National myths and self-Na(rra)tions: Mustafa Kemal's Nutuk and halide Edib's memoirs and the Turkish ordeal

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 102, Issue 2-3, 2003, Pages 509-527

  Adak, Hülya ^a  

^a SABANCI UNIVERSITY   (Turkey)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 56149122470     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-102-2-3-509     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. In 1925, after the instigation of Takriri Silkun (law on the maintenance of order), which ensued in the closing of the opposition party and the silencing of its press, the Republican People's Party became a "power monopoly" as the Kemalist regime became an authoritarian single-party regime. With the exception of one more experiment with an opposition party, Turkey did not have a legal opposition until after the 1940s. Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (New York: I. B.Tauris and Co., 1998), 184
2. For instance, Kazim Karabekir's autobiography, prepared in 1933, was burned before it was published. In 1960, Kazim Karabekir's istiklal Harbimiz [Our independence war] was published, but the published copies were collected because the autobiography violated the law against defaming Atatürk, and as such, was a serious case of lese-majesty. istiklal Harhimizin Esaslari [The facts of our independence struggle] was not published in Turkey until the 1990s
3. Kazim Karabekir, İstiklal Harbimizin Esaslari (Istanbul: Emre Yayinlari, 2000.)
4. The first night of the occupation of Istanbul, British soldiers began a search to arrest nationalist leaders, including Dr. Adnan because of his affiliation with the Struggle. Halide Edib, The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York: Century Co., 1928), 67-69
5. In 1950, Edib became MP from İzmir for the Democrat Party led by Adnan Menderes; she resigned from the political arena altogether in 1954, accusing the Democrat Party of tending toward a dictatorship. See Orhan Koloǧlu, "Halide Edib, Fevrimler ve Demokrasi" [Halide Edib, revolutions and democracy] Tarih ve Toplum Dergisi [Journal of history and society], no. 177 (1998): 181-87
6. The Progressive Republican Party was closed because the Independence Tribunals found the party complicit in the Kurdish rebellion of 1924 and accused the party of using religion for political purposes. Zürcher, Turkey, 180
7. See Gazi Mustafa Kemal, Nutuk-Söylev, 2 vols. (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1984), 4, 17, 49
8. Mustafa Kemal, A Speech Delivered by Ghazi Mustafa Kemal, October 1927 (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1929), 1
9. Edib, Ordeal, 190
10. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24-25
11. George Schöpflin, "The Functions of Myth and Taxonomy of Myths," in Myths and Nationhood, ed. Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 19
12. Hifzi Veldet Velidedeoǧlu, "Doǧumunun 100. Yilinda Söylev'in 9. Basisi Üzerine" [One hundred years after his birth, on the ninth edition of The Speech], in Mustafa Kemal, Söylev [The speech], 3 vols. (Istanbul: Can Matbaa, 1988), 30
13. For instance, in the Times Literary Supplement, The Turkish Ordeal was described as a "history written by the novelist who helped to make it history." John Murray, "The Turkish Ordeal," Times Literary Supplement, November 29, 1928
14. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Ondokuzuncu Asir Türk Edebiyati Tarihi [History of nineteenth-century Turkish literature] (Istanbul: Çaǧlayan Kitabevi, 1988), 200
15. See Leigh Gilmore, "Autobiographies: Women's Autobiography and the Poetics of Identity" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1988), 69
16. Further, in the eighteenth century, the notion of self-conception came to be synonymous with individuality. For instance, according to Goethe, "individuation" was a constant interaction of a maturing self with a changing world configuration. Such "an interlinked coexistence" between the gradually changing self interacting with the gradually changing world was how the self experienced history. Karl Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 336
17. Kemal, Nutuk, 2; my translation
18. See Kemal, Nutuk, 21, 1105, 1185
19. For instance, even though the Independence Struggle was a struggle fought by the Muslim community of the Ottoman Empire, namely the Kurds and the Turks, Nutuk portrays the struggle as one fought exclusively by Turks. This myth of rebirth and narrative of discontinuity was highly influential in the writing of republican history, especially the distancing of the Ottoman Empire from the Turkish Republic. Republican historians vouched for the "discontinuity thesis" mostly because of the significance of religion in the Ottoman Empire that secular republican intellectuals did not want to embrace and also because of the ethnic heterogeneity of the Empire that was modified with the ethnic nationalism of the Turkish Republic. Büşra Ersanli, "The Ottoman Empire in the Historiography of the Kemalist Era: A Theory of Fatal Decline," in The Ottomans and the Balkans, ed. Fikret Adanir and Suraiya Faroqhi (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2002), 135
20. Transnationally and transhistorically speaking, the interpersonal exploration of identity might be a trait common to women's autobiographies. See The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries, ed. Domna Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)
21. Thus, The Turkish Ordeal could be located at the nexus of autobiography and biography, between Phillippe Lejeune's autobiographical pact (author is/is not the narrator is the protagonist) and the biographical pact (author is/is not the narrator is not the protagonist). Philippe Lejeune, "The Autobiographical Contract," in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 204-5
22. This phrase is borrowed from James Olney's analysis of Samuel Beckett's Watt. See James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 229. I use the phrase to refer to a changing "I" in line with historical change. It may be added that the "I" is not even reflexive because whenever the "l" returns to or refers to itself, it is not or no longer the same "I."
23. Halide Edib, Memoirs (New York: Century Co., 1926), 32
24. Kemal, Söylev, 724-25