Howard Fast
Amerikan author
New York, August 2001

I wrote of Nâzım Hikmet and called him my brother because his life was connected with my life, his thoughts connected with mine and his suffering had come out of doing what I would have done were I a part of his community.

Like him, I was a member of a brotherhood, the people in the Communist Party; and not since the first Christians had there been such a brotherhood, not of family, nation or race, but of a dream that mankind might one day live in the peace and love that Christ preached.

It was destroyed by the malice and fear of one man, Stalin who was a Communist only in name, but in all else an enemy of communism; and in that
I include e men in Russia who carried out his ordeds.

But the destruction of the Soviet Union was a part of the endless struggle for human dignnity. It had to happen because it was wrong on every level, but communism was not destroyed, nor did Nâzım Hikmet live and die in vain.

The struggle will take time, a long, long time, but only a moment in God’s time-and in the end, the people will win. As workers rights advocate, Mother Bloor used to say: “We are many, they are few” Or to quote Eleanor Roosevelt: “It is better to light one little candle than to sit and curse the dark”



TO NÂZIM HİKMET

The way your own walls could not contain your words,
so did they find us, my brother,
nor could our walls exclude them.
And there came to me that day in prison,
speaking in the prison whisper you know so well,
that gentle writer, Albert Maltz -
Like you, his crime was words that sang of life,
of peace and hope and the things men cherish –
¬and told me you were free.
Free, he said, Nazim Hikmet's free,
and walks in freedom on his own good native ground,
and sings loud and proud, for all men to hear.
How can I tell you, friend, comrade, brother too,
whom I have never seen but know so well,
and hold so high, in such precious esteem -
how can I tell you what this. meant?
For in that moment we were free.
For in that moment my heart sang a song to equal yours,
and I knew you as well as ever I knew a man,
knew you and all your kind, our kind,
such a brotherhood that surmounts nations,
and they think to quiet us,
to make us silent behind walls.
A small blow once we struck in your behalf,
yet I tell you that you freed us,
two writers of a land five thousand miles from yours, 
like yours a land where evil men do evil things,
like yours a land where freedom bows her head in shame,
but will awaken yet.
When you went free we understood
the small moment of our own walls,
erected by clowns and smirking killers,
a small moment in the march of man toward light and glory –
¬yet do I have to tell you,
when surely you heard the song our hearts made!

From: Masses and Mainstream, cultural monthly, New York, October 1950

Quoted from To live, free and single like a tree  / but in brotherhood like a forest edited by Erhan Turgut.