Yaşar Kemal (1923-2015)

He is one of the latest writers of Turkish literature. He is a novelist, journalist and folklore compiler. He was born in 1923 in the village of Hemite/Gökçeli (now called Gökçedam), located within the borders of Osmaniye. His real name is Kemal Sadık Gökçeli. His mother's name is Nigar and his father's name is Sadık. His family is from Ernis village of Van. When the Russian army occupied Van in 1915, his father Sadık Bey settled in Çukurova with his family after a long migration journey. The village where Yaşar Kemal was born was a Turkmen village that was settled in the 19th century. He became blind in one eye as a result of an accident at a young age. Afterwards, his father was killed by his adopted son, whom he found and healed on the road while migrating to Çukurova. He became a stutterer after this incident. He stopped stuttering at the age of twelve. From the age of eight, he wrote poems like folk poets under the pseudonym "Aşık Kemal". When he was in the last year of primary school, he met Âşık Rahmi, the famous epic writer of the Taurus Mountains. Although the poet gave him an instrument as a gift and offered him an apprenticeship, Yaşar Kemal did not accept it and continued to secondary school. During these years, he worked as a shoemaker's apprentice and a gardener; He worked in a cotton gin factory. After leaving secondary school when he was a senior, he worked in many jobs such as solicitorship and agricultural work. He worked in Ramazanoğlu library between 1942-1944. He was introduced to the classics in this library of thirty thousand works. On the other hand, he traveled around the villages of Çukurova and made folklore compilations such as laments, rhymes, folk songs and poems. He published some of these compilations under the name Laments in 1943. In the same years, he met the literature and art circle in Adana. Abidin Dino, Arif Dino, Güzin Dino supported him, and Orhan Kemal became his close friend. The author, who embraced socialism in these years, established relationships with former socialist workers and intellectuals. He went to military service in 1944. He wrote his first story, "Dirty Story", while he was in the military. He went to Istanbul in 1946 and worked as a gas control officer in a French company. He returned to Çukurova in 1948 and became a water guard in the rice field in Kadirli. He was imprisoned in Kozan for several months on the grounds that he was one of the founders of the Communist Party in Çukurova in 1950 and was making communist propaganda.


When he became unemployed in Çukurova due to his political views, he returned to Istanbul in 1951 and with the help of Arif Dino, he joined the Cumhuriyet newspaper as an interview writer. He started giving interviews under the name "Yaşar Kemal". His first interview was the "Diyarbakır" interview. In the same year, the "Baby" Story was serialized in Cumhuriyet. In 1952, his work Sarı Hot, containing nine stories, was published. He married Thilda Serrero the same year. The couple's marriage continued until Serrero's death on January 17, 2001. Thilda Serrero, a translator, contributed to Yaşar Kemal's recognition abroad by translating many of his works into English. While the author was doing interviews for Cumhuriyet newspaper, he also wrote İnce Memed. When the administrators at Cumhuriyet insisted that he remove the long description of Çukurova at the beginning of the novel, he resigned, but later returned to his job. The novel was serialized in 1953-1954. It was published in book form in 1955. İnce Memed is the author's first published novel. The author's first novel, "The Iron Wheel", is lost. He published Teneke in 1955 and Ortadirek in 1960. In 1955, he published his interviews, which were previously serialized in Cumhuriyet newspaper, in book form and won the Istanbul Journalists' Association Interview Award. In 1962, he joined the Workers' Party of Turkey founded by Mehmet Ali Aybar and became a member of the Central Executive Board. He was among the founders of Ant magazine in 1967. He was prosecuted for his articles in Ant magazine. He resigned from the party in 1969. He was among the founders of the Turkish Writers Union, which was established in 1973. He served as the chairman of the union in 1974-75. Between 1976 and 1980, he went to countries such as France, Belgium and the United States. He lived in Stockholm for a while. He received the International Cino del Duca award in 1982 and the Commandeur rank of the Légion d'Honneur in 1983. He became the first president of the PEN writers association, founded in 1988. He was tried in 1995 for his articles in Der Spiegel and Index on Cencorship. Even though he was sentenced, his sentence was postponed. Yaşar Kemal, who received the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Prize in 2008, died on February 28, 2015 and was buried in Zincirlikuyu Cemetery. Although Yaşar Kemal is known as a novelist in the literary world, he was interested in poetry from an early age and entered the literary world through poetry. His first poem "Seyhan" was published under the name Yaşar Sadık Göğçeli in Görüşler, one of the Adana Community Center magazines. Later, his poems appeared in different magazines, and the author published these poems in 2010 under the name 'Gün days Bahar İndi'. The oldest of these poems is Fairytale, published in Visions in 1940, and the newest is Hannaya Poems and Fairytale, published in 1973. The oral culture products he listened to since his childhood and compiled in his youth were also reflected in his novels. The author, who said that his masters were the oral literature of his own land, also stated that Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Dickens were the sources of his novels, and that he found his understanding of the novel close to Homer. Arif and Abidin Dino introduced him to the classics and contributed to the development of his taste in literature. In his first novels written in the 1950s and 1960s, he mostly talked about Çukurova and the people of this region. The main themes of these Çukurova novels are the relationship between man and nature, the reflection of the deterioration in this relationship on man's relationship with man, the oppressor-oppressed conflict, customs, blood feud, poverty, murder, the settlement of nomads in Çukurova, the landlords trying every way to expand their lands, and corruption. Although Yaşar Kemal deals with the realities of Çukurova, what distinguishes him from a classical village novelist is his use of archetypes, symbols and myths.


