Being Hundreds of Birds at Once…

By Sefa Kaplan

Translated by Aysel K. Basci

The fog surrounding the reality of Halide Edib (1), one of the leading names of both the Turkish War of Liberation (1919-1923) and Turkish literature, has not yet entirely cleared. Who was Halide Edib, the brave author of school textbooks and an intellectual widely perceived to be an American sympathizer? What were her thoughts; what were her deeds?    

Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square is experiencing one of its most crowded events. It’s May 23, 1919, and an incredible buzz echoes between the minarets of Hagia Sophia and Sultanahmet Mosque. Nobody is paying attention to the Allied warplanes diving so dangerously low over the crowd. At the podium, 35-year-old Halide Edib is eliciting huge waves in the crowd, from one end of the square to the other. Every sentence she utters brings tears to the eyes of many in the jostling throng. 

“A day will come when a greater court of justice will try those who have deprived the nations of their natural rights. That court will be composed of the very same nations whose governments are now against us. Those peoples will condemn their own governments then for having been unjust to other nations in their name, for there is an eternal sense of what is right in the heart of every individual, and nations are made up of individuals. Governments are our enemies, peoples are our friends, and the just revolt of our hearts is our strength.” (2)

Many years after that historic speech, in one of her published memoirs, Halide Edib described her state of mind as she walked onto the podium that day to address an audience of over 200,000 people.

“As I set foot on the podium I knew one of the rare, one of the very rare, moments of my life had come to me. Every atom of my being was galvanized by a force which at any other time would have killed me, but which during that crisis gave me the power to experience—to know—the quintessence of the suffering and desire of those 200,000 souls.”

Halide Edib is the unforgettable orator of the Sultanahmet protests. Known as Corporal Halide in the Turkish War of Liberation, she was one of Mustafa Kemal’s closest supporters during the war—and one of his early critics after it. She was the first person to choose voluntary exile due to her opposition to Mustafa Kemal. An author of countless novels, stories, and memoirs, she lived 80 years straddling two centuries, from 1884 to 1964. 

But who was Halide Edib? Why did she oppose Mustafa Kemal, and why did she become the subject of so many accusations? Who was the real woman and intellectual behind this author of so many novels, school textbooks, and encyclopedias?   

The House in Wisterias. Having lost her mother at a very young age, Halide Edib spent her childhood between an Özbek lodge and a Greek kindergarten located in Üsküdar. When she became sick, her father (a royal secretary at the Ottoman palace) took her to a German doctor, while her grandmother took her to a traditional healer. She studied classical piano as well as Arabic. She eventually enrolled in Üsküdar American Girls’ College, and after graduation, entered a doomed marriage with Salih Zeki, a renowned mathematician.     

In 1909, following the March 31 Revolt (3), Halide Edib was blacklisted, and her name was included on an arrest list because of her association with the Young Turk revolutionaries as well as several newspaper articles she authored. But Halide was one step ahead of her prosecutors, and escaped to Egypt before moving to London. There she became good friends with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had yet to become famous. During World War I, she again faced trouble after criticizing, in a conference, the Committee of Union and Progress for their poor treatment of the Armenians fighting alongside the Russians against the Ottomans. She escaped to Syria and, in 1917, married Dr. Adnan Adıvar, another respected intellectual of the period.   

Halide Edib remained quiet for a time—until the Allied forces invaded Izmir. When protests demanding liberation from foreign occupation erupted around the country, she began delivering fervent speeches to large crowds. Her protest speeches quickly elevated her status and she became a legend. Around this time, she started exchanging letters with Mustafa Kemal, who had moved from Istanbul (much to the dismay of the Sultan) to Anatolia to begin organizing armed resistance against foreign occupation. Many years later, Mustafa Kemal published one of those letters in his Nutuk, and Halide Edib was implicated as an American Mandate (4) sympathizer—an association she was never able to escape. Mustafa Kemal was vehemently against all mandates. 

Years later, during an interview on the subject, Dean Mete Tunçay pointed out that “at that time, out of desperation, pretty much everyone supported the American Mandate.” (5) Much later, while dictating the Turkish translations of her novels, Halide Edib confided in Vedat Günyol, a family friend, in a sad voice, saying, “In the beginning, Mustafa Kemal too was in favor of the American Mandate. But in the end, I got stuck with all the blame.”     

