DIYARBAKIR, Turkey: A book fair in Diyarbakir, the largest city in southeastern Turkey, took place for the very first time in this far-flung, Kurd-populated region. Nearly 125 exhibitors unpacked their boxes full of books in the halls of the Tüyap exhibition centre, which until recently featured cars and agricultural machinery. For an entire week in May, nearly 89,000 visitors from Diyarbakir and the surrounding areas used the opportunity to survey the Turkish-Kurdish publishing landscape and to generously stock up on books.
The shopping bags of fair visitors were full of language, grammar and poetry books, all of which are highly valued in a region noted for the oral transmission of its literature. Sales were also brisk for many standard works on the history of European politics, sociology and philosophy.
Publishers at the book fair confirmed that readers from this region have a greater interest in sociological and political issues than elsewhere in the country. "It is striking how totally different readers in Diyarbakir are from those in Istanbul. People in Istanbul pursue extremely varied interests and that is reflected in their book purchases. Here, people seem to be searching for books with political solutions and on new ways to live their lives," said Gazi Bertan who works at Kaos Publishers Istanbul.
"It has taken Turkey a long time to recover from the restrictive policies imposed after the 1980 military putsch. Now there is a great thirst to freely discover new paths and possibilities. Perhaps this is why many political and religious books are so popular — because they were unavailable for so long," explained a book dealer at the fair.
The crowd in front of author Iskender Pala’s table where he signed autographs bore witness to this theory. The professor of Turkish language and classical literature, as well as a writer of mystical love stories, Pala provides a voice for the emotional world of a young, religiously conservative generation, which for the first time is consciously creating a path for itself that includes both its traditional faith and participation in modern life.
Kurdish publishing houses such as Avesta, Lis, Nubihar, and Belki were notable at the book fair in Diyarbakir. These small Kurdish publishers often can’t afford a stand at the large book fairs in Istanbul. But here, in the overwhelmingly Kurdish populated east of the country, their books were certainly the public’s favorites.
Written Kurdish was illegal in Turkey for much of the 20th century, which makes the event all the more poignant. "In addition to textbooks on the Kurdish language itself, people here primarily buy the classics, such as poetry by [16th century Kurdish writer and mystic] Melaye Ciziri or epic poems by Ehmede Xani [a 17th century Kurdish writer and Sunni cleric]. Although these books are almost 500 years old, they are new for most Kurds. Kurds are only now beginning to become familiar with their own literature," said a book dealer from the religiously oriented Nubihar Publishing House.
An amused group surrounded the next stand where staff at the Diyarbakir Kurdish Institute is selling t-shirts featuring wordplay in Kurdish in an attempt to increase the popularity of the Kurdish language. And publishing houses such as Avesta, Belki and Lis offered a broad range of books by young authors who write in Kurdish.
The event provided Kurdish publishers with the opportunity to represent themselves alongside the larger publishing houses, as well as to establish tentative business relations on the basis of translation licenses (from Turkish to Kurdish and the other way around). This is an important step towards assimilating Kurdish culture within the broader Turkish identity. The Turkish publishing house Ithaki is a prime example. It has already translated into Turkish many works by Mehmed Uzun, the grand seigneur of Kurdish literature who lived in exile in Sweden as a political refugee until 2005.
A secondary indication of this normalization process is that for the first time Turkish language publishers at the book fair attempted to attract a Kurdish language clientele. For instance, the company idefix.com published the first e-book in Kurdish and the Turkish publisher Dogan had a banner at the book fair in Kurdish that stated, "Reading is the Future."
On one of the evenings, Diyarbakir’s busy mayor, Osman Baydemir, made an appearance and distributed Kurdish language children’s books at the city administration stand. And while all the cameras focused on the mayor, in the background, book fair hostesses hurried through the aisles and some books even ended up in the pockets of bibliophile thieves. It was business as usual, even here in Diyarbakir.
Sonja Galler is a freelance writer. This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from Qantara.de. The full text can be found at www.qantara.de.
