We heard the same words from a lot of people who read the Rhino, a Turkish book publisled recently: I left it a few times, it was very hard to stand. A rhino passing through successive stories, questioning morality and family, living corpses…
Cumhuriyet newspaper writer Mine Söğüt wrote a fairy tale in her latest book Gergedan questioning contemporary relations. When we found the journalist, a journalist on one side, we asked about everything we had about Rhino. Mine Söğüt and her answers are as follows:
– The Rhino actually has current issues. Morality, religion, politics, laws are all in the stories. But on the other hand, these are stories. Could the rhinoceros be a tale of Aesop?
Mine Söğüt: The fact that this book tells a human story through a rhino can make it a kind of Aesop tale. But I think what you want to ask here is, nasıl How is a fairy tale so realistic and tough? Human drama begins when he thinks that fairy tales are really fairy tales.
At that point, the person who breaks away from reality turns to alienation from himself and the problems. In fact, what is called a fairy tale is the truth itself. Those fiction texts tell people. In its toughest form. What we perceive as a fairy tale is a feeling about the dreamy language and structure of those texts. But by using that structure and language, key issues such as brutality, power, conscience, love, hatred, revenge, justice, family, faith, equality or inequality are discussed in the most striking form in fairy tales.
As you said in this book and in all the texts I have written, there is a fairy tale language and even the most serious truths of humanity in fiction. All the works in the fictional language, from fairy tales to novels, are an effort to understand and make sense of man by recreating himself. So is the Rhinoceros.
“Whatever you are, The Rhino is that”
Well, there’s a rhinoceros that goes through many stories. The rhinoceros in these texts is a feeling, a concept or an entity?
That’s the question I want the reader to ask him after he finishes the book. The rhinoceros is a hero I borrowed from Ionesco’s play. When you read his text or watch the play, you ask the rhino the question ne What does this represent, who does it represent kimi. And there is no single answer. The reader can think of his own perception, reason, political stance, etc. I want to interpret according to the rhinoceros. Because he’s not a character representing one thing. The rhinoceros may be the concept of the state in human consciousness, morality, fear, ideal… Something of the reader. Actually, whatever you are, he’s the Rhinoceros.
Ok readers are facing with what you tolerate
– We heard that many readers were uncomfortable with the feelings of the book and stopped reading. Well, I guess it’s something you’ve been waiting for.
Yeah, because I’m used to it. This was happening in every piece of work I wrote, but the most severe one is the rhinoceros. There are also those who abandoned Crazy Women’s Stories. Those who can’t stand Sahbaz. Five Sevim Apartments frightened … In short, I’m used to it, my endurance is always a limit in the texts I write. There is something I persistently insist on; I am telling a life we live and endure.
The response of the reader is in the face of the ıs insistence of confronting the folds ğı imposed on him by the text he read. Either he makes a doctrine, whipping, provocation without confrontation, or he doesn’t want to confront, he thinks it’s not the right time for it yet. Very understandable. Because we all try to overcome the heavy burdens of life in different ways. We are living on some of us by going on, some more sucking, ignoring them – not saying them in a negative sense. Even for my books I have friends that I say, “Reading is not good for you right now”.
– There’s a moral question in the book. The reader sees how close the morality and the immorality are to each other without even a line and asks them questions. Maybe that’s why he’s bothered?
Of course, the reader of the Rhino needs to ask him a lot of questions. And these are questions for demolishing many solid structures. We come from a process of civilization shaped with the consciousness that destruction, death, change and transformation are negative. So the questions are unsettling for most people. The reader can leave the book not only when he doesn’t like it, but also when he encounters texts that make him nervous.
– There are middle-class characters in the book, the middle-class characters are more like trying to protect the concept of “morality çok. What do you think about this?
In fact, it is the middle class that describes morality. This is my class. So I tried to explain what I know from the inside. In this age, the middle class is the majority that determines in which direction everything will be drawn, with and without preference. So the most dangerous segment.
We are discussing the middle class because of the economic crisis in Turkey. We’re talking about the crushing of the middle class that Turkey experienced in the political transition period. Is it a coincidence that this book is in fact most sought after by the middle class during this period?
While the middle class determines everything, it is also the main actor of all consumption patterns. They also consume culture and art and hence book their confrontation space.
