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.*

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