GREEKS IN THE NIGHTS OF PLAGUE

 

“The little Ottoman island of Mingheria, situated in the Eastern Mediterranean and famous for its marble and roses, has declared independence. For the last nine weeks, the island, whose population of eighty thousand is split evenly between Christians and Muslims, has been gripped by a terrible outbreak of plague.” 

Mingheria is the latest of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s creations, a fantastical topos where he seeks to explore the process of the construction of mythology, political repression, nationalism and human nature. The “pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea,”, Mingheria at the time that the principal events in the novel take place, which is at the turn of the twentieth century during the ruler of the genocidal Sultan Abdul Hamid II, is poised upon the cusp of great change, with two opposing forces assailing the island: Modernity and westernisation, as exemplified by the western educated doctor and nephew-in-law of the Sultan, and traditionalism and conservativism as represented by the reactionary sheikhs of various Islamic sects on the island, who despite their backwardness, can pose a threat to the Ottomans’ rule and thus have to constantly be placated.  

This ability, or rather predicament, of inhabiting the past and the present simultaneously with now clear demarcation between them, a phenomenon common to the lands formally under Ottoman rule, is no more so starkly symbolised as by the clock in Mingheria’s post office, which is marked with both Ottoman and European numerals. According to the Ottoman manner of counting time, the new day begins at sunset rather than at midnight as in the western usage, necessitating an hour hand that simultaneous must indicate two separate numbers. Thus an Ottoman soldier consulting the clock is overwhelmed by a sense of: “metaphysical apprehension,” wondering “Could two different clocks both mark the same moment in time but use different numbers?” 

Pamuk also transfers this hybridity from the temporal to the physical and the social. Mingheria is situated by the author between Crete and Cyprus. Like both those islands, Mingheria’s population almost evenly between Greeks and Turks and the tensions Orhan Pamuk describes between the two peoples are nuanced and complex, even though there is limited social contact between them. 

For the Turkish ruling class, Greeks are considered as by nature subversive. As such, they are constantly under surveillance and repressed, even when there are subjected to arbitrary, blatant violent attacks by their Ottoman co-citizens, as it is considered that by their very nature, they are disloyal. Consequently, their national aspirations are not even considered on their merits. Instead, they dismissed as being the consequence of machinations by non-native troublemakers and agitators from other islands, such as Crete and so, have no legitimacy. The Greeks’ ties to the island are considered as those of exploitation: they are there to make money and most of them are immigrants from somewhere else. Accordingly, their commitment to the island and to its welfare is constantly called into question, especially so when disaster strikes the island by way of a pandemic. Rather than staying behind to look after each other and their island, Pamuk portrays the Greeks as abandoning the island en masse, in the most conniving way possible: bribing their way through an Allied blockade of the island through their western connections.  

In the eyes of the Ottomans of Mingheria, then, Greeks are interlopers and parvenu westerners and it is in delineating the tension between East and West that Pamuk excels himself, but only in relation to his own people. “To accept quarantine is to accept westernization,” he has a western doctor declare: “and the farther east one travels, the more tortuous the matter becomes.” Significantly, we are not granted any insight by the author as to how the Greeks saw the Ottomans or indeed their own position on the island, as the author only allows us to see the Greeks through Ottoman eyes. As a result, the narrator of the novel, a descendant of the Ottoman royal family, makes basic mistakes in her observations about the Greek people, such as claiming that the Orthodox bishops on the island are married and have children. This perspective, that of a coloniser knowing little about the colonised and systematically delegitimising them, has broader implications that also touch upon the fabric of Australian society. 

Pamuk’s multi-faceted portrayal of the relationship between the Ottomans and the Greeks is complicated by an original factor. According to Pamuk’s mythology, neither the Greeks, nor the Ottomans are the original inhabitants of the island. Instead, the native people of the island, the Mingherians, are said to come from a mythical homeland near the Aral Sea. According to the narrator, few Mingherians now speak their language and such language as exists, is limited to a few household words, rendering the use of the language as a spoken medium extremely difficult. Pamuk’s focus, in recounting how a Mingherian identity and language was resurrected or indeed constructed, when the island, through a bizarre and thoroughly entertaining concatenation of circumstances eventually declared its independence from the Ottomans, is to examine how cultural and linguistic elements can be fused and manipulated to create and identity and to uphold a political regime. Nonetheless, even as the narrator flags exaggerations and falsehoods in the narratives of the past, her privileged position as scioness of the former and founding rulers of the island, has profoundly disturbing implications for the way we view Ottoman rule in the islands of the Mediterranean. 

Firstly, even though it is evident we are dealing with a work of historical fiction, by placing in this particular region, a purportedly “native” people (who are ironically not native considering they have implausibly come, through means unknown, from Central Asia), Pamuk can be seen albeit inadvertently, as effacing the real history of the region and trivialising the plight of Greek islanders under Ottoman rule, which from Crete to Cyprus and beyond, was a brutal experience.  

Secondly, in Pamuk’s imagined microcosm, while most Mingherians have assimilated so that their culture and language is no longer dominant, the author suggests that the vast majority of these “native” islanders have in fact espoused Islam and have assimilated to the culture of the ruling Ottomans. By inference therefore the line of “legitimacy” thus lies through the Ottomans of the island, (as opposed to those in Constantinople), rather than the Greeks, who again, are thus presented as outsiders. Is Pamuk, for all his cultural sensitivity, trapped within his own perspective-obscuring narrative, one that is inevitably culture specific? 

This is certainly not the intention. After all, Pamuk in his lengthy narration, reveals how inconstant the reconstruction of the so-called “Mingherian” identity is, how it serves merely to reinforce existing power structures which largely remain the same and even how such an identity is selectively appropriated and discarded by privileged members of the ruling class. Ultimately, Pamuk seems to argue, concepts of nativity and identity are fluid, can be manipulated at will, and are inevitably suborned to serve the interests of power, creating their own realities in the process. If we are therefore to seek a pathway in which to engage in meaningful cross-cultural discussion and achieve a working consensus within multi-ethnic polities, such concepts provide no help at all. Consistent with the polyvalent quality of Pamuk’s art, rather than obscuring Greek experience under Ottoman rule in the Mediterranean, perhaps the novel serves as a telling parable as to the formation of the modern Turkish state, the lacunae, inconsistencies and errors in the narrative, being just as significant as historical facts. 

Identity politics aside, there is much to this novel that is ground-breaking, especially the prescient manner in which Pamuk conceived of the social and international effects of the arrival of a pandemic on an island, years before Coronavirus made its appearance on the world stage. His lyric evocation of a rose-perfumed idyllic island that is anything but, in which ethnicities, religions, ideologies and would be power-brokers contend blissfully unaware that they are about to witness the dawn of a new age, for which they are completely unprepared, as well as his sensitive and yet simultaneously merciless depiction of the foibles, insecurities and self-delusions of the human condition in crisis make for compelling reading. 

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU 

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 3 December 2022