The totalitarian Turkish regime revoked Nazim Hikmet's citizenship in 1951. According to a statement of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), those same forces that exiled Hikmet are today celebrating him. "They read his poems; they talked about how big poet he was.
Their sole aim is to liquidate him, to defeat his ideas which they could while he was alive," said the statement. But why?
2002 is the centenary of Hikmet's birth and UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organization, is celebrating Hikmet and his poetry worldwide. The Turkish government saw this as a great opportunity to promote Turkey and so remade Hikmet as a nationalist anti-Communist, who opposed the Soviet Union.
In fact, Hikmet was a lifelong communist and died in the Soviet Union where he had been exiled from Turkey for his political beliefs. Today, the Communist Party remains semi-legal in Turkey and its members have been jailed repeatedly in the past years.
So the Communist Party of Turkey collected 500,000 signatures calling on the Turkish government to reinstate Nazim Hikmet's citizenship posthumously. Hundreds of poetry events and celebrations were held throughout the country and the world. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) sent a solidarity greeting stating: "Let's act for new Nazim Hikmets, Yannis Ritsos, Pablo Nerudas or Luis Aragons!" and called for an end to the ban on TKP.
If you would like to learn more about Nazim Hikmet and the Turkish Communist movement, you can visit:
Communist party of Turkey (TKP) www.tkp.org.tr
Communist Party of Greece (KKE) www.kke.gr
Last Will and Testament
By Nazim Hikmet, April 27, 1953
As translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk
Comrades, if I don't live to see the day
-I mean, if I die before freedom comes-
Take me away
And bury me in a village cemetery in
Anatolia.
The worker Osman whom Hassan Bey ordered
Shot
Can lie on one side of me, and on the other
Side
The martyr Aysha, who gave birth in the rye
And died inside of forty days
Tractors and songs can pass below the
Cemetery -
In the dawn light, new people, the smell of burnt gasoline,
Fields held in common, water in canals,
No drought or fear of the police.
Of course, we won't hear those songs:
The dead lie stretched out underground
And rot like black branches,
Deaf, dumb, and blind under the earth.
But I sang those songs
Before they were written,
I smelled the burnt gasoline
Before the blueprints for the tractors were
Drawn.
As for my neighbors,
The worker Osman and the martyr Aysha,
They felt the great longing while alive,
Maybe without even knowing it.
Comrades, if I die before that day, I mean
-and it's looking more and more likely-
bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia,
and if there's one handy,
a plane tree could stand at my head, I wouldn't need a stone or anything
|
Top level
Dynamic Magazine
