NEZIHE MERIÇ, The Irrepressible Narrator

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NEZIHE MERIÇ (1925-2009) THE IRREPRESSIBLE NARRATOR Nezihe Meriç, a writer whose stories made an enduring contribution to modern Turkish literature, passed away on August 18, 2009. The articles written by her colleagues and friends in literary magazines and newspapers after she died were testaments to her impressive writing career which had lasted almost for six decades. Her quest for authenticity, her desire to express the thoughts and feelings of a young woman born after Turkey became a republic, were the motivating forces of her creativity. She was always defined as the first Turkish woman writer born after the republic. She herself was amused by this description and felt that such statements had to be supported by analysis and interpretation of the role bestowed on her. Yet it is worthwhile to ponder on the meaning of this description. This implies an awareness of the historic period that was crucial for the emancipation of Turkish women.

By the time Nezihe Meriç was publishing her first short stories in the 1950s, women in Turkey had won their voting rights. Women entered all the professions hitherto closed to them. However, these women were a minority; the majority of Turkish people still lived in rural areas and were largely illiterate. In many of her early short stories, Nezihe Meriç’s characters were young women like herself, emancipated and free to appear in the public sphere, yet at the same time facing the hostilities of the outside world not quite ready for the changes. The inheritance of the patriarchal past had not disappeared.

Her themes dealt with the plight of women in their domestic lives, the emergence of male-female friendships, frankness in sexuality, the price of non-conformism in society, poetic descriptions of beauties of nature in not

2 yet fully urbanized corners of the cities and an almost utopian yearning for a simple life.

She said that every time she went outside she would have at least ten stories to write when she was back home. Her stories were told in an idiomatic everyday Turkish. She had an impeccable ear for the rhythms of colloquial Turkish, particularly the speech of women she represented in her work.

Perhaps this language is what Julia Pardoe, a British travel writer, had heard when she arrived in Istanbul in December 1835. As she stood on the deck of her ship and gazed at the busy Istanbul harbor, she saw women in yashmaks and feraces huddled together traveling in caiques and chatting in harmonious Turkish that was like music in their mouths.1 This was the language that was passed orally from generation to generation.

Nezihe Meriç believed that each generation lived its own fate. This was not a passive belief but the thoughts and feelings of an active woman witnessing the tremendous changes in the society she was living in and writing about it to save it from oblivion. In the 1950’s Turkey was going through unprecedented changes due to industrialization and urbanization. In some of her stories she narrated the lives of the people who migrated to the cities from the villages.

In her book of memoirs, Inside the Waterfall, Silently (Çavlanın Içinde Sessizçe, 2004), she expresses a kind of reluctance to write a memoir, but the reader gets wonderful glimpses of her life and of her writing career.

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The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836, Volume I (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837), p.15

3 Nezihe Meriç was born in 1925 in Gemlik, a small town on the shores of the Marmara Sea. She spent her childhood in small towns of Turkey where her civil engineer father, Halis Bey, worked in road-building projects in the early years of the republic. Vast spaces of these Anatolian towns from the snowbound eastern town of Karaköse to Kırşehir and to Eskişehir made indelible impressions on her young mind. In Karaköse in winter nights they were telling stories about bandits, all the roads were covered with snow and cow dung was used as heating fuel. In all these towns she attended public schools. She was able to go to a bookstore and buy a book for the first time in her life when she was a secondary school student in the larger city of Eskişehir. She also saw her first movies there and became acquainted with the radio. Her father was an educated man and wherever they went, two magic trunks containing his books, musical instruments and paints and brushes accompanied them. Her mother, Muattar Hanım, provided all the domestic comforts in the difficult conditions that existed in the provincial towns of Turkey. But this was a shared fate. They were not alone and there was a sense of solidarity and good neighborly feeling. These experiences provided the cultural stimulation and the background necessary for her future career as a writer.

After Nezihe Meriç completed her high school education she went to Istanbul. There she entered the university, studying Turkish literature and philosophy for two years. She felt somewhat dissatisfied, and abandoned her studies without getting a degree. Perhaps she did not want to delay getting down to her writing adventure. In Istanbul she could meet young men and women of her generation who, like her, had limited means to sustain themselves but were determined to find their way in the field of arts and literature. She studied music and worked as a music teacher for eight years in a primary school in Heybeliada, a beautiful island in the Marmara Sea.

