In the Shadow of the Yali

by Suat Dervis

  PRAISE FOR

  IN THE SHADOW OF THE YALI

  “Suat Derviş is an important novelist. She suffered a great deal for her political views, and her works were suppressed…In the Shadow of the Yalı is a work of beauty. A painful love story. A novel that examines love from a Marxist perspective. In my opinion, it has no equal in our literature.”

  —Selim İleri, Orhan Kemal Novel Prize–winning author of Boundless Solitude

  “The most remarkable thing about this deviously moving novel is the apparent absence of politics in a tale told by a committed and persecuted socialist. Well…read it. Suat Derviş, who lived through the fall and rise of elites from empire to republic, obviously did not need Foucault to figure out that there is no escape from social conflict and games of power, even in an affair flavored by tango and cologne. The translation brilliantly succeeds in staying true to the baroque romanticism of the Turkish original.”

  —Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, Harvard University

  “This feminist novel takes the reader into the world of the granddaughter of a Circassian slave who was born into privilege, lost everything, married a greedy, ambitious man, fell in love with a tycoon, and lost everything again. Suat Derviş paints a vivid portrait of the new rich during the early days of the Turkish republic still in the shadow of its Ottoman past.”

  —Miriam Cooke, Braxton Craven Professor of Arab Cultures, Duke University

  “A captivating tale of a passionate affair with unexpected consequences. The twists and turns of the unfolding narrative keep you reading to the end—which happens at a most unexpected point.”

  —Afsaneh Najmabadi, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

  “It is high time for the Anglophone literary world to meet the work of Suat Derviş, a remarkable woman writer from Turkey whose works appeared in French and Russian translation during the 1950s. Persecuted by the Turkish state in the mid-1940s for her socialist activism, Derviş earned a living by composing serialized romances for the Istanbul dailies. Narrating the gripping story of a passionate heroine who is willing to risk everything in the name of love, In the Shadow of the Yalı also tells a deeper story about Derviş’s decision to pursue a life of activism at the expense of her social relationships and privileges as an elite woman. Derviş’s work has embodied hope, integrity, and fortitude for several generations of women from Turkey. It is a gift to readers and students of world literature that she can now be read in English alongside other writers of her generation, from Jean Rhys to Tillie Olsen.”

  —Nergis Ertürk, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University

  “It is a fine thing to have a novel of Suat Derviş’s available for English-speaking audiences. At last this important voice from the Turkish republic’s early years—a feminist voice, a leftist voice—can be appreciated by a wider public. The novel lays bare the personal struggles and conflicts confronting women in this period, when the ‘modern woman’ was officially embraced, but expectations around sexual morality remained strong and fundamentally patriarchal. In this new landscape, Derviş shows us, men and women cannot really understand each other. This graceful translation offers readers a window on a crucial historical moment and access to a moving reflection on the possibility (or impossibility) and peril of female agency.”

  —Holly Shissler, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History, University of Chicago, and author of Between Two Empires: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the New Turkey

  “In the Shadow of the Yalı evokes the torments of a woman dreaming of freedom but trapped by her own past, the expectations of men, and the harsh judgments of society. Divided by historical rupture, her story conveys both the promise and the devastation of the twentieth century in the Turkish republic and beyond. This novel deserves a wide readership for its richly portrayed characters and evocative writing, skillfully translated by Maureen Freely. Scholars and students of global feminisms and the history of the modern Middle East will also find much to discuss here.”

  —Claire Roosien, Assistant Professor, Providence College Department of History and Classics

  “This novel tells a story of seduction by love both pitted against and intertwining with a story of seduction by money and power in the rising capitalism of the Second World War years in Turkey…The economic and psychological investigations of the novel are foregrounded on the belated awakening of Celile to, first who she is as a woman, followed by an awakening to how she’s defined and viewed by society. This double-epiphany reminds me of similarly tragic American heroines who realize too late that their upbringing as women of a specific class prevented them from turning their individual awakening into real personal agency in society, such as Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening or the eponymous heroine of Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell. In the Shadow of the Yalı, now available in English in Maureen Freely’s masterful translation, adds Celile to this literary sisterhood while capturing the particularities of Turkish society and providing a comparative perspective.”

  —Sibel Erol, Clinical Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, New York University

  “Suat Derviş—a feminist writer of solitude and freedom—shows how a couple speaking the language of desire slowly faces the dark sides of their relationship. With the escalation of Celile’s self-discovery of her position as an intermediary between her husband Ahmet and lover Muhsin, we as readers are invited to the heights of the psychological thrills of love with no calculations. With Celile, Suat Derviş spotlights how women’s emancipation became a political impasse in the cultural modernization of the post-Ottoman household.”

