Review Memed My Hawk By Yasar Kemal

Content Summary

In the content has been referred to the topic of Yasar Kemal Memed My Hawk’s expressions. The summary has been presented and put forth of how the book was written including the research. You will find a list of Yasar Kemal’s other books in the text where related to Ince Memed’s citations take place.

Memed My Hawk Price Comparison

Memed My Hawk is the biggest expression I’ve read in turkish literature. That’s why it’s quite impossible to analize the serie of four books in just one blog. Not really knowing where to start and which part of it to tell – let’s just try!

At the beginning, thinking that he wrote his expression of Memed My Hawk for money, Yasar Kemal doesn’t want to use his own name by publishing in the feuilleton of the ‘Cumhuriyet’ newspaper. After getting convinced by the newspaper management, he includes his name on the book. In a broke period he completes the novel and it get published chapter by chapter inside the ‘Cumhuriyet’ newspaper. Later, just how in Yasar Kemal’s expression, it’s carnival.

Memed My Hawk is Yasar Kemal’s first novel and there is just few novelists getting classic with their first novel. The expression comes across a big like. It gets translated in dozens of different languages. The project of one narrative grows to the second, third and fourth written part. The style of Yasar Kemal, dancing with words and looking like written without any hassle, presents a sucess by using an informing text paradigm  and extraordinarly puts the reader into litarary pleasure.

Yasar Kemal’s Black and White Photo

I have read Memed My Hawk from the ‘Yapi Kredi’ publishing which includes all parts in one delta printing. For a long running epic like this it’s not really logical to chose an all-in-one delta print. However the sizes and prints might be suitable, it’s hard to carry and small fonts are tiring the eyes. But I have to note that the print of Yapi Kredi had a qualified and solid remain against my rough usage.

Memed My Hawk Summary

Memed My Hawk’s summary is as follows: Memed loves Hatçe. But landowner Abdi wants Hatçe to marry his nephew. Memed run away with Hatçe. And all the people of the village chasing them. Memed shoots the nephew of landowner Abdi and escapes to the mountain. After this, landowner Abdi who’s tyrannizing Memed’s mother, sends Hatçe with thousands of slenders into prison. Memed saves Hatçe from jail and kills landowner Abdi.

The first two parts summarized above continue with a critisation of the regularity about this first uprising political identity. Memed becomes the symbol of the Çukurova peasants, which are groaning under the cruelty of their landowners and dying in the rice plantations from malaria. They will give their lifes, but never deliver Memed.

Yasar Kemal Hardcover

I took dozens of notes while reading the book. I underlined maybe hundreds of places but when the number increased it became impossible to mention all of it. I didn’t wanted to make the same mistake as Robert Musil mentionning every single detail. So after I read the whole serie, I just wanted to write generally a look into the book with some citations.

The Topic of Memed My Hawk

The topic is about Memed My Hawk. Memed born in one of Çukurova’s villages as a son of a indigent family, who raises against the landowners and the system. As the narrative expands, you will recognize that Memed’s contumacy deepens and that he shows a great national critisizm against the landowners, religion and the small accounts of the gentry of the town.

This national critisizm comes just with a human genuineness in front of the reader:

“You never know about mankind, master. The way he is today might change by tomorrow. A human reborns every day if he only wants, master. But he can arise every morning from his mother renewed and as another human. He can be born good as well as bad… The one you looking at now is me, but tomorrow I might do something which we both would not even slightly expect. That’s why you should resign.

Don’t search for more to get on. It’s not easy to describe mankind. Neither the birds nor the bugs are how they seem to be. Every living in this world has a habit yet humans have hundret thousands of habits. Master, you would lie if you say that you knew a human, your wife, your brothers or sisters, your dauther or son and your mother and father.”

Landowners which tyrannizes the people are human too, as well as the insurgents. Even though at the end of the first parts the narrative satisfies us, we get a bad feeling that this irregular system will not continue like this. But we perceive that the people are the problem and that instead of killing, learning is the solution. Ince Memed makes us think:

“This world is like this.” he said. “Water filles into trenches. Mankind gets born, dies and one day sinks. Trees are growing and perishing. Water flows, clouds are whitening. You kill the landowner another comes at his place. You kill him again, a new one comes.”

