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CHAPTER 8 – YABAN, KADRO, ANKARA 
247 
His attempts to describe the villagers constantly resort to similes from western 
literature or the Christian Bible which would be meaningless to them and are quite 
alien to their traditions. These similes are not just a display of pretentious learning by 
the author. The function is dramatic: Their frequency is meant to suggest the attempt 
of the western educated mind to fit something strange to it into familiar categories. 
The failure of the attempt leads to an incoherent repetition of the very words: 
“Benzetiş, iştiare… Benzetiş, iştiare…” (Simile metaphor… Simile, metaphor…)
21
. 
The sense of alienation rooted in the very title of the work. Even the reference and 
meaning of the title is ambiguous. From the preface one might think it simply refers 
to the hero, Ahmet Celal (and means little more than “L’Étranger”). But it is much 
more than this. Yaban is a word of Persian origin.
As a noun it means desert and 
wilderness. As an adjective it means wild and savage. In a provincial meaning it 
denotes the stranger or the world of strangers beyond the family or social circle
22
. In 
his 1970 interview with Jacobson, responding to the translation of Yaban as Stranger 
Yakup Kadri said
 
that such a translation “does not give the full connotation of the 
word”. He suggested that “in addition to the meaning of outsider or foreign it carries 
the meaning of the barbarian too
23
. Later he recommended that the word should 
remain as it is without being translated, followed by a note of explanation
24
.
21
Karaosmanoğlu 2006, 69, Jacobson 76 
22
Redhouse, 1233-1234 
23
Jacobson, 95 
24
Jacobson, 97 

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CHAPTER 8 – YABAN, KADRO, ANKARA 
248 
The reference of “yaban” is richly ambiguous. Ahmet Celal himself is a yaban in the 
provincial meaning and is referred to as such. But the title of the novel does not refer 
only to him. It refers also to the reality of Anatolia and its people. Clearly from the 
descriptions in the book, Anatolia is like a desert land and its people barbarians, in 
the ancient Greek sense of the word, the civilised world being the capital and the 
West. Yaban, according to what has been passionately and repeatedly developed in 
the novel, can also refer to the Western invaders as barbarians in the modern sense of 
the world this time: are there any more fitting words than savagery and barbarism to 
describe the attitude of the Western world and their Ottoman allies towards the 
Anatolian peasant and the Anatolian land? Both – people and land - were and still 
are, of course, the core of the Turkish motherland. Yaban could also refer to the 
savagery of the war and to the savagery of the neglect which Anatolia suffered. 
To enhance the sense of alienation Yakup Kadri resorts to a hallucinatory narrative 
from which the narrator emerges as almost deranged. The narrator says so himself: 
“Am I not, too- like them-one of the deranged ones?”
25
. But this is not merely self-
conscious soliloquising. The alienation devices are so deeply rooted in the structure 
of the novel that the author succeeds in making the whole narrative seem like a 
delusion. The plot unfolds in a circular repetitive manner on various levels. As far as 
time is concerned, there is clearly a succession of seasons that leads up to the climax 
of the novel at the time of the Greek advance to and retreat from the Sakarya in the 
late summer of 1921 but the references to actual historical events are interestingly 
25
Karaosmanoğlu 2006 59, Jacobson, 63 

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