"Stone and Shadow" by Burhan Sönmez

Our Book Club discussed Stone and Shadow with the author on February 6, 2024. This transcript is edited lightly for length and conciseness.

Q: Stone and Shadow, your fifth novel, concerns Avdo, who as a boy of unknown origins turned up in the late 1930 in a market in Mardin, an ancient city on the Turkish-Syrian border. He was taken in by an Assyrian stonemason who trains him as his apprentice. Once he grows up, Avdo goes to the central Anatolian village of Haymana, home to many Kurds. There he falls in love with a local woman. He winds up in a cemetery in Istanbul, but the story of his life takes us to other places at several historical moments. One is Dersim during the massacre, but you don’t go into it in detail–did you intend for readers to want find out more about Dersim?

Burhan Sönmez:  It’s a pleasure to be with you. I always try to write about dreams and memory and the hopes of mankind, especially in my home region. In this novel, I decided to write the story of a person, to show his life, but to compare the history of a certain region with a personal life. How much does my own life reflect my country, my history, even of five hundred years?

Avdo is about 80 years old. As we trace his life, we also see the history of 20th century in Turkey. Dersim is a pillars in that story, but we go to Syria and Jerusalem, Egypt, Italy, Istanbul. All those regions have affected each other for thousands of years. I’m interested in individual psychology but also social psychology, and how they are related. I wanted to relate the individual psychology of Avdo to the psychology of the whole society. A society lasts longer than a lifespan and has a subconscious. I tried build a personality out of his personal suffering but also the regional and social suffering.

Q: Was it intentional that Avdo, an orphan who never knew his parents, didn’t have a history, amid tons of history?

Sönmez:  In my books I always try to understand how human beings manage to create their own destiny. Are we victims of our destinies, or do we make our destinies? Are we really free to decide? For example, the jacket I wear—I shopped for it and chose it. I decided. I made that decision as a free man. But who decided that fashion? What was trending that year? As people in society, we are all shaped by broader entities. Movies and books and political powers all shape our lives.

Marx said we are children of conditions, and that it is our role to shape conditions. We are trying to do something, but we are always being influenced by our conditions. We have to find ways to build something more beautiful for ourselves and for people around us.  I don’t believe in victory, I believe in struggle.

Q: I was struck by your use of flashbacks, shifting back and forth in time. It was disorienting at first, but then I realized that’s sort of how memory works.

Sönmez:  Writing about a subject is easy. What’s hard is figuring out how to present it. What is the best form? You have to understand the spirit of the story you’re writing. When I was writing this novel, I thought, our brains work like circles. The history of mankind is always with us. Think about Jesus crucified—it was 2000 years ago—what does that mean? But the idea of suffering is still with us. People were murdered in the Dersim Massacre, but in our memory it is still current. The memory of mankind always moves faster than light. We bring the history of nature and mankind into the present moment. And it’s always fractured. How are we going to design these fractures? Which do we collect, which do we leave out? Our brains fragment, but in those fragments we can build anything.

Q: And yet with our fracturing brains, we are looking for a story.

Sönmez:  I grew up in a small Kurdish village. We didn’t get electricity until I was 14.  Yet it was the best time of my life. My mother would gather us kids and tell us fairy tales. She would tell the same stories, in the same voice, for years. But even though we knew how a story would end, it was new for us. Some nights the light next to her face would be different, which gave a new place to the story. Or it depended on the kind of day she had. Storytellers add something new. When I realized this, I realized, give clothing to a story. Our clothing changes every day. Someone once made a list of all the basic plots that have been written. There aren’t many–love, separation, fight, happy ending. Even so, we still we feel excitement hearing stories. That’s the magic of art and storytelling.

Q: IS this story of the fox and the elderly lady from your mother?

Sönmez:  Yes.  I heard the same story in different versions from different  Kurdish villages.

Q: How has your Kurdish identity influenced your writing?

Sönmez:  This is my boiling question nowadays. I learned Turkish in primary school, and I learned Kurdish in my village. In Turkey we Kurdish writers tend to stay in one language or the other.  But I always try to reflect my Kurdish identity in my books.

My second novel, in Turkish, was about my Kurdish village. When it was published in Turkish, I received many unpleasant letters from Turks: “You bloody Kurd! If you don’t like Turks, go back to ….” But where? This is my place—where can I go? People sometimes say my books are too political. In my opinion, they aren’t political, they’re just reflecting life in Turkey. People like us from Turkey, we don’t have to decide to think in political terms.  It’s like poison, it’s already in our brains. We can’t run away from it. It’s always in our minds and it’s unconscious in my stories.