The Shirt of Flame. In 1920, after Istanbul’s invasion by Allied forces, Halide Edib and her husband—committed to the cause of armed resistance—fled to Anatolia to join the liberation movement led by Mustafa Kemal. As an active member of the resistance’s inner circle in Ankara, Halide Edib joined the war as a soldier. A physically fearless woman, a keen equestrian, and a fine shot, she was commissioned a corporal, at first, and participated directly at the front lines. Later, in recognition of her military services, she was promoted to the rank of sergeant major. In addition to her regular soldier duties, she tirelessly translated war-related news articles published in Western journals and helped Mustafa Kemal write speeches and conduct interviews with foreign journalists. During the war, she was always present next to Mustafa Kemal. 

Years later, in an interview, Günyol, who spent about 18 years with Halide Edib, suggested “there was an emotional relationship between the two […]. I sensed it while translating The Turkish Ordeal into Turkish. There, she describes how she went to say goodbye to Mustafa Kemal after his marriage to Latife Hanım. She was clearly sad. On his part, he gifted his pelerine to her as a special souvenir.”

Yet other contemporaries disagreed with Günyol’s thesis. Docent Yalçın Küçük argued that in their relationship, Halide Edib “did not reciprocate to Mustafa Kemal.” Meanwhile, Professor Mina Urgan, who had known Halide Edib since childhood and later worked as her assistant, said, “Halide Edib is both highly intellectual and very charismatic. She is used to everyone serving her with utter faithfulness and obedience. Mustafa Kemal could never be obedient to a woman. Halide Edib dominated everyone around her. Mustafa Kemal could not bear to be dominated.”      

Perhaps, it is best to leave the last word on the matter to Halide Edib. A few weeks before her death, during an interview, a reporter, Turgut Etingü, asked her how she remembered Mustafa Kemal during the War of Liberation. She answered, “Let me tell you. We had just arrived at the front. The 53rd division of our forces had taken a position in a narrow straight near Polatlı. Our 15th and 23rd divisions were attacking the enemy positions. Like giant bees, numerous enemy warplanes were flying above us, bombing the skyline with a hellish fire. The air was full of dust and smoke. I saw Mustafa Kemal looking at us from a trench. He said, ‘Come on over, Madam. See, we are battling.’ He was smiling like a child playing his most favorite game. He introduced to us the commander of the army corps, Kâzım Pasha. He then said to me, ‘We are attacking Duatepe.’ I will never forget this image of Mustafa Kemal. Doesn’t this tell you a lot?”

Thrash the Harlot. Seen in this light, it is rather curious that following the victorious end of the war and the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the first opposition to Mustafa Kemal, who became president of Turkey and would later be given the honorary surname Atatürk by the Turkish Parliament, came from Halide Edib herself. By this time, she had become increasingly alienated by Mustafa Kemal’s absolutist ruling apparatus. In 1925, Halide Edib and her husband left Turkey to live in self-imposed exile in London and Paris until the death of the Turkish leader. According to Docent Mete Tunçay, “Halide Edib’s opposition to Atatürk is not global. She, along with her husband, does not want the new Republic to be governed by a single person. They are in favor of a true democracy with multiple political parties.” When that didn’t happen, Halide Edib left the country she had personally helped rescue. Not surprisingly, soon after her departure, a consistently negative campaign against her emerged.

Years later, in an interview with a literary magazine, İsmet Bozdağ stated that, “during this period, there was a smear campaign against all those who had left the country. […] Naturally, Halide Edib received her fair share of those campaigns.” Bozdağ also shared that “one day I was talking with Celâl Bayar [third president of Turkey, 1950-1960]. We somehow ended up talking about Halide Edib. Bayar said with an angry voice, ‘Forget about that pro-American enemy of Atatürk.’ When I asked him, ‘How do you know that?’, he responded with the same angry voice, ‘Is there anyone who doesn’t know it?’”

In another interview, an anecdote shared by Günyol demonstrated just how effective those smear campaigns were: “One day we were with Halide Edib at her home. There was a knock at the door. It was Nehru. Using an excuse that she was ill, Edib refused to invite the Indian leader in. She was afraid that if she did and Celâl Bayar heard of it, he might get upset and speculate ‘I wonder what Halide is up to now?’” Günyol also recalled how Recep Perker, a “single political party ideologue” who taught reform history at Istanbul University, constantly ridiculed Halide Edib by referring to her as “the woman in a scarf.”

