Author
Günay-Erkol, Çimen
Publication Date
2020-09-01
Publication Place
-
Taylor & Francis
Subject
Burhan Sönmez, Gender, Literature, Torture, Trauma, Turkey
Type
Periodical
Language
English
Digital
Yes
Manuscript
No
Library
Özyeğin University
Library Asset ID
1475-262X
Record ID
3df4e203-6951-42c0-b499-30f242a19d3d
Library Location
Humanities and Social Sciences
Date
2020-09-01
Sample Text
Burhan Sönmez’s İstanbul İstanbul (2016) is a powerful addition to contemporary prison novels in Turkey. The novel revolves around prisoners who experience systematic torture and are unable to escape the grim destruction that surrounds them. The discussions in the novel around Islamic faith, free will, solitude and captivity produce self-reflexive stories of memory and forgetting, in which gender also comes to the fore as an important center of gravity. In this grand scheme of brutality and torture, the only female prisoner, Zinê Sevda, is limited to sign language, and she facilitates men’s transformative recognition of their trauma through her ghostly presence. In this article, I explore how Zinê Sevda’s silent witnessing transforms men into overseers of themselves and comment on the implications of her sign language. I argue Sönmez’s play with traumatic memory and its resilience is an excellent metaphor for the recurrence of military tutelage in Turkey.
DOI
10.1080/1475262X.2021.1890384
Cilt
23
