Ink No. 13, 24 July 1971, ‘Felix Dennis Archive’, p. 6

James Baldwin writes an extensive article about the Turkish novelist and translator Yaşar Kemal

I have a friend in Turkey. His name is Yashar Kemal, who is one of the great living Turkish writers. He’s been put in jail by the present Turkish government for disseminating communist propaganda. This propaganda is a translation of a book which is published here by Laurence and Wishart, written by a man named Emile Burns. As far as I know, Emile Burns is not in jail in England for disseminating communist propaganda. So it seems a doubtful legal principle that the translator should be in jail in his own country for helping to have published a book which no one else considers dangerous.

[...]The crisis in Turkey is very much a crisis in my own country, or in Europe. The details are different. But it’s all a part of the ferment which is created by many millions, young and poor and non-white (to speak only of those categories), who are trying to learn to live and to breathe in a place where the standards we have imposed on them make it impossible. Yashar is trying to find, to create, in his own country, a language for millions and millions of people whom no one’s heard of, whom no one has ever spoken for, and who cannot speak. His imprisonment I an attack on them, and in as much as that is so, it is an attack on us.