JOSEPH STAROBIN

A TALK WITH NÂZIM HİKMET

Berlin

This Youth Festival in Berlin was one of Nâzım Hikmet’s first encounters with people from other lands since his 13-year ordeal in Turkish dungeons. Every moment of it seemed precious to him.

When I presented myself one morning at the German Press Club where he was surrounded by half a dozen journalists all seeking an appointment-he brushed aside his solicitous German secretary to insist on finding time for an American.

"This is very important for me," he said, "I want to send greetings to the American friends who are now being imprisoned."

There is a magnetic nobility about Nâzım Hikmet, a strength and simplicity hard to capture in words. Hikmet is a tall, broad-shouldered man with a full face, deep blue eyes under reddish-brown lashes, a mustache of the same hue and a trace of gray at the temples which merges with a full shock of sandy brown hair. Nothing in his demeanor suggests the torture of his long imprisonment.

The amazing story he told me began immediately after the first World War, when Hikmet was an officer in the Turkish Navy. Several sailors who had taken part in the 1918 revolt of the German sailors at Kiel had returned home with Marxist ideas. Hikmet was among those who mutinied against the old Empire; he was forced to flee, and made his way to young revolutionary Russia.

Despite a sentence over him, he returned and took part in the bourgeois national revolution led by Kemal Ataturk against the invasion of Greece, then the pawn of the British effort to dismember and dominate Turkey. But he was on the Left of the national movement.

While in the thick of political activity, he was above all the poet. A young Turkish student who was with us during the interview said he remembered his family reading Hikmet's poems from the very earliest years.

At the trial, following his arrest in 1937, it was alleged that Hikmet had carried on revolutionary education among the students; his volume of poems, though published legally, was placed in evidence as "subversive" and designed to "corrupt the youth."

That brought a first sentence of 15  years by the Military Tribunal. In a second case, conducted by the Maritime Tribunal, the sentence was 20 years. The judge admitted the reason: a war was in the offing. Turkey would have to side with Hitler and gain the oil of Baku.

Hikmet was held three months in a four-by-six cell through whose open roof the snow poured in. Later it was even worse; a cell on board a ship, actually the ship's latrine where he was forced to live for weeks, taken out each evening to pace the deck. He never knew whether his jailers were tempting him with the visions of liberty if he would "confess" or preparing to dispose of him by alleging an accidental fall overboard.

And then a ship's cell (at this point, he drew a picture of a vessel and showed the porthole of the cell in the hold). There it was, in the steaming summer, a virtual coffin.

When he was, transferred to Anatolia, it was a different kind of prison - full of peasants, sometimes entire families, who had transgressed a minor law, or fought against the rich land-owners. They lived in common - these families. And through the coming and going of the simple peasants, he was able to keep contact with his people, to send his poems out.
Toward the end, when the old Kemalist Party was on the verge of being forced out of power, the politicians were prepared to release him... it was the American minister, Hikmet said, who intervened and was responsible for more months of imprisonment.

What enabled him to survive all this? He replied directly to the question. "I never lost faith. 1 believe in Man, in my own people, in the peoples of the world."

I asked him about the Americans in Turkey. For it was with regard to Turkey (was it not?) that the Truman Doctrine began. Apart from militarizing the country, planting air-bases everywhere and vassalizing the economy (so that the native textile industry, for example, cannot compete) the Americans are behaving very badly in Turkey, said Hikmet.

"But," he added quickly, "we always make a distinction between the American people and the American ruling circles." Your soldiers, he said, "seem to be kept drunk most of the time; there are incidents every week in which Turkish girls are kidnapped in plain daylight to serve them.... We detest this America of the atomic madness; we honor the America of Walt Whitman, of Paul Robeson, of Howard Fast ... "

When I mentioned the protest movement in our own country during his hunger strike, the poet said quite simply, "Yes, I heard of it. I saw clippings of the Daily Worker while in prison .... "

Masses & Mainstream? Yes, he had seen the magazine which introduced his poems from prison to America.

Hikmet wanted to know each detail about the trial of the Communist leaders, about the current arrests. He took out a sheet of paper and wrote out a message. It must be sent immediately, he insisted, a message of admiration and affection for William Z. Foster and Eugene Dennis, from faraway Turkey, from a man who had faced prison too.

And his immediate plans? "I have one plan - the independence of my people. I have fought for this in every way I could, sometimes by attending peace congresses, sometimes by illegal work, sometimes from prison, sometimes by writing poems. And sometimes (he smiled) by an interview such as this to an American such as you."

From: Masses and Mainstream, cultural monthly, New York, October 1951