Once he sets foot in Kars, the poems flow. Everywhere he goes, Ka is followed by the hated secret police. The headscarf girls are seen in 'modern' Turkey as misguided souls who fight for the right to wear the symbol of religious oppression.Īs Ka wanders around the town, the shadow, the spectre, of the PKK (The Kurdish separatist movement) is everywhere. The 'headscarf girls', egged on by Islamists, are demanding the right to wear a headscarf. Sadly the lot for girls in a backward Muslim community. Girls have been committing suicide in nearby Batman, now the problem has spread to Kars.Īll the girls, bar the one who refused to obey the headscarf edict, have been very badly treated by their families. No sooner does Ka arrive, than the town is cut off, the roads blocked by snow. Ka arrives in Kars in the the middle of a snowstorm. Women, as everywhere under Islam, are suffering oppression. Now it suffers under Turkish occupation and the rise of political Islam.

For a brief period during the 1920s after the First World War it was independent. For hundreds of years it has been fought over by warring empires. Kars is a border town close to the Armenian border. Ka has another reason for being in Kars, to meet Ipek, recently divorced, the love of his student days.

Ka, a Turkish poet exiled for many years in Germany, takes a trip to Kars, in Turkish occupied Kurdistan, ostensibly as a journalist for the left-wing periodical Republican to investigate a plague of suicides and to cover the local elections. Joseph Conradįor it is by reading novels, stories and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled and hidden by our families, our schools, and our society it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are. We are about to speak of very ugly matters. Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though impossible to ignore. Because the EuropeanĮnlightenment is more important than people. Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. The most important thing today is not to pray or fast but to protect the Islamic faith.

Snow turkish novel