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WORK TITLE: Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy
WORK NOTES: trans by Zeynep Beler
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 7/22/1973
WEBSITE:
CITY: Izmir
STATE:
COUNTRY: Turkey
NATIONALITY: Turkish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ece_Temelkuran * https://www.versobooks.com/authors/729-ece-temelkuran * https://www.ft.com/content/dc576628-69fa-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea034f
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 22, 1973, in Istanbul, Turkey.
EDUCATION:Ankara University’s Faculty of Law, graduate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, author, poet, and political commentator. Milliyet, columnist, 2000-09; Haberturk TV, presenter, 2010-11.
AWARDS:University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, visiting fellow, 2008; Human Rights Association of Turkey’s Ayşe Zarakolu Freedom of Thought Award, 2008. Pen for Peace award and the Turkish journalist of the year.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including the Guardian, New Statesman, Le Monde Diplomatique, and New Left Review.
With six other authors, wrote play, Son Bir Kez.
SIDELIGHTS
Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish journalist, author, columnist, poet, and political commentator. She was a presenter for Haberturk TV before her criticism of government repression and the December, 2011, Uludere massacre cost her that job. Temelkuran has won many awards for her reporting, including the Pen for Peace award and the Turkish journalist of the year. She has published a poetry collection, Book of the Edge: Poems as well as nonfiction books and novels. Her book Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide was translated into English. She has also written for the Guardian, New Statesman, and New Left Review. She holds a degree from Ankara University’s Faculty of Law.
In 2010 Temelkuran’s Book of the Edge: Poems was translated into English by Deniz Perin, winner of the 2007 Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators. Writing in a voice she calls the “explorer” and addressing the reader as “you,” Temelkuran describes an allegorical journey of self-discovery, leaving behind prejudices, and discovering the connection between all living beings. While the translator uses a female pronoun, the Explorer should be considered genderless, a universal human being. With poems featuring animals like a butterfly, swordfish, and sow bug, and revealing cruel city dwellers, she observes human nature, ignorance, knowledge, and spirituality of people throughout her journey. In World Literature Today, Fatma Tarlaci commented: “Ece Temelkuran’s exquisite sense of nature and humanity is rendered through Deniz Perin’s precise translation, which skillfully conveys the tone of the original Turkish.”
Temelkuran published Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy in 2016. In the book, she reveals the contradictions of her country: while it is officially a democracy, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has begun to resemble a dictatorship; opponents to government changes are jailed and dissent is suppressed; and the secular nation is facing pushes for religious conservatism from Erdogan’s Justice Development Party (AKP). Just shy of its hundredth anniversary in 2023, the country is profoundly damaged. Conflicts from the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, and terrorists (ISIS, PKK, al-Qaeda, and others) are straining Turkey’s position between the secular West and Islamic East. She expresses frustration with government overreach, military coups, and the outrageous acts committed by politicians over the years.
Despite these backward trends, Temelkuran believes there is a culture of opposition and dissent, begun with the Gezi Park protests of 2013. Nevertheless, with recent elections that gave the AKP a comfortable win and a crackdown precipitated by the coup attempt to topple the AKP regime, Temelkuran doubts there will be positive change in the near future. Praising Temelkuran for her passionate and poetic prose, a writer in Publishers Weekly said: “Temelkuran holds a mirror to Turkey and a people ‘forced to live with such complicated psyches.’” According to Alev Scott in the Financial Times, “Temelkuran’s book is as tumultuous and haunting as the news that emerges daily, relentlessly, from Turkey. … [Temelkuran] makes no attempt to conceal the emotion of someone writing in the eye of the storm.” A writer in the Economist said “anger at times blunts her analysis and it robs her of political traction. She misreads the reasons for the president’s success, … [and] risks demonising as irrational or unethical all those who support the president.”
In an interview with Simon Leser on the Culture Trip Web site, Temelkuran explained why she wrote the book: “I just wanted to tell my story of Turkey, not only as a critic of the political powers, but through more personal experiences. As you know, writers, intellectuals, and journalists like me were quite invisible for a while, when the perfect marriage between moderate Islam and democracy was the only acceptable Turkish narrative. But now that the ‘Turkish model’ experiment is failing, everybody is turning their heads, seeing what else people have been saying.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Economist, November 12, 2016, “Fault-lines upon Fault-lines: Turkey,” p. 74.
New Internationalist, September, 2016, Jo Lateu, review of Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, p. 38.
Publishers Weekly, August 8, 2016, review of Turkey, p. 54.
