Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 8 – YABAN, KADRO, ANKARA 
246 
strongest emotion, which leave the plot behind and sound almost personal, and 
which closely resemble other passages in Yakup Kadri’s work. One obvious example 
is the move in Ahmet Celal’s mind from his donkey to his toys, to his childhood, to 
the otherwise unmentioned sea, to dying soldiers crying for their mothers, to himself 
crying for his mother just before his arm was amputated. This is strongly reminiscent 
of the closing of Yakup Kadri’s own 
Ateşten Gömlek 
where the characters remember 
their mothers and one of them wonders whether our unhappiness increases as we 
grow older, because we are moving further from a mother’s affection
18
. The depth of 
maternal affection is the foil for the references to the stepmother in 
Yaban 
19
.
The feelings which erupted in 
Yaban 
have their source in a deep personal sense of 
distance and shame in 1921. In interpreting the novel this cardinal point should not 
be forgotten.
Ahmet Celal grasps that there is more than he can grasp
20
: 
The soul of the Turkish peasant is a quiet, deep pool. What is it at the 
bottom? Is it a ragged boulder, a mound of clay, a soft layer of sand? It is 
impossible to discover. 
When they looked at me, conspicuous in the eyes of everyone was a bead 
of light which would shine and go out; go out and then shine. Without a 
doubt I cannot remember anything which has disturbed me as much as 
this light, which is an oozing out of a kind of clandestine, demonic 
intelligence, whose roots are so deep that I will never be able to reach 
them.
18
See Appendix 1, Fragment C: “
Ateşten gömlek” romanının son sayfalar
and Appendix 2, Fragment 
C for its translation. 
19
Karaosmanoğlu 1989, 8: In an interview with Nedim Gürsel, Yakup Kadri remarked that the title of the Italian 
translation of 
Yaban, 
“Terra Matrigna” (Stepmother Earth) was the best of any translation.
 
20
Karaosmanoğlu 2006, 20-21, Jacobson, 6-7 

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