Testimony, historiography, and atonement in the works of Leylâ Erbil

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the experiences of disaster, which is the subject of Leylâ Erbil’s literature and which determines its ethical-political and poetic framework. Erbil turns calamities experienced in Turkey into a source of atonement through historiography. Her effort to turn witnessing into the subject of literature with a focus on calamities aims to not forget the massacres and genocides and to take over the history of the oppressed by sovereigns through historiography. In this thesis, the process of historiography, envisaged as a collective repair and healing, is discussed on the basis of historical philosophy from the perspective of Walter Benjamin. Accordingly, Erbil’s literature has been divided into three periods through a critical consideration of the changing political-cultural conditions in which the texts were produced and of the decreasing and changing nature of atonement awareness. Tuhaf Bir Kadın (1971), which marks the political sphere of the 1970s and the hope for collective repair, is regarded as “action and hope;” Karanlığın Günü (1985), whose topic is situated in the 1980s, when action and politics became idle, is characterized as “withdrawal and melancholy”; Cüce (2001), which accepts the absolute domination of the cultural market and is disenchanted with the belief in atonement, is labeled “grudge and resignation”. This thesis discusses how Erbil’s literature transforms the poetics of the changing ethical-political framework on the basis of experiences of calamities on the basis of Tuhaf Bir Kadın, Karanlığın Günü and Cüce.