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Enduring Grief: Autobiography as "Poetry of Witness" in the Work of Assia

Djebar and Nazim Hikmet

Article  in  Comparative Literature Studies · January 2003

DOI: 10.1353/cls.2003.0016

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Azade Seyhan

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 40, Number 2, 2003, pp. 159-172

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DOI: 10.1353/cls.2003.0016

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 ENDURING GRIEF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS
“POETRY OF WITNESS” IN THE WORK OF
ASSIA DJEBAR AND NAZIM HIKMET

Azade Seyhan
In the brilliance of this desert, in the safe harbor of writing in
quest of a language beyond languages, by trying fiercely to oblit-
erate all the furies of the collective self-devouring in oneself,
finding “the word within” again that, alone, remains our fertile
homeland.
——Assia Djebar

He who invokes history is always secure,

The dead will not rise to witness against him.
——Czeslaw Milosz

I. Poetry of Witness

Critical interest in the growing body of exilic literatures has necessitated

another reexamination of the generic status of autobiography. Writing out-
side one’s language and geography requires a contract between spaces, tem-
poralities, and cultures. By convention, it is the autobiographical “I,” be it
part of a “real” referential system or a literary one that does not necessarily
aspire to transparency or reality but can mimic it, that negotiates this con-
tract.1 Writers of exile have pushed the limits of autobiography by trans-
forming the voice of the traditional subject into a multivoiced expression of
their communities in exile, philosophical meditations on loss and memory,
or the (auto)biography of a particular geography. Postcolonial theory has

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES , Vol. 40, No. 2, 2003.

Copyright © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

159
160 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

undeniably brought about a paradigm shift in our reading of modern

literature(s) and contributed significantly to the rising popularity of Cul-
tural Studies as a discipline. In a similar vein, exilic writing or what I have
elsewhere called “writing outside the nation,” positioned both within and
without national borders and postcolonial discourse, has crossed disciplin-
ary boundaries in its quest for mapping dislocation, cultural fragmentation,
confrontation with foreignness, and, ultimately, the translation and under-
standing of the foreign (other).2 These tropes of exile find their most poi-
gnant and distinctive expression in the voice of the displaced “I.” Taking
into account this polyphonic idiom and interdisciplinary imagination of
modern autobiographies of exile, some critics opt for the term “autobio-
graphical voices” that suggests a dialogic connection between the “author”
of the autobiography and her family, community, and ancestors.3 Notions
of identity, family, and native territory shift and demand reformulation, as
increasingly larger numbers of people move across borders and histories.
Most contemporary forms of exilic writing bear the impress of social
and historical upheavals that have precipitated major demographic trans-
fers. As a nongeneric genre that resists classification and conclusive defini-
tion and captures the fluid nature of personal recollection, transition, and
dislocation, autobiography has become a preeminent venue of expression
for diasporic voices. The ever expanding domain of autobiographical writ-
ing and the steadily growing interest in exilic and other forms of
(auto)biography have brought these into the focus of disciplines ranging
from literature, history, and philosophy to anthropology, ethnography, so-
ciology, social work, and even science. Michael M. J. Fischer, an anthro-
pologist, who has written extensively on the reflexive storytelling capacity
of autobiography, argues that “autobiographical screenings of science”—
that is, scientists’ autobiographies—not only echo the collective voices of a
scientific community (the sum of its theoretical and empirical efforts) and
its specific social and cultural terms but also become important means of
explaining science and offering a hermeneutic account of multiple perspec-
tives in scientific procedure.4 With regard to the use of autobiography in
anthropological research, Fischer considers the cross-cultural fluency of
ethnic autobiographies and autoethnographies an indispensable tool for
sketching out “cultural and social terrain where traditional social theory is
blind or archaic.”5
The interest in the sociological dimensions of exile and ethnicity has
led to the incorporation of autobiographical narratives as heuristic tools
into the fields of social science research. Such narratives no longer repre-
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS THE ‘POETRY OF WITNESS’ 161

