Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

“MEMED , MY HAWK” by Yashar Kemal [birth name Kemak Sadik Gokcell].  First published in Turkish in 1955 as Ince Memed ; translated into English by Edouard Roditi and published in 1961 as Memed, My Hawk

            Readers of this blog will be aware that my “Something Old’s” are often books that I take off my shelves and read because I have a very large library and too many books that I haven’t got around to reading. Some book-spines look at me reproachfully, asking me when I am going to read them. Case in point – Yashar Kemal’s Memed, My Hawk has been looking at me sternly for decades. So recently I finally took off the shelf my paperback copy of Memed, My Hawk and read – with great pleasure as it happened, because it moves at a galloping pace. Also, of course, it was related to Turkey, and I had just finished reading Alexander Christie-Miller's account of modern Turkey To the City.

            I’ll reverse my standard habit of first giving you a detailed synopsis, and will instead deal first with the novel’s author. Yashar Kemal (1923-2015) was born in Anatolia, the central part of Turkey near the Taurus mountains. Unlike most Anatolians in the village where he grew up, his family were partly Kurdish by ancestry. As a result, in later life Kemal championed the idea that the Kurdish province should become an autonomous state. The Turkish government were angered by this and he was often threatened with jail or having his books supressed. His first two novels were confiscated and destroyed. For a couple of years he took refuge in Sweden. Some of Kemal’s grandparents had taken to banditry in the early part of the twentieth century, and bandits often became folk-heroes, lauded by the peasants for fighting against the oppressive landlords who ruled them. Yashar Kemal was very left-wing. For many years he was a member of the semi-legal Turkish Communist Party, but he resigned from the party in 1968 when the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia. He remained a fervent socialist. In all, he wrote 17 novels, many of them based on rural and folklore themes. But it was only Memed, My Hawk that gained international fame. On the basis of Memed, My Hawk, Kemal was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was passed over. Nevertheless, he received many international awards. Despite his criticisms of the Turkish government, when he died he was given what amounted to a state funeral and was officially praised as one of Turkey’s greatest writers. After reading his best-known novel Memed, My Hawk, I was surprised to discover the Kemal wrote three more novels about the bandit Memed, but they seem to have not gained the traction of the first Memed novel.

            So to the inevitable synopsis. Memed, My Hawk is set in the 1920s and 1930s, when Yashar Kemal would have been a little boy. Despite the fact that the Sultan and Ottomans had been overthrown in 1922 and Turkey was now a republic, the conditions for the peasants were still basically feudal. They were serfs. Landlords controlled vast swathes of land and had the right to tax and punish their serfs. The official police always sided with the landlords. In this context, bandits were the only force that could outfox the landlords and sometimes relieve the peasants – not that all bandits, hiding in the mountains, were so charitable. Some were just out for plunder.

The novel opens with Memed, a very young boy, running away from his master, the landlord Abdi Agha who controls five villages. Abdi Agha has regularly beaten the boy and forced him to do heavy work. The boy first appears to us covered in blood from the slashing thistles he has had to run through in his escape. Thistles become a motif in this novel, representing the barriers to progress. Memed is taken in by a sympathetic family and for a while recuperates and is able to work less strenuously as a goatherd. But Abdi Agha catches up with him, forces him back to day-long work in the fields, and punishes him by allowing him and his mother to have only starvation rations…. but some villagers surreptitiously feed them. There is at least some solidarity in the crowd.

Reaching adolescence, Memed falls in love with the girl Hatche and the feeling is mutual. The trouble is, Hatche is betrothed to Abdi Agha’s nephew. So Memed and Hatche decide to elope and run away to the mountains. But they are chased through the forest by Abdi Agha’s gang, including his angry nephew. Memed has firearms. He shoots and kills the nephew and just misses Abdi Agha, grazing him. But the landlord is able to capture Hatche and has her dragged back to the village where, by the perjury of some of the village, she is accused of having attempted to kill Abdi Agha and she is thrown into jail. Meanwhile Memed, who is still deeply in love with her, is now 18 years old.

