A master of Turkish literature: The stories of Nezihe Meriç to meet literature enthusiasts at İş Sanat

The stories "Çalgıcı" (The Musician), "Bazıları" (Some), "Kapalı Öykü-1" (Closed Story-1), "Işın" (Ray), and "Sepetli Kadın" (Woman with a Basket), written by Nezihe Meriç, one of the first female writers of the Republican era, will be performed by Tilbe Saran, Metin Belgin, Bülent Emin Yarar, Hakan Gerçek, and Aslı Yılmaz.

The recital, presented in the style of an old radio recording studio, was arranged by Atilla Birkiye, with Serdar Yalçın serving as the music director.

The recital, adapted for the stage by Mehmet Birkiye, will bring literature and music together and will be accompanied by Serdar Yalçın (piano), Seda Subaşı (violin), and Şemsa İdil Ural (cello).

The recital titled 'Yeşil, dalga dalga gölgeleniyor' (Green, shadowing in waves) will meet literature enthusiasts at the İş Towers Hall on Monday, February 19, at 20:30.

Attendance at the event is free.

WHO IS NEZİHE MERİÇ?

She was born in the Gemlik district of Bursa. Her full name is Nezihe Şükran Meriç. Due to a mistake by the civil registry officer, she was registered as "Neziha" on her identity card. Her mother was Fatma Muattar Hanım, and her father was Engineer Mehmet Halis Bey, who came from a family that migrated from Kırcali to Edirne in the 1800s. Mehmet Halis Bey was an Atatürkist and progressive intellectual who loved reading, knew Islam very well, but had no tolerance for bigotry; he spoke Arabic, Persian, and French.

Due to Mehmet Halis Bey's job as a highway director, Nezihe Meriç's childhood was spent in various parts of Anatolia. The migrations from city to city due to her father's duties left a mark on Nezihe Meriç's memories. She started primary school in Eskişehir and continued in Erzincan. She graduated from Ağrı Karaköse Primary School in 1936.

She completed her secondary education in Kırşehir between 1936 and 1939. She graduated from Eskişehir High School (1943). She attended the Turkish Language and Literature and Philosophy departments at Istanbul University Faculty of Letters but left before completing these departments (1945). Between 1946 and 1954, she worked as a music teacher at Heybeliada Primary School. In 1956, she married Salim Şengil, the owner of the magazine Seçilmiş Hikâyeler, and settled in Ankara. Between 1957 and 1973, she served as the managing editor at the magazine Dost, which was owned by her husband.

In 1968, she faced prosecution for publishing the works of Nâzım Hikmet at Dost Publications. She first served six days in prison. Although she was released on bail, she was sentenced to one and a half years in prison and six months of exile after the court upheld the verdict.

She lived as a fugitive until the "Amnesty Law" was passed in 1974; during this time, she stayed at the home of her close friend Türkan Poyraz. Her life as a fugitive ended in 1974, and she settled in Istanbul with her husband. She lost her husband in 2005. Nezihe Meriç, who succumbed to cancer, passed away at her home in Etiler (August 18, 2009).

Awards Received: 1962 Turkish Language Association Novel Award (for Korsan Çıkmazı), 1990 Sait Faik Story Award (for Bir Kara Derin Kuyu), 1998 Sedat Simavi Literature Award (for Yandırma), 2007 Mersin City Literature Award.

Nezihe Meriç, the first female writer of the Republican era, distinguished herself from both the writers before her and those of her own generation by handling women in a completely different way, looking at the women's issue from different angles, and more importantly, successfully using the features of the modern story in her works. According to Necip Tosun, although describing Nezihe Meriç as the "first female writer of the Republican generation" may seem exaggerated, it is certain that there are justified aspects to this expression (Tosun 2018: 231). Her father also had an influence on the artist's literary personality.

During their years in Kırşehir, she read novels serialized in newspapers by writers such as Kerime Nadir, Peride Celal, and Esat Mahmut. Nezihe Meriç displayed a different attitude in her stories than the female writers she read. First of all, she tried to approach women from a different perspective; she showed innovative tendencies in theme, plot, ideology, language, and narrative.

She successfully used the possibilities of the modern story and, especially in her later works, successfully applied new techniques such as stream of consciousness and internal monologue to her texts.

