"Dawn" by Selahattin Demirtaş

Dawn: Stories, by Selahattin Demirtaş. Translated from the Turkish by Amy Marie Spangler and Kate Ferguson. New York: SJP for Hogarth, 2018.

Discussed at our Book Club on April 4, 2023.

This slender book contains twelve stories by Selahattin Demirtaş, a human rights lawyer turned HDP co-chair turned political prisoner. Written from his cell in a maximum security prison in Edirne, the book is dedicated to “all murdered women and victims of violence.” The stories are simple, modest, and unpretentious, sometimes funny but more often heartbreaking.

Two seem to point to his current condition: in “The Man Inside” a prisoner in a high-security cell converses with a bird. And in the last story, “A Magnificent Ending,” the narrator is a politician, representing a city that has achieved all the demands in the HDP program.

Other stories relate to the author’s condition as a prisoner by expressing sympathy for prison workers. “Greetings to Those Dark Eyes” is about two construction workers And in “A Letter to the Prison Letter-Reading Committee,” a prisoner addresses a story to those whose job is to screen his words.

In other stories, Demirtaş projects himself into the lives and psyches of people very different from himself. In “It’s Not What You Think”  he writes from the point of view of a psychotic stalker. In “Ah, Asuman!” he captures a nighttime conversation between a bus driver and a young passenger as the kilometers roll by somewhere in Anatolia. That story is funny and upbeat, but “Kebab Halabi” is about the consequences of a bomb that exploded in an Aleppo marketplace killing 68 people.

Demirtaş sometimes takes the risk of writing from the point of view of women and girls. In “Mermaid,” he becomes a five-year-old Syrian girl who is taken by her mother to escape the country. In “Nazan the Cleaner,” a cleaning woman gets swept up in a violent demonstration and, through a series of mishaps, ends up unjustly imprisoned.

In “Seher,” a dreamy, romantic teenage girl is raped, for which she undergoes an “honor” killing at the hands of her family. The story is devastating.

Finally, “As Lonely as History” concerns a woman who is an architect, married to her professional partner. The couple become alienated from all aspects of life except their work. It is beautifully written and, among other things, a heartfelt statement of the power of literature.

Available for purchase from Penguin Random House.