Memed decides to join a bandit group in the mountains -  the gang of “Mad” Durdu, noted for his ruthlessness but also sometimes provisioning desperate peasants. At first Memed admires him, and joins him in a long [and detailed] battle with the pursuing police. Durdu seems invulnerable, managing to escape from any ambush. But Memed is disgusted when Durdu accepts food and hospitality from a nomadic tribe… and then proceeds to rob them at rifle-point of all their money, their clothes and their bedding. This is not a bandit who cares for the poor.

Memed  leaves Durdu’s band, joins up with two comrades, Jabbar and Sergeant Rejep, and now tries to act in the interests of the peasants… which means he will not hold up poor travellers who are in need,  but he will at last catch up with Abdi Agha and he will free Hatche. He makes a raid on Abdi Agha and believes he has killed Abdi Agha in a fire he has set… but he hasn’t. Abdi Agha goes for help to a far more powerful landlord than he, Ali Safa Bey, and now Memed is chased through the forest and mountains by police, Ali Safa Bey’s forces and the fickle. There are many skirmishes. He becomes legendary for his ability to escape capture. At one point, Memed is able to slip into his village of origin and advise the peasants that they should take over all the fields and burn down the thistle bushes that are hindering their agriculture. He is able at last to spring both Hatche and her mother from jail and finds an apparently impregnable hide-out in the highest mountains. When finally he is trapped, and after Hatche’s tragic death, Memed is able to talk his way out of it and make his case. Then he once again slips away and ends up as a legend.

Now stop being appalled, please. I know from my brief and inadequate synopsis, in which I have ignored many characters in the novel,  you may be thinking that this is merely an action story, more-or-less a Turkish cowboy tale. Not a bit of it. First, please note that Memed is a character who grows and develops. Yashar Kemal carefully presents him in a calculated sequence. First, the intimidated child. Then the adolescent who falls in love. Then the young man who can take on the responsibility of eloping. Then the fighter who becomes a bandit for the sake of being a bandit. Then developing a conscience and realising that the violence he uses has to have a purpose – benefitting other people, especially the down-trodden. Seen in this perspective, the novel has been interpreted as a Bildungsroman. At the same time, of course, Yashar Kemal is telling a socialist story. If the peasantry are not able to free themselves from servitude, then they have to be guided by some strong and charismatic person who can do extraordinary things – like Memed telling them to burn the thistle bushes and take over the land. The dominance of a charismatic leader has often led to misery in real history, but at least it takes a specific person to spark off a revolution. Note that in Memed, My Hawk we are often shown peasants who are fickle in their allegiance – sometimes admiring Memed and sometimes changing heart when the landlords persuade them. They need real guidance. This at least is Yashar Kemal’s collectivist idea.

At the same time, in writing about serfs and peasants Yashar Kemal deliberately uses a style, half epic and half folklore. The skirmishes and fights are presented as heroic, like Homer, like theThousand and One Nights, wherein Memed is sometimes able to shoot apparently endless ammunition, toss hand-grenades with ease. and when surrounded he can still escape. When he and Hatche and Hatche’s mother take refuge in a convenient cave on a snowy mountain, which has mats to sit on and a baby to nurse, we are in the land of fable. Yet, in the passages set in the villages, we have downright peasant dialogue, reminding me of such peasant novels as Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine or Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and many others. Novels of earthy things and painful things, regardless of the nation.

Just a few things to round off my chatter. First,  the novel’s title is not explained until very late in the novel, when an old man called Osman says that Memed reminds him of his faithful hawk, which never stole from people. He begins to call Memed “Memed , my hawk”, the sign of a righteous man. Second, in 1987 Peter Ustinov – best known in his comic roles – directed and performed in a film version of Memed, My Hawk with an all-English cast. It bombed and has been widely panned. Third, this matter of the word “peasant”. It seems to upset some people who think it is an insult. Rightly speaking “peasant” simply means a person who works the land but does not own it. Once, on this blog, I mentioned that the Red Army in the Second World War was largely made up of peasants. A reader rebuked me for using such a degrading word. He seemed to be even more annoyed when I pointed out that the U.S.S.R. proudly claimed its society was made up of three classes: Peasants, Workers and Intellectuals.