Abstract
On the 50th anniversary of Turkish writer Halide Edip Adivar’s death, novelist
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Born in 1884, Halide Edip Adıvar became a renowned feminist leader and a key figure in Turkish nationalism in the early 1920s. She was fiercely intellectual, incredibly well-read and worked tirelessly for girls to gain equal education opportunities. Yet Genç believes she has been maligned by male historians, who painted her as a traitor. In 1926, after she fell out with the leaders of the new republican regime about the direction the revolution should take, she was accused of treason and fled to Europe. Adıvar believed too much power had been laid in the hands of too few men. She wanted more political representation for women and a more horizontal and democratic power structure,” says Genç.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Adıvar’s death and, although some universities marked the occassion with honorary events, the wider public paid no heed. “This is, unfortunately, the fate of authors in Turkey,” says Genç. “People love to ignore figures who don’t have radical political beliefs. Adıvar was a democrat and wanted moderation in the political sphere. This was enough to get her into trouble during her lifetime.”
Genç, who studied for a literature doctorate at Istanbul University, says he was inspired to write the story for Index after seeing Adıvar’s old chair in the head of department’s office two years ago. In his story, Adıvar directs her attentions towards a middle-aged female scholar, who feels under pressure from a different sort of repression as she struggle to contain her own secrets and beliefs. “One has to speak out,” Adıvar warns her. “When you start speaking out, it turns into a kind of habit.” Such advice seems all the more pertinent after the Turkish goverment’s recent crackdown on social networks, including Twitter and YouTube.
Genç says he first started to read about Adıvar’s controversial past when he was a first year at college and his own tutors were more forthright when discussing her. “In Turkey, university administrations are generally suspicious of English literature departments. They worry that those departments may introduce dangerous ideas to their pupils. This was one of the reasons I liked being there. We had sparky tutors and their discussions on feminism made a lasting impression on me.”
ABOVE: Students outside Istanbul University’s main entrance on Beyazit Square
Credit: Travelstock 44/Alamy
He hopes the story might spark some interest in feminist Turkish writers and highly recommends Adıvar’s Memoirs and her novel The Clown and His Daughter, about a young girl’s relationship with her father who plays the female role in the oyunu (the orta), traditional Turkish theatre.
To Tell, Or Not To Tell
The long corridor of the department of Western literatures was dimmed. They walked silently, as if not wanting to raise the dead. They passed pictures of classic authors, hung on the long, white wall. She knew them by heart: Faulkner, Nabokov, London, Hemingway and Woolf. Men accompanied by a woman, placed there as if to prevent female scholars from complaining of sexism. He took a bronze key and placed it into the lock of the second door from the left. The door opened with a wooden sound.
“But this is her room,” she whispered. “We can’t do it here.”
He closed the door, double-locked it, held her waist, lifted and placed her body on the metal desk.
Although it was darker here, her inner eye reminded her what was inside. When she pushed aside a pile of papers, she instinctively knew they were article abstracts handed in by graduate students earlier in the day. Her body landed on a book, which she identified as the Oxford Shakespeare, and she threw it of the way, on to the wooden chair adjacent to the desk.
His fingers ran across her body. She imagined herself from outside: a woman in her 40s, sitting half-naked on her boss’s desk.
“Someone may come inside,” she whispered, although she knew it was impossible.
“Inside,” she repeated. “Someone can come.”
She remembered the first time she had laid eyes on him. It couldn’t have been more than a month ago when he had arrogantly entered the assistants’ room, asking if they had “proper coffee”. She closed her eyes and allowed him to do whatever he liked and when something entered the room a minute later, her eyes were half-open.
She asked them to forget the things they learned in high school, because most of that was inaccurate
She saw a shadow move on the wall. It belonged to neither of them and had the distinct outline of a woman who was coming towards them like some strange butterfly.
“Shakespeare,” the ghost whispered. “How thoughtful of you to have placed Shakespeare’s works on my old wooden chair. Thank you! The Bard had been my favourite author since girls’ school. He was a very passionate fellow, you know, and I am sure he would be very happy to watch you at this late hour, making love in a room wrongly rumoured to have once belonged to me...”
She looked at this presence, which had an outline but not a proper body, and it sent shivers down her spine.
“This is impossible,” he said. His sentence had stood up with him as he raised his body to her shoulder level. “I know you. You are Halide Edip Adıvar. You died 50 years ago... You are dead!”
The ghost came closer and it was as if it had the power to change any historical fact she desired. Its self-assurance scared her. She wished she were in bed with her husband, and imagined her daughter lying safely in her room. Instead she was in Halide Edip Adıvar’s room, talking to her ghost – without wearing any underwear.