Until Nezihe Meriç, women in our literature were always handled emotionally. According to her, a woman struggling in society has a social status and a gender. The sexual freedom of women, their abuse, exploitation, and oppression in the male-dominated world also began to be voiced and discussed through Nezihe Meriç's stories. For example, the women in the author's first story books, Bozbulanık and Topal Koşma, are young women and helpless women who closely watch what is happening around them, look at the society they live in and think, are aware of things going wrong, and are disturbed by the broken order.

When Meriç draws these portraits of women and young girls, there are no concrete examples she can observe. Therefore, women with such personalities first appeared in Nezihe Meriç's works. Her women have a combative, patient, and indomitable nature in the face of events. On the other hand, the artist also had a great influence on the acceleration of the women's issue, especially after the 80s.

The first period of Nezihe Meriç's storytelling, which we can divide into three periods, is represented by Bozbulanık (1953), Topal Koşma (1965), and Menekşeli Bilinç (1965). In the stories in these books, the author mainly examined the relationships between men and women. Nezihe Meriç, who showed political tendencies with Dumanaltı (1979), entered her second period. In the last period, she showed postmodern tendencies with the books Bir Kara Derin Kuyu (1989), Yandırma (1998), Çisenti (2005), and Gülün İçinde Bülbül Sesi Var (2008). The influence of Sait Faik is clearly felt in Nezihe Meriç's storytelling.

Indeed, she expressed certain aspects of her influence by saying, "The storytellers I like do not reach three or four. Among them, I only admire Sait Faik. But even that is more for his stories, his atmosphere, his water, his sea, his fish, his personality than his storytelling..." While being influenced by Sait Faik, Meriç also made criticisms from time to time and compared her own storytelling with his. The artist saw herself as a storyteller: "I am a storyteller. I love my stories very much. I both love them and like them. This self-appreciation is one of my characteristics. Because I am someone who is at peace with myself and loves myself very much. Even my flaws... As for the writing business, I am not someone who writes quickly or can write. A story lives in me for years." (Meriç 2009: 12). The artist, who thinks that being a storyteller and loving the story is a very beautiful endowment, believes that carrying these characteristics is difficult and that storytelling is a serious occupation.

The artist's first article titled "Ümit" (Hope) was published on February 15, 1945, in the magazine İstanbul, where the culture-arts section was managed by her professor from the faculty, Mehmet Kaplan - signed as N. Ufuk due to a mistake. Her first story, "Bir Şey" (Something), was included in the "New Signatures" section of the magazine Seçilmiş Hikâyeler, which was published in Ankara by Salim Şengil, made great contributions to the development of our storytelling, and included important names in its writing staff (1950). Seçilmiş Hikâyeler (1947-1957, 66 issues) attracted attention by featuring stories and articles by master writers as well as discovering new storytellers. The magazine, which acted as a literary circle for storytellers, also produced special issues dedicated to single storytellers.

Nezihe Meriç is also one of the writers who had a special issue in this magazine. Her second story, "Ümit Fakirin Ekmeği" (Hope is the Poor Man's Bread), was published in the magazine Yeditepe. Behçet Necatigil made the following assessment for the artist's first story book, Bozbulanık: "The author, who adds an inner richness, rested attentions, and dimensions to the subjects she handles, had already accepted her value in this first book." (Necatigil 2016: 100).

In her first three books, the author, who deals with the intertwined consciousness and subconscious adventures of people, also dealt with people in the midst of social and political turmoil in her later books (Solok 1998: 382). While an optimistic and hopeful picture was drawn in her first stories, a pessimistic atmosphere prevailed in later stories. Nezihe Meriç, who entered the second period of her storytelling with Dumanaltı, which contains ten stories, addressed the reflection of the political atmosphere of March 12 on individuals. In this period, when political chaos prevailed, she revealed the effect of arrests, trials, the actions of young people, and deaths on social life. A distinct feature of this book is that it contains local idioms and derived words.

The political atmosphere of the March 12 period was also addressed in the same way in Bir Kara Derin Kuyu, where a pessimistic portrait is drawn. Bir Kara Derin Kuyu, which contains summer city stories and describes Bodrum, stands out with the artist's innovation in form and content. It is felt that the artist is in search of new things in Yandırma, which contains seven stories.

According to Füsun Akatlı, Yandırma draws attention in that it reveals that Nezihe Meriç thought a lot about the act of writing and shared her writing adventure with the reader. Adnan Özyalçıner made the following assessment for Çisenti: "Çisenti is Nezihe Meriç's last story book. The book contains eight stories she tells with long titles and eleven stories under the title Çisenti. In the first eight stories, she tells about the mansions, the Balıkpazarı, which she refers to as the bazaar in Beyoğlu, Istanbul with the Bosphorus, and those living in Bodrum, which she describes as a 'coastal city'. She also gives a narrative section from her own life." (Özyalçıner 2005).

