Seyyit Nezir: The poet's struggle against mafia-ization and digital oligarchy

What is happening in Turkish literature? How did we transition from times when even the trees leaned to the left, and when the left, socialism, and a progressive republicanism held sway in the world of thought, literature, and other fields of art, to the dominance of political Islam? Which bastions have fallen in Turkish literature? Or rather, is there a bastion that has not fallen, and what kind of adventure is it to search for one?

Poet and author Seyyit Nezir, who has also published literary magazines for many years, answered our questions and commented on the orientations of our literary world that led to his recent work, "Üvercinka".

– You are republishing the magazine "Üvercinka", whose first issue you published in November 2014, after a 1-year hiatus. What does Üvercinka draw attention to? In other words, what kind of void do you think exists, or what kind of error is there, that you are trying to protect and keep such a "literary" platform in the field to seek answers?

SEYYIT NEZIR – Since I rolled up my sleeves in the kitchen of the weekly political newspaper Gerçek in the 1970s to probe, examine, and intervene in current debates within the general flow of literature, magazine publishing became a passionate adventure for me, especially in the 1980s. First, let's trim the old months and make them stars. You will remember those years: In the 1980s, at the beginning of the process where you were also publishing Edebiyat Dostları and engaging in a stubborn fight against the September surrenderers, I, too, after Yazko Edebiyat, continued this adventure—stumbling but persistently—in other kitchens, first in Düşün, then in Broy the following year, even if I took breaks due to personal issues.

A NEW DARK AGE EQUIPPED WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

In 2001, when I sensed that the global oligarchy was forcing the world into a new dark age equipped with digital technology, with the support of Demirtaş Ceyhun, we set out in the magazine Eski to fight to the end; with your striking and effective articles, we formed a triple and strong barricade against neoliberal drifts, postmodernism, and the New Middle Ages. Your article on İlhan Selçuk brilliantly emphasized his function and that of Cumhuriyet in the 50-year process after 1960. Immediately afterward, in a group interview we conducted with Afşar Timuçin, Demirtaş Ceyhun, and Yalçın Küçük, we examined how the postmodern personality of clinging and sycophancy toward brands they had their eyes on put the "Individual in the New Middle Ages" into a state of being a "kiptip" (a derogatory term for a sycophant). Indeed, those colorless, base-intentioned people who started everything in their dream worlds from scratch and with themselves were examples of "kiptip" at the sub-zero level of a literary environment where they were blinded to the point of not seeing that they were actually zeroing themselves out while being seduced by the cheapest brands with their desires to rub their hands and steal awards in front of sponsor-cajoling and selection committee networks. The function of not only exhibiting works but also taking on the individual's confrontation with themselves in line with their universal goal and their social conflicts on a scientific, intellectual, and artistic plane and carrying them into action had now clearly imposed itself, but my health conditions interrupted all plans and orientations.

MAFIA-IZATION AND DIGITAL OLIGARCHY

– You always talk about and warn against the "dominance of mafia-ization and digital oligarchy"... Did Üvercinka become a task you deemed appropriate to resist this in such a period, but which was officially dumped on you?

SEYYIT NEZIR – In a way, yes... While I was focusing on writing again by overcoming health problems in the 2010s, and around the time I started giving talks, with an impetus provoked by Zühal Tekkanat after my speech at the Melih Cevdet Anday event of the Cemal Süreya Culture and Art Association, I first took a position in the association, and then I found myself in the secluded forest of dreams of the Üvercinka magazine. I must say clearly that this adventure was based on a motivation different from the "must publish your own magazine" line of some, and on an insistence on the essence of our literature's tradition of struggle. Adnan Özer, while taking his place in the ranks of postmodernism to destroy the "hegemony of Marxism over our literature" in Kaçak Yayın, where he assumed the role of a spoiler against this insistence on tradition, had also lent his support to the attitude followed by Hilmi Yavuz and Hasan Bülent Kahraman in Varlık under the management of Enver Ercan. Yücel Kayıran provided the best definition of the issue exactly 3 years ago in the magazine DoğuBatı: "The history of our Modern Turkish Poetry is a history of poetic struggles."

