Coming Soon...

Depeche Mode
by Serhiy Zhadan
Translated from the Ukrainian by Myroslav Shkandrij

... But Not Defeated

Ahmet Altan was arrested during Turkey's media crackdown after the failed July 2016 coup d'état and he was expecting that sooner or later he would be arrested just like his father was many years ago¹. Just after his arrest, he realized how he would miss the things that he loves, routine he enjoyed as a writer and most importantly his freedom to decide. Nevertheless, he didn't submit to hopelessness and continued his observation of prison details with eyes of a novelist. He yearned freedom which he couldn't ask loud, instead motivated himself to bear the harsh prison reality and terror. In a prison cell devoid of mirrors, Ahmet realized how it feels to be distanced from one's reality and as he got to know the background of other cellmates, slowly the prison life took new form for him, where he was able to uncover the shades of experiences never touched or thought of before. Ahmet tried hard to look normal, so that his loving ones could take it easy and he himself could stand to the burden of captivity, even when knowing that the possibility of a reasonable trial was almost none.

1.       What I was experiencing was not déjà vu. Reality was repeating itself. This country moves through history too slowly for time to go forward, so it folds back on itself instead.

Ahmet got to listen to a story²—and later fabricating it himself— of a young teacher who couldn't bring himself to give out names of his friends to earn liberty, and also of other prisoners with the attentiveness of a writer, blazing his imagination and taking pleasure in the stories he absorbed from them, when he tried to relive someone else's experience when he was not able to live his own³ – which only proves how hungry Ahmet was to get back his creative space.

Ahmet recalls the episodes when he was released before being arrested again and an encounter with a policeman who has read his novel and discovers in prison how the concept of time is rooted in our lives and what happens when it is distorted. In the process he finds a way to measure time in solitude of prison without clocks, when he wasn't able to envision⁴ things, the only creative fodder the writer can live with. Ahmet has taken realistic, philosophical and imaginative route and wiseness to share his experience in a way of an essayist, a novelist and a victim and at times we forget that he is inside a prison writing this.

2.       The only way to move was with the voice – by talking and telling. Anyone on earth who finds a listener has a story to tell. What is difficult to find is not the story, but the listener. I was the listener in that cage.

3.       In a cage that objectified unhappiness, I was thinking about what happiness was. Like a blind alchemist searching for the spell that turns copper into gold, I was trying to find the secret that turned “frozen seaweed” and “coffin lids” into joy.

4.       I was not able to imagine. I could not imagine a single thing. My mind was petrified. Not even an image moved inside it. The magical images of the land of my imagination were glued on the walls of my mind like discolored frescos. They were not coming to life.

Ahmet can see how the shape of truth has changed for him and what it means to write and to be free; he comes across paradoxes or lessons⁵ between the voids and silences of the prison walls and spaces in which he makes his voyages. Struggling with his longing and witnessing that of others Ahmet tries to understand his dreams too – unrelated to his prison life. In a thirteen-foot-long cell the people of different faith and culture has merged into one another, and despite the personal views of Ahmet differs to those of his cellmates, he finds it easy and satisfying to show respect for their faith, and realizes that our primordial connectedness unfurls under the dire situations when human emotions become the only religion we can perform.

As Ahmet is sentenced to life in prison without parole, he is reminded of one of his own characters in a novel, who faced the similar fate as his, and he feels like it was he himself who wrote his destiny or at least he could write his fate⁶. He feels the final flicker of hope dying when he is sentenced for life nevertheless collects himself to keep his fighting spirit⁷ alive though the impact he has suffered internally is not something that he can ignore. When he is able to get a book to read in the prison, he dwells on literature and writing and finally is relieved to find solace in something he loves utmost, meanwhile he encounters the nature of evil and tries to understand it, as he becomes its victim. In the final chapter The Writer's Paradox, Ahmet uses a famous paradox to show his position, while still being a victim inside a prison, and challenges Turkish government and those who imprisoned him that they've failed⁸; they cannot capture a writer's mind.

5.       Forgetting is the greatest source of freedom a person can have. The prison, the cell, the walls, the doors, the locks, the problems and the people – everything and everyone placing limits on my life and telling me “you cannot go beyond” is erased and gone.

