Literary Cartographers | How Gwendolyn Brooks and Orhan Pamuk “Mapped the Soul” of the City 💜

Of Kitchenettes and Gecekondus | When Writers Turn Cities into Living Texts

Gwendolyn Brooks

& Orhan Pamuk

#onherbirthdaytoday

#onhisbirthdaytoday

7th June 2026

Before I begin this post, I have a confession to make.

Yes, today happens to be the birthday of yet another famous writer - Nikki Giovanni! But I couldn’t tag her under this blogpost because of the fact that, I couldn’t perceive a lot of connects amongst these three writers, (Pamuk, Nikki and Brooks) when taken together. 

Hence, I’ve discussed her in a separate post. Yes, Nikki is HERE, btw. 😊

However, quite interestingly, Gwendolyn Brooks and Orhan Pamuk who share their birthdays today, seem to share quite a lot of similarities as well.

Both writers seem to anchor their entire bodies of work in the geography of a single city.

In other words, the city becomes a text that they seem to have “read” extensively, and then charted it out for their readers.

Pamuk foregrounds the post-imperial Istanbul, while Brooks anchors her work in mid-century Black Chicago (specifically Bronzeville)!

And while Pamuk deals with the melancholic weight of a fallen empire and the clash between East and West, Brooks documents the localised, systemic confinement of Black Americans during and after the Great Migration.

It is quite fascinating to note that, both authors treat the city not just as a backdrop, but as an active, force that shapes the psychology, class struggles, and ultimate destinies of its residents.

Brooks’ Kitchenettes and Pamuk’s Gecekondus are examples to this credo.

For example, in her poem titled, “Kitchenette Building,” Brooks examines how the overcrowded apartments of Bronzeville - a direct result of racist redlining and predatory housing practices – serve to suffocate the spirit.

Similarly, in Pamuk’s novel titled, A Strangeness in My Mind, Pamuk tracks the rise of Istanbul’s gecekondus - shantytowns built overnight by rural migrants.

By elevating the subaltern figures of the street, Pamuk and Brooks not only act as urban archivists but also serve to produce a counter-discursive framework against the grand, official narratives of their respective nations.

In one of his interviews that he gave in November 2009, he talks about the concept of Turkish melancholy that pervades his writing. He contrasts it with the western concept of melancholy, saying that, while Turkish melancholy is communal and collective, Western sense of melancholy is individualistic!

For example, in his autobiographical memoir titled, Istanbul: Memories and the City, he dissects the concept of Turkish melancholy while “reading” the city.

Now for the literary takeaways – as usual -

The literary tradition of the “city as a text” or the “city as a character” have for long been great sources of inspiration for writers across the ages. Hence, when a writer maps a city, they simultaneously document milieu of that particular era as well.

I am tempted to give away a few more prominent writers who used the town or the city as a text/character in their writing.

James Joyce’s Dublin foregrounds the hyper-local literary geography of the topos (place). He so beautifully captured the streets, the pubs, the dialects and the social cultural landscape of Dublin such that, he himself once claimed that, if Dublin were destroyed, it could be rebuilt brick by brick using his novel as a blueprint.

Charles Dickens through his reimagining of Victorian London captures a city rapidly transforming under the weight of the Industrial Revolution. Be it the fog-choked alleyways of Bleak House or the bureaucracies and debtor’s prisons of Little Dorrit, Dickens used London’s topography to critique profound class stratification prevalent at that time. (It was the best of times/ It was the worst of times).

Zadie Smith gives us a multicultural slice of North West London, thereby mapping the complex intersections of race, class, and identity in the process.

Fyodor Dostoevsky foregrounds St. Petersburg as a character in his writing. Interestingly, St. Petersburg was an artificially constructed city, built by Peter the Great as Russia’s “window to the West.” Dostoevsky used its brutal, cramped tenements to mirror the psychological fever and alienation of his characters. In works like Crime and Punishment and The Double, the city’s yellow fog, muddy canals, and claustrophobic taverns actively drive his protagonists toward madness and existential crisis.

Whether it’s Brooks’s Bronzeville, Pamuk’s Istanbul, or Joyce’s Dublin, these authors prove that the greatest cities are indeed living, breathing texts!

And it’s a truth universally acknowledged, that, while bureaucrats map the body of the city, it is the writer who maps its soul!

Literary cartographers, we call them! 😊

PS: You may want to read Dr. Benet’s soulful review of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, on our past post, dated 17 October 2020, HERE on our blog. 

You may also want to read our past blogpost on the Painting of the Cityscapes, featuring great writers who “painted” Cityscapes in their writing (that includes Pamuk) on our past post, dated 21 March 2019, HERE on our blog.