She looked at Halide’s ghost. She had black eyelashes, a strong nose, and the lips of an angry woman. Her hair was cut short.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Is it because you are mad at us?”
“Maybe I am mad at you. Maybe I hate you. Maybe I am here to teach you a lesson.”
He made it to the door and turned on the lights. As the fluorescent lamps lit, one by one, she listened to their sounds and, when she looked at the room again, she realised that Halide was gone.
***
Who was Halide? She was the founder of their department, perhaps the biggest feminist icon in Turkey’s early republican history, and a political exile whose troubled life she had once written about in a much-discussed article. Earlier in the day, during an orientation meeting with freshman students in the large faculty hall, her name had come up and it was only after seeing her ghost that she realised the connection.
It had been a very short meeting. Some pupils had brought coffee to class; a stylishly dressed girl had played with her iPad Mini throughout. At least two boys had dozed in the solitude of the back seats.
“A very good morning and semester to you,” she had told them.
“As this is your first class at university, perhaps I should remind you that you are no longer in high school. University is another country. We do things differently here.”
She had asked them to forget all the things they had learned in high school because, unfortunately, most of that was inaccurate, thanks to the ideological nature of Turkish historiography. She had scribbled a few words on the board – Halide’s name among them – and had told them about the department head and the professors and the assistants and office hours and other practical details. But it had been Halide’s name that had attracted the pupils’ interest most. The skinny girl with the tablet computer had raised her hand.
“Can you tell us about Halide Edip Adıvar and the history of the department?”
“Well, you have answered your own question. Halide Edip Adıvar’s life is the very history of our department.”
“In other words, ours is a traitorous department,” a voice had said from the crowd.
“Who said that?”
“I did,” an attractive young man had said. “I remember learning in high school that Halide Edip Adıvar was a traitor and sold the country to Americans.”
“And did they tell you how much she was paid?”
“I heard she was against the republic and that was why she was exiled to London,” another voice from the back said. “She was too scared to return to Istanbul because she was a renegade.”
ABOVE: Halide Edip Adıvar, on a Turkish stamp, circa 1966
Credit: rook76/Deposit Photos
“This is your high-school education speaking,” she had managed to say, taken aback by the comments. But she had dropped the matter because it had been a tiring day, and she had been too busy thinking about him and about his remark about “meeting up” after the final class. So she left the Halide discussion to a later date. “If you took note of office hours and the address of our Facebook page, then that will be enough for the day,” she had said.
***
The morning after Halide had appeared in the head of department’s room, they stood next to the water cooler to prepare coffee. It had been their morning ritual for the past three weeks. When they stood there they could flirt as much and unashamedly as they liked. He asked her how she had slept the previous night.
“Not very well, as you can imagine. It was the sleep someone would have after seeing a ghost.”
“I think I know the feeling.”
“We should tell the head of department what happened.”
“Is that what you think? We should tell her that, while her new assistant was making out with an assistant professor on her desk, the ghost of Halide Edip Adıvar had come inside and caught them in the act? That would give her a perfect reason to fire both of us, would it not?”
This time she looked older, with a monocle on her face and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. It was scarier to meet her alone
“But she has a right to know,” she said, putting sugar in her cup. “What if she has a similar experience? That could give her a heart attack and we would regret it for the rest of our lives.”
“I don’t think I would care much for her health if she fires me,” he said. Then he came near her and touched her arm and pressed his body on to hers. She said nothing but wanted to resist him and thought keeping silent would be a means of doing that, but he did not back off.
* * *
She took the coffee with her to class where she came across some of the faces she had seen the previous day. Not all of them were here, but those who talked about Halide were.
“Yesterday,” she began, “I mentioned some practical details about our department.”
“Namely that it was founded by a traitor,” the attractive boy said automatically.
“Haha!” The skinny girl laughed.
“I have to say that is also how I remember yesterday’s session,” a sleepy face said.
“Then you remember it inaccurately.”
The class came to an end and all the pupils, with the exception of the attractive boy, walked outside. She watched him as he moved slowly, as if preparing to make an announcement. He carefully placed his notebook into his beige Eastpak before walking towards the podium.
“Can you give me your email address?” he said. “I want to send along some stuff about Halide Edip Adıvar, which I believe will show you her real character.”
“Nothing can change my mind about her. Why are you so obsessed with her anyway? You are here to study English literature. Why talk about a dead Turkish novelist all the time?”
“She is a traitor and she should be known as one.”
When he uttered the word “traitor”, a cold breeze touched her on the neck.
She wrote down her email address on a piece of paper and wondered whether Halide was merely an excuse for him to hit on her. She feared it was and thought he had the potential to be even ruder than the young assistant.
