Immigration

When I write, I immigrate into the language. In other words, into sound, nature, and meaning. As a Turkish poet, Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca said, Turkish is the flag of my voice. I immigrate into the truth of my language when I write.

When I write, I immigrated out of the simplicity of others. I know this sentence demands an explanation. In my hometown, a small Anatolian city in the middle of Anatolia where people depend on agriculture mostly, the Turkish that my relatives speak is simple, practical, and shallow. They only use some part of Turkish, which suffice to enable daily conversations. After a while, I noticed that it is never enough for literature as a writer should know the delicate ways of expression, the dark corners of the language, the old and the new; so that he/she can find the necessary forms of expression for different situations where elasticity, elegance or rhythm are needed.

Linguistic Borders

There are linguistic borders in my use of Turkish that can be summarized in two different points.

First is that in terms of identity, a notion which I consider very important in the career of a writer, the language that I use has borders which I don’t want to cross. This is evident in my choice of words, especially. I know dozens of words that were used in Ottoman Turkish and poetry, words some of which are still used by my grandfather and mother, words with various meanings and even theological connotations; but I don’t use them in my writing. Some of those words were only used by the small aristocratic people of the palace anyway, and I’m not Ottoman. The identity I assume has a modernist aspect. I prefer the contemporary versions of those words in Turkish.
(I should note that I don’t completely agree with what has been done during the first decades of the Republic of Turkey to modernize the language. During that time, the responsible institution tried to eliminate many words while trying to replace them with words with no roots, words that are made up or ancient. Some of them have found their place in the language, but most of them did not and some of them exist alongside the old versions. For example, ‘city’ is equivalent to ‘şehir’ in Turkish, a word that has Arabic origin, while ‘kent’ is a relatively new word which has been used since the 1940s.)

Secondly, there are linguistic borders that I prefer to cross from time to time. These are the grammatical borders, and the rules that determine the use of the auxiliary parts we add to the words according to the time they imply, or the negative/positive meaning that we intend to deliver. While writing, sometimes I make small changes to the words and the auxiliary parts. These changes end up enriching the meaning or the metaphor.