BRUSSELS, Belgium – When his Kurdish friends commented that his novel says nothing about Turkey’s 30-year war against the Kurds, he replied: “I write for tomorrow.”
Seyhmus Dagtekin, a Kurd who has won accolades and awards for his writing in French, believes that literature is not limited to the present.
“I try to move beyond the daily things to try to reach a state of fullness that we should all try to find. regardless of the daily worries,” he says.
His novel “A la source la nuit,” or “To the spring at night,” won him the “Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie” in 2004.
The novel was then translated into Turkish in 2010 and into English in 2013. A translation into Kurdish is due out soon.
Dagtekin explains that the problems of daily life, including war, are not things that people should ignore. But at the same time, human beings and literature are not limited to the present, he says; people should take some distance to open the door to the future.
The writer, who hails from the Kurdish village of Harun in Turkey, is now an award-winning poet and novelist in French, even though all he could say was "bonjour" when he first arrived in France nearly three decades ago.
Now 51, Dagtekin told Rudaw that the secret to not just mastering French but becoming a literary figure in the language was falling in love with it.
“Patience and hard work are the keys,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Paris.
“You have to take the time to caress every word, to love every word so that it reveals itself to you,” he said, comparing his intimate approach to learning the language to a love affair.
His method has paid off spectacularly: he has won four prizes for his work, which includes nine books of poems and one novel.
In 2007, he won the “Prix Mallarmé“ for his collection of poems “Juste un pont sans feu,” or "Just a bridge without fire." A year later, the same book won him the “Prix Théophile Gautier” from the famed Académie Francaise.
Dagtekin has also received the Yvan Goll international prize for Francophone poetry for his “Les chemins du nocturne,” or "The nocturnal paths."
Although he comes from a humble background, he and his brothers benefited from a family where education was important. After finishing high school, he entered the University of Ankara to study journalism.
In 1986, when he was 22, Dagtekin arrived in France to do a PhD in cinema. Though he had studied English in Turkey and knew some Arabic, he could not speak French.
He studied French as a foreign language for nine months at the University of Nancy, where he embraced the language and took his time to understand its intricacies.
Even though the professors advised against it, he also attended a higher-level French course and was soon on the road to mastering the language.
Dagtekin started writing Turkish poems at the age of 14 and continued doing so throughout his studies. He first published an anthology of poems in Turkish in 1992, when he was in France. It was called “The simple state of love,” and contains all the poems he wrote between the ages of 18 and 25.
A few years later he began publishing in French. “Les Chemins du Nocturne,” which won him yet another award, was published in 2000.
Between 1992 and 2010 Dagtekin did not return to Turkey because, he said, “I did not want to go back to a country that was launching war against my people and I did not want to do military service.”
In 2010 he renewed his Turkish passport and has since returned to Turkey three times to see his sick father.
In 2012, he took his two sons to his village of Harun. Even though they do not speak Kurdish or Turkish, they felt they belonged there, he recounted.
Himself, he never felt a stranger in France or anywhere else, because he never felt in exile, Dagtekin explained.
Wherever he is, he said, he only needs to lean on a tree to find the bond to the land he had left.
He loves this planet as if it is his village. That is why, he said, his literature is not about exile but about transition: “It is not the distance that makes you an exile, but the way you position yourself to your roots, and where you come from.”