***
Later that evening, when the department was almost empty, he sat next to her and asked whether she had talked to anyone about last night.
She could see it in his eyes. He was more concerned about hiding what had happened between them than in telling people about Halide’s ghost. She said she had not told the head of department. He moved his hand, very irritatingly, on to her bra. She told him to take it away and he complied.
She hated him and hated herself for having sex with him, although from a technical standpoint they had only attempted to, thanks to Halide’s interruption. After she had made clear that she didn’t want to see him that evening, he said he would go to Taksim to meet some friends. She was only happy to get rid of him. After he left she went into the corridor and walked to the bathroom where she looked at the mirror and, to her utter surprise, saw the reflection of the shadow again.
This time she looked older, with a monocle on her face and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. It was scarier to meet her alone.
“You have this extraordinary talent of concealing essential things in your life,” Halide said in a tired voice.
“You manage to hide your affair with that young assistant and nobody seems to realise that you are flirting with your students, which could get you into serious trouble if someone found out. But the thing that irritates me the most is your intellectual cowardice. You are an academic, are you not? Why aren’t you telling your pupils about me? You act like a man. They say ‘traitor’ and you say nothing. Would you say nothing if one of them called a female author a whore?”
She couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“You had published an article about me a decade ago. I had read it with great pleasure. But then you got into trouble for it. That was to be expected in a society dominated by male values... You clarified some basic mistakes. You made clear the room where you made love to the young assistant yesterday was not mine. I used to sit on that wooden chair all right, but in 1950s, the department building was in a distant neighbourhood, where I had the wonderful view of the Bosphorus. And you mentioned why I had to go to exile. You were brave enough to tell the truth. But you were not as brave when it came to defending your essay in person. Can you tell me why?”
“I didn’t want to frighten my colleagues.”
“Frighten them? According to your line of thought, telling the truth, rather than keeping it as a secret, would frighten your colleagues.”
“I surely have the freedom to reveal things when I choose.”
“You have the freedom to tell the truth, darling, and you also have the freedom to hide it. You chose the latter.”
Before she could respond, the head of the Germanic department entered the bathroom and the ghost disappeared, leaving her alone with her face on the mirror.
***
Before going to sleep that evening she visited her study and read the articles her student had sent to her a few hours earlier. They were written in a particularly nasty tone, in that condescending macho-puritan register. The implication was that Halide was a woman with questionable morals and an unnatural thirst for power. Looking at the computer monitor she was reminded of her early years as an assistant and about how she was treated by her male colleagues and she remembered, too, the tone of their voices. In the faculty corridors and assistants’ rooms, she would be reminded by those men about the possibility of her becoming a spinster. They would flirt with her and yet make fun of her status as a single woman. That they could be so comfortable flirting with her despite being married made her sick.
And it was partly as a reaction to them and to the fear of not belonging to their club, that she had taken an interest in Halide and, in the course of one mad August evening 15 years ago, wrote an angry article about her mistreatment. When her colleagues received that article with fury, not to mention a formal warning from the head of department, who said the political atmosphere was not quite right for such truth-digging, she had felt miserable and visited the apartment of an assistant from the Germanic department she had dated a few times. She bore their first child nine months later.
In the darkness of the room, she wondered whether she had done the right thing by visiting him and abandoning Halide, as it were. As she walked to the door of her study, she suddenly came across the ghost. She was clad in a black burqa and her face looked very young. Her eyes had the most peculiar expression.
“One has to speak out,” she said. “When you start speaking out, it turns into a kind of habit. Your mistake was giving it up when you were faced with criticism. You should have continued speaking out. You could have turned it into a habit.”
The lights turned on and she saw her husband at the entrance of the room.
“Who are you talking to?”
***
The next morning she received a text from the assistant. She didn’t know how to respond because it consisted of an explicit sentence, and as she started climbing the endless stairs that led to the faculty floor she thought about the stupidity of the sentence’s construction and about how little thought had gone into it. How could she have offered her body to a man with such vile ideas? She was ashamed of herself. The tone of his text was carefully designed to shock and excite her, but it failed on both grounds. Looking at it again the only thing she could think of was Halide’s words. She wondered how men managed to speak in this infuriating register. It was the same aggressive, do-as-I-say-or-else tone that had forced her into silence and cunning all those years ago.
She entered the lecture hall and saw the expectant faces of her students.
“Yesterday evening I received an email from one of the members of this class,” she said. “The email contained a link to an article that argued that Halide Edip Adıvar, the woman who founded this department, and about whom we had a brief discussion the other day, was a traitor to her nation.”
