On being a writer in Wales: Özgür Uyanık

Özgür Uyanık

I’ve been writing in Wales since 2017. Initially, I was doing creative writing assignments for an MA and revising a long-gestating novel that would be published in 2020.

By that time, I had completed the MA, begun a PhD in creative writing, and built up a portfolio of screenwriting supported by Ffilm Cymru Wales. Looking back, it seems that a daisy chain of writing projects has kept me occupied here since my arrival.

But let me go back a few links in that serendipitous chain to give the broader picture of why I came to Wales in the first place.

The novel mentioned above had been drafted in an exquisite blend of heartbreak, despair, and hops in İstanbul several years prior, following the end of a long-term relationship and, incidentally, the failure of the nationwide Gezi Park protests against the authoritarian regime there. The resulting sense of overwhelming pessimism left me feeling trapped and I began to write a novel, seriously applying myself to the task after years of severe procrastination.

Opportunities

I had moved to İstanbul from London, where I grew up, to pursue a career in directing commercials in the country of my birth. However, despite the numerous opportunities in that field, I realised there was no future for me in a country suffocated by mounting levels of censorship when there was a perfectly decent alternative country where I could ply my trade(s).

Even the private act of writing a novel, I knew, would not sustain me for long in Türkiye ‒ a sad and sobering conclusion for someone who is very fond of his native land and wants to be near childhood friends and loved ones as he gets older.

As going back to the craziness of London felt like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, I sought out a new, less congested, environment. Finally, after spending six months in Amsterdam doing a screenwriting lab with writers from around the world, I enrolled in a master’s degree program in English literature and creative writing in Cardiff, a place I had visited once as a child.

I only knew that Wales was not England, and Cardiff was nothing like London or İstanbul ‒ but still a vibrant capital city ‒ and that seemed like a good enough bet. Rapidly, I discovered that Wales was quite a compelling place to be for me: it was bilingual like me, its people challenged the overbearing status quo like I aspired to, and they had identity concerns similar to mine as well.

Welsh woes

Essentially, I could easily relate to the ontological woes of the Welsh. They have England to contend with, while Türkiye has Europe’s hegemonic presence ‒ cultures locked in a perpetual dance of mutual mistrust, envy and, dare I say, thwarted attraction. The Welsh nation was striving to be heard and seen with a troubled self-identity that resonated with me and, moreover, their conscious strategies to counter their issues provided a tonic for the cynical hopelessness that had built up in my system over the preceding years as I experimented with who I was and where I belonged.

I realised that Wales had an articulable existential mission that mapped on to my own Turkish preoccupations about representation and emplacement and I found this commonality invigorating. Growing up as an émigré in England, I was continually reminded of my Turkishness ‒ otherness ‒ throughout my formative years.

Additionally, I am often made to feel like the other in my home country as an allegedly Anglicised Turk, leading me to seek a tentative sense of affiliation with Wales where I sensed that people were less strictly judgemental. According to my arguably reductive analysis, Wales sees itself caught in a liminal state of quasi-foreignness as I do.

On the whole, I find myself identifying closely with the place and its people who seem to share a perpetual feeling of fractured belonging, especially in the south of the country where I am based, as they oscillate between languages and cultures, trying to form a position somewhere in between. I know from experience that it is a knife-edge upon which a healthy identity cannot be tolerably sustained.

Or can it?

Dilemma

Why can’t a person be two things at once, I began to ponder. The Welsh appeared to be on the horns of a similar dilemma, and how they dealt with it was instructive. Perhaps I could reach for a certain poise ‒ reject being defined ‒ and embrace not belonging entirely to any one geo-cultural entity. Here in Wales, unless I am gravely mistaken, one is allowed to exist in an outlying space and be comfortable with it.

Moreover, the community of writers in Wales is both lively and welcoming. In fact, the whole place is extremely welcoming. The only serious racism I experienced (in Cardiff) became the subject of a short story called ‘Banter’, and other than that I have found the Welsh are far more hospitable than the English and almost as accepting of foreigners as Turks are famously known to be.

Writing remains a mostly solitary pursuit and having a network of like-minded individuals who understand the unique challenges and triumphs of the writing life can be incredibly grounding, so the smaller scale of the literary scene is an advantage here for meeting other writers with reading events, book launches and writing retreats aplenty.

The unrestricted spirit of self-expression available for all and openness to the other is something I have found to be particularly strong in Wales, albeit with certain limits (one of the main concerns of my PhD thesis entitled Othering the Self in Turkish Arthouse Cinema is about the limits to freedom of authentic self-expression afforded to the other in the West).

Furthermore, the Welsh language itself is a symbol of resilience that I aspire to, and the efforts to preserve and promote Welsh are a testament to the importance of cultural continuity and the value of heritage, which can be a fragile thing in the presence of a dominant neighbour.

Ultimately, living and writing in Wales has provided me with the option of not having to decide who I am or what I am. I can choose to exist as an undecided immigrant and, therefore, I feel more at ease here than anywhere else, which is conducive to my writing.

Özgür Uyanık’a collection, Men Alone: Stories, is published by Parthian and is available from all good bookshops.