Spectator (London, England), September 24, 2016, Elif Shafak, “What Makes Turkey Tick,” p. 40.
World Literature Today, Volume 85, number 1, 2011, Fatma Tarlaci, review of Book of the Edge: Poems, p. 73.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (March 24, 2017), Alev Scott, review of Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy
Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey's best-known authors and political commentators. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Pen for Peace award and the Turkish journalist of the year. She was previously a journalist, before her outspoken criticism of government repression led to her losing her job. Her previous books in English include Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide (2010) and the poetry collection Book of the Edge (2010). She has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and New Left Review.
Ece Temelkuran
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ece Temelkuran (born 22 July 1973, Izmir[1][2]) is a Turkish journalist and author. She was a columnist for Milliyet (2000–2009) and Habertürk (2009 – January 2012), and a presenter on Habertürk TV (2010–2011).[1] She was fired from Habertürk after writing articles critical of the government, especially its handling of the December 2011 Uludere massacre.[3][4][5][6] She was twice named Turkey's "most read political columnist".[citation needed] Her columns have also been published in international media such as The Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique.[1]
A graduate of Ankara University's Faculty of Law, she has published 12 books, including two published in English (Deep Mountain, Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide, Verso 2010, and Book of the Edge, BOA Editions 2010).[1] In 2008 she was a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, during which time she wrote Deep Mountain, Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide.[1][7] Her books include Ne Anlatayım Ben Sana! ("What am I Going to Tell You!", Everest, 2006), on hunger strikes by Turkish political prisoners.[8] She was awarded the Human Rights Association of Turkey's Ayşe Zarakolu Freedom of Thought Award in 2008.[1]
Her first novel, Muz Sesleri ("Banana Sounds"), was published in 2010 and has been translated into Arabic[1] and Polish[9].
Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known journalists and political commentators, writing regularly for the Turkish newspaper Habertürk. She has published widely and won numerous awards for her work, including the Pen for Peace Award and Turkish Journalist of the Year.
Language is a Battlefield: An Interview with Turkish Writer Ece Temelkuran
Simon Leser
Literary Editor
Updated: 4 November 2016
We caught up with Ece Temelkuran to discuss her latest book, Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, as well as Turkey’s increasingly volatile state of affairs. Read our review here.
Poet, novelist, journalist, TV presenter and unwitting dissident, Ece Temelkuran has been a constant figure in Turkish public life. In 2012, she became a victim to the political establishment’s hardening grip on freedom of expression, getting fired from Habertürk for her critical stance on the ruling AK Party — her columns had culminated in a scathing attack, following the massacre of residents of the Kurdish border town of Roboski by the Turkish Armed Forces.
Her latest title translated to English was published this month, and traces the historical origins of the country’s current woes in a form that defies convention — it is part memoir, part political essay, and part creative non-fiction. A timely release, then, considering the troubling events that recently befell the country: A failed coup, attempting to topple the AKP regime led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a brutal repressive aftermath, targeting tens of thousands and further condemning democratic institutions. In London last week to promote her book, Ece Temelkuran met with The Culture Trip to discuss her work, the false dichotomy of pessimism and optimism, as well as the politicization of the Turkish language.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
The three works by Ece Temelkuran currently available in English | Courtesy of Verso Books, Zed Books, and BOA Publishers
This book reads very differently from your last translated work, Deep Mountain (2010), despite also being something of a variation on the theme of political non-fiction. What was its impetus, and how was it written?
I just wanted to tell my story of Turkey, not only as a critic of the political powers, but through more personal experiences. As you know, writers, intellectuals, and journalists like me were quite invisible for a while, when the perfect marriage between moderate Islam and democracy was the only acceptable Turkish narrative. But now that the ‘Turkish model’ experiment is failing, everybody is turning their heads, seeing what else people have been saying. It’s like they’re discovering, for the first time, that actually a lot of criticism had already been piling up.
This book was written about one and half years ago — first published in German — and it is just a start to the story: I try to make it, you know, a ‘Turkey for beginners’. It is a very complex story even for those of us who have been following it professionally, sometimes it’s almost impossible to understand. So this book is an orientation tour, so to speak, of my Turkey, not only a place where journalists and intellectuals are critical of Erdoğan, but where people like us — seculars, progressives — were left invisible. That’s what was devastating and traumatizing: You turned on CNN International and the BBC, all of those huge media outlets, and you saw people talking about your country, completely dismissing the fact that you are a part of it as well. They created an identity for Turkey which didn’t include people like me at all. So you go crazy… 10 years of that!