Someone giggled.
“The past few days showed me that this is a belief widely shared by you. Like many contemporaries of Halide you seem to think that this brave woman, the founder of Turkey’s PEN club and the author of a number of great novels, should have spent her time at home, rather than become a public intellectual.”
There was silence in the room.
“But is it a crime for the artist to become an intellectual and criticise her country when she believes things are going in the wrong direction? As you all know, men are perfectly attuned to following orders. It is often women, or the womanly side in men, that dare criticise what seems wrong and ill-conceived.”
The skinny girl smiled at her.
“I want to talk about this woman whom you seem so ready to hate and consider an enemy because you are too scared to question what had been taught to you at high school. First, I shall give you some basic facts. Halide Edip Adıvar was born in 1882 and was educated in an American girls’ college in Arnavutköy. She knew Shakespeare by heart. During the occupation of Istanbul by allied forces, which went on for five terrible years, she was one of the leaders of the resistance movement. Instead of writing nasty columns about rebels, Halide became one. She helped organise an uprising and gave a legendary speech to more than 200,000 people in Sultanahmet Square, which you pass by every day on your way to this faculty. Today it is a tourist site; at the time it was the centre of the uprising. Did anyone tell you about her speech, or the role she had played in the liberation movement? I didn’t think so. The history of the Turkish revolution was written by men, after all. Many of those historians were uncritical scribes of the patriarchal discourse. In the eyes of those men, if something was decided then it was perfectly legal to destroy anything that stood in its way. As often happens in this country, women were the first casualties of the realisation of male ambitions.”
“As a young woman, she became friends with the leading revolutionary figures and served as their interpreter when foreign journalists came to interview them. She was among the most sophisticated young women in Istanbul. She travelled with the revolutionaries and discussed with them the course of the revolution.”
“Can you fast-forward to the point where Halide becomes a traitor?” a voice said. It was him, she knew.
“I cannot because she never became one. That identity was manufactured by men who found her dangerous. After the foundation of the republic Halide campaigned for women’s suffrage but she was a lonely figure among male revolutionaries. When she demanded more democracy, and political representation for women, she was told to shut up.”
People laughed.
“But they didn’t expect what she did next. Halide did not shut up. The lady was not for turning.”
“What did she do then?”
“She went to London and lived there for more than 15 years. There she became friends with such eminent figures as Bernard Shaw. Columbia University invited her to give a series of lectures and she was more than happy to talk about Turkey and Turkish culture to American audiences. She loved her new role as a visiting lecturer. Her interests had an international scope: she wrote about India’s politics and became a popular figure among Indians. She wrote English books and her memoirs were published in England. The New York Times hailed her as the face of the modern Turkish woman.”
The New York Times hailed her as the face of the modern Turkish woman
She told them about the year 1940; about Halide’s return to Istanbul and the pleasure she took from her new role as a professor of literature. She told them about her assistants and about her time with the PEN club, and about the wonderful atmosphere she had created in the English literature department. She told them about how some of the most important socialist intellectuals of the country had worked with her, under her patronage. She told them about how, despite her liberal politics, Halide had befriended leftists and tried to protect them when the single-party state started a witch-hunt against them, with the goal of cleaning all socialists from the universities during the1940s.
They listened to her in a state of excitement and disbelief. She hoped they believed her words, but she couldn’t tell if they did.
Then she realised she didn’t really care about what they thought. After the class came to an end she left the hall and went into the assistants’ room. The head of department was there. She asked her whether they could talk in her office.
“Now?” she asked.
“Yes.”
***
It was the last day of winter. The bedroom overlooking the backstreet was silent. She placed her brow on the window, felt its cold surface on her face and eyed the street. She saw a few cars parked a few metres away from each other. She looked at the large oak tree that she found herself staring at a lot lately. She watched a black cat climb one of its thick branches. She watched her body and the ease with which she moved. Spring had finally come to Istanbul.
The house was empty. She sat on the small bed she had bought for herself last month. Her divorce had been a messy affair but it was worth it – and, when she thought about it later, she knew that it had all begun with Halide’s ghost. She had the custody of her daughter and she now wondered what she was doing at school. She had not seen her ghost again after her final appearance in the faculty bathroom but she could feel it continued to move with her. She put on her shoes and felt happy to be alive, although being jobless was not the best companion to a pleasurable state of mind.
But today it could wait. First she would take a walk in the city. She would pass through the areas of Karaköy, Sirkeci and Sultanahmet. She would smell the streets, before deciding on whatever it was she would be doing in the day, whether to spend it alone or with the young neighbour who had asked her out once with the lame excuse of finding out about her favourite author.
