Notes
Turkish is grammatically a non-gendered language without gendered pronouns, articles, or adjectives. Some nouns are intrinsically gendered, such as kadın/erkek (woman/man), kız/oğlan (girl/ boy), anne/baba (mother/ father). Aside from these clearly marked nouns, there is nothing on the level of syntax that is gendered. The only pronoun is the gender-neutral “she/ he” that appears on its own or modifies verbs and adjectives accordingly. Thus, it is through cultural codes and context that the language marks – or rather, hints at – gender.
All Turkish poets rely on cultural codes to mark the gender of their characters, should they desire to do so, because those are the means by which gender can linguistically be represented. Second, poems always have to be situated within their specific temporal and cultural contexts. Most of the time, regarding gender, the contexts reaffirm traditional relationships (read: monogamous and heterosexual) and stereotypical dichotomies (male/ dominant/ active and female/ submissive/ passive). Thus, even while Turkish may seem more inclusive in terms of gender representations; linguistically, due to the constant situatedness in conservative cultural contexts, it can be quite constricting.*
About the Author
Gülten Akın (January 23, 1933 – November 4, 2015) is among the important poets of Turkish Literature. She dealt with the concept of “I” in almost all her poems. Her understanding of poetry progresses from the individual to the social, without leaving the concept of self. Sometimes there is a happy, sometimes unhappy, loving, longing, bored, depressed, lonely young woman and the reader sees the emotional swings in her poems.
Akın won many awards for her poetry and some of her songs have been performed as songs.
| Read poem in Turkish | Read poem in English |
Kapıcı Kadınlar
Doorkeeper Women
Kısarak seslerini, sözlerini eksilterek
Eğerek başlarını
Yeraltından usulca çıkıyorlar
Mor yemenileri ve turuncu hırkalarıyla
Kapıcı kadınlar, kocalar, çocuklar
Çorak kentlerimizi bahçeye dönüştürüp
Solgun daha solgun daha solgun
Uçuyor yüzleri geceye kadar
By squeezing the women’s voices, reducing their words
Bowing their heads
They’re coming out of the underground
With purple denims and orange cardigans
Concierge women, husbands, children
Turning our barren cities into gardens
Paler more paler more paler
Their faces fly into the night
*This poem is in a free verse style and has two stanzas.
Analysis
Doorkeeper/ doormen; a worker who has been put in a position that is in the lower class of social status, oppressed, despised, and rushes to everything. Underground; indicates both the infrastructure class and the basement. As is known, apartment workers usually live in the basement. Basement apartments are flat, small. Generally, men do this job.
Due to the location of the windows, they do not receive much sunlight. Ventilation is not good, sometimes damp. These people, who were pushed underground, were intended to be kept out of sight. Since they do not have the same status as other apartment residents, they do not live in the same conditions as them. There is also an intercom in the concierge’s apartment. Thanks to this intercom, the residents of the flats connect with the concierge. The people living in the apartment order from where they sit and call the doormen to their feet. The doormen come out of the underworld softly, lowering their voices, lowering their words, bowing their heads. The upper class, that is, the residents of the apartment, give orders to the doormen day and night. The doorman, with his head forward, lowers the tone of his voice, says, “Okay, sir.” They are always embarrassed. They always feel the underclass treatment clinging to them.
In the second part of the poem, we see that those who come out of the underground softly, lowering their voices, lowering their words, and bowing their heads, are the doormen in purple kerchiefs and orange cardigans. As soon as we read the words purple Yemeni (muslin) and orange cardigan, the poet offers us a photograph. The cardigan and the Yemeni are the main symbols of the clothing style of young and old people, that are more common in villages. It is not possible to see those types of cardigans in most middle-aged and younger women in cities. At the same time, this style of clothing is an indicator of the life condition of women. The family, who migrated from the village to the city and have problems with housing and work, continue their old lifestyle in the place where they now live, and sometimes they falter.
In this regard, the identification of the woman in the poem as a mother is pointed out through the mention of a husband and child. The mother serves as a caretaker, providing domestic service, taking care of the children and helping her husband. Domestic labor forms the basis of the gender-based division of labor in Turkey.
Jobs that require physical labor such as preparing meals, cleaning, washing clothes and ironing for the people living in the household are mostly undertaken by women as a natural result of the gender-based patriarchal division of labor.
Women do not have any financial security from these jobs. When the internal and external work is combined, it is seen that there is quite a lot of burden and effort in total. The use of the expression “motherhood of the doorman woman and not the man but the husband” points to “sexuality”as the key feature that marks the woman’s return to a commodity element. The faces of the janitor women, who turn the barren cities into gardens, are fading until the night, and then even more so. As their faces fade, they becomes whiter and the color drains from their faces. The phrase turning barren cities into gardens first brings to mind gardening. As the doormen water the flowers and trees in the garden, the garden literally becomes a garden. Otherwise, it will remain a barren city. Since urban people are far from nature, they put the garden maintenance work on the doormen. Because the doormen come from the village or is intertwined with nature, they understand more about gardening. If a doorman’s hand touches it, barren cities may turn into gardens. At the point of conversion, on the other hand, we can remember the expressions “women’s hand”, “women’s hand touched”. As the barren cities touched by women turn into gardens and become beautiful, the face of women is fading from moment to moment. Since a huge burden is on her shoulders, she cannot get rid of her weight until the night, until she falls asleep. It turns pale, fades, and remains white, almost like a sick or dead face.
Sources
*This poem was curated by Gülşen Şencan, a member of NML’s Language Leadership Council representing Turkiye.
Akın, G., 2016, Kestim Kara Saçlarımı, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, İstanbul. pg.100.
Büyükbay, T. Zeynep, XII. Uluslararası Türk Sanatı, Tarihi ve Folkloru Kongresi Sanat Etkinlikleri, p.5.
Louie, E., 2019, A Woman’s Voice: Methods and Obstacles of Feminist Translation in Persian, Spanish and Turkish Poetry, A Thesis, pg. 82.
YılmazG, E., 2016, Yalnızlık ve Kadın Bağlamında Gülten Akın’ın şiirleri, Mecmua Uluslar arası Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, pg. 35-36.
(online) https://siirtutkusu.com/kapici-kadinlar-siiri/, Access date: 14.08.2022.
(online) https://www.siir.gen.tr/siir/g/gulten_akin/kestim_kara_saclarimi.htm, Access Date:14.08.2022.