The Melancholy of Separation from the Cultural Roots

143 Hence, the above discussion reveals that the separation from the ’bed’ 228 or the native land the Ottoman cultural legacies and the meeting with the new cultural identity the Westernization agenda that based on Western secularism. This separation unavoidably brings profound sadness to the life of Turkish people. This radical separation from their cultural root leads them to suffer from insecurity, hopelessness, and perplexity that haunting their life. The oscillation of the characters in this discussion will be further discussed in the next subheadings to emphasize the state of melancholy they encounter as a result of their separation from their cultural roots and the fixed identity imposed by the Republican agenda under the sovereignty of Atatürk.

2.1 The Melancholy of Separation from the Cultural Roots

The separation from Ottoman caused quite a complicated period of negotiation. The transition period from the multi- lingual, hybrid and heterogeneous Ottoman Islam to the targeted monolingual and homogenized nation- state was a mismatch between the Islamic grounded society taking its power from its colonialism, monarchy, and cosmopolitanism hybridity and the Republican nation-state established upon a state-imposed secularism and westernization. 229 This mismatch resulted in a dislocated identity that brings profound sadness for Turkish people and the character is depicted in Pamuk’s novels. 228 Please refer to page 22- 23 for the discussion of human’s separation which is symbolized by a reed torn from its bed in order to get a flute. 229 Leyla Yücel, an Experimental Analysis: The Problem of Liminality in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and The New Life, Unpublished Dissertation, Belgium: Ghent University, 2013, 29. 144 Celal ’s lamentation over the loss of their identity and the modernization that undermines their cultural roots or Galip’s references to ‘helpless pain’ of people who live in a novel rootless identity can be taken as Pamuk’s criticism or objection toward modernization that abandons Turkey’s traditional values and identity. This agony of missing the root of identity can be observed more in the chapter “Bedii Usta’s Children” the sixth chapter of The Black Book dedicated to examining the transformation of fashion and clothing in the early Westernization projects in early 1923s. 230 In this chapter, Pamuk talked about ‘undisputed’ master of Turkey’s mannequins Bedii Usta. He was ordered by Abdülhamit to build mannequins for Turkey first naval museum under supervision of Prince Osman Selalatin. Unfortunately, the Sheikh al-Islam was furious discovering the ‘magnificent creations’ in the museum that impeccably resemble human beings. As a result, the mannequins “were swiftly removed from view and banister were erected between the galleons” BB, 60. 231 Twenty years later, things begin to change in Bedii Usta’s life along with Ataturk’s Westernization project that brought a wave of novelty in Turkish outward appearance. This changing includes abolishing Ottoman’s clothing, be it 230 Ataturk’s policy on men clothing ordered all citizens to discard their fezes and replace it with Western hat whereas for women he ordered the removal of headscarf. 231 Traditional Islam has different perspective on arts and painting. In Islamic tradition, replicating God’s creation perfectly means to compete with God Almighty. Three dimensional art objects such as mannequins is an act of idolatry, therefore it is prohibited in Muslim tradition. This perspective is depicted in Pamuk’s international big hit, My Name is Red, where he uses the art of miniatures as a feature to contrast Eastern and Western artistic traits, and the “irreconcilable religious and cultural differences that lie beneath them”. See Üner Daglier, “Orhan Pamuk on the Turkish Modernization Project” Humanitas XXV. 12 2012: 146-167, 154. 145 fez and turban, replacing them with Western-clothing and adopting clean-shaven face for man. 232 In the great westernizing wave of the early years of the Republic, when gentlemen threw aside their fezzes to don panama hats and ladies discarded their scarves in favor of low-slung high heels, mannequins began to appear in the display windows of the finest clothing stores along Beyoglu Avenue. These however, were brought in from abroad, and when he first set yes upon these foreign mannequins, Bedii Usta was sure that the day he’d awaited for so long was upon him BB, 60. Bedii Usta takes the sample of his works to department stores to sell his mannequins, but all of these grand stores fail him. They defy buying his works as his mannequins do not look