Adıvar: The Name Behind the Crater

An Appreciation of Halide Edip Adıvar

It came and went and few seemed to notice: January 9, 2014 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Halide Edip Adıvar, the famous Turkish novelist, feminist and parliamentarian. She founded Turkey’s first English literature department, as well as its first PEN club.

This forgetfulness was a good example of our cultural amnesia, which is nowhere more apparent than in Turkey’s approach to its writers. When the calendar year marks the bicentennial of Dickens’s birth, the world knows. When it marks the semi-centennial of the death of a female Turkish writer, there is silence. Why is that?

Adıvar was no Kafka. Nor was she a figure like John Kennedy Toole whose work was discovered years after his death. She was a public intellectual, perhaps the most public intellectual the country had ever seen. She had always been involved in politics and rubbed shoulders with those in the upper echelons of power. She attempted to be the voice of the oppressed nations of the east. She flew too close to one kind of power in order to undermine another.

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Celal Yalınız, a Turkish philosopher better known as “the bearded Celal”, described Turkey’s intellectuals as “folks running toward west onboard a ship heading east and calling it westernization.” On the face of it, Adıvar’s life fit his description. Among authors who had lived in Istanbul in the last decades of the empire, she was among the most westernized.

But appearances are misleading. Adıvar was also a great appreciator of her own culture and a passionate defender of eastern world. She spoke Turkish, French, English and Arabic; she knew Hamlet by heart but that didn’t stop her from reciting Quran and loving ezan, the Muslim call to prayer. She fasted during Ramadan, loved speaking in public, and chain-smoked until her death.

Born in 1884 into an influential family in Istanbul, Adıvar had a privileged childhood. Like many intellectuals who later adopted revolutionary ideas, she had close connections to the Sublime Porte, the center of the Ottoman state bureaucracy. Her father worked as an accountant for Sultan Abdülhamid in a state department called the Imperial Pocket (Ceyb-i Hümayun). He sent her daughter to an American college in the city’s Üsküdar neighborhood for her education and raised her like a British child. Adıvar’s hair was cut short; she had to drink a glass of milk every evening; her reading diet consisted of English books. Her wardrobe was filled with European style clothes.

When Abdülhamid issued a decree that prohibited bureaucrats from sending their children to Istanbul’s foreign-language institutions, Halide was forced to leave the girls school. Abdülhamid...