Keynote Speech of Adalet Ağaoğlu:

“No writer is able to talk about, write about him/herself.”


Adalet Ağaoğlu, May 3, 2009, NYC


"My writing adventure is nothing but a search for my own answers to my own questions."


Presented by Adalet Ağaoğlu during the "Panel & Book Signing" program at the Turkish Center on April 30, 2009.

Dear guests,

I am greatly honored to be a part of this gathering organized by Light Millennium to mark the publication of the English translation of my novel Summer’s End in the US. I also would like to thank the presenters who make valuable contributions to this gathering by expressing their ideas both about this novel and my career as a writer.  But you see; this is the most difficult moment for  a novelist. The moment when she needs to look within herself and reveal her own position and understanding about her work. Especially in the case of an author who has aspired for many years to write the novel of the shortest moment... An author, starting from her first novel Lying Down to Die, published in 1973, giving an account of an hour and twenty seven minutes, to the last one A Romantic Vienna Summer, published in 1993, where she believes she has been able to lay out the construction of the history of five centuries starting from a single moment of hearing some musical intimations in the Baroque style.

I should confess that I have always felt despair when it comes to talking about myself. I have always had—I still have—a hard time explaining my 60 year writing career in front of others, who speak a different language, come from a different culture, just like now.

Even if there were not a wall of “otherness” between the author and the audience, a creator defining his/her own identity would be very suspect for many reasons.

I couldn’t even face the proposition that came from a journal in my country many years ago for me to “talk about myself; write about myself” and simply rejected them by saying, “No writer is able to talk about, write about him/herself.” And then I attempted to prove this opinion of mine, presenting many pages of evidence and exhibiting many suspect approaches. No, no; don’t worry: I won’t tell you about those experimental evidences here! But if I need to say it briefly: “A writer cannot talk about herself” because, first of all, she cannot be objective about her past identity. She always tries to patch up her past identity with her current identity: she even may give in to daily trends and may show her past either as very miserable or as overly privileged. So that you would think that there was no one on the face of this earth more respectable than her family, her lineage. More and more, she falls into the calamitous belief that there is no better writer than she...

If the narrator cannot find a clue to verify her present in her past, then she simply starts to make things up. Well, what are those biographical first novels presented in the guise of novel other than attempts at making things up, anyway?

In fact, everything that was small yesterday is big today in the eyes of the author, just like it is for everyone else. Everything that was difficult yesterday is easy today; things that were ugly yesterday are beautiful today. This must be the mania of nostalgia. As these fabrications have become more and more widespread, the genre of novel lost its bearing. For a long time, the “modern novel” has been considered rotten and exhausted; and in accordance with the changes under the command of capitalist values, the genre of novel started to take on the games of postmodern construction, following the trends in “architecture.” Well, why would I lie, these games of authorship are quite entertaining.

As I have tried to underscore in my novel Summer’s End, everything happened as it was supposed to have happened one more time; it still is so, and now we see that great longing for the past, interest in “antiques” and in medieval mysticism have risen: Let’s think of the great interest in “Sufism” which started to become widespread in the West since the years of 1945-50 after World War II. In our world that has been becoming more and more arid in every aspect, the advocates of globalization, which has been promoted as a way toward liberation, are in search of a common belief. In such an atmosphere where we face a chaos of values and ambiguity about our future, I ask for your forgiveness because many of you might be thinking that I have submitted myself to such “frivolities” by attempting to raise suspicion over the identities of authors. But I cannot help it. Please consider it as the result of the rapid approach of an ambiguous future making it difficult for me to see the present clearly.

My writing adventure is nothing but a search for my own answers to my own questions. This must be to overcome my sense of being under siege from the outside, from other circles; and more than that, from my own circle, my own society, and therefore from deep within; it is a profound need that I feel to analyze and diagnose the desperation caused by such stressful times. Yes it is so: Writing is a search for me. Believe me, I have not learned from anything as much as I have learned by writing.

I am someone who has experienced, and is still experiencing, the depression caused by the serious conflict between the culture of the Ottoman Empire, which was a religious state, with that of the 85 year old state of the Republic of Turkey, which has aspired to become a secular state. To be able to understand this society of ours, people of ours, a patient archeological excavation is vital. It is necessary to approach problems that may not even be issues in other societies thoroughly and search for  answers through a multitude of means. Turkey's problems are different because it has suffered a crisis of a transition to a secular state from a 5-6 century-old religious state and its efforts to create a secular state out of a religious one was totally shaped by its own internal experiences rather than by external forces like missionary and colonial activities from the West. Maybe, it is the need I felt to make my people and society understood that made me become a writer, especially a novelist.

However, writing for me is not about writing from a single ideological viewpoint by counting solely on human creativity, but it is about writing by looking at things from all aspects. It is writing by weaving all different dimensions, colors, voices in harmony with each other, and so trying to pay our humanistic debt to the aesthetic dimension. And the deep pleasure of this.