like the European models. The mastery of Bedii Usta’s mannequins lays on its total resemblance of the real Turks. However, one of the shopkeepers tells Bedii Usta that customers desire a totally different thing, a new style of fashion in order to be a new person. The customers want: a coat worn by a new beautiful creature from a distant unknown land, so he can convince himself that he, too, can change, become someone new, just by putting on this coat. Turks no longer wanted to be Turks, they wanted to be something else altogether BB, 61. This fact tears apart Bedii Usta who wants “to ensure that the mannequins in shops windows were based on our own people” and his ambition to do so “was prevented by a powerful cabal, who were themselves the victims of an international conspiracy dating back two hundred y ears” 233 BB, 187. “These historical power did not want to give our people chance to be themselves” BB, 189. Broken-hearted, Bedii Usta works to produce mannequins that 232 See Arus Yumul “Fashioning the Turkish Body Politic” Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity Conflict and Change in the Twentieth Century, eds. Celia Kerslake, Kerem Öktem, and Philip Robins New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010: 349-369, 350-355. 233 The Westernization movement was spearheaded by Sultan Mahmud the Second reigning 1808- 1839. It was the prototype of the founding of Turkish republic in 1923 led by Atatürk. 146 accommodates the dream of his fellow Turks- the dream of becoming somebody else. He also tries to locate whom: These people were imitating, whom they had taken as their role models for change. […] They were discarding their old ways, faster than eyes could see; they embraced a whole new set of gestures. Their stock of little everyday gest ure was “life’s greatest treasure”, but slowly and inexorably, as if in obedience to secret and invisible master, they were changing, disappearing, and a whole new set of gestures taking their place BB, 63. He finally discovers that it is the Western movies which destroy the expressions, gestures and bodily movements of their people BB, 63. Rüya’s ex- husband also believes that movies and televisions bring negative effect for Turkish people as the movies makes them “so entranced by the streets and clothes and women they’d seen on the silver screen that they’d been unable to go on living as before ” BB, 128. He further says that those movies are made “to erode [their] collective memory with movie music.[that] will rip away [their] memories, [their] past, [their] history, leaving [them] with nothing to share but [their] misfortune” BB, 127. Yet, Bedii Usta convinces his son that : “. . . a nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures” BB, 62. For this reason, he decides to keep on making “his sons” BB, 60 and to hide them in his basement until they are rediscovered again. His efforts, however fail to compete with the imported Western style mannequins and he was “reeling back into the darkness of his basement atelier and spend fifteen years producing more than one hundred fifty mannequins until the day he died” BB, 61. 147 These mannequins’ issues represent the mourning of Turkey’s lost identity as an impact of Westernization’s policies imposed by the state-led modernist. The ‘gesture’ here is a metaphor that stands as their source of identity their Ottoman’s past which is cut from their essence and replaced with a whole new set of new ‘gesture’- a new cultural identity imposed by the elite Westernization’s project. Similar melancholy envelops the Crown Prince, Osman Celalatin Efendi. Pamuk dedicated one chapter entitled The Story of the Crown Prince in order to recount the Prin ce’s melancholy of the anguish of loosing identity that takes him into a deep lamentation and solitude. For him, the most fundamental thing to solve concerning Turkish identity is the question of his people “How to be oneself?” BB, 419. The only way to s ave his people and his country from “destruction, enslavement, and defeat” BB, 419, is to solve and locate the proper answer to this mystery. In Osman Celalatin’s perspective, ”it was because they had failed to find a way to be themselves that the whole peoples had been dragged into slavery, the whole races into degeneracy, and entire nation into nothingness, nothingness” BB, 419-20. The crown Prince believes that “ all peoples who are unable to be themselves, all civilizations that imitate other civilizations, all those nations who find happiness in other people’s stories were doomed to be crushed, destroyed, and forgotten” BB,429. To save his country and his people from the curse of identity crisis, the Prince withdraws himself from the rest of the world and lives in an austere solitude, to discover his true self before the opportunity to rule his country and cure his people from the agony of identity predicament. 