Kozhikode: Fiction is a mirror to a society – and “it’s also a mirror to its blind spots”, Turkish author Defne Suman said at a panel during the Kerala Literature Festival 2025. Her books, three of which have been translated into English so far by Betsy Göksel, focus on histories of trauma that societies keep buried.
Her latest translated novel, Summer Heat, follows art historian Melike on a complex journey through the past – unearthing secrets that her family and her nation have been unable to forget even while they pretend otherwise. “I like stories where a lot of things happen,” she said while talking about her book – and Summer Heat is undeniably that, with layers of history finding their way into the present. It is a look at the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t.
On the sidelines of the festival, Suman sat down with The Wire to talk about the secrets nations keep, the impacts of hidden – but not forgotten – violence, and the stories that draw her in.
Edited excerpts from the conversation follow.
You’ve said in the past that your work looks into the “silent parts of Turkish history”. What do you imagine the role of literature to be in bringing out histories that have been suppressed?
I don’t think literature has any role; I don’t want to think about it as if literature is a mission. We’re not there to make a change. But we know that one of the deepest resistances you can have against the existing power systems is through literature and arts, because it speaks to the heart of people. It’s not a manifesto, it’s not telling people to change – but you can have a transformation at the level of the heart through literature and art.
Defne Suman
Summer Heat
Apollo, 2024
So I don’t think the author should start writing [while thinking that], ‘Oh, now I’m going to bring change and I’m going to bring a voice to the silenced ones.’ It’s not activism. But if something bothers me, let’s say something is hurting me, like when I learn about something [that makes me say], ‘Oh my God, these people were so silenced, they never talk about their trauma because layer upon layer, power structures forbid them from talking’ – now there is a story there, and I am always chasing stories. And why do you chase stories, not because you want to get more readers or more impressive stories, [but] because it’s it you feel it as your life’s calling, as your karma that you want to be the voice to those silenced voices. So you start creating your art around it. If it reaches certain people – others will never be affected – [but] if it goes and transforms some psyches, some human beings, it’s wonderful for the writer. But mostly it’s the writer herself who changes. So by giving voice to the silenced parts of Turkish history, I transform myself, I become a person who is able to talk, I become the person who has courage to have her own voice out there. Because whatever is silencing the women, the minorities, it’s also working in me. Either it’s silencing me, so I don’t talk about certain things, or I am part of the silencers, that I ask people not to talk about those [things].
So in either case, I am realising my own self and changing it. And then, if the book is a successful book, if it’s a good book, the reader finds the same thing: ‘Oh, I’ve been silenced about this, now I can talk. Or, I was the perpetrator of the silence in my country, and now I’m not going to play this game.’
So I just think, one reader at a time. It’s a healing process and yes, we have to heal ourselves from the past, but more importantly, we have to continuously heal ourselves from the present day, because we are continuously being wounded by the existing power systems. So it’s a healing; I think literature can be a great healing tool.
Taking off from what you said about voices that are silenced and bringing those out, what I felt while reading Summer Heat was that I was able to get a far greater understanding of the women characters and their trajectories than the male characters, whom I did not get to know in the same way – perhaps with the exception of the protagonist Melike’s father. Was that a conscious choice?
No, it’s not, but I am a woman, so I understand women much better than I understand men. I also grew up in a family where there are lots of women, almost no men – like a lot of [female] cousins, a lot of aunts – just by chance. These women were very strong, so they got divorces, they got remarried, again divorces. So while I grew up, men were coming and going, whereas women were always permanent in my life. So when I sit down for writing – and I remember this as a young child, like when I started playing with my dolls, I didn’t have any boy dolls, I had a bunch of girl dolls, so I think it’s the same thing, continuous – I start with coming up with the female characters, their world, their connection to one another, and I think it’s something literature needs. We don’t have A Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez’s novel for example, in the female version. We’re not seeing what’s really happening in the homes of the women; literature waits for that space to be filled.
So I feel content. I don’t feel, oh no, I should give more voice to Sinan [Melike’s husband] or to Petro [Melike’s lover] or – okay, Orhan [Melike’s father] has his voice – but we know them as much as they touched Melike’s life. And that’s how we are with men actually, it’s really hard for us to go into their world and understand who they are, as much as them coming into our world to understand who we really are. So I try to take that into my books – there’s always a limitation of knowing the other in general, men and women. So knowing the male, the other sex, is always to a certain degree.