sent the voice of a singular self but are registered as conversations between
one or more narrators in a larger social and communal context. Autobiog-
raphy has often been defined as a form of self-translation. Writing about
one’s culture in exile or as member of a minority group within a dominant
culture requires a labor of cultural translation in the widest sense of the
term. The speaking subject needs to translate not only voice into writing
and the mother tongue into the other one but also one cultural idiom into
another. In an age of shifting perceptions about national, ethnic, and gen-
der identities, changing borders, and seemingly endless movement of popu-
lations, autobiography, because it is a genre that defies containment yet
contains the various (psychoanalytic) tropes of displacement and transfer,
is uniquely positioned to lend expression to the anxiety of memory and the
trauma linked to various losses suffered in departure and transit.
I have elsewhere argued that (auto)biographies of exile are often struc-
tured as an out-of-bounds genre that captures the fluidity of the experience
of migration and transition in a nuanced fashion. The defining trope of this
genre is neither the singular self nor subjective remembrance but a collec-
tive memory. Autobiographies of exile can variously and simultaneously
assume the form of personal testimony and biography of parents, ancestors,
or community. They can also be “the diary of a place (often a city); a polyvocal
history; a meditation on language, love, and metaphysics,” and, in some
cases, “‘an unauthorized biography of the nation.’” 6
There is, however, another conceptual and thematic dimension to per-
sonal accounts of exilic experience that demands critical attention in these
times besieged by ethnic and religious fighting, ubiquitous terrorism, and
the senseless killing of civilians within and without the range of actual war-
fare. When people are persecuted, catapulted out of home and history, and
suffer unimaginable trauma, what survives as witness to their lives and sto-
ries? What are, if any, the conditions for the possibility of communicating
trauma and the experience of victimhood? And if communicability is
thwarted for lack of interlocutors, are the persecuted doubly victimized? Is
it possible to express tragedy without indulging in tragic forms of subjec-
tivity, without recourse to self-representations as victim? If speaking for
victims who cannot speak for themselves is viewed as an ethically objec-
tionable gesture, what possibility remains for them to claim agency in his-
tory? In what follows, I read selected (auto)biographical narratives of exile
as poetry of witness, as they bear witness to personal and collective histories
threatened by forgetting and erasure. By acting as interlocutors, these
(auto)biographical voices moderate a delicate and critical exchange between
162 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

self ’s experience and representation of trauma and the emphatic identifica-

tion with the trauma of others who are voiceless by force or circumstance
(or due to the absence of an sympathetic interlocutors).
Although the course of the twentieth century became a stage to an
unprecedented number of widespread migrations and displacements, our
memories have recorded only a fraction of the tales of human tragedy that
unfolded on that stage. In Europe, the first half of the century witnessed
the victimization and deportation of millions of people by their own gov-
ernments. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have forcefully argued
that modernity transformed the ideals of the Enlightenment into a massive
betrayal of the masses.7 The modern nation-state betrayed and persecuted
its own citizens by acts of unspeakable horror. By definition, the unspeak-
able cannot inhabit speech. However, writers whose lives have been in-
scribed by extremities of loss, by persecution, exile, and dislocation, have
invented and imagined modes of writing that translate unimaginable trauma
into powerful narrative. They have shown us that memories of violence
need not be suffered in silence and solitude. In his powerful account of life
at the Buchenwald concentration camp, the Spanish born philosopher and
poet Jorge Semprun, who was arrested by the Nazis for his role in the French
Resistance, demonstrates that writing can capture the unspeakable.
Semprun’s Literature or Life resists Adorno’s famous dictum that there could
be no poetry after Ausschwitz. Semprun argues to the contrary that since
“language contains everything,” those who “are able to shape their evidence
into an artistic object, a space of creation . . . [o]r of re-creation” can see into
the most unreachable depths of human experience and bear witness to
unarticulated extremities. Writing conveys “some of the truth of such testi-
mony.”8
However, the re-membering of extreme trauma cannot be gauged by
simplistic criteria of accuracy. The experience of extremity requires new
forms or transformations of poetic expression. It fragments received forms
and reconfigures them in tropes of loss. Those who live in exile occasioned
by political persecution suffer a double or manifold loss, that of homeland,
community, and language as well as that of family members and close friends
who were victims of imprisonment, torture, and assassination. Long-winded,
realistic depictions of tragedy and sorrow inevitably take away from the
intensity of lived experience. Poetic (auto)biographies that are the subject
of this paper, on the other hand, rely on the intimacy of shared silences,
whisper, direct speech, and the power of images to protect that intensity.
Since autobiography is a re-membered form, its structure is one of memory—
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS THE ‘POETRY OF WITNESS’ 163