The 1980 military coup is a recurring theme in the book. Not only does it seem to have set the tone for what is happening now, but it is an event you remember, one that’s affected you personally. Is it comparable to Turkey’s more recent dramatic developments?
No, this time it was so sloppy. I remember seeing these young soldiers not knowing what to do on the bridge — we know what a proper coup looks like! Normally they don’t ask you to leave politely, you cannot stand against them… you get killed. When you have a coup you always expect politicians to be arrested and so on, yet they were all speaking in the media. Many people thought that was strange. It was only after the fact that new footage was released and we saw how well organized the whole thing had been. That night, I was in Istanbul, with the jets flying over us, and the sonic boom… You know I’ve seen a lot of things, I did journalism in places like Lebanon in 2006, but I was very scared. Because to go through that as part of your job is one thing, but to go through it with your pyjamas on is devastating, and very frightening. Things became really serious when parliament was bombed, I could see how it traumatized everybody.
Actually, I’ve a novel that’s going to be published next year in English [Devir] about the 1980 coup and how Turkish politics is a vicious cycle of vendettas. I come from a Leftist political family — I would’ve been a Red Diaper Baby had I been born in the United States. And you know what they say about football? ‘Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, Germans always win.’ Well, a military coup is a simple game: it comes with a 48-hour curfew and, at the end, Leftists are always imprisoned. So, you know, to compare it, it was disorganized, but I still thought with many others in Turkey: ‘Okay, whoever is doing this right now, you’re going to be killed, along with the Leftists.’ This is always what happens.
Since the coup, more than 100,000 civil servants have been purged from the state apparatus, and upwards of 43,000 people have been detained…
Turkey is a very traumatized country right now, you know, and this coup attempt came as a trauma to the political powers especially. So this is the response… and even the President now admitted that it might have gotten out of hand, saying so to state officers. There is a lot of confusion at the moment, and it has its devastating consequences. I find it interesting that everyone is paying attention now, whereas exactly the same kind of repression had happened 10 years ago against seculars. And it was as massive! The only difference today is that this is happening over a very short time… but the government had already built this gigantic prison¹ outside of Istanbul, with a courthouse actually inside, for political prisoners. So this kind of response is not exactly… unexpected.
Years of repression, an attempted coup, and now an unprecedented crackdown… and all this time the main opposition party (the social-democratic CHP) seems very silent. Two of its most prominent members, Gürsel Tekin and Sezgin Tanrıkulu, came to London last January, and they seemed particularly defeated… to say the least.
Yes, this is what they do. I mean, they politely ask the Turkish government to release all those detainees (laughs)… Erdoğan is a brilliant politician, and I mean it, he paralyzed every section of the opposition in just a few years, so I wouldn’t blame the CHP really for not doing enough. The CHP have their own difficult experiences.
For the past 10 years the same thing has been happening to the Turkish intelligentsia and the opposition: They go on TV, say, talking about something, criticizing something — doesn’t matter what — and all of a sudden this AKP guy brings up a completely different subject. For instance: ‘so what are you going to say about your support for the previous coup?’ The answer, of course, is that the conversation isn’t about that. But then the AKP guy goes again: ‘because you don’t want to’. And at some point the presenters turn around, and you have to ask: so are we going to talk about that, change the whole conversation for it? This is extremely ruffling. The opposition has to be on the defensive. This is how they manipulate, and all you’re left with is to ask yourself… what’s happening?
This sounds similar to the political rhetoric many Western countries have started to see — ’post-truth politics’, as it’s called here. In your book you talk a lot about history being forgotten, is that how you think it got started?
I should say that I really think neo-liberalism, at the end of the day, stupefied the whole planet — and this is what you get if you worry about free-market democracy, and only free-market democracy. If the Turkish story goes back to the 1970s², the whole mess for the world started in the 1950s, I think, when they thought it was a brilliant idea to kill all the progressives in the Middle East and Africa. We ended up with all these conservative, right-wing, ignorant masses… You see, progressives weren’t only there to promote socialism, as everybody feared, but they were also the seculars and, as it turns out, the pro-reason faction! Now we’re left with post-truth and post-reason.
Progressives are on the retreat everywhere; intellect is pretty much a failing narrative, and has itself been disappointing. I read this article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago about Voltaire and Rousseau, and it was saying that Voltaire has been defeated by history, whereas Rousseau, who was in a way against elites, is now on the rise. The world is going to be witnessing this anti-elite political discourse much more. And we are seeing the consequences: a gigantic sweeping motion going from south to north, and the European Union countries — Britain as well — experiencing the consequences of the Syrian and refugee crisis; the idea of a uniform world, unipolar world, is not working. But I think it’s kind of too late — I am famous for my pessimism, by the way. I do think that we’re going to be living in a Mad Max kind of world with less, you know, style (laughs).
