Kurdistan Observer

Prominent writers and publishers from Sweden, Norway and Turkey honored Mehmet Uzun with a one-day conference at Istanbul's Bilgi University

Monday, February 19, 2007

Mehmet Uzun has drawn attention time and time again to how important it is for a writer to be free and detached from ideologies, governments and official points of view

ISTANBUL – Turkish Daily News

Sixteen prominent writers and publishers from Sweden, Norway and Turkey paid tribute to author Mehmet Uzun on Saturday at the Istanbul Bilgi University. Uzun who is Kurdish but a Turkish citizen, spent years in exile in Sweden where he first began his long journey to establish a literary Kurdish language tradition.

During the one-day conference, the speakers pointed out the problems faced by those authors who have had to leave their own cultures and countries, that is, the same problems Uzun faced in his writing. They also discussed his status as the most important writer in modern Kurdish literature.

Author Eugene Schoulgin, who was chair of the Writers in Prison Committee for International PEN between 2000 and 2004, discussed at length the difficulties of being a writer in exile and of having the memories of one's homeland while trying to adapt to his or her new country. Schoulgin concluded, For Mehmet Uzun I think his life in exile has given him just as much as it has taken away from him, but he is living proof that nothing can stop a real writer from creating as long as he continues to fight the barricades, they might be put there by intellectually inferior authorities or by his or her own mysterious mind.

Uzun himself spoke at the end of the conference, saying that he wasn't accustomed to addressing meetings such as had taken place because in the past his writings and authorship had been discussed in police stations, prosecutors' offices and the courts. He stressed that in his works he had always talked about the defeated and the oppressed because history was written by the victors. During his 15 years in exile in Sweden, Uzun wrote many novels and essays in Kurdish, Turkish and Swedish but when his works began to be published in Turkey, the authorities took notice and opened legal cases against him. He was subsequently acquitted of all charges.

The author was diagnosed with cancer last spring and the doctors who were treating him gave up hope; however, when he returned to Turkey by plane and on a stretcher because he was so weak, he went on to Diyarbakir where he continued treatment, he began to improve. He himself calls his recovery miraculous. He also emphasized, I am determined to continue writing about the defeated and oppressed.

Uzun who had been working on a novel based on the life of Erich Auerbach before diagnosed with cancer announced that he had completed the preliminary work on the book and would now begin writing it. Auerbach, a Jewish philologist, fled Nazi Germany and spent years teaching at Istanbul University. His best-known book, Mimesis, analyzes the representation of reality in Western literature.

Drawing attention time and time again to how important it was for a writer to be free and detached from ideologies, governments and official points of view, Uzun said, For the saving of man and humanity there has to be conditions of justice, mercy, conscience, equality and freedom. He also stressed that a writer has to trust in these values.

Following the end of the conference, Uzun was given a standing ovation; he then signed books and posed for photographs.

The large audience consisted of people involved in literature, authors and academics. Turkey's leading writer Yasar Kemal and his wife, Ayse Semiha. Uzun calls Kemal, who has frequently been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, his spiritual father. Uzun has also been nominated for the prize in recent years.

The conference was sponsored by Bilgi University's Comparative Literature department, Anatolian Culture and the Swedish Mehmet Uzun Committee with the support of Sweden's Istanbul Consulate General.

The subject of the morning session was Writing in a Language that was faced with Obstacles and examples from Mehmet Uzun's works and contributions were evaluated within the context of the tie between language and literature. The second session began by addressing the question, What Happened to the Storyteller? Attention was focused on oral literature traditions and the storyteller as the basic character in Uzun's novels.