eidetic yet fragmented. The writing of official history may be the preroga-
tive of the victors and rulers who erase the vanquished from time’s registers
and rob them of their names. However, narrative memory that is power-
fully linked to trauma confronts the theft of history, and the site of writing
enables alternative remembrances and histories to emerge. In this essay, I
focus on the work of Assia Djebar, the Algerian writer and filmmaker who
lives in Paris, and the poetry of Nazim Hikmet, the prominent Turkish
poet who died in exile, in an attempt to illustrate how memoirs and biogra-
phies written outside the nation transform poetic imagination into a sanc-
tuary for outlawed remembrances. The simultaneously personal, dialogic,
and public nature of the two writers’ exilic memoirs mark these as exem-
plary instances of poetic Trauerarbeit (work of mourning) that ultimately
becomes a memorial to silenced voices.

II. Assia Djebar and Writing Witness in Exile

Algerian White is Djebar’s moving and intimate account of her bleeding

motherland where in the mid-nineties thousands of intellectuals, teachers,
women, artists, enlightened and tolerant Islamic leaders were daily am-
bushed, murdered, or assassinated by extremist Islamic groups—Islamic
Salvation Front (the outlawed FIS), its military branch, Islamic Salvation/
Liberation Army (AIS), Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Her story takes the
form of a sustained eulogy for her three fallen friends, Mahfoud Boucebi, a
psychiatrist, M’Hamed Boukhobza, a sociology professor, and Abdelkader
Alloula, a dramatist. It is a meditation on courage and death, a search for a
language of outrage, and a critical-poetic combat against the dying of the
light. Here Djebar creates a multifarious narrative form that ideally suits
the work of mourning and commemoration.
The Algerian Liberation War that lasted from 1954 to 1962 was one
of the bloodiest independence struggles in recent memory. Less than three
decades after Algeria won her independence from the French, the country
was hurled into yet another abyss of violence that claimed hundreds of lives
daily. The extremity of political unrest pushed the country to the brink of
civil war. The tone of Djebar’s narrative carries all the cadences of the tragic
mode. In the face of overwhelming tragedy, Djebar declares that writing
acquires urgency. She writes to resuscitate “[a]n Algeria of blood, of streams
of blood, of bodies decapitated and mutilated.”9 The urgency of writing is
the urgency to stop the bleeding, the ink as antidote to blood. “[I]n a ran-
164 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

