Maternal slavery and Gothic melancholy in Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Vâlidem (My Mother) and Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics

Bibliographic Data

ID6093591
AuthorsBurcu Gürsel (0000-0002-3052-5938, Kırklareli University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume70
Pages52-70
Publication date2024-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Perspectives on Turkey (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0896-6346 • E-ISSN: 1305-3299
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/npt.2023.35
OpenAlexW4392661644
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited28

Late Ottoman writers whose mothers were formerly enslaved were haunted by the mother’s arrested mourning for her lost mother/land in the Caucasus. “Intimate biofiction” by these writers – potential masters and sons of slaves – offers a unique narratorial point of view distinct from first-person slave narratives and third-person abolitionist literature. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s long narrative elegy, Vâlidem (My Mother), written at the time of her death around 1897 and published with a sequel in 1913, triangulates the mother/land, the father/land, and the son on his diplomatic and exilic itinerary. In Ottoman Turkish and aruz meter, Hamid imagines the melancholic crypt of the mother, the paradigmatic child of Gothic literature who remains undead – a phantom haunting her own progeny. In a melancholic inversion of loss, Circassia is reincarnated as the mother/land who lost her. Hamid’s mother is resurrected in a sequel to give birth to the sons of the new fatherland. Her narrative overwritten once again, the same mother appears in Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics alongside the nanny who stayed. The metonymic chain of exilic replacement mothers extends even to Hamid’s last, teenage bride from Belgium

Archaeology · Art · Cadet · Elegy · Fatherland · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Politics · Turkish · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Law · Philosophy · Turkey's Politics and Society

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