flew into Geneva, our new passports in the pockets of our new jackets, my brother and I were overcome wit terror. The plane banked as it came in for a landing, and to us this country called Switzerland seemed to be place where everything, even the clouds, was on a steep incline that stretched to infinity. Then the plane finished it turn and straightened itself out. My brother and I still laugh when we remember our relief on realizing that this ne country was, like Istanbul, built on level earth.
The streets in Switzerland were cleaner and emptier than those at home. There was more variety in the shopwindows, and there were more cars. The beggars didn’t beg empty-handed, as in Istanbul; instead, they’d stand under your window playing the accordion. Before we threw money to our local beggar, my mother would wrap it in paper.
Our apartment—a five-minute walk from the bridges over the Rhone River, at the point where it emerged from Lake Geneva—had been rented furnished.This was how I came to associate living in another country with sitting at tables where others had sat before, using glasses and plates that other people had drunk from and dined on, and sleeping in beds that had grown old after years of cradling other sleeping people. Another country was a country that belonged to other people. We had to accept the fact that the things we were using would never belong to us, and that this country, this other land, would never belong to us, either.
My mother, who had studied at a French school in Istanbul, sat us down at the empty dining-room table every morning that summer and tried to teach us French. Only when we were enrolled in a state primary school did we discover that we had learned nothing. My parents hoped that we would learn French simply by listening to the teacher day in and day out, but we didn’t. When recess began, my brother and I would wander among the crowds of playing children until we found each other and could hold hands. This foreign land was an endless garden full of happy children. My brother and I watched that garden with longing, from a distance.
Although my brother couldn’t speak French, he was top in his class at counting backward by threes. The only thing I was good at in this school where I couldn’t understand the language was silence. Just as you might struggle to wake up from a dream in which no one speaks, I fought not to go to school. As it did later, in other cities and other schools, my tendency to turn inward protected me from life’s difficulties, but it also deprived me of life’s riches. One day, my parents took my brother out of school, too. Putting our passports in our hands, they sent us away from Geneva, back to our grandmother in Istanbul.
I never used that passport again. Although it bore the words “Member of the Council of Europe,” it was a reminder o my first failed European adventure, and such was the vehemence of my decision to turn inward that it would b another twenty-four years before I left Turkey again. When I was young, I always gazed with admiration and envy a those who acquired passports and travelled to Europe and beyond, but, despite the opportunities that were presented t me, I remained fearfully certain that it was my lot to sit in a corner in Istanbul and give myself over to the books that hoped would one day make my name and complete me as a person. In those days, I believed that one could understan Europe best through its greatest books
In the end, it was my books that prompted me to apply for a second passport. After years spent alone in a room, I had managed to turn myself into an author. Now I was invited to go on tour in Germany, where many Turks had found political asylum; it was thought that those Turks would enjoy hearing me read from my books, which had yet to be translated into German. Although I applied for a passport with happy excitement at the idea of getting to know Turkish readers in Germany, it was during that trip that I came to associate my passport with the sort of “identity crisis” that has afflicted so many others in the years since then—that is, the question of how much we belong to the country of our first passport and how much we belong to the “other countries” that it allows us to enter.
Video: Conversation between Orhan Pamuk and Salman Rushdie
A conversation between Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. From the 2007 New Yorker Festival.
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