But he never stops trusting in mankind

 “Destiny, destiny… This they can’t call destiny master Abdi!” he said. It’s not destiny. A cat, a dog, a flying bird or whatever you provocate like that will fear at first. In the second… third it will become a tiger and break you into pieces. People shouldn’t be provocated…

… There is mankind you wouldn’t trust any trash. But there is mankind as well if you put your life in their hands, they will protect it as their owns.”

Citations Of Memed My Hawk

This contumacy of Memed My Hawk, when he is out into the wild in the fourth part with the preceptor’s sermon, they sound of his voice and by catching the value of religious texts shows a aesthetic literature concretision:

“It was friday when preceptor Ferhat climbed the peack of the rock to read prayers out loud as the village didn’t had a minaret. He went in front of the parish to make them pray. People of Yanıkören wanted him to read the friday sermon as well. The preceptor started talking like a mountain, over pebbles and between paramount cliffs, like water cascading down through bushy forests. He was yelling that God created humans to live under persecution.

This world became a cruel place. Neither God nor the prophet, they don’t want this. While someone is eating, thousands are watching. God doesn’t want this, he said. In the Koran, God says, he continued, the ones who are persecuting are infidel. Know that the ones seeing persecution and not setting against it, by ther deaths and hungers will, they are infidel too. Heaven is under the feet of the ones who withstand persecution and cruelty. And continuously long times he researched in arabic koran verses and with his heart touching voice he inferred from God’s words. Finishing his sermon he was tired and sweating.”

Yasar Kemal trusts people who say that God is with the ones who rise against. Since many years we realize that the democracy concept which the politics never stop talking about, isn’t just a way to rule, it’s also a lifestyle. We intuit that the voice of the public increases with the time, accumulating thousands of years as they are mostly blamed for unresponsiveness.

“A day like that will definitely come, said the preceptor with a deeper, faithful and trusting voice. “A day like that mankind will surely see… Because mankind is making war for a day like that since humans are existing. Mankind will do as they tell, wolf and lamb will spread.”

We see Ince Memed’s mistakes, positive efforts, lovers and the he is the last poet of his kind while he is building up his homeland.  

Yasar Kemal Books

One reason that the style of Yasar Kemal and the way he writes about a huge country with human reality stands out, is that at the beginning of every part, there is an informing text with a magnificial description of Çukurova. While reading Yasar Kemal, we think that it has been written easily and that is an important detail for the narrator. If the reader thinks of how easily written that qualitative literary text is, than the text is surely successful. It means, after long efforts, the writer reached the result of making an easily-written impression.

Memed’s Drawing (from old book cover)

Another point putting Yasar Kemal’s books forward are his utterances between the public, and that he uses his words and idioms mostly in his narratives. His rich expressions are particular and mostly used in the turkish language. That’s why his books are also suggested to the primary students as the most distunguished samples in our language.

Yasar Kemal uses utterances and richness in such an advanced level that Ali Püsküllüoğlu created a Yasar Kemal glossary. Ilber Ortaylı refered in his book How to Live a Lifetime?(Turkish Book) to this subject. For foregin translations Yasar Kemal’s wife and first editor Tilda smoothed this utterances nicely so it was possible to translate it into other languages.

Below you find the whole list of Yasar Kemal’s books, which were in my sight an inspiration for many turkish cinema movies and also the famous movie Feyzo the Polite One, which is known as giant in the turkish literary:

Tale Books

• Yellow Heat

Novels

• Serie of Ince Memed, My Hawk
• Three Anatolian Legends
• The Legend of Mount Ararat
• The Legend of the Thousand Bulls
• The Life Stories of the Famous Bandit Çakırcali
• The Drumming-Out
• The Wind from the Plain
• Iron Earth, Copper Sky
• The Undying Grass
• The Agas of Akchasaz Trilogy
• To Crush the Serpent
• The Saga of a Seagull
• The Birds Have Also Gone: Long Stories
• The Sea-Crossed Fisherman
• Little Nobody I
• The Pomegranate on the Knoll
• Little Nobody II
• Little Nobody III
• Look, the Euphrates is Flowing with Blood
• Ant Drinking Water
• The Cocks of Dawn

Children Novel

• The Sultan of the Elephants and the Red-Bearded Lame Ant

References

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