Les solidarités afro-asiatiques des écrivains communistes turcs

The internationalist trajectory of the poet Nâzım Hikmet is well known, but his figure has overshadowed his successors in the historiography of Turkish literature. However, since the founding of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1958 in Tashkent, Turkish Communist writers have taken part in these Third-Worldist networks under Soviet influence. Turkish writers had an ambivalent status in the Afro-Asian Association, as Turkey was neither a former colonized country nor a socialist state. Turkish communists were therefore marginal within these anti-colonial solidarity networks: both Eastern and Western, temporarily colonized and beholden to an imperial past, it was their status as exiled and oppressed communists that enabled them to integrate Afro-Asian organizations. The correspondence, testimonies and archives of the satirist Aziz Nesin and the poet Ataol Behramoğlu are compared in order to explore this hypothesis.