4 She was twenty years old when she wrote her first short story Ümit (Hope), using a pen name. This story was selected among other contestants and published in the magazine Istanbul. She also had eight short stories published in 1951 in a special issue of the magazine Seçilmiş Hikâyeler (Selected Short Stories). Nezihe Meriç married writer-editor Salim Şengil in 1956. They published magazines and books. In 1968 she was the editor of the literature magazine Dost (Friend). She was arrested for publishing the poems of Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963). She was tried and sentenced to one and a half years in prison. She managed not to surrender and lived clandestinely for many years with her young daughter until the general amnesty of 1974. These were the years of anxiety that curtailed her creativity. Her first two short story collections Bozbulanık (Murky Affairs, 1952), with 17 stories and Topal Koşma (Lame Running, 1956), with 10 stories, represent the voices of young women like herself relentlessly searching for answers about the place of modern women in a changing society. This quest was also taken up independently by other women writers who were born between 1929 and 1938. Here we can mention Adalet Ağaoğlu, Sevim Burak, Leylā Erbil, Selçuk Baran, Sevgi Soysal, Füruzan, Ayla Kutlu and the poet Gülten Akın. They were all educated in the public schools of the republic in the new Latin alphabet. Women writers born in the 1940’s and the following decades added to an unprecedented efflorescence of women’s contribution to modern Turkish literature. Equality of the sexes had finally arrived in literature, if not in life.

In the long history of the Ottoman Empire there were only a few women poets who were from the elite class. Here we are talking about six hundred years of history when even many of the Ottoman Sultans wrote poems.

5 Poet, novelist and essayist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962) in his seminal book The History of Nineteenth Century Turkish Literature speaks about the importance of women’s role in society and in the development of modern literature. He mentions the fact that the Oriental Palace’s ceremonies were without women (p. 11). Many palace women were foreigners and could not contribute to the development of the language (pp. 19-20). And finally what he calls the absence of male-female relationships (p. 31), by which he might have meant the strict separation of the sexes in the Ottoman society, was among the factors that curtailed the earlier development of a western type of fiction which could only start towards the last quarter of the nineteenth century.2 Perhaps Virginia Woolf’s book, A Room of One’s Own, still provides the best understanding of the problem of women’s entrance into literature even though it was written in England in 1928. She wondered why there were no women poets in Elizabethan England when Shakespeare wrote his wonderful sonnets. Life’s conditions were not allowing women to write poems. Only from the seventeenth century on did English women start putting their words on paper. That eventually led to great 19th century writers like Jane Austin, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. Virginia Woolf considers this phenomenon more important than the Crusades and the Wars of the Roses (p. 68). 3 This may sound like an exaggeration of Virginia Woolf’s boundless wonderful imagination but she says that “women have sat indoors all these millions of years and after all the dinners are cooked, the plates and cups are washed, the children sent to school and gone out into the world.

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Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, 19 uncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (first ed. 1949). Çağlayan Kitabevi, Istanbul. 3 Virginia Wolf, A Room of One’s Own. A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1929, 1957

6 Nothing remains of it at all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it.” (pp. 91-93) Virginia Woolf meant mostly middle class women. Women in “all these millions of years” were tillers of the soil and providers of food; they were caretakers of the family who performed many other duties. There have also been women in world history who wrote poetry and prose. Sappho (sixth century B.C, Greece) and Lady Murasaki (c. 978-1031?, Japan) come to mind in this very long stretch of historical time.

It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century that the formidable Turkish woman writer Halide Edib (1884-1964), who was also a political activist and a fervent participant in the nationalist struggle (1919-1922), took her place among the male writers like Hüseyin Rahmi, Halit Ziya, Mehmet Rauf and Yakup Kadri who were creating their first works in the field of fiction. Her contribution to the development of Turkish literature entering into its modern phase is multifaceted both in her use of subject matter and the introduction of an entirely new type of women characters. She created two heroines in her novels Shirt of Flame (1922) and Strike the Whore (1926) who were dedicated to the national struggle for the independence of Turkey. She also created leading women characters in the novels Handan (1912) and The Heartache (1924). In these two novels, the treatment of the inner lives of the women protagonists and their resistance to accepted norms was truly unprecedented. The great sexual attraction and unconsummated love affair between Major Hasan and strong-willed heroine Zeyno in The Heartache was a daring theme for its time. Their quail hunting expeditions in the suburbs of Istanbul were the signs of Halide Edib’s attributing of a certain degree of androgyny to her female characters. However, these women came from the upper classes and their life experiences were different from those of the majority of Turkish women who lived even in a large city like Istanbul.

