Halide Edib: Writer, warrior, exile, teacher

A few meters away from the Million Stone in Istanbul's Sultanahmet district stands a little bust in a small clearing with seats serving as a loitering and meeting space. The rather sorry-looking bust is in fact that of larger-than-life woman , Halide Edib, a writer, warrior and teacher. Halide Edib is one of those authors whose name everyone - at least in Turkey - has heard, but whose books have been hardly by anyone. She is also one of those figures whose life began in the Ottoman Empire and ended in the era of the Republic of Turkey. She was, in fact, a very active figure in that transition and her novels, memoirs and newspaper articles testify to the fact.

The daughter of a wealthy Ottoman family, Halide Edib, who was well-educated, began writing in newspapers both in Turkey and abroad and made a name e for herself as a Turkish woman with a sharp pen: So much so that in 1909, she was invited by Isobel Fry to meet the literati in London. It was there that she bought herself a typewriter to start writing her first novel titled, "Seviye Talip." After Istanbul's occupation by the Allied Forces, she became a prominent figure of the Turkish resistance on June 6, 1919, when she addressed hundreds of thousands of Istanbulites who had gathered in Sultanahmet - hence the bust that sadly does no justice to her - to protest the invasion of western İzmir province by the then-Greek kingdom. It was a decisive moment: The people of Istanbul and Anatolia were either going to accept the Ottoman defeat of Sevres and watch the country be parceled out between European powers and their pet states, or organize a resistance that would ensure the sovereignty of the people.


An earlier photo of Adıvar

After this meeting, Halide Edib continued to confer with the leading members of the resistance in Istanbul until March 16, 1920, when the British forces disbanded the Ottoman Parliament, exiled some members of parliament to Malta and condemned members of the resistance to death, including Halide Edib. She escaped from Istanbul and joined forces with the Republic's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in Ankara, writing about her experiences both in fictionalized form in "Ateşten Gömlek" (The Daughter of Smyrna), and as a memoir titled, "The Turkish Ordeal" (available online). It was originally written in English, as she says in the book, to raise awareness about Turkey's plight. A revised, Turkish version appeared decades later in 1962, titled, "Türkün Ateşle İmtihanı" (House of Wisteria).

These books give a very interesting account of the years in which Istanbul was occupied by the Allied Forces from 1918 to 1923 - a period that is not much talked about or fictionalized in books or on TV in Turkey. "The Turkish Ordeal" draws attention to how relations between different ethnic and religious communities in Istanbul deteriorated under British policing: "The British headquarters were actually wishing for a violent and bloody fray between the Turks and the Christians, according to those reports, and so, of course, it was to their advantage to let us throttle each other so that they could be given a pretext to occupy Istanbul in the name of peace." When things did not go according to the British plan, on March 16, British soldiers stormed the Parliament and arrested representatives. Halide Edib calls this a "coup d'etat" in her memoirs and when you read the descriptions of how the bridge ("the bridge" at the time naturally referred to the one over the Golden Horn) was blocked by allied soldiers and the clashes that happened in Fatih, it is impossible not to draw parallels between the evening of March 15, 1920 and July 15, 2016.

In her memoir, the scene then moves on to Anatolia and the fighting there, including scenes that demonstrate Mustafa Kemal's authoritarian tendencies. It is these tendencies that more or less exile Halide Edib to Europe with her second husband, Adnan Adıvar, who was a member of parliament for the Progressive Republican Party, Turkey's first attempt at a multi-party system. The couple traveled to Europe and settled for various periods of time in Paris and London, and Halide Edib became the face of modern Turkey, giving lectures and interviews while always downplaying the fact that she was, more or less, on the run, fleeing the Ankara government. She wrote novels depicting the clash between regressive and progressive characters, upholding the values of the new Republic which she was effectively exiled from, such as "Vurun Kahpeye" (Strike the Harlot), and "The Clown and His Daughter" (Sinekli Bakkal), again, originally written in English. Her interviews and pieces appeared several times in The New York Times and she was invited to the U.S. to give lectures at the Williamstown Political Institute. A couple of years later, in 1934, she was invited to India where she gave lectures at the Muslim University in New Delhi and met Mahatma Gandhi. She also wrote about her travels in the subcontinent in "Inside India."

Turks are often told about how the Turkish independence movement inspired Indian Muslims and a preface written to an English translation of "Ateşten Gömlek" published under the title of "Daughter of Smyrna" in the 1940s by a certain Muhammad Yakoub Khan is evidence of this claim: "Needless to say, I venture to present to the public this English version of the patriotic fervor, sufferings and sacrifices of our Turkish brothers and sisters in the name of national freedom and national honor in the hope that it may kindle something of the noble spark in the bosoms of the sons and daughters of India which is just now passing through the travail of rebirth."

Not long after her return to Turkey following Atatürk's death, in 1940 she was given the task of establishing the English Philology Department of Istanbul University. She went on to write the history of English Literature in Turkish, much of which was filled by her favorite author, Shakespeare. She liked Shakespeare so much that she set out with her students to translate his plays. In İpek Çalışlar's excellent biography, famous Turkish dramatist Haldun Taner remembers her tenacity and the way that other professors feared her "because they all knew that this woman in a headscarf had thought and experienced more than all of them put together." It is nice to think that a writer who, despite her political disagreements with Atatürk, is a foremother of the "modern Turkish woman," as well as a precursor to the headscarved professors one can, after a couple of decades' interruption, see in the hollowed-out halls of academia again.

In many ways Halide Edib, like many other writers who witnessed the transition from an empire to a nation-state, feels like a contemporary when you read her work - not least of all because Turkey still seems to be trying to answer the questions she discussed in her extensive body of works that merit closer inspection by both the Turkish and the international reader.