Poet Başak Akgün Akil: A pomegranate breaks and shatters, but it multiplies as it breaks

Interview: Sercan Meriç

Lawyer and Poet Başak Akgün Akil has begun to voice the melody of life through her poems. Akil spoke to 12Punto about the process of writing 'Kırık Nar'. The book, published by Kırk Yayınevi under the Kırmızı Kedi Publishing Group, conveys a greeting from a new poet to its readers... A greeting knotted with pains, joys, the secure feeling of family bonds, the past, and hope extending into the future. Just like our humanity... Now, the floor is Başak Akgün Akil's...

The poetry book titled "Kırık Nar" met its readers last May through Kırk Yayınevi, which belongs to the Kırmızı Kedi Publishing Group. We would like to get to know you briefly...

I completed my undergraduate education at Bilkent University Faculty of Law in 2013; simultaneously, I graduated from the Radio and Television Programming department at Eskişehir Anadolu University. Following my graduation, I completed my master's degree in IT Law at Hacettepe University. For about 12-13 years, I have been practicing as a freelance lawyer in Ankara, primarily in the field of intellectual and industrial property law; in addition, I work as a trademark and patent attorney and a mediator. I could neither take my heart away from poetry and literature, nor my mind and ideals from law. All paths taken with heart eventually intersect. In 2024, I presented my first poetry book, "Kırık Nar," to readers through Kırk Yayınevi, part of the Kırmızı Kedi Publishing Group, by plucking the pomegranate of my heart; I wanted it to multiply.

On one hand, you are a lawyer, and on the other, a poet... How do you manage to pursue both at the same time?

When the question of "who one is" or "who one will be" is asked, one thinks about it a lot at these ages. Perhaps I would like to answer this question a little bit for other women as well. In our country, working women are asked a question after becoming mothers: "What happened, are you going to quit your profession now?" I heard the same question a lot after the book was published, and I smiled.

In our childhood, in our family, and in our schools, we were taught to be "versatile and whole" human beings. In our country's history, pashas, statesmen, and teachers have placed great importance on painting, poetry, and music throughout history. For instance, have you ever heard a man being asked, "Are you quitting your job?" just because he loves watching matches and watches them? Or has a man ever heard this question when he became a father?

I don't think so. Can a person leave their soul or heart separate from themselves? Women attained their rights after very great struggles; as Muazzez İlmiye Çığ said, "I do not give up on anything, I do not give up and retreat to a corner!" Isn't being a woman, and being a Republican woman, already something like this, and how else can I teach my daughter to be herself? And to remain that way! Women should hold their children's hands just as Atatürk held the hands of his spiritual daughter Ülkü Hanım, with their heads held high, with such pride! Fathers should too! A person must continue on the path of transforming time, but without ever diminishing themselves! Therefore, I will continue to live as both a lawyer and a woman in love with poetry and literature, and by believing in both with all my heart.

How did you start writing poetry, and can we talk a bit about the publication process of your book?

Due to my father's profession, I got to know different cities in our country. My mother and father are originally from Adıyaman; both are from the generation of "fireflies" who left their hometowns for education while they were still in middle school and were scattered to all corners of the country. I was born in Antalya, grew up in Kırklareli, and studied in Ankara. Our extended family was in Adıyaman. It was as if our heart's yarn had been spilled across the country; my mother, my father, and we were constantly running in one direction, and whichever way we ran, the other side would unravel, and whichever side we knitted, that place would warm up. To have a poem, you need to have a story. God had granted me and my family many stories.

My grandfather had studied in Istanbul; he would tell stories, and I would listen; my aunts would tell stories, and I would listen. My grandmother and grandfather were very much in love with each other; I would watch them with admiration. A plane tree would sway in their garden, and I would listen to its leaves. Sour unripe grapes would bloom in the vineyards, and I would reach out and watch them in their shade. As long as I have known myself, I have wanted to hear cities, people, and trees, and to write about them. That is how I got to know cities, people, the shattering of black figs on their branches in the August heat in the southeast, the hospitality of the East to a stranger in its own land; the way sunflowers in Thrace always turn their faces to the sun, the dark, beautiful faces and the smiles of the Roma with their bare feet; that is how I got to know them. My grandmother had lost my grandfather at a very early age.

For years, she waited for him at the corner of the same armchair standing by the window. When she washed her balcony on hot yellow summer days, the heat of the wet concrete would smell like the sun; the scent of geraniums and basil; those waterless trees with trunks as thick as a lifetime and branches as green as can be, the stars that descended from the sky to the tips of our toes at night—if I hadn't seen these, I couldn't have written poetry. Poetry is a memory. It requires lived experience and wear and tear.

I think memory is related to childhood...

My childhood passed with the dream of writing my grandfather's story, then I wanted to write my aunt's story, and I realized my grandmother's story much later. Life is a preoccupation, a rush; sometimes while saying "let me finish all my duties, let me run to my profession, that day will come too," time slips away. When I was a child, I thought all my loved ones were immortal. I learned to lose with great pain. The leaves of my extended family had already begun to fall slowly... And then... the February 6, 2023 earthquake happened... Thousands of lives were lost in our country. Thousands of stories, thousands of lives, thousands of homes, thousands of pains, all streets were razed to the ground... A very important history of our country was razed to the ground... I lost seven lives from my family. I no longer had a home where I could rest my head on their laps when I returned... The houses where I ran in their gardens, the memories where I sat at their tables, the houses where my mother and father grew up, the historical mosque on the corner on the way to my grandmother's house, those trees, cypresses, parks, those houses, those people... None of them existed. Only that clock in the square, stopped at the last breath of our loved ones: 04:17. And a city that is now flat, a dust and smoke... In those days, the lines "The homeland was a place that was always very far away and whose return was no longer possible. Have you ever seen a rootless tree?" fell from my hand. That day, I envied the olive tree that had lived in its garden for thousands of years by its own rule, just because it had lived longer than your family, than your roots.

