“Revolution is the Equality of Children and Adults”: Yaşar Kemal Interviews Street Children, 1975

Nazan Maksudyan

doi:10.1017/s002074382100088x

Abstract

AbstractIn 1975, the world-famous novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) undertook a series of journalistic interviews with street children in Istanbul. The series, entitled “Children Are Human” (Çocuklar İnsandır), reflects the author's rebellious attitude as well as the revolutionary spirit of hope in the 1970s in Turkey. Kemal's ethnographic fieldwork with street children criticized the demotion of children to a less-than-human status when present among adults. He approached children's rights from a human rights angle, stressing the humanity of children and that children's rights are human rights. The methodological contribution of this research to the history of children and youth is its engagement with ethnography as historical source. His research provided children the opportunity to express their political subjectivities and their understanding of the major political questions of the time, specifically those of social justice, (in)equality, poverty, and ethnic violence encountered in their everyday interactions with politics in the country. Yaşar Kemal's fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews also bring to light immense injustices within an intersectional framework of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. The author emphasizes that children's political agency and their political protest is deeply rooted in their subordination and misery, but also in their dreams and hopes. Situating Yaşar Kemal's “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization.

Highlights

Situating Yaşar Kemal’s “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization
Kemal was a world famous writer, one who has been translated into multiple languages, who received dozens of literary awards during his lifetime, and who was considered for the Nobel Prize. Kemal publicly affirmed his Kurdish identity in a country where it was forcefully denied and challenged official state policy. He was a civil and human rights activist who defended social justice and socialism, and who did not hesitate to speak about taboo issues, especially those concerning the genocide of Armenians, the oppression of the Kurdish people, and racism in Turkey
Yaşar Kemal is well known both for the sociopolitical commitment of his narratives and for developing sophisticated written works based on oral traditions of folk literature and myths

Summary

Introduction

In her cultural analysis of the literary representation of “poor but honorable” children in the melodramatic and bestselling novels of Kemalettin Tuğcu (1902–96) from the 1950s and 1960s, Nurdan Gürbilek stresses that, in these plots, children’s poverty, labor, and homelessness are not told with reference to social injustice, but as a personal misfortune that the child will overcome by hard work, good character, and virtue—without getting involved in crime or violence, without losing dignity and childhood.47 Another novelist of the period and a friend and mentor of Yaşar Kemal, Orhan Kemal, on the other hand, told a different story, in which the poor child could not grow up unstained.

Results

Conclusion