dom and bloody lottery,” writes Djebar, “some of the most audacious” and
“the most reserved” intellectuals have been carried off into an eternal si-
lence. Although they have been silenced, and the voices of those left be-
hind cannot halt the violence, Djebar maintains her faith in the corrective
and redemptive power of words: “Such a chain of violence and its blind
acceleration certainly emphasize the uselessness of words but their neces-
sity as well.” 10
In Fantasia, Djebar had employed a montage of memoir, letters, dia-
ries, reportage, and fantasy to narrate the tragic and heroic history of Alge-
ria.11 In Algerian White, the dominant metaphor that cuts to the heart of a
terror perpetuated by a religious fundamentalism, determined to take power
at all costs, is the shroud. It is the white brought about by hemorrhage and
death, “the white of dust, of sunless light, of dilution.”12 Djebar’s fluent
narrative of remembering is a poetic outrage against the unrelenting serial
murders of writers, scholars, artists, and teachers. The immediacy of inti-
mate conversations recalled, the memory of cultural intimacy born of shared
languages of bi- and trilingual intellectuals in Djebar’s circle, and reflec-
tions on history, language, and literature situate this Trauerarbeit at the in-
tersection of private grief and public commemoration of a beloved martyred
homeland. Djebar’s book is a tribute to three personal friends, a heartbreak-
ingly urgent will to protect their legacy, and a raw reflection on her own
mortality and sense of survivor’s guilt. Although Djebar dedicates the first
half of the book to her three close friends, other martyrs are not forgotten.
She reconstructs from shards of memory, eye-witness accounts, and news
reports minute by minute scenarios of the deaths of many other prominent
Algerians and of three women friends. Unlike Fantasia, Algerian White does
not attempt to specifically recover women’s voices; here martyrdom is not
and cannot be gender-specific. In a land darkened by shadows of undis-
criminating death squads, suffering and trauma are equal opportunity do-
mains. “Half of the land of Algeria has just been seized by moving, terrifying
and sometimes hideous shadows,” writes Djebar, “[i]t is no longer just the
night of women separated, isolated, exploited as mere child bearers—for
generations on end!”13
The three women Djebar elegiacally recalls in this intimate portrait of
mourning are not in a class with the millions of Algerian women deprived
of voice and status. They were women with powerful voices who wrote
“until their final farewell.”14 Josie Fanon, a journalist and the widow of Frantz
Fanon, commits suicide. Anna Gréki, a prominent poet, persecuted and
imprisoned as a Communist militant and exiled, returns to Algeria after its
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS THE ‘POETRY OF WITNESS’ 165

independence only to die in surgery at the age of thirty five. And Taos
Amrouche, poet Jean Amrouche’s sister and a renowned poet and singer
dies prematurely of cancer. Djebar, herself “settled into a constant coming
and going, resigned . . . to this between-two-worlds, between-two-lives,
between-two-freedoms,” shares in their discourse and lament of exile and
in their difficult and conflicted relationship with both Algeria and France.15
She states that she assembles the profiles of these women, haunted by tena-
cious pasts, not only because she misses them but also because she laments
the broken promise of a new age of women’s literature in Algeria.
Not only colonization but also modernization projects of liberated new
third world nations that took the form of an imposed Westernization have
fractured shared histories, languages, and allegiances. During the war for
independence, thousands of young Algerian men and women who joined
the revolution were killed by their own people, because they were educated,
spoke the language of the colonizer, and were, therefore, suspect. Religious
fundamentalism and provincial nationalism have targeted teachers, univer-
sity students, and journalists, dedicated to the education and edification of
their land’s underprivileged. Similarly, the foundation of the modern Re-
public of Turkey, established after a victorious guerilla style war of inde-
pendence against the Western powers that had occupied the crumbling
Ottoman State after its defeat in the First World War, rested on a fault-line
that divided the secular minded architects of the Republic from a silent and
temporarily suppressed religious majority. Many modernization reforms,
such as alphabet and literacy reforms and universal suffrage that were suc-
cessfully implemented in the major cities failed to have much effect on
religious rural strongholds. Members of a young revolutionary “education
army” in Turkey incurred the fate of many Algerian intellectuals who had
fought in the Algerian war of independence only to be persecuted by their
own people. Turkish literature of the early years of the Republic, of the late
twenties and thirties (especially in the work of such acclaimed writers as R.
N. Güntekin and Y. K. Karaosmanoglu), poignantly portrays the tragic fate
of the young teachers who, with a new degree in hand, go to desolate and
far away provinces to battle superstition and ignorance, only to be hunted
by religious village heads, imams, and fathers who needed to keep their
children working in the fields. Many Turkish writers, who went into exile
in Germany in the seventies and eighties, have captured, in their
(auto)biographical accounts, the troubled legacy of modernity in Turkey, a
land that had to come to grips with all the challenges of belated nation-
hood.
166 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