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As the western style of fiction writing became an important part of Turkish literature in the first decades of the twentieth century, several women writers started writing romance novels. They were serialized in newspapers and published and became popular. However, a more multidimensional and socially critical approach, as in the works of Nezihe Meriç and her contemporaries, could only take place after a few decades of modernization and secularization both in life and in literature. In an in-depth interview Nezihe Meriç gave to Asım Bezirci in 1983, she said: “I have always loved to live among people - streets, avenues, bazaars, markets, ferries, buses, theaters and movie houses… I have always looked around, observed, thought about, recreated and then narrated. The inner worlds of people always fascinated me. This approach contained all facets and aspects of realities of what is called life. And all this made me feel very excited.”4 This is the affirmation of the presence of the modern Turkish woman in the public sphere. In her first book of short stories, Boz Bulanık (Murky Affairs), all the seventeen stories involve ordinary people living their everyday lives and interacting with people around them. In the story called “Hope is the Bread of the Poor” (“Umut Fakirin Ekmeği,” 1950) a young woman is walking on an endless dusty road on a hot summer day to visit her husband in a hospital. She feels faint and squats under a tree. An old lemonade seller nearby sees her and offers her a glass of lemonade. They start talking and exchange their life stories. The description of a hot summer day and the sympathetic attitude of the old man trying to help this 4

Asım Bezirci, Nezihe Meriç, Monografi, Evrensel Basım Yayın, Temmuz 1999, p. 61.

An invaluable book for information on Nezihe Meriç’s career, published posthumously, it includes articles written by critics about her work until the 1980’s. Asım Bezirci, a critic, essayist and translator, was among the 33 victims of Madımak Hotel fire of 1993 in Sivas which was set up by fanatic reactionaries to kill a group of intellectuals and artists meeting there.

8 woman to find a job, in perfectly rendered Istanbul Turkish, is a gem of narration disclosing the deep humanity of its characters. In the same collection the story called “Őzsu” (Lifeblood) is narrated by a young woman recovering from an illness resembling a depression. The main character in this story is a woman called Hayriye, the wife of a working class man, who brings happiness, order and beauty to a street where the narrator lives in a run-down neighborhood of Istanbul. She is a woman who loves life and helps all her neighbors. But her presence is not tolerated by her landlord, who evicts the couple and their young daughter. However, the magical change she managed to bring into the street lives on.

Nezihe Meriç takes up her heroine Hayriye again in a two-act play Sular Aydinlaniyordu (The Waters Were Illuminated, 1970). She is the central character, but does not appear on the stage. Eight women of different ages, from a teen-age girl to an elderly woman who knew Hayriye, express their opinions about her - some for, some against – which create the tensions in the play and provide the clues to their characters. All the eight roles were played by one actress.

In Topal Koşma (Lame Running) there are ten stories, all called Susuz (which could be translated as thirsty or desirous) whose characters are young people (teachers, artists, professionals) who are caught in clashing values of society. The story “Thirsty VII” is a perfect example of absurd situations that a young woman, Meli, a teacher, experiences. She lives alone. One evening a male friend, Ahmet, a young lawyer, drops in. He is ill with high temperature. Meli’s next door neighbor Sofiya, a Greek woman who runs a small dry-cleaning shop, happens to walk in and take charge of the sick man by preparing an old-fashioned hot toddy with cognac and quinine, and putting him in the young woman’s bed. The two

