“We, Too, Are Eastern”

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran (1902–1963). It explores how his communist and anti-colonial political commitments helped him forge an alternative vision of what it meant to be modern, one that challenged the pro-Western and capitalist orientation of the young Turkish state. Nâzım (as he is affectionately known in Turkey) had an eventful life that spanned the end of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Turkish Republic. At 19, he left school in Istanbul to join the nationalist independence movement in Anatolia. On the way, he was exposed to communist ideas and in 1921 made his way to the Soviet Union, spending over half of the decade in Moscow. There he studied Marxism-Leninism, met other young revolutionaries from across the world, and participated in the Soviet avant-garde artistic currents of the era. Back in Turkey, the poet faced near-constant repression. From 1929 until his final arrest in 1938, he was tried with various charges calculated to silence him. Able to command crowds with his powerful reading voice and uniquely demotic poetic style, Nâzım posed a threat to the authorities. In 1938 a military judge threw the book at Nâzım, sentencing him to 15 years for inciting the military to revolt with his poetry. An international campaign to free the poet was coordinated by Pablo Neruda, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Robeson, and Pablo Picasso. In 1950 he was finally released but fled to the Soviet Union upon further harassment by the authorities. As he settled in Moscow he was stripped of Turkish citizenship. He was never able to return home but spent the rest of his life circling the globe, traveling everywhere from Cuba to Tashkent as a spokesman for the revolution. He died of a heart attack in Moscow at the age of 61, leaving behind a massive collection of poems, plays, and essays in Turkish and translated into the world’s major languages.