Imagined Turks: The Tatar as the Other in Halide Edip's Novels

Ottomans – Crimea – Jochids Studies in Honour of Mária Ivanics Edited by István Zimonyi Szeged – 2020 This publication was financially supported by the MTA–ELTE–SZTE Silk Road Research Group Cover illustration: Calligraphy of Raniya Muhammad Abd al-Halim Text: And say, “O my Lord! advance me in knowledge” (Q 20, 114) Letters and Words. Exhibition of Arabic Calligraphy. Cairo 2011, 72. © University of Szeged, Department of Altaic Studies, Printed in 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the author or the publisher. Printed by: Innovariant Ltd., H-6750 Algyő, Ipartelep 4. ISBN: 978 963 306 747 5 (printed) ISBN: 978 963 306 748 2 (pdf) Contents Preface .........................................................................................................................9 Klára Agyagási К вопросу о хронологии изменения -d(r)- > -δ(r)- > -y(r)- в волжско-булгарских диалектах ..............................................................................13 László Balogh Notes to the History of the Hungarians in the 10th Century ......................................23 Hendrik Boeschoten Bemerkungen zu der neu gefundenen Dede Korkut-Handschrift, mit einer Übersetzung der dreizehnten Geschichte ...................................................35 Csáki Éva Kaukázusi török népek kálváriája a népdalok tükrében ............................................47 Éva Csató and Lars Johanson On Discourse Types and Clause Combining in Däftär-i Čingiz-nāmä......................59 Balázs Danka A Misunderstood Passage of Qādir ʿAli-beg J̌ālāyirī’s J̌āmī at-Tawārīχ..................71 Géza Dávid The Formation of the sancak of Kırka (Krka) and its First begs ...............................81 Mihály Dobrovits Pofu Qatun and the Last Decade of the Türk Empire................................................97 Pál Fodor A Descendant of the Prophet in the Hungarian Marches Seyyid Ali and the Ethos of Gaza ............................................................................101 Tasin Gemil The Tatars in Romanian Historiography .................................................................111 Csaba Göncöl Remarks on the Čingiz-nāmä of Ötämiš Ḥāǰǰī.........................................................123 Funda Güven Imagined Turks: The Tatar as the Other in Halide Edip’s Novels ..........................133 Murat Işık The Animal Names in the Book of Leviticus of the Gözleve Bible (1841). Part I: Mammal, Insect and Reptile Species ............................................................145 Henryk Jankowski The Names of Professions in Historical Turkic Languages of the Crimea .............165 Mustafa S. Kaçalin Joannes Lippa: Türkçe Hayvan Masalları ...............................................................181 Bayarma Khabtagaeva On Some Taboo Words in Yeniseian ......................................................................199 Éva Kincses-Nagy Nine Gifts.................................................................................................................215 Raushangul Mukusheva The Presence of Shamanism in Kazakh and Hungarian Folklore ...........................229 Sándor Papp The Prince and the Sultan. The Sublime Porte’s Practice of Confirming the Power of Christian Vassal Princes Based on the Example of Transylvania............239 Benedek Péri Places Full of Secrets in 16th Century Istanbul: the Shops of the maʿcūncıs ..........255 Claudia Römer “Faḳīr olub perākende olmaġa yüz ṭutmışlar” the Ottoman Struggle аgainst the Displacement of Subjects in the Early Modern Period .........................269 András Róna-Tas A Birthday Present for the Khitan Empress ............................................................281 Uli Schamiloglu Was the Chinggisid Khan an Autocrat? Reflections on the Foundations of Chinggisid Authority ........................................295 Hajnalka Tóth Entstehung eines auf Osmanisch verfassten Friedenskonzepts Ein Beitrag zu der Vorgeschichte des Friedens von Eisenburg 1664 ......................311 Вадим Трепавлов Мосκовсκий Чаган хан ..........................................................................................325 Беата Варга «Крымская альтернатива» – военно-политический союз Богдана Хмельницкого с Ислам-Гиреем III (1649–1653) ..................................331 Barış Yılmaz Deconstruction of the Traditional Hero Type in Murathan Mungan’s Cenk Hikayeleri .....................................................................339 Илъя Зайцев – Решат Алиев Фрагмент ярлыка (мюльк-наме) крымского хана