Keeping the faith: Staging Ece Temelkuran's Women Who Blow on Knots
On a new stage adaptation of a novel of female resilience at London's Arcola Theatre.
I’m writing this from Tirana, where I’m running a workshop on criticism with young writers from Albania and the wider region. It’s taking place as part of the Kosovo/Albania Theatre Showcase, which is hosted by Qendra Multimedia (and about which I’ll be writing more in future weeks). The programme is intense - we’ll be seeing a lot of work over the next few days. Before I went, I had the opportunity to interview Ece Temelkuran, the Turkish journalist, author and political commentator - a writer I’ve long admired - about the new stage adaptation of her novel which opened in London this week.
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Ece Temelkuran wrote her second novel, Women Who Blow on Knots, as an act of survival. The political commentator, journalist and novelist, whose 2019 book How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, details what feels like to watch your country slip into authoritarianism, the mechanisms and tactics used to strip you of your freedom, the warning signs for the West, had just lost her job.
The political situation in Turkey was already deteriorating, she explains, when in 2012 she published two articles about a massacre, in which Kurdish civilians were killed on the Iraqi/Turkish border. For this she lost her job. “I was pushing the limits of what can be written, and I pushed it too far.”
She was in Tunisia, unable to go back to Turkey, and being subjected to an intense campaign of online harassment. It was a very difficult time, so she turned to fiction. She started to write the novel to “escape from my reality at the time, but also from a determination to create beauty.”
Women Who Blow on Knots became a publishing phenomenon in Turkey, selling over 120,000 copies since its publication. It has now been adapted for the stage by Leyla Nazli, co-founder of the Arcola Theatre in east London, and directed by Turkish director, Lerzan Pamir. Since reading the book ten years ago, Pamir has wanted to direct it. “It felt like a guidebook reminding me of my inner strength when I felt hopeless,” she says. “It's a story I love deeply and bringing it to the stage along with Leyla is a true privilege. I'm so pleased that we get to share the story of these brave and powerful women, and I hope that the show inspires people in the same way that the book did for me.”
Located in a former paint factory in Dalston in east London, the Arcola was founded by Nazli and Mehmet Ergen in 2000. In its early years, when the theatre was still located in a converted textiles factory around the corner, it generated a real buzz (and arguably contributed to the hipster-fication of the neighbourhood), attracting big name writers, actors and directors. (In this piece in the Evening Standard, Ergen and Nazli tell the story of the theatre on its 20th anniversary). It’s a theatre with close links to Turkey and the Turkish and Kurdish communities in London. The theatre’s Turkish-language drama group, Arcola Al Turka, often stages works in Turkish with English surtitles. The Arcola also has a history of staging texts with a connection to Turkey, including Pera Palas by Sinan Ünelin, back in 2007 and Shrapnel, Anders Lustgarten’s play about the Roboski massacre. The adaptation of Temelkuran’s novel is the latest in this line. It wilk be performed in English but will have Turkish surtitles.
The novel, which is set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, tells the story of four women who go on a road trip from Tunisia through Libya and Egypt to Lebanon. In the novel, a Turkish journalist who has recently been made unemployed goes on a journey with an academic Maryam, and a Tunisian activist and dancer, Amira. They are later joined by a mysterious older woman, Madam Lilla.
The situation in Gaza and Lebanon has made Temelkuran think a lot about this need for beauty in our lives. “When we are presented with the ugliest versions of humans, how do we resist this?” She clarifies what she means when she talks about beauty. “It's not an escape,” she says. “When reality gets too ugly to look at, I think we have to get closer to it, to see the glimmers of human beauty. We have to focus on that beauty and create beauty through that lens.” She is not just talking about art either, she stresses, when she talks about beauty. “I'm talking about political beauty. I'm talking about moral beauty.”
This is even more important now, she says, as “the doors of the West are closing.” They’re trying to protect the garden “That's why they are strengthening the borders, fortifying the castle walls. It is obvious that now that the doors are closed, physically, morally.” In a situation like this, what can we do? “We have to look at that footage and we must see something other than horror. We must see the determination of people to survive and stay human while surviving. We have to take courage from that to create our own art or politics.”
“It's not lost on me,” says Pamir, “that I'm in another country, staging a play about borders, and the coming together of women from different backgrounds and cultures - it feels like the process of making this work has reflected the key themes of the story.”
As well as being majority female-led, the creative team and cast for Women Who Blow on Knots features many Turkish people too, she adds. “I've followed and admired Arcola Theatre for years, for their international outlook as well as their connections and work with Turkish communities, so this is incredibly meaningful for me. “
Despite the Arcola’s reputation for internationalism, this is the first production to be set in an Arab Spring country. As Nazli points out in an interview with First Night Magazine, there’s value in reflecting on this period and lessons to be learned from it. It’s also a story of women, of women of different ages and backgrounds who find strength in one another, something which will resonate with many.
“This play highlights issues in the Arab Spring that still persist today—migration, exclusion, displacement, and belonging,” Nazli said in the piece. “If we can get people to think about these themes, reflect on the struggles migrant women face globally, and perhaps see how they can support or enact change in their own way, then the play will have achieved something.”
