seminar 41:3 (September 2005)

Is Orientalism in Retreat or
in for a New Treat? Halide Edip Adivar
and Emine Sevgi zdamar Write Back
AZADE SEYHAN Bryn Mawr College
Hashish!
Resignation
Kismet!
Golden cages, caravansaries, caravans
gazebos!
A sultan dancing on silver trays.
The heir, the padishah,
A thousand-year-old shah.
Ivory slippers dangle from minarets,
Women with hennaed noses
Embroider with their toes.
Imams in green turbans call the faithful to prayer.
This is the Orient through the eyes of the French poet!
This is
the Orient image
disseminated by books,
printed a million a minute!
Yet,
neither yesterday
nor today,
nor tomorrow,
was there,
or ever will be
such an Orient!
Nazim Hikmet, Piyer Loti (irrler 16566;
translated by the author)
Nazim Hikmet, arguably the most prominent Turkish poet of the twentieth century,
whose name has come to be associated with resistance to oppression, exile, and
lyric remembrance, wielded his pen against the one-sided flow of Orientalist
210 AZADE SEYHAN
images long before Edward Saids Orientalism delivered its scathing criticism of
British, French, and American academic discourse on the Orient. Said regarded
such discourse as complicit in the imperialist designs of their respective great
empires. It was in their intellectual and imaginative territory that aesthetic,
literary, and disciplinary endeavours generated structures of cultural domination
that controlled and manipulated the knowledge of the Orient (Orientalism 15).
Saids argument focusses on the insidious power of representational regimes that
abet imperialistic designs. His analysis of the scholarship on the Orient unveils the
truth of the text as representation. For this reason, [t]he value, efficacy, strength,
apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient [...] relies very little,
and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. Thus, any meaning at-
tributed to the Orient relies more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense
is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the
Orient visible, clear, there in discourse about it (2122).
Nazim Hikmet penned the poem Piyer Loti (sic.), from which the above
lines are taken, upon hearing rumours that the French writer Pierre Loti, an aficio-
nado of exotic locales and best known for Aziyad, a fairly typical Orientalist
novel about his clandestine affair with the young wife of a Turkish pasha, was an
officer on one of the enemy warships that sailed into the Istanbul harbour after
the defeat of the Ottoman empire in the first World War. Hikmets poem is an
apostrophe to Loti, who becomes a trope, a metonymy, for the Occidental fictions
of the Orient, which are, as Hikmet forcefully asserts, invested in ideologies
that have perpetuated the political, socio-economic, and cultural exploitation
of Asian lands and peoples. A relatively obscure writer of exotic fictions, Loti
has attracted considerable critical interest after Roland Barthess memorable
rereading of Aziyad as a novel that is an almost motionless discourse, which
posits meanings but does not resolve them, a metatext of ellipses and absences
(Pierre Loti: Aziyad 111). What is striking about Barthess reading is his as-
sertion that Lotis Orient is neither a fact of history nor of geography, but rather
one of discourse, Whether Turkish or Maghrebi, the Orient is merely a square
on the board, the emphatic term of an alternative: the Occident or something else
(116; emphasis in the original). But when Loti has to shift from the imaginary to
the real and yield to the constraint of praxis, meaning ceases. The desire for the
meaning of the Orient, a hallucinatory investment, marks a political regression,
for such desire always proceeds toward an extreme archaism, where the greatest
historical distance assures the greatest unreality (117).
Both Hikmet and Barthes, guided by poetic and critical insight and intuition,
preconfirm Saids notion of the Orient as a site of discourse and a mode of
representation that plays into the hands of cultural and political structures of
domination. Although well-known and respected scholars of Islamic cultures such
as Bernard Lewis have engaged in very public debates with Said, contesting what
Adivar and zdamar Write Back 211
they saw as his uninformed generalizations, it cannot be denied that the publication
of Orientalism has radicalized English, French, and American literary theory of
the past two centuries and invested postcolonial studies with considerable critical
capital. The paradigm shift set into motion by Saids work helped expand the
purview of literary and cultural study to initiate, at least in certain academic circles
if not in an arena of public discourse, a dialogic engagement with non-European
cultures, whereby the study of the latter implies more a hermeneutics of contract
than a desire for cultural colonization. There is no shortage of scholarly articles
devoted to questions generated by the debates around discourses on various
Orientalisms. Have these well-meaning efforts, however, really reversed what
Said has called the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves
reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding
the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have
had different views on the matter (Orientalism 7)? The answer is, for the most
part, in the affirmative. Scholarship has made great strides on the road to an anti-
Orientalist frontier in the last quarter century since the publication of Orientalism.
On the other hand, some practitioners of seemingly self-reflexive theories such as
Marxism, cultural deconstruction, new historicism, and even postcolonial theory
itself have carelessly taken the wrong exit to atemporal sites, where specific
histories fade into a horizon that levels them. I have elsewhere criticized Homi
Bhabhas seductive notion of all culture and literature as hybrid, which has turned
into a one size fits all rhetoric, instrumental in abstracting texts away from the
specificity of political and historical contexts (5). Such abstraction foregoes an
analysis of social spaces and cultural geographies, from which stories emerge. In
his later work, Said voices strong objection to practices of interpreting other cultures
in a timeless vacuum that delivers them directly into a universalism free from
attachment, inhibition, and interest (Culture and Imperialism 56). In the context
of these critical debates, this article will look briefly at some of the developments
in recent German Studies with regard to scholarship in multicultural/multiethnic
literatures of Germany.