  —Çimen Günay-Erkol, Assistant Professor, Özyeğin University

  Originally published in Turkish as Çılgın Gibi in 1945 and in French, in a different form, as Les Ombres du Yalı in 1958

  Copyright © 1958 Suat Derviş

  This work is protected by the International Copyright conventions.

  This book has been published by arrangement with Telif Hakları ONK Ajans Ltd. Şti.

  Introduction copyright © 2021 Maureen Freely

  Translation copyright © 2021 Maureen Freely

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Derviş, Suat, author. | Freely, Maureen, 1952- translator.

  Title: In the shadow of the Yali : a novel / Suat Derviş; translated from the Turkish and with an introduction by Maureen Freely.

  Other titles: Çılgın gibi. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020057159 (print) | LCCN 2020057160 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590510414 (paperback) | ISBN 9781590510421 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PL248.D4 C5513 2021 (print) | LCC PL248.D4 (ebook) | DDC 894/.3533—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057159

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057160

  Ebook ISBN 9781590510421

  Publisher’s
Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  A Note About Turkish Honorifics

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  Translator’s Note

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  By the time she turned sixteen, Suat Derviş had witnessed the collapse of an empire, and with it the social order that had given her family its lofty rank. Constantinople, the city of her birth, and for two millennia one of the world’s great capitals, had been ravaged by more than a decade of political upheaval and, finally, defeat in the First World War. Refugees now roamed its streets in the hundreds of thousands. In the waterways dividing its European and Asian shores, the proud Ottoman Navy had been replaced by a hybrid fleet of British, French, Italian, and American warships.

  Vanquished and dispossessed, the old Ottoman elites were in disarray. Some had fled to Germany to escape prosecution for war crimes. Others had pledged themselves to the occupying powers. Most of the rest were gathering, sometimes in public but more often in secret, to aid in the struggle for independence.

  At sixteen, Suat was already committed to that struggle. When she went out on long walks with her childhood friend Nâzım, cheerfully straying far beyond permitted limits, they spoke of independence. Their country’s, and their own.

  Nâzım had recently graduated from the naval academy, but had no interest in a naval career, let alone a navy in which to enlist. He was therefore devoting his days to poetry. Suat, who had attending university in mind, was still in school, and that was where she was when Nâzım happened to drop by the family home one afternoon in October 1920 to find a stack of her papers sitting unattended on a table.

  He had always been more interested in wild, beautiful Suat than she in him. At some point in their romantic friendship, she had broken his heart. And he had written a poem about it, in which he spoke of walking in her shadow without her ever deigning to lower her gaze. Though he knew she had been writing stories and novels since the age of seven, she had never shown him a word. Now here was his chance.

  Amid the scribbles and the lines copied from great works and great minds, Nâzım found a prose poem she had signed with her own name. Its title was Delirium. “Tonight I am drunk,” it read, “Tonight I am driven mad. I am raving, raving, raving!”

  Well-mannered boy that he was, Nâzım sought Suat’s mother’s permission before taking the piece to a friend who was editing a literary journal. The following Sunday, he returned to Suat’s house, proudly waving the latest edition, in which the editor had given her poem pride of place, also promising his readers that she was to be a regular contributor.

  Seeing her name and her most secret thoughts exposed on the printed page, Suat burst into tears. After telling Nâzım never to poke his nose in her private business again, she ran from the room, slamming the door behind her. But she did submit a story to the next edition of that journal. In the months and years that followed, she became the regular contributor she had never agreed to be, crossing the Bosphorus by ferry to the Sirkeci quarter, in the old city, climbing the narrow lane up to the publishing district of Babıali to deliver by hand her stories and articles to this and like journals. Her confident manner and fashionably modest attire won her a certain degree of respect, though no one in those smoke-filled, men-only offices knew quite what to make of her. If she ever heard the nervous sniggers she may have left in her wake, she was too happy to care.

  “I am not ashamed of being a woman,” she once said. “And I take great pride in being a writer. That title is my sole fortune, my single pride, and my bread.” Her aim in life was “to gaze at the stars” without impediment.

  She was hardly alone in nurturing such aspirations. Despite the Ottoman Empire’s long tradition of keeping women far removed from public life, the progressive elite had been educating its daughters for some time, if only with the assistance of French and English governesses, and behind closed doors. As early as the 1890s, Ottoman women were in regular contact with the suffrage movements of Europe and avid, active readers of European literature. By 1920, the city’s most established feminist newspaper had been publishing weekly, and in two languages—Ottoman Turkish and French—for more than four decades.