6.       I will never see the world again; I will never see a sky unframed by the walls of a courtyard. I am descending to Hades. I walk into the darkness like a god who wrote his own destiny. My hero and I disappear into the darkness together.

7.       I will fight. I will be brave and I will despise myself for it. I will be injured by my inner conflicts. I will write my own Odyssey, write it with my life in this narrowest of cells. Like Odysseus, I will act with heroism and cowardice, with honesty and craftiness, I will know defeat and victory, my adventure will end only in death. I will have the Penelope of my dreams. I will write in order to be able to live, to endure, to fight, to like myself and to forgive my own failings.

8.       I am writing this in a prison cell. But I am not in prison. I am a writer. I am neither where I am nor where I am not. You can imprison me but you cannot keep me here. Because, like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through your walls with ease.

I Will Never See the World Again is a thought-provoking and clear picture of not just Ahmet's case but of all those who are incarcerated, unjustly accused and whose freedom to speak, write and live has been compromised. This prison memoir heralds the endurance in the face of adversity born out of politics corrupt with power which treats every citizen as a threat and puts trial of courts – run by corrupt judges – only as a formality. We see senseless and evil authorities running the prison system and one man struggling, building block by block an internal shield to keep being motivated and preserve his creative spirit and repose to fight so as to be heard – a voice both tender and sharp which speaks to us all.

Author: Ahmet Altan

Translator: Yasemin Çongar

Publisher: Other Press

Page Count: 224pp

Price: $15.99

Author Photo Credit: https://www.otherpress.com/authors/ahmet-altan/

Review Copy Courtesy: Other Press

What's in the Grey?

Yun Yun lives with her widowed father in a quarter of an old people's home and their tie is strong with the family of Mrs Cai whom Yun calls auntie; nevertheless Mrs Cai treats her like her own daughter. Yun wants to spend her time especially with her cousin Zhang Qing – who is almost of the Yun's age but who has started to show sign of adolescence – and takes part in Qing's adolescent fantasy of being made-up or kissed. While Yun's father spends time playing chess with a neighbour, Yun passes most of her time at her auntie's home, listening to her cousin who wants to be grown-up soon or bearing her mood swings or having conversation with aunt who's especially curious about Yun's father and who feels it excessively urgent to take care of Yun Yun. As the story unfolds, cousin Qing seems to part away from Yun, however she takes interest in her cousin's affairs and promises to keep her secrets. Having learnt few things about what the adult men and women do from her cousin, Yun cannot keep it to herself and poses questions at the wrong person, which shows her innocence, caught in the world of grown-up behaviors and unable to make any sense of it. 

As Yun realizes that she is able to understand or predict the consequences of things¹ around her, she learns that the people close to her share some unknown history and personal secrets, and which still haunt them. Qing rebels against her mother for free will to have a boyfriend and spend time in her own way, and Yun observes the clashes between her cousin in adolescent crisis and her aunt whom her daughter thinks² is committing adultery. As the individuals and the two families intersect each other for better or worse, hitched in psychological tangles, Yun Yun finds herself alone with her wit and sharp eyes for details, fulfilling her natural curiosity³ – who is visited by the white horse in unexpected places and circumstances – meanwhile taking her own flight of being grown up and facing the myth of her birth. We take the view of Yun Yun, and the blanketed events, personalities and interests are only as evident to us as to her, and so is the world in the backdrop which is characterized by drama of deception.

1.       My dad squeezed her hand and said solemnly: 'That was a long time ago. It's all water under the bridge.' I suddenly thought of something very philosophical: The world is full of secrets… It certainly was.

2.       'My mum's such a bitch; what made my dad decide to marry her?'

3.       'Don't believe everything you see on TV,' my dad said. 'Only dirty foreigners kiss on the mouth. Chinese people don't.'

White Horse is a story of a child growing up and caught in the world of adults and their affairs, and whose ingenuousness is faced by human relations that may stand on weak or doubtful base and identity. Story, translation and the illustrations – the triad tells the story that is simple but sharp, and though Yun Yun carves a way out or within her space, we still dwell on the complexities of adult life, formed and cracked by love and misfortunes. The White Horse represents the enigma of the world standing on truth and lies, and where sometime we are left alone to be baffled by ourselves.

