sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

A WOMAN’S RETROSPECTIVE JOURNEY: AYLA KUTLU’S
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS A CHALLENGING STORY OF GROWING UP
FEMALE
Dilek DİRENÇ *
Ayla Kutlu, a prominent writer of contemporary Turkish fiction, published an autobiography in
2006, titled Zaman da Eskir (Time Also Ages), which covers the first twenty‐two years of her life, the
years between 1938 and 1960. Kutlu thus provides a narrative of growing up which focuses on a
formative period of her life, from her early childhood to early adulthood. The narrative opens with
the uneasy years leading to the Second World War and illustrates the coming‐of‐age of a girl‐child in
the Turkey of the troubled 1940s and 1950s. Her individual story is placed within a broad context, for
the narrative interweaves Kutlu’s personal and family history with the social, cultural, and historical
circumstances of the period and also with the geography and antiquity of her homeland. Her account
strongly emphasizes that her life is shaped by the social, cultural, economic and political forces of her
time and milieu. As a woman’s life narrative, Zaman da Eskir presents a woman’s retrospective
journey: Kutlu’s narrative demonstrates how, at a very young age, she has become aware of the huge
inequality between genders and articulates the emotional cost of this awareness. She witnesses the
injustice faced by women around her and, with adolescence, starts questioning this agonizing
situation. Her life‐narrative illustrates that her deep attachment to her homeland and her keen
awareness of gender inequality in her culture shaped her identity and vision and nourished her
literary imagination; it is easily traceable in her narrative how place and gender have jointly become
the sources of inspiration for the woman who would become the artist subsequently. This paper
focuses on the author’s experience and reading of gender in her time and place as demonstrated in
her autobiography.
Kutlu chooses to call her narrative a memoir though it would be more accurate to name it as an
autobiography since the narrative is based on the form of the Bildungsroman, organized by the
development of her identity, rather than on a concentration on certain events, persons, or moments
in her life as it would be the case in memoir.1 Its structure is sequential and linear whereas memoir
employs an episodic one. Zaman da Eskir takes advantage of retrospective narration: as a life unfolds
in a rear view mirror, the growth of a self is observed more distinctly and the crucial moments in this
life are identified more easily. In her narrative Kutlu exposes that the emerging self is
overwhelmingly dependent upon cultural and ideological gender systems in which this process takes
place; she stresses over and over again that gender is a defining influence in shaping a life and for
women it means crushing repression and restriction. In their book Autobiography, Smith and Watson
observe that the prominent nineteenth century genre, the Bildungsroman, or novel of development
or education, had significant impact on nineteenth and twentieth century life narratives since “its
developmental model” inspired diverse texts which employed “its paradigm of a self developed
through education, self‐directed ‘intellectual cultivation’ through reading, and encounters with social
institutions.”2 As they explain,
[t]he Bildungsroman narrates the formation of a young life as gendered, classed, and
raced within a social network larger than the family or the religious community. But, as
feminist scholars note, gendered norms differ for women, who historically have not
chosen, but been chosen (or not); who are not initiated into social life, but retreat from
participation; who awaken more to limitations than possibility. 3
*
Ege University, Faculty of Letters, Department of English Language and Literature.