The prize-winning Kurdish poet Ilhan Sami Çomak has been in prison in Turkey for 28 years, since he was 22 years old.
Sit back and think about that for a minute. This man has spent more than half his life in prison, the last eight years in solitary confinement. He has a pet bird and regular visits from his Mackenzie Friend, Ipek Özel, for company. (A Mackenzie Friend is a court-appointed guardian who represents the prisoner in all third-party interactions, effectively assuming the role of family.)
During his confinement, Çomak has written eight award-winning collections of poetry. His first collection in English, Separated from the Sun, edited and with an Introduction by Welsh poet and translator Caroline Stockford, was published in September by Smokestack Books. Later that month, his first play was staged, although he has never seen a play performed.
Çomak was a geography student when he was arrested and accused of setting a forest fire in the name of the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party, the PKK. This happened when the Turkish state was in conflict with the PKK, resulting in thousands of convictions and harsh sentences. After several days of torture, he confessed, but since then he has consistently denied the charges against him. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2007 that his conviction was unlawful.
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During his confinement, Çomak has become a highly-respected poet, with a growing international reputation. Pen Norway runs a campaign called Free the Poet, in which recognised poets – including several from Ireland – exchange responsive poems with him. A compilation of this work will be published in due course.
The remarkable thing about Çomak’s work is its lack of bitterness. We might expect anger, or a railing against injustice but instead he writes about love and hope and freedom. He writes about colour and memory. He writes about Things That Are Not Here and This Morning and Feather Collecting. Life, he writes, is ‘seeing the flight of a butterfly’. He asks and answers a question with universal relevance: What Good is Reading Poetry? in a poem of that title. In another, he writes of
“Life; separated from the sun.
There’s no direction here.
But there is a way out.
Always a way out.”
Çomak asserts the sustaining power of friendship, which overcomes the apparently insurmountable barriers imposed by prison walls. He is an accomplished correspondent, hence the wide, and increasing, circle of friends who believe in him and call for his release. In a letter to supporters of the Free the Poet campaign, he refers to a line in an Anatolian folk song: ‘They left me in blind wells with no ladder.’ Being a prisoner for so long has increased a sense in his soul that he has been abandoned in that dark well without a ladder, and has laid siege to his concept of self, his senses and his mind. But he knows a secret, he says, which wards off time and human cruelty. That secret is the creative, imaginative power of poetry. The people who know his work and reach out to him in response are his ladder.
In a letter written to Irish Pen, accepting their invitation to become their first Honorary Member, Çomak says: “I write poetry for the sake of life and to stay alive, for my deep connection with life, because I miss life, because it brings life to my cell, because I love life and people with a passion and because I believe in life and myself. The continuity of this belief is all I have. (…) Over these 28 years of unrelenting confinement, I missed life so much, I spoke of so many longings that in the end the longings took on a life of their own; with poetry, above all with poetry, I woke up to life.”
Pen America’s 2021 Freedom to Write Index showed Turkey ranking with China and Saudi Arabia at the top of a list of the world’s worst jailers of writers and public intellectuals. In a letter to the Guardian in 2020, several activists and poets, including George Szirtes, Anne Stevenson, Ruth Padel, Ifor ap Glyn, Choman Hardi and Gillian Clarke, called on the British prime minister and foreign secretary (then Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab) to make representations to the Turkish government to free Ilhan Sami Çomak as soon as possible.
In the meantime, Ilhan wants the world to know his poetry, so that even though his body is imprisoned, his voice is free, unconfined. By reading his work and absorbing his passion for life and poetry, we lend substance to the power of his imagination and his belief in poetry, making them stronger than the oppressive regime that holds him in captivity. A man whose youth was stolen while he studied the contours of this Earth, he now explores the inner reaches of the human heart from the confines of a prison cell, a world both smaller and more expansive than most of us can imagine, in lines that grow into tracks and paths through the vivid, luminous, limitless world of poetry.
Excerpt from: “I came to you, Life” (for Ipek Özel)
And the tree’s shade buckles, birds give all they know to their wings.
The wind blows an ovation and from the sun comes the need to touch.
(…)
There is no city we need to reach. Everything is here.
Open the window. Open it as the horses whinny in the wideness of the world. Open it without speaking
of the shortness of summer, the never-ending winter. Open it, that the sky stirs with the hidden symbols of my mind.
I came to you saying, ‘Open the door to the presence of
existence’ as the sky stirs in its form.
I came to you saying, ‘Open the door of becoming.
Open the door of existence, to me.’
(Translated by Caroline Stockford)
November 15th is the International Day of the Imprisoned Writer
