Yasar Kemal, a feather of land and violence – Liberation

Despite the years and his blind eye, Yasar Kemal has continued almost to the end of writing in pencil on large white sheets that had to be his autobiography. Died at 92 years, this descendant of ancient Kurdish lords of famous bandits and wandering poets wanted to testify to a long life of fighting and commitments. “I am a coward and I hate heroes, but like many men I can not help me to run in front of my fear,” liked to recall the great Turkish writer. For a long time the only known abroad, this prolific novelist was translated into many languages ​​including Chinese and Macedonian. He was approached several times for the Nobel Prize, the first Turkish winner Orhan Pamuk was in 2006, a talented writer whose works have neither the power nor the resonance those of his predecessor.

Her writings and his political activism against injustice and brutality of power, especially against the Kurdish minority, have earned Yasar Kemal over twenty trial and in prison. This is also in court that, moreover, saw the first public reading of the first of its new, Bebek (newborn). “The judge read very well and told me after the hearing that he had enjoyed the story” says with a smile Yasar Kemal, who was arrested for the first time in 17 years, because the suspect Communist sympathies. “All our poems, our epics and our songs reflect a secular oppression” , assured the writer, who has always maintained his love of freedom and the mosaic of cultures and peoples the Anatolian plateau.

“Memed thin” literary classic

His most famous work, the Saga Memed thin (Gallimard Quarto and Folio), is a world literary classic of revolt. Memed is a young hungry peasant justice as much as bread leaking misery and working the soil “with thistles snatch your leg like a dog” . He refuses the arrogance of the Agha, the lord, and went underground remember this is a dead end. “Never bandit will be master of the world” says an old Turkish song.

The fictional universe of Yasar Kemal rooted in the earth and violence. The earth is that of Cukurova, the great southern plain at the foot of the Taurus Mountains, facing the Mediterranean where his parents settled themselves, Kurds fleeing eastern Anatolia and the thrust of the Russian forces during World War I World. The violence is also that of the vendetta, an obsession with the price of blood in which he grew up after the assassination of his father, stabbed in the mosque before his eyes when he was 4 years old. In shock, he remained stutterer 12 years

“As a child I had a part of me that bathed in the blood and the other in the spell of dreams.; First haunted by horse thieves and bandits smeared with blood, the other invested by great storytellers epics “, told Yasar Kemal, who was self-taught and then shepherd tractor driver before launching the Journalism Cumhuriyet , the newspaper of the Turkish left at the end of the 50s, and then the novel. French and English perfect Thilda his wife, who died in 2001 from an old Jewish family in Istanbul, translated much of his work and contributed to his worldwide fame.

The First World War “original tragedy of Turkish modernity”

Yasar Kemal was first a great storyteller in a stuffer language fertilized by the popular speech. His long wanderings and multiple trades have introduced him to both men nature. In Memed , he narrated an agrarian Turkey, the ever populated mountains of eagles and wolves. He saw the changes, the changeover to the industrial era. “I was witness to a tragedy” willingly repeated the novelist who was an ecologist from the start, noting that aghas of his youth have now become factory managers or holding companies. His last great saga, and the Euphrates was carrying blood, is going on at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. “This is the original tragedy of Turkish modernity that continues to haunt our memories: wars, forced population displacement, massacres, genocides, but also the destruction of nature,” expliquait- he said.

When he was staying in Paris, he was still contemplating Notre Dame. “Like Mount Ararat, it is simply there, as eternal in its power. This is the most beautiful statue that is, “ explain this mystic without God, nourished by the infinite despair of the people of the Anatolian plateau, who loved the French capital as he loves Stendhal, he read and reread constantly . It is found in the revolt of Julien Sorel as in the quest of Don Quixote since young self-taught country, he discovered the great European literature together with commitment.