The Semi-Peripheral City: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul and Latife Tekin’s Dear Shameless Death

In the second section of the book the focus shifts to Europe’s south-eastern margin, to Turkey, and the works of Latife Tekin and Orhan Pamuk. The shift in geographical perspective is accompanied by a shift in focus, to spaces of concentrated uneveness: the city and the border. Chapter three starts by extending the discussion of literary representations of national history that was the focus of chapter one, by exploring Turkey’s history of imperial decline and post-imperial nation-building as represented in Latife Tekin’s autobiographical novel Dear Shameless Death and Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul: Memories of a City. It argues that both texts give insight into the impact of Kemalist nationalism on the city of Istanbul and that the notion of hüzün (melancholy) in Pamuk’s memoir and hemşehrilik (village fellowship) in Tekin’s novel can be understood as articulations of alternative forms of belonging that draw on shared experiences of the city’s history of decline to counter the parameters of inclusion and exclusion that characterised the nation’s founding era. The chapter opens with a discussion of Rosa Luxemburg’s essay on “Social Democracy and the National Struggles in Turkey” (1896), in which she outlines some key aspects of Turkey’s imperial disintegration. It then turns to Pamuk’s and Tekin’s representation of Istanbul. The final section explores the narrative function of memory with reference to Walter Benjamin’s essay “A Berlin Chronicle” and shows that in both novels’ memory serves as a mapping function that challenges the ‘persistent segmentation and proliferation of multiple spaces and temporalities’ (Harootunian 2005, p. 45) that congregate in the urban semi-periphery. It argues that, like Laxness’s and Heinesen’s earlier novels, Dear Shameless Death and Istanbul are shaped by the conflicts and contradictions of rapid capitalist development. The instability of the urban modernity this engenders is encoded in the different registers of uneveness identifiable across the two texts.