‘In 1966 I came to live in Istanbul. It felt like a sharp pain that split up my childhood. Unfulfilled dreams tore apart the people that I grew up with. My father quickly became working class, then gradually fell into unemployment. Three brothers worked on construction sites. I finished high school, slipping away like a trembling shadow from seven brothers and sisters. I paid the price of moving away from fear and loneliness to go to schooclass="underline" subjected to a thousand denials and pressures, I was incredibly shaken. I fought hard to keep up with the city and was badly bruised. During my struggles I fell apart from those that I grew up with. But I resisted in order not to lose my own values, my language, and the constant and passionate love that those people bore me. This book is my reward from the people I grew up with for my resistance…’
Dear Cheeky Death was based on Tekin’s childhood and adolescent experiences of the village and of the outskirts of the metropolis, and it was unlike anything that had previously been written in the genre of rural or urban fiction. The ‘Village Novel’ had been established as a major genre in Turkish fiction since the 1950s in the predominant mode of social/ist realism, focusing on the problems and dynamics of rural society from the ‘enlightened’ point of view of the educated writer of peasant origin with a mission. The rural fiction of Yaşar Kemal transcended this genre in its use of myth and in epic scope and style. The urban novel, on the other hand, bore the stamp of the ‘intellectual’ left-wing author, chiefly concerned with the tensions brought about by social change, political conflict, and by a republican ideology based on westernization. The novel itself was an adopted genre, introduced from Western literature in the second half of the 19th century when the Ottoman Empire came under political and economic pressures, and social and cultural influences from Europe. It was used initially as a vehicle for a critical attitude towards family and society, differences between Eastern and Western values and ways of life, and represented a reaction to the fantasy and escapism of the Eastern romance. An acute sense of realism, however, did not emerge till the early years of the new, proud but poverty stricken republic founded (1923) on the remains of the Empire that fell at the end of the first World War. By the 1950s, social realism had become the formative mode determining the conventions of the modern Turkish novel, regardless of the urban/rural distinction. Society was the sacred area of concern in the novel while the inner world of the individual found its best expression in the short story. Since the 1960s, however, both the novel and the short story have gained a rich diversity in subject matter, scope and style while still holding on to the realistic tradition. This is largely due to the proliferation in fiction by women who have proved to be less fearful of exploring new ground. While some boldly imaginative women writers in the 1960s came under critical pressure, either stopped writing for a long time or changed their course and fell more in line with mainstream fiction, others more confident in the 1970s went their own way. Barriers against introspection, fantasy and sexuality were broken down.
Even in this broader context, however, Latife Tekin stood as a challenge to the mainstream fiction of the 1980s by rejecting ‘realism’ in favour of a highly metaphorical perception of reality in which fantasy is an essential element. In conjunction with fresh narrative forms, Tekin developed a figurative style which is vigorous and innovative. She has often expressed the desire to forge ‘a language of the deprived’, one that gives expression not only to their way of life but also to their outlook on life, perception of reality, sense of humour and dreams. In this respect Berji Kristin, her second book (1984), can be considered a breakthrough in modern Turkish fiction.
In Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, the squatter settlements built on rubbish tips may appear bizarre or unreal to some readers, but in fact refer to a ‘real’ phenomenon in the Istanbul of the 1960s. In the experience of millions who, since the 1960s, have been flowing into the big cities to make a living, squatterland was an extension of the village. But as seen in Berji Kristin life there, unlike in the village, had different dynamics and was subject to sharply dramatic as well as gradual changes. Makeshift dwellings could be set up overnight (‘gecekondu’, the Turkish word for squatter hut, means ‘set up/perched overnight’) but razed to the ground the next day. Even in the 1990s it is not uncommon to have police raids on squatter huts built on land unlawfully possessed. Such news, accompanied by photographs conveying the drama especially of women and children torn away from their homes, still make the headlines. While struggles continue, especially in pockets or frontiers, the primitive dwellings of thirty years ago have been transformed into two or three storey buildings, roads have been built, public transport has been provided by local authorities. But ‘Rubbish Road’ has remained the name of a bus stop on the main road from the Bosphorus to the city, the mosque with the tin minaret was still standing in 1988, and those who witnessed the survival of the baby whose cradle landed on a treetop, have themselves survived to pass on their ‘tales’ to their sons and daughters. Tekin’s narrative, akin to the oral tradition of the ‘masal’ (fairy/folk tale) is based on the testimony of the older generation of squatters who witnessed the genesis of a subculture of enormous social significance despite its marginal situation. Assuming the position of a detached but devoted narrator rather than a patronizing intellectual onlooker, Tekin has reconstructed the dreams and realities of squatterland in specific detail and with a uniquely metaphoric use of the language, without overlooking the humorous attitudes, ironic perception and emotional vitality of the community amid the filth and poverty of its living conditions. The squatter settlement, which had so far existed in Turkish fiction as the periphery whose inhabitants were taken into account in terms of the social class they represented, became in Berji Kristin a world of its own.
This is essentially a man’s world, but women appear in it as strangely powerful figures, despite their subordination. Their world in Tekin’s fiction maintains a distinctive interaction with its male counterpart and womanhood is conceived as a secret society resisting and, at times, subverting oppressive forces. However, like the majority of Turkish women writers, Tekin makes no claim to feminism in the Western sense, which is regarded as a separating and restricting factor for a fiction writer. What lies behind this stance are the specific conditions created by a secularist ideology of a republican state (which tends to shun any form of separation or segregation), the desire for total social involvement, and the need to address a wide readership. It is interesting, for instance, that in Berji Kristin the rise and decline of the community on the garbage hills is symbolized by the female attributions in the title: ‘Berji’ for innocence, and ‘Kristin’ for prostitution.
The rich variations in Latife Tekin’s language, which give expression to a powerfully creative inner voice, will inevitably be recognized as having sparked off the imagination of a whole new generation of writers, regardless of gender. Following the trends in the West, the impressive works of Orhan Pamuk, for instance, appear as a subtle challenge to the conventional novel from within the mainstream, but the making of the modern Turkish novel has also to account for the consistently unpredictable originality of such writers as Latife Tekin.
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One winter night, on a hill where the huge refuse bins came daily and dumped the city’s waste, eight shelters were set up by lantern-light near the garbage heaps. In the morning the first snow of the year fell, and the earliest scavengers saw these eight huts pieced together from materials bought on credit — sheets of pitchpaper, wood from building sites, and breezeblocks brought from the brickyards by horse and cart. Not even stopping to drop the sacks and baskets from their backs, they all ran to the huts and began a lively exchange with the squatters who were keeping watch. A harsh and powerful wind kept cutting short their words and at one point almost swept the huts away. The scavengers pointed out that the ramshackle walls and makeshift roofs would never stand up to the wind, so the squatters decided to rope down the roofs and nail supports to the walls.