writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Ayla Kutlu was born on 14 August 1938, in Antakya, Hatay’s central town.16 However, she opens
her narrative on July 7, 1938, over a month before her birth, providing an account of the handover
ceremony between Turkish and French authorities in her hometown.17 The story of that moving day
soon becomes part of the folklore of the region and Kutlu explains that her account of the day was
based on the stories that she grew up hearing. Thus, she starts weaving the history of the Hatay
region, the place that she calls “My Eternal Love,” to her personal history.18 As the names of the
towns in the region become chapter headings in the initial episodes of the narrative, the region is
almost personified and it joins the processes which make the writer/narrator Kutlu both the person
she is and the artist she will eventually become through its multilayered history, impressive natural
beauty and amazing cultural diversity. Her familial history is another source which contributes to her
development as an individual and writer. Her family from both sides comes from Caucasus and the
Chechen traditions of her immigrant family have deeply affected her during her visits to their
mountain village in Maraş,19 which became the adopted home of the family in Turkey.20 It is also
during those summer visits that she initially recognizes the destructive power of gender ideology. It is
a disturbing awakening for her to witness the extent of women’s subordination and subservience
within Chechen culture and traditions and also of the exploitation of their labor. The pictures of her
grandmothers that emerge in her narrative are particularly striking. Both women had worked awfully
hard and led grueling lives in an extremely male‐controlled culture and society; yet they developed
completely different attitudes and characters in response: Her maternal grandmother appears as a
woman of “vast compassion” whereas her paternal grandmother is identified by her severity.21 This
encounter with her ancestral culture informs her that each community defines womanhood for itself
and that women’s lives are shaped by these definitions. Yet what remains constant in these
definitions is the subordinate status of women; it is only the degree of it that may change.
Kutlu was the only daughter of a family with four children. As she describes her immediate family,
it becomes clear that she comes from a remarkably stimulating background. She describes her father
as an unusually gifted man, a well‐educated and versatile intellectual of his time. He was an
enthusiastic teacher of the young Republic; also a journalist and a poet, who published periodicals,
staged plays, painted, and played several musical instruments. Her mother emerges in her narrative
as an intelligent and refined woman who was deeply in love with her husband. She had to give up her
formal schooling at an early age; yet she kept her passion for learning alive and remained an avid
reader throughout her life despite her heavy domestic responsibilities as a mother of four children.
Although the couple seemed to fit into the traditional domineering male and submissive female
pattern in their relationship, their intellectual interests and endeavors surely made them into
unconventional figures and thus exceptional role models for their children for their time and place.
Kutlu emphasizes that her generation was born into a country which was still experiencing the aftereffects
of the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence that followed. Although Turkey
did not enter the war, the privation and misery of the Second World War years were also intensely
felt throughout the country. Similarly, her family was adversely affected by the poverty of the
elongated war years. However, as Kutlu portrays in her narrative, the children grew up in a culturally
liberal and intellectually lively environment in the family although they often experienced material
deprivation, even hunger.
Kutlu foregrounds the history of her generation in her writing and situates it within historical
continuity. Significantly, this history is written through a woman’s point of view and is based on her
experiences and insights. As a woman’s autobiography, it is as much interested in the domestic life of
the family and gender inequality as it is in the public events of the time. As mentioned above, Kutlu
was the daughter of a mother whose desire for getting education was cut short; having no other
choices in life, her mother adopted traditional womanhood and had to “trim down her world.”22 For
Kutlu however, as the girl‐child and later woman of the following generation, her main obstacle in
her way to receive education had been the family’s limited financial resources and eventually she
was able to go to university in Ankara on a government scholarship. In her story of growing up,
education emerges as a pivotal experience that enables her to go beyond traditional womanhood
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