Сахиб-Гирея ........................355 István Zimonyi Etil in the Däftär-i Čingiz-nāmä ..............................................................................363 Imagined Turks: The Tatar as the Other in Halide Edip’s Novels Funda Güven Introduction “Tatar” and “Turk” have both been controversial terms in world literature. Western literature has referred to Mongols as “Tatars,” while Russians have used the term “Tatar” for their Turkic subjects. The name “Turk,” also, has been used by Westerners for all Muslims living in Europe. Both terms have had an insulting meaning since they were used to define the "other" group or nation. When ethnic nationalism launched in the late Ottoman period, ideologists had long discussions on the name of a new nation. They decided to call it Turk, but they did not know how to define who the “Turk” was. Halide Edip got actively involved in discussions starting from 1911. Having been brought up in a cosmopolitan family setting, and having a liberal education, she welcomed all groups while she used “Turk” as an umbrella term to depict the characters in her novels. However, she needed an ethnic group to focus on since new nationalism was seeking its primordial ties within an ethnic Turkic community. She became acquainted with the Tatar community who came to Istanbul for education and settled there, as well as the Tatar community living in Anatolia, during her service to the Turkish army and the inspection after the War of Independence as well. She did not hide her admiration for modest, educated, and caring Tatar women. To uproot the negative image of Tatars and create a role model for Turkish women, she used the image of Tatar women in her two novels. This article explores Halide Edip’s novels New Turan and Tatarcık, in which both protagonists are Tatar women. Background Halide Edip Adıvar (1882–1964), one of the pillars of Turkish nationalism, contributed to the nationalist movement’s becoming a populist movement based on ethnicity and language. Halide Edip had Islamic and Western education and grew up in an intellectual surrounding in Istanbul. She attended an American all-girls boarding school, which gave her a better understanding of Western culture, while her extended family lived in all-Turkish culture. She was involved in politics when 134 Turkish nationalism was moving between the first and second generations of nationalists in the late Ottoman period. The ideology of the first nationalists of the Ottoman period, based on patria, was “liberal and human,” which was a reactionary movement against the monarchy (Adıvar 1930: 86). The first generation, who were called Young Ottomans and Young Turks, was constructivist, bringing new ideas such as liberty, the constitution, and the fatherland into political and cultural discourse. They presented an Ottoman-Islamist identity while focusing on establishing a modern democratic state based on the separation of powers. They were able to force the Sultan to declare constitutional monarchy and initiate democracy in the Ottoman Empire. However, because of the domestic impetus and conjectural developments out of borders, the Sultan abolished the parliament and returned to monarchy. Ultimately, the Sultan could not prevent another wave coming from members of the army and a new generation of intellectuals. The military forced the Sultan to open the parliament and held elections again in 1908. This time intellectuals who lived in the Empire joined a pro-nationalist, pro-Turkish movement, which was not imported from abroad but developed inside the Empire. Halide made her home a meeting point for those nationalist intellectuals, who attended to discuss politics, literature, and history. Ahmet Ağaoğlu appreciated her for challenging segregation between sexes among upper-class elites in Istanbul and opening her house to male intellectuals (Ağaoğlu 1959). Because her first husband served in UPP (Union and Progress Party), and her second husband took an active role in the nationalist Turkism movement and the establishment of Turkish Hearts, Halide found herself in the second wave of nationalism, which gradually hinged on language and ethnicity. While the first wave had been based on the adoption of new ideas coming from the West, the intellectuals of the second wave looked for “local and national” ideas rooted in the culture that they dwelled in, language as an amalgam of Turkish nationalism, instead of ideas of liberty, constitution, and fatherland. Halide Edip found any political nationalism ugly since it made men destroy each other. Yet, she justified that Turkish