The autobiographical fictions of many German-Turkish writers writ-

ing against oppression in the relative security of exile in the West are veiled
testimonies of political factions. Since I have written extensively about their
work elsewhere, I’ll only refer very briefly to a few of their texts here.16 Like
Djebar’s Algerian White, Aysel Özakins’s Soll ich hier alt werden? (Am I to
grow old here?) and Leidenschaft der Anderen (The sorrow of the others)
depict the high cost of political conflicts in the land she had to flee and
expose the perpetuators of a culture of terror that victimized the loved ones
she left behind.17 The biographical sketches of her homeland become testi-
monies that purchase entry into history for the nameless fallen men and
women and honor their place in the momentous transformations of a fate-
ful era. Özakin’s writing in exile often reads like an expression of penance
in which her martyred friends, the unsung and forgotten heroes who re-
sisted political oppression, are honored in narrative memory. Emine Sevgi
Özdamar, arguably the most prominent Turkish-German woman writer
and recipient of numerous prestigious literary awards, including the Ingeborg
Bachmann Prize, employs the language of the fantastical or instances of
the untranslatable to convey the unspeakable. In a story from her collection
of autobiographical tales, the Mutterzunge (Mother tongue), she recalls the
grief of a mother standing in front of the prison where her son, a political
prisoner, was executed. Describing the torture that this young man and
many others were subjected to as political prisoners, Özdamar writes, “they
pumped out the milk they drank from their mothers through their nos-
trils,” a common figure of speech in Turkish which means to harass or tor-
ture but which sounds through this alienation effect of untranslatability
particularly savage and serves as a graphic description of police brutality
she is referring to.18
Many Turkish writers who sought asylum in Germany during the eight-
ies have chronicled in stories written in exile what could not be said at the
time in their homeland. As was the case in Algeria, in the Turkey of eight-
ies and nineties, courageous journalists, writers, and professors who dared
to speak out against fundamentalist Islamic movements were gunned down
in broad daylight. Writing the terror painstakingly re-membered breaks
the silences of history. Djebar does not openly name or condemn the
ultrareligious factions that assassinated her friends, as she refrains from re-
ducing their memory to a partisan posture. Written before the fateful events
of September 11, 2001, Algerian White is a powerful poetic prophecy of
what was to come. Alice Schwarzer, editor-in-chief of Germany’s leading
feminist journal EMMA, has recently edited a collection of essays by writ-
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS THE ‘POETRY OF WITNESS’ 167

ers who have long been critical of Islamic fundamentalism but who “no-
body wanted to listen to until September 11.”19 In her introduction to the
volume, Die Gotteskrieger und die falsche Toleranz (God’s Warriors and the
false tolerance), Schwarzer forcibly argues that political interests in the West
believed they “could play with the genie in the bottle, use it to their own
ends—against communism or for pipelines. But that genie has long since
escaped the bottle.”20 The Western “liberals,” on the other hand, tolerated
Islamic fundamentalism outside their borders as a fundamental human right
in the semantics of an outmoded humanism. Media and political analysts
can speak out self-righteously after the fact, but writers like Djebar inti-
mate or expose, without being intimidated by assassins, the fatal conse-
quences of silence against terror.

III. Nazim Hikmet

Perhaps the single most powerful source of inspiration for Turkish writers
of Germany is the poetry of Nazim Hikmet, arguably the most acclaimed
modern Turkish poet, who died in Russian exile in 1963 at the age of 61.
Almost half of his life was spent in prison and forced exile, bereft of family,
home, his only child, and his beloved mother tongue. Yet his voice remained
strong, defiant, and hopeful in the face of torture, prison, and a life in exile.
Unlike his literary successors who mostly write in German, Hikmet, while
exiled from his native Turkish, used this language in a wealth of poetic
forms to register exile. His books were banned in Turkey during his life-
time. Although he was translated into several languages, the pain of not
seeing his Turkish in print grieved him immeasurably and became an en-
during tragic marker of his exile. During Turkey’s long struggle for inde-
pendence between 1919–1923 after the defeat and collapse of the Ottoman
Empire, Hikmet was in the forefront of the revolutionary movement. After
the establishment of the young republic, Hikmet and a few friends, fired by
the excitement of their youthful idealism and the desire to take the revolu-
tion against imperialist powers a step further, went to study in Moscow and
learn about the promise of Marxism firsthand. Upon his return to Turkey,
Hikmet’s star rose rapidly as his powerful first poems published under the
title 835 Lines became widely read both in Turkey and abroad. However,
the fragility of the new republic, its fear of insurgencies, and the Russian
threat next door had generated an air of mistrust and suspicion against
independent minded artists and intellectuals who became targets of politi-
168 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