But my dream has always been to write a novel in my mother tongue. It’s  something I always wanted to do. So for my sixth novel, I thought, if I have this dream, why shouldn’t I do it? So for the first time, I wrote a novel in Kurdish—it’s  is coming out next week. The Turkish will come later.

Q: How much is the book based on true experience?

Sönmez:  No wise novelist can answer this question. [Gabriel García] Márquez used to say that when people asked, “Are your stories real?” he’d say, “All these stories are real. My grandmother told me this one. It’s magical realism. Everything I’ve written is real, coming from my grandmother.”

Q: I’m curious about Avdo going to Haymana.

Sönmez: I love Haymana, I go there every year, for the harvest.  I always mention it. In Stone and Shadow, I just used Haymana from another perspective.

In Haymana, when we were little, we didn’t have radio or TV . When people said there are Kurds in the east, we would say, “Why are they there?” We didn’t know that was the main land of Kurds. We thought we were. Our region was settled by Kurds 500 years ago. There are many books about this history of Kurds in Haymana. Because we are outside Kurdistan, surrounded by Turks, Armenians, Greeks, people kept their identity strongly.

Today in Haymana people know my writing. They’ll come up to me and say, “In this book you talk about Haymana, but I’ll tell you my story.” Then we talk about it.

Q: What message should your first-time readers take away?

Sönmez:  I avoid the word “message”—it’s very dangerous for a writer. We tell stories, we don’t aim to send messages. The main thing is, I have certain feelings. What is the meaning of death for the living? It’s in every novel. Also the idea of goodness. What is being a good person?  It’s an obsession for me. In Istanbul Istanbul,I wrote about certain people torturing others. But even with them, I tried to give a picture of them as human beings, in the end. I try to explain goodness through stories. Suffering gives people the potential to achieve goodness, even if they may do evil things. We need to work on that potential, we need to promote it.

Q: Like Commander Cobra, who starts out seeming like the epitome of evil, but then as the novel goes on, we learn about his sister who died and that he is still living with her memory. But if justice means making things right, is it enough to say we all have goodness in us? What about those who are being tormented?

Sönmez: I believe in justice, it’s something we should fight for. But to reach justice, are we going to apply the same violence that victimized us, or are we going to insist on peaceful means?

As a young man, I believed that violent revenge could be a form of justice. But in the Middle East, Ukraine, Afghan, Myanmar—it’s all still going on, the whole world is burning.

But justice obtained through violence fails in the end. It’s never successful. Something comes and corrupts certain ideas and dreams. I call myself a pacifist now and pursue justice for everyone. Goodness and solidarity are so important for me now. At PEN, every year we focus on helping writers at risk, in Turkey, Syria, Belorusia, Ukraine. We help thousands of writers and never use volence. But when ISIS is murdering and kidnapping and enslaving and selling women in markets, and Kurdish women are fighting them–I can’t tell them just to resist in a peaceful way. That’s a dream. It has a long way to go. There are problems with the evolution of humankind.

Q: As PEN president, it must be difficult to answer questions and be just.

Sönmez:  It’s challenging in every respect. You need to convince your fellow writers. We have 40,000 members, and they are independent writers with their own ideas. Sometimes they are full of anger and denounce things. You have to find a way. I don’t believe we can create 100 percent unity in a society. The main thing is to understand differences and try to find ways to address different colors. We can’t say everyone is equally right, but everyone has a right to be on the platform with their voice.  When you try to achieve something collectively, you have to know what not to say, you have to know how to be tolerant.

Q: Adem the officer is at first prejudiced against the uncivilized easterners. Once he’s there, he becomes just, he knows what is just and unjust.

Sönmez: About 10 years ago I participated in a collective story book about Dersim. A Story of Dersim. We all wrote stories and presented the book. While we were writing them, we learned more about soldiers who had participated in the Dersim massacre. Some of them regretted it, were disturbed psychologically, and confessed to the press.

Q: Once I read at the end what Avdo finally wanted—that was the greatest conclusion. It blew my mind. Thank you for being here with us. We’re looking forward to your next book.

The photo of Burhan Sönmez was taken by ActuaLitté in Frankfurt in 2017. Creative Commons.