Author: Yan Ge

Translator: Nicky Harman

Illustrator: James Nunn

Publisher: HopeRoad Publishing

Page Count: 88pp

Price: $12.99

Author Photo Credit: https://www.hoperoadpublishing.com/authors/yan-ge

Review Copy Courtesy: HopeRoad Publishing

The Sad Backdrop

BONDAGE

The first part of the Imdadul Haq Milan’s Two Novellas Bondage is narrated by Lalan, who came to Germany from Bangladesh, and would often wait for the letters from home, where, apart from his family, he had left behind his girlfriend, who was waiting for him to come back so as to get married. Every day, he came to the room from work exhausted, both from working and having to climb six flights to his room. And Muneem, a close friend of Lalan, though complained about everything of their poor living conditions and had things to say how the people from the Third World countries changed after coming to a developed country like Germany, especially his own countrymen, thought Germany was a heavenly place to earn and relish.

Imagine a life: haunted by alarm clocks; always in a rush to catch the bus that leaves on schedule; the movement in life is so limited that you even remember the steps and minutes it takes to reach one place from other—this is common among the immigrant workers, and here the everyday truth of Lalan. Always living under the anxiety of being sacked by the employer or removed by landlord, mostly the immigrants from the Third-World countries have to make themselves accustomed to working like a clock and tirelessly; wary of order of the things to be taken care of.

Then one Friday, when Lalan and Muneem go out for coffee at McDonald's, they come across another Bangladeshi man named Wahid, who hadn’t managed to eat rice for months and looked frail. Later, both of them go to Muneem's room to booze, after finding other options of enjoying off-putting, only to get Lalan blitzed¹. Soon after, Lalan receives the awaited letters from home and his girlfriend, and is burdened and disappointed by the fact—he hasn’t let anyone in the family know, in what draining settings he has to work to earn—that the family is demanding even more without bothering to care about his happiness or how he feels. Nevertheless, Lalan gets another job for making up the amount² asked by the family back home, only adding more rush and fatigue to his life, and when his co-worker goes absent... this finally forces him to seek medical attention and take long needed break from work.

1.       “… When I drink I become aware of myself, I realize I am who I am. The rest of the time, I feel like a stranger. I find it difficult to accept that the young man named Lalan, who toils eight hours every day in a foreign land, is me.”

2.       Money was nothing but a trap for enslavement that each day was turning me a stranger to myself. I’d no idea when, if at all, I’d be able to earn my release from the trap.

In Bondage, we get a clear picture of immigrant workers who are stricken with unhappiness and longing for home and have nothing else to talk about except work, fatigue and money. Meanwhile, they are getting adapted to the people, rules, custom, language and way of life in Germany, though most of them are having hard time keeping up with all of those. There are workers: those who are unemployed and living on the dole; those who have earned work permit and in the meantime are processing their application for political asylum—Lalan is one of them; those who are reapplying to the limit even after their application is rejected thus lengthening their stay. In fact, most of them are not genuine political asylum seekers but economic refugees/migrants.

Immigrants like Lalan and Muneem have been closely observing the changes happened over time to their image among the natives and are afraid of the growing social unrest between the surging migrants and natives. They are already facing unhappy Germans who hate their presence—those encounters have to be born helplessly³ by the immigrant workers and thus try  to avoid it—and who now know well the stories told for backing political asylum applications are all fabricated and thus Lalan and Muneem know that their stay will terminate in future. Toiling Lalan, who feels like smoking when he is angry and curse the money for which he has to be away from home, doesn’t want to stay in Germany any more.

3.       “What’s the point of feeling bad? We’ve to stay here, don’t we? What’s there for us back home? We won’t even get a job that pays four hundred takas.” “At least, we’ll have freedom there. Isn’t that enough to live by?” “You can’t fill your belly with freedom, can you?”