148 The Black Book shows that the imposed new cultural costume brings certain melancholy to the characters as they encounter a dilemmatic condition of losing their roots and gaining new identity that completely different from their native identity. This longing of the authentic self which is banished and ripped away due to blatant imitation of another culture becomes the heart of Pamuk’s oeuvres and he immortalizes the anguish of losing ‘memories’ as the locus in his novels. 234 He then elaborates this collective feeling of losing memories in Istanbul Memories and the Cities 235 , a memoir centered on the concept of hüzün, an Arabic world for collective melancholy which is left untranslated in P amuk’s Istanbul Memories and the Cities. This gloomy feeling is a result of “the pain they feel for everything that has been lost” 236 Pamuk examines hüzün as a response to loss and grief in the Islamic tradition and from among the many meanings of the term, he highlights two: hüzün as a spiritual, sublime feeling and hüzün as the manifestation of an illness. “Imbued still with the honor accorded to it in Sufi literature, hüzün gives 234 The longing of their cultural roots that take its first form in The Black Book, is examined deeper in The Silent House. In this novel Pamuk presents the effect of Atatürk’s Westernization on each individual in the novel. This novel presents the confusion of embracing new cultural identity as part of Western country by abandoning their cultural roots; including the changing of their traditional outfit, alphabet, time and calendar. 235 Istanbul a memories and the City is Pamuk memoir after his ‘first political novel’ Snow. This book has no plot, no characters, no conversation, nor the labyrinthine of neither characters’ identity quest, nor East-West oscillation as we can find in his other works. This book genuinely recounts on the description of old Istanbul and homage to writers range from Western and Eastern writers that contribute to shape Pamuk’s hüzün. Hüzün, is Arabic word for collective melancholy, which left un translated in English- according to Pamuk is a word he derives from Arabic word zenettul huzn which indicates in the Quran as the “year of mourning” for Muhammad’s wife Khadija and his uncle. As depicted in Turkish literature- hüzün typically has had social function. It expresses a certain kind of melancholy felt nationwide, rather than personal feeling of loss and grief, it emphasizes on the communal myths and discourses which binds the society. See Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul a Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely New York: Vintage International, 2007: 90-107. 236 Orhan Pamuk Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely New York: Vintage International, 2006, 103. 149 the resignation of an air of dignity, but it also explains their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat, and poverty so philosophically and with such pride.” 237 This melancholy of losing what they once had been echoing in all Pamuk’s oeuvres, and it first manifested in The Black Book. This shows how the imposed modernization by Atatürk has affected the life of the characters in Pamuk’s novels. This novel presents the criticism toward the westernization ’s agendas in Turkey. It recounts the longing of each character to their origin as they are harshly cut from where they belong. Therefore, the characters in this novel wail for the other part of their self. Pamuk’s The Black Book recounts the agony of being painfully detached from the unity with the native land. However, The Black Book merely presents the longing for the identity origin that seems to speak the author’s criticism toward the imposed Westernization agenda. Yet the author offers no solution to the identity issues suffered by the characters, he merely presents the effects of the imposed modernity to the life of his characters. 238 In Snow, this longing for the cultural roots still echoes and the 237 Orhan Pamuk Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely New York: Vintage International, 2006, 91-104. 