Looking back from yesterday, it is interesting that the discourse suddenly shifted again to an incline where poetry carries weight, but we cannot avoid this, especially in our literature. In fact, not only in our modern poetry, but since before, since Şinasi and Namık Kemal, poets have occasionally dabbled in other genres. Except for Dağlarca, almost every one of our poets, including Ahmet Haşim and Yahya Kemal, took part in the poetic struggle not only with their poetry but also with their prose. While Nâzım, by carrying the struggle to the "We Are Destroying the Idols" stage with his harshest rhetoric in Resimli Ay, created a new language and thus received praise even from Ahmet Haşim, he was weaving Divan stitches into his poetry in his epic of Sheikh Bedrettin. It has come this way and continues. I must add: After Yazko, in the curve of the adventure that integrated with the historical process I took over from Memet Fuat, I had also planned to propose a realism whose horizon opened to the contemporary by preparing the program and principles of De Yayınevi with the motto of "continuity in tradition and innovation" and moving from İlhami Bekir Tez's House in Taşlıtarla toward Aragon.

FROM A NOVICE TO THE PEN AWARD FOR THE SULTAN OF POETS

– I guess it didn't end there...

SEYYIT NEZIR – There are many intersection links added to each other. And more complicated ones... After all, one does not descend into today's literature from the sky overnight... In the 1980s, in the same process, Hilmi Yavuz was spending time gathering young people in a circle aimed at eroding our literature's tradition of struggle, without ever letting the so-called "leaning on tradition" nonsense fall from his tongue. Yavuz, who also tried and used Poesium with this approach during his years as the Head of the Istanbul Municipality Culture Department, while boasting that "I am repairing Turkish poetry" by belittling masters like Tevfik Fikret, Yahya Kemal, Haşim, Nâzım, Dağlarca, Orhan Veli, Cansever, Turgut Uyar, Cemal Süreya, and many others who became giants by being a movement in themselves, was presenting his postmodern attitude in his book Taormina as a breakthrough simultaneous with the world and preparing for the liquidation.

In those years, the magazine Broy opposed the desires to consume the tradition of struggle with the "Yenibütün" (New-Whole) Manifesto (1988). Cemal Süreya expressed his stance with the words, "I think of Yenibütün as a justified breakthrough of Turkish Poetry. We are all Yenibütün-ists." Look at the irony of fate: PEN, which was hoped to be based on a democratic ground in the management sequence of Yaşar Kemal, Aziz Nesin, Şükran Kurdakul, and Alpay Kabacalı, confirming the boomerang of history, gifted the 2025 World Poetry Day Award to the Sultan of Poets Hilmi Yavuz with the playfulness of his novice Haydar Ergülen, and declared the end of its own function.

The situation in the novel is, of course, no different, but with his salvos of "Blasphemy Novels" and "Aesthetic Reckoning," Yalçın Küçük had stripped the gilding of many, especially Orhan Pamuk and Ahmet Altan. When Orhan Pamuk tore himself apart for Armenians and Kurds for the sake of the Nobel, Metin Celal, the President of the Publishers Association, who used his pen like a weather vane sword alongside Enver Ercan in the alliance of rewarding every departure from tradition, never listened to Küçük's criticisms either. The same Celal is now looking for an exit for the MetaVerse era in Semih Gümüş's interview with Fethi Naci from 30 years ago: Fethi Naci, who said, "Postmodernism became a sanctuary for those who want to move away from reality," was how right he was! It is again that same Metin Celal who refreshes postmodern passions in an article immediately after the intention to try to take refuge in reality with Naci's words, with the question, "When will literary awards keep up with the era?" Such inconsistency is mind-boggling... Postmodernism does not attack the fascism of reason over pleasure in vain; it gets results, because it is a full-blown success.