Nezihe Meriç did not lose her perspective on women in her last story book, Gülün İçinde Bülbül Sesi Var, which she published a year before her death. The author again leans on a weary, sad, and soulful voice. The whole story is on "ah!". The narrator looks back and tries to solve the human conditions that make people say "ah!" and the language of "ah!"s. In all the stories, she examined the "but how is it going" of the cliché "life goes on" which is frequently used in daily life (Tosun 2018: 193).

When the artist's stories are evaluated in general; it is seen that a wide variety of themes and motifs such as marriage, the world of women, freedom, love, migration, poverty, joy of living, March 12, boredom, happiness, and generation gap are handled. Various professional groups, especially teachers and painters, are included in the stories. Although active and combative women are dominant, she also included passive women.

Most of these are urban and educated women. According to Önder's determination, the main character of three stories in Bozbulanık, four stories in Topal Koşma, two stories in Dumanaltı, one story in Bir Kara Derin Kuyu, and two stories in Yandırma is male. All other main characters in the story books are women (Önder 2006: 194). The artist was also able to change and transform her female characters.

Gezeroğlu, who examined Nezihe Meriç's stories according to Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope (space and time) concept, stated that the plot in the stories is solid and that time and space form two important pillars of this structure (Gezeroğlu 2015: 157). In the final analysis, it can be said that Nezihe Meriç built a solid bridge between traditional Turkish storytelling and innovative tendencies.

Her plays Çın Sabahta, Sular Aydınlanıyordu, Sevdican, Tartışma, and Öyle Bir Gün, which had never been published or performed anywhere before, were published as a book under the title Toplu Oyunlar (2003). The artist also questioned the position of women and their entrapment between their homeland and life abroad in her plays. She handled women's search for identity in the spouse-mother-individual triangle and their conflicts deepened by psychological disintegration.

The themes and narrative techniques seen in her stories are also seen in her novels. Meriç wrote her first novel, Korsan Çıkmazı (1961), based on the story titled "Susuz VII" in her story book Topal Koşma. Korsan Çıkmazı, which is based on memories, associations, emotions, and internal monologues and takes its name from a street in Beyoğlu, was met with great interest in the year it was published due to its mastery in narrative and innovations in expression. The artist questioned family and male-female relationships in Alacaceren (2002). In the work, it is seen that Bengi and her younger brother Gün are negatively affected by the arguments between family members.

The difference of the novel from the others is that it is written with the novel-within-a-novel technique. Bengi is a writer character who loves to write. She realizes the family she longs for in the life of Ayşe, the protagonist of her novel.

Alacaceren was published in France under the title “Les Matins de Benguisu” (L’Inventaire, Paris 2005). In the novel Oradan da Geçti Kara Leylekler (2006), she tells on one hand about the experiences of women whose names and themselves change along with the houses they go to work in, with husbands who do not change except for the long baskets on their arms; and on the other hand, about the urbanites who find themselves face to face with themselves while trying to express this change. As a writer with a female sensitivity and perspective, Nezihe Meriç handled people of different types and positions in both her stories and novels; not falling into artificiality in this effort was one of the leading features that ensured her success.

The artist, who said, "Children's literature in Turkey needs to be surrounded, protected, guarded, supported, and created from all sides as soon as possible. Who should this be told to? How should this be told?" (Meriç 2009: 146), had a special place for children in her writing adventure. Nezihe Meriç, who did not think of "children's literature for children," wants to write books that are not written directly for children, but whose subject is children, which children do not have difficulty reading, and which are followed with interest (Çelikten 2019: 51). She stated that children are separate individuals and have their own unique worlds, and expressed that books written for children are not actually suitable for them.

Especially the river novel titled Küçük Bir Kız Tanıyorum is one of the works of the artist that should be mentioned in this field. In her children's books, she aimed to make values such as fairness, scientificity, friendship, freedom, honesty, respect, love, patriotism, thriftiness, helpfulness, peace, contentment, patience, and responsibility felt.

She handled the basic values observed in her stories and novels in her children's books in a way suitable for the psycho-social development of the child. For this reason, Nezihe Meriç's works are extremely important in terms of both Turkish education and literature education. In Çavlanın İçinde Sessizce (2004), there are important memories from Meriç's childhood to her writing adventure, from her youth to the details of her storytelling.