In his most recent novel (Nutshell), Ian McEwan has a fantastic line about pessimism, actually: ‘Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions’. Would you agree?
I don’t believe in this dichotomy. I refuse it. I come from a turbulent country, where I am something of a public figure, and I’ve had people ask me ‘Is there hope, Ece?’… I hate that question. Because what if there is no hope, are you just going to lie back and do nothing? So no, I don’t believe in the dichotomy of pessimism and optimism, hope and despair. But then, I do understand why McEwan said that. It is always more delicious to talk about things in negative terms; it allows you to be sarcastic as well.
I do think that there is a way, but it won’t be easy. ‘Andalucia Reloaded’³, as I mentioned in the book — I would love to be part of that solution! We are in a serious need of a new International [Socialist International], and all these experiences in North America, Turkey, the Middle East and Europe should be discussed on an international level. We need a new narrative. I was following the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and India, and the discourse created there was actually very useful, and had an influence on the world… just not in the way we expected it. You ended up seeing the likes of Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah, in their twisted forms, using that very discourse.
Sabahattin Ali’s melancholy 1943 novel Madonna in a Fur Coat has been something of a surprising bestseller in Turkey for the past two or three years. Why do you think that is?
Well, it was featured in a scene in a popular TV show, but beyond that… [laughs] No seriously, nobody knows why people are reading this book. I think one of the reasons might be that the Turkish language has been constantly damaged by political powers since 1980. This book is written in very rich Turkish, and it might be the first time this generation’s read that kind of Turkish. And they are really amazed by the language — which was actually daily conversation some 40 years ago. They go on Twitter and put these, to me, very normal sentences and comment like ‘My god, look at this! How beautifully said’. It’s not! They just forgot their language… This is a very serious issue in Turkey, people cannot speak Turkish.
What do you mean cannot speak Turkish? What’s happened to it?
As I say in the book, the aftermath of the 1980 coup saw some Turkish words being banned. Well it didn’t stop there: The intellectual world vanished, and Turkish was transformed into something militarized, Ottomanized, Arabized, and people don’t understand each other for the very simple reason that they can’t speak proper Turkish. I’m seeing it on television: a guy is saying something and it’s obvious he’s meaning something else, and a guy saying something else is meaning completely the same. It is crazy! Words have become political signifiers to an excessive degree. For instance, there are two words for “society,” if you use the Arabic term millet, which is the AKP’s favorite word, you mean those AKP supporters. If you say halk, like I do, you become kind of suspicious… and this is for almost every word. Take, for example, “genuine”: if you use samimi which is the Arabic word, it means you are AKP-inclined; Erdoğan uses that one, for example. But if you say içten, which is the actual Turkish, it means you are part of this elite. This is a language which is partitioned, polarized in its every word.
So what’s next for you? Do you plan to keep on fighting for your language?
A few years ago I made the decision not to write anything political anymore; the fight in Turkey had become extremely ugly. I decided to write stories… two of my novels are going to be translated into English, actually: one out next summer [Women Who Blow on Knots], and the other at the end of next year [Devir].
In the beginning — in the very beginning — I was a literature person, and I’m dying to go back to it, and this new novel I’m working on. I’m really looking forward to Turkey being a more serene, calm place. I have a beautiful garden in Istanbul, right now the olives are ripe… there are many fruit trees. I’m looking forward to going back without being depressed about the country.
¹ Silivri Prison, opened in 2008.
² Large pro-market reforms were instituted in Turkey after the 1980 coup, which had its roots in the previous decade.
³ ‘There’s no other solution but to return the words and the knowledge of being an able mass to the poor, the repressed and the wronged, not only of Turkey but of all other lands. This is why all revolts, both above and below the navel of the Earth, must be “united”. The East and the West must be reconstructed at the point of contact: that is, Andalusia.’
What makes Turkey tick
Elif Shafak
332.9813 (Sept. 24, 2016): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy
by Ece Temelkuran
Zed Books, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 320
I remember an American author once saying she wrote about love and friendship because, after all, these were the fundamental things that people talked about when they gathered around dinner tables. Not quite so in Turkey. Over lengthy breakfasts and suppers, lunches and drinks, we Turks tend to talk about something else: politics. The truth is, we cannot get enough of politics. Even though politics dampens our spirits and darkens our minds, we return to the subject, like moths to their flames.
