TANK Book Talks: Sema Kaygusuz with Maureen Freely and Nicholas Glastonbury

TANK Book Talks: Sema Kaygusuz with Maureen Freely and Nicholas Glastonbury In 1938, the Turkish Republic launched an operation to systematically erase an entire community of Zaza-speaking Kurds in the eastern Anatolian region of Dersim, slaughtering thousands and leaving those who survived displaced and decoupled from their community and culture. Sema Kaygusuz’s novel Every Fire You Tend is a mythic reckoning with this history of violence and its afterlife in contemporary Turkey. Here, she is joined by two of her translators, Maureen Freely and Nicholas Glastonbury, to discuss translation, trauma and “Turkification”, the state-led effort to homogenise Turkish national identity through dispossession, forced relocation and, among other things, the renaming of people, places and animals.