WRITERS ON TRIAL

ISTANBUL

I am a novelist. When I write, I don't calculate the consequences of what I'm writing. I just surround myself with the story.

That's what I did in writing my latest novel, "The Bastard of Istanbul." The tale of two families -- a Turkish Muslim one in Istanbul, and an Armenian American one in San Francisco -- is to me a book about memory and forgetting, about the tension between the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it. It tackles a political taboo -- what we in Turkey call "the Armenian question" -- but when it was published here in March, I didn't think a work of fiction would get me branded a traitor to my country.

But others thought differently.

The novel unleashed a months-long campaign against me by a group of ultranationalist lawyers called the Unity of Jurists, who have forced high-profile prosecutions of as many as 60 writers, journalists, publishers, scholars and other intellectuals in Turkey over the past year under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which prohibits "public denigration of Turkishness."

Last Thursday, my own trial on charges of denigrating Turkishness through the words of some characters in my new novel opened -- and closed, with a surprising but gratifying acquittal. It was the first case against a work of fiction under Article 301; if found guilty, I could have been sentenced to up to three years in prison.

I had waited two months for the trial. But when the day came, I wasn't there. I watched the television reports about my own proceedings from a hospital bed not far away, nursing the daughter I had given birth to the previous Saturday. The court had refused to postpone the trial, even though I was due to deliver my first child soon.

Listening to the testimony, I felt torn: The writer in me wished I was there to defend myself. But the mother in me refused. At the same time, I was gratified by the huge outpouring of support I had received. And after the acquittal was announced, I felt a stirring of hope that my case could finally start breaking the back of Article 301 and the nationalists' efforts to silence those who oppose their views.

Turkey today is experiencing a severe culture clash. On one side are those who want an open and democratic society that can come to grips with its past and its multicultural heritage, and who support Turkey's bid to join the European Union.

On the other are those who speak the language of fear. Believing that Turkey is surrounded by enemies and that the E.U. bid should be stopped, they do everything in their power to turn the country into an insular, xenophobic state. They are fewer in number, but their voices are so loud and their methods so aggressive that they manage to manipulate the political agenda and give the country a black eye.

They were certainly aggressive in my case. I was at the supermarket when I got the first call from my publisher, Muge Sokmen, in early June, informing me that a complaint had been lodged against us under Article 301 and that we were to be interrogated by a state prosecutor in a few days. I was surprised, but not too alarmed. I remembered that the charges against Turkey's top writer, Orhan Pamuk, had been dropped last year before he went to trial. And no charges had ever been brought against a novel before. I thought we could make the case for freedom of expression, especially in a work of fiction.

The interrogation went well. The prosecutor was reasonable and heard us out. I pointed out that my novel was full of characters with many opinions. It was impossible to judge an author simply by plucking one or two characters out of a book and saying that they represented what I believe, as the nationalists had done. It would be like judging Dostoyevsky to be a criminal because one of the characters in his books commits a crime.