My questions and worries are not only about issues this local, this national. I have worries about the future of mankind and therefore all living creatures of the world in our day where industrialization has reached the level of spatial science and knowledge; and nuclear energy has turned into a commodity that can be sold and bought. I have worries about the ambiguity of the horizon in this global catastrophe. In fact, these worries have invaded my mind and soul since Hiroshima. The great creativity of the human mind: Massacre! What is this? The sign of what? This means, the power of money equals the power of weapons and vice versa.

What a big problem. It is not something to be overcome within the closed borders of nations. Maybe the intensity of the problems that arise from this is what made me come running twice to the call of the Light Millennium, this nonprofit organization, which has a mission of “providing a better future to global humans.”

My novel Curfew was the first one that was translated into English and published in the US. It was John Goulden, the British ambassador in Turkey ten-fifteen years ago, who did the translation. The choice of this novel was his. Curfew is again a product of my search for the “novel of a short time,” a book that takes place in a Central-Anatolian city on one night, during martial law. I have witnessed how an outsider, Sir Goulden, who had lived in Istanbul by breathing it in during his youth, has almost come to feel my society completely, by wandering in the provinces of the Republic of Turkey through this novel of mine for two years. We met very often during the translation.

However our encounter with the founder of Talisman House, Publishers, dear Prof. Edward Foster, and my translator Figen Bingul is more interesting to me. I was completely unaware that The Light Millennium, this organization which aims to bring light to the future of humanity in the next millennia, was a member of the United Nations; however, as a result of the enthusiasm of their members here, our last meeting happened. A meeting at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey was organized about my authorship. I can say that I became quite well known because of the multi-leveled introduction presented by Prof. Sibel Erol, a valued professor at NYU, who has been diligently researching Turkish literature and authors. At that time, I also learned that Talisman’s Edward Foster, who is also a writer and a prized poet, had published an anthology that covered different periods of Turkish poetry. Prof. Foster was so kind to ask me: “We’d like to publish a book of yours here; which one would you suggest?” I immediately said Summer’s End. First of all, I believe that foreigners can understand the society of the Republic of Turkey and the people of this society in depth only by reading the literature of the Republic, especially poetry and novels from this era.

I never stopped mentioning this in my talks in foreign countries. My suggesting Summer’s End to be published here is because of this: When it is said that “Turkey is a Mediterranean country,” the only image people have is mainly the Aegean Region. It is the Kyklades on the Greek side, and Bodrum, Marmaris, and of course the port of Izmir on our side that come to mind. But for Summer’s End, I especially chose the region I call “The Eastern Mediterranean of Turkey” including Side, Alanya, Mersin and more eastern regions. Because the real conflict suitable for a novel is the conflict that has been, and still is being, lived intensely in this region. And also for this novel, I  used a  poetic language that would be suitable for the natural setting there, by placing politics and the harsh reality of society that was evident there, the migration to the shores from the South Eastern region, coup d’états, and terror as a backdrop. I was excited to take modern narration to a carnivalesque narration step by step. And my Summer’s End, which was published in 1980, turned out to be a “postmodern novel.” This is a surprising and pleasing discovery of the Middle Eastern and Turkish Literature department of Holland’s Leiden University. Let me explain this here as well. One of the reasons I have chosen this novel might have been this.

Then,  Figen Bingul began her translation of Summer’s End together with her advisers, and then the publishing agreement was settled, and while all this was happening, dear Ed Foster asked me, “Where do you live in Istanbul?” and I told him. Wouldn’t he say, “I lived in that neighborhood when I taught in Istanbul at a university for a year and a half?” That is not all. I had left a poetical novel of mine in the hands of a poet publisher. Well, but how would I know that many years ago he had gone and seen Alanya and Side, the places I had been trying to explain in my essay “Time in the Eastern Mediterranean?” Please look carefully at the cover of Summer’s End, published last year by Talisman. Because this is all a work of Edward Foster. His gift to “Time in the Eastern Mediterranean” with great modesty: A photograph he had taken in Side many years ago! What are the odds, wouldn’t you say? You see, this is how it should be in our world, when people find each other and cooperate quietly! To feel the “other.” To understand. We are in the same journey altogether toward the Light Millennium’s vision as a non-governmental organization, and I wish it sustains its efforts to reach its goal in peace.

Adalet Ağaoğlu, March 28, 2009, Istanbul

Written based on a request by the Light Millennium for the "Book Panel and Signing: SUMMER’S END with ADALET AĞAOĞLU" program, and presented by the author during the program.

- For Hightlights from the Summer's End Program>
- Time in the Eastern Meditrerrean (Essay)

Translated by Figen Bingul.
Co-edited by: Ilkan Taskin and Sibel Erol

Photos: Emir Bingül and Ilkan Taskin (Turkish Center); Bircan Ünver, Portrait of the author