The presence of large migrant Muslim communities in contemporary Germany,
especially those of close to three million Turks, has inevitably drawn public
attention to the double incursion of Islam and the Orient into German culture.
The massive amount of ink spilled on the political, historical, and sociological
implications of this foreign presence has, for the most part, been contained
within and controlled by a discourse of social and cultural incommensurability.
On the other hand, for scholars of German Studies, the encounter of German
culture with its Others has provided productive venues of investigation that
have benefited from postcolonial modes of inquiry concerned with recovering
histories of domination and uncovering conditions of deracination that lie at the
heart of the large-scale migrations of our time. In a special 1993 issue of Der
212 AZADE SEYHAN
Deutschunterricht on Turkish culture a select group of Turkish and German
literary scholars, among them Yksel Pazarkaya, Deniz Gktrk, Zafer enocak,
and Marlis Wilde-Stockmeyer, have published theoretically astute and content-
rich background essays that map the critical coordinates of Turkish literary
history (Scheuer). Of course, one advantage scholars in Germany have over their
colleagues in the United States is their easy access to major modern works of
Turkish literature in German translation and, because of Germanys geographical
and historical proximity to Turkey, more contact with Turks and their culture. On
the other hand, American and British Germanistik has been much more active in
terms of producing books, anthologies, articles, and special issues of journals on
Turkish-German culture. The series Culture and Society in Germany, issued
by the British-American publisher Berghahn, is dedicated to creating a forum
for the discussion and investigation of the diverse cultural fabric of German
society today. The books in the series testify to the sociocultural dynamism of
the once persecuted or marginalized minorities of Germany and showcase their
determination to integrate but not assimilate, thus turning their own history and
cultural heritage into a sustainable resource. In a revolutionary move, each book
in the series links cultural production to social context and analysis by focussing
on a German-language writer.
The critical attention of the first book in the series, Turkish Culture in German
Society Today, focussed on the work of Emine Sevgi zdamar and includes, be-
sides selections from her work and a revealing interview with her, interpretive
essays on her early writings and on the general contours of the social history of
Turkish migration to and settlement in Germany. The articles in this volume claim
to be neither original nor provocative, rather they offer the reader meticulously
researched narratives and important social insights to ponder. An essay by David
Horrocks on zdamars Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei is one of the most concise
yet comprehensive interpretations of her intriguing first novel. A combination of a
sophisticated book review and a cultural-historical overview, Horrockss article not
only delineates the major foci of the novel, which are language, images of Turkish
life and history, images of women, and the omnipresence of death which serves
as a metaphor for a past embedded in the present but also clearly recognizes
the pattern of cultural semiotics that informs the texture of zdamars tale. The
introductory article by Moray McGowan and Sabine Fischer on the development
of migrant writing in the Federal Republic offers a clear-eyed and refreshingly
jargon-free review of the contours of Germanys new literary map in progress. It
also delivers an unequivocal critique of feminist scholarship on Turkish women
that triangulates gender, tradition, and Islamic oppression. Gowan and Fischer call
for an awareness of the enormously complex cultural divisions that mark modern
Turkish society. Their contribution to the volume stands as a testimony to the clarity
of different cultural voices acting as each others interlocutors.
Adivar and zdamar Write Back 213
The labour of interpretation bears the burden of historical and culture-specific
attachments. It is unfortunate that in many recent conference presentations historical
abstraction in the manner of Bhabha has deteriorated into sound bites and catch
phrases. The glib tenor of these readings dehistoricizes stories by deploying gender,
ethnic, or national identity as singular or interchangeable analytic categories without
attending to the diversity of voices that speak through the texts. In an article on
Libue Monkov that reads the work of this Czech-German author as a meditation
on Czech literary tradition and national culture, Katie Trumpener points to the dangers
of conflating categories of analysis. The much romanticized metaphor of border
crossings, for example, should not be taken to equate unproblematically female and
expatriate experience, female and multicultural aesthetics, or ethnic and experimental
art (99). Trumpener also maintains that the work of authors of non-German origin,
though written in German, is overwritten by a strong sense of other cultural and
linguistic memories and, therefore, the problems of German history and culture are
not as central to their concerns as they are to the professors who teach their work.
One of the methodological devices Said employs for studying authority is
strategic location, which is a way of describing the authors position in a text
with regard to the Oriental material he writes about (Orientalism 20; emphasis
in the original). By strategy with respect to the Orient Said means the authors
approach to the Orient, his or her will not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its
sublimity, scope, and complexity, and the narrative tactics and images the author
employs to represent the Orient and speak of it on its behalf. Any oversight of
the necessity of locating textual sites of tension, which refer to stories of conflict,
rupture, loss, and recovery within sociocultural histories of others, underscores
the intractable vestigial presence of Orientalism in current scholarship. In
Orientalism Reconsidered Said reassesses the implications of his own critique
that imposed the necessity of a paradigm shift on the discourse of Orientalism.