Following the publication of How to Lose a Country, Temelkuran was asked over and over again: what can we do? How do you we resist this? It led her to write Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now. One of the things she writes about in Together is the distinction between faith and hope, and how she prefers to talk about the former rather than the latter. (She expands on this distinction in this interview). Hope can only carry you so far. Faith is something deeper. “I came to the idea of faith through my experience with fascism and my experience with the people who did not react to fascism at the time,” she says. She was moved by people who supported each other when everything was falling down around them, by their faith and the faith they inspired. Her understanding of what it means to have faith in people stems from the time she was writing this novel. “It was really a difficult time for me,” she says. She’d lost her job and was being vilified on social media, systematically intimidated and attacked. She felt as if there was no hope, as if she’d hit bottom and had to “rediscover what I believed in and what keeps me together.” She had to find the faith that things will change, “that there'll be a better tomorrow, that I can still be a person.”
This is not the first time Temelkuran’s work has been adapted for the stage. There have been productions of her work in Turkey before, so she is not new to this process. As an author, being adapted is a process that requires you to relinquish control and ownership. It is not always easy. But “I’ve been thinking about humility a lot lately,” she says, “and humility is quite important when you are talking about art.”
“When you sit at a table and make things up and then these things inspire others to make something else,” she says, “when people come together and produce something else from your work, this is magical. It is incredibly inspiring, but more than that, it refreshes my faith.” That’s not to say it’s easy to see the product of your imagination filtered through someone else’s eyes. “Of course, I'm afraid that it's going to become something else from what I've written,” she says, but there is something beautiful in seeing something you created be reshaped by different artists, in seeing it multiplied. She feels blessed, albeit not in a religious sense, to have so many people focused on bringing this work to the stage.
Since How to Lose a Country was published, the FPO have scored an election win in Austria and the AfD have done dismayingly, if not unpredictably, well in elections in Germany. Slovakia has just purged many people in positions of artistic leadership who were not party-compliant. Having left Turkey, Temelkuran spent several years living in Zagreb, before relocating to Berlin. How does she feel about the political situation in Germany? In the West, she says, there is a tendency to put the past in a box, to think of it as if it were “part of a black- and-white documentary,” something that happened a comfortably long time ago. The is a tendency to think of fascism as “this German thing that happened once, long ago,” but this way of thinking is “a historical mistake, an ideological mistake and a moral mistake.” That’s particularly apparent now, she says, as we watch events unfold in Gaza.
She can already imagine the documentaries that will be made in the future about this period. “I can already see the people in the documentaries confessing their mistakes and then apologising. “I've seen this exact same thing happening in Turkey,” she says. When things are happening, a few people speak out, even if they are often ignored. “Later come the documentaries, where people are confessing, justifying, explaining, and apologizing,” she says.
Turkey is, she says, “a country coming to a breaking point.” The country has lost any sense of law and justice. “This is a very, very dangerous thing to happen to society” she says. There is a process of social unravelling underway which will be very hard to reverse.
When commentators and analysts talk about the loss of democracy and all the factors that contribute to it, she says, “they tend to forget that this does something to people emotionally and morally.” That is the long-term effect, she says, and it is something that is not easy to repair.
There’s a tendency, she continues, to think about politics as something abstract but it trickles down into personal lives, into our close friendships, our marriages, our relationships with relatives and so on.” Political division can break apart marriage and end friendships. “There is a different kind of loneliness that Western societies are now beginning to experience.” Turkey has been through this already, she says. The West is heading down this path too.
This can leave you feeling exhausted she says, in the sense that Hannah Arendt used the word. “What's exhausting is not just what's happening, but the loss of meaning that comes with it.” You end up feeling: what's the meaning of saying something? What is the meaning of going to that demonstration?” It is the sense that nothing will change no matter what you do that exhausts you.
There’s an arrogance in the West, she says, a reluctance to heed the warnings. “They think themselves different.” They hold on to “the illusion of their democracies being more mature.” But this is just an illusion. This is a process with no bottom, she says. If people don’t resist this process, things will keep deteriorating. “People think that if they hit the bottom, then they’ll bounce back, but there's no bottom.”
That’s where faith and beauty come in. Finding the will to keep creating in the face of all this is a form of resistance. The faith of which Temelkuran talks is a faith in people. This is what it it is important to hold onto. There is something almost magical in the way a book or a piece of art can connect writer with reader, artist with audience. “I do believe that there is some sort of magic there that I cannot explain,” she says. “This book has changed many lives.” It means an awful lot to people, she says, There are even people who have been so touched by her book that they have tattooed certain sentences of her text on their bodies, she says, smiling as she recalls seeing a photograph of a woman with a long passage from her novel tattooed on her hip. “How lucky am I?”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days
Attempts on her Life – Lilja Rupprecht directs Falk Richter’s new translation of the postmodernist play by Martin Crimp, consisting of "17 scenarios for the theatre" which offer multiple perspectives on the slippery, shapeshifting character of Anne. It premieres at the Schaubühne in Berlin on 30th October.
euro-scene – The 34th edition of the international dance and theatre festival in Leipzig, which runs from the 5th-10th November, has been overshadowed by a recent controversy over its programming of And Here I Am, a 2017 production by Palestine’s Freedom Theatre. Written by Iraqi playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak and directed by Zoe Lafferty, the show stars Palestinian actor Ahmed Tobasi and is based on his own experiences, including his youthful participation in Islamic Jihad. The play was actually performed at the Arcola back in 2017 - here are reviews from The Stage and the Guardian. It was supposed to be performed at the festival on 6th and 7th November but after receiving heavy criticism from organisations including Artists Against Antisemitism, which issued a statement highlighting the fact the festival has not programmed any Israeli artists and alleging that the piece trivialises terrorism. The festival eventually cancelled the performance. Here’s a piece on the cancellation. The annual conference of the ITI - International Theatre Institute, which was supposed to take place as part of the festival, and at which Laffertym was due to speak, was also postponed.
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