Halide Edib Hampstead’de: İngilizlerin İşgalci ve Ev Sahibi Olarak Temsili
Nagihan HaliloğluBu makale Halide Edib [Adıvar]’ın (1884-1964) İngiltere ile olan ilişkisini yazılarındaki ev sahibi, misafir ve işgalci kavramları üzerinden inceleyecektir. Halide Edib’in İngiltere ile olan ilişkisinde bu kavramların hem tarihi hem de söylemsel karşılıkları vardır. Bu kavramların söylemsel manalarına Haswell ve Haswell’in geliştirdiği misafirperverlik ve yazarlık çerçevesinden bakılacaktır. Haswell ve Haswell bu çerçeveyi sömürge ilişkileri üzerinden inşa etmiş olsa da, tespitlerini sömürge ilişkisi olmayan durumlarda da gözlemlemek mümkündür. İngiliz ordusunun İstanbul işgaline tanıklık etmiş, yazılarında Hindistan’a dair örnekler veren Halide Edib’in eserlerindeki İngiliz figürü genel edebiyat tarihinden tanıdığımız sömürgeci figürüyle örtüşmektedir. Yazarın en sevimsiz İngiliz karakteri olan Ateşten Gömlek’teki gazeteci Mr. Cook sömürgeci zihniyetini temsil eder. Halide Edib’in kahramanı Ayşe de okuyucuya bu sömürgeci söyleme nasıl karşılık verilmesi gerektiğini gösterir. Halide Edib böylelikle bir çeşit “metin ile karşılık verme” formülü geliştirmiş olur. Yazarın bu formülü elbette kendi ev sahibi, misafir, işgalci anlayışı ve yine kendi enternasyonalizm ve milliyetçilik anlayışı etrafında gelişir. Kariyerinin bir döneminde İngiltere’de sürgün hayatı geçirmek zorunda Halide Edib’in hayatındaki işgalci figürüne misafir olması bu kategorileri tekrar tekrar gözden geçirmesine sebep olur. İngiltere’deyken işgal anılarını İngilizce kaleme alan Halide Edib Türkiye’ye döndüğünde bu sefer İngilizleri Türklere anlatma görevini üstlenir. Bir İngiliz Edebiyatı okuyucusu ve Türk Edebiyatı yazarı olarak Halide Edib Haswell ve Haswell’in geliştirdiği ev sahibi-yazar ve misafir-okuyucu kategorilerini ters yüz eder.
Halide Edib in Hampstead: Representations of the English as Occupier and the Host
Nagihan HaliloğluThis article traces Halide Edib’s interactions with England and the English and the ways in which she represented them in writing. I argue her representations were governed by conceptions of host, guest and occupier- a triumvirate of relations that is informed by Haswell and Haswell’s understanding of hospitality and authoring. I examine how Halide Edib’s understanding of occupier and host, nationalism and internationalism were shaped as she witnessed the British occupation of Istanbul, as she set about writing columns for the independence of Turkey, maintaining her cosmopolitan approach. Halide Edib expressed her views of the English in fiction, memoir, and newspaper article format, dealing with different aspects of a nation in different contexts. The first impressions of England she had in 1909 remained with Halide Edib for a long time, as evidenced in the newspaper articles she wrote in 1939. Both during her earlier visit and years in exile, England introduced her to an international world of letters which she embraced for the rest of her life, and which led her to lecture in places such as the US and India. This article investigates the various methods she uses in describing the English throughout her career, in a way that both consolidates her initial impressions and recognizes the changing context.
This paper considers Halide Edib [Adıvar]’s (1884-1964) writing through her relationship with England, as her narratives straddle between the categories of host, guest and occupier. These categories have historical as well as discursive meanings in Halide Edib’s relationship with England. Halide Edib is a figure whose life runs through the end of the Ottoman Empire to the first years of the Turkish republic. She was a writer, warrior and politician who fell out with Atatürk and spent the years of 1926-1936 in exile abroad, mostly in England. Halide Edib’s father was a proponent of the Anglo-Saxon model of education and employed an Anglo-Indian governess, and her intellectual development was bilingual from the start. Halide Edib’s later records in writing her interactions with the English at this early age, followed by her impressions of London in 1909 as a guest, and then in the 1920 as occupiers in Istanbul. This is what complicates the categories of host, guest and occupier. I delineate the discursive meanings attached to these categories using Haswell and Haswell’s understanding of hospitality and authoring. Although their framework is a colonial one, Haswell and Haswell’s methodology applies to Halide Edib’s writing in so far as she both experiences Istanbul’s occupation by the British and is often inspired by the Indian example. I argue that as a reader of English literature and writer of Turkish literature, Halide Edib transformed the host-author, guest-reader complexes that Haswell and Haswell so fruitfully map out. Her most unsympathetic English character, the journalist Mr Cook in Ateşten Gömlek represents the English colonial mind-set, and Halide Edib’s heroine Ayşe reveals to us how one ought to fight this colonialist discourse: thus Halide Edib also formulates a nascent mode of ‘writing back’. This mode is very much connected to her understanding of occupier and host, nationalism and internationalism. Her mode of ‘writing back’ was shaped as she witnessed the British occupation Istanbul and wrote columns for the independence of Turkey, meanwhile maintaining her cosmopolitan approach. I argue that when we consider the discourse she uses in her writing from the start, there is no irony in the fact that it was in London where she found a literary home when she had to leave Turkey. Her writing insists that host-guest relations become meaningless under occupation, and that only during peacetime can nations and individuals develop meaningful relationships. Halide Edib’s work reminds us to consider host- guest- occupier relationships in two registers: the relationship between states and the relationship between individuals. This becomes very apparent when she returns to Turkey to write newspaper articles under the heading ‘England and the English’ in which she reports her personal experience of England, without ever mentioning the occupation of Istanbul in the 20s. She prefaces her observations and encyclopaedic knowledge of England with the caveat that one can never generalize the characteristics of a nation. Still, her observation of English institutions gives her a model through which one can assess Turkey’s attempts at becoming a new state and nation. It is particularly the English Parliament that comes across as a talking point and inspiration in her non-fiction. In her memoir The Turkish Ordeal, which is an indictment of the British occupation’s violence and Mustafa Kemal’s later despotic tendencies, it is still the image of the British Parliament that she and her husband evoke when they are discussing how best to respond to the closure of the Ottoman parliament. On her return to Turkey, not only does she inform the general public about the English through her newspaper columns, but also becomes the reader-occupier in the English language as founder of the English Literature department at Istanbul University. Through her representation of the English Halide Edib gets her message across about occupation, colonialism, but also the importance of institutions for a country to be successful. She uses the categories of host, guest and occupier in her narratives variously while she is perfectly aware of the role she has to presume in different points in her life. And these roles have been as various as cosmopolitan Ottoman writer, member of the international republic of letters, and an intellectual that translates between cultures.
