writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

iographical plays, takes some of the memoirs of the women that she writes about and leaves some
of their memoirs out. In Halide, this act of choosing shows us how Erenus criticizes the official history
and questions the “forms of application of process of modernization and results it created.” The plot
in the play includes the memoires from the childhood of Halide until the first period where she went
to İzmir after the War of Independence. Play proceeds with the victory of National Struggle and
opening of the National Assembly. Play has a feature of a somewhat meta‐fiction. Because, in the
play Halide has the knowledge of the future as well and as a character in the play she can see both
the writer and her era at the same time.
In the play, Halide is composed interwoven with all her emotional contradictions, fears,
weaknesses and her strong standing and successes. Her suppressed emotions and what she felt as a
woman is also questioned and an answer is looked for. She has a varying self. In the play there is a
figure called the Dwarf who makes things appear. Although Halide is asexual in her autobiography,
she is not so in the play. The Dwarf is there as a figure to accompany and reflect her contradictions.
He is her fears, anxieties, inner voice and apart from memoirs he all of a sudden switches roles and
becomes the voice of the dominant discourse of their era or the voice of the authority. Play starts
with Halide bringing the Dwarf by force to a place called “the temple of childhood”, which is the main
place of action of the play, a shaggy place that looks like a depot of materials and people taken from
the memoirs of Halide. She tells the Dwarf that she wants to live consciously and therefore she is to
reconsider all her past. There, Halide is a person who can look at the history from outside and who
knows everything, she is the person that she composed in her autobiography and now she wants to
see everything once again but this time consciously and with settling the accounts and with analysis
of the past.
In the play this temple of childhood is an important place in constructing Halide’s self, her image
of a writer and an intellectual woman. With the help of Halide who is questioning her own life by
going back and forth between the past and today, Erenus wants to construct a women‐ subject who,
as an eye from outside, can observe critically, question and criticize herself. However, Erenus does
not construct a subject outside Halide’s body, which consists of purely an idea. Halide’s identity was
unified with national struggle and this causes her to become asexual. In the play this situation is
handled with its contradictions. We see a woman who is aware of the fact that she had to suppress
her sexual identity. Halide, the warrior of national struggle, is there, questioningly looking at herself
as a warrior and with the awareness of how this warrior image pushed back her sexual identity.
Halide has always been the person of dualisms: this was not different in national struggle; her image
includes both, the patriot and the traitor. Play becomes an arena of the history where all of the
images loaded on her are questioned or in other words, disclosure of the elements that constitute
her image. Erenus knows that she will never be able to reach the real Halide, all she can reach is
Halide’s identity, as created and constructed in literary circles, in her books, in history books, in
fiction or in her memoirs. Erenus wrote this play with such awareness, therefore she primarily
questions images created on paper. Erenus’s concern is about writing, which is the origin of the
image formed in minds by male dominated structure. We see that the image of Mustafa Kemal on
Halide’s mind is also demolished in the play. Disappointment and unveiling of the masked realities
behind images constitute the structure of the play. As Halide confronts her past in the play, we the
readers/spectators start to question the image of Halide stamped in our minds. While questioning
we see how each social and political ideology described Halide within the limits of their circles and
perception and how she was judged. Halide is more than these images, as this play shows us. In
addition to all these, the play, with a composition that goes back and forth between times, criticizes
the confusions of the country, starting from years right after the foundation of the republic until
today, changing of people’s perception and socio‐political situation. Halide is disappointed because
of what she witnessed when she was in the future in the play. She gets frustrated and thinks that the
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