"The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols and using women as pawns in a political game."
This quote is spoken as part of the recorded conversation between Dr. Yilmaz, the Director of the Institute of Education, and his eventual assassin. In it, though the assassin tries to push back on Dr. Yilmaz's enforcement of the state's secular policies, we see the doctor's retort that what truly punishes young woman is the symbolic scapegoating of the hijab as the symbol of political Islam. As such, this quote is important because it highlights one of the novel's key thematic points about gender as a stage for the tensions between secularism and religion, as well as between authority and insurgency, that run so violently and deeply in Kars. It is not really the women or their hijabs that are so contentious, but rather the larger social structures surrounding covered women that the people in power refuse to address.
"Political Islamist is only a name that Westerners and seculars give us Muslims who are ready to fight for our religion."
In this quote, Necip rebuffs Ka's claim that Blue is a militant political Islamist (something that Ka has read in Turkish papers). More importantly, however, he draws our attention to the fact that, when one stands in opposition to institutions of power, their entire existence becomes politicized to the point where state media and popular opinion try to paint them as a threat to the established order. This, Necip claims, is why the West-leaning and secular Turkish press has labelled Blue, a vitriolic Muslim activist, as a terrorist with political aspirations.
"There’s a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in God."
This quote is spoken by Ka during his meeting with the Sheikh Effendi. While on the surface level, it alludes to Ka's supercilious attitude and his desire to feel superior to the provincial and impoverished believers of Kars, it calls attention to the larger conflict in the novel between secularism and religious zeal. In the text, these two spheres—the religious and secular—are compounded with a series of other labels that put them in greater conflict. Where the secular is recognized as the individual and enlightened, the religious is made exotic and distrusted on account of its perceived violence and regressiveness. Despite Ka's clear stake in this conflict as a liberal, bourgeois, Westernized Turk, one of the very interesting and key dynamics in the novel is way in which an understanding of Kars's poverty, beauty, brutality, and resilience moves him to try and discover his own individual faith and relationship with God. Ultimately, however, readers are meant to question the viability of Ka's individual faith, since he both spurns those in the community of believers (i.e., Blue) and fails to discover happiness on his own in Frankfurt as a result.
"The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That’s why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another."
This quote comes up in Ka's first conversation with Kadife. As Kadife talks about the snowfall in Kars with Ka, she recalls her childhood with her sister in Istanbul, where the snow brought people together and cast a veil over their differences. Conversely, then, it is striking that, in Kars, the snowfall exacerbates the already existing tensions in the city as it seals Kars off from the rest of the world. At the same time, it is only the snowfall and the attendant isolation that brings various political and religious factions together at the meeting at Hotel Asia, for example. Together then, these show important evidence of the fundamental ambivalence and duplicity of snow as an image—it is a pharmakon of sorts, both enabling and stifling progress in the city while ensuring that it remains suspended in time and space all the while.
"It was Hegel who first noticed that history and theater are made of the same materials [...] Remember: Just as in the theater, history chooses those who play the leading roles. And just as actors put their courage to the test onstage, so too do the chosen few on the stage of history."
When this quote spoken by Sunay Zaim is uttered, he is busy showing Ka around the city of Kars after emerging from his base at the local tailor's shop. This quote, though it is mostly an aside in the larger conversation, is deeply significant in the context of the novel as a whole for the way in which it links the theatrical and the political. Not only is this a key aim of Sunay Zaim's, accomplished both through the coup and the second play he stages in Kars (i.e., the one with Kadife), but it also draws our attention to the theater involved in everyday politics, as well as the general posturing that many of the citizens of Kars have to do in order to fit in. In a city filled with undercover agents, spies, and extremists, after all, so much is bravado and front that it is hard to tell who or what is genuine.
"Even if you did believe in God, it would make no sense to believe alone. You’d have to believe in him the same way the poor do; you’d have to become one of them. It’s only by eating what they eat, living where they live, laughing at the same jokes, and getting angry whenever they do that you can believe in their God. If you’re leading an utterly different life, you can’t be worshiping the same God they are. God is fair enough to know it’s not a question of reason or logic but how you live your life."
This quote is spoken by Sunay Zaim to Ka in the military headquarters. Sunay speaks in response to Ka's claim that, while in Kars, he has started to rediscover his faith and build up a relationship with the divine, and he tells Ka that one cannot really believe in God as an individual. After all, if one does not live their life in the same way as other believers—that is, if one has nothing in common with the community of worshippers—how can it be said that they worship the same God? This idea that one believes in what works for them reinforces the notion that secularism and fundamentalism stem from two essentially incompatible but coexistent ways of life. Moreover, it underscores the text's thematic focus on the relationship between the individual and the divine, as well as probes the question of whether any humanist can truly have a relationship with God in the same way as a community of traditionalists.
"Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings us so close to God; it’s the fact that no one is more curious than we are to find out why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world. [...] Will the West, which takes democracy, its great invention, more seriously than the word of God, come out against this coup that has brought an end to democracy in Kars? [...] Or are we to conclude that democracy, freedom, and human rights don’t matter, that all the West wants is for the rest of the world to imitate them like monkeys? Can the West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them? I have something to say to all the other nations that the West has left behind: Brothers, you're not alone."
In this quote, Blue gives a statement to Ka for reproduction and publication in what he believes to be a Western newspaper. Here, he rejects the Orientalist and patronizing gaze of the West, drawing out the fact that the people of Kars are close to God not out of desperation alone, but rather how their condition forces them to consider the deeper meanings behind existence and the world to come. Moreover, he confronts the notion of Western "democracy," directly exposing the way in which policies of repressing dissidents and insurgents that threaten order is inherently anti-democratic. Thus, this quote is important for the way in which it nakedly reveals the inherent tensions and hypocrisy of Western/secular exceptionalism, as well as makes the case for oppressed peoples of the Eastern/marginalized world to unite in solidarity.
"The Eastern Anatolian press is in desperate trouble. Our average Kars citizen doesn’t bother to read the paper. Almost all our subscribers are government offices. So of course we’re going to run the sort of news our subscribers want to read. All over the world—even in America— newspapers tailor the news to their readers’ desires. If your readers want nothing but lies from you, who in the world is going to sell papers that tell the truth? If the truth could raise my paper’s circulation, why wouldn’t I write the truth? Anyway, the police don’t let me print the truth either. In Istanbul and Ankara we have a hundred and fifty readers with Kars connections. And to please them we’re always bragging about how rich and successful they’ve become there; we exaggerate everything, because if we don’t they won’t renew their subscriptions. And you know what? They even come to believe the lies we print about them. But that’s another matter."
This quote by Serdar Bey comes out of his explanation to Ka and Turgut Bey regarding the anti-Ka article he is going to publish. Though it reveals the flimsiness of the authoritarian press on a surface level, on a deeper level it calls our attention to the ways in which all media are necessarily tailored to draw in a larger audience, as well as the way in which such tailoring can create echo chambers where any absurd action is made possible as reality is distorted. This quote, then, is also a fundamental one for the way in which it implicitly shows the suggestive power of media in everyday life.
Ka: "In a brutal country like ours, where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries."
Kadife: "Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs."
This exchange takes place just as Ka is trying to convince Kadife to abandon her principles and bare her head for Sunay Zaim's play. When Ka suggests that Kadife is wrong to resist Sunay's play—which will guarantee Blue's release and survival (or so they think)—he speaks the first line above, going so far as to suggest that in a less liberal and secular state, adherence to beliefs and ideals is foolish. When the price for disobeying the party in power is one's life, Ka argues, it is foolish to strongly stick to only one side. As a one-time exile himself, he constantly walks on eggshells in Turkey and works for both sides of the secular/religious conflict in order to serve as a putative mediator and save his own skin. Kadife's retort, on the other hand, alludes to the larger truth that desperate people, who truly have nothing to life for and would even commit suicide (like the young women of Kars) to save their pride, can only cling to ideals and beliefs as shattered fragments of the world that could have been for them, if only they were born a bit luckier.
"Ka was convinced that everyone has his own snowflake; individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one’s own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of his or her own snowflake."
This quote appears in the main narration of the text. It describes Ka's fascination with the symbolism of snow, as well as hints towards the hidden geometries of life that Ka was able to perceive while sealed away inside the snowy landscapes of Kars. On a deeper level, however, note also how Ka's use of the snowflake symbol resolves the text's fascination with the individual/group dynamic: we are all, after all, part of the human collective and share the human condition with one another, though the specific contours of our human experience differ from person to person. It is only on a larger scale, when we seek to put people in groups and ideological camps, that such idiosyncrasies can be ignored and reductively simplified in favor of labels and classifications. Under this belief system, there is room for an individual to believe in God without a community of believers, but there is also notably room for people to bond in their commonalties to form a religious community. The difference is only in one's perspective and distance from the flake (i.e., the individuals in question).