nationalism was different from the Western case since Western Powers supported each other, but Turks were all alone for their survival (Adıvar 1930: 82). While the intellectuals of the first wave aimed to change the political culture, the second wave aimed to bring culture to politics. The second wave was focused on tangible straits of culture, such as religion, language, ethnicity, and custom. Halide Edip, Ziya Gökalp, Ömer Seyfettin, Fuat Köprülü, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, and Yusuf Akçura were the intellectuals of the second wave, who aimed to bring a change by using faculties of society to create a popular nationalist movement from bottom to top. For this reason, they needed to examine the Turkish nation to find what they wanted to see in her cultural codes. Reforming language was one of them, but not enough: they needed a united society to use this standardized vernacular language. The second wave, also, did not focus on geography or fatherland at the beginning, 135 but the human capital of their nationalistic ideology, because they did not know where to end their nation.1 Theory Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm elucidated that nation-states are the product of imaginations. Anderson argued that “the nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (Anderson 2006: 7). When all is said, the pioneers of Turkish nationalism looked for a framework which made Turkish nationalism essentialist. The roots of Turkish nationalism started with imagining patria and a nation. It was the most democratic starting point, but they were not able to create a grassroots movement since the geography that they addressed was vast, and the population was cosmopolitan. Their ideal nation was obscure, and they could not reach ordinary people, only Ottoman elites. This first occurrence of nationalism went hand in hand with Islamism. In this sense, their ideology stood on essentialism. A Crimean Tatar, Ismail Gaspirali, led a parallel attempt which overlapped with the last years of Young Ottomans, who tried to form national consciousness of a vernacularly imagined Turkic community. His reductionist view was also essentialist, since it was based on communication in a common Turkic language, and grounded in the ethnicities of Turkic societies, as well as a liberal model of Islam. At the same time, his imagination, which did not go beyond an imagined liberated Muslim society from Russians, was survivalist—those two romantic movements abided by another essentialist nationalist movement of Young Turks, who imagined an absolute nation. The Young Turks who, thrilled by German nationalism, instilled ethnicity and language in their ideology. Ideologies of those three nationalist movements do not have a geographical limit and definition of the values’ democratic principles, but a tangible, particular Turkish nation. Halide Edip engaged in the third group when she wrote her novel, New Turan, in 1912 and had already parted with all of them when she wrote Tatarcık in 1938. 1 However, Hülya Argunsah categorizes Halide Edip with Yakup Kadri and Yahya Kemal, not with Ziya Gökalp, Ömer Seyfettin, or Hamdlulah Suphi under the title of National Literature. She argues that Yahya Kemal’s ideas of land-based nationalism conformed to the philosophy of national movement in Anatolia. This categorization was based on themes of their writings, since three of them wrote about defeating Greeks from Anatolia (Argunşah 2005: 211). 136 Behind the Turkish Identity: Gökalp and Akçura Ziya Gökalp, ideologist of UPP, had written his book Becoming Turk, Islamic, and Civilized in 1918, in which he sought to show how to construct a nation by the will of people based on cultural relativism (Gökalp 2014: 2/12). In his book, he argued that the Islamic nation has its own space where Turks belong. On the other hand, he defined a space, “Turan,” for the new establishment of the nation under the influence of Gaspirinski. His idea of “Turan," an imagined community, is formed by only the Turkic society, including all Turkic places (Gökalp 2014: 4/39). Following up Gaspirinski’s Turanism Gökalp mentored and relied on two authors to disseminate his ideas in a simplified form, using literature. One of them, Ömer Seyfettin, was at the forefront of Turkifying the language, while Halide Edip’s sharp and brave pen was fighting to form an ethnic component of the new Turkish identity. The friendship of Ziya Gökalp and Halide Edip went back to the Turkish Hearts, founded in 1911, where they discussed the bases of Turkish nationalism and propagated their