I Will Never See the World Again

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Novinár a spisovateľ Ahmet Altan je muž literatúry a filozofie, ktoré mu umožňujú aspoň malý odstup od skepsy a bezútešnosti väzenského prostredia.

I had surrounded and extinguished the fire of terror, which life had lit in a cage, with the fire of death. That was the ideology. But in reality, it turned out that prisons are perhaps the most antithetical environments for moral growth. Put a human around that much violence and in that state of deprivation and their priority will be for survival, not salvation. I will never see the world again" is a memoir made up of a series of essays written by Ahmet Altan, a journalist and a writer who's now imprisoned in the aftermath of the 2016 failed coup in Turkey. In fact, the book was put together thanks to notes the writer managed to smuggle to his lawyers. I found similarities in this book with Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" and actually even Altan sees this as well, mentioning this book in his memoir.

In putting the emphasis on the power of the imagination to transcend the physical incarceration, this sounds reminiscent of Jean Genet, the famous French prison writer, who basically just fantasizes his way out of his cell, which actually led to him physically coming out of the cell because he was championed by the intellectuals of the day. I can’t see that happening in Turkey. He says that he didn’t know where those words came from. He was as surprised as the officer to hear himself saying them. But the moment he heard those words, he thought, “I’m going be okay. I’m going to be okay, because I have irony and all the possibilities of language. Because I’m a writer, I am going to survive this situation.” Scaling Everest remains a perilous task even for veteran mountaineers. Nearly one in three who attempt it fail; at least 11 people died on the mountain in 2019 alone. In 2001, Erik Weihenmayer, an American, became the first blind person to stand on the 8,849-meter summit. Since then, only two other blind climbers — including Zhang — have been able to reach the top. He got out of prison after writing this. And then, days later, got arrested again on another trumped-up charge, spent a long time inside again, and was released in April 2021. It divided reality in two, like a samurai sword that in a single movement cuts through a silk scarf thrown up in the air.

Readers may have followed the furore over the statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, erected to honour the writer, philosopher and advocate of women’s rights near her erstwhile home in Newington Green, North London. Ever since it was unveiled in November – the result of a ten-year-long campaign led by the writer Bee Lowlatt – it has caused controversy and fired debate. I became so self-enclosed,” he says. “I always wanted to do something different to prove myself, but I’d never found a direction that would allow me to make such a breakthrough.” If I were to tire and let go of the branch I was holding, it would be fatal; I would fall to the bottom of the abyss and become a mess of blood and bones. Though the expedition is over, Zhang says his adventure is just beginning. He’s determined to continue pushing himself, hoping his feats can inspire blind people around the world.For a moment, I had an irresistible urge to get up, hold the iron bars and shout, ‘Let me out of here. Let me out of here, I am suffocating.’ To use the title of the novel my father wrote in prison, ‘a handful of sky’ is what you see when you look up, but even that is divided into the small squares of the steel cage above. I Will Never See the World Again is Altan’s memoir detailing his arrest and imprisonment. It depicts a parallel world in the prisons and courtrooms of Turkey, where words are meaningless and action impossible. As the judicial process becomes more absurd and Altan’s release less likely, he finds the only escape is his imagination and the ability to write. His liberty and independence of thought were not effortlessly maintained: whatever your inner fortitude, prison, by its very nature, is crippling. “In a matter of 5 hours I had travelled across five centuries to arrive at the dungeons of the Inquisition.” The sensory deprivation was immediately disorienting: like Oscar Wilde, he discovered that time ceases to mean anything. “The air and the light in our cage never changed. Each minute was the same as the last. It was as if a tributary of the river of time had hit a dam and formed a lake. We sat at the bottom of that motionless pool.” The first anniversary of failed coup in Istanbul, 2017. Photograph: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images Tell me,’ I said, ‘what is the bigger sin – a man eating an apple or punishing all of humanity with torture because a man ate an apple?’