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THREE CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF
AN ARTIST
Novelist Orhan Pamuk lets the art
speak for itself as he creates an imaginary dialogue between the
figures in the enigmatic drawings of Muhammad of the Black Pen.
Translation by Maureen Freely
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Untitled (Two men and a Donkey), late fourteenthcentury,
attributed to Muhammad Siyah Qalam, from the Fatih album
in the Topkapi Palace |
We are troubled by the abundance of rumours about
where we come from, who we are, where we’re going and
who drew us. We are not, in essence, the sort to be
easily deceived by gossip, and neither are we swayed by
the stories, be they true or false, that people tell
about us. Obviously we don’t give a damn about what
academics say, and the same goes for the loose talk we
hear when people subject our drawing to close
examination. Like the donkey standing with us, we belong
to this world; we step through it cautiously and know
exactly where we are going. Our concern is that people
have become so caught up in arguments about our origins
and our likely destination that they’ve forgotten we are
a drawing. We would have preferred you to take pleasure
in us not because we come from the darkest corner of a
lost story in a forgotten history, but because we are a
drawing. We ask that you try and see us in this way: to
savour our full presence, our humble colours and the way
in which we have immersed ourselves in our conversation. |
To find ourselves on this coarse, glueless, unfinished paper,
to have been sketched so hastily and with such crude lines –
this pleases us. Because the artist chose not to draw the
horizon behind us or the earth, the grass and the flowers on
which we tread so heavily, he makes our raw and virile vitality
all the more apparent. The eye is drawn to our gigantic fingers,
to our rough clothing, to the strong and healthy gestures that
bind us to the earth. Please note the alarm in the donkey’s eyes
and the demonic glint in ours; see the panic in our gaze, as if
something has frightened us. At the same time it should be clear
from the winsome way the artist has drawn the donkey, the
haphazard way he has sketched us and the colour he has given our
cheeks, that the mood is light. The fear you see in our eyes,
the panic, haste and humorous alarm, the blank page that
surrounds us – all these things suggest that something important
is happening. It is as if one day hundreds of years ago, we
three and our donkey were travelling along a road when we
happened upon an artist – just the way it might happen in a
story – and this artist, God be praised, this master artist
captured us on paper, as deftly as if – and please permit us to
use an expression from another age here – he’d taken our
photograph. Our master artist got out his rough paper and his
black pen and drew us so quickly that he caught the chatterbox
among us with his mouth open, showing his ugly teeth in all
their glory. We would like you to enjoy our ugly teeth, our
whiskers, our clumsy hands that look like bear paws and all the
other dirty, tired, shabby or even malevolent guises we’ve taken
in other drawings. Just remember it’s not us you’re smiling at –
it’s our drawing.
| But we know it’s the master artist that most
concerns you. What a pity it is that you belong to an
age when people cannot learn to love a drawing without
first knowing who the artist was. All right then: his
name is Muhammad Siyah Qalam [Muhammad of the Black
Pen]. It is probably clear from our drawing’s theme and
style that our artist was the same man who did many
other drawings of us nomads. But all scholars agree that
the signature on the edge of the drawing was only added
much later. We can confirm their hypothesis.
The person who drew us did not sign our drawings
because he belonged to an age when storytelling and
artistry were more important than signatures. To tell
you the truth, we didn’t mind this at all. We were,
after all, drawn in a distant time when the point of a
drawing was to illustrate a story, so for us it was
enough to serve our stories well. We were humble. But
long after these stories had been forgotten, in an age
that was more inclined to accept us as drawings in our
own right, a sharp-eyed person working in the Topkapi
Palace during the reign of Ahmed I (1603–17) took it
upon himself to add this signature to a number of
drawings. |
Untitled (Demon Standing) |
It was all rather haphazard, however, so ‘Black Pen’ served
more as an attribution than a signature. The desire to link us
with a master artist led to a further mistake, for this
signature also appears in other drawings that were placed, for
whatever reason, in the same albums, although they bear no
stylistic or thematic resemblance to our own. Just because we’re
in the same album, called the Fatih album, they give us all the
same signature. However, the historians Dust Muhammad, Qadi
Ahmad and Mustafa Ali, who saw fit to write a few words about
the great Persian and Ottoman artists, make no mention of Siyah
Qalam. In other words, we know nothing about our deft and
masterful artist except for his name.
But as a consolation for those who have been so anxious to
conjure up for us a common style, a name, a signature and a
master, let us also say this: the name we’ve been awarded, Black
Pen, refers to the thick-bordered, black and white line drawings
favoured by Persian writers during the sixteenth century. So we
can draw this conclusion: Black Pen is not the name of the
artist who sketched us so hastily as we three chatted and ambled
along that road, but the name of the style he used. If this is
the case, then what are we to make of the glorious reds and
blues he has splashed all over us?
Untitled (Akvan Prepares to throw
Rustem into the Caspian Sea) |
Almost everything people say about us contradicts
everything else they’ve said, and we find it all very
amusing. There have been scores of articles, theories
and learned conferences to establish where we come from
– to prove that we are Uighurs, Turks, Mongols or
Persians, to establish that we lived at some point
between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries – but after
years of politely contradicting each other, scholars
have come no closer to offering definitive or convincing
evidence to link us with a particular time and place.
