A Life in Exile: An Analysis of the Uncanny and National Identity in Yaşar Kemal’s Look, the Euphrates River is Flowing Blood

Abstract

Having a preliminary place and paramount significance among Yaşar Kemal’s historical fiction novels, Look, the Euphrates River is Flowing Blood is the first book of his quartet entitled “An Island Tale” that was published in 1997. Dealing with the ordeal and uncanny feelings of the Anatolian people after the First World War, Yaşar Kemal recounts the material and spiritual destruction caused by the phenomenon of migration both within and beyond the borders in this work. As a result of the Exchange Agreement signed between Turkey and Greece in 1923, the inhabitants of Ant (Mirmingi) Island, were forced to migrate to lands they never knew. With the population exchange decision taken in Lausanne, the Greeks were sent to Greece and it was decided to settle the people who lost their homeland in the wars on this island in the Aegean. With this news, the people of the island experience some stages of queer, uncanny emotions, such as grief, anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and ultimately acceptance, and step into the Greek lands as an exchange. Vasili Atoynatanoğlu, who is a veteran of the Sarıkamış operation, however, did not participate in this forced migration. People from various origins who take refuge on the island, with the support of Poyraz Musa, launch a new life despite all the pain they have experienced. Predominantly based on Freud, Bhabha, and Kristeva’s theories of the uncanny, the paper handles the issues of forced migration between Turkey and Greece and its profound impacts on migrants and local people in the nation-building process of the new Turkish state. The purpose of this paper is to analyse Yaşar Kemal’s Look, the Euphrates River is Flowing Blood through the theories of the “uncanny” and nationalism by highlighting the uncanny presence of characters within the novel.

Keywords

• Yaşar Kemal
• Look
• the Euphrates River is Flowing Blood
• uncanny
• nation-state
• national identity
• forced migration

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