ideas. The spirit of the imagined Turkic community, which was named “Turanism” by Ziya Gökalp, yielded to a Turkism whose principles he wrote in 1923. He described Turkism as a hegemonic ideology which had a land and people to govern. Halide Edip mentioned in her memoirs that she wrote her novel, New Turan, under the influence of her friend Ziya Gökalp before they parted ways in 1915, after they had different ideas on education and politics. In the meantime, their populist character of Turkish nationalism was shaped in the hands of another intellectual whom Halide Edip worked with, Yusuf Akçura.2 Halide Edip did not write much about Yusuf Akçura, a Kazan Tatar, although she worked with him closely at Turkish Hearts, and her late husband Adnan Adıvar was one of the founders of National Turk Party with Akçura. His ideology rested solely on a secular Turkish identity, based on ethnicity, eliminating Islamic values in the new formation of the nation. Despite Akçura and Halide Edip’s husband’s close ideological fellowship, she insisted on the liberal values of Anglo-Saxons, in which religion finds a place in citizens’ lives. Akçura’s secular ideology, which excluded Islam, conflicted with Halide’s sympathy for folk Islam and Mevlevi culture. Under the influence of her grandmother and her Mevlevi circle, she drew attention to the Mevlevi order as representing Islam in the culture of Turkish people. The second conflict was on multiculturalism. Yusuf Akçura did not tolerate multiculturalism in Ottoman land but exalted suppressing Turkish culture. When they met in the Turkish Hearts, they had heated discussions on performing Anatolian ethnic music. Akçura lost against Halide and Fuad Köprülü, both of whom defended that Turkish culture must include other cultures of people living in Anatolia, even if they belonged to different ethnic groups. The third conflict between Akçura and Halide was about the 2 At the convention of Turkish Hearts, represent of Izmir argues that Halide Edip is not a Turkist. Her friend Hamdullah Suphi stands up to him and advocates Halide Edip because of her international reputation (Üstel 2004: 158). 137 federation. As we will see in her novel New Turan, Halide was for a federation; however, her fellow nationalist ideologists Akçura did not support this idea. In her utopian novel, New Turan’s new ideology lies in the Mevlevi culture of Islamic Sufism and the protagonist’s defense of federalism. First, five or six Mevlevi dervishes arrived on the stage with flutes, ney, in their hands. Right behind them, ten or twelve children in Mevlevi dervish dresses stood in a row. New Turan’s inspiration in architecture and music was always going as far back as the period of Selcukis. In addition to this, after many years of influence and penetration of Western culture, I do not know; one of the songs, hymns, or dramas of new musicians with these thin enigmatic Sufi elements was bringing the soul and voice of wild, rascal, sturdy, and brave Turko-Tatars (Adıvar 2014: 28). New Turan: Tatar Cousins Lead the New Party In her memoirs, Halide Edip mentions that she wrote the novel New Turan under the influence of Ziya Gökalp’s ideas. The novel was published in a newspaper in 1912 and as a book in 1913. She must have written the novel while she was visiting her father in Greece. The genre is a utopian novel in which pro-Turkish nationalists were dreaming of a country following their ideology (Balcı 2020: 10). Moreover, she wrote a play from the novel and participated in it in 1913–1914. However, Major Cemal Pasha banned them from staging the play, since they objected to Muslim women acting on stage (Üstel 2004: 68). A female protagonist, a half-Tatar Turkish girl Kaya is the crucial person between two political groups competing with each other to form the government. The pre-bourgeois ruling class of New Ottomans and their constituent Islamists are personified by Hamdi Pasha and his nephew Asım, a journalist of New Ottomans. The first-person narrator, Asım, narrates the ideas of two camps depicted in a romantic love story between two cousins, protagonist Kaya and Oğuz. The confessional narration reveals the truth that the narrator witnessed, but did not dare to intervene, in the life of his uncle, who is also an influential political figure and the leader of the New Ottoman Party. The nephew of Hamdi Pasha represents the change and calls reader’s attention for mass transformation from “Ottomanism” to “Oğuzism.” The reader gets engaged in the arc and roots to change with the narrator’s change during the development of the plot. The tone of