Yasmine Ghata: "The Calligrapher's Night"


Yasmine Ghata has written a novel about her grandmother, Rikkat Kunt – one of the few female calligraphers in Turkish history. Review by Jan Valk

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After the abolition of Arabic script in Turkey, calligraphy lost a large part of its cultural significance | If one is to believe the legend of Theut and Thamus, the discovery of writing began with a dispute: when the divine inventor Theut tried to push his latest product to the Egyptian king Thamus, he met with rejection.

Unlike its inventor, Thamus did not re-gard writing as a tool to make people wiser and improve their memory, but rather the exact opposite: as something that harbors the risk of suppressing memory and re-placing the clarity of live conversation with obscurity and ambiguity. The spoken word is life, while writing is akin to death – for like all lifeless things, it can neither reply to questions, nor can it contradict.

Yasmine Ghata's debut novel "The Calligrapher's Night" also tells a tale of writing. Her book is a declaration of love to writing, and to all those who have devoted their entire life to kalem – the reed pen. For her, too, death and writing are closely related: the first-person narrator even begins the story of her life at the end – with her own funeral. She tells her life from the perspective of death, a life that is inextricable from the activity of writing.

Self-assertion and quiet dissent

The narrator is Rikkat Kunt (1903–1987), Yasmine Ghata's grandmother and one of the few female calligraphers in Turkish history. Nonetheless, as the book leaves no question, the writing at issue here is anything but dead: it proves itself to be a medium in which all the things that threaten to be annihilated by command-ments of silence and mechanisms of oppression find a living refuge: all that is quiet, intimate and not of its time, what cannot be immediately articulated or what is in dan-ger of being drowned out by the noise of "the big story".

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Yasmine Ghata | At the same time, Ghata's novel is remarkable in a completely different respect: it is not only a densely atmospheric, sensual and poetic narrative, Rikkat Kunt's life story also makes clear the enormous changes and upheavals which it spanned: the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of a young Turkey, the transformation of old Istanbul into a modern metropolis.

Rikkat grows up in her parents' Yali, a wooden villa directly on the Bosporus and is engaged at a young age to a crude dentist, Ceri, who has little interest in her. She discovers calligraphy as a technique of self-assertion and quiet dissent: "I prac-ticed calligraphy to comfort my hand for having been promised so prematurely. Shift-ing the letters, breaking up the lines was my way of protesting against this marriage."

Chicaneries of half-enlightened, half-crazy old men

She begins to seek out the old calligraphers and becomes an assistant to these "learned old men inspired by God's word". She endures all the chicaneries of these half-enlightened, half-crazy old men – and absorbs their art with all her senses. At last, when the old master Selim takes his life, leaving Rikkat his precious writing utensils, the young woman makes the decision to devote her life entirely to calligra-phy.

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Cover of the English edition of Yasmine Ghata's debut novel | She sets to work like one obsessed. Her absolute devotion to this art deals the death blow to her unhappy marriage with Ceri, who wants a partner who is satisfied with her role as wife. Rikkat is left alone with their son, but she does not depart from the path she has taken. Even as the old religious art seems to be increasingly losing status, she remains true to calligraphy.

She experiences Attatürk's abolition of Arabic script and the demise of the madrassa, the old Islamic institute which was home to calligraphy for centu-ries. But Rikkat remains undaunted. She advances from pupil to teacher and begins teaching at the Academy of the Arts in Istanbul.

Increasingly, her work on the sacred texts becomes an act of finding her own place – not only with respect to the intense and silent dialogue with God to which the callig-raphers are devoted, but also in the defense of private freedoms that are increasingly coming under attack. In particular her second husband Mehmet feels provoked by his wife's work, becoming increasingly abusive; this marriage collapses as well, while calligraphy remains to the very end.

"The Calligrapher's Night" tells of the subversive power of the written word and abso-lute devotion to a life goal. It ends with the sly certainty that all who believe that writ-ing is lifeless and incapable of contradiction are guilty of a vast underestimation.

Jan Valk

© Qantara.de 2007

Translated from the German by Isabel Cole

Yasmine Ghata: "The Calligrapher's Night", Hesperus Press, London, 200 pp.


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