Nazım Hikmet Lives on Through Poetry

In the first act of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Gertrude reminds Hamlet: “Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.”
One life that has passed on into eternity is Nazım Hikmet who died on June 3, 1963. Tomorrow will be the 50th anniversary of his death.
 
“This ship is a black coffin.
 
This sea is a dead sea.
 
Human beings, where are you?
 
Where are you?”
 
It was he who wrote such powerful lines concerning Hiroshima. Nazım, perhaps the greatest Turkish poet of the 20th century, was inseparable from his political beliefs. In addition to being an incredible writer, he dedicated his life and works to socialism.
 
In this endeavour he was a frequent critic of the Turkish government and the policies it pursued. He opposed the authoritarian path that the Menderes government had chosen, prophetically warning him of dire consequences. He vehemently opposed Turkish participation in the Korean War and continuously campaigned for workers’ rights in Turkey. His poems reflected upon contemporary political developments, attacking the prevailing capitalist system.
 
Nazım was a committed communist, that much is true. But one must also clarify what he was not in order to understand the true Nazım. He was not a communist in the Stalinist sense. He opposed authoritarianism, which culminated in his personal distaste for the socialism pursued by Stalin. He was a radical man for his time. One must remind oneself of the era in which Nazım was born, raised and grew into adulthood. His beloved land was fighting a continuous war in which defeats were much more common than victories. He lived under a regime that was crumbling while still clutching at its vanishing power and authority. The empire he had been born into was collapsing around him and a new consciousness was emerging that aimed to rebuild anew from the surrounding smoldering ashes. His adored city, İstanbul, was occupied and ravaged, leading to not only physical discomforts but deep psychological scars.
 
As a young man, he could not accept such a predicament and vowed to rebel and resist. He became committed to the anti-imperialist cause of Atatürk and devoted himself to national liberation and self-determination. An avid reader, he came across another anti-imperial philosophy; that of Marxism. Desiring to learn more, he took the radical step of studying in revolutionary Russia’s capital, where he immersed himself in socialist ideology. After becoming a firm advocate of communism, his life was one that could be neatly divided into intermittent phases of incarcerations and tentative freedom. When he was finally released from prison in 1950 after serving a dozen years in jail, he escaped to the Soviet Union, where he spent another dozen years in exile in Moscow before his death at the age of 61.
 
Anti-Stalinist
 
While living outside of the Soviet Union, he viewed Soviet socialism as a panacea for the ills of the world. When he finally returned to Moscow after a more than 20-year absence in 1951, his disdain for Soviet socialism was made clear to his close circles. He deplored the cult of personality and the Great Terror as evidenced by his critical poem concerning Stalin:
 
“From stone, bronze, plaster, paper,
 
From two centimeters to seven meters,
 
In all the squares of the city, we were under his boots.”
 
Nazım was a political animal. He lived and breathed politics. The public image that he created was that of an unstinting promoter of a different way of living, a different way of understanding, of a very different, benevolent future.
 
Despite his faith in communism, his patriotic credentials were quite strong. Linguistically he had a major impact on developing the new Turkish script and language. While living in his adopted ideological home, he criticized the Turkic republics of the Soviet Union for replacing their native languages with Russian. He admonished Azerbaijanis for constantly preferring to speak the language of Moscow rather than that of Baku.
 
A romantic communist
 
The most accurate simple characterization of Nazım, however, can be found in the biography written by Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, as its title neatly sums up the man: “Romantic Communist.” Nazım’s conception of communism was utopian. He defended the Soviet system but always found it wanting. He preferred it to other political regimes but constantly found it unable to accommodate what he perceived as the true model of socialism. He admitted that what he regarded as the ideal economic system resembled the social-democratic, worker-friendly environments of Austria and Sweden much more than the strict socialism of the Soviet Union. He was utopian, especially when viewed from his extrapolation of where Turks originated and where they were heading:
 
“This country shaped like the head of a mare
 
Coming full gallop from far off Asia
 
To stretch into the Mediterranean
 
This country is ours.
 
Bloody wrists, clenched teeth, bare feet,
 
Land like a precious silk carpet
 
This hell, this paradise is ours.
 
Let the doors be shut that belong to others
 
Let them never open again
 
Do away with the enslaving of man by man
 
This plea is ours.
 
To live! Like a tree alone and free
 
Like a forest in brotherhood
 
This yearning is ours.”
 
His critiques of Turkish foreign policy became outspoken as he began the last years of his life in exile. It is correct to refer to it as exile, as he himself experienced it as such. He longed to return to his homeland, and in a celebrated poem, he even desired to be buried in a nondescript ordinary Anatolian village. Though even in that poem, he did not fail to highlight his political message: the exploitation of village agricultural laborers.
 
Right or wrong: relevant
 
One may ask whether Nazım was correct in all of his criticisms and recommendations. Could anyone be? Concerning the Korean War at least, Nazım was wrong. Though one can understand his position given the thick ideological lens he looked through to explain contemporary developments. Quite naturally, he opposed Turkish membership in NATO, and while visiting Hungary in the mid-1950s he liked the developments that were taking place there. He was tremendously impressed by the Cuban Revolution, as well as the hopes inspired by Lumumba’s Congo and Nyerere’s Tanganyika.
 
Nazım was correct to openly criticize what he saw as the unacceptable features of capitalism as well as privately share his fears of Moscow’s deviation from the central tenets of socialism. In the end he was an internationalist, but one with a Turkish touch, if that is not an oxymoron. His famous epic concerning the Turkish War of Independence memorably demonstrated his affection and admiration for Atatürk, who was described as a great leader resembling a blue-eyed, blonde wolf.
 
While many were silent or indifferent, he was perhaps the only Turkish poet of stature to write about the Spanish Civil War, firmly opposing Franco and putting himself on the side of the republic. He was an internationalist, as he freely admitted to in his lines:
 
“If half my heart is here, doctor,
 
the other half is in China
 
with the army flowing
 
toward the Yellow River.
 
And every morning, doctor,
 
every morning at sunrise my heart
 
is shot in Greece.”
 
For half a century Nazım has remained in the bosom of many Turks, his poetry etched in their hearts and carved into their souls. In the final analysis then, is it better to be liked and remembered by some people across the globe, or to be adored by many in one country? That is the case with Nazım Hikmet, as he is not universally popular or loved in the land of his birth, but celebrated by public intellectuals the world over. If we were able to communicate with him, he would smile, nod his head and repeat his line, “Nothing’s so soon forgotten as the dead.”
 
He would be wrong. Love him or not, no one can deny his existence or meaningful relevance. He lives on. Forevermore.