the narrative is mostly sad and somber. The narrator witnesses that his villain uncle forced Kaya to get married for two reasons. First, he loved Kaya when she was very young, and the second, he spies the opposite party called “New Turan” and wants to end the popularity of the party’s activities, organized by Kaya and the leader Oğuz. 138 On the other hand, Oğuz, coming from the Tatar community in Yıldırım in Bursa, was brought up by a strong, literate, religious Tatar mother. His widow mother sends him to school and provides for him by working very hard. The narrator highlights how this Tatar family especially values the education of girls. His mother opens a small school for girls, which Oğuz also attends. Oğuz, a charismatic and progressive character of the novel, receives his first religious education from his mother and later goes to mosques nearby. The narrator emphasizes that his strong religious foundation drives him to respect women. The main difference of the two men, Hamdi Pasha and Oğuz, and the ideology of New Ottomans Party and New Turan Party, is that progressive Oğuz defends the necessity of women’s education and participation in social and economic life, as well as federalism as a political system, whereas conservative Hamdi Pasha oppresses women and is for a unitarian state. The role of the first-person narrator in the novel becomes clearer when the climax approaches. The narrator carries the message with the two main characters to convince the reader for federalism. Formation of a modern nation-state goes hand in hand with building a nation living on a land. Halide Edip highlights and justifies a federation between Kurds and Arabs. The narrator gives a direct message to the reader that local people support federalism in some regions where they have started federal governance (Adıvar 2014:108). Representing confusion between what Kaya defends and his party expects, the villain Hamdi Pasha does not show strong leadership. This old-school bureaucrat prepares the tragedy of the protagonist and her love Oğuz. Yet, the narrator’s confession gives the reader hope for the future of New Turan while feeling repugnance for the New Ottoman Party. By giving the name “Oğuz” to a Kipchak or a Tatar character and creating a romantic idealist who dies for his ideas, the author confirms essentialist nationalism where she answers the question of who a Turk is.3 Given names as symbols or given identities show primordial ties between individuals and the hegemonic ideology (Smith:1986). Those brand-new Turk characters of the novel, essentially Tatars and or Ottomans mixed with Tatars, carry Turkish names. Kaya abandons her Arabic name, Samiye, to go back to use her given name, Kaya, which is still in the memory of her aunt and cousin (Adıvar 2014: 127–128). Villain Hamdi Pasha does not sympathize with the protagonist’s Tatar identity. He insists that her name is Samiye, but the protagonist prefers Kaya as her both primarily given and later chosen name. The repentant narrator says, “We have a lot of odd New Turan women, whose names are coming from stone, rock, sky, moon overall from the science of space and spheres of the Earth,”when he goes to the New Turan Party’s meeting in the setting of the novel (Adıvar 2014: 22). 3 Giving Turkic names became famous as a project of Turkism. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk supported the idea giving names such as Oğuz, Kaan, Mete in the first years of the Republic. Duman, Derya https://www.haberturk.com/yasam/haber/1212411-docent-dr-derya-dumanhaberturke-anlatti 139 The narrator brings the underlying “otherness” of Tatars from Ottoman identity and shows the reader how the word “Tatar” is used as an ethnic slur. When Hamdi Pasha was not able to convince Katya to sleep with him after a fight over carrying Ottoman or a Turkish identity, he says “Kaya behaves like a Tatar tonight”4 (Adıvar 2014: 104). Hamdi Pasha addresses the protagonist by her name Kaya, and when he uses her previous Arabic name, Kaya corrects him. Yet, he always emphasizes her Turkish identity: “You are the bravest Turkish person among the Turks who I have known” (71), "You, strong Turkish girl!"5 (Adıvar 2014: 116). Protagonist Kaya and Oğuz, two burgeoning leaders of New Turan Party drink kımız, a fermented mare’s milk in Eurasia. When Kaya gets sick, she refuses to drink ayran, a drink made of yoghurt, and insists upon drinking kımız instead. New Ottoman Hamdi Pasha buys kımız from Turan restaurants and brings two bottles of kımız for Kaya from work every night. Opposition party newspaper learns it and writes