When we go back 50-60 years, we see a parallel design in three different areas: Umberto Eco says we are hearing the footsteps of the New Middle Ages. Toynbee, seeing that technology is being used at very different levels with radical transformations, introduces the concept of postmodernism by pointing out that a post-modern period where armament and war have gained priority has been entered. Coppola with The Godfather and his subsequent films, and Sergio Leone with Once Upon a Time in America and others, display how "mafiocracy" in the business and political world erodes democratic functioning and relations by cutting deals equivalent to the law, and how uncertainty strengthens and becomes dominant. Alongside this, with Foucault, philosophy abandons the concept of the subject and the activist content of modern philosophy, contenting itself with interpreting power relations. Digital technology, in order to form the infrastructure of all these processes, works with a program of consuming historical accumulation and the human being, and hiding reality from society in the so-called information age.

When we reach the Third Millennium, after the postmodern situation ravages philosophy and literature, doesn't the global oligarchy, which becomes more bloated and accelerated as it consumes the world and humanity with all their material and cultural values, impose "mafiocracy" on the human being whose mind is also consumed via mobile phones with 7/24 New Middle Ages nonsense, in alliance with imperialism and Zionism, and officially ignore international law to occupy the Middle East entirely, and attack Iran with an 80-year-old obsession?

QUALITY IS BEING LOST

– "Touch one and hear a thousand sighs," that is what they call this... So, what is the state of Turkish literature as of 2026? When you look at it as a whole, what do you see in this literature, or rather, what kind of literature do you see in this great crowd? Can you make a brief assessment?

SEYYIT NEZIR – After computers entered every home and the internet entered every pocket, although the quantitative expansion Marx envisioned for art seemed at first glance to diminish the elitist narrowing, at the last glance, we witnessed the loss of quality in every sense. While Marx, in the Rheinische Zeitung, used the motto "Art is Dead, Long Live Art!" for art, which he saw as a field where every individual would deal with free and creative orientations in the ample free time that technology would provide, he must have hoped that the level of social consciousness would overcome this, even if he had thought for a moment that the place would be covered by virtual foams like MetaVerse in the name of imagery and that the human being would be buried in 7/24 nonsense.

At this point, we are stuck with the determination of Hegel, the greatest thinker of the modern age, whereas we must overcome it. Namely, according to Kojève, in Hegel, "man desires the desire of himself, that is, he tends to desire the desire of another; that is, he wants to be known-recognized and accepted by another." For this, he enters into a struggle for respect to the death.

The following expression in your question is very terrible: "What kind of literature in this great crowd?" The reality Hegel identified emerges as an inevitable need in the internet age. Today's human appears before us as a digital technology addict, with the delusion that they have seized the opportunity to be seen 7/24. In a world where 9999 out of ten thousand people only read on their mobile phones, thousands of poems, novels, stories, and furthermore, research-studies are published. Tens of thousands of people try every way to stand out as a subject on Facebook. A complete alienation... The artist meets this alienation not by disrupting it with Brecht's alienation effect, but by surrendering to Fischer's tyranny of fascination. If you want me to explain this, as Yılmaz Onay once said, I would have to talk for ten pages. Let me say one sentence, let those who are curious about the rest start from Hegel themselves. But Marx, in the Grundrisse, the draft of Capital that could not be written as a book, summarized it roughly like this: Either we become serfs by bowing to technology, or we shape and use technology with the principles of communism. Today's writer has no knowledge of this fact, the poet has none at all. And those who do, do not care at all. They are now extending their necks to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) guillotine to appear as an award-winning Snow White or Frog Prince in MetaVerse superstitions.

By the way, let me say something, there are many examples, but in one of them, in this line of one of the Black Sea folk songs, how simply Hegel's concern of "desiring to desire" has been expressed, and I noted this exactly in the margin of the book in 2000: "Ask for me from my father".