238 Daglier’s research articles shown that although Pamuk does not offer his solution in The Black Book, he offers his favor in My Name is Red. Here, he shows that Westernization agenda in the Ottoman and the Turkish Republic would come to no avail due to Islamic deep-cultural background. Master Enishte Efendi, once he visits Venize on his duty to deliver a diplomatic letter from the Sultan, is deeply overwhelmed with European culture and civilization. He then convinces the Ottoman Sultan to fund project to make an Occidental style painting and give it to Venetian Doge. His project however, comes fruitless as he suffers from violent death by an Islamic fundamentalist who does not want to betray the Islamic art. See Üner Daglier, “Orhan Pamuk on the Turkish Modernization Project: Is It a Farewell to the West?” Humanitas 24. 12 2012: 146- 167, 148-9. Enishte Efendi’s yearning for Westernization is once depicted in Pamuk’s The White Castle and The Silent House. In The White Castle, Hoja, the Ottoman scholars, who long for Western civilization forces his slave the Venetian scholars given by the pasha as a gift to teach him everything he wants to know about Western sciences and civilizations. In the end, Hoja forsakes 150 pain is pretty intense, especially in the depiction of the neglected old buildings laden with historical accounts that contribute to the richness of the cultural past legacy. More contemporary issues such as the rise of political Islam and the complexity of identity construction portrayed in Snow make this tale even richer. The issues of identity construction in Snow are presented in the ‘clash’ between the Ottoman legacy and the imposed modernization. Snow covers the past nostalgia of Turkey’s fundamental identity in its contemporary identity issues. The disputes that take place in Kars is a result of the conflict between fundamentalist who wants to stay and remain within their Islamic identity and secularist who wishes to abolish all elements of Ottoman Islam’s legacies. Once w ielded an “enormous power under the Ottoman Empire for centuries”, 239 Turkey underwent profound changing by the imposed Westernization led by Turkish national hero’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The issue of identity fixedness based on the Kemalist secularism worth discussing here is Sunay Zaim who embodies the Kemalist secularist group. Sunay Zaim represents nationalism concept taking on Western model especially French. Sunay is an actor and director of Sunay Zaim Theatrical Company who believes he belongs to Western-elite and has a duty to enlighten the marginalized people in Turkey’s small town. Sunay is the total imitation of his own country and swaps his place with his uncanny resemblance, the Venetian slave, to live his dream life in the West as one of the Frankish in Venezia. While his Venetian slave stays in Istanbul and lives as Hoja because he believes that after living in Istanbul and exploring the relation with Hoja and the Eastern culture will not be able to return to Venize as he used to be: “I knew that if I should return to Venice I would not be able to pick up my life where I had left it” Pamuk, White 32. In The Silent House, Dr Selaahattin lives in reclusion in order to write his encyclopedia of sciences that will enlighten his fellow Turks on Western science and civilization. 239 David N. Coury, “Torn Country”: Turkey and the West in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow” Critique 50. 4 2009: 340-49, 344. 151 Kemalist reformers believing that to promote social change; all he needs to do is imitating the West through arts projects. Sunay starts his life as a student at Kuleli Military Academy however, “he had been expelled in his final year for slipping over to Istanbul in a rowboat in perform various Beyoğlu theaters” Snow, 190. Sunay is a man of iron-willed, being fallen several times in his life he eventually manages to have his own theater company that he takes on tour to introduce modernization and teach modernity to his fellow marginalized Turks. He dedicates ten years on Anatolia tour as he wants to bring “culture to its teahouses”, and he wants to liberate his “poor brothers” from the curse of overwhelming despair that makes them “ sit in the houses; day after day they go there and do nothing” Snow, 194. His agenda is because he “wanted to help [his] unhappy friends out of their misery and despair Snow, 195. The theater military coup, he stages upon Kars is proposed by performing My Fatherland or My Headscarf, a famous play in the mid-thirties that goes hand in hand with ”westernizing state officials eager to free women from the scarf and other forms of religious coercion ” Snow, 147. The play shows a covered woman who liberates herself for independence by removing her scarf and flaunting her hair. Funda Eser, Sunay’ wife who acts as the covered girl emphasizes: that when the angry girl tore the scarf off her head, she was not just making statement about people or about national dress, she was talking about our souls, because the