Entwined narratives

latife tekin's ecopoetics

pp. 127-166

in: Meliz Ergin, The ecopoetics of entanglement in contemporary Turkish and American literatures, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter investigates Latife Tekin's ecopoetics to tease out formal and linguistic entanglements. Tekin's work borrows elements from different Turkish literary traditions and genres, while not limiting herself to any single one of them. Like Spahr, she uses a connective reading methodology to explore the relationship between language, ecology, and politics. Ergin first focuses on Rüyalar ve Uyanışlar Defteri, a poetic account of an unnamed narrator whose nightly dreams reenact existing ecopolitical problems in Turkey. In a pre-apocalyptic dream narrative, where quotidian life is penetrated by capitalist nightmare, Tekin revives a heterogeneous language—including languages of ethnic minorities, of women, and the voices of animals on the brink of extinction—as the ultimate form of resistance. She then turns to Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, the account of a desolate community that collects garbage to survive, to examine material-semantic entanglements and the relationship between waste and language.