Here, he voices concern that any theory of history writing (he is referring to the
methods and practice of scientific world history), even if it is ideologically anti-
imperialistic, depends on a method of conflating in Ernst Blochs terms non-
synchronous histories, cultures, and groups, with the result that it suppresses
any latent critique that would link it to such discourses as Orientalism on the one
hand and, on the other, to the Western domination of the non-European world
(Orientalism Reconsidered 210). Thus, theory without genuine self-critique
cannot sustain an extended critical meditation. As Nietzsche knew only too well,
it merely offers respite as a heuristic fiction from the elusive, aleatory, and chaotic
nature of existence.
Saids intellectual debt to Nietzsche is mediated by the work of Michel Foucault.
By his own account, Said has fashioned his understanding of Orientalism on
Michel Foucaults notion of discourse. For Foucault, discourse is an institutionally
coded disciplinary practice of speech governed by rules of exclusion that include
214 AZADE SEYHAN
prohibition and rejection. Although, on the surface, speech by itself may not be
of great significance, the prohibitions imposed on it make transparent its links
to desire and power. Foucault engages in a critique of institutions that claim
ownership of discourses that appear rational and neutral but that exercise political
power and exclusion in obscure ways. The purpose of Foucauldian critique is to
unmask these structures of domination in order to combat them. Similarly, Saids
objective in depicting Orientalism as a discourse is to demonstrate how it has
systematically constructed and managed the Orient politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively (Orientalism 3). Said
has managed to expose the complicity of representations and interpretive regimes
in objectifying and mastering a place, a geography, and a history.
While Orientalism exoticized the Orient as a homogeneous block on the map
and either cherished its difference (not always for the right reasons) or used it to
claim superiority, the opposite tendency in scholarship has, in some instances,
erased differences by dehistoricizing the subject of study. As Said has observed,
it has neutralized nonsynchronous developments or what might be considered
cultural and historical specificities by recourse to theories that are blind to
their own ideological underpinnings. For the most part, recent scholarship in
German Studies has been compelling in its investigation of identity politics,
social disenfranchisement, and struggles for cultural memory among expatriate
communities in Germany. On the other hand, the tendency driven by the good
intention to see Turkish artists as catalysts in the successful integration of Turks into
German society to read the new generation of Turkish-German authors writing
as a pseudo-German text and as an effort to understand German history abrogates
the writers histories and arrogates their works. As long as the intractability of
colonial desire operates within any theoretical discourse on the postcolonial, the
post would in no way signify that colonial desire has become obsolete or that a
misguided sense of intellectual mastery over the Other is a matter of the past.
In one of his later essays, Said maintains that the major geographical shifts
in modern history have made arbitrations between history and literature almost
impossible without taking into account the complex constellation of historical
experiences in the post-Eurocentric world (History, Literature, and Geography
471). The award-winning Turkish writers of Germany, among them Yksel
Pazarkaya, Aysel zakin, Alev Tekinay, Feridun Zaimoglu, as well as enocak and
zdamar, are certainly products of multiply centred histories. Their work embodies
the responsibility of narrating the legacies in which they participate. The major
works of zdamar, recipient of several prestigious literary prizes, among them the
Ingeborg Bachmann prize in 1990 and, more recently, the coveted Kleist prize,
are extended conversations with and meditations on a Turkish-Islamic-Anatolian
cultural legacy. zdamars references to German writers in her recent works may
be markers of a newly found awareness of German cultural memory, but they
Adivar and zdamar Write Back 215
are also rooted in her earlier education in Kemal Atatrks hastily Westernized
young Turkish Republic. Writing outside a homeland whose transformation from a
multiethnic empire to the new kid nation state on the block marked a seismic
historical shift in the fortunes of European and Arabic states, zdamar is attuned
to the tensions between official and community memory and aware of the human
cost of the quest for national unity.
In order to investigate these points of tension and conflict within frameworks
of specific histories, I would like to revisit zdamars fabled caravanserei, where
travellers from all walks of Turkish life and history cross paths. Reading zdamars
autobiographical Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei with the autobiography of
Halide Edip Adivar, a prominent writer whose memoirs, like those of zdamar,
mark the crossroads of personal and collective history, can open productive lines of
investigation. Halide Edip Adivars prolific work, which reflects her various lives
and careers as a freedom fighter, teacher, founder of a Montessori school for orphans
in Jerusalem, novelist, critic, translator, and professor of English literature, embodies
an exemplary practice of cultural translation between Eastern and Western literary
traditions. Halide Edip (later Adivar) was born into an aristocratic Ottoman-Turkish
family during the final years of the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire had
begun its final descent into the dustbin of history. A multilingual writer, well versed
in several Western as well as Islamic literatures, Adivar, like zdamar, published her
early works not in her mother tongue, but in English. And like zdamar she spent
years away from her homeland, either in exile or teaching at the outposts of the Otto-
man Empire in Arab lands. The transit between languages and cultures and their
shared peripatetic perspectives invest the work of these two writers with the urgency
of rethinking nationalism not in terms of territorial, religious, linguistic, and ethnic
unity but in terms of the possibility of finding alternative systems and syntheses that
unequivocally tolerate diversity.
The main questions to be addressed in reading these writers within a shared
tradition must be cast in terms that resist absolute categories of analysis. Can we
read these texts as something other than the coming to voice of those variously
marginalized (women in a patriarchal society, outsiders, artists)? Can the refiguring
of history in these womens memories help realize the promise of recognizing
denied cultures, languages, and rights beyond time- and space-specific limitations?
