'A Sort of Strangeness Among People'

Hannah Arendt, street art, ‘No one has the right to obey’, Hannover, Germany

If you have ever experienced “a sort of strangeness among people”, even when they are “your own people”—those who share your background, language, food and culture—and if you have somehow felt a lingering loneliness amidst crowds, not quite alienated or disconnected but not fully belonging either, a state of being both insider and outsider, both from ‘here’ and ‘everywhere’, then this essay is for you.

The first time I read Hannah Arendt’s writing I was in my early twenties. I was studying international relations back then, with a growing interest in political philosophy, struggling to find my path through the humanities and social sciences, but knowing deep down that it was fiction where my heart beat, now and always.

Literature was where my soul felt at home.

I wanted to be a novelist and I wanted to write novels of ideas, trying and hoping to bridge “the East” and “the West”; “the intellectual” and “the emotional”; “the written word” and “the oral culture”…. But the thought of making ends meet by penning imaginary stories was such a difficult, crazy dream that I did not even dare mention it aloud. Besides, even if I could write them, who would want to read my novels? Well, probably my mother would, I thought, and that was about it really. And while having that one loving reader sounded comforting to a degree, it was also terrifying. Because, you see, I worried that the kind of stories that I wished to create could be upsetting for her. I wanted to give voice to not only the stories of the land and the region where I came from, but also to its many buried silences and hushed taboos.

I was interested in not the centre but the periphery.

Not the touristic, glittery, picturesque Istanbul but its dark underbelly.

I wanted to write about the silenced. The forgotten. The erased. The censured.

Tread along the ruins, gently, in the hopes of unearthing the stories of women and the stories of minorities.

The first evening I moved into my tiny, barely furnished flat on Kazanci Yokusu (The Street of Cauldron Makers near the Taksim Square), I sat by the curtain-less window, listening to the sounds of the city. It seemed like Istanbul did not sleep at night and this suited me well since I, too, was nocturnal. I opened one of the cardboard boxes that I had brought with me and took out several books: Rumi’s The Mathnawi. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The poems of Federico Garcia Lorca. Then there were Virginia Woolf, William Blake, W.B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy. Bulgakov, Dostoyevski, Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. Michel Tournier. Italo Calvino. Czeslaw Milosz. Milan Kundera. The Persian poet and rebel Forugh Farrokzhad. Albert Camus. Carson McCullers. James Baldwin. Walt Whitman….

Then I took out The Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt looked at me from the cover, a pearl necklace around her neck, a cigarette in her hand.

I told her she was in Istanbul now.

‘Good,’ she said. “Maybe here I can finally smoke in peace.”

So we smoked together. Arendt was great company. The perfect philosopher to read when you are young and confused and searching, just like she remains the perfect philosopher to read when you are older and more experienced but none the wiser.

I quit smoking after a while but I read more and more of her work throughout the years. The human condition. The banality of evil. The ordinariness of totalitarianism. On violence. The dangers of apathy. Having survived the horrors of Nazi persecution (including being interrogated by the Gestapo) and having been forced to leave her motherland behind, she was worried about the destruction of individual autonomy and critical thinking. Yet at the same time, she warned us that if we were to become atomised individuals, each in our own cocoon, that is when terrible things could happen on a broader social and political scale.

At what point do we, as human beings, cease to think and cease to question, and simply go along with the tide?

Today, etno-nationalism, jingoism, tech oligarchy and populist demagoguery pose existential threats to pluralism and coexistence and liberal democracy. Human rights and rule of law are part of a delicate eco-system of checks and balances—far more fragile than many scholars assumed a few decades back. Numbness is not the way forward. We have to connect beyond borders. We have to be engaged. We need to hear each other’s stories and sorrows and joys. We also need to be careful about extreme polarisation and walled tribalism, which only serves into the hands of autocrats. Arendt’s writing remains strikingly timely, universal and relevant.

It might perhaps come as a surprise that Hannah Arendt, this iconic and strong female political thinker of the previous century, secretly wrote poetry.

Philosophy was the way she boldly shared her views, concerns and analyses with the world. But poetry was a reflection of her inner self— the personal, the vulnerable side.

In her exquisite biography, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl says: ‘Very few people—including her first husband—knew that she wrote poetry. Her poems were her most private life.’

I find this fascinating: Arendt experienced firsthand the atrocities and cruelties that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. She was an exile, an immigrant who lost so much and had to rebuild her life anew. And through all these ordeals and more, she carried her poems with her—tucked in small notebooks, which she would continuously edit and polish and rewrite.

In 1940s, as the world was fast spinning off its axis and authoritarian actors were growing louder, she quietly wrote:

“I know that the houses have fallen.

We entered the world in them, wonderfully sure, that they

were more durable than ourselves.”

These days I cannot help thinking about those lines.

We can no longer be “wonderfully sure” that our political and cultural systems are “more durable than ourselves”.

We live in the Age of Angst.

Nothing is solid anymore. These are liquid times.

In one of her final in-depth interviews, when asked about what remained of the Europe she had known and loved, Hannah Arendt responded:

“What remains? Language remains.”

This idea, though simple at first glance, is worth dwelling on. And it is not language alone that endures.

Literature remains. Art remains.

Let us expand our literary and cultural spaces; link radical creativity to compassion; join new ideas to new activism; support book festivals and libraries, and cultivate, far and wide, the art of storytelling. For the truth is, we need them now more than ever. Literature nurtures the seeds of hope, the promise of a better future for our shared humanity, and the strength for resilience—even in times of instability, erosion, jingoism and demagoguery. Perhaps especially then, especially now, the human spirit endures through its remarkable capacity to imagine, connect, change, resist and love.