A Turkish writer reflects on the fourth major earthquake he has experienced in his home country.
 | By Nana Asfour Staff Editor, Opinion |
"The girl with sad eyes must be around 10 or 12 years old. She hardly moves as she stares into the camera phone. Whenever she does move, her gestures are slow and sluggish." |
From its opening lines, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's guest essay is gripping. It reads like a novel. Only in this instance, what it describes is all too real. And it is heart-rending. |
The girl with sad eyes was trapped under a mound of concrete in Turkey, where Pamuk lives, following the massive earthquake that hit his country and its neighbor Syria. As Pamuk notes, the man who was videotaping the girl on his phone was unlikely to be able to get her out. Help was dispatched slowly and unevenly in the first couple of days after the earthquake, and similar scenes of entrapment were playing out across the country, with ever increasing fatality rates. (When we published Pamuk's essay last week, the death toll was near 20,000; by Tuesday, it had jumped to more than 40,000.) |
I had reached out to Pamuk because he has been a keen observer of Turkey for decades in his many novels and works of nonfiction. This was also the fourth major earthquake to strike his country since he was a child. In an essay that appears in his book "Other Colors," he wrote about the 1999 quake that killed more than 17,000 people. I wondered what he'd have to say about this latest calamity to devastate Turkey. |
As Pamuk described in haunting yet eloquent prose the plight of the girl and the many other victims of the disaster who died or were forced out of their crumbling homes and into cold, "apocalyptic" streets, the desperation and loss were palpable. He brought an intimacy to the events that we were seeing in news reports. |
Yet what he described were not scenes he'd witnessed up close but ones he'd watched online, as he sat in front of a screen for hours in Istanbul. Many of the posts he saw, including the one about the trapped girl, were shared on Twitter and elsewhere, he writes, "straightforwardly and without further comment." His essay, in essence, is as much about the tragedy as it is about how the prevalence and accessibility of technology is shaping our experience of modern disasters. The phone, he told me, is now our "pen and paper." |
Pamuk writes about the sense of helplessness and hopelessness that pervades in the pleas for help that he encountered online. But, as he told me, there was also something else: an underlying attempt at empowerment and visibility at a time of such despair and obliteration. |
Since Russia's invasion, the United States has allocated billions of dollars to defend Ukraine with security assistance and humanitarian aid. The Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof will discuss the future of foreign aid for the country with the USAID administrator Samantha Power in a live conversation on Twitter at 3:30 p.m. ET today. Tune in for a chance to ask your question live. |
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