A History of Erasures

When I set out to become a novelist in Turkey in the early 2000s, Leylâ Erbil had yet to publish what is perhaps her most accomplished work, What Remains (2011), an experimental bildungsroman written in verse about a woman obsessed with Istanbul’s stones, and published in an English translation last fall. Back then my favorite novels were Flaubert’s Parrot, The Name of the Rose and My Name is Red—the fruits of monkish devotion to historical scholarship transmuted into postmodern fiction. In contrast to the clever maneuvers of Julian Barnes, Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk, I saw Erbil as a remnant of a bygone era. I didn’t care for her explorations of middle-class morality and gender roles. Nor did I understand why she had rebelled against Turkish syntax and invented a unique form of punctuation known as “Leylâ signs.” She rarely used uppercase letters, and she favored a triplet of commas, a grammatical middle finger meant to force readers to pause and ponder. The writers in my pantheon treated their lives as just one text of many that needn’t take precedence over the others, a form of intertextuality that thrilled me; Erbil’s use of her own life felt hopelessly outdated, her use of her own rules self-indulgent.Born in 1931, Erbil belonged to the “1950s generation” of Turkish modernist writers, and seen from today’s vantage point she could not have been more chic. Like her friends Vüs’at O. Bener, Ferit Edgü, Demir Özlü and Tezer Özlü, she often wrote autobiographically. Her sexuality, her marriages—all of it was fair game. Erbil’s story collections, published in the 1960s and 1970s, earned her some recognition; A Strange Woman (1971), the masterpiece of Turkish autofiction, earned her a place in the pantheon of Turkish literature. She died in 2013 from heart failure; the country’s avant-garde authors and critics, who saw her as a trailblazing experimentalist, mourned her passing.For the rest of us, Erbil was a curiosity: an autodidact and a communist outcast who liked being mad, bad and sad in a nation of pious Kemalists.

Her father was a ship engineer and the son of a Rumelian family that had settled in a Black Sea town of Turkey in the early twentieth century; her mother was of Albanian origin, born in Thessaloniki, and moved to Izmir during the Balkan War population exchange in 1923. In her twenties Erbil joined her father on a cargo steamer bound for the United States. She abandoned her studies in English literature at Istanbul University in 1951 after getting married but returned to them the following year after a divorce. She delved into the works of Marx and Freud—she is the most Freudian of Turkish modernists. She shelved her studies yet again after marrying a civil engineer. “These days I harbor no purpose other than a passion to write continuously without losing my mind or my soul here within this society, and I have reached the age of maturity,” she wrote in 1969 while working on A Strange Woman. “To do otherwise,” she later wrote, “would be considered biased, and such behavior is the archenemy of the novelist.”Erbil used the same epigraph in each of her books: “never been submitted for any ‘awards.’” She was proud and a character, that’s for sure. And that was my problem with her. What she lacked in talent she made up for in self-promotion. Erbil was too eccentric, too full of herself. How could I take her seriously? What drew readers to her work, I thought, was not its quality but her extravagant self-display. The Turkish authors I admired, all of them male, were different. Invisible, silent and confident scribes devoted to ambitious literary projects, they resembled bank clerks, duly following standard Turkish punctuation and syntax, and were certain of receiving a solid dividend of praise upon the appearance of their new novel.●In 2020, while working on a book about the eclectic texts that constitute “Turkish literature” and reject homogeneous notions of nationhood, I read What Remains for the first time. Nine years after its publication and seven years after the death of its author, I finally understood Erbil’s power. By embracing experimental language and exploring taboo subjects, she had posed a challenge to literary conventions in Turkey, one that still feels urgent and contemporary.

As I savored What Remains and reread the books of Erbil’s I had once rejected, I came to see how she used her life to write the kind of selfless, political novel I thought only postmodernist techniques could achieve.In collaging her life with the life of her country, Erbil had fermented a new strain of literature that I wanted to emulate in my own autobiographical fictions. What makes her version of autofiction so unusual is the way its autobiographical elements expand into something far more thoroughly historical and political—her work was not as self-obsessed as I initially thought. As Sylvia Plath, another mad, bad, sad twentieth-century luminary wrote, “it’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself; it’s much easier to be somebody else, or nobody at all.” In ignoring Erbil’s work in my twenties, I had taken the easy way out, postponing the messy responsibility of reckoning with myself, and all that it entails.In an emblematic scene early in What Remains, the narrator guides readers through Istanbul’s Old City. On the way from Eğrikapı to Kocamustafapaşa, she observes: with their walls and boundaries, other sides, passageways, people of so many lineages here,,, no one here’s a local,,, no one anywhere’s a local,,, the true locals are the folks buried underground, the ones aboveground are all foreigners,,, the true locals are the ones buried yet another layer farther down below the true locals,,, and the even more local locals are buried down below them,,, half of us are down below beneath the city, the other half of us are here but soon enough we’ll be down below This is how Lahzen, the novel’s narrator, sees the world: layer upon layer, a history of erasures that human psychology is driven to excise and repress. Her stream-of-consciousness prose accommodates both personal and public political traumas, from the failure of her marriage to the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Dersim massacres of Kurds in the 1930s; from the discrimination experienced by a Jewish friend to the September 1955 pogroms against Christians and Jews. At the same time, a counter-force tries to suppress this act of recollection by numbing the writer with painkillers, ADHD medications and antipsychotics.

