The Construction of the Self in Nigâr Hanım’s Diaries: Writing the Female Subject in the Late Ottoman Period
Hüsniye KoçAs an important woman writer, Nigâr binti Osman (1862–1918) contributed to social and cultural change in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire through her intellect and her writings. From her early work onward, Nigâr Hanım cared about the issue of “writing herself.” Her diaries, kept from 1887 to 1918 evidence this: the diaries are constantly cited but have not been transliterated into the Latin alphabet. From an upper-class woman’s perspective, her writings convey firsthand impressions of the Ottoman Empire’s rapid political and social changes during the nineteenth century. Her diaries reveal her position, daily life, emotions, literary preferences, writing adventures, and quests. From these texts, Nigâr Hanım’s experience of life can be discussed as memory, experience, and testimony. In this study specifically, her diaries will be examined in detail as to construction of the self through this daily written genre, through writing by the female subject, and subsequent inclusion in public literature.
Nigâr Hanım’ın Günlüklerinde Benlik İnşası: Geç Osmanlı Dönemi’nde Kadın Özneyi Yazmak
Hüsniye KoçNigâr binti Osman (1862-1918), eserleriyle ve entelektüel kişiliğiyle on dokuzuncu yüzyılda Osmanlı’da yaşanan sosyal ve kültürel değişime katkıda bulunmuş önemli kadın yazarlardandır. Nigâr Hanım, ilk eserlerinden itibaren “kendini yazmak” meselesini önemsemiş bir yazardır. Bunun en önemli delillerinden biri kaynaklarda kendisine sürekli atıf yapılan ancak Latin harflerine aktarılmadığından dolayı içeriğine dair detaylı değerlendirmelerin yapılamadığı günlükleridir. Nigâr Hanım’ın 1887 ile 1918 yılları arasında tutmuş olduğu günlükleri, Osmanlı Devleti’nde siyasal ve toplumsal düzeyde hızlı bir değişimin yaşandığı bir dönemi birincil ağızdan aktarmaktadır. Böylece bu metinlerde yer alan kişisel bilgiler, “hafıza”, “deneyim”, “tanıklık” kavramları bağlamında tartışılabilmektedir. Ayrıca bu günlükler, Osmanlı üst sınıfına ait entelektüel bir kadının ve yazarın gündelik yaşamını, duygularını, edebi tercihlerini, yazma serüvenini, arayışını ve değişen siyasal ve toplumsal şartlar karşısındaki konumunu aynı anda takip edebilme imkânı sunmaktadır. Bu çalışmada, Nigâr Hanım’ın günlükleri, günlük türünün “benlik inşasına” sunduğu verilerden hareketle “benliğin kurulumu”, “kadın öznenin yazımı” ve “edebiyat kamusuna dâhil olma” meseleleri bağlamında detaylıca incelenecektir.
The nineteenth century encompassed a modernization period in the political, economic, and cultural realms of the Ottoman Empire. During this period, “femininity” and “female identity” became important symbols of modernization, during and after which women used new opportunities to express and represent the space offered through authorship and created a vast body of literature.
However, most texts produced by women writers were significant due to their guiding nature; these texts could not assume their places in the literary world, except for the few published, because they had to be transliterated into the Latin alphabet, which requires extensive archival work. Thus, studies of the nineteenth century Ottoman literature by women in recent years have focused on reintroducing formerly excluded women’s texts into academic study and the history of literature.
One of the important women writers during the period (1862–1918) was Nigâr binti Osman who contributed significantly to (the history of) Turkish literature both through her work and culturally rich life. Beginning with publication in 1887 and continuing to the end of her life, Nigâr Hanım wrote in a broad range of genres—letters, articles, essays, poetry, stories, and drama. She followed Ottoman poetry closely and shared the social environment with people from various religions and nations living in the Ottoman Empire. She also supported women’s consciousness, which began its social rise in the nineteenth century, and from her earliest work, she wrote in her own voice and from her identity as a woman.
One of the most important examples of Nigâr Hanım’s work is the diaries or journals she kept from 1887 to 1918, donated by her sons after she died to the Asiyan Museum. In these journals, she chose, as a woman, to refer to her internal problems rather than to social issues, to her relationships with her environment and her family, and to effects of political and economic changes on her life. Indeed, Nigâr Hanım’s diaries offer firsthand information about the writer’s inner world, her close circle, daily habits, literary relations, experience as a writer and reader, and story of life as a woman. The main motivation for these diaries was the helplessness and loneliness she felt about negative events in her life. She described her diaries as a form of “emotion emptying” and found much consolation in keeping a journal. However, the diaries share not only feelings of individual loneliness but also the content of what she wrote. In fact, she read her journal to her father every morning, and certain lines imply that she expected that someday, someone would read and understand the diaries as a whole. Strengthening this idea is that she left the locked drawer containing the diaries to her sons, on condition that it would be opened fifty years after her death. Nigâr Hanım took audience-oriented notes and expected eventual publication, revealing her aesthetic concerns. In addition, she attended to “writing the self” and recorded her own writer’s story.
The diary, considered a sub-genre of modern autobiographical narratives or self-narratives, coincides with the idea that what belongs to the inner world comes together with the process of individualization and allows the modern subject to establish her belonging and legitimacy. In this context, when the diary genre’s genesis and historical conditions are discussed, subjectivity, sincerity, and autonomy emerge as predominant motives. When Nigâr Hanım began to write her diaries, she preferred Western literature’s nineteenth century tradition of recording the individual’s inner world. She gave her name to Jurnalim (My Journal), cared about “writing herself” for over thirty years, and intended to share her thoughts with the world. In the diaries, the woman writer dates the text’s beginning, confronts herself, questions her experiences, exposes her feelings, and at the end, signs herself “Nigâr binti Osman.” Important in the diaries is that she used her ability to think about and understand her life and further used her talent to record these thoughts for posterity so that they can be discussed as memory, experience, and testimony. In short, she had a motive for recording, disclosing, confessing, announcing, healing, legitimizing, publicizing, and immortalizing life as a woman.