9 women sip the left over cognac. They are raided by the police who were after the young lawyer and taken to the police station for being caught in this “morally unacceptable” situation. The reputation of the young teacher will be ruined. Her nouveau-riche cousin and his wife who happen to drop by are shocked. They invite Meli to their tastelessly furnished villa to discuss her improper behavior. The young woman is determined to stand up for her principles. Her image as a free woman is drawn perfectly by Nezihe Meriç. She is dressed in a simple linen skirt and a blouse with rolled-up sleeves, wearing sandals on her bare feet. Her simplicity contrasts with the rich wife’s attire. She is unruffled. She feels like she can kick this villa and its furniture with her sandaled foot. She is defying both restricting traditions and the petit-bourgeois hypocrisy. But above all the free young woman shocks her cousin and his wife by expressing her opinions on virginity, love and marriage – by demystifying the accepted values including a run-of-the-mill concept of romantic love. She even dares to utter the word abortion. Although the symbols she defends represent her defiance more than her actual life, their shock value is great. Nezihe Meriç’s themes of sexual freedom were further explored in her third short story collection Menekşeli Bilinç (Minding the Violets, 1965): the stories in this collection emphasize the lack of awareness among women in perceiving their plight. Although they are educated and earn a living, they are still tied to old customs. In the story called “Minding the Violets” a young girl leaves her family’s house and declares that, “I will not join the caravan of dead girls,” as her older sister did.

The first novel of Nezihe Meriç, Korsan Çıkmazı (Pirates Alley, 1961), won the Turkish Language Society’s prize for novel in 1962. In this novel two young girls Meli and Berni, whose families live in the eastern provinces of Turkey, are sent to Istanbul to live with an elderly couple to complete their education. With the help of this couple they become more

10 sophisticated in the ways of the world. They are also initiated into the world of arts, especially western music. They both acquire university education. Meli becomes a literature teacher. Berni studies music. Both married, they live in the same building on a street called Pirates Alley. The novel contains two parallel narrations. The first starts with Meli’s meeting her old friend Ahmet (the lawyer who was arrested) at a bus stop. They decide to go to an outdoor restaurant where Meli’s husband joins them later. The waiter who had settled Meli and Ahmet in a cozy corner of the restaurant is taken aback because he thought they were lovers. Here Nezihe Meriç hints the idea of friendship between men and women. After they leave the restaurant Meli and her husband decide to walk home and are attacked by a gang of rowdies in the dark streets of Istanbul. There is a hilarious encounter with the police and the story ends in the early hours of the morning when they reach home.

The parallel text printed in italics and placed alternatively with the actual story involves the lives of Meli and Berni from childhood on as stream of consciousness, going inward, questioning the rules of society restricting freedom. The short story “Thirsty VII” is incorporated into the text. There is an attempt to make sense of the world, to find something to hold onto which seems to be elusive.

All the books mentioned above give a portrait of Turkish society in the 1950’s and 1960’s, not only in terms of social customs but also in perfectly delineated life styles, houses, furniture, clothes, food, etc., that provide the realistic aspects of Nezihe Meriç’s story telling.

Worldwide political turmoils of the cold war years resulting in deep ideological chasms of the 1960s and 1970s deeply affected life in Turkey. Nezihe Meriç wrote several short stories about this period which were published in her book Under the Smoke (Dumanaltı, 1979).

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The story called “To Set Up a Stall for Hope” (“Umut’a Tezgȃh Kurmak,” 1976), written in the first person, is about the experiences of a woman, a teacher of literature in a high school, just released from prison after two years of incarceration. She had told her husband and her son not to meet her at the gate of the prison. As she is waiting for the bus to go home she reminisces about all the events leading to her arrest and her life in jail. Political inmates were sharing the same ward as ordinary criminals. These people and their relationships go through her head like a movie. Among those prisoners the portrait of an elderly woman, Boncuk Hanım, stands out as a model of integrity. This woman had allowed some young rebels to take refuge in the basement of her unoccupied old house. She acted out of empathy for young people, unaware of their political activities. She represents a type that is always against the greedy money-grabbing new bourgeoisie who happen to exist in her own family. Nezihe Meriç invents this elderly woman to represent human values, love, and common decency, counteracting cynicism.

