Because not all testimony takes the form of speech, and not all speech is admissible as testimony. Because pain is not translatable. Because language falls short before atrocity. Because legality is not adequate to justice.
The deepest threat to power is not sedition but solidarity: the idea that a movement might be broadened, community chosen, that one group’s plight might be everyone’s concern.
They capture the slippery thing “I” really is, more plural than the word identity implies: a tangle of mimicries, hauntings and experiments, gestures of fierce self-assertion snatched from a vista of stock images and half-digested histories.
Her larger works emulate the splendour of the natural world – its epic appetites, its sheer rude health. When I am at the beach a few days after our meeting, all the seaweed on the shore is plagiarising Hicks.
Here is a Syrian’s view of France, a description of Europe where Arabs circulate and thrive, a portrait of the Mediterranean as a zone of intense contact and interwoven histories.
The state-led turn to antiquity was bound up with the young nation’s fantasies of Western modernity. As the minister of education Hasan Ali Yücel put it, “The roots of the civilisation we want to be a part of are in ancient Greek”.
The literature on Muhammad’s ascension to heaven grew to be enormous, but only after it slipped its scriptural moorings and slid out into poetry and folklore. Every life of the Prophet had a chapter on the subject, and scholars and mystics endlessly pondered its meaning. The story was deployed and reinterpreted among Islam’s subcultures, and also among its foes: there are versions in Malay, Uzbek, and Old French, in Buginese and Castilian, and a beautifully illuminated version in Chaghatay, a form of Middle Turkish named after Genghis Khan’s second son.
Tithonus was loved by the dawn, who wanted to love him forever. She asked Zeus to grant him eternal life, which is not the same as eternal youth. The gods are literal-minded; the wish is granted; Tithonus withers and wastes.
As a figure of wistful obsolescence, Mevlut is in keeping with Pamuk’s interest in tradition, but as a poor man with an internal life he marks a bracing departure in the oeuvre.
Patients are photographed in domestic settings, their gowns parted to reveal long scars, their hands sometimes resting on an ornate table where enormous tumours stand jarred.
In a dacha outside Moscow he found a Constructivist masterpiece being used to close up a window; the owner wouldn’t part with it. He dashed to the city to fetch a piece of plywood the same size, ferried it back to the dacha, and swapped it for the painting.
Dolmabahçe Palace was turned into a primary school where servants, ministers of state and other high officials learned the new script with the president of the republic as their teacher. He even composed an Alphabet March to help his pupils along.