The Endless Fair. Halide Edib remained in London until Mustafa Kemal’s death in 1938. There, she was surrounded by intellectuals and wrote back-to-back novels. In 1939, she returned to Turkey and accepted a job as the head of the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Istanbul. Professor Mina Urgan, her assistant at the university in 1941, described those years as follows: “Her authority was vast and not just over our department, but across all departments in the Faculty of Literature. So much so, that although she never served as the dean of the Faculty, she was nicknamed ‘Mrs. Dean.’”

In 1955, after the death of her husband, Adnan Adıvar, Halide Edib became lonely and isolated. On January 9, 1964, her tumultuous life ended, leaving behind many unanswered questions and endless discussions that continue to this day. Docent Mete Tunçay summarized Halide Edib’s 80-year life with these words: “Halide Edib was incredibly cultured and highly educated. Imagine, she is not only an expert on Shakespeare, but she is translating him.” In reality, she was much more! She was a feminist before it was fashionable to be one (6). She was a soldier long before women were accepted into the military. She was a member of the Turkish Parliament (1950-1954) when many women in the world were still trying to gain voting rights. She was indeed in a class of her own, and decades ahead of her time. 

The fog covering the Turkish War of Liberation and the first Republic generation has not yet cleared. Halide Edib is but one of those covered under that fog. Although her name is written in Turkish literature with gold letters, it is omitted from the political history she helped create. Her fate, in this regard, is no different than that of Rabia in The Clown and His Daughter or Aliye in Thrash the Harlot.

Supplemental Notes: (Added during translation, for clarity).
Bold subheadings are titles of notable Halide Edib novels and memoirs.

1. Halide Edib published most of her writing under her maiden name. 

2. An excerpt from Halide Edib’s famous 1919 Sultanahmed Square speech, later documented in her memoir, The Turkish Ordeal.

3. March 31 Revolt. The Young Turk Revolution, which began in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire, spread quickly throughout the empire and forced Sultan Abdulhamid II to restore the Constitutional System in 1908. The countercoup of March 31, 1909, was a rebellion by religious conservatives against this decision. It aimed to restore Sultan Abdulhamid II as the absolute monarch. Several progressive military units (Army of Action), including one commanded by Mustafa Kemal, came to Istanbul and crushed the countercoup. Sultan Abdulhamid II was deposed and replaced by his younger brother.

4. “American Mandate” is part of a political scheme introduced by the Allied Nations at the end of World War I. It proposed the administration of several countries, mostly in the Middle East (deemed by Western powers to be incapable of administering themselves), by more developed countries such as Britain, France, and the United States. In practice, the proposal amounted to nothing more than colonization. At the conclusion of the war, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson proposed a 14-point framework—the Wilsonian Principals—for the peace agreement. The 12th point of those principals dealt with the Ottoman Empire, and it promised “national sovereignty” for the Turkish portions of the empire. For this reason, when Wilson’s 12th point was first introduced, it gained some support among the Ottoman intellectuals. They preferred the American mandate over those of the British, French, and the others, who had not made such promises. However, after the Allied partners of the U.S. disagreed with Wilson’s 12th point (proposing instead to divide up nearly all of Asia Minor among themselves), that support waned and eventually disappeared.     

5. Tunçay, Mete. The Establishment of a Single-Party Administration in the Republic of Turkey 1923-1931, Yurt Yayınları, 1981.

6. In 1928, the American media introduced Halide Edib as a fiery feminist. That same year, she became the first woman to address the Institute of Politics at Williams College in Massachusetts. Three years later, she appeared as a guest lecturer at Barnard College. During one New York luncheon, she told her audience she had found American women’s position to be so advanced she feared the country would eventually become a matriarchy.  

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Sefa Kaplan is a widely published Turkish poet, author, and journalist. His poetry, essays, articles, and biographical works have appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals, and books. He is the recipient of the prestigious Behçet Necatigil Poetry Award. Being Hundreds of Birds at Once is from Sefa Kaplan’s book, Tarih Tereddütten İbarettir, which was published in Turkey in 1990 by Endülüs Publishing (pages 231-236).  

Aysel K. Basci is a nonfiction writer and literary translator currently working on various titles. She was born and raised in Cyprus and moved to the United States in 1975. Aysel is retired and currently resides in the Washington DC area. Her writing and translations recently appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Entropy, Bosphorus Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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