Yasar Kemal, Master Turkish Novelist and Strident Political Critic, Is Dead
Yasar Kemal, the master storyteller who repeatedly clashed
with the Turkish state while emerging as his country’s first novelist of global
stature, died on Saturday in Istanbul, according to Turkey’s state-run news
agency, Anadolu. His age was uncertain, because no one kept records in the
isolated village where he grew up, but he was born in 1922 or 1923. Anadolu
reported his age as 92, but other news agencies said he was 91. Mr. Kemal’s home region — Cukurova in southern Anatolia,
known in antiquity as Cilicia — is the backdrop for his sweeping tales of
rapacious landlords, callous bureaucrats and peasant heroes who fight
injustice. He wrote more than two dozen books, using a colorful narrative style
that appealed to a broad audience, fiercely criticizing injustice and creating
noble outlaws who became permanent parts of Turkey’s cultural landscape.
His best-known hero was Slim Memed, who appeared in his most
famous book, “Memed, My Hawk,” and in a sequel, “They Burn the
Thistles.” Slim Memed takes up the cause of his oppressed neighbors, flees to
the hills and leads soldiers on wild-goose chases as local people feed, shelter
and encourage him.
As an outspoken advocate of Kurdish rights and a sharp
critic of his country’s leaders, Mr. Kemal was often in trouble with the law.
During the 1980s and ’90s, when he was considered a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature,
newspapers and government leaders denounced the Swedish Academy for failing to
choose him, asserting that it was motivated by anti-Turkish prejudice. That
same establishment, however, hauled him into court several times for his
outspoken views. Some nationalists called him a traitor. None of this intimidated him, any more than his peasant
heroes were intimidated by the aghas, the feudal lords who brutalized and
exploited them. “For a writer,” he once explained, “looking over your
shoulder is suicide.”
Kemal Sadik Gokceli was born into a Turkish-Kurdish family
in the village of Hemite (now Gokcedam) in southern Turkey. By his own account,
few of his male ancestors died in bed; his Uncle Mahiro, he said, was “the most
famous outlaw in eastern Anatolia, Iran and the Caucasus.” When he was 5 years
old, he saw his father murdered, which left him with a severe stutter for
years. He began composing and reciting his own poems at the age of
8. After working as a cotton picker, tractor driver and threshing machine
operator, he took a job at the library in Adana. There were few patrons, and he
spent his time devouring world literature, especially the works of Stendhal,
Cervantes and Chekhov, whom he called “my master.” “If I had not discovered literature,” he later mused, “I
would have become a bard, a singer of epic poems.”
In 1951, he went to Istanbul and began more than a decade of
work at the prestigious newspaper Cumhuriyet. Wishing to escape the notoriety
of his youth — he had discovered Marxism in Adana and been imprisoned for
several months on charges of spreading Communist ideas — he adopted a pen name,
Yasar Kemal. In 1962, he joined the leftish Turkish Workers Party, and he
served as one of its leaders until quitting after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
in 1968.
Although his books focus on the hard lives of peasants and
the valor of rebels who spring up among them, his work is also notable for its
focus on environmental destruction. The burning of forests, the draining of
swamps and the slaughter of dolphins are among the evils he portrays as ruinous
results of greed. As a young journalist, Mr. Kemal played a key role in
stopping the planned destruction of a historic Armenian shrine, the Holy Cross
Church on Akhtamar Island in eastern Turkey. Armenians are sympathetic
characters in several of his novels. In 2013, the Armenian Ministry of Culture
gave him its “Krikor Naregatsi” decoration to recognize “his tribute to
Armenian cultural heritage and his courage, as well as his commitment to
universal values related to justice, freedom and human dignity.”
If Mr. Kemal had a stylistic comrade, it was Turkey’s
greatest poet, Nazim Hikmet, who was also a Communist and died in Moscow in
1963 after being chased from his homeland. Both men rejected the heavy,
formalized language of Ottoman literature and instead wrote vivid narratives
infused with traditional stories, myths, proverbs and colloquialisms. In 1996, after asserting in the German magazine Der Spiegel
that Kurds had a right to break away from Turkey, and following that with an
article in the London journal Index on Censorship denouncing the “racist,
oppressive regime” that “crushed all the people of Anatolia like a
steamroller,” he was tried and given a suspended sentence of 20 months in
prison for “inciting hatred.”
Mr. Kemal lived long enough to see his government move
toward democracy and change its approach to its Kurdish population. In his
later years, he was showered with honors, including the Presidential Cultural
and Artistic Grand Prize, Turkey’s highest cultural award, in 2008. By that time, his global reputation was assured, but a
younger generation of Turkish writers, many of them modernists who emerged from
the urban elite rather than the peasantry, was eclipsing him. When Orhan Pamuk,
the most prominent of them, won the Nobel Prize in 2006, Mr. Kemal’s chances
evaporated. Yet these novelists acknowledged their debt to him.
“He is one of the few writers who can deftly blend the
compassion and love he feels for his characters with astute irony, morbid
criticism and sharp social observations,” said one of them, Elif Shafak. “In
each and every book, he touches and lifts up the beauty of becoming a free,
soul-searching human individual, even in the most feudal social settings. He is
the architect of unforgettable literary heroes and a beacon for writers of the
generations that followed him.”
Mr. Kemal married Thilda Serrero, who came from one of
Istanbul’s leading Jewish families, in 1952, and before her death in 2001, she
translated many of his books into English, including “Wind From the Plain”
trilogy, published as a boxed set in June 2011 by Yale University Press. In
2002, he married Ayse Semiha Baban. She survives him, as does an adopted son,
Rait Gokceli.
In “They Burn the Thistles,” a villager who shelters the
outlaw hero, Slim Memed, gazes at him as he sleeps and describes him in terms that
might apply to the novelist himself. “In that man there’s a brave heart, a good brain, and great
humanity,” he tells his wife. “He’s so big-hearted that both the aghas and the
government are afraid of him. Terrified of him. There were 500 bandits in the
mountains, but that didn’t bother the government. Why not? Because they were
not generous, big-hearted men.”
