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A review by arirang
Every Fire You Tend by Sema Kaygusuz
4.0
The thing called legend isn’t just the backbone of narrative keeping this community’s spirit alive; it was Frik Dede’s only solace in this infernal world, an inner shrine that enabled him to turn his back on the inhumanity of everything else.
Every Fire You Tend, translated by Nicholas Glastonbury, is described by the publisher, Tilted Axis Press as a "lyrical, highly allusive narrative by one of Turkey’s great contemporary authors", Sema Kaygusuz, and it is hard to improve on that description.
The origin of the novel is the 1938 Dersim massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dersim_rebellion) of a community of Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds. The author's own grandmother was one of the survivors, and in the novel, that is true of the main character's grandmother, Dese.
But this is far from a historical retelling of those events. As the author explains in an afterword:
You were the protagonist of my novel, ready to do everything I want her to yet incapable of knowing what the next sentence will hold. You were the figure of a woman not yet defeated, yet you still guarded a paradox, the mystery of which I couldn’t resolve.
...
You were the protagonist of an anguished story, borrowing the consciousness of a woman from another time, a victim’s consciousness, one that continues to loom large in the present.
...
You were seeking a language for yourself, a language inherited from no one and akin to no one else’s, a language of figs...
But the non-linear story that is told, takes us back to Bese's experience in the aftermath of the massacre when she encounters the legendary figure of Hızır, but also back-and-forth through history, including legends such as the Quranic narrative of Hızır's odd encounter with Moses, the parting of Elisha from Elijah (both seen as manifestations of Hızır), and the legendary figure of Zulqarnayn.
Towards the end of the novel, the narrator concludes:
Even the work of carvings gems from rock cannot compare with the journey that shame takes to reach language. Because the tongue gets tied. Because children like you, born into the silence that remains after catastrophe, are born unable to cry out. Even if misery comes undone in language, even if wistfulness gives you pleasure, even if grief makes you feel you matter, still, shame will always settle like a stone in your gut. The sheer horror in the scene of a massacre, in the killing of one person by another, can never be contained in a photograph.
So forgive me, I can’t speak like everyone else. I can’t form long winding sentences that can explain away the historic trajectory of all the emotion I carry. All I can do is beseech with sighs, lament with wails, freeze up in bewilderment. I can speak in metaphorical language about the hollow left when human dignity is torn from its roots.
Be grateful that Bese left you not with the bruises of affliction, but with the shame of being human, a shame that grows in the aftermath of ruin.
An impressive work, and a wonderful translation. As with the same publisher's recent [b:Of Strangers and Bees|43402371|Of Strangers and Bees|Hamid Ismailov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1566232079l/43402371._SY75_.jpg|67439914], a book which as a reader I felt I failed at time to do full justice, but a novel that shows the power of translated literature to bring us not only insights into different cultures, but different ways of telling stories.
Two other reviews that do the book more justice than I can:
http://www.themodernnovel.org/asia/other-asia/turkey/sema-kaygusuz/every-fire-you-tend/
https://booksandbao.com/2019/11/18/review-every-fire-you-tend-sema-kaygusuz/
And I would be surprised, and disappointed, if a Tilted Axis title, a publisher set up with the prize money won by Deborah Smith for the inaugural Man Booker International, does not feature on the 2020 prize list.
Every Fire You Tend, translated by Nicholas Glastonbury, is described by the publisher, Tilted Axis Press as a "lyrical, highly allusive narrative by one of Turkey’s great contemporary authors", Sema Kaygusuz, and it is hard to improve on that description.
The origin of the novel is the 1938 Dersim massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dersim_rebellion) of a community of Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds. The author's own grandmother was one of the survivors, and in the novel, that is true of the main character's grandmother, Dese.
But this is far from a historical retelling of those events. As the author explains in an afterword:
My novel Every Fire You Tend stands as a question mark that opens the threshold onto this corrupted world, precisely as it was seen by Hızır and my grandmother. If what we call the novel is an art, then at the same time it is a chamber with two doors that declares a secret undisclosable, that maps safe country for all the exiles of the world, wandering in search of their place. I have reserved a place here for my grandmother, yet I haven’t managed to fit the shame of being human, the shame that she left to me, onto a single page. The more I explored the details of the Dersim Massacre, the heartrending photographs and historical documents that came to light, the more I have come to refuse the notion of inuring the reader to this violence, by making a novel about how this massacre began and how it ended, by portraying these people, already so horribly dehumanized, as if this were their only fate, their only essence, frozen in place and time.The protagonist of the novel, an unnamed woman in Istanbul, is addressed mainly in the second person by the incorporeal narrator, who also has agency as a character in her own right:
You were the protagonist of my novel, ready to do everything I want her to yet incapable of knowing what the next sentence will hold. You were the figure of a woman not yet defeated, yet you still guarded a paradox, the mystery of which I couldn’t resolve.
...
You were the protagonist of an anguished story, borrowing the consciousness of a woman from another time, a victim’s consciousness, one that continues to loom large in the present.
...
You were seeking a language for yourself, a language inherited from no one and akin to no one else’s, a language of figs...
But the non-linear story that is told, takes us back to Bese's experience in the aftermath of the massacre when she encounters the legendary figure of Hızır, but also back-and-forth through history, including legends such as the Quranic narrative of Hızır's odd encounter with Moses, the parting of Elisha from Elijah (both seen as manifestations of Hızır), and the legendary figure of Zulqarnayn.
Towards the end of the novel, the narrator concludes:
Even the work of carvings gems from rock cannot compare with the journey that shame takes to reach language. Because the tongue gets tied. Because children like you, born into the silence that remains after catastrophe, are born unable to cry out. Even if misery comes undone in language, even if wistfulness gives you pleasure, even if grief makes you feel you matter, still, shame will always settle like a stone in your gut. The sheer horror in the scene of a massacre, in the killing of one person by another, can never be contained in a photograph.
So forgive me, I can’t speak like everyone else. I can’t form long winding sentences that can explain away the historic trajectory of all the emotion I carry. All I can do is beseech with sighs, lament with wails, freeze up in bewilderment. I can speak in metaphorical language about the hollow left when human dignity is torn from its roots.
Be grateful that Bese left you not with the bruises of affliction, but with the shame of being human, a shame that grows in the aftermath of ruin.
An impressive work, and a wonderful translation. As with the same publisher's recent [b:Of Strangers and Bees|43402371|Of Strangers and Bees|Hamid Ismailov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1566232079l/43402371._SY75_.jpg|67439914], a book which as a reader I felt I failed at time to do full justice, but a novel that shows the power of translated literature to bring us not only insights into different cultures, but different ways of telling stories.
Two other reviews that do the book more justice than I can:
http://www.themodernnovel.org/asia/other-asia/turkey/sema-kaygusuz/every-fire-you-tend/
https://booksandbao.com/2019/11/18/review-every-fire-you-tend-sema-kaygusuz/
And I would be surprised, and disappointed, if a Tilted Axis title, a publisher set up with the prize money won by Deborah Smith for the inaugural Man Booker International, does not feature on the 2020 prize list.