that Hamdi Pasha finally remembered that “he was a Turk” (Adıvar 2014: 78). When Oğuz was shot and wounded, he also asks to drink kımız to recover. Beside their ideology and blood ties, cultural products of Tatars bring them together even if they are apart. It is clear that members of this new imagined community live in the Ottoman Empire and are connected to Tatars who are well educated and active in politics. The author relies on the image of Tatar women in the novel, New Turan, for two reasons. First, this revolutionist nationalist movement needed a middle class who could carry the new ideas, since old elites of Ottoman Empire were not eager to change the status quo. The protagonist’s father cuts his ties with old Ottomans and abandons his old circle and house before he dies. Orphan Kaya gets a good education and serves her community and becomes politically active. Oğuz changes his middle-class status by getting a good education and becoming politically active. The reader gets a message that two Tatar women together support Oğuz’s political agenda and Turkist ideology. Motherhood in the novel is sublimated and only serves for ideology. Oğuz’s mother, like the Virgin Mary, raises her son by herself. On the other hand, Kaya, does not conceive a baby in four years of marriage with Hamdi Pasha. The author refrains to represent a synthesis of two ideologies. In other words, although it is a constructivist ideology which invent a nation with its symbols, new Turkism has its pride coming from its essence. This ideology presents soldier-like women: women members of the "New Turan Party” sometimes wear black and sometimes gray robes cover their heads with white headscarves and wear thick modest shoes, reminiscent of Turko-Tatars.6 Women of this ideology sacrifice their body in the sake of the future of their ideology (Adıvar 2014: 19). 4 5 6 “Kaya’nın bu gece Tatar damarı tuttu!” “Seni çetin Türk kızı!” In her memoirs, she says that she borrowed this image not from Tatar culture but the culture of Quakers, a liberal Christian group. 140 Oğuz, raised by a devout Muslim mother and in a Muslim environment, respects Islam. Kaya accuses Hamdi Pasha’s fellow party members for provoking Islamists against Turkists and causing Oğuz’s death. Islamists gain the majority in New Ottoman Party to defeat Turkists after Oğuz’s bill, decentralization of the government, passes. The love between cousins stays platonic and idealized from the beginning to the end of the plot. Both the protagonist and Oğuz live for their ideals. Tatarcık: Calling a Girl “Little Tatar” or “Sandfly” Halide Edip served at the front during the Turkish War in 1921–1922 (Adıvar 2010: 216). She visited many villages when the Turkish army was defeating the Greek army and saw people and their life in Anatolia in the early 1920s. She wrote the novel Tatarcık between 1938–1939, when she was in self-exile. During her service in the army, she spent quite a time in the Tatar villages, which “Greeks had spared because they mistook them for Russian settlements.” She admired that “they were all clean and well cared for; the women looked wide-awake and less tired, every child could read, and it was a surprise for her to talk to their schoolmaster.” Her admiration went further when she realized that in every form of material progress, Tatars, emigrants from Crimea, were superior to people living in Anatolian villages. She was disappointed when Ismet Pasha used Tatars’ appearance as an excuse not to accept their fellow Crimean migration from Crimea in the early 1900s. Their birth-rate was high, and their infant mortality low. As the supreme problem in Turkey seems to be the scarcity of its population, I wondered why we did not allow them to emigrate to Turkey from Crimea, where there was a great famine. I mentioned that Ismet pasha one day. He was looking at his garden, where a Tartar woman was passing with a pail of water. She was an elderly and typically Mongolic woman, plain but pleasant, whit skit eyes and high cheekbones. He shook his head, humorously. ‘They would alter the looks of the Turkish race,’ he said. I don’t want us to look like that” (Adıvar 1928: 232). Tatars had been living in Anatolia for hundreds of years since the mass migration of steppe Nogai Tatars to the Ottoman Empire started during 1787–1792, after the Jassy Treaty. Not developing a national identity based on the land but an affiliation to Islam, Tatars left the Darul Harb, “land of war,” where Russians governed, and emigrated to Darul Islam “land of Islam” where the Great Ottoman Empire, the protector of Muslims, reigned, so that they could preserve their religion and religious life. It is called hijra, or homecoming, in the history of Islam when a group of Muslims return from a place of infidel’s reign to a place where Muslims can practice Islam freely. Those emigrants found a haven for themselves in Anatolia and brought their unique culture with them (Williams 2016: 13). Tatar emigration continued until 1902, including many Tatars who came for education and did not 141 return because of Russian annexation. 