Andrea Bajani on the ‘posture of literature’
The Italian novelist discusses autocracy, Russia and Turkey
Dear readers,
The Lion and the Nightingale is out in paperback on May 16, 2024, and is available for pre-order. If you want to support my work, you can pre-order the book from Bookshop.org, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.
Today I leave you with Andrea Bajani’s article about The Lion and the Nightingale, which appears in its Italian edition as an epilogue.
Bajani is one of my favourite Italian writers and he was kind enough to write this piece, days after Russia started its invasion of Ukraine.
The courage of kindness
Andrea Bajani
Between exile and resistance there is yet another posture, which is that of literature, which does not throw in the towel and does not take aim with words to strike power to death. The posture of literature is that specific attitude to oppose complexity to simplification, to multiply stories and points of view, instead of reducing sentences to propaganda. To put our hearts into reacting with History, rather than transforming the alphabet into the army of ideology. Kaya Genç’s The Lion and the Nightingale is one of the brightest examples of how literature, and even a certain stubborn and firm kindness are more effective - and ultimately powerful - than any pamphlet.
Kaya Genç is a writer and a kind man. Yet his kindness is tinged with such honesty in his gaze that somehow coincides with courage. He is delicate but never retreats, doesn't hide or run away.
Reading through all four seasons of this important book you understand that his courage, in recounting the desperate contradictions of today's Turkey, derives mainly from two things: love for truth and for human beings.
The Turkey that this prolific and passionate writer tells us about is a powder keg. It is a place where you can disappear and die, where walking away seems like the only alternative option to silence, keeping quiet and minding your own business. In which exile seems to be the only choice left, for those who do not want to choose to be reduced to being just a private person and no longer the citizen of a country.
Yet there is still a choice to be made, and it is the one Genç makes: stay and tell, don't stop letting life, stories speak, oppose life and literature to silence.
"In Turkey, reporters represent the lowest rung of the journalistic career. Those who do not become editors-in-chief are considered failures. Reporters are the least paid." Climbing positions, aspiring to power - in journalism - means trying to climb so high that you are then abysmally distant from reality and no longer able to see it. And without seeing it, you can't tell it. Which is equivalent to telling a second-hand world. Genç tells the story because he knows it, looks at it, meets it. Hence the importance of a book like this.
What The Lion and the Nightingale stages is ultimately an ostinato trust in the story. Genç could have left Turkey, left the country as many have done, legitimately. And from there to have a life not colonised by the Turkish state, a new life, private and public at the same time, free to be what he wanted, to write stories without fearing becoming an enemy of the state with every sentence. And instead he decided to stay, to continue to make words coincide with things. And to do it as a kind of act of dignity and love. For himself, for Turkey, for honesty.
As I write these few lines, Europe and the world are on the brink of a war with frightening and boundless scenarios. Russian planes bomb Ukraine, Europe and the United States of America send aid and weapons, and it is not yet clear whether this will put out the fire or - as it seems to me - add fuel to the fire. We don't know, and we live moment by moment, while the siege of Kiev claims innocent victims. When you read these lines you will know what happened, something that I cannot know now, writing.
But it is a fact that the armed arm of the war in Russia was the silence of information. Nothing comes from Russia anymore, foreign journalists have left the country to avoid running into prison. Well, that silence, that absence of information, is more devastating and effective than many assault battalions. It is a silence that bleeds, that hurts History.
Faced with the gag of every totalitarian system, with that nothingness that leaks into the outside world, Genç's gentle firmness is an example of civilisation. He knows what he risks facing the sovereign, but he also knows that it is more important to say it, to get the stories beyond the border, into the rest of the world. That kindness is true courage, it is what literature can do, its strength is in its freedom.
March 13, 2022