The voice of Every Fire You Tend seems to reach us from the depths of a cave: confined, echoing, intense. The stories it tells are allusive, building up and breaking apart, splintered through centuries and civilisations.
Sema Kaygusuz has become an important figure in contemporary Turkish literature, for numerous novels, story collections and essays that blend the quotidian, historical and mystical with lyrical humanism. Her work interrogates the position of the individual – particularly women – in society, favouring the wider perspective of nature and imagination over the confines of the political. In her first novel translated into English, following the 2015 short-story collection The Well of Trapped Words, an unnamed second-person narrator is addressing a silent woman who has lost an integral sense of who she is. The voice reminds the woman of her memories and tells her tales reaching far back in time.
Who is this young woman? What has happened to her? We’re offered the briefest glimpses: her ground-floor apartment in present-day Istanbul; her work as a photographer; her attendance at a Hıdrellez celebration in honour of the prophet-saint Hızır revered by Alevi Muslims. There are visits to the young woman’s grandmother, Bese, who tells fantastical stories of her encounters with Hızır. And there is the inherited memory of Bese as a young child, fleeing the Turkish army’s massacre of Alevi Kurds in the eastern Dersim province in 1938.
“I know from my grandmother how pain gives way to silence,” Kaygusuz writes in her afterword to the novel. Although her own grandmother, an exile from Dersim, constantly told stories, she never spoke of what she witnessed in those few months of her childhood. Perhaps her silence was due to fear, in the face of a monolithic Turkish-Sunni narrative. Perhaps it was the impossibility of giving words to the horror. Perhaps it was the shame of being alive. It is this silence that the novel’s protagonist has inherited and whose deafening void she tries to fill with stories.
The woman’s story never comes into full focus; the events of her life do not add up as they might in an official telling. History cannot be faced head on, Kaygusuz is telling us; there is no language for trauma, because it estranges us from ourselves: “You try to embody Bese’s moral fortitude, but in the process (…) you split in half (…) and you have no choice but to observe that stranger, always, to listen to her tortured voice.”
What we’re offered, instead, are tales reaching back thousands of years. They present various guises for reality, just like the mysterious Hızır himself, who flits in and out of the novel’s pages, changing form through the centuries as the narrator tells the young woman story after story. At times, this vast sweep of history can be frustrating, with stories from the Assyrians, Hittites, Lycians and Ottomans stitched back to back, without a uniting narrative. One wishes that these narratives would pierce the novel’s surface and merge with the young woman’s fraught psyche. Still, they widen the scope of a shared and violent past, beyond cultural and temporal frames, situating them within a single, lyrically rendered consciousness. Ultimately, perhaps, it is these stories that offer solace and a sense of selfhood, albeit fragmented.
“Have the courage to turn your face to me,” the narrator tells the young woman. “See at last who the mutterings in your head belong to. Find me among the mottled shadows cast by the rays of light filtering into your home. Look into my eyes, dim with fear. Let me tell you everything you have imagined.” The self is speaking to its cowering double; Kaygusuz has fashioned a two-way lens of its shadowy silences and its fleeting lights of stories.
• Every Fire You Tend by Sema Kaygusuz, translated by Nicholas Glastonbury, is published by Tilted Axis (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
