There is a stirring symmetry of sorts between two entirely unrelated events – Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan's call for an extraordinary congress to end the 30-year armed struggle for a separate state and the death on Saturday of the great Turkish writer Yasar Kemal. He died at 91, having been both an ethnic Kurd who spoke out against state oppression and entirely Turkish.
Despite a period in exile and a suspended jail sentence for criticism of Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds, Kemal lived long enough to see his country’s approach to that minority change.
Kemal’s life illustrates one reason why Ocalan seeks to end the struggle. But he went beyond ethnic boundaries, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak has said he wanted to be a storyteller, and was taking Turkish folktales to the wider world. Memed, My Hawk, a novel about a villager fighting feudalism, became a film starring Peter Ustinov. “If I had not discovered literature,” he once said, “I would have become a bard, a singer of epic poems.” He was: in prose.