The drama of the novel lies in our own attempts to see it all too—to learn to see as Lahzen does.In each stone of Istanbul, Lahzen sees a sign of past atrocities, such as the disappearance of harmony between Greek Orthodox Christians and the Laz people of the Black Sea. Only “the immortal stones of this earth” can counter the erasures of the city’s violent past. This is why the stones of Hagia Sophia, “bound together / by the pouring of molten lead condemned to immortality,” enchant Lahzen. She’s amazed at how “simply by pouring molten lead / they stopped up the cracks in the stones / the liquid metal flowed finding the gaps / and filling them in the gaps between the stones that earthquakes, disasters, armageddon could not pry apart.”Along with its stones, an irrepressible interest in Istanbul’s gates, walls and ruins runs through the text. Lahzen’s house lies within the city walls, which stretch from the Golden Horn to the Marmara Sea and were built 1,500 years ago by Emperor Theodosius II. In Fener, the neighborhood where Lahzen grows up, the sun sears everything, and “a feral masculine harmony” pours from the Greek High School for boys, a building “carved out of a ruby the size of a mountain in 1881” by the Greek architect Dimadis. Nearby, fig, mulberry, plum, pomegranate and sycamore trees frame the Ayakapı Gate, formerly known as Aya Theodosias. Each thing, each person has a history awaiting excavation.Erbil reminds us how Fener, “with its rows of matchbox houses and narrow streets behind the walls,” was once the core of Old Istanbul and the heart of Christian Orthodoxy. On the opposite shore lay Pera, the quarter of embassies and diplomats, with a more Catholic flavor. In Fener, Lahzen sees “nestled together, the souls of dead cities leading down into endless layers of the past.” The neighborhood’s distinct character is still there, if you know how to look, how to listen: the last remnants of the Greek petite bourgeoisie live there. Lahzen remembers how “songs were everything” in those years.

From every house, she would hear a different voice, a phrase from a different language: “yirise…” “night and day…” “c’est si bon…” “ayrılık belki ölümden beter…”A path leading to the garden of a neighboring house, owned by a Greek family, is paved in pebble mosaics made by a Greek citizen at a time when “there was no need to conceal one’s faith,” she writes. These mosaics are flower-patterned, and as a little girl Lahzen wonders whether they blossom or contain flower seeds: “when one is little, one thinks that everything contains something else.”Erbil’s gaze soon turns to a specter from Lahzen’s childhood: Rosa, a Jewish schoolmate. They had been inseparable from primary school until college; the “essence of the truth of this text,” she writes, “may have to do with her.” Together Lahzen and Rosa discovered Istanbul’s culture, spending summers “binging on the episodes of our glorious history’s past” at school. Turkish historiography’s embrace of the “inheritance of bloodstained caftans / heirlooms of our forefathers” has troubled them. Parents expected children to be in awe of their past, but “this rusted-out demand / weighed heavily upon us,” she notes. How could they take pride in their rulers “hacking to pieces hundreds of thousands of alevi kurds or qizilbash”? Neither could they admire “suleiman the magnificent / slaughtering 25,000 enemy soldiers / on the plains of mohács / making a graveyard of the marshes of karassó.” Instead, reading such historical episodes made her and Rosa’s hair stand on end.This tradition of cold-blooded murder is a central theme of the novel. In the fifteenth century, when Mehmed II ascended to the throne, Ottoman law legitimized the murder of the brethren of sultans, permitting him to have little six-month-old prince Ahmed strangled and unleashing a cycle of killings: “earringed selim poisoned his father bayezid II / and then / had five of his blood nephews executed along with his brother prince korkut and his brother prince ahmed / suleiman the magnificent / had piri reis put to death.”