Ahmet Atlan is a Turkish author/journalist born into a family of authors. Like his father and brother, he was jailed unjustly after writing an article dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide. After a failed July 2016 coup d’état in 2016 against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s oppressive regime, Altan was arrested during Erdoğan’s purge of media personalities. He was charged with giving “subliminal messages” in favor of the coup when he appeared on a TV program the day before the overthrow attempt. Atlan spent over three years in pre-trial detention. Finally, in 2018, along with his brother Mehmet, Atlan was sentenced to life imprisonment.
I Will Never See the World Again is a series of brief chapters, written by hand and then smuggled from his prison, which describe his incarceration in a small cell from which his only view of the outside world is a square of sky visible through wire bars that form a cage above. According to the translator, Yasemin Çongar, “Each piece was handwritten on white sheets of paper in blue ink.” The book is short but packed with intense emotion rendered in sparse prose as he reflects on his life and how he escapes his prison with books and his mind. Atlan grew up in a household with an abundance of books, and for a period during prison, he was not allowed even the joy of reading. I particularly loved his description of his earliest memories of books: “Books were the wood sprites in a forest the essence of which I couldn’t quite grasp, one that looked quite complex and boring to me. I liked the fairies bright charm, their air of mystery, their promising smiles more than the forest itself.” He managed to retain his sanity because “like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through your walls with ease.”
In July 13, 2021, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Cassation ruled that Turkey must free Ahmet Altan immediately and pay him €16,000 in damages for violating his rights to freedom of expression, as it found “no evidence that the actions of the applicant had been part of a plan to overthrow the government.” He was released from prison on April 14, 2021.
I Will Never See the World Again is really a wonderful look at the love of literature contrasting with the starkness of imprisonment. It reminded me of Jack London’s short novel, The Star Rover, in which Darrell Standing, a university professor, is serving life imprisonment for murder in San Quentin State Prison. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a straight jacket, and Standing copes with the torture by entering a trance-like state and wandering among the stars and experiencing past lives.
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I Will Never See the World Again (Granta Books, March 7, 2019) is available through:
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