Politics is a fast-running hare: we chase it as fast as our legs can possibly carry us, never quite managing to get hold of it. Everything happens too fast in Turkey. From one week to the next the mood alters. Yesterday's heroes become tomorrow's betrayers, and then suddenly, vice versa. There is barely any time to stop and contemplate and analyse. Instead we, millions of us, speed forward in confusion, trying to make sense of the next scandal, the next tragedy, the next political tension. In the span of one single summer, this nation has witnessed a series of terror attacks by PKK and Isis, a bloody and horrific coup attempt by a Gulenist cabal within the Turkish army, and sweeping purges in its aftermath that affected thousands of people. As a nation we are traumatised. Certainly depressed. But there is, as always, no time for any healing. Almost every day I hear about another journalist, writer or academic being blacklisted for this or that reason. Fear, paranoia and conspiracy theories abound. Many citizens try to plough their way forward, as though afraid that if they look back they will all turn into pillars of salt. Remembrance is cursed in this land. No wonder this is a society of collective amnesia. One would go mad if one kept it all stored in recent memory. And yet because Turkey refuses to come to grips with the mistakes of the past, it is bound to make the same mistakes over and again.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Ece Temelkuran's Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy should be read against this turbulent background. As one of Turkey's leading journalists and activists, Temelkuran offers a vivid portrait of a nation in constant turmoil. The book is deftly divided into three parts: yesterday, today and tomorrow. Referring to the mad pace of daily life in Turkey, she says, 'The speed with which funerals are carried out in Turkey might surprise a westerner but really it shouldn't.' Even grief is a waste of time in a land where so much happens so fast.
The book analyses the rise to power of the AKP government and the dramatic changes that it went through over the years. Identity lies at the core of the most bitter political debates and cultural clashes. 'From the start, the party declared that we were the mighty grandchildren of the Ottoman and would once again assume our former grandiose, intimidating identity.'
A substantial section of the book analyses the lack of urban planning, speedy gentrification and the construction of shopping malls in major cities. Temelkuran points out that the AKP government is particularly fond of shopping malls. 'They don't love them merely as glittering indicators of a prosperous economy: they think opening new shopping malls is a magic solution for the most serious political and social problems of the country.'
One of the strongest points of emphasis in the book is Temelkuran's focus on how 'women are being used as cannon fodder on the front line of social life'. Equally powerful is her analysis of the loss of freedoms across the Turkish media, both visual and in print. Temelkuran touchingly mentions how her 74-year-old father feels frustrated because he needs to get the hang of technology, especially social media, in order to be able to follow the news in Turkey. As many observers have pointed out, over the years, while the Turkish media has visibly and increasingly lost its diversity, social media has become more and more politicised.
For many of my friends in England, for instance, social media is mostly a tool for socialising--posting messages and images about places to visit, movies to watch, books to read, restaurants to discover etc. For the Turks it is rather different. Cyberspace is a relatively more egalitarian and diversified political space than any public space. It is a platform where you can vent your anger, obtain information (and, unfortunately, misinformation) and ultimately, feel that you are not as lonely as you thought you were. But there is also a major downside: the Turkish-speaking social media is a platform where hate speech is given free rein. Anyone who dares to speak differently is singled out immediately and attacked by trolls. Because of a comment they have made, artists, writers, poets and academics can be easily lynched or even sued. Women writers and journalists are especially subject to misogynistic abuse.
Temelkuran underlines how one of the first things to change radically in Turkey over the years was daily life itself. From sculpture to literature, from satire to theatre, the conservative ideology of the times tried to shape every inch of daily life. Until not that long ago, anyone who went to school in Turkey would be familiar with the national oath. We would line up in school gardens and shout in unison: 'I am a Turk, I am honest, I am hardworking ...' The oath would end up by repeating the line: 'May my existence be dedicated to the Turkish existence.' This is a society of altruistic dedications--sometimes to fatherlands, sometimes to fathers. Temelkuran says Erdogan singlehandedly 'amassed all political power for himself' and she calls him 'Turkey's most effective leader since Ataturk'.