Some struggling to settle, some unsatisfied with their savings and some missing their dearest, their ways and oddities sometimes prove rowdy to the locals and landlords, and the only thing that keeps them occupied, even though for a short time, is the company of their own countrymen amidst the discomfort with the ways they have to follow. And therefore they spend time chattering about everything they are unsatisfied with during weekends, before happily accepting the same throughout the weekdays in their grim and dim existence.

Bondage is an exceptional novel, based upon author's own experience in Germany, dealing mostly with the human side of economic migrants’ problem and Lalan is a strong character who represents all immigrant workers, who face and suffer boredom, disappointments, quandary, hopelessness, estrangement, bouts of silences and also those baffled by the extravagance of their families back home at their expense and also young men in the Third-World country like Bangladesh looking for better life elsewhere in developed countries.

EXILE

In Exile, the main character Abdullah has trouble holding onto a job for long, particularly manual jobs, and has already taken many jobs in the four years of his stay in Germany, without success on any of them, and has even slept on the bus-stand bench in his worst days. Frau Mann, an elderly lady of the employment bureau, is whom Abdullah seeks every time after he is laid-off, and in any case she tries her best to get him a job like always. Abdullah shares a room—one he was provided to dwell while in the job for a construction firm, but which also sacked him within two months—with five Punjabi Pakistanis, with whom he cannot speak in his mother tongue, and he is out of job from last three months, living on the unemployment dole. He cannot manage to live elsewhere, having unstable job and meager income. Meanwhile, Abdullah has picked up German language very well and thinks that he can impress the Germans with it. He finds it hard to befriend other Bangladeshis and keep his miseries to himself¹, and it is even more difficult for him to cope with the attitude, mockery and alienation from the fellow roommates and landlord, and rather feels dispirited and threatened to live among them, taking care not to offend anyone, though he pays for the room too.

1.       Sometimes it seems everything has been for the best. At least my family has not had to suffer the ignominy of seeing the man who once taught at a college trudging miles in the snow to look for a labourer’s or cleaner’s work, being thrown out of his job every now and then, and living furtively like an animal that scarcely dared to breathe. I would rather have taken my own life than made them go through it.

Abdullah was a teacher back at home and had no big dreams except to live an ordinary life with his wife and two daughters. He was progressing quite well in his job and was loved among the students until embezzlement conspiracy forced him to flee from Bangladesh, where imprisonment awaited him in his return, and in the meantime his original plan to bring his family to Germany is never realized, opening a chasm in his relation to the family to whom he has feeble chance of meeting again.

Abdullah fabricates a political lie so that he can get a job and place to stay and meanwhile convinces² the manager of the hotel that he is a genuine runaway who is seeking asylum in Germany, backing his story by political history of his country. As the story progresses, he takes job as a Hausmann in a hotel but finally decides to go back home to face whatever the consequences might be, when something terrible happens to him again.

2.       The Germans were used to taking people at their face value, though these days they, too, had learned to be skeptical of immigrants from the ‘third world,’ each of whom came with their own particular tale of woe in order to get political asylum. The Germans saw them lying, fighting and stealing even after getting work, and had veered somewhat to the opinion that immigrants were not to be trusted.

Exile, like Bondage deals with the similar problem of immigrant workers, however this touches even more personal story of an individual in detail. Abdullah too, like Lalan, doesn’t want to remain away from his family, but he is ensnared with his self-inflicted exile in Germany to save himself from losing freedom at Bangladesh, however, he doesn’t happen to realize it in Germany with constant anguish and subtle melancholy stifling and occupying his thoughts, which in turn never allows him to work for more than few days or months. Combined, the two novellas draw a harrowing image of the economic migrants and those migrating with their personal causes, from Bangladesh, who regardless of everything want to return to their country if ever.

The book is part of Library of Bangladesh series.

Author: Imdadul Haq Milan

Translator: Saugata Ghosh
Editor: Arunava Sinha

Publisher: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Page Count: 144pp

Price: $11

Author Photo Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imdadul_Haq_Milon_-_Kolkata_2015-10-10_4866.JPG

Review Copy Courtesy: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Coming Soon...

The Dregs of the Day
by Máirtín Ó Cadhain
Translated from the Irish by Alan Titley