There was a
rush in our house in a gloomy evening at dusk. That rush was because of my
mother's considering everything to be perfect while she was getting ready for
visiting our family friends while beginning a journey. While a journey was flying
like a buttferfly for my father, it was needing to review the kids, the house,
our cows, the vineyards and orchards, all properties for my mother. My mother
was as if she was unable to go on the journey if my father wasn't hurrying up
with starting the car.
Everytime
my mother goes to anywhere and doesn't take us, the kids, I feel myself as if I
am deserted. I remember I was looking behind them from my grandmother's room.
The persons
which I had mentioned as family friends were in fact family friends of my
grandfather. One of them was living in Turuncova, the other was in Isparta and
my father and my aunts were trying to continue the relation with them.
When my
mother and father arrived to Turuncova a night time, they wonder the girl of
the house when they couldn't see her and asked “Where is she?”. To their
surprise there was a boredom in the house. One day, the family saw that their
daughter was reading a novel and they became very angry and raged. They started
to think “Absolutely she has a secret relation if she is reading a novel” and
they had forbidden her to go out from
the house and had locked her in a room. My mother was sympathizing to the
persons in that situation, probably because she was suffering from being not
able to get education too. Whatever they talked,my mother had entered into to
the room and had tried to understand her problem, probably she was very
affected.
My mother
returned to home with gloom from the journey which she had begun for having a
change, a hope and she told this story to us. The story of that girl whose name
didn't remaine in my mind is sticked in my mind.
When I had
completed the primary school, most of my friends completing the primary school
were not able to be sent to the secondary school by their parents. Being
registered in the secondary school was like a privilege for me and I never like
privileges, going to the school from our neigbourhood solitary was like a
burden for me. Fortunately, my big brother was going to the secondary school
too, we would fraternise. Somehow, my father would take us to the school with
his car in rainy days, so I was preparing myself to the school.
The
building of Demre Secondary School was newly-built, we studied on grasses for a
time, then we didn't study on grasses after the classroom desks were bought and
the classes were prepared. Demre was a banishment place for the teachers at
that time. Most of them were leftist, they installed little libraries in our
classes with their enlightened standing. The first book I read was 'Kuyucaklı
Yusuf'¹ novel of Sabahattin Ali. It is possible to say that this novel was
the book which took me into the world of the books and put reading love into
me.
As I have
written many times before, the library which I had met at my Lycee life had
encouraged me more in reading issue. I had found opportunity to read the
Russian and French classics in the house of the elder sister Yurda. I had also
read the English classics in the library of the older brother Erkan in whose
house I was staying during the last year of the Lycee. Somehow, I remember “The
Grapes of Wrath” of John Steinbeck from there.
While our
friendship was continuing with Ahmet, my family was under more pressure than
me. When someone was seeing me with Ahmet in the street, immediately he was
sending message to Demre and was making my family upset and that bad situation
was reflecting back to me.One day – I never forget- my big brother came to the
house which I was staying in. He warned me after suppressing his love to me in
his heart and said: “You think the life is like it is written in the novels,
but the life is not like it is written in the books”. His words remained in my
mind, but I don't remember whether I had given an answer to him or not.
Perhaps
four-five years later my older brother made this conversation with me, we got
married with Ahmet. Ahmet opened the doors of a world in which I could easily
read books with him, that was a door openning to the world of the literature.
When he presented me ‘Mrs. Dolaway’
of Virginia Woolf, I recognized that a novel could be written in a different
way. The stories, novels, poems of Adalet Ağaoğlu, Peride Celal, Sevim Burak,
Susan Sontag, A.S. Byatt, John Fowles, Truman Capote and many other authors
became a part of our own universe.
Why we read
novels, what are the sentences pulling us into them, what tell us the lives
installed there, so we are not able to desist ourselves from reading. This is
because the author in his fictional world, in fact, reveals us the right and
wrong, the opressed people and the opressors, the richness and the poverty, the
justice and the injustice, the class contradictions, the love and the
lovelessness, and the insensitivity based on the observation of true stories
and starting from this point. The world there is in fact not a factoid dream
world, it puts exactly the core of the life in front of us.
The novels
are like guides helping us exactly how to live the life, what kind of standing
we have to choose against the events and situations. Reading a novel needs wending
a time period too, it is a travel at the same time. Going on this journey is
not a thing which everybody can afford, who knows, even presently, in a place
which we don't know, a young girl is putting up what kind of a fight to read a
novel or a book.
Imren Tuzun
Antalya, 19
September 2015
Translated by Serkan Engin
1--Kuyucaklı
Yusuf, The novel of Sabahattin Ali which had been published firstly in
1937 year.
The novel which was the first work of
the author is one of the most important novels of Turkish literature.