I Will Never See the World Again

"Yes. The first writer we’re going to look at today is just that kind of prisoner. It’s called I Will Never See the World Again by Ahmet Altan. The first thing to say about it is that it’s exquisite. Altan was arrested in 2016 for allegedly sending subliminal messages in his writing to encourage a coup against the government. This book is written from his cell. The book opens on a quiet morning. Altan is in his pyjamas. The police are at the door. He lets them in and they turn over his whole house searching for something—they flip the mattress, pull out the drawers, cut open the bottom of the sofa. Altan’s seen this before, because 45 years earlier his father, who was also a writer, had been arrested on some trumped-up charges as well. So Altan just makes himself a bowl of muesli and sits there eating while it’s all happening. He’s arrested, but the reality of it doesn’t hit him until he’s put in a cell (or ‘the cage’ as he calls it). He looks around and sees numerous people, people who haven’t been out for a number of years. Altan realises that he is never going to get to go to a restaurant again. He’ll never make love to a woman again. He’ll never get to go out for a stroll in the middle of the day. He will never see the world again. The reality of it has him by the throat. He can’t see how he’s going to cope. He gets pulled into the interrogation office. The police officer sits down and offers him a cigarette. Altan says, “No, I only smoke when I’m nervous.” He says that he didn’t know where those words came from. He was as surprised as the officer to hear himself saying them. But the moment he heard those words, he thought, “I’m going be okay. I’m going to be okay, because I have irony and all the possibilities of language. Because I’m a writer, I am going to survive this situation.” “Questions about time are more intense when you’re discussing them with people who are serving an indefinite sentence” Later in the book, his cellmate shares a story with him about a happy episode that happened in his life 10 years ago on a snowy day. Altan envelops himself in the other man’s story, imagining the snow landing on his face. He transports himself outside the prison walls. I Will Never See the World Again is in the lineage of books like Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning . Boethius is lamenting in his prison cell when Lady Philosophy visits him to tell him that “Nothing is wretched only thinking makes it so.” Frankl describes how in a Nazi concentration camp he discovered that there is a gap between stimulus and response and we choose our own attitude to a situation. Altan’s message is the same: ‘I am not going to let reality conquer me, I am going to conquer reality.’ One of the chapters in I Will Never See The World Again is called “The Writer’s Paradox” where he talks about Zeno’s arrow. Altan says that when he was younger, he learned that Zeno’s arrow is both where it is and where it is not at the same time and it reminded him of the feeling he got from being a writer. As a writer, he was in prison but also not in prison: he was in St. Petersburg, or in Rome, or standing next to Odysseus on deck—in all of these places, and not in them. Altan survives prison not by grinding out stoic mantras, but by his beautiful turn of phrase. The book becomes even richer when Altan interrogates the idea of using writing to survive. He says that being a writer is his way of being brave. But he also believes that a writer should not be brave. A writer should be honest before anything else. He worries that his bravery is an expression of dishonesty and that in relying on writing for survival he is sacrificing the thing he values most about writing. There’s a tension and vulnerability within his fierce, writerly resistance. He got out of prison after writing this. And then, days later, got arrested again on another trumped-up charge, spent a long time inside again, and was released in April 2021. Incredibly dangerous. He’s living in Istanbul and still lives with the threat of random prosecution. He refuses to go into exile. 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. In putting the emphasis on the power of the imagination to transcend the physical incarceration, this sounds reminiscent of Jean Genet, the famous French prison writer, who basically just fantasizes his way out of his cell, which actually led to him physically coming out of the cell because he was championed by the intellectuals of the day. I can’t see that happening in Turkey. It was mostly international pressure that lead to Altan’s release. The Guardian led a campaign. I Will Never See the World Again was translated into 28 languages, but it still hasn’t been published in Turkey. I think Altan wants to show that he can maintain his dignity no matter what they do to him. Genet had the opposite strategy. He describes how he loved to smell his own farts in his prison cell, wafting them towards his own nostrils. He embraced the shame identity of the criminal. As a man criminalised for his homosexuality, he was told he was depraved, so he went on the offensive by delighting in his depravity. I didn’t know that. I think it’s a good example of the tensions that arise when philosophers talk about memoirists. In conceptualising a life, you risk running roughshod over the messy details of it."