1,000,000 or 1,200,000 Tatars immigrated to Ottoman land during this period (Williams 2016: 37). However, they never felt the same as local people, who called “muhajir” or migrant. While the Tatars who remained in Crimea became more religious to protect their identity from the Russians, those new inhabitants of Anatolia enjoyed following their folk religion, Islam. The opening of the novel Tatarcık starts with a discussion on the nickname of the protagonist Lale. The third-person narrator raises that there is a dispute on this nickname Tatarcık in the setting and during the development of the plot. The narrator indicates in the setting that the place and characters are all fictional, since the author was living abroad when she wrote the novel. The plot takes place in a village in Istanbul, where it is somehow connected to the life of upper-class old elites of the Ottoman Empire, who had lost their wealth and power, and new elites of the Republic of Turkey. The opening sentence is, “Everybody in the village used to refer to her as Tatarcık.” Then, the third person narrator introduces the protagonist’s father in the setting. After knowing Tatarcık’s village, you should know her father since some people gave this nickname to her only for her father was a Tatar. Though it was said that she was called as Tatarcik because they resembled her a small biting insect (sandfly), it was not resolved yet (Adıvar 1993: 14). Despite the cultural discrimination against the Tatars in society, the third person narrator idolizes them. Villagers called the protagonist’s father “Tatar Osman” behind his back to degrade him, but the narrator exalts his character by revealing his merits. The narrator emphasizes that Osman, a fisherman, was a literate person. He performs Friday congregational prayers; however, villagers feel discomfort being around him. Although he was a very private person, he makes donations and helps people in need. He supports the Independence War by smuggling ammunition and guns to Anatolia with his boat. The narrator uses a sad and apologetic tone to show agony that he remained an alien to them during his entire life, despite the fact that he had lived in the same village with them for almost three decades. Even though he had an education and lived in Istanbul for almost 30 years, it was clear from his accent that he was a Tatar. He insisted on stressing the “k” sounds of the letters "kaf" and "kef" (Adıvar 1993: 16) The narrator stresses that Osman, the protagonist’s father, did not change his Tatar accent. The reader can see hostility to Tatar elements in the language not only from ordinary people but also from intellectuals. Elites of Istanbul and the new elites of Ankara never tolerated accents in standardized Turkish. Halide Edip mentions that it is because of pride of Istanbulites who discriminated against minorities for their accents in shadow theatres and traditional Ottoman comedies. Since one of the founders of Turkism was a Tatar and the movement’s ideology was based on an imagined Turkic community, their sympathy for Tatars received backlash from new 142 literary elites of Republic of Turkey. Ahmet Haşim wrote in 1914 that “The followers of Pan-Turkism and those who styled themselves ‘Pan-Turanists’ made Constantinopolitan speech clumsily cumbersome by borrowing words of Asian origin from the pre-Islamic legends and mythologies of Turkish tribes. In juxtaposition with Constantinopolitan literature and language, the product of refined and sophisticated civilization, this new phraseology interspersed with Tatar origin words gave the impression of a tousled, repulsive alien figure” (Haşim 2016: 95). The tension of popularizing vernacular language to create a “national printlanguage” had central ideological and political importance. Benedict Andersen mentions that print language is massively used by the first wave of Turkish nationalists in the late nineteenth century. He also argues that "the first groups to do so were the marginalized vernacular-based coalitions of the educated," who were new bourgeoisie. Once specific standards were