The wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit edgü

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü

Turkish literature

Original title – Doğu Öyküleri & Nijinski Öyküleri

Translator Aron Aji

Source – Personal copy

I move on to a couple of works from Turkey. Firstly, he is an established Turkish writer who has written several books and works as a writer, but he, like many of his contemporaries, chose national service. To become a teacher in the Kurdish area of Turkey. This initial visit to the part of the country was eye-opening and formed the basis of his best-known book, A Season in Hakkari, the region he was sent to. He was shocked by the difference between himself and the locals and how his view of the Kurds differed greatly from the actual region and people. He has since written many books, and this book has two novellas he wrote at a later date, but he writes books about the region still, and these both came out at times of tension and conflict between the Turkish people and the local Kurd population in the area. I will focus on the first novella here.

They escaped with their animals.

Not just horses or mules. Sheep as well, thirty, forty of them.

Most perished on the way, a man says.

He’s not crying. Maybe smiling.

They carried two of the wounded sheep on their shoulders.

He gestures at the big cauldron nearby: Now they’re both in there.

A woman is standing by the boiling cauldron.

Her belly up to her nose.

She uncovers the cauldron, stirs.

A pungent meat smell.

Fate is fate. Born this side of the mountain or the other, makes no difference for the baby.

Is that what she says, I ask Vahap.

Yes, that’s what she says.

And that she’ll name the baby, Ferman —decree.

It’s this land’s custom, Vahap says.

Ferman’s the child born in exile.

As the journalist and interpreter head into the moiuntains he sees those escaping the violence.

As I said, this is all about the Wounded age. Where we follow a journalist as he is sent to the southeastern area of Turkey as the is a rise in conflict and killing in the region as the Kurds try to fight for their freedom. He heads to the mountains and sees the locals as they are firstly trying to escape the Turkish army what will follow when they come in, and the repercussions of the violence from the Kurds as they struggle in their fight for freedom. The massacres happen in the region, with many people dying. This was a starting point for this book when the journalist has a fever-like dream of an old man fishing the great river Zab as he draws his nets in. There are the bodies of the dead woman and children in the nets. When he awakes, he finds it was a dream, but the trauma iof this vision changes his views of the region of the locals and what is happening to them.

This time, I screamed. The old man, still holding on to the net, straightened his body, and, passing the net to his left hand, wiped his sweaty brow with his right hand. I told you to leave, he yelled, this time in my language. Now leave, you saw what you wanted to see. Go the hell away. I started walking backward to the edge, my eyes still fixed on him.

Corpses of women, of children, swept in the current, brushed past my legs. I screamed. When I came to, my heart pounding against its shell, I was sure I woke up in the afterworld.

The old man fishing the Zab and just catching bodies in his net.

Both novellas are set in the Hakkari region of Turkey, which is predominately Kurd in population. Some of the things that the journalist sees and talks about remind me of a friend I had when I worked in a factory in. German, he was from Kosovo, a Kosovian Albanian. When we chatted over the time I worked there about the oppressive nature and society of the Serbians, he also loved Glenn Hoddle, the footballer. So, this is a similar society, and there have been several significant massacres over time. The one that inspired the book still haunts Turkey, and the violence and deaths in the region still need to be addressed as they tried to wipe out the PKK but instead wiped out villages, like in the story where we see a dead woman and children floating in the river. There is a great interview with the translator on the Turkish Books podcast. Where he talks about translating this book, how he discovered Edgu as a writer, and the plan to bring more of his books out and, eventually, A Season in Hakkari. His style is poetic, sparse, and brutal at times with the images of the dead bodies floating in a river. He is a writer who makes an impact on you as a reader. Have you read a book about the Kurdish Conflict?