Citation:
Date Published:
5 June 2020Abstract:
This article examines the collocation of the Dersim Rebellion (1937–1938) in Eastern Anatolia and Turkey’s entry into the Korean War (1950–1953) in Erendiz Atasü’s 1995 autobiographical novel Dağın Öteki Yüzü (The Other Side of the Mountain, 2000). Atasü writes in her “Letter to the Reader” that the protagonist Vicdan is based on her mother, who in 1935 climbed Mount Uludağ in Bursa with her brothers to celebrate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s foundation of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923. Vicdan’s unnamed daughter-narrator, however, idealizes neither her Kemalist mother, who supports the armed conflict in Dersim, nor her veteran uncles (Burhan, Reha, and Cumhur): Burhan’s guilty conscience connects the causalities of the Korean War to his murder of the rebels in Dersim; Reha remembers the woman he raped in Dersim; the disabled Cumhur suppresses his anger at the government that forsakes lives in Korea for NATO membership. Atasü’s circular narrative that travels backward and forward in time portrays history not as progressive but as repetitive due to Turkey’s involvement in war. The Other Side of the Mountain narrates the silenced “other side” of the Republic by recalling Turkey’s entry into the Korean War and the armed conflict in Eastern Anatolia.
March 2020: Ayşe Naz Bulamur is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has articles on the works of British, American, and Turkish writers, such as Margaret Fuller, Hannah W. Foster, A. S. Byatt, Elif Şafak, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Martin Amis. She is the author of Victorian Murderesses: The Politics of Female Violence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Her research focuses on postcolonial theory, urban theory, feminist criticism, and nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction.