The conspicuous absence of Tezer Özlü’s work in the English language is, to many readers of Turkish literature, a huge oversight. With precise, knowing style and modernist sense of bending convention, the lyrically humanistic nature of her prose propelled her reputation as a writer in deep dialogue with the specificities and absences of her place and time. Now, in anticipation of her Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri, soon to be released as Cold Nights of Childhood by UK publisher Serpent’s Tail, Matt Hanson gives us a glimpse at the themes of Özlü’s oeuvre, as well as how the sensitivities of her writing continue to carry through to present day.
In 1980, a Turkish novel appeared under the name Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri (Cold Nights of Childhood), written by one of the country’s most beloved writers. As the text reached the public, Tezer Özlü had just six years left to live, before breast cancer would take her life at the age of forty-three. Even amidst illness, she continued to influence European literature from its fringes as internationalist writers—entering the late twentieth century—continued to adapt modernist expressionism as representative of individual, universal humanism.
Özlü wrote mainly in her mother tongue of Turkish, yet her style, temperament, voice, and life aligned technically and thematically with the earlier German and Italian writers she admired, from the Joycean experimentalism of Italo Svevo to the singular meta-fictions of Franz Kafka; yet, it was the atheistic loneliness of Cesar Pavese who inspired her to end her last book, Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuk (Journey to the End of Life)—first published in German two years before her untimely death—in the very hotel room where he committed suicide. Along with the aforementioned, her four books, issued by Turkey’s prestigious publishing house Yapi Kredi, include a collection of letters with fellow lifelong comrade in literature Leyla Erbil, and a complete works edition of a plays, prose, and translations prepared by her sister, Sezer Duru.
In the last four decades, Özlü has not faded from the literary landscape of young readers. Between her books, the thirty-five printings of Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuke are only outmatched by the thirty-eight printings for Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri. She is known, adoringly, as the melancholic princess of Turkey by the youngest generation of readers (such as the editor Dilara Alemdar), and as the wild child of Turkish literature by experts (such as NYU Turkish literature professor Sibel Erol).
Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculu is a slim novel. The voice of the main character can be read as a fictionalized self-portrait—approachable, charming, familiar, and liberating to Turkish readers for her emotional honesty and radical, post-nationalist individualism, all conveyed through an uncompromising prism of intellectual self-awareness. The novel opens under the heading of “Home,” and begins with the imposing character of the narrator’s father, whom the narrator speaks as prevailing like a military ruler over their family’s domestic life, mirroring the social strictures that followed in the wake of the 1960, 1971, and 1980 military coups. Özlü has a supple gift for evoking joy in the reader, offering poetic imagery—focusing, for example, on the yellow and purple primroses poking up out of the snow, glorifying the clarity of summer mornings. Then, quick as whiplash, she reverts to an icier tone to describe how her hands bleed in the flesh-cracking cold of Ankara. Roosters and oxen blend with buses carrying passengers to Istanbul, stinging her young, isolated heart with envy. She takes refuge in the warm bed of her mother, but a neighboring slum rumbles to the sound of tambourines as they sing and dance. With these surroundings so lucidly detailed, Özlü sets a convincing stage of authenticity based on external description. Morning’s fire is juxtaposed with freezing bathwater.
With mere paragraphing, doing away with the portioning of chapter breaks, Özlü jumps from one location to another rather undramatically, as is her deadpan style. The true substance of her telling is inwardly driven. From tea with quince marmalade on toast in the village, to coffee with powdered milk in Istanbul, she is on her way to seeing a movie at Atlas cinema. Özlü handles the theme of rural to urban migration with a gentle touch, emphasizing their incongruity and the fleeting nature of their coexistence within a single person’s life. The narrator’s surroundings abruptly shift between these opposing ways of life, urban and rural, as Özlü navigates the lingering, overshadowing presences of provincial life in Turkey.
Her narrator’s suicide attempt, within the first ten pages of the novel, becomes a device that she would go on to employ often in her work, similar to her contemporaries like Adalet Ağoğlu, who passed away in 2020. The dramatic effect of suicide has never quite faded from Turkish storytelling, exemplified in Turkey’s original Netflix series, Ethos, where, by the second episode, a leading female character—also living in a village and suffering from mental illness—cuts her wrists under the same roof shared by her husband, son, and sister. While film delivers a kindred image of a suicidal woman looking out of her window, fogging the glass in the dead of an insufferably depressing Anatolian winter, Özlü’s pen mines the thoughts of that trope.
By way of Turkey’s short story master Sait Faik Abasıyanık, who introduced Istanbul’s literati to Sartre, the suicidal nausea of existentialism affected Turkish writers. Sait Faik was also known as an island dweller, residing on one of the Prince Islands in the Sea of Marmara, and although he died when Özlü was only eleven years old, his lasting impact, like hers, influenced the way Turkish literature is written and read.
Özlü’s narrator in Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri contemplates the beauty she extrapolates of her dead body, and commits to memory her plan for keeping down the tablets she’s prepared to swallow. As the language exalts imaginary landscapes of beauty beyond life, the paragraph abruptly cuts to a dirty pillowcase with the insignia of a psychiatric hospital. Özlü writes it as if the character might already be dead. While the hysterical, overactive imagination of her inner voice subsides, the tension between the scenes does not, clamouring as the narrator struggles to leave the hospital.
Her grandmother, affectionally called Bunni, is described as someone who tirelessly cleans the house, her life defined by immediate bodily needs and prayer. Her father had lived with her until she was sixty-six, and the narrator adds, quite sardonically, that she has not slept with a man in seventy years, and immediately follows with the counterintuitive declaration that nevertheless, she likes living. It is the voice of clinical depression and, in its rawness, endures for today’s readers with vital relevance. Rational, transparent responses to mental health issues—not to mention a respectful forum in which its victims might speak—are rare in Turkey, as they are throughout the region, where psychiatric and psychological healthcare has not enjoyed the critical attention in popular consciousnesses in the same way that physical care demands.
When the narrator goes to a funeral with her family, she ruminates on the idea of death as a border that does not exist. It is an apt metaphor for the constraints of nationalism, where the absolute limits of life are tied to the sense of territorial bond. It seems that mortality and nationalism were the two most formidable questions that Özlü sought to ask and answer in the thoughts of her characters’ narratives. In the same way that her narrator wants to leave Turkey, she also wants to leave her body.
About halfway into Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri, the narrator is in Paris, enduring a persistent nostalgia for Istanbul, loving and leaving multiple men as she might go between cities. Emotionally, she is neither here nor there, and speaks of lovers like passing trains. Some trail off with a touch of romance—those men she likes with feminine faces—and others run away, crashing into her core. After all, she is clear on love: “I must be a great love for him. Do I need such a love? No. I only need a man.”
The capitals of Europe are empty saviors, as absent of soul as the men she encounters. Their flowers smell of cigarettes. Their dreams are nightmarish. Istanbul, Berlin, Ankara, Paris, they are all lost causes, like love. The prose is liquid, and gushes with visceral detail—palpable, obsessive, captivating. There are repulsive scenes that, even from the distance of reading, are disturbing and honest. In life, Özlü herself suffered sexual abuse at the psychiatric hospital, and novelized her experience of being coerced, inappropriately, to undress before a male doctor.
As a feminist symbol, Özlü represents a shift in the demographics of Turkish authors as the predominance of men faded in the late 1970s, and more women rose to become published authors of national renown. As the younger sister of her brother and fellow writer, Demir, Özlü took part in the literary soirees of Istanbul’s society of letters from a young age, demonstrating her disdain for traditional strictures by attending Istanbul’s Austrian high school in miniskirts, surrounded by conservative Muslims and secular nationalists equally hostile to women’s sexual liberation.
Özlü’s deep dive into the loneliness and alienation of Marxist nonconformism was, more than her peers (like Sevgi Soysal, Tomris Uyar, and Leyla Erbil), ardently apolitical, internationalist, and individualist. In contrast to Soysal, whose early Turkish feminism is clear, Özlü did not stand up to government, nor did she take part in activist movements. She was not jailed like Soysal, for example, whose prison writings are part of her literary output. Instead, Özlü penned essays, such as “Our Women,” in which she ties together the crisis of thought in confrontation with systemic, patriarchal misogyny. But more so, she attempted to make sense of life and death, and to create an individual by way of literature—an individual that must have a life outside of her nation, outside of her family, outside even her body. In the process, she fared the bitterness of such an emotional, psychological leap into the unknown, beyond familial or national recognition.
Perhaps that is one of the more enduring lessons of Özlü: essentially, an inward shift is required to dismantle and redress the collective grievances of nationalism which continue to spread. The literary efforts of Özlü are extant as an antidote to the global pandemic of xenophobia, inevitable in the prevailing, broken system of globalizations, as rigged as it is vulnerable to crony and disaster capitalism. In world literature, as Sibel Erol observes, Özlü might be compared to Forough Farookhzad and Sylvia Plath, for their fearless portrayals of female introspection. In her writing and life, Özlü demonstrated her dedication to transforming gender roles.
In English translation, the coming seasons in international book publishing are harbingers of a revival for Turkey’s proud tradition of late twentieth century feminist writing. Özlü’s fellow litterateur, Leyla Erbil, will also appear in English by way of two of her novels. Though the two shared similar practices of stream-of-consciousness writing, Özlü, in her commitment to autobiographical fiction, followed a special line of inquiry during a time when authors around the world concurrently navigated the pull from modernism to postmodernism.
Özlü is not alone on the frontlines of this ongoing conversation, but judging from her prose alone, she has more than demonstrated a deserved prominence in Turkish letters, commanding her language with directness, not entirely untranslatable or overly literary in style, and with a lucidity that was as daring and tragic as the most praised writers of her generation.
The translation of Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri is set to appear in English with the British publisher Serpent’s Tail, and will likely make a splash as Western cultural history is reappraised in light of this century’s sweeping changes, coming to center upon the liberation of bodies long oppressed by the post-imperial status quo.
Matt A Hanson is a freelance journalist and art writer based in Istanbul, where he contributes to Artnet News, Tablet Magazine, The Millions, Words Without Borders, Al-Monitor, forthcoming for the Jewish Review of Books, and many others. He is an editor of artist books and exhibition texts for Arter, Dirimart, Pera Museum, Koç University Press, Yapı Kredi Publications, with collaborations featuring the poet Lale Müldür and the artist and writer Deniz Gül. For a series on art writing in Turkey by SAHA Association, he wrote an autobiographical essay.
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