scarf, the fez, the turban, and the headdress were symbol of reactionary darkness in our souls, from which we should liberate ourselves and run to join the modern nations of the West Snow, 151-2. As the closing remark of the scene, Funda burns her headscarf on stage that provokes the anger from the religious boys at the back rows. They angrily shout 152 “So why not take everything off and run to Europe stark naked?” Snow, 152. This central scene depicting new identity for Turkish women imposed by the secularist Republic raise a conflict amongst Turkish’s citizen. In addition, this play also reveals Turkey ’s divided-spirit, between the secularist and the Islamist. The secularist believes that cutting themselves from the Islamist promising freedom, yet the Islamist sees t hat this ‘freedom’ is meaningless, since they will sacrifice their cultural roots and the soul of their tradition on the altar of modernity. As the audience gets furious with the play, the army takes over the stage and the coup takes place during the play. The coup is designed by Sunay with the assistance of his friend, Colonel Osman Nuri çolak, and Sunay’s friend for more than thirty years since their study in Kuleli Military Academy. Colonel Osman Nuri and Sunay plan their ultimate coup by which they hope to defeat the Islamic party from the upcoming election by staging his own martyrdom in his version of The Spanish Tragedy. 240 Adopting Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Sunay wants to have Kadife, the leader of headscarf girls to play the heroine by p romising Blue’s release as an exchange for her role to unveil on stage. Sunay also uses Kadife as his tool to gain a myth as a martyr for modern art. He announces his own death on the stage beforehand by writing a news article in which he summarizes the play describes his death on stage. He visits Serdar Bey, the owner of the Border City Gazette and dictates the journalist to write down his death on stage: 240 The Spanish Tragedy is a play written by Kyd. 153 DEATH ON STAGE. ILLUSTRIOUS ACTOR SUNAY ZAIM SHOT DEAD DURING YESTERDAY’S PERFORMANCE... The death of the great Turkish actor Sunay Zaim was for the audience more shattering than life itself. Although the people of Kars were fully aware that the play was about a person liberating herself from tradition and religious oppression, they were still unable to accept that Sunay Zaim was really dying... and never will they forget that he sacrificed his life for Art Snow, 336-7. Eventually, Sunay indeed died in this play. The gun he gives to Kadife as the final act of the play is loaded. When Kadife pulls the trigger after she has removed her headscarf, Sunay does really fall and the audiences respond as if he is really shot. By his megalomaniac desire to die on stage, Sunay succeeds to bring what he believes, as modern art to Kars citizen and to promote Atatürk’s agenda that the unveiling is the passport for women to embrace modernization. 241 Sunay spends his theatrical time to bring modernity to Turkey based on his belief in Republican’s formula to imitate all things related to the West as the sole key to enter the portal of modernity. . However, Kadife seems to have her own wish, therefore she uses her role as her means to defend her fellow women’s right within Islam and also her personal point of views on the orthodox interpretation of Quran. At the beginning she agrees to bare her head to ‘buy’ Blue’s freedom from Sunay. Following the news about Blue and his new mistress, Hande, who are died on the raid by special operation, Kadife realizes that this role will secure her own role as a woman of her own. In her debates with Sunay, Kadife insists that she will not go to hell, 241 Leila Ahmed argues that in a Muslim country that works to be a member of Western world, the men sacrifices their women on the altar of the West civilization based on European colonialism of “Islam is oppressor and the West is the liberator. For more details explanation see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of Modern Debate New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1992, 165. 