Can the realization of such recognition finally drive home the point that the self-
translation of others is not and should not be about their domestication for the
West, the here, and the now? By listening to zdamars performative voices in a
series of dialogues with other actors on the larger stage of Turkish political and
cultural history, we realize how the epistemological desire to reduce context to a
unified field of vision falters. The point of that hesitation, or stutter, is where we
can start to reverse the recidivist tendency to reorientalize the text. zdamars
intimate relationship with the complex subtext of history and the proximity of her
216 AZADE SEYHAN
positions on the triangulation of language, religion, and identity to those of Adivar
secure a place for her work in a new genealogy that refutes ties to Orientalist
regimes of reading. It is interesting to note in this context that the second half
of zdamars second autobiographical novel, Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn,
refers elliptically and in the form of a personalized history to what, in retrospect,
was a decade-long civil war in the 80s and early 90s between the Turkish state and
armed Kurdish insurgents. The reasons for this censored struggle, where lines of
ethnicity, religion, language, and nationality cut across configurations of time and
territory, are literally and figuratively presented in contemporary Turkish writer
Orhan Pamuks bestselling novel Snow. Pamuks narrative bears witness to the
uncontainable fractures in the ideological and religious fabric of the state. In the
post-9/11 era, Pamuks international fame, now cemented in the United States by
this his last novel to be translated into English, has turned him into the unofficial
interpreter of Islam for the American public. In many ways, Snow and Die Brcke
vom Goldenen Horn complement one another in their personal, fictional, literary,
and pseudo documentary accounts, and they present from different geographical
and personal vantage points the conditions for the production of major tears on the
surface of the national map. zdamars in transit position between Germany and
Turkey during the ethnic and religious upheavals of the late 70s in Turkey lend her
account a multiplicity of perspectives that remind us of the roads not taken and
the exits blocked by strife, blood, and the debris of human life and dignity. These
parallel lines of reassessing the recent past in the work of Adivar and Pamuk
are of critical importance for an informed reading of zdamar, for her tales and
memories do not refer to German frameworks as defining coordinates.
Despite the fact that she writes in German and publishes in Germany, zdamar
is the product of a Turkish educational system, which, in spite of its many short-
comings, exposed her to Western and German literature (the opposite is not the
case). Furthermore, zdamar comes from a close-knit extended Turkish family that
passed on its strength, wisdom, and independence of spirit to her. Like many Turkish
writers, Pamuk and zdamar, though writing in different languages, have responded
to the necessity of listening to the silenced actors and subjects of their history. In their
respective idioms, they have been critical of the rupture in Ottoman-Turkish cultural
legacy that Atatrks Westernization reforms brought about. The results of this rupture
had broad and tragic political implications beyond the cultural sphere. Turkeys
transition from a multireligious, multiethnic, and multilinguistic state to a belated
nationhood, rooted in the antitraditionalist philosophy of the Enlightenment and held
together by the unifying discourse of shared territory, ethnicity, language, and culture,
came at the price of widespread political trauma. As Ernest Geller has correctly
observed, the Ottomans, by organizing the overall society into self-administering
ethnic-religious millets, made this millet-ethnicity highly visible and significant, and
thus obliged people to identify with it (46). When the Ottoman Empire conquered
Adivar and zdamar Write Back 217
the Arab and Balkan lands, the people of those lands were allowed to retain their
standing communal allegiances and keep their language and faith. But when the
non-ethnic, communal, or imperial polities of the pre-nationalist age (64) had to
yield to the mandate of nationalism, ethnic and religious conflicts proved inevitable in
the course of time and were often resolved by brutal means. The work of Pamuk and
zdamar, among that of many writers of their generation, reflects the iterative crises
of recent Turkish history in symbolic and semidocumentary registers.
Halide Edip Adivars memoir, Mor Salkimli Ev (The House with Wisteria;
title translated by this articles author), originally written in English as Memoirs of
Halide Edip and published in 1926 in London, twenty years before zdamar was
born, tells of the final years of the Ottoman Empire, first in the third-person narrative,
through the eyes of the little girl that she was, and later in the first-person narrative
of the young woman novelist, who served as a teacher-principal in the schools and
orphanages at the outposts of the empire in Arab lands. Adivars memoirs end roughly
where zdamars story begins, and the latter, in a way, serve as a kind of prefatory
postscript to the former. Besides ties of history and heritage and the device of using
a child narrator, these remembrances also illustrate that the relationship of women
to the modern Turkish nation has never been an indirect or obscure one. Adivar saw
active duty in the Turkish war for independence, and thousands of Turkish women
fought behind the lines. The new republic gave women the right to vote along
with men and equal rights in all spheres of public life. In zdamars Das Leben
ist eine Karawanserei, women are highly politicized, and their protests against the
corruptions of the regime do not go unheard. With biting wit and panache, they fight
local officials who try to bribe them and sway their votes. Both Adivar and zdamar
portray women as having equally strong ties to national politics and community, and
it is almost solely in their voices that memories of nation are told.
