The Turkish poet imprisoned for 26 years for a crime he did not commit
The good news is that last year the Turkish poet İlhan Çomak won a major award, the Sennur Sezer poetry prize, for his eighth and most recent book of poems, Geldim Sana (I Came to You). The bad news is that he is in prison and has been in prison for 26 years, since his arrest as a geography student at the age of 22. All his books have been written in prison.
How did he come to be there? One factor, most likely the main factor, is that he is Kurdish. That is not a crime in itself, but belonging to, or even associating with a Kurdish political organisation is. There is also the specific matter of starting a forest fire, but no serious evidence has ever been brought to prove that. The only “proof” was his confession under torture and this has been highlighted in any appeals to free him.
It is not unusual in Turkey for writers to be imprisoned. There have been, and still are, too many to mention here but none has been incarcerated for as long as Çomak. Some have published from inside, some with great success. One of Turkey’s greatest poets, Nâzım Hikmet, who died in 1963, spent much of his life in prison or exile.
Putting aside writers, there remain the students. Following the Gezi Park environmental protests of 2013 there were over 70,000 students in Turkish jails and total numbers will have swollen since the attempted military coup of 2016. The precise number is unknown.
After the abortive 2016 coup some 53 newspapers were shut down. Many more media organisations were outlawed. There is regular pre-trial detention for those writing or sharing social media messages thought to be even faintly or indirectly subversive. Above all, perhaps, it is the the Kurdish population and Kurdish writers who have been most affected. The Kurdish Insitute was closed after 2016 and the very existence of Kurdish literature is under threat. Çomak’s poems are increasingly appearing in English translation though not yet in book form.
Should we think of Çomak as a prisoner who happens to write books of poetry? The poems need no such framing. They are not political in the sense that they advocate any specific point of view. His concerns have been elemental and full of memories of freedom, love and companionship. As he writes in “Life Does Not Lie”, translated by Caroline Stockford:
A fellow poet, Haydar Ergülen, suggests the poems could have been written inside or outside prison walls. And of course we must remember it wasn’t for his poetry that Çomak was imprisoned. His contacts with the outside world are very limited. He has been shifted from prison to prison to prevent his parents having access to him, but they have followed him each time. It is worth noting that Britain has strong economic ties with Turkey and could demand the immediate release of Çomak as a precondition to any agreement. Appeals against his sentence have been constantly delayed but his poetry, rightly, reaches ever more readers.