Another old woman, a hermit, an archetype, is the subject of the short story “To Go Beyond Suffering” (“Acıyı Aşmak”, 1976-1979). It is narrated by a woman who watches her from a distance in her vacation place on the Aegean coast, across the Greek islands, where the winds blow carrying the scents of thyme, sage and ripe figs. On top of a hill a very old woman crippled by old age lives in a shack. She is the last member of a family which had immigrated from Bulgaria during the Balkan wars. She lives alone. The villagers nearby put some food for her under an olive tree on the slope of the hill, and she leaves the figs she gathers in exchange. One day three tired young men running away from the gendarmes end up in her place. The old woman tries her best to feed them and give them some comfort. The food left under the olive tree disappears much quicker than usual, which makes the villagers wonder. At the end these young men

12 are discovered and shot. The news spreads everywhere: “Three anarchists were caught!” Yes, the gunshots were heard because they were caught and killed. The old woman comes running down the hill and yelling at the top of her voice, “Infidels, what have you done to my sons?” (p. 151) The narrator is sobbing uncontrollably and keeps thinking, “Ah! I could have saved them.” At a distance she could hear the happy shouts of the young vacationers. Her three boys were among them. Her husband rebukes her for having an over-developed social consciousness and for the shallowness of her reasoning. He always lectured her on the futility of young people’s struggles for equality. She says to herself: “There was no peace and order in the country. Rightists, leftists, rabble-rousers, the army, the police, the parties, the government, the intellectuals and the people – all were in a mess. All I wanted to do was to have our children, whom we raised with so much struggle, not be killed.” (p.152) This subject is taken up again in the story called “Tan’s Story” (“Tan’ın Őyküsü,” 1978). A group of friends meet in a restaurant in Bodrum – the wonderful town of sea and sunshine, of white houses covered with bougainvillea. But there is martial law and the news of the arrests of friends keeps coming. Tan is the son of a poet-writer in the group. He is very excited about the fishing trip he will go on the next morning. But the police arrive and ask Tan’s father to go with them to the police station for interrogation. The party is broken up and they all wait for the arrested friend at the police station. Next day Tan’s parents return home, the father escorted by the police. Friends take Tan for the fishing trip and when he goes back home his mother tries to lighten the situation by telling jokes about the police who sacked their apartment and their interrogation. She hints that they may come back and ask him questions too. Tan asks,

13 “Mommy, could they really question me too?” Then he adds, “They should ask the third grade questions, we haven’t studied the fourth grade yet!” (p.143). The innocence of the child strikes a poignant note of irony. There are many more “Bodrum Stories” in the collection titled A Bottomless Black Pit (Bir Kara Derin Kuyu, 1989) that take up humorously the confrontations of native Bodrum people with the tourists who flock into their town during vacations. Nezihe Meriç is much more hopeful in her children’s stories. In Alagün Çocukları (Children of Alagün, 1976) Ali, the son of a couple who migrated from a village to a city to work as janitor and cleaning woman, finds an old lady who lives alone in a house at the end of a road on the outskirts of the city. This retired teacher becomes a cultural mentor to the bright boy Ali. The series of stories called Küçük Bir Kız Tanıyorum (I Know a Little Girl) is about the life of Ayşe from the age of six to the age of twelve – her family, her neighborhood, her school life - all written both from the point of view of the inner development of this girl as it relates to the happenings in the big wide world outside.

Nezihe Meriç wrote two other plays after The Waters Were Illuminated: Sevdican (1984) which was staged in Germany, and Çın Sabahta (At the Crack of Dawn, 1995). Both plays have only women characters who fight to have their place in society and make living more meaningful like Hayriye of her first play. The story “Erol Bey” in the collection Under the Smoke is about an elderly pampered bachelor who lives with seven women (all relatives and a servant) in an old decaying mansion on the Bosphorus. Each of these

14 women is portrayed vividly in their appearances and idiosyncrasies representing different times and circumstances of life in Istanbul. They are all emotionally tied to Erol Bey and he to them; yet he also likes to get away from them and finds solace in his excursions to drink joints where he imbibes his daily share of rakı and talks to his fellow drinkers who are not on the same cultural level. This charming drunkard Erol Bey resists the plot by a vulgar profit-seeking contractor to demolish his decaying mansion and erect a multi-storeyed apartment house.

Nezihe Meriç gave the most poetic descriptions of the Bosphorus in this forty page long story which can be called a novella. It gives the reader a sense of bygone days without sentimentality. It is also a soul searching narrative about how to construct a story. Nezihe Meriç used this approach in her later stories. Most of Nezihe Meriç’s stories were written in the first person singular. All these I’s may not necessarily be Nezihe Meriç herself, but a sign of identification that stretches over a whole range of women – the neglected gender. Perhaps this is what Virginia Woolf was writing about, the fact that in literature women were always shown in relation to men. (p.86). The reversal was necessary to achieve the historical balance. There are, of course, many men in Nezihe Meriç’s stories. Some are dissatisfied middle class men who are not able to achieve their goals. There is also a whole new class of men who come to the cities from the villages and work as janitors. They live with their families in the damp basements of apartment houses, providing all the services of the building and some personal shopping for the tenants. In the story called “Markets in the Cities,” there are men from different regions of the country, hawking fruit and vegetables. We can hear their voices, smell and see the colors of their produce as Nezihe Meriç describes them so vividly.