cal persecution. In 1938, Nazim was tried for inciting the army to riot based
on the ridiculous “evidence” that one of his books, freely sold in all book-
stores at the time, was found in a cadet’s room in the military academy. He
was sentenced to 28 years in prison. In 1949, an international committee of
writers and artists—including Paul Robeson, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Paul
Sartre—was founded in Paris, and a campaign for his freedom began.
Hikmet was finally released in a general amnesty in 1950 but was drafted at
the age of 49 to be sent to the front in the Korean War. He was frail and in
very poor health. Fully aware that he would not come back alive from this
ordeal, Hikmet fled in a small boat to Russia by way of Rumania. He trav-
eled extensively in Europe, remained an active member of the World Peace
Organization and an advocate for the oppressed, and died of a bad heart in
Moscow.
His persecutors, petty, paranoid, and small-minded as they were, nev-
ertheless, had no doubt about the power of Hikmet’s words to fire his audi-
ences and enlist them in the fight against tyranny. His work reached its
most profound expression in the poignantly confessional idiom of his exile
years. The powerful lyricism of Nazim’s autobiographical voice heeded the
ethical imperative of giving expression to the pain and trauma of those
subjected to persecution and torture. As the tragic course of his own life
was intimately connected to the many hapless victims of fascism in the
early twentieth century, the vocabulary of Hikmet’s testimony of loss and
extremity became an empathic and emphatic form of identification with
the martyred whose voices were silenced. Like Djebar’s elegiac re-membering
of the last moments of her martyred friends, Hikmet’s visions of his victim-
ized fellow humans participate in real-life tragedies by lending their imagi-
nations to the stories on paper. Here poetic empathy conveys the urgency
of remembering and insists on the necessity of witnessing rather than dwell-
ing on the ethical undecidability of representing the trauma of the other.
In a haunting poem entitled “It is Snowing in the Dark,” Hikmet’s
voice, which he compares to “the song of an untalented street singer,” reaches
out to the unknown fallen soldier of the Spanish Civil War, a song the
singer knows will not be heard by his intended listener. In the intimacy of
the direct address, Hikmet speculates that the soldier at “Madrid’s gate”
may have been a farmer, a coal miner, or perhaps somebody with a beautiful
voice. “Maybe you were a student of philosophy or attended Law School,”
the poet muses, “and your books were destroyed under the wheels of an
Italian tank in the university district.”21 University students, the future of a
nation’s progress, cut off in the prime of their lives by their own armies and
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS THE ‘POETRY OF WITNESS’ 169

governments, are the most tragic heroes of Hikmet’s poems. In a grippingly

visual poem, “The Body Lying on Beyazit Square” (the gate of the Univer-
sity of Istanbul faces Beyazit Square), written in May 1960, the poet mourns
a fallen student killed in an attack on student protestors. The wound on his
forehead, like a crimson carnation, will drip on the street “until my people,
armed and singing songs of freedom, march to the big square and conquer
it.”22 In fact, on May 27 of the same year, the Turkish armed forces, backed
by popular support, brought down a corrupt and cruel government that had
emptied the treasury, fomented religious strife, and ordered the army to
turn its weapons on students, professors, and judges.
Because he lived and wrote in an era that witnessed two world wars,
the Turkish war of independence, the Russian revolution, and the growing
political consciousness and resentment against Western imperialisms in
Asian countries and experienced the trauma of displacement, disenfran-
chisement, prison, and involuntary exile, Hikmet’s poetry was informed by
a passionate rejection of unwarranted pain inflicted on innocent citizens by
governments the world over. Though a self-styled Marxist and engagé writer,
Hikmet left a poetic legacy that was not partisan in any accepted sense. But
the viscerally engaging power of his verse sensitizes the reader to the plight
of invisible and inaudible masses eclipsed by the enormity of history’s di-
sasters.
Much has recently been written about the impossibility of represent-
ing the Shoah. Does witnessing extreme trauma bring with it the responsi-
bility of owning up one’s inability to express the other’s suffering? Maybe.
But the ownership of this inadequacy should not mean the defeat of our
response. Understanding suffering can benefit from poetic hearing. The
structure and cadence of Hikmet’s elegies suggest that experiences of loss
and suffering are always incomparable, and the listener/recorder/writer has
to approach each instance of trauma on its own terms. The unspeakability
of trauma need not always arise from the impossibility of representation—
which itself has become a trope. Experiences of extremity may not be trans-
lated into a common idiom; however, this untranslatability should not erase
the reality of that experience. Hikmet, like Heinrich Heine, Bertolt Brecht,
W.H. Auden and many other attentive listeners of human tragedy has used
the powerful compactness of poetry as “material witness” to suffering. Lyric
fragments can be memorized and carried everywhere as enduring testimo-
nies and mementos. The elliptical or fragmentary forms of lyric writing
represent extremity indirectly yet powerfully. The jagged edges of the frag-
ment suggest inflicted pain, and ellipses pack the power of the unseen.
170 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

