I Will Never See the World Again

Product Information

When I was writing my own book, I became a prison memoir nerd. I found myself scribbling my uncle’s name in the margins of this one a few times. My uncle Frank loves to entertain me with stories about his times inside. Altan is a literary heavyweight, whereas Frank needs me to fill out his benefit forms for him, but I think both of them have faith in the alchemic power of storytelling, that it can transform suffering and and give you access to power when you are powerless. It is said that the dead do not know that they are dead. According to Islamic mythology, once the corpse is placed in the grave and covered with dirt and the funeral crowd has begun to disperse, the dead also tries to get up and go home, only to realize when he hits his head on the coffin lid that he has died. Viewed from outside I was one old, white-bearded Ahmet Hüsrev Altan lying down in an airless, lightless iron cage. Who knows where this sentence came from. Nowhere in my mind had I chosen to make such a declaration. It was a sentence that put an unbridgeable distance between itself and reality. It ignored reality, ridiculed it, even as I was being transformed into a pitiful bug who could not even open the door of the car he was in, who had lost his right to decide his own future, whose very name was being changed; a bug entangled in the web of a poisonous spider. Nu uită să ne spună și despre agresivitatea cu care regimul încearcă să domolească intelectul temerar:

A row of cells with iron bars ran along the corridor. Each cell was congested with people. They lay on the floor. With their beards growing long, their eyes tired, their feet bare and their bodies coated in sweat, they had melted the boundaries of their existence and become a moving mass of flesh.

I Will Never See the World Again

I was the lieutenant happily eating cherries with a gun pointing at his heart. I was Borges telling the mugger to take his life. I was Caesar building walls around Alesia. There are two descriptions of the author used for himself in the book. One is that he is not a brave man. The other is that he possesses a godly arrogance. Both descriptions are spot on. The guides only needed 20 seconds to tie a climbing knot, whereas it might take me a few minutes,” says Zhang. “But as long as our safety and schedule weren’t compromised, I did it by myself. It was my own experience.” Taken to court, the disorientation continued. The judges were out of Kafka, but as in Kafka, not savage or brutal, but erratic, bewildering, surreal. He found that he had been arrested not, as originally stated, for sending “subliminal messages” in support of the attempted coup, but for having participated in it. Challenged as to the change of charge, the judge, remarked, airily: “Our prosecutors like using words the meanings of which they don’t know.” I think some people in prison put a lot of faith in personal agency. Once, I was talking to them about Gregg Caruso’s free will scepticism and his idea that we should see crime as a public health issue rather than looking at it with the lens of moral responsibility. A lot of them reacted by saying ‘No, I’ve put myself in prison, I can get myself out.’

With the wind howling, there wasn’t time for arguments. Qiangzi gave Zhang a final push, and Zhang marched on. Then, with the compassion of a father feeling sorrow for a child, the voice added: ‘He is afraid of the sky.’

Become a Member

In Turkey, as in many other countries, writing is a dangerous occupation. Altan has spent his working life skating on thin ice: he has had over 200 court cases against him and carries a gun for self-defence. However, it is just as easy to be arrested for what you didn’t write. After all, “subliminal messages” are hard to disprove. Altan is damned both ways. While in prison, he wrote this beautiful memoir in which you get to see how democracy dies, how the judicial system is used as a tool to give the authoritarian regime a legal front for its abuses and how lives are ruined in the process. Gândul că aș putea muri a avut asupra mea un efect liniștitor. O persoană care urmează să moară nu are motive să se teamă de vicisitudinile vieții". Și Altan nu se teme de moarte. Mai degrabă se teme de uitare, pe care o consideră cea mai mare pedeapsă pentru un scriitor. "Focul se stinge cu foc", mai spune acesta și își acceptă destinul fără pic de resemnare fariseică, înțelegând cât de firești sunt lucrurile într-o societate renegată, în care dreptatea a devenit doar un mit.