15 From the first publications of the stories of Nezihe Meriç, they were critically acclaimed by well known contemporary writers. Her stories were considered truly original, with a genuine flowing narrative style using words with the sensitivity of a painter and a poet. Her sharp observations of women’s lives and their conscious or unconscious rebellions were praised. Yet, at the same time, some critics – Asım Bezirci, Fethi Naci, Ahmet Oktay and a few others – commented that she did not have a social point of view. She did not delve deeply into the socio-economic causes of the conflicts and their influence on the plight of women. Her rebellion was more of an individualistic rebellion of a woman, or a mother. According to these critics, if women did not organize socially they could never get out of their plight.5 However, these stories, written many years ago, still possess their human and emotional forcefulness. Perhaps a more doctrinaire approach may have weakened the human and moral outrage of a woman, a mother. It is the strength of that voice that makes the stories appealing today. In her later years Nezihe Meriç’s creativity did not stop. She published two short story collections Çisenti (Drizzling, 2005) and Gülün İçinde Bülbül Sesi Var (The Rose Contains the Song of the Nightingale, 2008). She also wrote a movie script Oradan’ da Geçti Kara Leylekler (The Black Storks Flew Over There Too, 2006). An important theme in the later story collections is the exploration of her thoughts about the logistics of writing a short story. In the collection Drizzling the long title of one of the stories is: “Nobody Asked Me If I Wanted To Come Into This World, Or How I Wanted To Live… I Can Only Write A Small Chapter Of My Life Story As An Example.” These are the words of a woman who moves to a town on the Aegean coast to live alone, just to write. She feels totally free

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Bezirci, op. cit. This book includes many reviews and excerpts from reviews of Nezihe Meriç’s work.

16 as she repeats the words of the master short story writer Sait Faik “I can’t live without writing” (p.57) In the same collection a story in four parts named “This Is A Long Story Written From Here And From There” (pp. 35-56) takes place in a Mediterranean town. A doctor, an elderly intellectual recluse, a young woman teacher, a widow with two children and the town’s wise-fool are the main characters whose lives intermingle. There is also an old local woman Kuma Gelin (a common-law wife in a polygamous marriage) who sometimes narrates the town’s past happenings. The four parts of this story do not follow a chronological sequence. In the first part the son of the widow, who is now a grown man living in a large city, breaks up with his wife and returns to the Mediterranean town where he grew up. His mother had opened a restaurant there to support her children and the place had become the town’s center of good life. The intellectual doctor had become a mentor for him. The young teacher who observes and thinks about the people around her also listens to Kuma Gelin’s and the wise-fool’s stories. One day she may become a writer. “Written from Here and from There” may seem like the notes for a novel but it works perfectly as a short story because its power lies in the vivid expressiveness of its language and the development of the attachments of its characters who were strangers at the outset.

In the collection titled The Rose Contains the Song of the Nightingale (pp. 12-25), the story titled “Kıpırtı Hanım” (Lively Lady) is about an elderly woman who considers living in Istanbul the greatest blessing in the world. Every day she goes out carrying her nylon handbag that contains cookies and other edibles she bakes in fair amounts in case there is a chance to offer them to somebody she meets on her excursions. All day long she takes walks in different parts of Istanbul. She loves to sit in a shady corner on the shores of the Bosphorus or she climbs a hill with the view of the

17 sea. As she settles down on her rickety stool she takes her crochet and thread out of her handbag and starts making lace. She also thinks, always thinks.