One of the most memorable instances of confronting sorrow and loss

in the economy of the lyric is Hikmet’s poem, “Autobiography,” written
during the last years of his life in exile. Here the poet’s sole interlocutor is
his own voice. The power of the autobiographical “I” confirmed by the
name of the author is joined by the fluency of the lyrical “I” to convey the
urgency of losses suffered. Here the poet speaks not merely of his life but
also implicitly attends to voices silenced by persecution in any form. “[S]ome
people know all about plants some about fish / I know separation,” he writes,
“some people know the names of the stars by heart / I recite absences.”23 At
thirty, he was condemned to death and at forty-eight awarded the Peace
Prize. However, the ban on his books in his native land proves more devas-
tating than prison, death sentence, or exile: “my writings are published in
thirty or forty languages / in my Turkey in my Turkish they are banned.”24
About his daring escape from his beloved Turkey in a small boat, he says,
“in ’51 I sailed with a young friend into the teeth of death.”25 He concludes
by stating, “even if today in Berlin I’m croaking of grief / I can say I’ve lived
like a human being.”26
The enormity of Hikmet’s trials are toned down not only by the sober-
ness and precision of the poet’s diction but also by his rejection of self-pity
and acknowledgment of the greater suffering of others. Hikmet states that
he never went to war or had to “burrow in bomb shelters in the bottom of
the night” or “take to the road under diving planes.”27 But he spent thirteen
excruciatingly difficult years in ailing health in Turkish prisons and thir-
teen in exile, mostly in Moscow, where he dared to be an outspoken critic of
the totalitarian state that, in his view, betrayed the ideals of Marxism. Both
at home and in exile, he lived under the threat of persecution, incarceration,
and deportation, and barely escaped two assassination attempts. He was
stripped of his Turkish citizenship, and in spite of the efforts of many Turk-
ish politicians, intellectuals, and artists who have been campaigning to re-
store, post mortem, his citizenship on the 100th anniversary of his birthday
in 2002, this has not happened. He sailed into a certain death when he
made his escape in a tiny motorboat in the dead of the night across the
stormy Bosporus in hopes of reaching Bulgaria. He had to leave his wife
and infant son who were denied permission to join him and who lived for
years under virtual house arrest after his escape. Few years before his death,
he arranged for them to immigrate to Poland that had granted him citizen-
ship in 1959. His last poems reveal a keen awareness of approaching death
and speak in an accelerated, breathless voice. However, nowhere in his vo-
luminous oeuvre is there a trace of self-pity or defeat. In reaching out to all
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS THE ‘POETRY OF WITNESS’ 171

those who suffered loss and trauma through political persecution, house
arrest, imprisonment, torture, exile, and execution, Hikmet and his work
became poetic witness to fateful times.
Never willing to compromise in his life, beliefs, and art, Hikmet also
resisted accepting some autonomous and abstract source of evil—the “State,”
its institutions, the “Oppressor”—that created an oppressed individual iden-
tity robbed of agency. Numerous poems from prison and exile are apostro-
phes to those who shared a similar fate. They do not bemoan that fate but
record it, so as to resist the forgetting of experience and the erasure of the
affected from history. Through the intimacy of apostrophe, the epistolary,
and multivoiced conversations, Djebar and Hikmet restore name, dignity,
and agency to victims of history. While they are aware that the other’s pain
is unreachable, they will not allow this truism to co-opt them into silence.
In memory and imagination, they overcome the recalcitrance of language
to represent trauma. Carolyn Forché, a poet who has written extensively on
the twentieth century “poetry of witness,” writes in the “Foreword” to the
new edition of Poems of Nazim Hikmet,