Temelkuran finishes her book by raising the vital question of 'What is homeland?' Is it a place, a memory, a longing? 'A deep place of silence hollows out inside you, dark and locked up.' Written as though 'talking to a good friend who is far away', packed with both knowledge and emotions, The Insane and the Melancholy will help you to understand Turkey better. Here is a book that should definitely be on the reading list of everyone who is sincerely interested in this troubled country and its beautiful, often confused, always lonely people.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shafak, Elif. "What makes Turkey tick." Spectator, 24 Sept. 2016, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464883675&it=r&asid=538c51dc0efb688fc6891e543213f303. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464883675
Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy
Jo Lateu
.495 (Sept. 2016): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy
by Ece Temelkuran, translated by Zeynep Beler (Zed Books, ISBN 9781783608898)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Depending on where you live, Turkey is portrayed as a model for the Middle East (which should become more Western in its habits and outlook), a threat to that great Fortress Europe, or a piggy-in-the-middle that doesn't know what it wants or where it belongs. But what does Turkey mean to those who actually live there? In Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, Ece Temelkuran, a high-profile dissident writer who has had her fair share of run-ins with the government and its allies, offers us a no-holds-barred insight into the psyche of a people 'either too jaded or too angry to speak'.
With sardonic wit, she considers Turkey's past and present. She notes that the country is divided, despite claims to unity--a founding premise of Ataturk's republic. She derides the government, whose antics would be laughable if they weren't so serious. One example she cites is an initiative to provide milk to schoolchildren. On the first day, 1,193 children were hospitalized as a result of poisoning; a government spokesperson said the children 'had overdosed'.
And what of the future? Despite the 2013 Gezi park protests and Kurdish representation in parliament for the first time, Temelkuran finds it hard to be positive. As underlined by the recent failed coup, and the increasingly authoritarian response to it, Turkey is a nation in turmoil.
**** JL
zedbooks.co.uk
STAR RATING
***** EXCELLENT **** VERY GOOD *** GOOD ** FAIR * POOR
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lateu, Jo. "Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy." New Internationalist, Sept. 2016, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900620&it=r&asid=dd5f26f7eeaeec62135166d25002938d. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900620
Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p54.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy
Ece Temelkuran, trans, from the Turkish by Zeynep Beler. Zed, $19.95 trade paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-78360-889-8
Temelkuran, a celebrated Turkish journalist who lost her job for criticizing the Erdogan regime, profiles her tumultuous homeland, elucidating the distinct problems it faces as a nation straddling continents and struggling to understand, never mind resolve, its internal contradictions. She describes a country where the conservative AKP (Justice and Development Party) has "gained control of the implementation of law, thus completely demolishing all stabilizing mechanisms, political or judicial." Control over the most intimate aspects of personal identity has long been a hallmark of Turkish politics, and through language reforms Turkish "has been maimed to make sure the Kurdish could not speak Kurdish, the left could not speak of ideology, women could not fight for their rights, workers could not resist, and much more." Many of the trends and events Temelkuran recounts will be completely unfamiliar to much of her audience, a tension she addresses: "I chose to write this book as though I were talking to neither a foreigner nor a fellow citizen but to a good friend who is far away." Through passionate and poetic prose, Temelkuran holds a mirror to Turkey and a people "forced to live with such complicated psyches." (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900399&it=r&asid=a66fba68d856511e52a7aaae7157230e. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900399
Fault-lines upon fault-lines; Turkey
421.9015 (Nov. 12, 2016): p74(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Erdogan, keeping up with the Kemalists
Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey. By Kaya Genc. I.B. Tauris; 230 pages. To be published in America in December.
Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. By Ece Temelkuran. Translated by Zeynep Beler. Zed Books.
ISTANBUL is an achingly beautiful city, bridging past and future, loss and longing. The Turkish word most closely associated with it is huzun, a melancholic and paralysing nostalgia. But more than nostalgia is needed to render the way both city and country have begun to come apart in recent years as the social fabric holding them together has frayed.
In strikingly different ways, two books, one by Kaya Genc, a novelist and essayist, and the other by Ece Temelkuran, a journalist, rise to this challenge and chronicle the changes that have convulsed Turkey since the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came to power.
Turkey has always been divided, frequently violently so. But under Mr Erdogan, the slide into angry polarisation has been especially traumatic. The president has set about rewriting the country's foundation myths. For nearly a century, the national story has been that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in the wake of the first world war and the demise of the Ottoman empire, dragged a backwards Turkey towards Western-facing nationalism and secularism. Mr Erdogan begs to differ. He tells his countrymen that Turkey has always been a pious and conservative country, and that he intends to drag it back from the excesses of Kemalism.
