The life story of writer Ilhami Akter, which began in 1972 in Dep (Karakoçan) in Xarpet (Elazığ), turned into exile in his early youth due to political reasons. Akter, who was affected by Germany’s policies towards Kurdish refugees, was only able to visit his mother after finally obtaining citizenship following 20 years of life in exile. His return to his village coincided with the end of the 2013–2015 resolution process, and he also personally felt its consequences. After being detained for one month, he once again fled to Germany through clandestine routes. He first wrote the book Escape from Erdoğan’s Judges, followed by Taxi Stories / Journeys Written by Life, inspired by his 23 years of working as a taxi driver.
Ilhami Akter spoke to ANF at the taxi stand in front of Hamburg Central Station about his life story, his writing journey and his books.
You spoke to readers first with Escape from Erdoğan’s Judges and now with Journeys Written by Life. Could you tell us a little about Escape from Erdoğan’s Judges?
This book may be my autobiography, but what I actually wanted to describe is the reality of life of a people. It can be called an archival document that records, in all its rawness, the brutality imposed by a colonial state. In a geography where war takes place, it is not only armed forces who kill each other. Nature is destroyed, hunger and misery prevail, rights and justice are trampled underfoot. The most striking example of this is in the Shexmus scene, where animals are set on fire by soldiers inside a barn before his eyes and burn alive in agony. Or, for example, when I went up to the highlands and saw how vast land had turned into desert due to neglect. And again, in the Agir scene, he comes across the body of a dead soldier by chance in the mountains, and afterward his psychology collapses. In short, this is a work I wrote based on the truth of life, insisting on it from the day I was born until today, drawing from what I have learned and experienced.
Your other book takes place in Germany and we read stories through the eyes of a taxi driver. Could you tell us a little about that?
It is completely different from the first book in many ways. Even though I am a Kurdish citizen of Germany, the subjects, characters and messages belong to Hamburg, to Germany. It is written from the worldview of a taxi driver from Hamburg. Another influence, of course, was my own experiences. It is a chain of events in which people you would never expect display a life performance you could never imagine. Most importantly, someone gets in, someone gets out, and all that remains are the stories they tell and the moments they share with you. It is again a work written in an original, uncensored and simple language. It turns into writing the images and snapshots of people running here and there with great effort, struggling with life. For example, someone desperately trying to catch their job, their bus or their train. Another fighting relentlessly to find drugs as soon as possible. As a taxi driver within this flow of life, sometimes you become part of a struggle for rights, sometimes a witness to someone’s story, sometimes you give advice, and sometimes you are confronted with stories that emerge from the brutal truth of life in which you yourself are a victim. As I lived all this, the idea of writing such a work formed within me.
What was your motivation in writing these books?
My biggest motivation is my self-confidence. Contrary to what people might think, I didn’t graduate from universities or faculties of literature. I wrote through my own effort and I will continue to write.
You come from a background of human rights activism. Because of that, you have always been involved with writing and books. But writing is a very different form of expression. How did you start writing?
As a Kurdish individual, especially if you come from a political family, you inevitably get introduced to the world of books. This naturally gave me a certain cultural and literary foundation. I can say that I began writing when I was around 10–12 years old, by writing letters to my brother who was imprisoned in ‘Elazığ Bin Sekiz Yüz Evler’, dictated to me by my father. Later, in Hamburg and many other cities in Germany, I began writing letters, some asylum petitions, some personal correspondence for Kurds who were illiterate, and most importantly, I was influenced by all of this and started writing.
For me, writing is expressing the screams inside, the rebellion, emotions and thoughts through words. In the process I have lived through, writing became my greatest response to the things I experienced in the lands where I was born and raised, the things I could not answer. Most importantly, it is also about leaving a mark in history, leaving behind a work. It is to witness the time and process within the society I live in, in the lands where I was born and raised; to write in a simple language about the living conditions of the time, the brutality of war, people’s states of mind, their pets, their nature, their pain and their joy.
In a sense, I always want to write so that my rebellion, my voice, my cry can be heard. It is like tearing away a wound inside me that has turned gangrenous, I feel relieved. While doing all this, I set a principle for myself: to always write with literary character, literary ethics, literary aesthetics and a simple language, drawing from the truth of life. My main purpose in doing all this is to add literary richness to our society and to encourage people to read and write by giving something of myself.
Another rule of writing and literature is listening. When I was very young, I would go with my mother to visit my uncles. My uncle would tell us those endless Kurdish tales. And while talking about storytelling, we must also acknowledge the role of the dengbêjs (traditional Kurdish storyteller).”
Finally, what would you like to say to your readers?
I wrote all these stories, memories, narratives and impressions by selecting them from the conversations, events and discussions I experienced with thousands of passengers, and I present them to you, my valued readers. I tried to convey them without exaggerating a single word of those involved, insisting on realism, through the notes I took in those moments and the sentences that stayed in my mind.