Adivar, along with Reat Nuri Gntekin and Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu,
belongs to a generation of writers who are credited with underwriting the edu-
cational policies of the new nation during the early years of the republic, roughly
from 1923 until 1950. They were active in public life not only as novelists and
dramatists but also as journalists, teachers, school superintendents, diplomats, and
cabinet members and were rightfully considered the architects of the new nation that
embraced secularism as its guiding principle and set out to eradicate the oppressive
hold of fundamentalist Islam. Most of the writers of the period made note of the
great danger in the secularization-resistant character of Islam and its trenchant
power that proliferated through saint cults. Their works stand as a symbolic warning
against the dangers of this obscurantist force, which was poised to challenge and
combat nationalism. Adivar, however, though a thoroughly Western-educated in-
tellectual and a dedicated feminist, remained a firm believer in the possibility of
reconciling the serene spiritualism of Islam with the progressive elements of an
educational system based on the principles of Enlightenment humanism. The need
218 AZADE SEYHAN
for the comforting rituals of Islam and the longing for the grandeur of the Arabic
language and literary culture that marked the life and many careers of Adivar are
also an informing trend of zdamars early work and constitutes one of its para-
doxes. In both writers, the same paradox operates in the belief that unequivocal
social freedom and equal educational and political rights for women are compatible
with Islamic practice. At the level of personal faith or in a purely spiritual sense, this
is certainly possible, but not under the shariah (Islamic law).
zdamars work has shown an uncanny ability to venture into diverse
literary traditions, cultural practices, and community memories and to weave
the deliquescence of their memory traces into texts of multiple centres. Like her
predecessor Adivar and her contemporary Pamuk, zdamar has championed the
autonomy of identities that had once constituted the mosaic of the Ottoman Empire
but had been driven underground under the banner of one nation. Pamuk is an astute
student of Ottoman history, and his works, based on Borgesian identity games and
rooted in an information-rich context, allow for an open-ended and intriguing act of
cultural translation. The symbolic and moral complexity of these works is, in a manner
of speaking, retranslated by zdamar into a Turkish-German idiom. zdamar and
Pamuk reopen the case for the investigation of silenced voices and use the agency
of the poetic voice to reconfigure time and history in a more nuanced understanding
of location and identity. The family resemblances between Adivar, Pamuk, and z-
damar are not merely thematic or stylistic, nor are they simply a matter of origins;
rather, as Trumpener has argued, they point to the necessity of situating writers of
non-German heritages in frameworks of contiguity that raise an awareness of the
social and cultural signifiers informing their work. It is a well-known tenet of critical
hermeneutics that all understanding is rooted in shared tradition. Therefore, reading
the stories of Germanys others outside of tradition or in the absence of histories
that have shaped them runs the risk of implicating itself in their misrepresentation.
One of the most powerful strategies for an anti-Orientalist stance, Said proposes,
is studying the imaginative and critical works of authors who write from the other
shores and who self-consciously position themselves against prevailing stereotypes
and claim ownership of their cultural histories through scrupulous research and
reflection (Orientalism Reconsidered 21213).
The conceptual scope of the present argument leaves no room for a discussion
of zdamars work in relation to Pamuks (post)modern oeuvre or of the formers
generic ties to the works of other non-German writers such as Yoko Tawada, a virtuoso
of linguistic and poetic memory. The focus of the analysis at hand is on the historical
and symbolic contiguity that links Karawanserei to Adivars memoirs. In the absence
of a variegated analysis of the sociocultural coordinates of the Turkish presence in
Germany, there is a tendency to read autobiographical tales of Turkish-German writers
as autoethnographies that provide the sole access route to Turkish culture. There is no
doubt that Karawanserei is a compact, fictionalized archive of recent Turkish political
Adivar and zdamar Write Back 219
fortunes as they were played out in the lives of ordinary citizens during Turkeys fateful
first experiment with democracy in the decade 19501960. Writing Outside the Nation
provides a detailed comparative analysis of zdamars language games and their
function in cultural identity formation (11324). What remains untold in most accounts
of her work is the almost photographic memory that has recorded events forgotten by
history textbooks and monographs. For the general reader, Karawanserei may provide
a tour de horizont of recent Turkish history. For the historically initiated, it is a tour
de force of poetic historiography. The dizzying language games and the metaphorical
power of the tale at times underplay and obscure the historical weight of the narration.
Nevertheless, the stream of satiric allusions to the follies of the regime trope this history
as a kind of tragicomedy. The continuous moves of the zdamar family from town
to town and within cities in order to eke out a living at a time of rapidly diminishing
opportunities for the middle class are reflected in narrative ruptures inserted proverbs,
anecdotes, verbal combat, doomsday prophecies and thus mimic through figural
ploys the uncertainty of the times.
Adivars memoir, on the other hand, predates the postmodern consciousness of
rhetorical strategies that dictate the shape of historiography. However, as a practice
of memory that is informed by the specificities of a national history and that maps,
in Michel de Certeaus elegant formulation, the multiple paths of the future by
combining antecedent and possible particularities (82), it lends zdamars auto-
biographical history, its progeny, the authority of tradition. As de Certeau has observed
with keen insight, we find a subtle alteration of authority in every popular tradition,
for memory hails from many different moments, makes possible alterations without
being negated by them, and, far from being a mere repository of the past, it sustains
itself by believing in the existence of possibilities and by vigilantly awaiting them,
constantly on the watch for their appearance (87; emphasis in the original). Like
Adivar before her and many other women writing in diasporas, zdamar has har-
nessed the power of storytelling to reopen and continue the received tradition, make
possible its transition, and rewrite it as biographies of history itself. Hlne Cixous
imagines the role of womens writing in the purchase of historical agency through a
global lens:
As subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places.
Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels
forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield. In woman, personal history
blends with the history of all women, as well as national and world history. (882)
Although Cixous maintains that it is impossible to define a feminine practice of
writing, she believes that it will be conceived by subjects of history that stand
outside systems where master narratives dominate, by those who cannot be
subjugated to the dictates of patriarchal political regimes. Where personal story
220 AZADE SEYHAN
blends with community history, as in Adivar and zdamar, the actors on destinys
stage are not the Napoleons, Atatrks, and Churchills of textbooks, but rather the
masses of unsung heroes and heroines whose individual and collective acts have
ultimately led to seismic shifts in the course of time.
In a personal afterword to the current Turkish edition of Adivars memoirs, a
prominent poet and literary critic observes that history books are a far cry from
recounting, expressing, and impressing on us the lived reality of human lives
with all their joys and sorrows. Adivars memoirs and zdamars Karawanserei
succeed where history textbooks fail. The memoir Mor Salkimli Ev recounts, on
the margins of Halide Edip Adivars personal story, the story of a young idealist
writer and teacher of the Ottoman aristocracy, the history of the Young Turk rev-
olution, one of the boldest and most peculiar events that marked the last years of
the Ottoman Empire. When the revolution finally took place in 1908, the despotic
Sultan Abdlhamid was not deposed but was forced to recall the parliament he had
abolished more than a decade earlier and surrender most of his power. The series
of uprisings that finally led to the revolution had started around 1906 in eastern
Anatolia as a result of economic hardships. Soldiers and civil servants, who had
not been paid for months, quit their jobs. Corrupt governors and other officials
were fired, as discontent reached critical proportions. After eastern Anatolia and
Syria, Thessaloniki, in todays Greece, was racked by a large-scale revolt of the
Third Army Corps. Agents sent by the sultan to investigate the unrest came under
violent attack. Finally the sultan, fearing for his life, agreed to reinstate the 1876
constitution. For a brief, happy moment in its late history, the Ottoman Empire wit-
nessed the coming together of its people in a collective celebration. This was not to
last long. The Young Turk leadership that took the power away from the sultan was
to witness the decimation of the Empire through several major wars. After the final
defeat of the Ottomans in the First World War on the side of Germany, the Ottoman
territory was divided among the victors. The nationalists, headed by Mustafa Kemal
who was later given the last name Atatrk, the father of Turks waged a guerilla
war against the sultans government. Eventually, with the support of the western
conquerors, Kemal prevailed and founded the new Turkish Republic, which severed
all its ties to the Ottoman-Islam culture through a series of sweeping reforms. The
Arabic alphabet was dropped, Turkish adopted the Roman characters, and schools
replaced courses in Arabic with those in French, German, and English.
What is remarkably prescient in Adivars account, when read against zdamars
story, is the sense of unrest about the eradication of a cultural legacy that had sustained
a people for centuries. Adivars memoirs, which cover highlights of the above history
until the onset of the First World War, emphasize, retrospectively and in no uncertain
terms, the vital importance of maintaining and respecting the ethnic, religious, and
linguistic differences that had cemented the foundation of a culture. Adivar was the
first Turkish graduate of the American College for Girls in Istanbul. However, from a
Adivar and zdamar Write Back 221
very early age on, she was exposed to both Western and Eastern cultures. As a child,
she was home-schooled by her father and various tutors, learned Arabic, became well
versed in the Koran, briefly attended a Greek school, and read the world classics in all
the languages in which she was proficient. Her personal experience of being caught
between the otherworldly, religious, and tradition-bound world of her grandmother
and the intellectual world of her father is the reason behind her lifelong endeavour to
synthesize the tenets of (mystical) Islam with the principles of an enlightening and
liberating education. There was both horror and comfort in her childhood experiences
of religion, forged by the women in her family circle, among them a half sister who
was overly fond of tales about the torture of sinners in hell. At an early age, Adivar
notes a melancholy trait in the Ottoman-Turkish character expressed in a self-ironic
tone that is a prominent feature of her tale: Marriage, holidays, even starting school,
in short, all the occasions that are cause for great joy and celebration in other lands,
become occasions for mourning for us. Women unfailingly cry, men assume a pose
of fearful reverence. Yes, all that gives others joy, gives us sadness (Mor Salkimli
Ev 70). This remark follows a scene that describes the now forgotten festivity that
accompanied a childs first day of education. Children would be dressed up in the
finest silk wear and ride to school in carriages with pillows under their feet. There they
would kiss the hand of the teacher and be given sweets and money. This celebration
was considered to be as momentous an event as a wedding and as expensive, and, in
adherence to the strong sense of charity in Ottoman life, neighbourhoods would help
the children of the poor participate in this important ritual. This is but one scene in the
tale that restores a long-lost portrait of sociocultural history to memory.
One of the early scenes in zdamars tale Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei also
marks a remembrance, albeit narrated in the structural and thematic conventions
of magical realism, of the same history told by Adivar. During a train trip with her
grandfather, the young narrator listens to his life story as he tells it to a group of
soldiers travelling on the same train. While the grandfather speaks, his beard starts
growing and weaving itself into a carpet of a fantastical text(ure). As the beard
grows, so does the tale of her grandfathers fortunes, embedded in the larger history.
