Silence, Secularism, and Fundamentalism in Snow

Abstract

In Snow, Ka, a struggling poet returning from a decade-long selfinflicted exile in Germany, is commissioned by a national news paper to report on young, religious girls committing suicide in Kars, in Eastern Turkey. Once a cosmopolitan city with “thousandyear-old churches,” “a large Armenian community,” Persians, Greeks, Kurds, Georgians, and Circassians, Kars is now a poverty-stricken provincial outpost suffering from “destitution, depression, and decay.”¹ As Ka makes the journey on a bus in the thick of winter, it begins to snow, which he sees as “a promise, a sign pointing back to the happiness and purity he had once known as a child” (4); he is inspired to write a poem, titled “The Silence of Snow.” The “inner peace” that the poet initially feels, however, is gradually replaced by an apprehension brought about by the escalating snowstorm; it becomes “tiring, irritating, terrorizing,” creating “a fearful silence” among the passengers (5). As the bus continues its journey, it literally distances Ka from the familiarity of the Western values of Istanbul. Upon arrival, he feels culturally displaced in “a ghost town” of idleness and extremism, where human rights are violated and privacy laws are meaningless. Most importantly, the journey to the periphery of the nation forces Ka to enter into the ongoing political struggle between secularists and Islamists, and to rethink the usual rhetorical depiction of this struggle.²