I know, it has gone on too long. But among so many words, if we are to pass without mentioning this word of Agamben, the most resilient philosopher of our day against the oligarchy, let us delete any paragraph of what I have said, and please use the sentence of today's Socrates, who accounts for the torture inflicted on humanity during the Covid-19 process before the Constitutional Court:

"Artificial Intelligence is dangerous not because it is artificial; but because it thinks outside the subject. The real risk is not the machine, but the human giving up on thinking." (Giorgio Agamben)

However, Agamben also overlooks this fact: Machines determine us at a much more fundamental level than humans shape them. They first give us intellectual and functional habits according to their own structural characteristics, immediately afterward they direct us to the next innovation, and as soon as they do, they surround us with its conditions and impose new habits. In AI, this skill is at a much higher level than all machines and far above the average human's faculties—and it controls and determines the human at every stage in a more uncompromising way, directing them to another innovation.

ENDING THE COLLAPSE IN TURKEY

Do we have such a chance? We have no other chance anyway: It is postmodernism that is collapsing. The realist writer must meet with tradition again... "Poetic Impasse" (Poetik Çıkmaz), recently published with an introduction by Yalçın Armağan, assumes the perspective of a late dead person to form a shell for today's literature and poetry, whose marrow has been consumed by postmodernism. Orhan Kâhyaoğlu, in his "Anthology of Modern Turkish Poetry," had sacrificed our modern poetry, which he probed in a mess of hollow examinations loaded with inconsistencies, for the sake of giving validity to a distortion in the name. Indeed, İsmet Özel and many great poets remained outside this freak. This time, let's say it with his own introductory sentences, "political and social tensions experienced in a historical section where even the start and end years mark coups have led to poetic problems being constantly pushed to the background, and precisely for this reason, subsequent research on the poetry of the period has remained quite limited," assuming this, he himself sets out to research in the name of postmodernism and global oligarchy:

"Since no distinct poetry, movement, or trend formed in those years, I tried to focus on the tendencies and orientations of the new generation of poets here. The focal point of these tendencies was the socialist-realist poetry whose roots extend back to the 1930s."

Consuming the entire historical accumulation with a so-called search for tradition suits postmodernism perfectly, but the experience of communists returning to historical roots and creating a productive breakthrough from there is ignored, not by criticism, but by military coups, that is, by using force. There is a saying in Turkish: Force breaks the game. Indeed, the Second New Poetry also realizes its rise to a more effective poetry by finding the opportunity to get rid of the poisonous pollinations of hollow meaninglessness tendencies and turn to new social and intellectual themes with the May 27 Revolution. The truth is that the scientific, intellectual, and artistic searches between 1960-80 emerged under Cold War conditions, pushed by post-war developments in Europe and all over the world.

Even those who signed the "Yenibütün" Manifesto, which is the harshest stance against the postmodern wave, unfortunately, as Baki Asiltürk said, "could not form an effective point of resistance." But there is also this: Just as Yenibütün said, money, which has one face as a slave and the other as a god (as a slave-god), has wiped out the values of ten thousand years, the accumulation of literature and philosophy, not only in our country but all over the world.

If we speak inspired by Cemal Süreya's poetry, Iran is not included... Those who wish can add China, Russia, Spain, and many other countries to this. After Korea, now the Baltic countries, Hungary, Italy, and England have already turned to this attitude—except for Germany!

The actual traditional processes where Modern Turkish Poetry entered the broadest revolutionary interactions between 1960-80 are defined by "Poetic Impasse" and the book becomes the target of accusations in terms of volume. It is unbelievable! While even the fact that the bed of poetry, which progressed by intersecting at a universal level with the discussions in magazines such as Papirüs, Halkın Dostları, Militan, Sanat Emeği, and Türk Dili, especially Yeni Dergi, in the delta formed around Nâzım's poetry, was formed by coincidences carries great value, saying there is no poetics and innovation is the product of a complete postmodern nihilist mind...