It is difficult to keep pace with Turkey these days. Both "Under the Shadow" and "Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy" were written after the Gezi Park protests in 2013, when opposition to Mr Erdogan exploded onto the streets of Istanbul and other cities. The books were finished before the failed coup in July, although published afterwards. And it is striking that despite their otherwise astute analyses of Turkey's divisions, both writers only hint at the fissure between religious conservatives that would play a role in the coup and its aftermath. Mr Erdogan blames Fethullah Gulen, a cleric based in America, for the coup, which Mr Erdogan has since used as an excuse for a wide-ranging crackdown. No one (the authors here are no exception) saw this coming.
Ms Temelkuran, at times playful, but more often polemical, surveys the wasteland of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when Turkey suffered three military coups, and she excoriates the current administration for dragging the country back to the brink of collapse. This is personal for her, having been fired as a journalist for her criticisms of the government. But anger at times blunts her analysis and it robs her of political traction. She misreads the reasons for the president's success, suggesting that he had won on grandiose promises to mend Turkey's view of its past, rather than on prosaic promises of stability and growth. And she hints obliquely at conspiracies ("the economy was flourishing with money suddenly pouring into the country from some obscure source"). She risks demonising as irrational or unethical all those who support the president. This is grist to Mr Erdogan's cynical mill. He makes a lot of his electoral mileage championing ordinary people against urban elites.
Whereas Ms Temelkuran seethes on the front line of Turkey's culture war, Mr Genc is a cartographer of the battlefield. "Under the Shadow" is built around a series of interviews with youthful students, activists, businesspeople and artists, "divided in politics but united in their passion". Mr Genc is refreshingly balanced; he gives as much attention to a man who came of political age listening to Mr Erdogan vow to vanquish the Gezi protests as he does to another who had helped spark the protests. If the book has a shortcoming it is that the author is too generous towards his subjects, allowing his own voice too little room. Mr Genc is a subtle guide to the wrenching changes Turkey is undergoing, and his personal testimony is rich in historical and cultural detail. More of his insights would have been welcome; he has announced himself here as a voice to be listened to as Turkey struggles to come to terms with itself.
Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey.
By Kaya Genc.
Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy.
By Ece Temelkuran. Translated by Zeynep Beler.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fault-lines upon fault-lines; Turkey." The Economist, 12 Nov. 2016, p. 74(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469668705&it=r&asid=d0bff942243a11d1bdc5cef3dca34574. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469668705
Ece Temelkuran. Book of the Edge
Fatma Tarlaci
85.1 (January-February 2011): p73.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Ece Temelkuran. Book of the Edge. Deniz Perin, tr. Rochester, New York. BOA. 2010. 127 pages. $16. ISBN 978-1-934414-36-1
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A journalist and writer, Ece Temelkuran has questioned highly controversial issues such as political prisoners, Armenian-Turkish relations, and Kurdish problems in her books and columns. Yet Temelkuran's writing represents not only issues related to Turkey but also the human-rights abuses she observes around the world, which she reflects on through her poetry.
Book of the Edge offers a quest toward exploring human values, taking its reader--called "the explorer"--into a "compulsory journey" of self-discovery leaving behind the "defined self," her sense of "Me," and learned prejudices. Translator Deniz Perin notes that for Temelkuran the explorer is genderless, but in Turkish the third-person pronoun has no gender. Perin chooses the female third-person pronoun in English for the explorer. However, the explorer should be considered as a universal, genderless human being. The explorer needs this journey to differentiate her "self" from "the crowd." The narrator instructs the explorer about what to leave behind and take along with her before the journey. Addressing the reader as "you," the persona captivates the reader and enables him to identify with the explorer. As "all that is defined shall remain in this world of definitions," with a fresh, unconditioned perspective and undefined self, the explorer and the reader begin the journey. The persona interchanges with the explorer throughout the book, and she becomes the explorer in the end. The book consists of six sections beginning at "the door," going to "the meadow," proceeding in "the air" and "the sea," before returning to "the city," and ending at "home" where the explorer needs to linger to reflect upon the knowledge gained throughout her journey.
The poems lead the reader to question the ignorance, knowledge, cruelty, and spirituality of human beings through the explorer's journey. Ece Temelkuran's exquisite sense of nature and humanity is rendered through Deniz Perin's precise translation, which skillfully conveys the tone of the original Turkish and makes the book a meaningful gift to readers of the English-speaking world.