Summer Heat tells the complex history of one family as their secrets are revealed, but the secrets in question are not just of the family unit – they are secrets created by political upheaval, by violence, by the complexities of history. What do you think burying or ignoring violent pasts does to a society in the present?
Many countries in the world, Turkey is not an exception, have a past that is secretive. In a way, for a nation state to be built, you have to have a very secretive past because some people suffer tremendously. [There are] massacres – like when we look today at what’s happening in Gaza – 200 years ahead, or even on this day, Israelis have no idea what’s happening there. They will always suppress and choose to forget what’s happening, whereas we are all seeing it. Two hundred years from now, nobody will remember them in Israel, and most likely if they’re powerful enough, even in the rest of the world – they will make everybody forget it.
But people live this trauma. Trauma is in your blood now, and in the early 20th century, as the Ottoman Empire was dissolving, people went through genocides, massacres, displacements and a lot of atrocities against the non-dominant class. I’m not talking about economic class, but more like if you’re Turkish, you’re Sunni Muslim, you’re male, you’re speaking Turkish – if you are confirming these things, you are allowed to live and flourish. If you don’t have these things, you are doomed. Find a way to get out of here, otherwise you will be doomed. This is, again, not unique to Turkey – that in order to build a so-called “healthy” nation, you have to sweep these pasts under the carpet or bury these sins, but they are not gone. If you bury things under the earth, sooner or later they come back, or they become part of your food, your food grows on that earth.
Families, at the individual level, they consume the loss, not knowing what they’re consuming. Or they’re consumed by it – and I think [this is what happens] in a country like Turkey, so cut off from its past, with one single narrative becoming the dominant narrative, and in that narrative there’s only the heroes, there’s only the good guys. Nobody’s a bad guy except, of course, the enemy. This disconnect creates a schizophrenia, a schizophrenic stage for the humans. You start seeing that at the everyday level of life, families are dissolving, fathers are becoming more and more aggressive, women are being more silenced. I think they’re all related to your history.
Defne Suman (R) and Anjana Shankar at the Kerala Literature Festival 2025. Photo: Aditya Sarin
Many of the themes you’ve covered in your book are still very much present today, as we see the growth of violent far-right politics, conservative backlash against women wanting to make their own decisions that may break social norms, and so on. You spoke earlier about literature having the power to heal – do you think it also has the power to push back against some of these forces?
No, I don’t think so. I think the reading community in the world – people who are reading is a community, right? – we are supporting each other. Whatever you read, your mind opens; the act of reading – even if you are reading the crappiest, surface-level thing – it opens your mind to the existence of the other. So this is one thing that I take very seriously.
People – and once I said that, and it became like my slogan – I am afraid of the people who don’t read literature, because those people have never had the mental exercise of becoming the other. So literature – even if it’s, I don’t know, crime, suspense, whatever, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a transformative work – it helps you to become the other person for a while. That’s like yoga, it’s an exercise. You do it, and the muscles of the brain are becoming more flexible in that way.
You can really do harm by prohibiting people from reading – and I’m thinking about the women in Afghanistan as they are, being taken further and further away [from books and the rest of the world]. They are not seen as living beings any more. Literature must be their only way of resistance right now; writing, reading – that’s the only way of finding a little bit of freedom. If that is taken away from them, if books are not allowed, then that’s like the end, that’s killing someone. That’s cutting the life vein.
Your work is rooted, in some ways, in the geography of Turkey and its surrounding areas. What is it like to come and present your work in India?
This was a dream for me even before I was writing books, when I was just a reader and seeing the Kerala festival. My favourite authors were coming here and giving speeches, and I was thinking how it would be nice to be there one day as a reader. I never thought of coming here as an author.
I’m a big fan of Arundhati Roy, she’s my author guru. I got to know Kerala from her book, The God of Small Things. So it was a dream, and from here I’m going to Jaipur, before this I was in Kolkata, then I’m going to Assam to another literature festival in Dibrugarh. So it’s like a dream.
But India is also like a home to me, so I feel very comfortable here. I’m a Hatha yoga teacher; I’ve been a serious yoga student for 20 years. So I have always been in contact with Indian culture and geography and people, so it’s like coming home, but it’s also like a dream.