With the work of César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Yannis
Ritsos, Attila Jószef, George Oppen, and Mahmoud Darwish,
Hikmet’s poetry is marked by the impress of extremity and a faith in
the salvific possibility of global fraternity and social justice, preserv-
ing the intensely personal subjectivity of lyric selfhood that finds
within the self a capacity for filiation.28

Commercial, economic, and political interests, as they are so comfort-

ably amnesiac, will never heed the emotionally eviscerating representations
of grief and trauma in the word. However, in this “random and bloody
lottery,” as Djebar states with such conviction, words—be they cautionary
tales, elegies, chants, memorial testaments, or poetry—are more necessary
than ever.
Bryn Mawr College

Notes
1. I borrow the idea of autobiography as part of two systems, a “real” referential system
and a literary one, from Philipp Lejeune. See Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. with a
foreword by Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1989) 126.
 172 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

2. See Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2001).
3. See, for example, Michael M. J. Fischer, “Autobiographical Voices (1, 2, 3) and Mosaic
Memory: Experimental Sondages in the (Post)modern World,” in Autobiography and
Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters (Amherst: Univer-
sity of Massachusetts Press, 1994) 79–127 and Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices:
Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
4. Fischer, 100–103.
5. Fischer, 81.
6. Seyhan, 96.
7. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische
Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1971) 41.
8. Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York and London:
Penguin, 1997) 13.
9. Assia Djebar, Algerian White, trans. David Kelly and Marjolijn de Jager, (New York:
Seven Stories Press, 2000), 137.
10. Djebar, 226.
11. See, Djebar, Fantasia, Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1993).
12. Djebar, 226.
13. Djebar, 217.
14. Djebar, 177.
15. Djebar, 177.
16. See, for example, Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, chapters 4 and 5; “Ethnic Selves/
Ethnic Signs: Invention of Self, Space, and Genealogy in Immigrant Writing” in Culture/
Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies, ed. E. Valentine Daniel and
Jeffrey M. Peck (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 175–194; “Scheherazade’s
Daughters: The Thousand and One Tales of Turkish-German Women Writers” in Writing
New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe, ed. Gisela Brinker-
Gabler and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
230–248.
17. See Aysel Özakin, Die Leidenschaft der Anderen, trans. Hanne Egghardt (Hamburg:
Buntbuch-Verlag, 1983) and Soll ich hier alt werden? Türkin in Deutschland, trans. H.A.
Schmiede (Hamburg: Buntbuch-Verlag, 1987).
18. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Mutterzunge (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990) 12. Translation mine.
19. Alice Schwarzer, “Die falsche Toleranz,” in Die Gotteskrieger und die falsche Toleranz,
ed. Alice Schwarzer (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002), 9–19, 9.
20. Schwarzer, 10.
21. Nazim Hikmet, Siirler. Yatar Bursa Kalesinde (Istanbul: Adam Yayinlari, 1987) 4: 28–
29. Translation mine.
22. Hikmet, Siirler. Son Siirler (Istanbul, Adam Yayinlari, 1987) 7: 48.
23. Hikmet, “Autobiography,” in Poems of Nazim Hikmet, rev. ed., trans. Randy Blasing
and Mutlu Konuk (New York: Persea Books, 2002) 259.
24. Hikmet, “Autobiography,” 260.
25. Hikmet, “Autobiography,” 259.
26. Hikmet, “Autobiography,” 260.
27. Hikmet, “Autobiography,” 260.
28. Carolyn Forché, “Foreword,” Poems of Nazim Hikmet, ix.

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