writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Smith and Watson maintain that in women’s life narratives the developmental Bildungsroman
model was reversed since women narrators relate not successful integration stories but rather
“expectations disappointed by barriers of gender.”4 When Zaman da Eskir was published in 2006,
Kutlu was already an established writer and a mature woman over sixty. It is significant that as she
looks back and recreates the story of her growing‐up, she foregrounds gender as the most formative
experience of her being and rewrites her early life as a challenging struggle against the oppressive
and regulating power of gender arrangements in her culture and historical period.
In her 1993 essay “Fictions of the Self in the Making,” Jill Johnston considers writing
autobiography as “a political act of self‐recognition.”5 It is political because the decision to write the
life posits the worth of the individual who creates the self in the narrative.6 The presentation of a self
in writing, however, becomes problematic when the self is a woman since cultural traditions assign
her to the private sphere whereas autobiographical writing, if intended for publication, means an
emergence for woman from the private domain into the public arena. As an established writer Kutlu
was already a public figure when she published her autobiography.7 However, the critical issue in her
life narrative is ultimately this particular transition from the domestic into the public sphere in her
own experience; she articulates the background story that enabled this move and her narrative
culminates when she leaves her hometown and family to go to college. Thus, her life narrative
illustrates a woman’s entrance into the public sphere through education where she would have the
opportunity to receive a degree in political sciences, and later a distinguished career in the Ministry
of Internal Affairs. Her experience epitomizes this transition from the private domain into the public
arena, which became attainable at least for some women in her generation. Consequently, her
narrative enables the reader to witness the emergence of a new generation of women who found
themselves between two worlds and experienced a challenging transition. As Smith and Watson
point out, in life narratives the Bildungsroman model has lately been used “by women and other
disenfranchised persons to consolidate a sense of emerging identity and an increased place in public
life.”8 Accordingly, Zaman da Eskir is the moving and often lyrical account of the childhood and early
womanhood of a remarkably talented woman and illustrates her attempts to understand her social
and cultural surroundings and achieve recognition of her individuality and worth. It provides an indepth
account of her search for finding the means of expressing herself and her experience. The
challenging intellectual and emotional journey of a gifted child ends with the realization that
education, intellectual achievement, and career are also possible for women in her strictly gendered
world though at a high emotional price.
Life narratives do not simply record but reinvent lives as the authors try to grasp the significance
of human dramas played in time. As Kutlu notes in her preface, the writing of one’s own life is a
process that ultimately enables the writer to gain awareness, understanding, and insight regarding
her past experiences. Writing a life is not only a journey for the writer into the past but more
importantly it is an inner journey; it is an intellectual and emotional quest for meaning. “Shortly after
I started writing Zaman da Eskir, I found myself looking inside my soul through a window that
opened. I had no idea that writing your life could have such an effect,” she observes in the preface.9
While she expresses her belief that this inward journey cannot be written objectively, she reminds
that literature has no obligation at all to tell the truth.10 Theorizing autobiography, scholars maintain
that the truth articulated in self‐referential narratives is an extremely complicated matter. Smith and
Watson comment that “[t]he writer of autobiography depends on access to memory to tell a
retrospective narrative of the past and to situate the present within that experiential history.”11 It is
almost a collectively accepted argument today that reminiscing implicates “a reinterpretation of the
past in the present” and “narrated memory is an interpretation of a past that can never be fully
recovered.”12 Since she has a similar understanding of remembering and memory, Kutlu emphasizes
that life‐writing is literature, and the testimony it provides is just one among many. 13 She is very
much aware of the multiplicity of perceptions and knows that the same experience can be
interpreted and narrated differently14 even by the same person at various moments in one’s life.15
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