Abstract
Çetin Altan, one of Turkey's best-known journalists, established his reputation during the sixties as an outspoken and radical newspaper columnist with the widest readership ever achieved by a political commentator in Turkey. As a result of his great popularity, he was elected to parliament in 1965 as a deputy for the left-wing Turkish Labour Party, but after the military takeover in March 1971, the Labour Party was proscribed and parliament suspended.
In 1972 Altan was sentenced to one and a half years' imprisonment on a charge of making ‘communist propaganda’ - in an article written six years earlier in 1966 for the Istanbul daily newspaper, Akşam. In December the same year the editor of Akşam, Dogan Kologlu, was sentenced to seven and a half years' imprisonment for publishing the article, and in January 1973 Altan was again tried for a 1971 article in Akşam called ‘Criticism directed to the President’. At that time he was acquitted (see INDEX 1 and 2/1973), but at some unknown later date he was again tried on the same charge and sentenced to a further two years' imprisonment.
Meanwhile Altan was confined in Saĝmalcilar Prison in Istanbul and during his sentence began to go blind. As a result of this infirmity he was granted a state pardon by President Koroturk in December 1973 and allowed to go free, but it was made clear that the pardon applied only to the first prison sentence and that the second one, of two years, might still have to be served.
While held in Saĝmalcilar Prison, Altan completed his first novel, Under the Big Eye, and began a second. Based on his own experiences but not narrowly autobiographical, Under the Big Eye is set in a prison cell in Istanbul where the hero has been brought for an unspecified reason. During his stay there, the hero's thoughts constantly return to his childhood experiences, which are interspersed, in dreamlike fashion, with episodes in the cell. He lives in constant fear of being tortured, and the guards do everything in their power to convince him that he is a murderer. At one point he is given a paper saying that no legal proceedings are to be brought against him and believes that this means his release, but at the end of the novel he is still in jail.
Yaşar Kemal, Turkey's leading novelist, has called Altan's work ‘a real step forward for the Turkish novel, a masterpiece' and, ironically in view of the author's situation, it has even won literary prizes and topped the best seller lists there. The following extract shows the laconic economy with which Altan writes and renders the nightmare atmosphere of life in jail.