The year was 1985.
In America, President Ronald Reagan began a peaceful second term.
In Turkey, seething tensions continued to grip a country torn apart by years of violence and death, both before and after a military coup had toppled the freely-elected government—triggering the tumultuous arrest of 650,000 Kurds and Turks, some sadistically tortured to death.
Most Turks and Kurds watched in horror—and silence.
But a young rising-star of Turkish literature, whose work would later phenomenally sell 11 million copies in 60 languages, was so alarmed at the unspeakable cruelty that he wanted to do something about it.
And he did.
Believing the pen is mightier than the sword, he invited two already-established literary giants to assess first-hand the vile brutality.
Orhan Pamuk, just beginning to amass writing accolades, persuaded two authors already enshrined in the international constellation of illustrious playwrights—American Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible) and Englishman Harold Pinter (The Homecoming and The French Lieutenant’s Woman)—to tour Turkey with him.
The generals shunned the playwrights like deadly locust plagues.
But torture survivors flocked to them, hoping for healing balm.
“Some were still trembling,” wrote Mr. Pinter, as they exposed their spine-shivering, heartbreaking torments.
One man’s wife would not even talk.
She couldn’t.
She had been petrified into muteness by the blood-curdling anguish of seeing her shattered, emaciated husband rotting in a Turkish prison.
Harold Pinter couldn’t get her hair-raising spectacle out of his mind!
The terrified woman haunted his conscience!
For Arthur Miller, this outrageous madness was a far different kind of “crucible” than the grim, long-ago Salem Witch Trials of 1692 America that he had written so powerfully about.
From Istanbul, they proceeded to Ankara. Robert Strausz-Hupé, the American Ambassador in the Turkish capital, honored them with dinner and invited several Turkish notables, including Nazli Ilicak, a Turkish journalist.
Sparks flew in minor clashes. Ms. Ilicak, who had recently been freed from jail and acknowledged that torture was routinely used on political prisoners, still spouted resentment. She claimed foreigners were only interested in exploiting it for money, and should butt out!
“That is an insult and was meant as an insult,” Mr. Pinter angrily responded, “and I throw it back in your face.”
In fairness to Ms. Ilicak, she knew her visitors well, and feared her country might be dissected by them, as Mr. Pinter had done a year before, after attending a swanky London party, where two “extremely attractive and intelligent young Turkish women” were incensed that Mr. Pinter was alarmed about torture in Turkey.
Mr. Pinter, instead of “strangling” them, as he was tempted, rushed home and wrote his One for the Road play about a torturer who fancies himself as the Almighty and wants to “keep the world clean for God.”
As Pascal warned us: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
The Spectator newspaper said the play “floods the mind with despair, the eyes with tears, the stomach with sickness, the heart with dread.”
Those are exactly the sentiments that soul-searingly leap from my body and mind when reading the book Prison Number 5, by Mehdi Zana, a sort of same-song, second-verse account of hideous torture and shameless malevolence in Turkish prisons that Mr. Pinter described.
The parallels are eerily similar, even though Mr. Pinter’s play was speculatively penned from his London studio, and Mr. Zana’s was actually drawn from real-life horrors shaming Turkish prisons.
If two beautiful Turkish women can “inspire” Harold Pinter to write such shocking scenes about a tortured father, raped mother and their frightened seven years-old son, what would he have written if he had met Mehdi Zana or read his account of the horrors in Prison Number 5?
Mr. Pinter wrote his play about the mute Turkish woman in 1988 called Mountain Language, which is uncannily reminiscent of Mr. Zana’s harsh ordeal in Diyarbakir Military Prison, one of the most notorious prisons in the world, but was not written until 1997.
It was as if Mr. Pinter could telescope through time’s ruthless register of nauseating crimes against humanity through the ages.
Mr. Pinter’s eight-page account clairvoyantly presages some of the most tear-jerking chapters in Mehdi Zana’s prison tribulation.
It also extracts this chilling warning from insightful Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
If so, the degree of civilization in Turkish society is perilously small!
Although the play Mountain Language has nothing to do with Kurds, the scenes are so extraordinarily frightening that Huda M. Salih of the University of Dohuk adapted it for Kurdish audiences and made direct references to the hapless Kurdish prisoner, Mehdi Zana.
Mountain Language and Prison Number 5 make commendable reading for Kurds, because they can easily identify with the sadistic hatred.
In Mountain Language, a mother waits on the frozen, snow-caked ground outside a prison to see her son—but is heartlessly refused entry for eight hours, during which a fierce Doberman dog has ferociously slashed her thumb, now bleeding badly through a dirty-rag bandage.
Even after she is allowed to meet her son, they are cold-heartedly warned that “mountain language” (Kurdish) is illegal in prison; they must speak only Turkish—which the mother doesn’t know!
After the son explains this to the guard, he thinks it’s so funny that he hilariously reports it to his supervisor.
On a second visit, the son, bleeding from pitiless torture, is told by the guard that a one-time exception will allow him to speak his mountain language—but only temporarily.
This callous kick-the-dog-a-bone gesture notwithstanding, the mother refuses to speak at all—despite anguished pleading from her son, moaning with convulsive misery as he collapses on the grimy floor.
But she still cannot speak.
Like the Turkish woman Harold Pinter met in Istanbul, she has terrifyingly retreated from her harsh, malicious, unforgiving reality. She has been mercilessly malformed into stark muteness!
Unmoved by the heart-rending scene, the pitiless guard snarls: “You go out of your way to give them a helping hand and they fuck it up.”
The lights darken.
The play ends.
Something similar happens in Diyarbakir Military Prison. Mehdi Zana has been horribly tortured. Many of his friends have been beaten to death. He is afraid that dire fate awaits him. He thinks of his family, especially his daughter who was born after his imprisonment—and wonders if he will ever hold her in his pain-racked arms.
One day, he is told he can see his mother—but sternly warned that he must speak only in Turkish. Knowing that his mother doesn’t speak it, he doesn’t know what to do—and just stares at her in stony silence.
His mother, puzzled by her son’s aching silence, cries out, “Hewaro, hewaro, kuremin kar u lal kirine!” meaning, “Oh my God, oh my God, they have beaten my son into muteness and deafness!”
I think God spoke—and spoke magnificently—through Mehdi Zana’s tormented, heart-shredded mother in that ill-fated moment of truth!
He may have also spoken through Jacob Bronowsky, the noted Polish-British mathematician and historian of science, who said it all with these profound words on torture:
“The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.”
Sadly, there are far too many “perverts” leaping through such infuriating loopholes in disgraceful Turkish prisons!