Very difficult days...

In those days, I was eight months pregnant and had started to have a risk of miscarriage. Every night I saw my loved ones in my dreams, every night I would wake up at the same time, 04:17, and find my hands stiff, as if they were trapped under a stone.

I had to get up, I had to hold on to that last tiny hand extended to me by my family tree whose leaves were falling. One day I opened the old drawers, all the old poems, cities, people, death, transformation, hope, birth, my human treasure... I poured out whatever there was. Perhaps the only way I knew to prepare for birth was to remember life.

That's why I attached it to the preface; "To my only daughter Pera İnci Akil, who came to our world this year, who holds my broken pomegranate red, the flower of my heart. A pomegranate breaks, a pomegranate spills, but your heart is the tree, my beautiful daughter. You are my tree." This is not an earthquake book; this is "a book of life" where life and loss are experienced together... This country has always paid these painful prices with human lives. Yet poetry... Yet art is a memory. I am very afraid that the lands I have seen and that ancient memory, which has accumulated like grains of sand over thousands of years, will never be seen again, and that these feelings will never be experienced again. Hüsnü Arkan's song "Hatırla Kalbim" (Remember My Heart) touches me deeply. Because, those streets, those people, those stories, those beautiful memories... I cannot forget them. My country should not forget them either!

Where does the name "Kırık Nar" correspond to metaphorically?

To explain "Kırık Nar," one must perhaps start with the "pomegranate metaphor." "Pomegranate" is that bountiful, that brave red that poets generously depict in their metaphors and painters in their still-life paintings! A person wants to be like a pomegranate, so beautiful, so bountiful.

There is a saying in Anatolia: "May your life be as bountiful as a pomegranate!" You think it will always remain like that before it ever breaks. Yet, is there any fruit that is shattered from its core like a pomegranate? A pomegranate breaks, a pomegranate shatters; but a pomegranate multiplies as it breaks.

It bends, turns, looks inside; it knows it will never be the same again. The inside of a pomegranate is chambered; there are many pieces side by side inside. Humans are like that too; people and chambers accumulate inside. When the heart breaks and shatters, one thinks it will never be the same again. But then one turns inside, finds cities there, finds people there, a human gives birth to a human... That is why I wanted this book to say to someone it encounters: "A pomegranate does not know it is full inside until it breaks; a human is the heart, the pomegranate of another human." I wanted it to encounter someone I don't know at all and do them good when they put it in their heart.

"With the multiplying heart of the pomegranate..."

-Perhaps with its wish...

Are there poets you are influenced by?

Let me tell you something funny: The first poet I knew was my grandfather; you didn't know him. When his eldest daughter, his first apple of his eye, my late Aunt Nurten was born, he started keeping a notebook and noted the following:

"The sun was rising in the sky like a red spear,

Nurten was born."

My grandfather had seven daughters and seven notebooks. The greatest lover and the most beautiful-voiced woman I knew was my Rose Mother (my aunt). My father never spent a single day without singing; sometimes with joy, sometimes with pain. He, too, had inherited his voice from his own father. My mother was a burst of laughter in her youth!

The people of Middle Eastern countries have both great hearts and many words. In such countries, women's drawers are full of poems. But how sad, we hear the names of most of them after they die. Most of their names are not known as "poet"; their names are "my mother," "my aunt." Since "poethood" could not easily be seen as a profession in our country, love-volunteering people return to their homes in the evening after work, struggling to make a living. Still, here, as a debt, with gratitude to them, I can say for the first time that I drew inspiration from my source. If I list the poets I was inspired by one by one, I would be doing an injustice to those I couldn't list. However, I must state as a debt that in my childhood, I met and was enchanted by the pens of very special and superior souls such as Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Melih Cevdet Anday, Nazım Hikmet, Sabahattin Ali, Orhan Veli, Behçet Necatigil, Ahmed Arif, Attila İlhan, Cemal Süreyya, Turgut Uyar, Tomris Uyar, Edip Cansever, Metin Altıok, Ahmet Erhan, Behçet Aysan, Gülten Akın, Ataol Behramoğlu, Şükrü Erbaş, Haydar Ergülen, Enis Batur, and Oya Uysal. Likewise, William Shakespeare, Paul Eluard, Pablo Neruda, Forough Farrokhzad... And dozens of special names I forgot while listing...

As a poet, in what kind of country would you like to write poetry?

Someone who writes poetry wants to live; wants to see, know, and experience; feeds not only on poetry but on all branches of art. For this reason, we owe a lot to all these names and those years. And to the struggle... To the troubles placed in the heart... If a poet were happy just coming home and watching television, getting a regular job and starting a family, and "giving up on this love" as many say, would we hear this beautiful world in their language? I never forget Attila İlhan's poem "Ağustos Çıkmazı" (August Dead End). It is said that the poet addresses himself in that poem:

"Live like everyone else

Mind your own business"

the poet scolds himself first. Then he asks for forgiveness from himself softly, as if:

"You get married, you have a child

Don't leave me and go, please"

These are very high, very deep emotions... If they had never lived, never written, our hearts could not have taken refuge under a poem like escaping from the rain in those great emotions we cannot define. On this occasion, I thank all of their pens...