As part of the 2024 Printemps des Poètes (Poets’ Spring) and Francophonie Spring, Institut Français Ankara presents a theatre piece created and performed by Benoît Vitse, based on readings of texts by the poet Nazım Hikmet.
“The project began two years ago with an invitation from Institut Français İzmir. Then, during an evening with Turkish poets whose work we read, I discovered the power and relevance of Nazım Hikmet’s poetry. When I returned to France, I set out to find more of Hikmet’s texts and to restore, through this performance, the power of his writing on stage.”
Drawing on a range of Nazım Hikmet’s texts – from poems written in prison to political writings and autobiographical memoirs – Benoît Vitse’s readings pay tribute to the Turkish poet and show how vivid and relevant his work remains today.
The music accompanying the play comprises works by Turkish musicians, above all Umut Adam Seytanin, and pieces for highland (Yayla) fiddles.
- Institut français Ankara, Thursday 7 March, 19.30
- Free admission, registration required. To register, CLICK HERE!
- Performed in French only
- Duration: 1 hour
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Benoît Vitse
Originally an actor, Benoît Vitse went on to spend fifteen years as director and manager of the Compagnie Guillaume Cale in the Oise. He won awards at the Avignon and Strasbourg festivals. From 1996 he was director of the French Cultural Centre in Iași, Romania, then of the Institut français in Kyiv, Ukraine, and in 2002 he became director of the Ateneu European Centre for Creation in Romania. He then ran the Compagnie Cassini in Hermes until 2018.
He is the author of several works: Autobiographie autorisée d’un gaucho picard in 2022, and Les Lettres du Moldave and Les Batailles impudiques in 2021.
In 2021 he translated Moi j’ai tué Hitler by the Moldovan writer Dumitru Crudu.
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Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963)
As a child, Nâzım Hikmet was captivated by the poetry of his grandfather the Pasha, a high-ranking Ottoman official, and of his mother Djélilé, an artist with a passion for French culture.
Outraged by the Allied occupation of Istanbul after the First World War, fired by the Turkish peasantry’s struggle for independence and swept up in the excitement of the October Revolution, Nâzım was barely twenty when he went to Moscow in 1922.
He returned to Türkiye in 1924 after the War of Independence, but, persecuted now as a “red”/Communist, he went back to Moscow in 1926, and there followed many comings and goings.
A communist because he loved everything passionately – freedom, his country, his people and his women – he became the exiled genius of the Turkish avant-garde.
Back in Türkiye, he was sentenced in 1938 to twenty-eight years in prison for having published, in 1936, The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin – a eulogy to a rebellion (a peasant’s struggle against the forces of the Ottoman Empire). He was released in 1949 thanks to the action of an international support committee formed in Paris by his comrades Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso and Paul Robeson.
Hikmet was constantly watched. He miraculously survived two assassination attempts but could not avoid the military service he was ordered to perform at the age of fifty. This was the Cold War, and he campaigned against the spread of nuclear weapons.
A very active member of the World Peace Council, the poet sang the Internationale yet did not keep silent about his rejection of Stalinism. Having been stripped of his Turkish citizenship, Nazım became a Polish citizen and travelled everywhere to escape exile – though only in Europe, Africa and South America, because the United States refused him a visa.
…
I have ridden in trains, planes and cars,
most people can’t.
I have gone to the opera,
most people can’t go – they have never even heard of opera
and since ’21 I have not gone to some of the places most people go,
mosques, churches, temples, synagogues, sorcerers,
but I have had my coffee grounds read…
(Excerpts from Nazım Hikmet’s Autobiography)