imposed in vernacular language, "from which too-marked deviations were impermissible." The second generation aimed to standardize the vernacular language which created oppression even among the compatriots (Anderson 2006: 81). The new model of Turkish language for Turks was based on not only standardized written language, but it aimed at verbal forms of the language, whose consensus was dissolved after penetration of Tatar culture, which was thought of as degenerating the status quo of elite culture. Indeed, using their status quo, dignity, and wealth, old elites rely on their dialect as their pride and cultural capita. Protagonist Lale lives with her mother after her father passes away. She receives her father’s veteran pension until it gets cut and attends school. After they cut the pension, she rents half of their houses and works as an English teacher. As an educated woman, the protagonist feels that she needs to teach to the villagers how to be civilized. The narrator brings a conflict between ignorant villagers and the protagonist over following traffic rules on the street. A fisherman gets angry at her after she has forced him to walk on the sidewalk by chasing him on her bicycle. He curses the protagonist and thinks to himself that “He would have showed Tatar bastard!” (Adıvar 1993: 29), but his wealthy client was waiting for him. This negative image of Tatars in the mind of the locals comes with her ethnic identity. In addition to the fisherman, old Islamist character Abdulgaffar Efendi who once saying "Tatars are a nation who were cursed by God. Wherever they step, the grass never grows.” (Adıvar 1993: 17). Halide changes her hostile attitude toward political Islamists in her novel Yeni Turan to sympathy toward cultural Islamists in Tatarcık. By the end of the plot, Abdulgaffar Efendi’s perspective changes, and he feels pity after the protagonist lost her father when she was 13. In addition to being ostracized by villagers, this modern Tatar girl becomes a target of bullies when her young neighbor invites his six friends to camp in the village. They are all well-educated young generation, sons of old elites of Istanbul, who all seek to the answer of the question who they are. However, she is insulted by the young host who does not like strong women who compete with men in the workplace. To insult her, he tells his friend that her last name was “Tatarcık.” When 143 Recep addresses her by “Miss Tatarcık,” the protagonist feels humiliated. This reaction to the protagonist goes to double meaning of the word “Tatarcık,” little Tatar, daughter of a Tatar or sandfly, that the author explains in the exposition. The protagonist never emphasizes her Tatar identity, but she centers her Turkish identity. One of the young guests asks why she feels offended being called “Tatarcık” if her father was a Tatar. Hasim’s father answers, "There is humiliation and mockery beyond it.” (Adıvar 1993: 93). He continues that the protagonist is a brilliant serious girl whom he admired. Although the protagonist of the novel Tatarcık, is a mixed Tatar and Circassian girl, the main character whom she gets engaged to the resolution is the son of protagonist Rabia in the previous bestselling novel of Halide Edip, the Clown and His Daughter. She transfers much information about his background from that novel to keep this newborn baby as the new generation of the new Turkish Republic, reminding readers that he is the son of a religious mother and converted Western father. References Adıvar, Halide Edip 1928. The Turkish Ordeal. The Century Co, New York London. Adıvar, Halide Edip 1993. Tatarcık. Özgür Yayınları, İstanbul 14. Baskı. Adıvar, Halide Edip 2007. Türk’ün Ateşle İmtihanı. Can Yayınları. Adıvar, Halide Edip 2014. Yeni Turan. Can Yayınları, İstanbul. Anderson, Benedit 2006. Imagined Communities. Verso, London – New York. Argunşah, Hülya 2005. “Milli Edebiyat” In: Yeni Türk Edebiyatı, Ed. Ramazan Korkmaz Grafiker Yayınları, Ankara, 2. Baskı. Balcı, Merve Burhan Çağlar 2020. Muharrire Hanım: Halide Edip Adıvar’ın Gazete ve Dergi Yazıları. Arı Sanat Yayınevi, İstanbul. Gökalp, Ziya 2008. Türkçülüğün Esasları. Hz. Kemal Bek, Bordo Siyah Yayın Basım, İstanbul. Gökalp, Ziya 2014. Türkleşmek İslamlaşmak Muasırlaşmak. Hz. Mustafa Özsarı, Ötüken Neşriyat, İstanbul. Haşim, Ahmet 2016. Selected Poems and Essays. Turko-Tatar Press, Translated Ender Gürol Madison. Smith, Anthon 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. Üstel, Füsun 2004.Türk Ocakları. İletişim Yayınları, 2. Baskı Williams, Brian Glyn 2016. The Crimean Tatars. Oxford University Press.