154 even after she kills herself and Sunay because as she tells Sunay although the Quran forbids suicides “but this does not prevent God in his greatness from finding it in his heart to pardon the suicide girls and spare them from going to hell after all ” Snow, 402. Prior to Sunay Zaim’s military coup 242 which is blanketed in the play at the National Theater, the disputes over the suicide epidemic in Kars take place as the government’s effort to stop the act comes to no avail. The Departement of Religious Affairs’ preliminary effort that has plastered the city with the poster declar ed: “Human beings are God’s masterpiece and SUICIDE IS BLASP HEMY” Snow, 14 comes fruitless, those who belong to political Islam is getting more and more furious. They demand the government to uplift the headscarf banning from the universities, but as the government provides no response, these people run anti- Atatürk movement in the city of Kars. The murder of the local Director of the Institute of Education at The New Life Pastry shop shows the picture of Kars at the current moment. The clash between Islamist and secularist occur as they have different point of view. The former wants to preserve the right of women to wear the veil, the latter insists to unveil women. This clash betrays the soul of the heterogenic Kars that used to live side by side in 242 Göknar emphasizes that the coup can be read as a symptom Republican national’s conspiracy of secular modernity. It is a form of paranoia mode of thinking that considers Islamic and ethnic Kurdish as a threat to the secular state. The coups in fact always appear in all Pamuk’s novels except in My Name is Red. Pamuk presents the coups as a historical event that represents secular statemilitary intervention into everyday life. The Turkish military, as the protector of Kemal’s ideals, is entitled to interfere in Turkish politics whenever the secular ideals of Republic come under a threat. See Erdağ Göknar. “Melodrama of Conspiracy, Burlesques of Coup: Snow 2002” in Orhan Pamuk Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel, London: Rouledge, 2013: 184-204. 155 harmony. Serday Bey, the owner of the local newspaper in Kars recalls the past life in Kars: In the old days we were all brothers. But in the last few years everyone started saying, I’m an Azerri, I’m a Kurd, I’m a Terekemian. Of course we have people here from all nations. The Terekemians, whom we also call the Karakalpaks, are the Azeris’ brothers. As for the Kurds, whom we prefer to think of as a tribe: In the old days, they didn’t even know they were Kurds. And it was that way through the Ottoman period: None of the people who chose to stay went around beating their chests and crying, ‘We are the Ottomans’Snow, 25-6. Unlike Snow that deals intimately with historical and political background over the disputes and conflicts of the headscarf banning and the political Islam that start to rise in the time span when Snow was written, The Museum of Innocence is not set in a heavy milieu of political background. Yet Pamuk still presents the political environment in the dangerous life in 1970s- 1980s, a period marked by violence between right and left wing political group that “busy killing each other ” MoI, 33. Yet, this political backdrop seems removed from Kemal’s life due to his neglicence to the world outside. The only thing that makes him care is that the political life shortens his visit to Füsun. As he recalls the ‘martial law’ that ‘imposed with its ten o’ clock curfews’: “ Even now, all these years later, whenever I read in the papers of military’s displeasure with the state of the nation, the evil of military coups I remembered most vividly is that of rushing home denied my due ration of Fü sun” MoI, 295. For him, the military coup d ètat in 1980 is only a thief that steals his romance at Fü sun’s house. Although he remains indifferent to politics, Kemal nevertheless enters a political realm through his encounter with Füsun whose social class is lower in contrast to his fiancée, Sibel, 156 a wealthy- proper lady from his class. A circumstance that his mother believes is impossible for him to strive because he mistook what he believes as love. As his mother warns him that “In a country where men and women can’t be together socially, where they can’t see each other or even have a conversation, there’s no such a thing called love” MoI, 450. Love after, all is “finding balance of equals,” Sibel said MoI, 219. Kemal’s sailing to a path destined for profound happiness resulted from successful business life and future marital bliss changes abruptly upon a reunion with Füsun, a-18 year old distant relative in a fashion boutique where she works. Kemal’s encounter with Füsun initiates an entry into an unknown realm for him. Being engaged to a proper lady from his class, Kemal obsession to Füsun definitely creates in- between realm for himself leading into an isolated life either from his upper status-circle friends or Fü sun’s middle life status. Kemal’s inability to end his relationships with Sibel who gives herself to him before their marriage, a taboo that only “European women or those legendary women who were said to wander the streets of Istanbul” MoI, 51 leads him loosing Füsun