Hope beyond bars

The former co-president of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş, is back in the news, almost despite himself, after a few years of substantial anonymity. HDP candidate in the 2014 presidential elections, he ranked third, subsequently leading his pro-Kurdish party to gather 13.1% in the parliamentary elections of June 2015 and 10.7% in the flash elections of November of the same year. Demirtaş, in prison since 4 November 2016, was still the HDP candidate in the 2018 presidential elections, although forced as a prisoner to manage his election campaign. Despite having repeatedly declared that he opposes the violence of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and while calling for the cessation of hostilities between the Turkish army and independence activists, the Kurdish leader risks hundreds of years in prison precisely for disputed connivances with the PKK, designated for years from Ankara as a terrorist organization. In this sense, a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights was of no use, highlighting the political reasons for his imprisonment, calling for his immediate release. Selahattin Demirtaş, meanwhile, has embarked on a new career as a writer since 2020, announcing, among other things, his retirement from political life in June 2023.

Probably, since his first two small collections of stories, Seher (Twilight) and Devran (name of the hero of the story) printed in hundreds of thousands of copies in a few months, Demirtaş understood that with literature he could more easily convey the feelings of a people than with the rhetoric of political rallies. But more than an invitation to political militancy, these writings are an incessant encouragement to hope. Devran is actually an Arabic word that means “circular”, but also “fate or luck”. There is a Turkish saying gün olur devran döner which can be freely translated: “every cloud has a silver lining”. In essence, it states that those who face injustice will one day have their rights recognized and their lives and fates, now seemingly hopeless, will be unexpectedly lifted.
The subversive side of these writings, as of those that followed, up to the very recent Efsun, is in the strength of a hope far from the superficiality of any reckoning, in a non-trivial optimism, rooted in a unshakable trust in the possibility of human redemption, as a secular dynamic, even before, possibly, a movement fueled by a believer's inspiration. The latter would bring with it an inevitably eschatological dimension and, therefore, with less impact on the present. When questioned about his inspirations, Demirtaş repeatedly responded that he was encouraged to write by the desperation and unhappiness of people outside prison, as well as by the impression that they are gradually being dragged into a meaningless life.

It is news in recent days that the novel Efsun, a contemporary love story recently released in bookstores, has been censored by the prison authorities of the Bolu penitentiary, in the north-western Turkish province. To a prisoner's request, the response, according to the Mezopotamya agency source, was: the publication cannot be delivered to the prisoner, as it could endanger the security of the institution due to its obscene content. It is truly significant that an invitation to "hope" can be considered "obscene" in the context of a prison sentence which, evidently, does not have as its main aim that of protecting society against crime and reducing the recidivism of a crime but rather, to silence voices of dissent with respect to a single thought aligned on the passive support of the dominant power!


Claudio Monge
NP March 2024