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  When John Lennon was killed the world
went into a state of shock, since the murderer turned out to be a fan of Lennon's
and not an enemy. The murderer, Mark Chapman, had his walls covered with John Lennon
posters. He listened only to his songs. In a sense, Chapman sought his identity through
John Lennon. The fascination kept growing, became unbearable and eventually turned
into a destructive urge.It was
during those same days that Yaşar Kemal's novel Salman, the Solitary was published.
This was quite a dense book, for years in the making. Yet, when it came out, it was
at the dead center of current events. Though the names were different, the book was
an analysis of Chapman, Lennon and the transformation of fascination into violence.Yaşar
Kemal set out from an autobiographical incident. When he was a child, his step-brother
had fatally stabbed his father at the mosque, right in front of the five year old
Yaşar. (As a result, Yaşar Kemal would lose his ability to speak and
be a stutterer for a period of time).It was
as a novelist and not as a witness that Yaşar Kemal would recount this life-altering
event, hence the secret to his writing. Out of this family tragedy, he would craft
a novel that explored the intricate psychology behind the transformation of fascination
into violence. Thus, he could also shed light on the complex make-up of the Lennon
assassination.Beyond
lame discussions over localism versus globalism, this was exactly the key to understanding
the Yaşar Kemal phenomenon in Turkey and abroad. First in his native Çukurova
and later in İstanbul, Yaşar Kemal observed the people he encountered. He delved
ever more deeply into those aspects of one's life that cannot even be revealed to
oneself; entered the mind-boggling labyrinth of the yearnings, the fears, the hatreds,
the passionate loves and of the vengefulness that drive us all. In those
depths, there was no telling one person from the other. This was the point at which
differences of culture, tradition and geography simply dissipated and where man found
himself stripped naked, as man and only man.In those
depths, Faulkner's Yaknapatawha, Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana, Marquez' Macondo and
Yaşar Kemal's Çukurova became a single location, and the characters
of their novels were the citizens of this vast "literary republic." It is this sense
of identification and not some exoticism that makes Yaşar Kemal so widely read
and recognized beyond Turkey.Still,
Yaşar Kemal is not a bland nor lusterless writer. When he writes about mankind,
he also writes about the conditions which created him, the texture of his natural
atmosphere. This texture sticks to you like a second skin in his novels. The reader
suffocates in Çukurova's heat, soaks under the fierce yellow rain and loses
himself in the dizzying smell of yarpuz and the taste of yalabuk. Add to that all
the myths the stories and the traditions that fill the novels, and you'll uncover
the reason why Yaşar Kemal's work has been only partially understood and often
wrongly associated with the simple appeal of folklore.In these
novels, nature is a part of man. Man transforms nature and, in turn, is transformed
by it. The same holds for traditions and myths. Under pressure, man creates a mythological
world and therein finds solace. Nature and myth figure prominently in his novels,
in order to provide a venue to reach the existential depths of humankind.Yaşar
Kemal avoided the many traps that were laid along his path. He never used local dialects
and escaped the lure of the "village novels" although he started his career at the
heyday of that fad. He avoided "socialist realism", the dominant school in the art
world in those years. That he could not be counted eather as part of the "village
novel" or the "socialist realism" schools in spite of the fact that he was a socialist
and he wrote about poor peasants is almost miraculous. Yet a final trap he avoided
was that of exoticism. Yaşar Kemal has never been a writer who sold the spices
he collected in different climates to a curious West. His words constantly paddle
through uncharted territory. And as they do, he recreates a language.The
language he recreates is that of the petitioner, for Yaşar Kemal too is a petitioner.A petitioner
who hears more than what men are ready to tell him. One who makes men comprehend
what they won't say, what they cannot understand. |
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Privateview: Autumn 1998 |