THE INTELLECTUAL'S JOB IS TO PRODUCE CRISIS

– Let's not go back, but you had organized a quadruple interview with Demirtaş Ceyhun, Yalçın Küçük, and Afşar Timuçin... Can you briefly summarize your work with Yalçın Küçük after that interview, now that he has migrated to eternity? What did you want to do with this interview; what were you able to do later with Yalçın Hoca and Demirtaş Ceyhun?

SEYYIT NEZIR – Umberto Eco has a saying that I value very much: The intellectual's job is to produce crisis. Yalçın Küçük is that intellectual. Both in the intellectual history of the left and in his own intellectual adventure, he often creates unexpected views, leaps, thrusts toward the right or left, and returns, but he never wavers. He is in a constant search. A time comes when the experienced situation is now a vicious circle; Küçük suddenly, immediately, now uses an event as an excuse and moves to a brand new situation. Until his book "Imperialist Turkey," I could not fully solve what he wanted to do. At that time, when I came across Eco's definition of an intellectual as one of the first writers and intellectuals to use the term New Middle Ages, I said, "Okay, Yalçın Küçük is exactly this." I said to Demirtaş Ceyhun, "Let's do a group interview, you join too." He said, "You can't get anywhere with him." I said, "Not to arrive, but to think and make others think: Afşar Timuçin also has a 3-volume History of Thought. A period when postmodernism is stalling... It's our turn for a breakthrough, I said." But the three of them seem suspicious to each other. Your mother is good, your father is good, I convinced all three. During the interview, Yalçın Küçük did not receive a signal from them about publishing a new magazine with himself—nor did he see any desire in me. Küçük was not taking seriously the argument that digital technology would bring control over humans and would be used to make humanity techno-slaves, and my questions in this direction; the concept of the New Middle Ages seemed empty to Ceyhun and Timuçin. By the way, I must also say this, it is the right place: Your article "Marketing Rebellion" is also like a plumb line; while criticizing Küçük, it also gives its weight one-to-one.

Here, it is necessary to include the anecdote that all three of them united throughout their lives on the following preliminary principle necessary for the concept of intellectual: The struggle to break the trap in the face of the desire to trick science, philosophy, and art (SPA) for political use never made the real writer, thinker, and intellectuals forget the principle that "the goal of art/science/philosophy is itself," despite tons of money placed in front of them.

– After decades in which a revolutionary left, or rather socialism, has been almost completely cleansed from Turkish literature, how do you answer the question "What is to be done?" today? Indeed, "What is to be done?"

SEYYIT NEZIR – You are also burdening me with the ordeal of answering a question that would not be enough even if many books were written about it. First of all, it is necessary to overcome the disease of appearing on Facebook, at events, in magazines, and showing off one's poetry or words. To be in a position of resistance and war in an environment... that is what is essential. We must try to succeed in making our poetry, our work, belong to everyone, rather than being something that belongs only to ourselves. What does "Poetic Impasse" question, what does it accuse? It questions exactly the peaks of poetry, literature, and art before postmodernism.

Moreover, is there a necessity that every poet, every generation, or movement/trend must bring a brand new discourse? It is a process for every new discourse to mature and reach its peak by becoming competent in a few poets. Modern Turkish poetry, which realized a magnificent stage on the tripod of Fikret, Yahya Kemal, and Haşim, reached universal extension on the tripod of Nâzım, Orhan Veli, and the Second New between 1960-80. Let us not look at the ravings of those who belittle this; let us leave the period, at least let us look at where they have carried their own poetry and see that they have been unable to do anything other than chew the same gum for 40 years.

Since history cannot hide this scandal even if all the digital software in the world comes together, let it not be forgotten that those who give up their identity as Turkish poets at the expense of being patched into the "Anthology of Modern Turkish Poetry" and casting a shadow on Modern Turkish Poetry will be sidelined, and İsmet Özel will be remembered as a Turkish poet with an eight-column headline.

What exit can those who attribute an "impasse" to the revolutionary poet show to today's poet against the impasse of Artificial Intelligence and UPA (Unmanned Poetry Apparatus) other than a blind man's cane?

QUESTIONS: OSMAN ÇUTSAY