Review: In the Shadow of the Yali, Suat Derviş
By Luke Frostick
“Those dissolute Ottoman families. Her father died at the gaming table. And her mother? Yet another crazy pasha’s daughter. Her grandmother? A palace lady, they say. I say, a palace slave. An odalisque!”
Suat Derviş is counted amongst the notable early republican, Turkish, feminist and socialist writers along side, Sabiha Sertel and Nezihe Muhiddin. She was persecuted ultimately exiled due to her beliefs. While her life is fascinating and the ideals she stood for remarkable, her newly translated book In the Shadow of the Yali is ultimately a disappointment.
Derviş is a fascinating character. Like so many of that amazing generation of Turks that saw the end of the Ottoman Empire, the founding of the Republic and two world wars. She lived through and was involved in fascinating times. She had stormy personal lives and was persecuted for her views, and forced to leave the country. She was able to support herself as a writer, and even when she was being blacklisted from publication in Turkey kept on. It is a bit disheartening to realise that the person who wrote the book was more interesting than the book itself. Although the book draws from her own experience, I found myself wishing that I was reading her biography or memoir something like Sabiha Sertel’s The Struggle for Modern Turkey.
In the Shadow of the Yali follows the the story of Celile a retiring woman from a noble but impoverished Ottoman family, her husband Ahmet and her lover Muhsin. It is about how, despite the advances made by women in the early republic, Celile is still trapped in a profoundly misogynistic bind, where a her life is defined by and dependent on her relationships with men. For instance, in a particularly jarring scene, Muhsin confronts Ahmet and announces that Celile will be divorcing him and becoming his lover. It doesn’t occur to him to ask Celile if that is what she wants. It’s a powerful point well made.
The books strength is that it is a feminist exploration of a newly emerging society, trying to be modernised but still holding on to the honour culture and norms of the fussy Ottoman aristocracy. Moreover, there are a lot of interesting details about what life was like for the people living in that time. In particular, the beginning sequence where Celile is growing up in a crumbling sea side mansion, a last remnant of Ottoman splendour, is particularly fascinating. Its weakness is its glacial plot broken up with long clumps of prose where characters explore their ideas of romantic love through strings of rhetorical questions.
Though the plot moves slowly, it does have a good ending. In fact it is a cold-blooded ending where Celile finds herself with her options utterly curtailed by the society and system she lives in. It was just quite a lot of work to get there.
The translation is by the legendary Maurine Freely so it goes without saying that it is excellent. Freely seems to be in a somewhat unique position as a translator with enough pull to bring unusual books like In the Shadow of the Yali to the market and bring them out. She does a great job here Derviş has some particularly evocative descriptive language that Freely brings out here.
This book is an interesting and important artefact in Turkish, literary, feminist and social history from a writer who was deeply invested in progress. However, it is a slow read compared to other early republican writers.
*