All they can do is arouse suspicion.Turks gripped by
romantic myths of nationalism are keen to establish that
we come from Mongolia or Central Asia. And looking at
the sweet djinns, devils and demons that appear in the
same albums, they like to link us with the shamans.
Speaking for ourselves – we like the fact that these
fearful but charming creatures wear the same crafty
expressions and are drawn with the same crude, curling
lines. Because other similarly drawn demons in the same
albums appear to be of Chinese origin, some scholars
claim we come from even further afield, perhaps even
from China; this speaks to our nomadic souls, awakening
our love of the road, and so it pleases us. |
Scholars who claim that the demons in some drawings carry the
influence of the Shahname (or Book of Kings), or that they are
similar in style to those produced at the Whitesheep Palace in
Tabriz, are inclined to place us within the borders of Iran.
After all, most scholars are inclined to see us as belonging to
the spoils of the victory won by the great Ottoman Sultan Selim
I, over the Safavids at Çaldiran in 1514. There are even those
who have studied the bell-shaped head-dress worn by our friend
in red and decided that we must be Russian.
The doubt and admiration that all these guesses inspire have
something in common with the admiration we hope to awaken in you
by asking you to appreciate us as drawings. There is first the
wonder, fear and doubt aroused by the drawing itself. Then there
is an air of mystery aroused by the rumours and theories about
our origins. We take pride in being the most enigmatic,
discussed, disputed drawings from the most remote corner of the
world. As for all those things they’ve written about us – yes,
they do make us uneasy, because of this tendency to forget we
are drawings. But all these theories they have spun about us in
the timeless bastions of art history, all the suspicion, fear
and admiration that our many observers have heaped upon us – it
does give us a lovely air of enchantment.
| What we really want to say is this: stop trying to
figure out whether we’re from China, India, Central
Asia, Iran, Transoxania or Turkestan. Stop trying to
pinpoint where we are from and where we are going, and
please, pay attention instead to our humanity. Look at
how caught up we are in what’s going on. Our eyes are
open wide and we are immersed in our work. We are trying
to protect ourselves and, even as our panic grows, we
are talking among ourselves. Our poverty is evident, as
is our fear, our endless travels – we are huge,
barefooted, men, we are horses, we are terrible
creatures – feel our strength! A wind is blowing that
ripples our clothes; we fear and tremble but we continue
down the road. |
Untitled (Shamans Dancing) |
The bleak plain we are trying to cross – it has much in
common with this colourless, featureless paper on which we are
drawn. Neither mountains nor hills rise up from this level
field; we are ageless, in a world beyond time. Once you’ve begun
to feel our humanity, it won’t be long, we think, before you
begin to sense the demons inside us.
We are aware that – even as we fear those demons – we are
made from the same stuff. Look at the horns on those creatures
[see illustrations, left], and their hair, and their curling
eyebrows – our bodies curl the same way. Their hands and thick
legs are just as crude as ours are but look at how they pulse
with life! Look first at the noses on the demons, and then look
at ours; understand that we are brothers and fear us. But we see
that you smile at the very thought that you should fear us.
There is, we know, a tragic reason why we cannot make you
quake with fear. The stories we once belonged to have been lost.
Just as you do not know who we are, where we came from or where
we are going, you don’t even know which part of which story we
fit into, and that is even worse. After passing through so many
misadventures and catastrophes, after walking such great
distances, it is almost as if we too have forgotten our stories,
forgotten who we are.
We hear angry protests about our being Turks, Mongolians, men
of Tabriz. Centuries after we were drawn, we’ve been linked with
many peoples, nations and stories. That sharp-toothed,
sharp-nailed, grinning demon over there – maybe he’s taken one
of us away, who knows where, perhaps even to the underworld. So
yes, as, for example, many of the sages among you have already
guessed, we could be from the great Persian epic, the Book of
Kings, and we could depict the scene in which a giant demon
named Akvan prepares to throw the sleeping hero Rüstem into the
Caspian Sea. But what about the other drawings – what moments do
they depict, and what stories do they belong to? As we three
walk down the road with our donkey, what scene from what
forgotten story are we bringing to life?
You don’t know. So let us tell you a secret. We were
travelling from some distant point in Asia, with our donkey,
when we met an artist who drew our drawing – this much you
already know. Well, look now at that friend you can see coming
up behind the donkey – our drawing is inside the portfolio he is
holding in his arms. When evening falls, when we are all sitting
together in a candlelit tent, this storyteller, perhaps someone
not so different from the writer who is at this very moment
using us as his mouthpieces, will tell us this tale. To add to
our enjoyment, and to make sure his story stays in our minds, he
will take out this drawing you are looking at right now and show
it to us. We will not be the first drawing he shows, nor will we
be the last. All the drawings he shows will illustrate our
story.
But after centuries of wandering, defeat and disaster, our
stories are lost. The drawings that once illustrated these
stories have been scattered across the world. Now even we have
forgotten where we are from. We in the drawing have been denuded
of our stories and our identities. But it was still a lovely
thing to have been drawn.
Once upon a time there was a storyteller who looked at us and
– perhaps because he shared our unease – began his story like
this: ‘We are troubled by the abundance of rumours about where
we come from, who we are, where we’re going and who drew us…’
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