Some novels have such a sense of place that it rewards to reader to actually see the place being described. Mehmed, My Hawk, is such a book. If you plan to risk the threats of violence and oppression in the south-east for a week or two, you should consider taking this classic novel along for the trip. It will provide a cultural underscore to all the wonderful panoramas you will see.
Set in the south-east in the 1930s, it presents a hard, hard world. Mehmed, an 11-year-old boy, protects his widowed mother from the local warlord through his strength of character and grit. Every day the boy is sent out to clear the endless tracks of thistles which grow around the village. He labours all day in all weathers, and he grows into an incredibly tough yet dignified man. He finds love, but cannot act on it because of the social mores of the time. Eventually he is pushed into brigandage and goes on a desperate journey to simply pursue his right to build a life.
The language of the original is spare and hard like the land and the life being described. It brings to mind For Whom the Bell Tolls, with its relentless sense of foreboding, sweetened by the love story at the center of the story.
It is not hard to read the novel as an allegory. Turkey was a nascent entity when this novel came out, where memories of the local pashas were yet to fade. These men were not uniformly despotic, but such were the conditions in the late Ottoman era that it was quite possible for them to treat their peasants as slaves. The workers of the Anatolian steppe were often victims for medieval justice, and Kemal makes his disdain for this abuse obvious. His title character is not just an archetype; he is an aspiration. Despite, or rather as a result of, all his misfortunes, he becomes a man of silent strength and determination.
This is essential reading if you want to understand how the Turkish Republic dragged itself away from the feudalism of the Ottoman era. It also gives you insight into the intellectual world of the mid-twentieth century, a crucial stage for the ideology of nationalism, where the early promise of statehood was burdened with the weight of the past. Mehmed, My Hawk, like the title character, endures.
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