İnce Memed, whose first volume was published in 1955 and took 39 years to write, tells about the oppressor-oppressed conflict and the rebellion against the oppressor. According to Yaşar Kemal, İnce Memed is the story of the "man who is forced" to rebel against hardship and oppression. There is another story of oppression and struggle in Teneke. This novel tells the story of a young and inexperienced district governor who sides with the villagers oppressed by the landowners who own the paddy fields in Çukurova. In his Akçasaz'ın Ağaları duology and his novel Hüyükteki Nar Ağaçı, the author discussed the change in production methods in Çukurova and the fact that mechanization caused the loss of traditional values. Another novel about lost values, The Legend of the Thousand Bulls, is the story of a Turkmen tribe experiencing the pain of transition from nomadism to settled life. In his Trilogy on the Other Side of the Mountain (Middle Mast, Earth Iron, Sky Copper, Ölmez Otu), written between 1960 and 1969, the author described the struggle of the villagers who went to Çukurova to pick cotton, and how people who were in a difficult situation in the face of nature and living conditions tried to get out of this impasse. In 1967, he wrote the stories "Köroğlu", "Karacaoğlan" and "Falageyik", which live in the oral tradition of folk literature, under the name Three Anatolian Legends. In 1972, he published the biography of Çakırcalı Mehmet Efe, who lived in the Aegean during the last period of the Ottoman Empire, under the name Çakırcalı Efe. He listened and noted the life story of Çakırcalı Efe while he was working as a petitioner in Kadirli. Afterwards, he did research and wrote this biographical novel. The loss of values is at the forefront in these novels of the author, who started writing novels centered on Istanbul after 1975. As in the Çukurova novels, corruption is the main theme of these novels. In his novels Deniz Küstü and Kuşlar da Gitti, he focused on how city life disrupts man's relationship with nature. Since these years, the sea, which has not been seen in Çukurova novels, has entered the author's novel world. In Al Gözüm Seyreyle Salih, he tells the story of human relations in Şile, changing values, and the struggle to hold on to life through the eyes of a child. The Sultan of Elephants and Topal Karınca, published in 1977, are allegories of Yaşar Kemal's thoughts in his other works. The characters of the work, which seems like a children's story at first glance, are animals such as elephants and ants. Through these characters, the author expressed the conflict between the exploiters and the exploited. The Kendicik trilogy, which he wrote in the 1980s, is an autobiographical novel series. It bears the traces of Yaşar Kemal's childhood. The theme of “Fear” is at the center of this novel. In this novel, a young man named Yusuf, who killed his father in his childhood, appears before the reader under the name Salman. The trilogy tells how the child Mustafa, who is faced with murder and death, copes with this fear. The author's last novels belong to a tetralogy and take place on an Aegean island in the west of Anatolia, overlooking the Kaz Mountains: An Island Story Quartet (The Euphrates Water is Flowing Blood, Look, Where the Ant Drinks Water, Tanyeri Roosters, Naked Sea Naked Island). In this novel series published between 1997 and 2012, the author, who built a utopian island life, discussed the tragic situations experienced by the people living in Anatolia and the nearby geography during World War I and the population exchange after the war. It can be seen in his works that the author, who realized the importance of the language issue in literature at an early age and stated at every opportunity that he came from the tradition of epic writers, aimed to transfer the rich, lively and productive language of Çukurova into the written language. The author did not hesitate to use words specific to Çukurova, local idioms and idioms in his novels. The fame of Yaşar Kemal, nourished by this traditional culture, did not remain only within national borders. Many of his works, especially İnce Memed, have been translated into different languages. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize many times, the first being in 1973. Drawing on local and traditional sources in his works, Yaşar Kemal's epic narrative style and the themes he deals with through the characters he creates have enabled him to be remembered as a universal writer.


works Novel: İnce Memed 1 (1955), İnce Memed 2 (1969), İnce Memed 3 (1984), İnce Memed 4 (1987), Teneke (1955), Ortadirek (1960), Earth Iron Sky Copper (1963), Three Anatolian Legends ( 1967), Immortal Grass (1968), The Legend of Ağrıdağı (1970), The Legend of Binboğalar (1971), Çakırcalı Efe (1972), Demirciler Çarşısı Cinayeti (1974), Yusufçuk Yusuf (1975), If They Kill the Snake (1976), Take My Eyes Seyreyle Salih (1976), The Sultan of Elephants and the Lame Ant (1977), The Sea Crest (1978), The Birds Too Gone (1978), The Plover Bird (1980), The Pomegranate Tree on the Mound (1982), The Castle Gate (1985), The Voice of Blood (1981). , Look at the Euphrates Water Flowing Blood (1997), Where the Ant Drinks Water (2002), Dawn Roosters (2002), Naked Sea Naked Island (2012), One-Winged Bird (2013). Story: Yellow Hot (1952), All the Stories (1967). Poem: These Days Spring Has Come (2010) Report: Fifty Days in the Burning Forests (1955), Çukurova Yana Yana (1955), Fairy Chimneys (1957), A Cloud is Boiling (1974), Soldiers of God (1978), 60 Years in Reportage Writing (2011), Children Are People (2013), Where Are You My Friend? (2014). Essay, Article, Joke: If Stone Cracked (1961), Baldaki Salt (1974 ed. Alpay Kabacalı), Ağaçın Çürüğü (1980), Yüzler (1994 with Abidin Dino), Ustadır Arı (1995 ed. Alpay Kabacalı), Zulmün Artsın (1995 ed. Alpay Kabacalı) , Garden with a Thousand and One Flowers (2009). Folklore Compilations: Laments (1943), The Sky Remained Blue (1982 with Sabahattin Eyüboğlu), Those in the Yellow Notebook (1997 ed. Alpay Kabacalı).