Yaşar Kemal

Life

Kemal was born to Sadık and his wife Halime on 6 October 1923 in Hemite (now Gökçedam), a hamlet in the province of Osmaniye in southern Turkey. His parents were from Van and came into Çukurova during the First World War. Kemal had a difficult childhood, because he lost his right eye in a knife accident when his father was slaughtering a sheep on Eid al-Adha. Moreover, when he was five years old he witnessed his father being stabbed to death by his adoptive son Yusuf while praying in a mosque. These traumatic experiences left Kemal with a speech impediment, which lasted until he was twelve years old. At nine Kemel began school in a neighboring village, and later he continued his formal education in Kadirli, Osmaniye Province.

Kemal was a locally noted bard before he began school but was unappreciated by his widowed mother until he composed an elegy on the death of one of her eight brothers, all of whom were bandits. However, he forgot it and became interested in writing as a means to record his work when he questioned an itinerant peddler, who was doing his accounts. Ultimately, his village paid his way to university in Istanbul.

He worked for a while for rich farmers, guarding their river water against other farmers' unauthorized irrigation. However, instead he taught the poor farmers how to steal the water undetected, by taking it at night.

Later he worked as a letter-writer, then as a journalist, and finally as a novelist. He said that the Turkish police confiscated his first two novels.

When Kemal was visiting Akdamar Island in 1951, he saw the island's Holy Cross Church being destroyed. Using his contacts to the public, he helped stop the destruction. (In 2005 the church was restored by the Turkish government.)

In 1962 Kemal joined the Workers Party of Turkey and "served as one of its leaders until quitting after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968".

In 2005 Kemal wrote a new introduction to his novel Memed, My Hawk, wherein he prognosticated that "...confronted with the massacre of nature, that great scourge of our age, we will create myths of fear as our ancestors did."

Marriages

In 1952, Yaşar Kemal married Thilda Serrero, a member of a prominent Sephardi Jewish family in Istanbul. Her grandfather, Jak Mandil Pasha, was the chief physician of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. She translated 17 of her husband’s works into the English language. Thilda predeceased Yaşar on 17 January 2001 (aged 78) from pulmonary complications at a hospital in Istanbul, and was laid to rest at Zincirlikuyu Cemetery. Thilda was also survived by her son Raşit Göğçel and a grandchild.

Yaşar Kemal remarried on 1 August 2002 to Ayşe Semiha Baban, a lecturer for public relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul. She was educated at the American University of Beirut, Bosphorus University and Harvard University.

Later years and death

On 14 January 2015 Kemal was hospitalized at Istanbul University's Çapa Medical Faculty, due to respiratory insufficiency. During the afternoon of 28 February 2015, in the intensive care unit, where he had been admitted owing to multiple organ dysfunction syndrome, he died. Following a religious funeral service held at Teşvikiye Mosque, attended by former Turkish president Abdullah Gul, political party leaders, high-ranking officials and an enormous assembly of mourners, he was laid to rest on 2 March 2015 beside his first wife Thilda's grave in Zincirlikuyu Cemetery. Kemal is survived by his wife Ayşe Semiha Baban and his adoptive son, visual artist Ahmet Güneştekin.

Works

Kemal published his first book Ağıtlar ("Ballads") in 1943, which was a compilation of folkloric themes. This book brought to light many long forgotten rhymes and ballads. He had begun to collect these ballads at the age of 16. His first stories Bebek ("The Baby"), Dükkancı ("The Shopkeeper") and Memet ile Memet ("Memet and Memet") were published in 1950. He penned his first tale Pis Hikaye ("The Dirty Story") in 1944, while he was serving in the military, in Kayseri. Then he published his book of short stories Sarı Sıcak ("Yellow Heat") in 1952. The initial point of his works was the toil of the people of the Çukurova plains and he based the themes of his writings on the lives and sufferings of these people. Kemal used the legends and stories of Anatolia extensively as the basis for his works.

He received international acclaim with the publication of Memed, My Hawk (Turkish: İnce Memed) in 1955. In İnce Memed, Kemal criticizes the fabric of the society through a legendary hero, a protagonist, who flees to the mountains as a result of the oppression of the Aghas. One of the most famous writers in Turkey, Kemal was noted for his command of the language and lyrical description of bucolic Turkish life. He was awarded 19 literary prizes during his lifetime and nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973.

His 1955 novel Teneke was adapted into a theatrical play, which was staged for almost one year in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the country where he lived for about two years in the late 1970s. Italian composer Fabio Vacchi adapted the same novel with the original title into an opera of three acts, which premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milano, Italy in 2007.

Kemal was a major contributor to Turkish literature in the early years after the language's recreation as a literary language following Atatürk's Reforms of the 1930s.

Literature prizes

Decorations

Honorary Doctorates