– We now see Mine Söğüt more on the big streets of Istanbul with “Gergedan”. Is this about the period, what do you think?
True, I wasn’t that concerned when my previous books came out. Now the situation is a little different. When I wrote Deli Women’s Stories eight years before the Rhino, social media was not used so effectively and I had not yet begun to write columns in the Republic. Along with the newspaper, another audience recognized me. Thanks to them, my articles are shared on social media and this makes me more visible than before.
In addition, the new generation of book readers are also using social media extensively. Therefore, recognition is inevitably influential in increasing the number of readers. A writer is much more noticeable than ever before. And as a result, when a new book comes out, we meet that author and his book more often on the big streets of cities.
What do you think about the popularity of literature in Turkey? Now we see rare writers on the first page of newspapers.
Newspapers no longer report on literature and the literary, and culture and art have no value on the first page. In this country, the government has made a great insult to intellectuals, the “elitist class pazar marketing. The changing face of the media has been a tool for this marketing. For example, as a Cumhuriyet Newspaper writer, seeing my book in one of the pro-newspapers or interviewing me is now a miracle.
They were in relation with the power
– What do you think the labs have left?
Never. Everyone still produces, writes. It tells the issues of the age, the issues of the individual. I do not think that the productivity of literature is diminishing. But, as we have mentioned above, the opposition has no visibility in the press. In addition, most of what we saw most often in the past were those who spoke the language of power of the time.
There are a lot of bodies in the book and people live with them. Do we really live with the bodies?
Even worse, we live like corpses.
– We didn’t see very good families in the book. How do you rate it?
I grew up in the happiest nuclear family in the world. Personally, I know a good thing about family, but I know that family is not a good thing. As a model of power, the family is the first diseased environment in which we begin to accept, approve and elevate the terrible model of power on that hill. Family firstly so nothing bad. The family model is damaged because the law that forms the basis of the family is bad. As a person who sympathizes with anarchism, I persistently advocate the end of domestic power and then state power.
But a child can destroy all the barriers
– In literature, children are like a liberated zone. And in your stories, children are like extensions of that destruction. Except for the story “Independence in the countryside”, there are almost no children.
In the story of ikl Independence is in the countryside İlk, the corpse of the Turkish girl and Armenian girl, who is a primary school student, collapses the whole structure and runs away, and in the countryside with a great rejection of the family and thus the state, they get their freedom. But a child can break all obstacles. The child is not originally a child; is the childhood of an adult. As in the story, if children cannot escape from those houses, they will build the same disease houses with the damage caused by the adults. And they repeat the same mistakes of adults.
– There is a discussion of children in literature in the last period, the expression of children in the works written years ago was revealed. What do you think about it and about censorship?
Censorship in art is a very dangerous issue that needs to be discussed from the right place. Pasolini is one of my favorite film directors. In his films, you see child abuse, heavy sexuality, and a daring critique of fascism on this occasion. He made very difficult films to watch. And those films are very valuable works with their content and aesthetics. Because he tells a heavy and difficult issue in a fiction that contains both violence and great poetry. I think it is necessary to determine the measure at another point in this book issue.
We have not read the entire book in question, we know a page. Yes, we may have an idea, if we know the market, we may have a bias about the publisher. Then we read that part of that text and think that there is no art. There is no rule that child abuse cannot be explained in art and literature. Everything is told. But within the framework of aesthetic and content awareness required by art. The first thing that comes to my mind in this one-page thing we see is that it is not literature, it only serves as a dirty trade intention. The lines we read were mediocre and not worth discussing as art. Therefore, I think the reactions were not shown to art and literature, but to the possible dangers of an obvious commercial intent.
– The book also includes pictures. In fact, when you look at the picture after reading “this rhinoceros that rhinoceros” you say. Tell me, what was the inspiration?
The pictures belong to Bahadır Baruter. He drew the covers of all the books as well as the paintings in the Mad Women’s Stories. We have been together for 30 years, and fortunately we both have a very aesthetic perception. We look at the issues from the same angles, with the same objections and concerns, and build our business in a similar language. We both complain equally about this order, this person, humanity. In this way, my writings of his drawings, his drawings speaks the language of my writings easily.
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