Fatma Tarlaci
University of Texas, Austin
Tarlaci, Fatma
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tarlaci, Fatma. "Ece Temelkuran. Book of the Edge." World Literature Today, vol. 85, no. 1, 2011, p. 73+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA246342959&it=r&asid=d7b2a26dd73561c06d48b892101d244a. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A246342959
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Turkey by Ece Temelkuran review — ‘both an elegy and an exposé’
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August 26, 2016
by: Alev Scott
Ece Temelkuran’s book is as tumultuous and haunting as the news that emerges daily, relentlessly, from Turkey. I write this as images circulate of the 51 wedding guests killed in a suicide bombing in the south-eastern city of Gaziantep, just five weeks after an attempted military coup claimed hundreds of lives and prompted a sweeping purge of academics, diplomats and state employees. Temelkuran could not have predicted these events, but she has nonetheless written a primer for today’s chaos, a masterclass in expecting the unexpected. A coup attempt in 2016 seems less surprising when viewed against the four coups of the last six decades, all of which Temelkuran weaves into her mosaic of political history.
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Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy lays bare not only the recent years of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule but the very foundations of the republic itself, a painfully close examination of the political and cultural shifts of a profoundly damaged country just shy of its centenary. Its author — an award-winning journalist and novelist both celebrated and reviled by her fellow Turks — makes no attempt to conceal the emotion of someone writing in the eye of the storm.
If her style seems hyperbolic or overly emotional to the western reader, that is because Turkey itself is pure hyperbole. Its history is also so densely packed that at several points Temelkuran resorts to bullet points to list the outrages committed by politicians at various stages during the republic. She regularly employs sarcasm when discussing the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), remarking that its obsessive focus on 2023, the centenary of the founding of the republic, means “they plan to stick around for at least another decade”. On the next page, she explores the “deep sense of frustration” inherent in a commonly used Turkish expression, moving seamlessly between wry polemic and astute linguistic analysis.
This book is both an elegy and an exposé of Temelkuran’s homeland. It is also, inevitably, partisan. She often refers to “them” when discussing supporters of the government and “we” to refer to its critics. In a country split 50/50 at the last election in its support for the ruling party, this is understandable (I am aware of doing it myself). Towards the end of the book, Temelkuran, who was fired by her editor at the newspaper Milliyet in 2012 for writing a column scathingly critical of the government, describes the psychological effect of a particularly bad period of abuse on Twitter, on which she has 2m followers: “The ridicule was so awful that I had started sympathising with the death and rape threats I was receiving at the time”.
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Many of Temelkuran’s observations have an almost spooky prescience; commenting on the “post-modern” coup of February 28 1997, during which a secularist military pressured an Islamist prime minister to resign, Temelkuran writes: “No one knew in those days that the pressure this course of events put on the political Islamists would feed into resentment, leading to a policy of never-ending vendetta years later.” This is how living in Turkey often feels: a grand, Middle Eastern version of The Godfather, in which vendettas are carried out in a relentlessly bloody power-cycle; Temelkuran provides us with details of the script and casting.
One of the treats of this book is the cameo appearances of some of Temelkuran’s insightful colleagues, including Ozan Tuzun, who has “figured out the algorithm that enables [Erdogan] to feign innocence despite all his crimes, and to convince the masses of his unparalleled victimhood despite all his power”. This provides some insight to answer the bemused west’s perennial question: “Why is Erdogan so popular?” With the exactitude of a scientist, Tuzun outlines his findings: “The algorithm is made up of several steps and, when given enough time, he will use them all (1 through 8), whereas if pressed for time, he will use only a few (in general, 1, 3, and 6).” This sounds like political satire but it is not; I ran through a couple of Erdogan’s recent speeches in my mind as I read through the steps and, sure enough, they match up.
Seeing the pattern in Erdogan’s speeches, rather than focusing on day-to-day scandal, is only one example of how it pays to look at the bigger picture in Turkey. Temelkuran ends her book just after the June 7 election last year, a moment of hope before a summer of violence erupted between the Kurdish PKK and the Turkish army, followed by the November 1 election when the vote swung back to a comfortable win for the AKP. Top that off with the recent crackdown precipitated by the coup attempt, and it is unsurprising that even the most optimistic of the “other” 50 per cent have given up hope of any positive change in the foreseeable future.
But, after all, what is “foreseeable”? Turkey is ever-changing, ever-surprising, as Temelkuran reminds us. “What will become of this country of ours?” — this common Turkish phrase is her parting note, part-question, part-statement of melancholy. It is all we can ask as we watch Turkey’s story unfold.
Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, by Ece Temelkuran, translated by Zeynep Beler, Zed Books, RRP£12.99/$19.95, 320 pages
Alev Scott is author of ‘Turkish Awakening: Behind the Scenes of Modern Turkey’ (Faber)