One day a painter with his easel appears at the pier and starts painting. The two become great friends. She keeps talking as he paints. The painter tells the lively lady that they are doing the same thing. “I paint, you make lace.” She demurs and says, “Oh, God, not at all, not at all!” As time goes by the painter stops coming and moves to a seashore town. But he writes a book about the lively lady that contains all the stories she told him and sends it to her. She reads the book slowly with tears in her eyes. “Wherever you stand in this city the sea surrounds and embraces you, even if you don’t see it. Istanbul is the city of the sea. Istanbul smells of the sea. In Istanbul the breezes and the winds of the sea blow; they contain the shrieks of the seagulls, the putputs of the motor boats and the whistles of the ferries, the moaning of the nightingales and their love songs in the ancient forests that are no more.” Ah, lively lady!

The stories in the last collections cannot be defined as closures. Nezihe Meriç felt that she could go on writing. The story titled “I was on Fire and my Smoke is up the Air” in The Rose Contains the Song of the Nightingale (pp. 7-14) starting with the sentence, “We became acquainted with death,” was written after her husband’s death in 2005. She is sitting alone in a dark room observing the stillness of her surroundings, musing about the sounds of the words and the letters of the alphabet and wondering how to express the overwhelming depth of her loss. This story has an open-ended feeling that she intends to write about this subject again.

In this essay I have tried to show the essential features of Nezihe Meriç’s literary career that spanned almost six decades. I have followed a chronological order and have given samples from her short stories that illuminated the Turkish life of those decades as seen by a Turkish woman writer. Memories of her childhood are taken up again in the story “Drizzling 6” (pp.91-94): “When I think about my childhood, to me it

18 seems like a fairy tale. First there was this big sky, with its clouds and stars so eye-catching. I felt as if it was my shell. It was always there.” Then little Nezihe running in the fields toward the mountains. There were mountains everywhere. She was singing a school song at the top of her voice: Father was always sent to another post in another Anatolian town. Their belongings piled up on a truck, the family went riding over the mountains with dangerous curves… There were tears, sorrow and nostalgia. None of the towns left behind belonged to her. Then moving to Istanbul – the first experience of being surrounded by the sea! For decades witnessing the transformation of a metropolis and expressing an inevitable feeling of loss again. This may seem like a full circle going back to times when her true identity was formed. But her search for the meaning of life continued in her later stories as she expressed it with these words: “As one walks in the arduous road of life each person’s heart beats by itself whether one finds, or does not, or could not find the magic of life, that unknowable entity.” (The Rose Contains the Song of the Nightingale, p.57)

Nezihe Meriç started her writing career at a time when modern Turkish literature had already made big strides in the first half of the twentieth century. This was true for the other art forms like painting, sculpture and music. Folklore studies in this period also contributed to a deeper understanding of the language and the oral traditions. Translations from foreign languages (both classics and contemporary literature) increased and widened the horizons of literature.

In the interview with Asım Bezirci, Nezihe Meriç said that she was deeply moved when she first read the short stories of Sait Faik (1906-1959). Sait Faik was writing about common folks and the fishermen of the islands in the Marmara Sea. She also mentions Sabahattin Ali, Orhan Kemal and poets Nazim Hikmet, Orhan Veli, Cahit Külebi, Oktay Rıfat, Attila Ilhan and many other literary figures of the time. Yet, one cannot identify any single influence as such in her work which was more of her own invention as she introduced new voices into literature in her stories. The search for multiple aspects of reality, questioning of values and, above all, the importance of a simpler language were all a part of the new literature and she wrote her stories in this atmosphere. Reading her spontaneous and lively stories today, even the ones written a long time ago, one is still

19 influenced by their daring narration. Even the titles of the stories – “Thirsty,” “Lame Running,” “Murky Affairs,” “Under the Smoke,” “Drizzling,” “A Black Bottomless Pit,” – evoke metaphors with deep meanings.

As the translator of some of Nezihe Meriç’s stories into English I would like to say that in spite of their genuine Turkish locales, subjects and characters their essential humanity does get across in translation and would appeal to readers who cannot read them in Turkish.

The awards received by Nezihe Meriç: Pirates Alley (Korsan Çikmazı)- 1962 Turkish Language Society award A Bottomless Black Pit (“Bir Kara Derin Kuyu”)- 1990 Sait Faik Short Story award Earth Upturned (Yandırma) – 1998 Sedat Simavi Literature award Inside the Waterfall Silently (Çavlanın Içinde Sessizce) – 2004 Dünya Original Book award City of Mersin Literature award - 2007

Nilüfer Mizanoğlu Reddy New York November 2010