  Like other notable Ottoman daughters who entered the public realm in the aftermath of the First World War, Suat could count on the support of a liberal-minded family. Her father was a French-trained obstetrician and gynecologist who drew his clientele from the city’s wealthy, westward-looking Levantines. Her mother, who came from a musical family, had herself once aspired to a life of writing. Suat and her older sister had never been kept secluded. From a young age, they’d been free to attend plays and concerts, meet with friends in teashops, and go on all those long walks.

  The family’s abiding principle—that convention was to be respected and perhaps negotiated, but never worshipped—is best illustrated by the story of Suat’s birth. Her parents had been hoping for a boy. When a girl arrived instead, they decided to give her a boy’s name just the same. The imam objected. Bowing to his will, they gave her a girl’s name, but only on paper. At home, she remained Suat.

  For all this family’s cosmopolitan ways, though, its Ottoman legacy still loomed large. Suat’s paternal grandmother had been a Circassian slave. Her paternal grandfather, Müşir Derviş Pasha, had been a minister under Sultan Abdülhamit. When this pasha first set eyes on the slave girl, she was performing a dance at a grand reception in the home of the grand vizier. Entranced, the pasha had asked his host if he could buy her. The grand vizier had insisted on giving the girl to his illustrious guest for free.

  She was fourteen years old when the pasha took her home with him. Though he already had a wife, two odalisques, and fourteen children, he quickly made her his second wife and had two more children with her. She died while giving birth to Suat’s father, the pasha’s sixteenth child. Not long afterwards, the pasha himself died, under mysterious circumstances: it was rumored that the sultan had him poisoned, as punishment for his liberal views. Suat’s father was left in the care of his half sisters, whose generosity had extended to a fine foreign education.

  It was in this tangle of Western thought and Ottoman tradition that Suat Derviş located her first novel, which she had ready and waiting in a desk drawer at the time of her first lucky break at the age of sixteen. Within weeks she had found it a publisher. Over the next eight years, she secured financial independence by publishing seven more. And though each and every one was a gothic roller coaster of twists, turns, and untimely deaths, with highs and lows as extravagant as anything you might find in Poe or Maupassant, they were also resolutely themselves. Rooted in the once-grand and now-disintegrating Ottoman mansions on the shores of the Bosphorus, and looking out onto a city that had now shaken off the occupiers to embrace the modernizing drive of the newly independent Turkey, they were, for all their stormy sensationalism, quiet disruptors of the didactic fictions wi
th which many women writers of the early republican era sought to teach their readers how to live and think.

  Suat Derviş’s novels were not written for men, nor, for the most part, were they read by them. But by the end of the 1920s, she had also made a name for herself as a political journalist. This too was due in part to her old friend Nâzım Hikmet. He was no longer in Istanbul, as Constantinople was now known, having left for the Soviet Union to witness its revolution firsthand. But his friends had become her friends, and these friends made up the core of the literary Left.

  By the 1930s, Nâzim was back in Istanbul, taking the poetry world by storm and working alongside his old friends, Suat among them, as they reached out to the masses with their revolutionary pens. The state was ferocious and unrelenting in its efforts to silence them in the decades that followed. They impounded their journals and raided their offices, threatening and blackmailing their employees. Those who would not be turned or silenced were taken to court, deprived of their passports and their right to work, locked up in jail, hounded into exile, or delivered into the hands of hired assassins. But still they continued to publish, disseminate, and innovate, breaking out of old forms to create new and revolutionary voices in poetry and fiction, on the stage and on the newsstand.

  Suat Derviş did some of her best work for journals like Resimli Ay (Illustrated Monthly), which did not target women so much as take them seriously. She also penned splendidly bold pieces of political reportage. Her most (in)famous, written after her second voyage to her friends in the north, was titled “Why I Am a Friend of the Soviet Union.”

  Suat had by now escaped from her third and stormiest marriage. Her first two marriages—the first to a member of the Turkish national football team, and the second to another left-wing writer—had ended almost as soon as they’d begun. Her fourth husband was Reşat Fuat Baraner, secretary general of the Turkish Communist Party—a gentle and courageous man, much loved by all who knew him. He and Suat were married in 1940, and although they remained man and wife until his death in 1968, Reşat Fuat would spend seventeen of those years in prison.