For three days and nights, the beard weaves a carpet of variegated strands that depict
the major events. They proceed from the despotic regime of Sultan Abdlhamid
to Bismarcks parcelling off of the Ottoman lands at the Treaty of Berlin, which
virtually gave permission to start the race to siphon off oil, to the partition of the
Empire after the disastrous defeat of the Ottomans in the first World War, and on
to the invasion of the French, the English, and the Italians with their oil barrels
die franzsischen, englischen, und italienischen Eimer teilten sich das Land
(39). They continue with Atatrks guerilla war, Lenins aid to this war in the name
of antiimperialism, the ultimate victory of the nationalists and the founding of the
Turkish Republic, Atatrks Westernization reforms, and the unabated poverty of
the Anatolian people who helped build the nation. At one point, the grandfather
222 AZADE SEYHAN
falls silent, but the tale tells itself. It turns out that the silence marks a heinous crime
the grandfather committed, the murder of one of his many wives, whom he kills by
tying her hair to the tail of his horse and riding the animal over stony roads until the
cries of the unfortunate women bring her dead parents out of their graves to take her
home with them. This account is later altered by the narrators mother, who tells
her daughter that her mother did not die during this ordeal but later from pneumonia.
The narrators relationship to this grandfather both in Karawanserei and in the
story Grovaterzunge, previously published in her Mutterzunge, is one of great
emotional complexity and, much like that of Adivar, testifies to the predicament
of standing between conflicting cultural values. The grandfather represents the old
regime and the glaring misappropriation of the spirit of Islamic law that allowed for
polygamy and the silencing, torture, and murder of women with seeming impunity.
He is a staunch enemy of secularism, a violent polygamist, hates Atatrk and his
reforms with a passion, and does not learn the new alphabet. Die Grovaterzunge
tells of the narrators (zdamars) experience of studying Arabic in Berlin in an
attempt both to explore the past of her mother tongue and to establish a closer bond
with her grandfather. She worries about the possibility of her grandfather becoming
deaf and not being able to communicate with her through writing. She hires an
Arabic teacher, Ibni Abdullah, falls in love with him, and describes their affair in
words that, ironically, would have provoked her grandfather to kill her, had he been
able to read the story. In the end, both the love affair and the attempt to learn Arabic
come to naught. This anticlimactic finale to the passionate love story with Arabic and
the master of Arabic provides another paradoxical and ironic footnote to zdamars
ambiguous desire to reclaim her Islamic past.
In Karawanserei, the narrator and her mother are consistently forgiving of
the grandfather. The narrators tone in many passages even conveys an implicit
agreement with many of the grandfathers views, whereas her mother, though a
dutiful daughter and wife, is a staunch supporter of the Republican Peoples Party,
which was established by Atatrk and remained a guardian of his reforms and secular
vision. This is the dilemma of zdamar, a Turkish woman with divided loyalties
that cut across generations, families, and political affiliations, a woman who is pre-
cariously poised between the demands of ancestral memory and those of modern
sensibility. She mourns the loss of Arabic but is not motivated enough to learn it;
she questions the replacement of the Arabic script with the Roman alphabet but
never mentions having read any Arabic, Persian, or Ottoman work readily available
in Turkish translation. On the other hand, there are numerous references to Brecht
and Shakespeare, to whose works she was liberally exposed in the Westernized
educational system introduced by Atatrks reforms. In the final analysis, however,
what both Adivar and zdamar mourn is an absence of consolation sustained by
cultural and religious legacy and by the inability of the nation to reconcile differences
between the many constituencies of the former Ottoman Empire.
Adivar and zdamar Write Back 223
In the autobiographical narratives of zdamar and Adivar, two forms of culture-
specific custom stand out as allegories of what de Certeau has called everyday
practices (arts de faire) resistant to amnesia. The first concerns the easy proximity
of life and death, their intimacy, as symbolized by a fascination with cemeteries and
incantations and prayers for the souls of the departed. Communing with the dead
through various rituals is a theme that runs like a thread through these narratives and
appears to be a practice much more common in the circles of women than in those
of men. The child narrator of Karawanserei spends much time in cemeteries with
her grandmother, who is never forgetful of the need of the dead for her prayers. The
young girl is spellbound by the power of the Arabic incantations her grandmother
murmurs, and her nightly prayers for the souls of the dead become longer and longer
as she hears of deaths, past and present, of people she knows and does not know.
Likewise, the young Halide, despite her intellectual fathers strongly rationalistic
upbringing, finds solace in the nightly prayers that her grandmother had taught her.
She never goes to bed without saying them and is convinced they shield her from
the many crises on the home front and in the larger world. She plays in cemeteries
where the cypress trees are believed to be the reincarnations of the dead and is told
that, although these cypresses look like trees during the day, at night they turn into
dead humans wearing green turbans and haunt the neighbourhoods. This intimacy
with the dead, in a way, stands as an allegory for the resistance to forgetting, the
comforting spell of the past, and the desire to preserve it.
