Ankara : Türk Edebiyatı Bölümü, Bilkent Ünivesity, 2008.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2008.Includes biblioraphical references 131-140.This thesis investigates the conceptions of love and the descriptions of the beloved in
the poetries of Nazim Hikmet and Cegerxwin, two socialist poets of Turkish and Kurdish
languages respectively, with a particular focus on the poets’ relationships to their traditional
literatures and the ideological meanings that they attributed to love and the beloved.
I first provide information about the political and literary climate against which Nazim
Hikmet and Cegerxwin produced their works in order for locating each poet within their
respective literary traditions. Then, I focus on the poets’ relationships to tradition and on the
main features of their poetries as a background to investigate the ideological dimensions of
their understandings of love.
Nazim Hikmet’s letters to Piraye involves reappropriations of the imageries of love
from the Islamic mystical poetry. I read this as the poet’s attempt to transform divine love into
material love. Moreover, rather than emphasizing the physical beauty of the beloved, Nazim
Hikmet portrayed his beloved with reference to the social reality of which she was a part. This
was a move that challenged the understandings of love reflected in both the Divan poetry and
Turkish poetry in the process of modernization. Furthermore, Nazim Hikmet offered segments
from the lives other people as constitutive elements of his treatment of the relationships
between the lover and the beloved. From a socialist perspective, thus, Nazim Hikmet
articulated a conception of the personal relationship as a medium through which to attain the
social and the universal.
This study reveals that Cegerxwin also challenged and transformed the way love is
treated in the classical Kurdish poetry in a similar vein. On the one hand, Cegerxwin added
modern images to the classical metaphors of love. On the other hand, he adopted a materialist
understanding of love by exposing the sexuality of the beloved. Cegerxwin also transformed
the type of lover: In contrast to the passive image of the lover that permeates the classical
Kurdish poetry, Cigerxwin’s lovers are active agents within the Kurdish nation-making
process. Besides these, Cigerxwin made the national homeland the subject of love: Cast as the
female body at which male love and desire is directed, homeland appears as the object of love
in Cigerxwin’s poems.
The thesis concludes that beneath Nazim Hikmet’s and Cegerxwin’s negations of the
Islamic mystical love, there lied a rejection of traditional forms of authority. While Nazim
Hikmet substituted traditional authority with social consciousness, Cegerxwin put forward the
principle of national sovereginty in its stead.Yekdeş, Ömer FarukM.S