who disappears following his engagement party. Fü sun’s departure takes Kemal into the dark of desolation and madness. His soul sinks into a labyrinthine agony of despair and his life is consumed by Fü sun’s. He wails every day upon loosing Füsun and her ghost occupied all spaces in his head and heart. Kemal ’s state of agony as a result of his separation from Füsun influences his social life. He is not solely dragging himself from the circle of his elite society, but he also becomes an ill-tempered man. He gets angry easily, especially when 157 he cannot overcome his yearning for Fü sun: “[…] when that longing went unfilled I would yearn to pick a fight with someone, anyone to whom I could attribute this damning, furious resentment” MoI, 159. He puts his company in jeopardy out of his jealousy to Turgay Bey, his family business partner, who flirts with Füsun long before he encounters an intimate relationship with her. Upon receiving news that Turgay Bey wishes to withdraw from a contract that they jointly bid and win following his disappointment for not being invited to Kemal’s engagement party; Kemal drives from Istanbul to Turgay’s company in Bahçevlier. Instead of managing to rescue his company’s future from losing one of its best partners, Kemal ends his compa ny’s partnership with Turgay Bey, out his anger and jealousy towards his affair with Füsun. His decision worsens his relation with his brothers and everyone else who apparently are aware of “his being indifferent to the rest of the world” MoI, 172. His future with Sibel, his fiancée, gets worse as his melancholy of loosing Füsun steals his desires and his ability to make love to Sibel. Sibel who trusts him enough to have sex before their marriage attempts to cure Kemal from his acute ‘nameless malady’. She believes that Kemal’s affair with Füsun is just an obsession out of pre- marital fear and she’s sure that his troubled fiancée apes La Dolce Vita- “to have some fun with dancers, bar girls, or German models before got married” MoI, 219. “This thing you thought was love- it was just a passing obsession,” she said. “I’ll look after you. I’ll rescue you from this nonsense you got mixed up in” MoI, 192. 158 They decide to live in a Bosphorus yali, a lifestyle considered as daring in the early adaptation of Western lifestyle. Society considers their decision as very ‘European and very civilized’ but at the same time dangerous if they happen not to continue their engagement to marriage.They believe that the pleasure of living in yali will be a curative for Kemal’s love pain. Despite lavishing Kemal with admirable understanding during the summer they spend in their yali 243 to cleanse his mind from Fü sun’s ghost, she is unable to resurrect her fiancée: “For months now we’ve been waiting for your illness to pass. But after all this waiting, there are no signs of recovery- and instead you seem to greet your illness with open arms. It’s very painful to see Kemal” MoI, 219. Having failed to rescue Kemal from his wounded heart, Sibel takes an initiative to break off their doomed engagement. “A week later, Sibel returned her engagement ring to me, via Zaim” MoI, 223. A very brave act as she and Kemal already live in Bosphorus yali after their engagement. In summarizing the focus of examination in this sub- heading, it can be pointed out that the detachment or separation from cultural roots brings a certain kind of melancholy, leading to confusion, chaotic and exilic life for the life of Turkish people in the three novels in this study. However, as previously analyzed 243 A mansion located in the waterside particularly on the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul. This is sort of secondary residence is a place where a family can spend some time to enjoy the practical purpose such as hunting, fishing, or enjoying temporary nature. Yali is also used to denote the 620 waterside residences that sprinkle along the Bosphorus. 159 in chapter three, separation or disconnectedness from the Beloved is a precondition that will lead to transformation. 244 A lthough the state of separation is regarded as a ‘fall’ or disconnectedness, it is also an essential and dynamic process. In the perspective of metaphysical realities whose nature is cyclic, descent is a requisite for the possibility of ascent to the perfect state. 245 Thus, separation does not solely involve fragmentation, but it also bears unity. The discussion in the following sub-heading will show how the state of separation leading to transformation or constituting the dynamic and the possibility of ascent mentioned.

3. A Dynamic Self: an Amalgam of Re-Union between the Old and New Cultural Identity.