I Will Never See the World Again

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Altan descends into a ghostly underworld. “Here in depths without light, the police, with each of their gestures and words, carved us out of life like a rotten, maggot-laced chunk from a pear, severing us from the world of ‘the living.’” He and the other prisoners are in between worlds, in a narrow gap between the living and the dead. I became so self-enclosed,” he says. “I always wanted to do something different to prove myself, but I’d never found a direction that would allow me to make such a breakthrough.” Made by the painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling, the statue drew immediate criticism due to its depiction of a silver naked everywoman, with various critics saying that it was insulting to honour the “mother of feminism” with a naked female form. Since then, the statue has been clothed with a festive red cape at Christmas, covering up its nudity, while in January it was defaced with orange graffiti. I found similarities in this book with Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" and actually even Altan sees this as well, mentioning this book in his memoir.

I wanted to get out of here, I wanted to get out right away and knowing this was impossible made my brain feel like it had pins and needles, as if thousands of ants were crawling in its folds.Because the prospect of being cut off from the precious lode of writing scared me more than anything, that fear would suppress all other fears and give me the ability to endure. Courage would be born of fear. Down there in the underworld of Turkey’s courts and prisons where words have little meaning, but can exact a high price, Altan reflects on his motives. Why is he here? Is it his vanity or his love of truth? Should he just keep quiet? Is it, in the end, worth it? In Turkey, as in many other countries, writing is a dangerous occupation. Altan has spent his working life skating on thin ice: he has had over 200 court cases against him and carries a gun for self-defence. However, it is just as easy to be arrested for what you didn’t write. After all, “subliminal messages” are hard to disprove. Altan is damned both ways.

Later in the book, his cellmate shares a story with him about a happy episode that happened in his life 10 years ago on a snowy day. Altan envelops himself in the other man’s story, imagining the snow landing on his face. He transports himself outside the prison walls.

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It was as if someone inside me, a person whom I could not exactly call ‘I’ but nevertheless spoke with my voice, through my mouth, and was therefore a part of me, said, as he was being transported in a police car to an iron cage, that he only smoked when he was ‘nervous’. Ahmet Altan is a Turkish writer and journalist that was detained and then received a life sentence because he was believed to have taken part of the failed military coup that tried to overthrow Erdogan's regime in 2016 Turkey. Each eye that reads what I have written, each voice that repeats my name holds my hand like a little cloud and flies me over the lowlands, the springs, the forests, the seas, the Browns and their streets. They host me quietly in their houses, in their halls, in their rooms. A must-read, especially in these challenging times when one begins to question the meaning of democracy. Zhang, meanwhile, was mentally preparing himself for the peril that lay ahead. A few days before leaving China, he’d had a sobering moment when he was asked to sign a series of waivers confirming that he accepted the risks associated with climbing Everest.