The other cultural legacy, lovingly and longingly recalled in the two auto-
biographies, is the fabled Karagz shadow play, a form of improvisational
puppet theatre accompanied by music and sound effects and performed by skilled
puppeteers. These shows were a staple of Ramadan entertainment during the Otto-
man years and represented a performance art that was socially engaged and often
politically combative in intent. Since it could be performed anywhere and did not
have a written text, its political message was resistant to censors and eluded all
manner of political or religious intrusion. The two protagonists of the play were
Karagz (Black Eye) and Hacivat, and their entourage included members of all
ethnic and religious groups living in the Ottoman Empire. The puppeteer had to
be able to imitate different dialects, accents, and speech mannerisms. Hacivat was
a caricature of the intellectual elite whose scholarly idiom went over the heads of
the others. Karagz, a street-smart wisecracker, pushed around but not a pushover,
acted as a foil to Hacivat by turning the latters words into homonyms, thus forcing
them into the semantic field of nonsense to comic effect. This show fascinates both
Adivar and zdamar as a panorama of social groups that made up the Ottoman-
Turkish ethnic fabric. As this form of performance turns on word play, double
entendre, mimicry, refrain, and verbal combat and depicts the trials of the average
Turkish person, it is particularly suited to zdamars stories, which naturally and
effectively reduplicate its structural and thematic properties.
224 AZADE SEYHAN
In the final analysis, the ties that bind Adivar and zdamar over generations and
temporally marked political divides reside not only in their role as agents of cultural
remembrance but also in their capacity as cultural translators. As such, they are pro-
ficient in two or more cultural idioms, and this facility is resistant to appropriative
interpretations of their work. In any translation that aspires to efficacy, the task is
not to replace the original with its translation but to focus on the specific mediations
of the two in clearly delineated spaces of historical tension, relation, and resolution.
Ultimately, the labours of translation show that what constitutes culture emerges
from both sides of the translational equation. At a time when tides of globalization
threaten the resiliency of many lesser-known cultures, the need for responsible acts of
translation is more urgent than ever. A conscientious cultural mediator or translator,
be she or he a writer, critic, teacher, artist, historian, sociologist, or anthropologist,
is equally attentive to each language and tradition, cognizant of their irreducibility
to an appropriative discourse, and respectful of their sovereign spaces. Saids
Orientalism Reconsidered ends with the suggestion of a common endeavour of
which a sustained critique of Orientalism is a part. The overarching tenor of this
essay intones that the counter-knowledge produced in response to the centrality
of European claims to a master discourse cannot be contained by an overarching
theory or methodology. In the sphere of world politics, Orientalism, as a branch of a
coercive system of knowledge, found its analogue in the acquisition and colonization
of the Orient by Europe. Said points to a need for greater crossing of boundaries,
for greater interventionism in cross-disciplinary activity, a concentrated awareness of
the situation political, methodological, social, historical in which intellectual and
cultural work is carried out (215). Without a sharpened sense of the intellectuals role
in defining and changing the dictates of context and time, the critique of Orientalism
would simply be an ephemeral pastime (215). In this sense, contemporary German
scholarship on Turkish or Islamic cultures stands to benefit greatly from a spirit of
genuine collaborative work, where the German critic and the Turkish writer serve as
translators and interlocutors for one another and where translation and interpretation
do not domesticate the others distinctive idiom. Only the vigilance of such translators
can ensure that cultural translation does not operate unilaterally and that no one
agency is allowed to own the language in which truth speaks.
Works Cited
Adivar, Halide Edip. Memoirs of Halide Edip. London: John Murrey, 1926.
. Mor Salkimli Ev (House with Wisteria). Istanbul: zgr, 1996.
Barthes, Roland. Pierre Loti: Aziyad. New Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1980. 10521.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
Adivar and zdamar Write Back 225
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1984.
Cixous, Hlne. The Laugh of the Medusa. Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen. Signs
1 (1976): 87593.
Fischer, Sabine, and Moray McGowan. From Poppkoffer to Pluralism: On the
Development of Migrant Writing in the Federal Republic of Germany. Horrocks
and Kolinsky, eds. 122.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language.
Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Gellner Ernest. Nationalism. London: Phoenix, 1997.
Gktrk, Deniz. Schwarzes Buch in weier Festung: Entschwindende Erzhler. Auf
postmodernen Pfaden in der trkischen Literatur. Scheuer, ed. 3242.
Hikmet, Nazim. Piyer Loti. iirler I. Istanbul: Cem Yayinevi, 1978.
Horrocks, David. In Search of a Lost Past: A Reading of zdamar. Emine Sevgi
zdamars Novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei. Hat zwei Tren. Aus einer kam
ich rein. Aus der anderen ging ich raus. Horrocks and Kolinsky, eds. 2343.
Horrocks, David, and Eva Kolinsky, eds. Turkish culture in German society today.
Providence: Berghahn, 1996.
zdamar, Emine Sevgi. Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn. Cologne: Kiepenheuer &
Witsch, 1998.
. Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei. Hat zwei Tren. Aus einer kam ich rein. Aus
der anderen ging ich raus. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992.
. Grovaterzunge. Mutterzunge: Erzhlungen. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990.
Pamuk, Orhan. Snow. Trans. Maureen Freeley. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
. History and Geography. Said, Reflections on Exile 45373.
. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
. Orientalisam Reconsidered. Said, Reflections on Exile 198215.
. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
Scheuer, Helmut, ed. Literatur fremder Kulturen: Trkei. Spec. issue of Der
Deutschunterricht 45.5 (1993).
Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
Trumpener, Katie. Is Female to Nation as Nature is to Culture. Bozena Nemkov,
Libue Monkov and the Female Folkloric. Other Germanies: Questioning
Identity in Womens Literature and Art. Ed. Karen Jankowsky and Carla Love.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. 99118.